Landing on the floor of the bar, Sandra tucked and rolled, coming up with daggers out.
Immediately, she felt the pressure of passivity weighing on her mind–the adorable fox-pup on the floor yipped and jumped up to her, licking at her face while it gave her the biggest, softest look possible, eyes glittering like pools.
(Awww,) Sandra thought, her focus taken up by the creature’s overwhelming presence of cute.
A second later, a sharp thud impacted on the creature’s side, and it lurched, rocking away. In an instant, its cuteness vanished, and Sandra saw the truth–teeth, claws, and fury, all in a tiny, fluffy package. Two arrows stuck out its side, each crackling with a hint of lingering lightning.
“Break its concentration!” Tarja called down. Sandra needed no other encouragement, lunging forward at the fox with both daggers.
The fox thing snapped at her, cute, doe-eyes replaced with pits of black fire. It chomped once, twice, but missed with both, and Sandra responded with a quick slash of her knife.
Compounding on the damage Tarja had already dealt, Sandra needed only a single hit, and the fox simply burst into pure energy, vanishing completely.
Sandra stood, wobbling a little, in time to see Quinn–sitting atop one of the invisible stalkers, his dress pulled over the monster’s head, wailing on it with heavy elbows dropped onto its head, one after the other, slamming its head through the frilly fabric.
Hadrian was too good for fighting, apparently–instead, he hovered above them all, hands out, channeling strings of purple energy.
“They’re summons!” Sandra called, gesturing to the enemies around them. “We’re fighting summons, we have to get to the summoner!”
Another arrow whizzed past her, striking one of the powder-coated elementals behind her.
With the fox thing gone, the other adventurers in the guild bar were fighting back, but they’d already lost much of the upper hand. Those who weren’t already disabled by mindbreaking pacifiers were pinned or struggling, outnumbered and caught unawares without their full suite of weapons or armor.
Sandra, on the other hand, was supercharged for a fight and had no qualms about going all out.
Spinning, she threw one dagger and slashed with the other, speed and dexterity coursing through her limbs. Her attacks came so quick it was hard to separate the individual slashes, and she made them as she tumbled through the bar, dropping a wound on one invisible foe before rolling to the next, trying to deal just enough damage that the struggling warriors could free themselves.
Then, around the room, Hadrian’s complicated magic kicked in, and five of the guild adventurers who’d been pacified and rendered helpless rose up, eyes still glassy, drool still dribbling from behind their pacifier shields. Thin strands of energy went from their wrists and ankles up to a series of hovering constructions in the air, x-shaped handles, like the kind used to control a marionette.
Despite their mindless appearance, the five warriors raised what weapons they had available and charged into battle, carried forth by Hadrian’s pupeteering.
Sandra’s mood surged, feeling triumphant–they were winning, and doing well to boot.
Her confidence dropped when she felt something slam into the back of her head, an attack she hadn’t seen coming in the slightest. Turning to face her new attacker, she saw nothing, but footprints in the baby powder dusting the floor told her another enemy was there.
Swallowing, she called up, “More! Hadrian, there’s mo–”
An invisible hand grabbed her by the throat, lifting Sandra into the air, and her umbral knives vanished from her hands as she grabbed the wrist, trying to hold herself up enough that she could breathe. She felt fingertips pressing on her blood vessels, cutting off air, blackness creeping in, and she could do little to fight it off when she saw the pacifier gag appear from nothingness, a bulb moving towards her gasping, breathless lips.
If it entered her mouth, she’d be defenseless, helpless, mindless, but she couldn’t wriggle away from the iron grip on her throat.
“RAAARGH!” Quinn bellowed, lunging forward and slamming the invisible arm with his warhammer. Sandra heard a sick crunching noise–elementals had something like bones that could be broken, it seemed–and the grip on her went slack.
Falling to the floor, she gasped, stepping away. “Summoner,” she coughed, ducking to the side of a flying mug of ale. “We need to take out the summoner.”
“If we leave the adventurers, they’ll be disabled,” Quinn said, “And we still don’t have a countercurse for those pacifiers.”
Pressing her lips into a line, Sandra called up, “Hadrian, Tarja, do you have this?”
Fingers dancing to move the marionette handles, eyes unfocused as magic surged through him, Hadrian nodded.
Tarja didn’t even need to reply, instead nailing another pair of arrows into the head of an invisible foe.
“You and me then,” Sandra said, nodding to her lacy, brutish friend. “We don’t want them dead, though–when we find the summoner, we knock them out.”
Hefting his warhammer, Quinn nodded grimly. Too much damage was being inflicted on their allies to revel in the fight, but she saw the anticipation in his eyes–he was furious, and ready to extract revenge.
Taking a guess on location, Sandra ran out the front door of the bar, her steps supernaturally light and quick. Casting her gaze around, she spotted their target almost instantly, a figure surrounded by a confluence of magical energy.
It took Sandra a moment to comprehend exactly what she was looking at. The figure in front of her was on all fours, but seemed stilted, awkward. They were in the form of a quadruped, like a wolf or maybe just a dog, but wrong. Their body was all a slightly shiny purple, more like a constructed latex facsimile of an animal than the real thing. It seemed to have very little range of motion, as though its forelegs didn’t have joints, and its hind legs dragged on the ground, giving the impression of a figure crawling on elbows and knees rather than a proper dog.
“It’s the summoner’s pet,” Sandra said, realizing–Summoners didn’t work alone, they had Eidolons to help them, companions that could handle the nitty gritty up-close fighting.
“Where’s the summoner, then?” Quinn asked, turning to look around.
“One thing at a time,” Sandra decided, charging the eidolon with reckless haste. It was just a planar being in the shape of an animal, and once Quinn came in they could get on both sides of it, bringing it down with ease.
Or, at least, that was her plan. Instead, something slick and cool conjured itself around her body, and as she charged at the creature, she lost her footing, tumbled, and fell onto her back in front of the latex eidolon.
It stepped over her, and she tried to make sense of what she was looking at. Its face seemed to be covered by a muzzle, and yet it managed to open, revealing a layer of canine teeth and, beneath that…
(Another muzzle?)
She saw the distinct shape of a leather face muzzle inside the creature’s jaws. Storage, she guessed, a way to keep magical restraints ready to go, so it could be spat out onto helpless targets.
Sandra made a mental note not to allow herself to be pinned by this thing, and rolled out of the way just in time to avoid its snapping jaws.
Quinn skidded up next to her, but had to stop and pinwheel for a moment as he stepped onto the same slick patch that’d toppled Sandra. Arms waving, he got his tentative balance, though his charge had lost momentum and the swing of his hammer landed with merely gigantic strength, instead of titanic.
Still, it was a start. Getting to unsteady, slippery feet, Sandra threw two dagger slashes at the eidolon, ripping its latex skin to reveal ‘flesh’ made of fluffy cotton. It spun, growling and snapping, but she was ready for the attack to come from the beast.
What she wasn’t ready for was the cloberring from behind as another invisible attacker struck her. She felt stupid–of course there’d be more invisible summons–but it hadn’t crossed her mind in her haste to deal with the visible enemy. She stumbled forward, right into a snapping bite from the wolf-thing that latched down on her leg, grappling her in place.
Quinn, for his part, slammed his boot into the ground, sending out a quake of power. The invisible figure holding Sandra tripped, falling back, and by the thuds she heard, a few others went down as well. Only the dog-eidolon-thing remained, as four legs rather than two gave it an advantage in stability.
Sandra could win a one-on-one. Raising her daggers, she brought them down in a double slash, taking advantage of its uneasy position, directly between her and Quinn. It staggered, and Quinn struck it right back into her, playing a game of tennis with their foe’s body.
The eidolon made eye contact with her–glassy, false black circles staring into her, and Sandra hesitated. She’d seen a flicker of magic come from the eidolon, but there was no time to identify the spell, and besides–Eidolons weren’t typically known to cast spells themselves.
She understood, then.
“That’s not the eidolon,” she said aloud, first quietly, then louder. “That’s not the eidolon, it’s the summoner!”
Maybe they were bound up in a spell, completely covered by the latex and cotton body that rendered a person into a four-legged, growling thing, but beneath it all there was a sentient being, the one summoning the monsters.
Flinching when Sandra called out the truth, the summoner first snarled and swiped to the side, tossing Sandra to the ground, then turned to flee–not away from the fight, but into the bar, where its other summons were still battling. It threw open the door, bursting inside, where the other melee was going on.
“Don’t let it get away,” Sandra said, before shouting at the top of her lungs, “Hadrian! The summoner is the thing!”
Quinn was right behind it, while Sandra had to struggle to stand, still coated in slippery lube. She got to her feet, just as Quinn got into the bar, then began making her way towards the bar herself.
Before she could take one step, her whole self seemed to blink. One moment, she was running in the street. The next, she was in the bar, looking up at Hadrian as he brandished his holy symbol and conjured power.
His eyes went wide, but it was too late–in the second it took him to react, his spell had already been cast, and invisible force lashed out at Sandra. She tried to react, but she’d been left in the most vulnerable possible spot, arms out, ready to take the hit in place of the summoner.
Magic twisted her arms and her legs, forcing her body down, prone, into almost the same four-legged position that the summoner had been in, and she felt cuffs spring into life around her wrists and ankles, bolting and shackling her to the floor.
“Sandra!” Quinn yelped in surprise. “Hadrian, what did you–dispell it!”
“I can’t, it’s not concentration, it’s just–” Hadrian stammered.
Sandra tried to lift her head, but though the spell didn’t conjure any visible restraints, it still kept her gaze down and low, forced her to stay on all fours. She could just barely see in the corner of her vision as her pants were yanked down, revealing her diaper, and then the diaper went next, leaving her naked from the waist down to her knees.
She knew what Magic Hadrian had been dabbling in, and she had a good guess what was coming next.
THWAP!
A sensation like a paddle stuck her bare, exposed ass, hitting with excruciating force. This was an offensive spell, not a tender-but-forceful partner: There was no warmup, no build, no safe word, only deliberate pain. Sandra cried out, gritting her teeth against the sudden shock.
THWAP!
“How long does this last?” Tarja called.
“I don’t know–like two minutes?” Hadrian said. “I–shit, how did Sandra get there?”
THWAP!
She couldn’t survey the bar or get a sense of the battlefield, not between the shocking slams of impact that struck every second, hitting hard enough that she could feel the impact reverberate up through her chest and into her head. She couldn’t help but yelp and whimper at every impact, the assault on her exposed ass was just too powerful for her to try and retain dignity.
Everyone could see, everyone could hear her whimpers, she couldn’t escape.
(Fuck me–)
THWAP!
“Where’s the summoner?” Quinn finally asked.
(Do they not get it?)
THWAP!
“Fuck!” Sandra yelled. “HE’S OUTSIDE, WE–”
THWAP!
Tears were hot on her cheeks. It felt as though scalding oil had been poured over her tender, exposed flesh, and every impact of the paddle set the whole thing alight for a split second, flashing pain and heat up through her body.
“They swapped places!” Hadrian realized. “Shit, that means he–”
“On it,” Quinn said, sprinting out the door.
THWAP!
“Don’t go alone!” Tarja chided, gliding gracefully down the stairs after him.
Sandra’s indignity continued to burn.
THWAP!
Sandra could hear whispers. Onlookers. She was vaguely aware that her diaper was incredibly visible, but the embarrassment of that didn’t even register to her next to the pain. She was helpless for all to see, a display of sheer masochistic torture.
Every part of her body felt like its senses were on overdrive, she could feel everything, the cool air and burning hot skin, all the smells of the bar, all the sounds of whispering onlookers who had nothing to do but watch her spanking play out.
THWAP!
She felt something hot on her leg. At first she thought blood, but the spanking hadn’t broken her skin–the acrid smell of urine assaulted her senses, though, and she got it on her second guess. She’d begun to wet herself. More for the onlookers to laugh at.
THWAP!
Balling her fists, she took deep breaths. The pain felt like it had reached a crescendo on every strike, always harder, always deeper. She couldn’t wait for it to be over, she had to fight.
She could take it. She had to take it. It was just pain.
THWAP!
“I can do this,” she whispered. She realized she wasn’t whimpering anymore–she’d begun to growl. She could take the pain, she could withstand it, she would not let a stupid spell break her.
She could win this. She only acknowledged the pain and moved on, accepting it, allowing it to pass through her, endorphins flooding her brain to fight off the torture.
THWAP!
“Argh!” she called out. “Is that all you’ve got?”
It didn’t matter that there was nobody holding the paddle, no actual master standing over her to deliver this punishment, she conjured one in her thoughts, an enemy she could get mad at, to overcome.
It
THWAP!
“Harder,” she whispered under her breath. “If you want to win, you’re going to need to hit me harder.”
(Let them watch,) she thought. (Fuck it. I don’t care. I’m better than thi–)
THWAP!
“HARDER!”
She was dizzy, her vision spinning. Whether it was the soup of hormones swimming in her head, or the sheer physical damage inflicted on her by the paddle and through her ass. There was something dark in the room, like a fog, encroaching over her eyes, making it hard to see.
THWA–