Chapter 25: "Lost in Disneyland" Works!
The sterile air in Ava’s lab hummed with the low thrum of machinery and the soft, despairing murmur of voices. Mara paced the perimeter of the glowing null-field cage, her heels clicking a furious tattoo on the metal grating. The energy barrier cast a sickly yellow pall over her face, highlighting the tight set of her jaw.
Stacy sat cross-legged on the floor, doing slow, controlled breathing exercises. Jan was perched on a discarded crate, idly sketching sigils in the dust with her finger, her expression one of intense concentration. Dale leaned against the wall, his face pale and slick with sweat from the pain of his healing scars. Vivian crouched beside him, her form subtly flickering at the edges—the null-field was leaching her energy, starving her.
Ava stood before them on the other side of the energy wall, her maid’s uniform crisp, her tablet in hand. Her eyes were fixed on a secondary monitor mounted on the wall. It showed a hallway feed. In it, Zack, still shirtless and flushed, was pinned against the wall. Ginny, in her grease-streaked peach babydoll, had her legs wrapped around his waist, his cock buried to the hilt inside her. Her head was thrown back, mouth open in a silent cry of pleasure. Molly knelt before them, her mouth working eagerly on Zack’s balls, one hand stroking his shaft in tandem with Ginny’s rocking hips.
“Your boyfriend seems… preoccupied,” Ava said, her voice a cold blade aimed at Mara.
Mara stopped pacing. She looked at the screen. A slow, exasperated breath hissed out between her teeth. She rolled her eyes, a gesture of profound, weary irritation. “For fuck’s sake,” she muttered, then raised her voice. “At least let me watch if they’re gonna use him as a human dildo again. The lighting in that feed is terrible. You’d think a high-tech evil organization could spring for better cameras.”
Ava’s composure flickered for a second. “You find this amusing?”
“I find it inefficient,” Mara snapped back. “You’re monitoring a consensual threesome instead of the ventilation shafts or the service corridors. It’s a basic tactical error. Hornpipe was an asshole, but he wasn’t stupid. You, on the other hand, are letting my idiot friends wander your ship asking about towel animals while you ogle my boyfriend’s dick.”
Stacy chuckled without opening her eyes. “She’s got you there.”
Jan’s head snapped up, her sketching forgotten. A wide, infectious grin split her face. She didn’t look at the screen. She was looking at the ceiling vent above Ava’s head.
The grate clattered open with a sound like a dropped tool tray.
Ava jumped, spinning around, a stunner whipping from her belt.
Mike Williamson, covered in a shocking amount of duct grease and grime, dropped from the vent. He landed in a crouch, staggering slightly under the weight of the infant carrier strapped securely to his chest. Inside, baby Rick gurgled happily, entirely unbothered by the sudden descent. A moment later, a blur of golden fur followed. Godfrey II landed with a soft whump, wagged his tail once, and then sat, panting, as if this were a perfectly normal way to enter a room.
“Uh, hi,” Mike said, straightening up and giving a little wave with his grease-blackened hand. “Sorry to drop in. We got a little turned around. Is this the, uh, ‘secret evil lab where you imprison our friends’? Or is it the ‘crew-only spa’? The signs on this ship are really vague.”
Ava stared, her stunner pointed at his face. Her mind, so finely tuned for magical threats and tactical counter-measures, crashed against the sheer, baffling normality of a grease-monkey dad with a baby and a puppy.
Jan’s sudden, pealing laughter broke the silence. “Told you!” she crowed, pointing at Ava. “You left the quiet ones alone!”
From the carrier, Rick let out a coo.
Ava’s eyes darted from Mike to the dog to the baby. Her trigger finger tightened.
“Don’t,” Vivian said, her voice weak but clear. She had stood up, her form solidifying. The flickering shadows around her hands condensed into sharp, needle-like points. “You hurt that baby, and I will drain every joule of life from your body before your heart stops. I’m very hungry.”
Ava hesitated. The threat from the half-succubus was credible, but it was the bizarre mundanity of the scene that truly disarmed her.
Mike took advantage of her hesitation. He stepped forward, peering at the null-field cells. “Hey, guys. Nice digs. Very minimalist.” He spotted Hank and Fatima in the adjacent cell. Hank was shirtless, Fatima in just her bra and panties, both pressed against the glowing wall. “Hank! You okay, man? You’re looking a little… Criscoed.”
“Mike?” Hank’s muffled voice came through the barrier. “What the hell? Is that my nephew?”
“Yep! He’s a great co-pilot. Slept through most of the ductwork.” Mike turned his earnest gaze back to Ava. “So, how does this work? Do we negotiate? Do you monologue? I’ve gotta be honest, my baby’s due for a feeding soon, and Casey gets real snippy if I’m late with the bottle. She’s around here somewhere, probably asking a janitor where to find the mythical ‘left-handed smoke shifter.’ It’s part of the plan.”
“The… plan?” Ava repeated, her voice dangerously low.
“Operation Lost at Disneyland,” Mike confirmed, nodding. “It’s a decentralized chaos protocol. We’re the distracting family unit. You’re the overwhelmed cast member.”
Ava’s expression cleared into one of cold fury. She was being played by a fool. She swung the stunner away from Mike, aiming it at Jan’s cell. “Enough. You will deactivate the field, O’Connor, or I will introduce your friends to a voltage that will cook their nervous systems.”
Jan stopped laughing. Her eyes met Mike’s across the room. She gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod.
Mike sighed. “Right. Well, we tried the nice way.” He looked down at the puppy. “Godfrey. Seek.”
Godfrey II’s ears perked up. He trotted past Ava, who was too focused on Jan to pay attention to the dog. He snuffled along the base of a large, humming console covered in blinking lights—the source of the null-fields. Finding a particularly enticing bundle of wires, he clamped his puppy teeth down and began to worry at them with happy, vigorous tugs.
A warning siren blared. The holographic displays flickered. The null-field containing Jan, Mara, Stacy, Vivian, and Dale wavered, its hum dropping in pitch.
“No!” Ava shrieked, turning.
It was too late. Jan closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and pushed.
It wasn’t a complex spell. It was the simplest, most fundamental Green Moon technique: the Power of Exposure. But channeled through her, amplified by her raw, unfettered will and the sudden surge of freedom as the field faltered, it became something more.
Ava didn’t see Jan disrobe. One second Jan was in her bohemian skirt and top. The next, she was simply… bare. Her fiery red hair seemed to burn brighter. Her smattering of freckles glowed like constellations against her skin. Every curve, every line of her, was rendered with such devastating, awe-inspiring clarity that it bypassed lust entirely and hit the brainstem directly.
Ava froze. The stunner fell from her nerveless fingers, clattering to the floor. Her mouth hung open. All thought, all command, all fury was scoured from her mind, replaced by a sublime, terrifying reverence. She was in the presence of something holy and utterly beyond her.
The null-field died with a sputter of sparks.
Stacy was the first one out. She moved like the athlete she was, a single, fluid motion that covered the distance between her and Ava. Her fist, hardened by years of martial training, connected with Ava’s temple with a sharp crack. The woman’s eyes rolled back, and she crumpled.
“Clear,” Stacy said, shaking out her hand.
Mara was already at the console, her lawyer’s mind parsing the controls. “It’s a series of individual locks. I can release them one by one.” Her fingers flew over the interface.
In the cell next to them, the energy wall holding Hank and Fatima dissolved. Hank stumbled forward, catching himself on the now-inert frame. Fatima strode out, her voluptuous body sheened with sweat, her dark eyes blazing. She ignored her state of undress, marching straight to the console beside Mara.
“Move over,” she said, her voice clipped. She placed her hands on the cool metal, closed her eyes, and murmured words in Arabic that seemed to make the air vibrate. The remaining cell walls—the ones holding Bethany and Liam, Charley and Rebecca—flickered and died with a sound like shattering crystal.
The captives spilled out, a tangle of relief and confusion. Liam gathered a shaken Bethany into his arms. Charley helped Rebecca to her feet, his hand immediately going to her stomach. Hank grabbed Fatima, pulling her into a fierce, silent embrace.
Jan, still gloriously, powerfully naked, walked over to the console where Godfrey was now gleefully shredding a circuit board. She scooped him up, nuzzling his head. “Good boy. Best boy.”
“Don’t look, Zack,” Ginny’s voice came from the doorway.
Everyone turned. Zack stood there, pants hastily done up, flanked by Molly and Ginny. He was blushing furiously, instinctively averting his eyes from Jan’s radiant nudity even as the magical awe of it washed over him. Molly just adjusted her glasses, a professional’s appreciation in her gaze. “The uniformed guys all got very confused when we asked if the lifeboats had mini-bars,” she reported. “Casey’s got a whole brigade of actual crew following her around looking for a lost diamond earring that never existed.”
Mike unstrapped Rick from his chest, handing the gurgling baby to an eager Stacy, who cradled him protectively. “See? Decentralized chaos. Works every time.”
Dale, leaning heavily on Vivian, looked around at the assembled, bruised, half-dressed group. He saw the fallen Ava, the ruined console, the grinning idiot with the baby, the naked witch petting her dog, the lawyer and the academic bickering over the controls, the Scottish poet wiping blood from his lip, the pregnant kindergarten teacher, the actress and her girlfriend looking like they’d been through a car wash, the fitness instructor now making cooing noises at an infant, and his own demonic savior who looked like she was about to pass out from hunger.
He saw the fallen Ava, the ruined console, the grinning idiot with the baby, the naked witch petting her dog, the lawyer and the academic bickering over the controls, the Scottish poet wiping blood from his lip, the pregnant kindergarten teacher, the actress and her girlfriend looking like they’d been through a car wash, the fitness instructor now making cooing noises at an infant, and his own demonic savior who looked like she was about to pass out from hunger.
A heavy metal door at the far end of the lab hissed open.
Six Consortium guards charged in, three men and three women, their grey jumpsuits crisp, their faces set in masks of professional alarm. They carried sleek, matte-black rifles, the barrels humming with a distinctive anti-magic frequency. Their eyes scanned the room, taking in the freed prisoners, their downed commander, the sparking equipment.
“Don’t move!” the lead guard, a woman with a severe blonde buzzcut, barked. “Drop to the floor, now!”
Jan, still radiantly naked, didn’t drop. She looked at Fatima. Fatima, standing there in just her bra and panties, met her gaze and gave a single, sharp nod.
They moved as one.
Jan raised her hands, palms forward. A shimmering wave, visible as a distortion in the air like heat haze, pulsed from her. It wasn’t a focused beam but an expanding sphere of pure, unadulterated want. Fatima, next to her, began speaking, her voice a low, rhythmic chant in classical Arabic, layering structure and intent over Jan’s raw, chaotic power. She wasn’t just amplifying desire; she was sculpting it, directing it.
The wave hit the guards.
Their anti-magic implants, tiny chips buried at the base of their skulls, sizzled and popped, emitting faint wisps of smoke. The guards staggered as the foreign tech short-circuited, overridden by a force more primal than any circuitry could contain. The buzzing rifles clattered to the floor, forgotten.
The lead guard’s scowl melted. Her eyes, locked on Jan’s sublime form, widened not with awe this time, but with a hungry, desperate lust. She turned to the man next to her, his own face slack with sudden need, and grabbed the front of his jumpsuit, pulling him into a deep, frantic kiss. Her hands fumbled with his zipper.
Another guard, a stocky man, dropped to his knees before a female colleague. He yanked her pants down her hips, burying his face between her legs with a groan, his tongue lapping eagerly at her cunt. She gasped, her fingers tangling in his hair, grinding against his mouth.
The lab dissolved into a tangle of bodies.
A male guard pinned a woman against a humming server rack, hiking up her shirt to suck greedily on her nipple while his other hand worked frantically at his own fly. Another couple simply collapsed to the floor, a mess of tearing fabric and wet, slapping sounds as he drove into her from behind, his balls slapping against her skin with each brutal thrust.
The air grew thick with the smell of sex, sweat, and ozone. Guttural moans, whispered curses, and the slick, rhythmic sounds of fucking filled the space.
Vivian, leaning against Dale, inhaled sharply. Her eyes, which had been dull and shadowed, began to gleam. She let go of him, standing straighter as a faint, shimmering vapor—like visible heat rising from hot asphalt—began to rise from the entangled guards. Tendrils of raw, unfiltered sexual energy, golden and warm, coiled through the air toward her.
She opened her mouth slightly, not to feed deeply, but to siphon. The energy touched her lips, and she absorbed it, a gentle, continuous stream. Color returned to her cheeks. The living shadows that comprised her true form solidified, her hunger appeased not by a single feast but by this sustained, ambient harvest.
“Well,” Mara said dryly, watching a female guard ride another woman’s face while a man took her from behind, “that’s one solution to the manpower problem.”
Bethany, having retrieved her seemingly small handbag from a confiscated property locker, pulled out her antique-looking Golden Wand phone. She snapped a few pictures of the entwined guards, her expression clinical. “Most of the ship’s crew are normal folks working for the cruise company,” she reminded them, raising her voice over the chorus of grunts and pleas. “We don’t have a brig. We don’t have any legal authority to lock anyone up, even these assholes.”
Jan lowered her hands, the pervasive aura of desire dialing back to a warm hum. “We can do a basic mindwipe for the rank-and-file. Let them forget, for a little while, that there are magic people on this ship. At least until the next Consortium stooge figures it out and takes over.”
Stacy, still cradling Rick, nodded. “It’s a stopgap. But it’s something.”
“In the meantime,” Jan continued, walking over to where Ava was beginning to stir, groaning on the floor, “we can do with her what we did with Redmond. Let the cruise company fire them for… let’s say, chronic unreliability. And if the Consortium wants to study the long-term effects of magical exposure on normal people…” She nudged Ava’s shoulder with her bare foot. “They’ll have two of their own as test subjects.”
The group exchanged glances. Liam shrugged. Hank, holding a now-dressed Fatima close, nodded. Mike caught Casey’s eye as she slipped into the lab, followed by a confused-looking legitimate ship’s steward. Casey just arched an eyebrow.
“Seems logical until a better idea comes along,” Mara conceded. “Let’s get this cleaned up.”
They worked quickly. Fatima and Jan moved among the spent, dazed guards, their touches gentle on glazed eyes, their whispers erasing the last hour and planting vague memories of a shared, illicit party and a collective decision to resign. The guards would wake, scattered in their own quarters, with hazy regrets and resignation letters drafted in their minds.
Bethany and Liam bound Ava’s hands with cable from the ruined console. Zack and Dale hauled her to her feet. She came around, blinking against a forming bruise on her temple.
“What… what are you doing with me?” she slurred, her earlier cold command replaced by groggy confusion.
Jan, having thrown on a colorful silk kimono from her bag, smiled. “We’re giving you a good time, Ava. A really, really good time.”
They moved through the ship’s corridors, a bizarre procession: the bedraggled friends, the prisoner, the baby, the pets. They reached a stateroom door marked for the ship’s Purser, Dan Redmond. Bethany fished a small, bronze, gear-covered disk from her bag—her Golden Wand lock-pick. She placed it against the electronic panel. Gears whirred softly within the device, and the door clicked open.
Inside, the sitting area was dim. Dan Redmond sat in an armchair, facing the door. He wore a clean bathrobe. His hands were folded placidly in his lap. A blissful, vacant smile was fixed on his face. A half-eaten plate of fruit sat on a table beside him.
Ava stared. “Redmond? What… what is this? What did you do to him?”
Fatima stepped forward, her posture one of serene authority. She placed her hands on Ava’s shoulders from behind. Ava tried to stiffen, but a lethargic warmth was already spreading from Fatima’s touch.
Jan stood before her, her head tilted. “I can feel it,” Jan said, her voice a conspiratorial whisper. “Redmond here… he’s got a thing. A real specific thing. For a woman in a maid’s uniform. The crispness of it. The submission of it. The power of it.” She leaned closer. “And you, Ava… all those late nights filing reports for him, fetching his coffee… you’ve wondered, haven’t you? What it would be like if he stopped seeing you as just his assistant.”
Ava’s face showed first a dawning horror, a resistance to the invasive warmth seeping into her mind. But Fatima’s chant was steady, layering suggestion over suggestion, finding the latent fantasy and nurturing it, amplifying it alongside the one Jan had plucked from Redmond’s dormant thoughts.
The horror in Ava’s eyes softened, then dissolved into a glazed, faraway look. Then, slowly, her lips curved. It wasn’t her cold, triumphant smile from the lab. This was something languid, seductive. Her shoulders relaxed under Fatima’s hands.
“It would just be a matter of amplifying those feelings,” Jan said softly, watching the transformation. “You’ll spend the rest of this cruise just… pleasing each other. Nothing else will matter.”
Fatima removed her hands. “We’ll be back from time to time,” she added, her tone matter-of-fact. “To make sure you get regular meals. But neither of you is going to care much to leave this room otherwise.”
Redmond, his eyes fixed on Ava in her maid’s uniform, stood up. His robe fell open. He was already hard. He walked toward her, his movements dreamlike.
Ava met him halfway. Her hands went to the buttons of her uniform jacket. Her earlier seductive grin widened, becoming genuine, hungry. She let the jacket slip from her shoulders.
Jan patted her on the back. “We’ll be back in a couple hours with breakfast.”
She ushered everyone out, pulling the stateroom door closed behind them. The last glimpse anyone had was of Ava sinking to her knees before Redmond, her mouth opening, and his hands weaving into her hair.
In the quiet hallway, the group stood for a moment listening to the muffled, eager sounds that began to emanate from behind the door.
“Well,” Mike said, adjusting his grip on Rick. “That’s that sorted. Anyone else hungry? I could murder a croissant.”