The Squire and the Succubus Ch. 04

Sam gaped at Dart.

"Wh-" she started. Dart lifted up the strange weapon she held, leveling it more clearly at Sam's forehead. Sam gulped as loudly as she could. Even her tail was still. Then, suddenly, it started to lash side to side hard enough to cause tiny whip cracks in the air. She scowled at Dart. "You big freaking liar!"

Dart laughed. "You didn't even try to sense my motive, girl." She shrugged. "But to be fair, I am one of those sneaky people who tells truths inside of lies."

"So, what, no one stole the Apocalypse Stone?" Sam asked, stepping to the side. Dart stepped to the side to match her, her grin still wide, her eyes glinting.

"Oh, no, there is," Dart said. She reached into her belt pouch, then pulled out a small, sleek stone that looked like a chip of granite that had been chipped from some cliff-face. It was roughly the size of a human's thumb and looked so utterly mundane that Sam had to look at it twice to be sure she was actually seeing it. "It's just I stole it."

"That's the Apocalypse Stone?" Sam asked.

"Look again," Dart said. "Properly this time."

Sam bit his lip. She breathed in, then out, focusing her eyes - drawing up the spectral vision that allowed her to see ghosts. The Stone flickered and flared and then glowed like the sun, a searing hot spark held casually in Dart's fingers. It shivered with an aura that radiated outwards around her hand - causing her arm to ripple and flex. Sam felt the magical heat from it caress her body like a lover's hand. She shivered slightly - her tail pausing in mid lash.

"The nice thing about tiny podunk planes," Dart said, slipping the Stone away again. "They lack the real bigwigs. Your most powerful hero is a midlevel paladin who let himself get kakked by a firebolt - though I suppose since he's dead, you actually count as the most powerful hero and that's just sad. You've got no Avatars, no real dragons worthy of the name. Not even a Storm Titan to call your own." She shook her head. "Filching the Stone was easy as pie."

Sam didn't say anything. Dart opened her mouth - then stopped herself.

"Oh, ho, ho, not all Lawful Stupid, are we?" She asked. "You almost got me to monologue. I think, instead, I will shoot you." She hefted her strange weapon again. "It's been a peach, Sam."

"So, this was all part of your plan? Harp turning evil? Everything?" Sam asked.

"Fuck no," Dart said, laughing. "I'm Chaotic evil, honey. I've been improvising since that stupid unicorn let himself get beat up by a girl. Original plan was to let him beat you, swoop in to save the day, get your ever-dying gratitude, then trick you into being my own spell component. Good choice on banging the farmer, mind. Being a sword-chucking damage sponge doesn't prepare you for dealing with wizards: Spell components? They're destroyed when used. If I used your virginity to blast my way out of here, you'd have, well, exploded."

Sam scowled at her.

"Now, I'm going to take these diamonds, blow this joint, maybe buy a few rounds at the Burning Corpse Tavern in Sigil and then, oh, I don't know. Sell the Stone to the highest bidder?" She grinned, wickedly. "Maybe use it to form the basis for my own Demiplane. Oh, I like that. It'll make the Demiplane of Dread look like a pile of cra-"

And that was when the candelabra slammed into the back of Dart's head. The half-elf's eyes rolled up into her head and she faceplanted onto the ground, her strange weapon skittering away from her to come to a rest near the pile of gold that made up the left corner of the treasury. Standing behind her was Vela - the village headwoman looked like she had sprinted across the entire palace. She lowered the candelabra in her hands, gulping slightly.

"I think, uh, I dented it," she said, grinning slightly.

Floating beside her was Albus' ghost, his chest puffed up proudly.

"Albus!?" Sam asked. "How did he-"

"He knocked over every portrait between here and where I was hiding," Vela said at the same time Albus pontificated.

"I most cleverliciously endifercated a course for her to reach this localization!"

Sam shook her head. "And the guard?"

Vela coughed and hastily hid the candelabra behind her back - but before she did so, Sam noticed that the other side was dented as well, several of the prongs bent inwards. Vela blushed as Sam glared at her. "Hey!" she said. "It seemed like an emergency!"

The door to the treasury burst open and half the castle guards came storming in, swords and spears at the ready. Their armor clattered and clanked as they surged into the room, and their shouts overlapped one another: Halt! Freeze! Stand down! Have at thee! And then they all shut up as they saw Sam. Sam looked down at herself - and remembered that touching the royal gemstone's wards had stripped her disguise away. Her disguise included her clothes. She blinked a few times.

The guards gaped at her.

Then, in the corner, one of them whispered: "Nice."

The captain of the guards, though, pointed his sword at her. "SUCCUBI!"

"Ohboy," Sam whispered.

She stepped backwards as Vela hurried over to stand beside her, the guards advancing in a ragged line. Sam held up her hands. "Wait!" she called out.

"Silence the harlot," the captain of the guard shouted. One of the mage-warriors in their band started to chant, moving her hands carefully in her armor. Casting in armor tended to slow wizards down for reasons that Sam had never understood. But it still wasn't enough time for her to say more than the words 'Please' and 'Wa-' before the silence spell crashed down on her head. Her lips moved for a few more moments before she stopped herself, giving it up as a bad investment of her time.

Well, this is it, she thought. We're going to die.

Then, behind the line of guards, unnoticed and unremarked and (somehow) untrampled, Dart stood. Blood dripped down her back, slicking along her shoulders, and her eyes looked hazy and almost red with fury. She tottered from side to side and snarled. "That's it," she hissed. "No more Missus Nice Half-Elf."

Oh, no, Sam thought. NOW we are going to die.

She grabbed Vela and flung herself down, covering the other woman a moment before the fireball hissed from Dart's fingertip and Sam learned the difference between a firebolt and a fireball as the world seemed to come to an end in a roar of smoke, flames and noise. Chunks of metal and flesh bounced off Sam's wings and thudded into her back, leaving painful bruises as flames washed along her skin. It felt oddly good, though the smoke left her hacking and coughing. The ringing in her ears made the silence spell feel almost like overkill - she wasn't sure she could hear herself think, let alone talk. She drew one wing back to let some hazy light in and saw Vela was unharmed - shouting at her.

Sam's lips formed the word: What?

Vela pointed.

Sam turned and saw Dart swinging her arms around her body - the diamonds in one hand, the Apocalypse Stone in the other. The diamonds burned with a pale blue white light, flaring and crackling in the wizard's hand. Then they vanished - silently - and a portal swirled open behind Dart, revealing a dirty looking alleyway and a yellow-brown sky. Dart turned. Sam was on her feet, Vela behind her. Beside her. Dart stepped through the portal, which started to close. Sam sprang into it and felt her succubi blood singing through her as she wrenched the portal as far open as she could. An infinitely strange set of colors swirled before her eyes - and then Vela hit her back.

The two of them fell into infinity.

###

Arms twirling, tail trailing behind her, the only thing Sam could hold onto was Albus' sword and Vela's hand. Then she felt Vela's fingers being dragged from her in the infinite chaos that surrounded them.

"Vela!" Sam cried out - but the headwoman was yanked away, spinning off and lost in the colors. Then, with a sensation not too dissimilar from being squeezed through a very large woman's vaginal cavity, Sam was ejected from endless madness and crashed into a hard, metal floor. She skidded along her shoulder, the sound of flesh rubbing against metal filling her ear - a hideous, fingers-on-chalk style screeching that left her skin crawling. She thudded into a wall and came to a stop. Opening her eyes, Sam had to blink them a few times to clear out the fuzzy afterimages that were left after her exposure to whatever had been between her jumping into the portal and here.

Through the slowly fading purple splotches, she saw that she had arrived on what seemed to be an alcove made of a silver-white metal. The floor was completely free of any ornamentation save for a single, curving line that seemed to have been cut into the floor with a broad plow. The walls boardered the room on five sides, leaving the sixth wall open to an immense horizon of cubes and gears and grinding clockwork that stretched on to infinitely. Arcing bolts of lightning leaped from crystalline spheres that were hung suspended by spider-like limbs of bronze and brass and wood, while hissing gout of steam poured from tubes that were big enough to swallow the whole capital city. Sam stood shakily, walking to the edge of her alcove, then leaped back to the wall again - the cubical room was only ten by ten feet wide, but even ten feet of clearance between her and that infinite, yawning abyss that stretched out beyond the edge of the room was not nearly enough.

Still. She could surmise that she was in a cube structure that was similar to the cube structure she could see across the infinite abyss: That cube structure had dozens of alcoves along each level as well.

"Where the fuck am I?" Sam whispered.

A loud bzzt sounded and a silvery oblong dropped from the ceiling - suspended by an articulated, finely wrought arm. It chattered and spat out a piece of parchment at her, the edge clipped off with a snick. The oblong darted back upwards.

Sam took the paper and saw the strange runes on it squirm about then resolve into Common lettering.

UNAUTHORIZED USE OF PROFANITY

100 CP FINE, PAYABLE TO M-UNIT 98211391

ISSUED YEAR 4,213,891,092 OF ORDER

SIGNED, M-UNIT 87231-b

CO-SIGNED, M-UNIT 921-c

Sam's brow furrowed and she realized the parchment was actually three parchments - the first which she had read, but then two identical copies of the other. It looked as if the ink had bled through onto the lower ones - which were colored pink and blue respectively.

"The fuck is-" Sam started.

Bzzt!

The oblong sprang down again. Again, Sam found herself holding three papers - in three colors - but this time the fine was up to 150 CP. Sam opened her mouth - then closed it. She crumped up the papers, then threw them over the side of the cubical. Then, smacking her forehead, she stepped backwards, then sprang out over the side and spread her wings and soared outwards into the air. As she did so, she heard the faint sound of three bzzts and several oblongs filled the space she had been in - dumping more of their paper. Sam rolled her eyes, already sure that they were fining her for littering and unlicensed flight.

She banked around one of the huge gears and called out: "Velaaaaaaaa?"

She didn't see her.

"Velaaaaaaaaaa!"

Sighing, Sam shook her head. The headwoman was untrained in the ways of war and combat - she didn't know magic, and she wasn't inherently magic either. Wherever she had ended up, she was surely-

Sam smashed, face first, into the brass bars that closed around her body as a cage sprang into existence around her. Chains wrapped around the cage and several flying creatures made entirely out of triangular shapes flew forward, grabbing onto the chains. One of them swung a triangular eye - set in a triangular socket on a triangular face - to look at her and warbled: "Dead, alive, undead, redead, or postdead, you are coming with the beings who are currently holding this cage. Resistance is extremely unlikely to be successful - but to say it was entirely impossible would be highly illogical and unlawful."

Sam grabbed onto the bars and gaped as the triangle beasts flapped away on polyhedral wings.

Vela, she thought - and dreaded what she was going through.

###

Vela shook her head, the crown resting atop her hair settling more firmly into place thanks to the addition of a leather strap that wrapped around her chin. It was required, considering the fact that her throne was slowly rotating in place, as if she was the centerpiece of an immense clock.

"No, no, no," she said. "If your wife counted five things today, and your son coughed three times, the only solution is for you to spin clockwise around the color of jealousy at least six times."

The two fairies who flitted before her throne looked at her, then at one another. Then, beaming, they flew in circles, cheering their new queen. Vela smiled - trying to not mind that the blood was rushing to her head as a half dozen obyvereager brownies sprang forward to offer her different forms of fey-drink and fey-wine. She demurred. But politely.

This is going remarkably well, she thought as a burly, bull-headed man sprang forward.

"Queen Vela!" he said. "I fell in love with the moon, and now, I can't get him out of bed in the mornings!"

Vela nodded as her throne brought her rightside up. "This is clearly only to be solved by-"

"And I haven't been laid in months!" The bull-headed man yanked off his loincloth, revealing what hung between his legs.

"-by, ah, spending some time with your Queen, to talk. In private," Vela murmured.

I'll find Sam once I'm done...sorting these problems out... she thought.

###

Sam was dumped out of her cage and before a court - that much was clear, despite it being the most alien court that she had ever set foot in. As a squire for Lord Albus, she had needed to visit many different courthouses and other areas of justice. And they all had a similar feel to them, despite the differences in culture and custom. So what if this judge was made of brass and steel and sinewy cables? He was still a judge. And he was still looking at her as if she was the local village troublemaker, dragged before him...again.

Though, once again, Sam had to hate her...condition. Because the judge was humanoid - his body formed from sculpted pieces of wood and brass, carved to look like muscles and flesh. He had rippling, gleaming abs, brightly polished nipples, and wore a simple toga that left very little to the imagination. She could see the corded lines of his cable-muscles, connecting to elegantly crafted hands that themselves looked to be as deft and skillful as any master craftsman. Looking at him, seated on his bench, the first thing that buzzed through her mind was how those fingers would feel sliding into her-

"T'nari," the Judge said, his tone dismissive.

"Bless...you?" Sam asked - uncertain.

The Judge shook his head. "Trifecta, report." He looked at one of the triangular beings that had dragged Sam into the room. The Trifecta bowed, folding its wings behind itself.

"Judge Unit 0969869," it said. "We captured this rouge T'narri, classification succubus, winging through air-cube Babylon, in Grid Epsilon-5. This was after two counts of unlawful profanity, six counts of unlawful trash disposal, and flight without a permit."

"Uh-" Sam opened her mouth.

"Silence," the Judge said. "I was selected for this hearing due to my experience dealing with..." he shuddered. "Chaotic beings. And thus, I am aware of your foibles. But in this court, you will not speak unless spoken too. Do you understand?"

Sam clapped her mouth shut.

"That was me speaking to you," the Judge said, sounding annoyed. "Answer me!"

"Oh!" Sam opened her mouth. "Listen, I'm really sorry about the swearing, but-"

"That's not answering the question!" The judge slammed his fist down on the table before him - the brass clacking loudly against the tabletop. "Tell me! Do you understand basic legal ettiquette, or do I need to have you sent to the Room of Renunciation!"

Sam clenched her jaw. She was used to being the...well, if not the bringer of law, at the very least, the person who held the scabbard of the person bringing law. Being lectured too - while her world crept ever closer towards destruction, while Dart was out doing who knows what with the Apocalypse Stone, grated on her. But she breathed in, grabbed her fantasies about being tied up and fucked with mechanical dildos while her nipples were clamped in rough vices and tugged on and shoved said fantasies in the deepest, darkest hole in her mind. Thus settled, she breathed out, made sure her bare thighs were clenched together, and spoke.

"Yes," she said. "I understand I will speak only when spoken too."

The Judge's face was more flexible and mobile than it being carved of metal would suggest - for instance, a single, artfully carved eyebrow lifted above his left eye as he regarded her.

"Very well," he said. "For a T'narri, you handle yourself better than anticipated."

"What were you anticipating, sir?" she asked before she remembered that she was only supposed to speak when spoken too. Fortunately, the Judge just laughed.

"You attacking me. Or trying to seduce me," he said. "It wouldn't work."

Sam bowed her head. "I wouldn't want too," she lied.

A bright red light flashed behind the Judge. He looked at it, then at her, his brow furrowing. "You're lying?"

Sam flushed, bright red. "N-No!"

The right flashed again.

"You did it again!" The Judge pointed at her with a single bronze finger. "Explain this."

Sam bit her lip, hard, her tail twitching from side to side. She wasn't chained up, but she was too scared to move her hands - lest she do anything wicked with them. So, instead, she squirmed on the floor, coughed, and stammered: "W-Well, okay. I wouldn't...mind...you taking me to bed. Throwing me down with that sleek, strong body, letting me see if you're sensitive anywhere or if I need to be creative to bring your metal form pleasure. I want to see if you...have...a cock...and if it's as perfectly carved as the rest of your body. I wonder if bronze tastes as good as a man's cock - if you have pre-cum. If you...can...cum in my throat..." Her eyes grew hooded and she hissed softly. "And then if you would throw me down into the bed, tie me up, and just...fuck me. Fuck my chaotic little pussy until I'm properly broken in and made to respect the law..."

She shivered.

Tink!

Sam opened her eyes.

"What was that?" she asked.

"...nothing," the Judge said, his cheeks flushed a bright silver. He shifted in his seat slightly - and another soft tink sounded out. Sam cocked her head. Then she grinned. The Judge went from blushing silver to blushing gold. He coughed, loudly. "Explain how you got here!"

Sam bobbed her head forward, her cheeks as flushed as the Judge's. She tried to ignore the ever so faint drip drip drip that came between her legs, her tail lifting and coiling behind her back as she presented herself. She tried to ignore the fact that there were two Trifecta standing behind her - and hoped that the utterly triangular beings were completely sexless. Though, considering her day, she wouldn't be shocked if she could have seduced them as well. Fortunately, like when she had handled Vela's infant baby, the Trifecta had awakened nothing carnal within her.