by Ophidia Cox
Behind the black curtain, the noise of the crowd without muffled, Sylvia stared at Victor as he sank into a chair. His face was reddened from being upside-down, not to mention his nipples and genitals from the cruel teasing of Vaughn’s torture equipment. He breathed rapidly, a grin on his face and a shudder of laughter gripping him with each exhalation. She stared, mesmerized, at the heaving of his sweaty chest and the wide hole in his glans where Vaughn had penetrated him with the prince’s wand.
When she put out her hand to touch him, he started. “Oh, don’t!” He laughed. “You can’t expect me not to be ticklish after a climax like that!”
Sylvia grappled his arms, pulling them behind the back of the chair. She grabbed the handcuffs from her belt and manacled his wrists together. “What were you saying?”
He was wide-eyed, terrified, when she walked around to stand in front of him once more. She forced his knees apart and bent over him, took hold of the most sensitive part of his body in her mouth. He yelped and convulsed in unwilling and unamused laughter as she sucked and stabbed the point of her tongue repeatedly into the tip of his phallus. Sylvia had only ever done this once before, to one man, and the fishy stink of it and the salty flood in her mouth when he’d come had made her gag, but that didn’t seem to bother her any more.
“Oh, stop! Dugong!”
The word stung. Didn’t he like this? Was this too much, when what Vaughn had done to him wasn’t? Still, it was the safe word, and everything Sylvia had read on BDSM said it must be honored as the cornerstone of the unwritten code. She immediately released him and rose from the floor.
“I’m in an act next,” Victor explained breathlessly.
Her purple lipstick was smudged around his pubic area and the base of his cock. “Find me later,” she said. “And bring my handcuffs back when you do, or else.”
Sylvia left him like that and stepped out of the dungeon into the evening sun, where a man dressed in pajamas lay on the ground while someone dressed as a fireman performed fellatio on him. Behind them was something similar to a football goalpost with no net. Several naked men were attached to it, their hands chained over their heads. They screamed as a woman deluged them with cold water from a fire hose.
What had come over her? This had gone so far past the threshold of shock it didn’t even feel weird any more. Perhaps Pikesley had given this assignment to her because he’d thought she’d crack and make an easy bribe. He was wrong. Sylvia could deal with this. She just had to concentrate on the job at hand and maintain the illusion, and not think too much about how she’d just stuck the opposing electrodes of a circuit into an obese person’s most intimate areas.
If they were dealing in memory banks with illegal software and information stored on them, the memory banks would probably either be stashed together somewhere out the way, or concealed among similar things. Vaughn’s dungeon might be one such place, but she’d taken Max down there and he hadn’t picked up any telltale electromagnetic fields that would occur around dormant devices. Then there was an area set aside round the back of the tents as a caravan park–probably where the Sideshow’s staff camped while they were in town. She hadn’t looked there, and that would probably be something more easily tackled in uniform or ordinary clothes.
That meant checking out places with other electronics. The zebra lady’s stall was the initial obvious place that came to mind. There were a lot of electronic devices there, so that was the first place Sylvia would try.
This part of the Sideshow appeared to be closed now, and the woman was nowhere to be seen. There were no customers. Sylvia poked aside curtains and examined the labyrinth of rooms hidden behind the stall. All of them contained high-tech sex toys. A number of memory banks and other electronics were piled tidily on shelves under a counter. She couldn’t tell what was on them, but there weren’t enough of them to count as intent to supply, even if all of them had contained illegal software.
But why would the Sideshow even bother with electronic contraband? These people looked to be doing lucrative business. They didn’t need to go taking risks by setting up a black market to deal in banned devices underneath their success. Everything about this case felt wrong. It was far more likely that members of the public disagreed with the Sideshow on principle, and the allegations that had been made were mere mudslinging. The problem was that Pikesley was more interested in appeasing the vocal demographic who objected to the Sideshow and getting the case tied up as quickly as possible than he was in seeing justice served.
“Ah, there you are.”
Sylvia spun to face Victor. Deep in thought, she hadn’t seen him approach. He wore a sailor costume with a large collar, short, tight trousers and a cap with a ribbon trailing over the back. He somehow succeeded in looking both childish and wanton. She searched his face for any hint of suspicion, but could find none. Once again she was glad of the mask to hide her motives.
“Have you, uh, used one of those before?” Sylvia pointed to a contraption in a room.
“That’s a four-way, mental-interface fucking machine.” The object comprised a central motor with a cam attached to four arms perpendicular to each other, with a turret from the center with neural shunt plugs attached to fiber optic cables. Sensors and electrodes and clamps lay on the floor around it. “I’ve used mind interface before. I prefer it without, to be honest. When I’m at someone’s mercy I prefer not to know what they’re about to do. Takes the thrill out of it otherwise.”
“How do you mean? You can’t mind interface to another human, at least not to be able to understand their thoughts. Human consciousness is too complicated to get anything meaningful from it.”
“You can’t get conscious thoughts,” Victor agreed, “but you can be affected by the other participant’s emotions through bleedback. If everyone orgasms at once, it makes it more intense. They’re best for group activities. We can try it sometime, if you like. I’m sure Vaughn can work out a way to torture multiple people simultaneously.”
“Oh, I thought we were just doing things in Vaughn’s dungeon,” said Sylvia hurriedly. Perhaps conscious thoughts didn’t make sense through mind interface, but if she mind interfaced to Victor she feared very much he would be able to see why she was here, or at least something in her thoughts would give her away, and he would suspect.
“Speaking of which, Vaughn’s been making something. He wants you to test it out.” He gave her a lecherous glance.
“Oh,” said Sylvia, not sure what to expect.
* * * *
Vaughn awaited them in the dungeon. He bowed deeply to Sylvia. “For you, madam.” He held out a metal rod in his huge palm. It had a ball on one end and a little side-arm close to that. The diameter was about as large as a pencil and coated with Teflon apart from the far end where there was a curved surgical steel point. The length was dotted with round silvered bumps and textures.
“It’s a prince’s wand.” Sylvia recognized it.
“Possibly the most advanced prince’s wand in the world. You can use it with or without a current. If you use it with, it benefits from two separate circuits–a single electrode designed to be used with a P-spot dildo, and a complete circuit through those little protrusions to give it some extra tickle. Have fun and gimme a report on it afterward. It’s a size up to what Victor’s accustomed to accommodating, so it should keep him quiet for a bit.” Vaughn rubbed his hands together. “I’m off to the pub before the next event starts.”
Victor stared at the prince’s wand in Sylvia’s hands, his eyes wide. “He’s had that on the drawing board for months,” he eventually said. “I’d almost given up on seeing the real thing.”
Sylvia put the wand down on a metal table. She’d not really had time to look around this room at her own leisure yet. All these things were presumably Vaughn’s creations: racks, manacles, sadistic variations on dentists’ chairs.
In one corner stood something that resembled a pommel horse from the gymnastics events in the Olympics. Its feet were riveted to
the floor, and rings for tying things down on surrounded it. Bollocks to Pikesley, she thought. Nothing untoward was going on here. This stuff did something for her, something she’d been missing out on since she’d started eschewing relationships because she couldn’t have sex the normal way. She was going to have her way with Victor, and she was going to enjoy it. She could tell Pikesley she’d spent all afternoon looking and had found nothing. The end result would be the same anyway.
“Take your clothes off,” she ordered Victor, and he obeyed. When he’d done it, Sylvia attached the collar and leash around his neck and led him over to the pommel horse. She fastened the end of the leash to one of the overhead moorings, so it hung loosely with room to maneuver. An assortment of chromed manacles hung on a rail beside the pommel horse. It took Sylvia a few attempts to find ones that fit Victor’s wrists and ankles well. After fastening them, she leaned him back over the horse and tied his arms behind his back, to the leg of the horse, with a clip like that on a dog leash through the rings on his manacles.
Although his rapid breathing and wide eyes showed he was clearly aroused, he still hadn’t become erect. Did he perhaps have some kind of medical issue, like hers? Perhaps he’d conditioned himself out of getting them, seeing as he seemed to prefer anal penetration and sounding. She’d looked up sounding on the Internet the previous night, and it seemed urethral probing didn’t work so well with a hard-on. She left him on his back in this uncomfortable position over the horse’s narrow length while she examined the other gear.
In a surgical jar, she found a stainless steel hoop–a cock ring. He gasped and she felt his skin pucker at the sensation of the cold metal as she squeezed his balls and shaft through it. She took hold of his limp phallus and detached the metal fish from it. Leaving him there, she walked back to the table to fetch the wand. The little fish was superbly detailed, from its ugly-but-cute face to the stripes on the tail pin. She left it on the table in the wand’s place. Vaughn had conveniently provided a tube of lubricant, which she applied to the wand before unscrewing the side-arm. Also standing on the table was a jar, with a clamped-down lid seal like a traditional honey receptacle. Metallic decals covered the glass, giving it a surgical feel. It was half-full of steel clamps and electrodes. Sylvia detached the lid and selected two cloverleaf clamps.
Victor stared at her in anticipation as she attached the clamps to his nipples. She bent over him, leaning her arm on his stomach and the heel of her hand in his crotch to grip his phallus. The point of the sound sank into the wide slit in his glans. Victor shuddered as the knobbled shaft made its descent into his body, his breathing loud and rapid. When the full length was in, Sylvia rotated it very slightly using the ball on the top, back and forth a few times while Victor whimpered ecstatically, before she slipped the side arm through the piercing at his frenulum and tightened it.
She leaned under the pommel horse’s body and disconnected his manacles. “Stand up.”
As he stood, she admired how the ball at the end of the wand bobbed with his motion, and how stiffly and uncomfortably he moved with that great, long thing stuffed in there. She turned him about and bent him forward over the pommel horse, so he was positioned lengthways upon it. She tied his wrists to the ring on the back of it. Stepping to the back of him, she raised one of his ankles, stretched it out perpendicular and secured it to one of the rings on the floor. His other leg she restrained likewise, using one of the rings on the opposite side.
Now he was tied down to the pommel horse, unable to move, exposed with his legs spread apart. All she needed now was a P-spot dildo. Sylvia walked slowly to the rack where they hung, and took her time choosing one, aware all the time of Victor straining his eyes to keep her in his vision. A squeeze of lube from the tube on the table onto its polished shaft, and it was ready.
Sylvia slid it up and down between his buttocks several times, teasing him before she inserted it very slowly, twisting it from side to side.
Victor quivered all over, his legs now and then breaking into jerks and shudders at the sensation. Just as the hilt reached his anus and the dildo fell into position, he blurted, “Please, would you gag me?”
“You’re not supposed to tell me what to do with you. I’m the one who’s master here.” Sylvia reached over him and unfastened the chain from his collar. She gathered the end of the chain against the handle and flapped the loose midsection against the back of his thigh. Afraid she would hurt him, she didn’t do it hard, but the yell he let out goaded her to do it again.
She picked up a gag and knelt beside him so her head was level with his. She ran fingers through his hair and stroked the back of his neck as she arranged the strap in position. “Victor, how will I know if I’m hurting you?”
Victor turned his eyes to where his wrists were restrained. With the small degree of movement available to him, he was able to rattle the chain on the handcuffs against the metal stem of the pommel. Sylvia fastened the strap on the gag. She would give him, this, because he wanted it, but she knew he also wanted to be made to feel he was powerless and she was in charge, so she had to make it believable that it had been her decision ultimately. She slung the leash casually on the floor as she strode round to stand in front of him. For a moment she stood, and admired how she’d arranged him so thoroughly captive and at her disposal. With the gag in his mouth he could make little expression with the lower half of his face, but he looked back at her with excited, admiring eyes, pupils dilated.
“I’m going to punish you for that. And not by anything so crude as flogging. I can think of much more efficacious methods.”
Victor’s eyes widened slightly: anticipation? Nervousness? She ran her palm down the length of his back and over the curve of his buttock, stroking her other hand under his chest and stomach. Sylvia stepped away from him, to the racks where a selection of chains hung. After making sure Victor could see what she was up to, she selected the longest chain there and walked slowly back to him with it held out in both hands like a lasso, the clip swinging on the end. She threw the chain over his shoulders and set her foot on the step of the pommel horse’s base, slid her knee over him and climbed up to sit astride his broad back. His chubby sides felt wonderfully soft and pliant to squeeze with her knees. She stroked his shoulders and the back of his neck for a moment, before slipping her hands down over his ribs.
He began to whine as she infuriated him with gentle tickles to his chest and tugs on the clamps. His noises grew louder and his shoulders jerked spasmodically in sobs of laughter, as he was unable to protect his defenseless sensitive areas from Sylvia’s merciless stroking and pinching. With her legs wrapped around him she felt him trying to flinch away, to squirm out of reach or block her access. He wanted to shout something but it made no sense through the gag. Probably it was no or stop but he hadn’t yet rattled the handcuffs against the pommel so she ignored him.
After several minutes of teasing and enjoying his reaction, she relented, leaving him panting as she attached the chain to both clamps and draped it across his back. She smoothed her palms over his flanks and under his legs, down the insides of his thighs. His respite from torment ended when she swiveled herself on her perch on his back and began to touch him here too, with exquisitely light strokes of her fingertips that slowly reduced him to a quivering mass of helplessness.
Sylvia took hold of the hilt of the dildo in one hand and twisted and shuffled it, holding the prince’s wand by its crosspiece on the underside of Victor’s dick in her other hand and making miniscule movements with it, so the bumps along the shaft stimulated him from the inside. His limbs struggled against the restraints, but he didn’t clank his handcuffs against the post, so she continued to push him higher and higher until his orgasm broke over, vociferously and with violent contractions that Sylvia felt as powerful waves as his prostate squeezed on the sound and the dildo.
As his spasms and groans ebbed, he started to rattle the handcuffs against the bar. Sylvia twisted round on his back and unfastened the gag. “W
hat’s the matter?”
“There’s someone over there.”
Sylvia quickly untied Victor so he could get down. “Where?”
Victor stood still and did not answer for a moment. “I’m not sure. But there’s someone here spying on us.”
A loud scrape came from the stairway. Just as Sylvia turned to look, a shape blotted out the light coming in from the tents above. The figure disappeared up and out. She hurried over to the steps and climbed so her eyes were level with the floor, but whoever it was had already left, and there was nobody there at all.
Sylvia frowned. “I thought you liked people watching you.”
“I prefer them to pay the entrance fee first!” He tipped up his chin. “Watching people without paying or asking...that’s just rude!”
“Oh well. Whoever it was has gone now.” Sylvia cast about the dungeon. She gave the chain still connected to Victor a gentle tug. Then she unclamped him and stroked his chest for a moment. She dropped the clamps back into the jar and put the lid back on. Sylvia hated seeing things with the lids off: milk left out of the fridge, that sort of thing.
Victor put down his hand and fiddled with the prince’s wand still in position. “What did you do with my barbell?”
“Barbell?”
“That anodized titanium thing. It’s a heraldic dolphin. Looks like a little fish.”
“I put it on the table.” But when she looked, it wasn’t there. “I’m sure I put it there. Perhaps it fell off.” She made a point of looking on the floor for it, but there was no sign of it there either.
“Are you sure?” Victor looked forlorn. “I hope it’s not got lost. I can’t get another easily, and it does have rather a sentimental value to me.”
“I’m sorry,” Sylvia said. “I was sure it was on that table.”
Victor’s face tensed, as though the loss mattered rather more than he was letting on. “It’s all right. I expect it will turn up. This is Vaughn’s dungeon, and he’ll recognize it if he sees it. If someone finds it, they’ll probably hand it in. People who come here usually seem to be fairly honest about stuff like that.” He made a last go of looking for it under the pommel horse before going back to the stairs. “Oh well. Let’s go up and watch the events. I need a rest after that.” He grinned at Sylvia. On impulse, she reached over and gave his buttock a pinch.