Chapter 13: The Succubus Queen
The common room felt different tonight. Charged. The usual clutter of rulebooks and dice was still there, but the energy had shifted from focused play to something more performative, more visceral. Emily sat on the edge of a worn armchair, her sketchbook open but forgotten on her lap. She’d drawn a few lines—the curve of a horn, the arch of a brow—but her attention was irrevocably elsewhere.
Across the scarred table, Mandy was practically in Jake’s lap. Not practically—she was. Her back was to his chest, her hips making slow, circular grinds against him as he nuzzled her neck, his hands resting possessively on her thighs. They weren’t even pretending to look at their character sheets. A laptop was open beside them, its screen displaying a chaotic chat window that scrolled with dizzying speed, messages punctuated by digital cash register cha-ching sounds.
“Donation from Lurker23: Twenty bucks to see the rogue get her purse plundered!”
Jake chuckled, his voice a low rumble against Mandy’s ear. “You hear that, rogue? The people have spoken.”
Mandy just smiled glassily in response, arching her back.
Emily’s gaze flicked to Sarah, who sat directly to Mark’s right. Sarah’s chair was pushed slightly back from the table. Her face was a masterpiece of controlled composure, cheeks flushed, lips parted. One hand was clenched around her d20, knuckles white. The other was out of sight, below the table. Mark was narrating, his DM voice a smooth, hypnotic baritone.
“—and the Succubus Queen’s tendrils of shadow weave around your ankles, your wrists, a cool, sentient velvet that tightens as she smiles,” he said, his eyes locked on Sarah. He made a subtle, rolling gesture with his fingers on the tabletop. “She asks you, Priestess Vex, what you value most. Your loyalty to your dark goddess? Or the experience that you thought only she could provide?"
A sharp, hiccupping gasp escaped Sarah. Her free hand flew to the edge of the table, gripping it. Her eyes screwed shut for a second.
Mark’s lips twitched. He didn’t look at the laptop or at Mandy and Jake. His entire world seemed to be the game table and Sarah’s reaction. “The sensation… builds,” he continued, his voice dropping, becoming intimately conversational despite the room. “A persistent, rhythmic pulse that mirrors the Queen’s own heartbeat in the stones beneath your feet. Do you resist it, cleric? Or do you… lean in?”
Under the table, Emily was certain Mark’s hand was moving. Adjusting a dial on a small, wireless remote. Sarah’s breath was coming in short, audible pants now. She bit her lower lip, hard.
Emily felt her own face grow hot. Her skin prickled. The chainmail from two nights ago might as well have been back on her body, a phantom weight, a memory of cold metal and searing friction. She crossed her legs tightly, a dull throb of awareness pulsing between them. This wasn't like the vague, sexy descriptions from before. This was targeted. Specific. Real.
“Sarah?” Mark prompted, his tone gently mocking. “Your character’s action?”
Sarah’s eyes flew open. They were glassy, unfocused. “I… I yield,” she breathed, the words barely audible.
The chat exploded with more cha-chings and heart emojis.
“Yielding is an action,” Mark said, satisfaction coating the words. He leaned forward. “Describe it.”
Sarah swallowed. Her free hand, the one below the table, was now a fist in her own lap. “I… let the feeling in. I stop fighting it. I let it… climb.”
As she said “climb,” Mark’s thumb must have moved. Sarah jolted in her seat, a full-body shudder racking her frame. A sound, half-groan, half-whimper, was torn from her throat. For three seconds, four, she was perfectly still, suspended. Then she slumped back, breathing as if she’d sprinted a mile, a sheen of sweat on her temples.
The room was silent except for the low hum of the laptop. Even Mandy had stopped grinding to watch, a smirk playing on her lips.
“A… an effective tactic,” Mark said, breaking the silence with a return to his normal narrator’s cadence. “The Queen is pleased. The psychic assault ceases. For now.” He finally glanced at the laptop. “And the chat… is very appreciative. Thank you, ‘Dice_Daddy_69’ for the super-chat.”
Jake snorted. Mandy giggled, resuming her motion.
Emily just stared. Her own heart was hammering against her ribs. This was the game now. Not just a story. It was a performance, a direct wire from narrative to nervous system. Sarah had confessed to the toy, to testing it. This was the live demonstration. And Mark was the conductor.
The session limped on for another half-hour, but the narrative thread was broken. Jake and Mandy were in their own world, the stream was a secondary concern, and Sarah was quiet, flushed, spent, occasionally shooting Mark a look that was equal parts accusation and worship.
When Mark finally called the session, everyone moved slowly, packing up with a collective, post-climax lethargy. Jake and Mandy gradually set angled themselves and exchanged a lingering look, her fingers trailing down his arm, before departing separately. Sarah lingered by the table, fiddling with her dice bag.
Emily approached her, sketchbook clutched to her chest like a shield. “So,” she said, her voice sounding too loud in the emptying room. “The succubus queen, huh?”
Sarah looked up. The usual sly confidence was back, layered over a deep, satisfied exhaustion. “Yeah. She’s a bitch.” She zipped her bag with a decisive pull. “Effective, though.”
“I could tell.” Emily glanced toward the hall where Mark had disappeared, presumably to the bathroom. “The remote… was that the…?”
“The blue one? Yep.” Sarah’s smile was wide and unashamed. “The one I told you about. Mark… has a real flair for dramatic timing.”
The casual admission made it more real, more insane. “And the chat? The donations?”
“Part of the experiment. Mark’s idea. Turns out, people will pay to watch a story get to someone.” Sarah shouldered her bag. “It’s about reaction. About loss of control. It’s… powerful.”
Emily remembered the feeling of Cody’s weight, his own loss of control, the soreness that had lingered for days. The way he’d looked at her afterward—like he’d discovered a new continent. This was that, but amplified, staged, and monetized. The thought was terrifying. And electrifying.
“You okay?” Sarah asked, peering at her. “You looked pretty engrossed.”
“I was,” Emily admitted. She couldn’t lie. Her own body had been humming in sympathy, a silent, unseen participant. “It’s a lot.”
“It is.” Sarah bumped her shoulder playfully. “But ‘a lot’ is where the interesting stuff happens. Outside the comfort zone.” She nodded toward the door. “Walk you back?”
They left the common room, its stale, electric air giving way to the cool, anonymous hallway of the dorm. The silence between them was comfortable, loaded.
"What's up with Mandy and Jake?" Emily asked curiously. "I would have thought they were just waiting for the session to end so the, err, real one could begin."
Sarah chuckled quietly. "Mandy has a boyfriend."
Emily's eyebrows rose in shock. "So she's, umm..."
"Very much in character?" Sarah interjected. "Oh yes, it seems like she's taking her rogue's interactions with the Eldorian fighter... very seriously."
Wide eyed, Emily tried to process yet another new dimension to the hedonistic performance she'd unwittingly signed up for.
“You know,” Sarah said as they reached the junction where their halls split, “if you’re curious… about the tools of the trade… the website I use is having a sale. ‘ArcaneArsenalDotCom’. Use promo code ‘D20_VX04’ at checkout.” She winked. “For… research purposes. Your barbarian might appreciate a few new magical items.”
She turned and walked away, leaving Emily standing alone under the buzzing fluorescent lights.
Back in her own room, the cozy nest of fairy lights and manga felt suddenly childish, a diorama of who she used to be. She dropped her sketchbook on the desk. The drawing of the succubus queen stared back, a few bold lines implying great power and greater hunger.
Her laptop glowed. It would be so easy.
The phantom ache from the chainmail night was gone, replaced by a new, restless emptiness. A curiosity that was no longer theoretical. It had a shape, a color—vibrant blue—and a wireless remote.
She sat down. The keys were cool under her fingertips.
Her search history was already full of dungeon maps and character lore. She typed in the new address, her pulse a quick, light rhythm in her wrists.
The page loaded. It wasn’t seedy. It was sleek, modern, with tasteful product photography that looked more like avant-garde sculpture than sex toys. She navigated, her face burning but her hands steady.
There it was. The “Siren’s Call,” model SC-2, in cobalt blue. Discrete, rechargeable, app-enabled. Five intensity settings. Pattern library.
Her cursor hovered over ‘Add to Cart.’
She thought of Cody’s bewildered, turned-on face. She thought of Sarah’s shuddering release under the table. She thought of her own body, listening to a story and responding like it was a direct command.
This wasn’t about Mandy and Jake’s primal display. This wasn’t even really about Sarah and Mark’s twisted game. This was a map. A tool for a territory she was only beginning to recognize in herself—a landscape where stories, shame, control, and pleasure were all the same raw, malleable clay.
She clicked it.
The sound of the cart updating was a soft, digital chime in the quiet room. She didn’t look for anything else. She went straight to checkout, filled in her info with robotic efficiency, and typed in the code.
D20_VX04.
The total dropped by fifteen percent. She almost laughed. A discount on damnation. Or liberation. It was impossible to tell the difference anymore.
She hit ‘Confirm Purchase.’ The screen flashed. Order Processed.
Emily leaned back in her chair. The fairy lights twinkled, stupidly benign. A notification would come. A package would arrive. And then, she would have her own magical item. Her own secret. A button to push, a frequency to find, a way to write sensation directly onto her own skin, alone in this room, or maybe, someday, not alone at all.
She saved the confirmation email in a folder labeled “Receipts.” She closed the laptop. The room was very quiet, but inside her, a new, soft hum had begun.
The room was very quiet, but inside her, a new, soft hum had begun. It was the hum of waiting, an anxious, anticipatory buzz in her veins that made the next two days stretch into a formless agony. She jumped at every text alert, checked her email compulsively, and found herself staring at the common doors in the student mailroom with a fixation that felt borderline deranged. The package was coming from two states over. It would take time. She had no patience.
On the third evening, the hum became a scream. Cody was at a team study session. Her homework was done. The silence of her dorm was a physical pressure. Her gaze landed on her desk drawer, the one housing her art supplies and, tucked beneath a sketchpad, the simple blue plastic cylinder Sarah had given her weeks ago. The “starter model.”
Her fingers were clumsy on the cap. The plastic was cool, impersonal. She lay back on her bed, the fairy lights casting their useless, pretty glow. This was foolish. It was just a thing. A tool.
She was already wet, a slick, eager heat between her legs born from memory and imagined scenarios. It still felt impossibly tight, a blunt, unyielding pressure that made her breath hitch. She pushed, her muscles clenching in instinctive protest before yielding all at once with a soft, gasping sigh. It was inside. A full, strange presence.
She lay there for a moment, just feeling it. It wasn’t magical. It was a piece of plastic. The magic, she understood suddenly, had to come from somewhere else.
She grabbed her laptop. In a hidden folder, nestled between PDFs of monster manuals and character backstories, were the files. The stories. She’d saved them months ago, telling herself they were anthropological research into fantasy tropes. She knew that was a lie. She clicked on the one with the most alarming filename.
The prose was crude, workmanlike. It wasted no time. A bar maid named Anya was grabbed from a tavern cellar, a sack thrown over her head, and dragged to a duke’s remote estate. By paragraph three, she was naked and collared. Emily skimmed, her heart thudding, the toy inside her a forgotten, neutral weight.
Then the tone shifted. The descriptions became sharper, more visceral. The duke wasn’t just cruel; he was bored, and his games were intricate. He made her serve his guests, not with submission, but with a challenging, mocking grace. Her value shifted. She became a prized entertainer, her willingness to endure transformed into a power to captivate.
Emily’s breathing slowed. Her hand, resting on her stomach, drifted lower. Her fingertips brushed her clit, a light, absent circle. In the story, Anya stopped fighting the sensations. She started cataloging them, studying the guests’ reactions, learning which twist of her hip or caught breath would elicit a sharper response, a louder groan. She began to orchestrate.
A sudden, deep pulse of want clenched inside Emily. It was involuntary, a swift, hot contraction around the inert blue plastic. She gasped, her back arching slightly off the bed. The physical shock pulled her fully into her body. The toy was no longer neutral. It was an anchor. The story wasn't just words; it was a script her nerves were beginning to follow.
She read faster, one hand scrolling, the other moving with more purpose now. Anya reveled in the power to unravel men of station, to make them beg a collared servant for release. The degradation wasn't the point. The point was the control hidden within the surrender.
Emily’s hips lifted from the mattress, seeking pressure. Her fingers worked in time with the story’s rhythm, which had become her own rhythm. The sensations built, not in a gentle climb, but in sharp, surprising crests that mirrored the narrative’s twists. She wasn’t imagining herself as Anya. She was imagining herself as the author, the one who decided when the touch came, how hard, and to what end.
The climax, when it broke over her, was silent and profound. It wasn't a shattering, like with Cody. It was an immersion, a warm, liquid pooling of heat that left her limbs heavy and her mind preternaturally clear. She went utterly still, the laptop screen casting a blue glow on her slack face.
Slowly, she pulled the toy out. The sound was obscenely wet in the quiet room. She looked at it, this simple, unremarkable object, now gleaming under the fairy lights. It had been a key, but not to some fantasy dungeon. The story had been the lock. And the thing it had opened was a door inside herself, revealing a room where surrender and agency were not opposites, but facets of the same dark, glittering jewel. She closed the laptop, the screen going black. The hum inside her was gone, replaced by a deep, resonant silence that knew its own name.