Chapter Text
Even though everyone went into it with bright eyes, bushy tails, and high hopes, 2381 kind of ended up being a really shitty year for the human race.
Everything was going swimmingly on planet Earth right up until The Thing happened. Expert economists, the world’s greatest post-quantum computer, and professional talking heads had finally cracked the economy and figured out a ridiculously complicated mathematical formula that ensured universal prosperity for all eleven billion of their homeworld’s residents. Or so they claimed, anyway.
The next day, a collective of the world’s greatest nuclear physicists (all working for a private quadrillionaire, of course) declared that they had solved the issues with cold fusion. No more decades-long snap ice ages just for a year of unlimited energy! They put out a paper with all of their purported findings and their peers all got to work on reviewing it. Curiously, they all got a sizable donation from the aforementioned private quadrillionaire and quickly confirmed the findings. After doing their due diligence, of course! Supposedly.
And later that week? Another private quadrillionaire snapped their fingers and bam, there went world hunger. Unlimited, emission-less meat-growing trees and cows who laid fruits ensured not a single man, woman, child, or mole person would ever go hungry again. Truly, the quadrillionaires were solving all of Earth’s problems one after another! None of them actually had put their supposed solutions into action just yet, of course, but investors all over were happily throwing whatever money their collective feet.
It was one hell of a week. VR motion sickness? Just like that, solved! Not available yet, but solved! A time machine that would allow a brave quadrillionaire to go back and kill Hitler as a baby? The ethics weren’t solved, but the math and physics lined up! Supposedly. Why, they even managed to bring back the long-extinct coffee plant, sure to give the few hundred university students left in the world the edge they needed to pass their exams! Next semester, when they were in full production.
Supposedly, supposedly, supposedly. Alas, the general public would never learn whether or not there was any truth to these claimed discoveries, because The Thing happened. Quite literally. Science went too far. Even if every other major breakthrough or discovery that week was a hock of shit, another private quadrillionaire did succeed in his efforts to bring back practical effects for film… through the wonders of cloning and genetic engineering.
Even in the year 2381, John Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing was seen as one of the last great uses of practical effects before the advent of computer-generated imagery redefined its industry. The private quadrillionaire who suggested using the leaps and strides in biology to make a true-to-life remake of The Thing was seen as a visionary, receiving hundreds of u-dollars from almost everyone on Earth (about the cost of a bag of chips, thanks to massive inflation).
Some of the scientists questioned if it was wise to make the Thing from The Thing instead of, say, just making far more lifelike puppets to serve the same purpose, but money talked. Climate activists wondered if it was responsible for them to recreate the long-melted Antarctic, but money talked there as well, always so very convincingly too. The project went ahead. They did not just recreate the Thing from The Thing . They spared no expense to acquire genetic material for John Carpenter, Bill Lancaster, and John Campbell Jr. to head the remake, flash-growing them to maturity; they brought back each of the stars, too, from Kurt Russell to Keith David, and conditioned them to believe they were the likes of MacReady and Childs.
They even grew a second John Carpenter, just for the sake of killing him on screen again for his cameo. The directing John Carpenter clone breathed a sigh of relief over that one. The only change they made in the literal live-action remake was removing dogs entirely, for obvious reasons. Everything went swimmingly at the start; they didn’t even need to reshoot the Thing from The Thing crashing upon Earth despite space debris knocking its spaceship off its intended trajectory. The trash surrounding Earth was perhaps the one problem no quadrillionaire had taken an interest in.
And from there–
Well. It went swimmingly at the start for like, five seconds, but the spaceship being knocked off its planned trajectory fucked everything up. Literally everything, as the Thing had been genetically engineered to behave just as it had in the movie. That meant it single-mindedly wanted to assimilate, control and consume every living organism it encountered before moving onto the next planet. And just as the biologist in the film predicted via his computer simulation, the Thing from The Thing spread quicker and quicker, a violent and hideous monster that could disguise itself as anything except dogs (and cats, because it was illegal across Earth to give preference to one over the other).
Humanity, at least as earthlings knew it, was fucked. And yet there was a shining light at the end of 2381’s dark tunnel! All that money hoarded by quadrillionaires? For the first time in all of recorded history, the uber-rich decided to spend their vast wealth for the betterment of humanity. They proved that they had consciences, bless their hearts! All their gathered seed money for their projects (definitely not scams!) was quickly reallocated in a last-ditch effort to save mankind, its best friend, and their sociopathic roommates (dogs and cats respectively), along with whatever other animals they could gather.
It seemed impossible and hopeless, but hey– money talks and it sure as fuck walks. The result of this thriftless spending was the Ama-Arks, great colony ships named in part for the company that donated the most to them. It had come a long way from just being a humble little online bookstore. It all came together in under a year, thanks to the miracles of money. Their destination would be Mars, already half-terraformed in anticipation of being the next great vacation spot after Neo-Hawaii (the original Hawaii was covered by the ocean).
Every possible human, pet, and other animal that could be confirmed as not-a-Thing was squeezed aboard before they launched, with just one set of exceptions: the rest of humanity had finally realized that the quadrillionaires were to blame for most of their problems, and had banded together to force them off. Perhaps if they had grown hearts a little sooner, the rest of humanity would have been happy to have the once-wealthy paupers along. Alas, even the CEO responsible for the Ama in Ama-Ark was left on the doomed planet.
Planet Earth ended on the eve of 2382, and fittingly enough it ended just as The Thing had: MacReady and Childs sitting together and sharing a drink, each of them wondering if the other had been assimilated as they waited for the bombs they had launched to scorch Earth clean in a cataclysmic nuclear firestorm. Ironically, they were both Things. They just didn’t know it.
Not a soul aboard the Ama-Arks looked back at the Earth as they left it behind, in large part because why the fuck would they have rear-view mirrors or back windows on their giant colony ship? Also, Earth had run out of sand some two centuries prior, so it wasn’t like they could make glass anyway.
In any case…
A little less than six months after their launch, the Ama-Arks reached Mars, and the people who once considered themselves earthlings relabeled themselves Martians– and not just because of the drastic relocation.
They did not do anything so ridiculous as going into cryo sleep during the voyage, long ago deemed impossible by science, even though a quadrillionaire had announced in early 2382 that his company had made a breakthrough. They lived life as best they could amidst the enormous-yet-cramped ships. They ate, they drank, and they slept. They read, they gamed, and they sportsballed. They talked, they fought, and of course, they fornicated.
Recreationally. A lot.
Mars would experience an immediate baby boom in the months that followed, with just one issue– just before landing, the earthlings realized some sixty-eight percent of them were actually assimilated Things.
Oops.
Their unstable DNA had reacted oddly with galactic cosmic rays that had leaked through the Ama-Arks’ shielding, because of course the quadrillionaires skimped on the shielding, just as they had with the budget Thing-Tests. They didn’t get to become quadrillionaires by paying full price, they got there by cutting corners and fucking people over. These people were different from the Things left behind on Earth, however– their connection to the First Thing had snapped with distance, leaving them decidedly themselves.
They were both human and Thing. Mutated versions of themselves, granted, but themselves nonetheless– and each with their own strange power that, thank-fucking-science, did not involve shapeshifting into hideous monsters. Considering they were the super-majority of surviving humans, many felt it warranted rebranding their collective species as Martians.
And every generation of Martian that followed was the same way! Until homo sapiens were officially out and the Thingish sapiens were all that remained of Earth. And the similarly-afflicted animals, of course!
And also the Things proper, of course: those that managed to complete their preordained goal, cobbling together scrappy spaceships before the nuclear devastation of Earth and moving on to the next planet. They underwent the same mutations as humans did thanks to the radiation leaking through their shoddy ships, locking them into strange new forms with otherworldly capabilities. Thankfully, they crash landed on the other side of Mars, and it would be decades before Martians and monsters ever met on their new world.
When they did, the Martians named them the Aggressors.
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2642 AD, or 260 A(fter)T(he)T(hing):
“...and that’s how life began here on Mars, to the best of our knowledge, bearing in mind the Great Data Crash of 132ATT– ah. Yes, Arabella?” The prof at the head of the lecture hall paused and gestured towards the tall and tanned beauty lazily waving her hand back and forth. Several other MAE-U students glanced up from their laptops and notebooks and uPads, some already starting to grin.
“Yeah, so,” Arabella asked as she lowered her hand, “I’m pretty sure we learned this shit in grade school. Are we going to get into anything interesting today? Because if not, I’m going to go take care of some things.” She paused, then smiled; despite her attitude, her smile was disarmingly pleasant, with her hazel eyes seeming far kinder than they truly were. Scattered laughter rose throughout the room, mostly muffled chuckles and giggles.
The professor sighed and glanced down at their wristwatch. No matter how prettily Arabella smiled? He had two and a half years of experience dealing with the present ‘queen’ of MAE-U: the Mars Aggressor Extermination University, where the best and brightest (and apparently the bitchiest) of Martians were sent for higher education, with a particular emphasis on monster slaying.
Today, the school’s queen had lasted fifteen minutes into her mandatory history course before losing her patience. Almost beat her record, the professor reflected, then shook his head and lowered his watch, taking a long look at Arabella before sighing. What she deserved was a reprimand and expulsion, but she was a sparkling darling in the dean’s eye. Above consequence, and far too valuable to chide. Her powers were valuable enough that she could probably get away with murdering him in front of all these other students. “No, I don’t believe you’ll find any of this interesting. So have a nice day, Miss Florakis.”
“You’re a doll,” Arabella’s pleasant smile turned radiant, a bright and beaming smile that could light up even the dark side of Mars; even so she remained impudent, radiating disrespect. “See you tomorrow,” she said as she turned her hips and stretched her long legs into the aisle between desks, hugged tight by black leather trousers that hid none of their shape. “Do you mind taking notes for me?” she asked her neighbor, so smitten with her that they simply nodded and grinned like she had offered him a date. “Thanks, babe.” He quickly reached to pull over Arabella’s laptop.
Then her silver high-heels, a direct spit in the eyes of the school’s dress code, clicked down on the floor and Arabella rose gracefully to her 6’2 height, boosted up from a barefoot 5’9. The red crop top that she wore was against the dress code, too– not because it was a crop top, but because it was cut to titillate those around her with a peak at the inner curves of her breasts, not a tan line in sight. She tossed back her long, curly black hair with a flick of her hands, then snagged her half-jacket off the back of her seat and tossed it on. By the time she was strutting her way out of the lecture hall, a few of her usual sycophants had gotten up and joined her.
It was neither a swift nor slow departure, giving everyone time to watch the leisurely swing of her hips as she went, and how her ass shifted beneath the leather that tried to be its second skin. All adults between nineteen and twenty-four, none of them actually needed the professor’s permission to fuck off from class, but Arabella liked to casually flaunt her power and privilege. Where most of the students wore the MAE-U uniform or at least assorted, branded pieces from the school store, everything Arabella wore was from Mars’ greatest designers. The professor waited for them to get out the door before continuing his lecture on the basic history of their colony, as they remembered it.
“So fucking ridiculous,” Arabella sighed as they moved down the empty hallways of the school, only passing a handful of students or faculty on the way. “You’d think if The Thing was so important to our history, we’d have it in an archive somewhere, or at least the book version.” To her perception, it was just mythology– a ridiculous tale that had turned into legend over the decades. The Great Data Crash of 132ATT had eaten up a lot of their history, but not all of it– evidently, their forefolks didn’t think too highly of the movie. “Even just a remake by Holdenwood.”
“You’re so right, Bella,” one of her ass-kissers piped up. “We should at least have the book version or a remake. It’s so stupid that we don’t. Holdenwood is really slacking.”
Arabella glanced at them through the corner of her eye, full lips pursing slightly before looking forward. She only let a handful of other students call her Bella, those most worthy of her favor– and they sure as hell weren’t one of them. One of her newer hangers-on; she had enough in each of her classes that she didn’t bother learning most of their names. Not until they proved themselves worthy of such a privilege, at least. “Yeah,” she drawled, more to herself than the others, before crooking her finger at the brown-noser. “Hey. Come with me, there’s something I want to show you. A special something I only share with special someones. I’ll see the rest of you after lunch, okay?”
The other sycophants– Arabella’s friends –exchanged knowing smirks and continued down the hall without her. “Oh, um… where are we going?” the ass-kisser asked, eyes widening with excitement as she stepped right up to Arabella’s side. She lifted her bag awkwardly and wondered, “Should I drop this off at my locker? It’s not too far from here.”
“No,” Arabella told her with a smile. The girl was a fair bit shorter than the queen of MAE-U, but cute enough, with blue eyes and blonde hair, and pouty lips. “You might as well take it with you.” She casually draped an arm around the ass-kisser’s shoulders, a hand rested atop her breasts, each of her graceful digits terminating in a trim nail painted pure white. “Won’t take us long, anyway,” she promised her, though it was several hours until lunch. “Remind me, what did you say your power was?”
“O-oh, um.” The girl nibbled on her bottom lip, a fair bit more shy and self-conscious now that she was in such close proximity to the queen– in such close contact, too! Few first-year students could say such a thing, she knew. “Temperature control. I’m… I’m still working on it, though,” she confessed. “My SSA isn’t combat ready yet.”
Arabella’s slim, black brows rose expressively with her interest. “Temperature control, huh? That’s interesting. I haven’t met anyone who could do that before. What’s the highest you can go? What’s the lowest?” The girl rattled off some number in celsius that meant nothing to Arabella, but the bitchy queen smiled as though impressed. “Wow,” she said as she steered the girl towards the main gymnasium– or more specifically, the stairs leading to the faculty observation deck situated above it. Not a place any other student would dare intrude. “That’s so awesome,” Arabella said, mockingly bubbly.
“Really? You think so?” Oh, how the girl perked, unaware that she was prey already sitting in a predator’s jaws.
“Absolutely,” Arabella assured her, eyes alight with warm malice. “You’ll have to give me a little demonstration of what you can do with it.”
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Two hours later:
“And– go,” Mr. Copperhyde called out from the side of the gym, the head of MAE-U’s combat instructors. He had set up a simple drill to test the small group of students he was working with, each one a first year and each eager to impress him. Copperhyde had the final say over SSAs, or student squad assignments, setting them up after picking and choosing those whose powers and capabilities seemed most complementary.
The SSAs determined a great deal of a student’s trajectory in MAE-U; only combat-ready SSAs were sent on field missions, a much-desired privilege for every first-year student.
They all knew that if they failed to make their SSA combat-ready by the end of the year, they wouldn’t be back for a second. Flunking out of MAE-U would earn them ridicule, but graduating would ensure they became one of society’s elites. Aggressor Exterminators, monster hunters– they were celebrities in their own right, paid handsomely for their dangerous work.
The five students darted into the obstacle course with one goal: to save as many ‘civilians’ as they could before time ran out. For their first drill, there wouldn’t be any captured, cloned or simulated Aggressors: just simple hazards and unique obstacles that would test the students for their creativity, problem-solving skills, and individual ability to work in a team. Each civilian was represented by a flashing rod. Green to begin, but every thirty seconds another would turn red, dead. Two of the students rushed ahead, perhaps too eager to impress– ensuring a poor grade right off the bat. Disappointingly common.
One had superhuman speed, but that didn’t mean their eyes or brain were as fast as their feet; they sped by objectives without seeing them, completely forgetting the point of the obstacle course in a hurry to reach the other end. Though the course was designed to be cleared in five minutes, they got to the end in five seconds. They had about as much control over their speed as they had brainpower. Copperhyde sighed, watching them skid out as they tried to screech to a stop on the gym’s polished wood floor, tumbling and rolling painfully into the wall. Two of the school’s medics dragged him out on stretchers. They weren’t always on standby, but Copperhyde had seen more than enough speedsters to know what to expect.
The other one rushing ahead tried to burn their way through a wall, only succeeding in rendering themselves useless when the overhead sprinklers reacted accordingly. Pyromancy was a common power amongst Martians and the obstacle course had been designed with several burnable walls in mind, each clearly labeled. The very first fucking wall was not one of them, because it had an obvious ladder stacked against it. Everyone in the gym got soaking wet. Except Copperhyde, of course, who had seen as many pyros as he had speedsters and always came prepared.
Those that remained took the obstacle course both slower and more seriously. At first, it didn’t seem like they were going to save most of the ‘civilians’– but one shy girl, in particular, stood out, once she got her teammates to stop bickering over prospective strategies to listen to her. He lifted the uPad in his umbrella-less hand and skimmed over her profile to remind himself what her powers were. “Taisya Carpenter… telekinesis, huh.”
Another common power, though a difficult one to use. With how weak most telekinetics were, they were rarely accepted into MAE-U– it was a power best suited for jobs where using several small tools at once was useful. Most of them ended up working in some kitchen or another, chopping or peeling vegetables if not doing the dishes (or all three, if they were good enough). They may as well have been born with four or five extra hands.
One of the arguing students shrieked with surprise, and the other shouted, “What the hell!” Copperhyde glanced up quickly, brow creasing, certain that they had done something stupid in the one moment he had taken his eyes off them. He expected to find Taisya to be in some sort of danger, and for the drill to be over, just like that, and was prepared to rush out to help another group of failures– and that really wasn’t what he found waiting for him.
No, he found the entire obstacle course lifted out of its modular sockets, suspended high in the air, leaving just the flashing green ‘civilian’ stand-ins. “Shit,” he whistled softly, slowly dropping his umbrella. One flashed red, just one, before the other two listened to Taisya’s softly-spoken urging and rushed forward to start collecting them. I’ve seen a lot in the ten years I’ve been here, Copperhyde thought to himself, but… fuck if this isn’t a first. Other groups had resorted to removing the obstacle course entirely, but never so one-sidedly; it was normally a group effort. Here, he wasn’t sure if he should reward the ‘teamwork’ or punish it.
It took them a little less than two minutes to clear the whole thing. The time didn’t quite beat the record set by the reigning queen of MAE-U, but it was close. Damn close. “Set it down slowly, Carpenter!” Copperhyde called out to Taisya, who slowly lowered her raised hands to gently slot everything back into its original position, panting and sweating from the exertion. “And all of you, go get changed out of those wet clothes. I’ll grade you when you aren’t likely to catch a cold.” The five students, including an exceptionally embarrassed pyromancer, began to head off for the locker rooms. It’d give him time to figure out what to do with the telekinetic girl.
His uPad beeped and then buzzed with the tone of a priority message, usually used to report Aggressor movements to nearby Exterminators. Copperhyde frowned and lifted the device, scanning the screen. Not a monster attack, but no less serious. At least to him, anyway. If he didn’t indulge the queen’s petty whims, the dean would sack him without a second thought. He sighed and pocketed it, then called out towards the last of the five, just steps away from the locker room. “Carpenter!”
Taisya stopped in her tracks, rubbing at the sodden sleeves of her MAE-U hoodie as she looked back at Copperhyde. She had lifted its hood for some protection against the water, not that it did much good under the sustained shower. Even so, some of her purple-hued hair peeked out of it, and her golden eyes were bright with excited satisfaction from what she’d done. Shy, but bright. After a moment’s hesitation and a longing look towards the locker room, she stepped toward the instructor.
“Left something up in the observation dock,” Copperhyde said, flicking his thumb towards the entrance. “Run up there and grab it for me, will you?”
“Um… okay,” Taisya said once she was close enough that her soft-spoken voice wouldn’t need to be raised any higher than it already was. Her hands lifted to her hood and dragged it back, revealing the wet and wavy lilac locks hidden beneath it. Didn’t trot straight off to do the errand, though. After a moment’s hesitation, the golden-eyed girl asked, “Can it wait until after I get into some dry–”
“No,” Copperhyde answered firmly. “I’m gonna need it now, so bring it to me in my office.” He started to walk away from her, inviting no further discussion of the subject.
“Wait, um– sir?” The instructor sighed and stopped, looking back at Taisya expectantly. “What am I supposed to be getting from up there?” A slight tinge of guilt ran through Copperhyde, but he liked the benefits that came with teaching at MAE-U.
“You’ll know it when you see it,” he told Taisya vaguely, waving a hand dismissively at her and walking away, mentally washing his hands of her. What happened to her now wouldn’t be on his conscience; it would be entirely up to her if there was a way to weasel free of it. He knew he wouldn’t be seeing her again that afternoon.
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“But, um…” Taisya mumbled and stared after her instructor. If he heard her, he didn’t stop, and she wouldn’t have expected him to. Shoulders sagging, she resigned herself as she always did throughout life: to obedience. The interaction was pretty well on par with the rest of her time at MAE-U; first-year students were simply expected to put up with the hazing and presumptive, condescending treatment faculty members gave them. They had to prove that they truly earned their place in MAE-U: old habits, like a general disdain for the ultra-wealthy across most Martians, died hard.
That meant Taisya had more to prove than most. Her family’s wealth wasn’t anything like the quadrillionaires of old, but she was decidedly bottom-rung upper middle class. Wealth didn’t buy her way into MAE:U, but it made sure she had a target on her back once people knew her last name. So many people put stock in the old legend of The Thing , predisposing them to further distrust of anyone with the surname Carpenter.
She waited until Copperhyde reached the door to his office and disappeared through it, clinging to the quarter-hope that the instructor would change his mind. When he was gone, Taisya turned and went for the doors, clumsily peeling out of the hoodie and leaving it draped on the bleachers as she passed them. No reason to keep that on while I’m doing this, she thought to herself, glad that the thin tank-top she wore beneath it was only a little damp.
Once she was out the door properly, the stairs she needed to take to the observation deck were to her immediate left. Taisya resolved to get her task done and over with quickly, ideally before the other students had a chance to use up all the hot water. She took the stairs as quickly as she could in her heeled ankle boots, not bothering to stop and listen to the noises that should have warned her off. There were faint moans mixed with whimpering, easily missed beneath the click-click of her heels and her harsher breathing as she made her ascent, but if she’d just been a touch slower–
Well! It was far too late for ifs, ands or buts. Taisya reached the top of the stairs, rounded the last corner, and stepped out to the observation deck, expecting to quickly find whatever it was she was meant to take back to Copperhyde. And in a sense, she did! She was meant to find Arabella, perched atop a most unusual seat less than a foot away from the observation deck’s entrance. “Oh,” the lilac-haired woman’s hands quickly flew up to cover her mouth, eyes wide with shock as she came to an abrupt stop. “Ohmygod. I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! I’m…!”
“Oh, it’s fine,” Arabella said, smiling prettily, the curve of her lips as languid as the words that spilled out of them. “You’re not the first bitch to walk in on me without pants on, and you won’t be the last,” she promised, Her white-painted nails curled in her seat’s hair, which had far more to do with Taisya’s shock and surprise than the fact that Arabella’s tight black leather pants were resting on the floor, leaving the school’s queen naked from the waist down but for her heels. No panties in sight, not that Taisya was looking for them. Not even the skimpiest of thongs.
The queen’s throne, at least for the moment, was her ass-kisser’s face. The poor thing beneath her was trembling, bound tight by nothing visible, made to bend in a way no one without hyper flexibility should bend, and she most certainly wasn’t kissing Arabella’s backdoor. Instead, her lips and tongue worked away wearily at the queen’s glistening folds, as though she’d been at it for hours and knew she’d be at it for hours more. The she-seat’s messy, wet face was further proof of that.
“I’ll– come back, I’m so sorry,” Taisya promised despite the assurance, stumbling back a step before turning and starting to beat a hasty retreat, face deeply reddened. Arabella blew out a grandiose sigh and snapped her fingers just a second before Taisya reached the corner right before the stairs proper. Something– no, several invisible somethings, wrapped about Taisya’s throat, shoulders, waist, and thighs, stopping her dead in her tracks and yanking her backward. “What?” she shrieked out, wide-eyed as she found herself dragged right back to where she had started her flight, but faced away. Whatever was wrapped around her felt like nothing but raw weight, impossible to fight.
The poor thing that Arabella was sitting upon let out a gasp of relief as the university’s queen dismounted her face, allowing her to take her first real breath of air in a long, long while. “You run along now, okay?” the queen told her temporary throne, ignoring Taisya as she tried to thrash against her bonds. “Keep working on that temperature control, and maybe next time you’ll be able to do something interesting for me.” Then Arabella snapped her fingers and whatever held her ass-kisser in such a straining position faded away, dropping her flat on her back. Finally freed, she wasted little time in starting to crawl away, scrambling to the stairs.
Taisya was jealous of her. Intensely, wildly, jealous– all of that felt through a stark lens of dismay and panic. The ass-kisser didn’t look back, mumbling something that sounded the slightest bit grateful as they fled the scene. “Wait, help, I can’t move–” Taisya squeaked, her breathing growing more and more rapid by the second. She reached after the other fleeing girl, only able to stretch fingers in her direction. Something felt off to her, very off. Terribly off.
The ass-kisser vanished.
“Oh, honey, you don’t need any help from her,” Arabella crooned softly as she walked up behind Taisya, slowly looping her arms around the golden-eyed girl’s waist and slowly giving her a squeeze, hugging Taisya against her front, soft breasts pressed against a lithely sculpted back. “Not when you’ve got me right here,” she added pleasantly, planting her chin on Taisya’s shoulder and resting her black-haired head lightly against the other woman’s lilac locks. “Take a big, deep breath. You’re not in any trouble,” she promised with a smile that her victim couldn’t see, but could certainly hear.
Taisya groaned softly and shuddered, but– she resigned herself, as she always did, to obedience. She took one long breath, filling her lungs and then emptying them. “One more,” Arabella suggested kindly. Though Arabella seemed to be pressed in against where some of that pure weight was wrapped around Taisya, she didn’t seem to be at all affected by it. Again, the golden-eyed girl breathed in deep and breathed out slowly. “That’s good, honey, that’s good. Now, what’s your name?”
Her power? Her power. This is… her power. Okay. I’m not in trouble, Taisya repeated to herself, though like every other student in MAE-U, she knew who Arabella was. She knew if there was one person who could make her time here miserable without laying a finger on her, it was the school’s queen, but… She said I’m not in trouble. Taisya swallowed, calmer but nervous, skittish. It’ll be okay, she told herself; the thought of giving Arabella a fake name never occurred to her. “Taisya Carpenter,” she mumbled, honest to a fault as ever.
“Oooh, Carpenter. That’s a naughty name,” Arabella teased, giggling softly. She pressed herself a bit closer against Taisya’s back, naked hips right against the curve of the other woman’s bottom against the skirt she wore. “Taisya isn’t bad, but I really like that Carpenter part. Tell me,” she continued, squeezing her captive a bit more tightly, “are you a naughty girl, ‘Miss Carpenter’? You’ve seen what I am… but what about you? Have you destroyed any Earths lately? Unleashed any Things upon an unsuspecting universe?” she continued, still sounding good-natured and pleasant about it all.
No matter how sweet Arabella could have made the words, however, Taisya would have flinched in just the same way. The words may as well have been a physical strike on her person. As much as people teased and tormented her over her name and wealth, she’d never gotten used to it. “I’m… I’m not actually related to him,” she mumbled in a weak protest, swallowing roughly after the admission. “We got to check the Ancestral Dot Com records from Earth, and–”
“Dot Com?” Arabella’s giggle turned into a bit more of a discordant sound. “Seriously? Don’t tell me you believe in that ‘inter-net’ bullshit,” she said without that veneer of kindness, her hands beginning to slide along Taisya’s body– one down along her wet skirt, one up along her slightly damp tank-top. “Gosh. Wait. Wasn’t that one of the quadrillionaires? Don’t tell me you’re related to John Carpenter and Kim Dot Com–”
“No,” Taisya squirmed in the strange power that held her tight, her heart fluttering in the worst sort of way. “No, no, I swear, I’m not,” she said, her breathing starting to quicken again. “My family is well off but we’re not that well off, I promise! I just mean– the database, it…” The words ran dry in Taisya’s throat, however, as Arabella’s exploring fingers started pressing against concerning places. One stopped atop her left breast, giving it a squeeze through her tank-top and sports bra. The other lazily traced along the inner curve of her thigh, pushing against her skirt. “What are you doing?” Taisya’s voice cracked out nervously.
“You’re well off, huh?” Arabella answered the question with a question of her own, smiling again. “Gosh, gosh, /gosh/,” she said, each ‘gosh’ a bit more mocking than the last. “You’re rich and a really powerful telekinetic, huh? Pretty, too. You really lucked out. So,” she said after a short pause, “tell me this. Are you a test tube baby? A bit of Carpenter, a bit of Dot Com? Some Bezos, and maybe a little Musk? Is that how you ended up being like this? Just the cutest little button,” she said, voice cloyingly sweet.
“No, I swear I’m–” Taisya tried to say, but Arabella was quick to lift a hand and quicker to slap it against her tit, cutting her off mid-sentence with a sharp yelp. She jolted as much as she could reasonably jolt in her invisible bonds. Even with the layers between her breast and Arabella’s hand, the tender swell of flesh stung like a bitch, like the bitch that stung it. As she settled from it, she whimpered, “Please stop.”
“We’re just talking, honey. You really need to calm down,” Arabella laughed, tilting her head against Taisya’s and nuzzling her jaw tenderly, before turning her head to plant a kiss against the side of her neck. “Just a talk between two friends. One a somebody, the other a nobody who seriously interrupted a half-decent time. Did your quadrillionaire parents never teach you to knock?” she wondered. “Did they raise you in a barn with twenty-three other test tube babies?”
“N-no, please– just… just stop,” Taisya said weakly, shuddering. There was just one thing that she feared more than Arabella at that moment, and that was herself: her powers were always at their strongest when she was feeling most threatened, yet that also ruined her control over them. No matter how miserable the school’s queen made her, the last thing Taisya wanted to do was hurt her in a moment of frustrated weakness. “Just… just let me go, please, before–”
Arabella hurt her again. Not in a drastic way, but enough to garner a shrill squeak out of Taisya, short but long-enough nails pinching her thigh through her skirt, just shy of her most sensitive of places. “Before what? Is the pretty little rich bitch going to toss me against the ceiling and make me into a pretty pancake?” she wondered, kissing Taisya’s neck again and then further up along it, lips leaving a damp trail along the other woman’s dark-dusky skin. She made Taisya shudder with a nip at her earlobe, then made her shudder with a lave of her tongue along its edge. “That’d be so naughty of you. Very Carpenter,” she giggled again.
Taisya flinched again, agitation cracking across her inner shell. “I’m not related to John Carpenter,” she whispered, “I’m not. I’m just… I’m just here to get something for Mister Copperhyde, so please–”
“No, honey.” Arabella’s questing fingers wandered a little further inward of Taisya’s thigh. “You’re not. Oh, you dumb little slit,” she sighed softly, lifting her hand from the lilac-locked lass to run through that purple hair, gently tilting it into Arabella’s resumed nuzzles. “So dumb. You don’t get it yet, do you?” she asked, even as Taisya’s heart started to hammer in her chest, disbelieving the implications. “He sent you up here because I wanted you up here. This school,” she hummed softly, “is my playground, and you’re just another one of my playthings now. Someone should have told me there was such an impressive telekinetic before, but I guess you’ve been a wallflower, haven’t you?”
Taisya’s heart hammered on and on, but her bottom lip quivered contrary to that, stricken by the supposed treachery. “I…”
Arabella simply spoke over Taisya, gently touching her through her skirt, fingers soft and loving in her hair. “Shush, honey. Let me tell you how things are going to go from here on out. … You’re going to be my bitch from this day onward, okay? You’re going to do whatever I tell you to do, and you’ll be happy to do it,” she continued, twirling a lock of Taisya’s wavy hair around one of her fingers. “Copperhyde will add you to my SSA. Mm… I’ll get the dean to transfer you to my room too. That way, you'll never be far from me. My stupid little telekinetic slit, Taisya Carpenter. That sounds nice to you, doesn’t it?”
Taisya swallowed. It didn’t, but she couldn’t– she couldn’t say that to Arabella, could she? She was so used to being obedient to scrape on by and avoid any sort of incidents. Again, the dark-haired bitch spoke in her ear. “Deep breath, slit. Deep breath, and then tell me how nice it sounds.” Again, Taisya obeyed, chest rising and falling slowly, deeply.
“No,” she whispered.
“Pardon me?” Arabella asked, so very sweet once more. Sweet and like flash-frozen ice kept at absolute zero and spoon-fed to a prisoner, just one of the many stranger punishments that had been devised by Mars’ for-profit penitentiaries. “I think you should say that again. Could have sworn that you said–”
“No,” Taisya whispered just a hair louder. “I… I don’t want to be your bitch.” All that Taisya wanted to do was prove she was more than her coincidental surname: she was the first Carpenter to ever be admitted to MAE-U, and her only dream was to make use of the opportunity given to her to make Mars a better place. Even if it meant going against the queen of the school and things being miserable. “Leave me alone,” she said, voice trembling but louder.
Then another slap came clapping down against her body. Not against her tit, but right down on her pussy, careless for the fabric in the way. Taisya hissed out sharply and tried to curl her body protectively, but other parts of her lashed out on their own, finally forced to choose between fight, flight, or submission. Her brain felt hot and growing hotter as her mind lashed out, seeking to do exactly as Arabella predicted: making a pretty pancake, and a second later it was done: the intense power that had Taisya lifting an entire obstacle course put an end to the bullying, right then and there–
Except it didn’t. Except Arabella was still there, still playing with her hair, patting against Taisya’s pussy casually as though building up to another slap. Taisya’s brain felt hot and she could feel a trickle of blood leak from her nose, but the raw weight that held her stiff around the joints, neck, and waist felt ice cold. “Somebody just tried to do something, didn’t they? Good for you, showing spine,” Arabella giggled, delighted, “but that was the stupidest thing you could have done.”
Everyone knew the queen of the school, but few knew her powers or why they warranted such special treatment from the faculty. “... What?” Taisya said weakly, disbelieving. The first time she tried to bring her telekinesis to bear against Arabella, it was reflexive. The second time was purposeful, and amounted to just as little. Arabella just giggled again.
“I’m telling you,” Arabella continued, wrapping the lock of hair she’d been playing with around a long digit, “that it’s useless, you slit. You’re my bitch, just the same as everyone else here,” she said, wrapping that lock tight before snapping her fingers. Suddenly, the same panic-inducing weight was over Taisya’s eyes and in her mouth, blinding the former and gagging the second– and then her nose, too. She couldn’t breathe, and that just made her try to breathe more, desperate, hyperventilating–
Taisya fainted within seconds.
***-***-***-***-***-***-***-***-***-***-***-***-***-***-***-***-***-***-***-***-***-***-***-***
“Wakey wakey, cow eggs and tree bakey,” a voice purred in Taisya’s ear as awareness slowly returned to her. She groaned softly and stirred, eyes refusing to open right away. When they did, her vision was blurry, and she saw double the ceiling overhead.
Double of Arabella, too, when she leaned over Taisya and peered down at her, upside-down to the lilac-locked lass’ eyes. “Has anyone ever told you that you sleep like a princess, rich bitch?” the queen of the school wondered, smiling wryly, her brows rising as though it were a little friendly ribbing. “You toss and you turn and you moan like a whore getting her cervix punched with a fifteen-inch dildo, it’s ridiculous.”
“W…what?” Taisya mumbled, trying to stir. Slowly, her memory of what happened before she choked out returned to her, and she squirmed all the more. Unfortunately, she was still tightly bound– tighter now, even, by whatever invisible and weighty force held her. A hint of color touched her cheeks as Arabella’s words sank in for her, though she knew it shouldn’t have been her first concern. “I’m not– I’d never,” the shy girl started to stammer.
“Whatever you say, slit.” Arabella waved her hand dismissively and then made a gesture. Just as Taisya realized she was suspended in the air, legs and arms akimbo, her position changed with a lurch. She gasped, finding herself brought vertical, and fought through the last fuzziness in her mind to look around the room. … The girl’s locker room that she had been so desperate to get into, just for the sake of changing. She remembered passing out wet, but now she felt dry– “Turns out that temperature twat is good for something after all,” Arabella laughed, running her hands over Taisya’s body from behind once again.
“What? I… who?” Taisya’s voice didn’t lift over a mumble even with a better sense of her situation; she felt cold with fear despite her clothes and skin now being dry. She took a rough swallow as the wandering hands neared her chest and thighs once more and whispered, “Please don’t. Just– just let me go.” She reached for her power, but now she couldn’t feel it at all– her one true advantage in life was gone. “I won’t tell anyone.”
The hands retreated, and Taisya breathed out a sigh of relief– at least until one set of fingers, each nail painted pure white, gently clasped her jaw and turned her face slightly to the right. “See that?” Arabella breathed softly in her ear, lifting her other hand to point it out just in case. Taisya didn’t need the assistance. Her family might not have been related to John Carpenter, supposed Destroyer of Earth, but…
Well. They did work in Holdenwood, Mars’ equivalent of the legendary Hollywood. Taisya knew what she was looking at. “... Why are you doing this?” she mumbled, staring at the free-floating camera, a little red light on its side indicating it was recording.
“Because you’re my bitch, and I don’t tolerate disobedience from my bitches,” Arabella pressed one last little kiss behind Taisya’s ear before stepping out from behind her, putting herself before her captive. Even though they had changed locations and Taisya herself had been speed-dried by a third party, the queen of the school hadn’t bothered putting her pants back on. Taisya couldn’t help but glance down at her, swallowing at the sight of the other woman’s hairless mound and flustering even more. She started to avert her eyes to the side, hoping to perhaps find some escape–
Again Arabella grabbed her jaw, and again Arabella forced Taisya to meet her eyes, finding a pleasant smile waiting for her there. “Oh, honey. You don’t have to look away, you know. In fact, you should look. As pretty as your blushing is, you’re going to want to get used to seeing my cunt. It’ll be the first thing you see when you wake up each morning, starting tomorrow– though you won’t get a taste tonight,” she said. “I’m sorry. I know that’s a disappointment.”
Taisya just bit down on her bottom lip, shoulders shuddering subtly. Arabella had already made it abundantly clear that speaking would just dig her a deeper and deeper hole. “Don’t worry, though. I’m not going to leave you high and dry, just because I had you dried.” Her other hand made a gesture, and the forces wrapped around Taisya shifted slowly, changing her position. She rose a bit higher in the air, finding her arms raised higher and her legs spread just a bit further. “How much of a slut are you?” she wondered.
“I’m not,” Taisya whispered back, closing her eyes.
Her bully only laughed. “Okay, slit. I’ll find out soon enough,” Arabella promised, “and if you ever disobey me again, everyone else will, too.” The fingers on Taisya’s jaw lifted, patting her cheek until she cracked open her eyes. Arabella pointed at the camera again. “The school. Your parents. Hell,” she added with a quick grin, “I’ll even sell it to a pornographer I know on Phobos. You’ll be famous across Mars and the moons. Got that?”
… She can’t be serious, Taisya thought, staring at Arabella’s mouth as her grin slipped into an amused smile; the other woman simply looked too happy and cheerful for any of this to be real, but… the only way Taisya saw through this was obedience. At least until she was released. Her shoulders gave another shudder before she weakly whimpered, “Okay.”
“Good,” Arabella’s grin flicked to life again, and she stepped back, snapping the fingers of one hand while the other gestured sharply across Taisya’s form, never quite touching her. The strange, invisible, and incorporeal force that Arabella seemed to wield snaked across her body, flaring cold before thinning. She felt a pressure against her skin through her clothes… and then she felt her clothes begin to slide off of her all at once, cut to a thousand scraps in the span of a second. The lilac-locked lass gasped and stared down at herself.
Though Taisya knew she was pretty, her shyness and insecurities and the cruelty of others had left her extremely reserved– and easily shamed. She didn’t even take off her towel in communal showers if there were others present, even though her body deserved admiring stares: lithe and toned from head to toe, with matching curves. Subtle, not the sort that were likely to ever stop like Arabella’s might, but incredibly appreciable. Sculpted, even. It had been a long time since anyone had seen her like this– or perhaps it would have been more apt to say it had been never . Any previous nudity-related incidents had her covering up quickly, but now Taisya was spread and helpless, every part of her body vulnerable to the meandering eyes of others.
“Aw,” Arabella laughed as Taisya trembled and stared at herself in shock. “Your nipples are so cute! Look at those,” she crooned, stepping close and playing with one helplessly hardened traitor, several shades darker than her already dark-dusky skin. Even though the school’s queen was gentle, to begin with, Taisya flinched and whimpered, trying to pull back– something that only seemed to invite Arabella’s rough cruelty. She squeaked out sharply when a more direct hit clapped her tit. “It takes a pretty big slut to get this horny from being groped and abused, you know,” she told Taisya sweetly, squeezing in close to her, arm shifting to loop around her back while still holding her tit.
“I’m not a slut,” Taisya whispered out desperately. “Please, don’t do this, just–”
“Just what?” Arabella asked with an innocent blink of her hazel eyes, though her other hand’s fingers had already interrupted Taisya in another way, fingers diving between her thighs to caress the girl’s cunt. Damp, and just as treacherous as her nipples, even though Taisya was far too fearful and shocked with her situation to feel true arousal. Its lips were tinged a bit darker than the flesh around it, just like her nipples. Arabella’s fingers parted her folds with confident ease, showing the camera a hint of the gleaming pink skin hidden past it. Taisya sucked in a sharp breath, hips giving a squirm– she could move them, just barely.
All she managed to do was feel the fingers venturing inside of her in a different way. “Really,” Arabella prodded her, verbally. “What? Go on and tell me. You don’t need to be shy,” she told Taisya teasingly, lightly, all the more cruel for it. She tucked another finger into Taisya and hooked both digits upwards in a slow, crooking gesture, as though trying to coax something out of the poor girl. “You might as well say it. Sing it. Shout it. Scream it. I don’t really care what,” she murmured, “you fucking stupid slit, but get it out of your whore mouth or I’ll shove something in there.”
“Just– just stop!” Taisya begged as she squealed and squealed as she begged, her body reacting pathetically to Arabella’s far too skilled touch. “Please just stop!” The restrained woman tried to jerk her hips up and get away from those fingers, but gravity was as much a bitch as Arabella was, and always brought her down– always just made her attempts to escape into the furtherance of the pleasure she was desperate to get away from, no matter how good Arabella made it feel. “I don’t want this to be my first time!” she shouted, just as Arabella invited her to. “So please just–”
Once more Arabella shut her up, but this time she went about it differently. And not because she didn’t want anyone to hear her, either– she was truly confident in her free reign on MAE-U’s campus, and wouldn’t have stopped even if the dean walked in. The sudden knowledge that this was Taisya’s first time made her want to do so much more than she planned. Arabella’s lush lips found Taisya’s pouty pair and took them boldly in a fierce kiss, all hard presses and harsh nips at her captive’s bottom lip, tongue intruding her mouth possessively.
It muffled Taisya, but it didn’t quiet her altogether. Between Arabella’s knowledgeable fingers and inadvertently fucking herself on them, she felt a horrific bliss, her body delighting in something that her mind loathed and her heart found heavy indeed. The fingers kept going and going, never tiring– not that Taisya lasted long once the kiss began, teased in another sensitive place. Just long enough to spend a minute moaning into it, before her seized thighs tensed up and quivered, trying desperately to squeeze together and lock in the thing making her feel such wonderful things.
Taisya was no stranger to cumming; every girl needed a hobby or three, and shy shut-ins only had so many options on Mars. Her fingers never made her cum as hard as Arabella’s did, though, and certainly hadn’t ever kept going through it, dragging the whole experience out and deepening it. “Ohmygod,” she wailed out breathlessly the moment that Arabella’s mouth pulled away from hers, her cunt’s wet walls squeezing on its intruder. “Ohmygod…!”
“Was that your first kiss to go along with your first time?” Arabella demanded, head still pressed close to Taisya’s as her fingers worked their magic on a hole that should have been far less willing.
“Ohmygod, y-yes! Y-you’re my–” Taisya shrieked out the answer without thinking, honest and obedient to a fault as ever. She surely would have squealed out more too, if Arabella didn’t suddenly divest her cunt of the fingers taking it on such an impossible and lusty journey. The sudden change made Taisya gasp and groan needfully, though she got the fingers back quickly– just not the way she wanted them. She shrieked out as they sharply, wetly cracked down against her twat.
“Don’t lie to me, slit,” Arabella laughed, though she believed Taisya. “No one but a slut would get off on this, so be honest for the camera and tell it exactly what you are,” she said, voice lifted, speaking over Taisya’s panting breaths. The queen of MAE-U delivered another body shuddering slap across the poor girl’s pussy, followed by many more: weaker, but rapid and continuous, never giving Taisya a moment’s peace. “Say it!”
“I’m–” Each of the pussy spanks jolted Taisya and made her squeal again, wordless, her whole body once again trying to curl up and inward to protect herself. They hurt , but they felt amazing, too, some wire in her Martian brain left crossed with another. The quivering that had heralded her first orgasm started again, her body thrashing about in the invisible bonds that restrained her. So many of the slaps struck her clit, at least in partial accident, and she felt it all over.
“Say it!” Arabella shouted in her ear, not that she stopped her abuse for a moment, not giving Taisya even the briefest of openings to do as she was told. “Come on, slit! Be honest for the camera, you rich Carpenter bitch!” Her hand not attacking Taisya’s pussy went to the nearby nipple instead, pinching it cruelly between her white-painted nails and heightening each cry that followed after it. “It’s just what everyone who watches this video is going to think, no matter what you say, so you might as well make this easy on yourself…!”
Taisya felt herself explode on the heel of those words, hitting the crescendo that paused her thrashing and briefly left her senseless, eyes rolled back and mouth parted yet silent. Then she screamed as the orgasm truly struck her, her everything threatening to wash away with the crash of its tidal wave. The attacks on her cunt stopped and she whined desperately, her hips jerking and rolling on their own as though they might manage to somehow grind her pussy against the hand no longer near it. Her first orgasm was long and hard; the second was sharp, swift, and over within seconds.
The invisible bonds holding her let her body droop slightly, and she sagged accordingly, chest heaving as her lungs sought to replenish themselves. Her pretty, almost wholesome face was simultaneously strained, flushed and vacant of expression, lids hanging heavy over her golden eyes. A long moment passed where Taisya simply existed, suspended, shivering.
Then Arabella slapped her pussy again, rough enough to make Taisya empty all the much-needed air from her lungs, leaving it throbbing and sore, throbbing and slick. “Say it, slit,” she said coldly as she grabbed a fistful of her bitch’s purple hair. She pulled Taisya by it, dragging her through the air with the assistance of her strange power; she snapped her fingers then settled herself atop an invisible seat, the other student draped across her lap. Another snap and Taisya’s strange bonds relented in most places. Her arms were left bound behind her back, and something still encircled her neck, though she barely noticed them.
The camera had shifted, too, now hovering right before Taisya’s unseeing golden eyes, recording every moment that followed. Arabella was out of frame, but just Taisya’s face was enough to make it clear what was being done to her, even without the wet noises Arabella’s fingers were making between Taisya’s thighs. The queen’s hand stayed in her bitch’s hair, keeping it pulled back tight and her face aligned perfectly. Tai’s eyelids fluttered and she groaned, her expression slack then tense, slack then tense– then tenser and tenser, until she squeezed her eyes shut and let out a long, lewd groan, made to cum again.
“I’m not going to ask again,” Arabella warned in the wake of that one. “Tell the camera what you are, slit.”
“I–I’m… a slut,” Taisya whispered weakly to the camera, hopeful for a reward– a stop to this. An end. Her body hungered for more, but she just wanted rest. There was no point in her continuing to resist. “I’m a slut,” she finally said, “and I’m… I’m Arabella Florakis’ bitch.” She squeezed her eyes shut, stiffening relaxed muscles as Arabella’s pussy-fingering hand began to stroke along her back, humming softly to herself all the while, not trusting what seemed to be a moment of aftercare.
She was right to do that, though the spanking that followed surely would have hurt less if she didn’t clench her ass against it. Arabella was relentless with her toned cheeks, nails clawing into them with each strike, continuing to pull Taisya’s hair, keeping her face aligned forward. Tears ran down her cheeks, and she was just as confused about them as the rest of what Arabella had made her feel. For how horrible it all was, something was relieving about just… giving in like this. Everyone else in her life who tormented her pulled short of going anywhere near this far. “I’m a slut!” she gasped again, and again, and again– but it never satisfied Arabella. “I’m Arabella Florakis’ bitch!” she wailed breathlessly, for almost ten minutes straight.
Arabella only went for Tai’s cunt again when her wrist was beginning to grow weary of the sadistic slapping spree. Just a few seconds of caressing proved to be too much for the lilac-locked lass after how wound-up the spanking left her, and she finally went limp amid another orgasm. “You and I are going to have so much fun this year,” the queen of MAE-U told her new, unconscious subject with a cheerful smile, bending and leaning down to press an affectionate kiss against her shoulder, stroking her back again. “You stupid slit.”
Right after that apparent display of affection, Arabella shoved Taisya off her lap entirely and called out to the ass-kisser waiting just outside the room, “Hey, temperature twat! Come get this slut some clothes and bring her to my room.”