Discipline and Reward
A Love Story
DISCLAIMER:
Standard EMCSA disclaimers apply. If you are too young, or don’t like pr0n, or just aren’t into my kinks...go away.
I welcome any feedback at my email link above. Everyone who ever writes stories has to start somewhere. This is my first time, please be gentle.
COPYRIGHT:
Copyright © 2013 Baltimore Rogers (balrog0517@hotmail.com) All rights reserved; this story is not to be reproduced in any form for profit without the express written permission of the author. This story may be freely circulated only in its entirety and with this notice attached.
SYNOPSIS:
An ancient superheroine falls prey to an even more ancient telepath. But what is he really after?
Chapter 11. In which pressure takes its toll
Time flies for Cindi in Themiscyra. Days are spent with her mother exploring the limits of each other’s secrets. Cindi learns more than she ever imagined there was to know about the early history of the Amazons. But she never finds out that Hippolyta’s fondest desire in life is to run off and find her lost love.
Hippolyta learns of her daughter’s first love, separated from her almost immediately by an ocean and the better part of two continents, killed just scant weeks later before she ever saw him again. But she never learns more about her daughter’s mysterious new God/Lover.
They exchange story upon story of victory, of defeat, of survival, of fallen comrades. They learn how alike and how different they are, both in ways they never would have imagined.
Evenings were spent with Kalliope and other friends, reliving century after century of friendship and adventure. Even so, ever-perceptive Kalliope begins to suspect that her offhand comment the first night hit the mark. Her beautiful, smart, passionate, courageous friend is saying goodbye—to her friends, to her mother, to the Queendom of Themiscyra itself.
At “night” Cindi spends mornings and early afternoons with me, pushing the limits of taboos and exploring the depths of her submission.
Scene: She’s eating her lunch from a plate on the floor, naked in a posh restaurant, of which there are several in my twelve block “clothing optional” zone. Other patrons are shocked, not necessarily by the nakedness—people other than Cindi can and do come here naked sometimes—but by her wantonness.
With her head down in her plate and her ass pressing against my side, she sighs, moans, squeals whenever I touch her. Women are livid and embarrassed. Men are enthralled and aroused. Cindi is putting on a show, hoping I will reward her performance. Later I do.
Scene: I bring Cindi to the gym, naked, collared, and leashed, of course—the gym is within my twelve blocks—and introduce her to the three guys, all “Ten Thousanders”, with whom I/Greg play basketball.
Instead of our usual two-on-two, I suggest a game of H-O-R-S-E, with Cindi as the prize for the winner. To make it more interesting I add the rule that Cindi will grant the winner up to five “wishes” with one less wish for each letter the winner has accrued. I play to lose of course. The point is for her to be a party favor for someone else.
For her part, Cindi gets creative. She kneels and sits back against the wall behind the hoop doing her best to distract the shooter. Whenever one of the guys misses a shot, Cindi rises up on her knees, cups her breasts, tweaks her nipples, and moans loudly.
After about an hour, the winner, Julia’s husband Fred, claims his prize with a score of H-O-R. He and Cindi disappear and come back almost two hours later, both disheveled with broad satisfied grins, having put his two wishes to very good use. Cindi walks home heeling behind me with someone else’s cum dribbling down her chin and chest.
Scene: Cindi is the “hostess of honor” at a nyotaimori luncheon for Western Australia’s wealthy and powerful. Chopsticks play across her body. Sushi disappears revealing the skin beneath. Cindi remains perfectly still except for facial expressions, all of which reflect respect, desire, happiness.
This stillness becomes difficult when the sushi is gone and the men and women amuse themselves by applying the chopsticks to her directly, but she perseveres. She visibly warms when she sees me nodding and smiling at her.
After the party is over, the sushi chef, a minor celebrity in his profession, takes part of his payment in services, which Cindi happily renders, still unmoving except for head and mouth.
Every degradation meets with smiling approval and “good girl” affirmations from me. These expressions are at variance with my actual emotions though, to say the least. For example, at the gym I was annoyed with Cindi’s happiness at “meeting my friends”, her ready willingness to play the whore for them.
And when the sushi chef was fucking Cindi’s face my stomach was churning. At one point when he was pausing overlong with his member fully thrust down her throat, I seeded him loudly, in Japanese, with his mother’s voice, «“Let the poor girl breathe!“». He looked around startled, maybe even a bit frightened, and pulled back.
On the walk home I was torn up about what I had done to her, but Cindi saw none of that.
Through all this Greg’s body seems to be coming down with something. During Cindi’s “Themiscyra” time I have a doctor come over. Yes, doctors do still make house calls...for billionaires. His diagnosis: “stress”.
I’m livid. “THAT’S THE BEST YOU CAN DO?”
“Mr. Wolfe...I’m very good at what I do, otherwise I would not be here now. I know what I’m talking about. Something has you so keyed up that your body is rebelling. If you know what it is, you need to deal with it. If you don’t know what it is, you need to figure it out and deal with it. In the latter case I can refer you to some excellent psychiatric experts, but I suspect the same person who found me could give you the same list, if not a better one.”
I calmed myself, thanked him, and showed him out.
On the morning of the fifth day of Cindi’s Themiscyra vacation Cindi and Hippolyta are having a late breakfast and planning their day. Then she hears, in her room, buried in her rucksack, the unmistakable sound of the LoH communicator’s emergency beacon. Hippolyta is surprised when her daughter stops talking in mid-sentence and runs upstairs.
When she returns she is wearing her Majestic Woman togs, now minus the crown, of course.
“It’s an ‘all hands’ alert, Mother.”
“But you’re on leave. Surely they won’t miss—”
“Mother... In the history of the Legion there have only been three all hands alerts.”
“Well, Kynthia, this could be the first without you.”
“Two of those were alien invasions.”
“But that doesn’t me—”
“We’re expecting an alien invasion, the first one we’ve ever anticipated.”
“Even so, that doesn’t mean you have—”
“I wrote the defense plan. They’re all counting on me.”
“Go,” says Hippolyta, exasperated, flummoxed, but somewhere under it all, proud, “I’ll be here when you are done.”
Then something changes on Hippolyta’s face. Pride has risen to the surface. She’s running across the room. She grabs her daughter in a fierce hug. “I love you, Daughter of Heracles.”
Tears suddenly welling in her eyes, Cindi responds, “I love you, My True Queen.“
And with that Cindi is gone. She picks a random direction and flies at top speed for about ten minutes. She’s obscuring the location of Themiscyra from the LoH.
During that flight time she tries to pump me for information, but I remind her of Blake’s “demonstration” a few days ago.
«“Think how suspicious it would have been if you had been expecting it. I can’t tell you what it is. But I can tell you that it’s a matter of life and death, every bit deserving of an all hands alert.“»
Her locator turns itself on. She’s the only LoH member with an “off” switch for her communicator’s locator function, and it only works within a 200 mile radius of Athens; it was her negotiated condition for accepting the thing in the first place.
As soon as the locator comes completely online she signals for pickup.
The familiar tingle of the teleporter gives way to the unfamiliar sight of the main concourse of Spyglass packed wall-to-wall with heroes. Catching Blake’s eye across the impassable room, Cindi mouths a silent question, “Betelgeuse?” Blake frowns slightly and shakes his head “No”.
Cindi watches as he turns his head to the extremely agitated gesticulating hero standing next to him. It’s Power Man. Even her hearing can’t make out what they’re saying over the general murmur of 200 voices.
She’s never seen Claud this upset before and with good reason. Life has taught the Rheonian superhero to keep a tight rein in his emotions. People get hurt when he loses control.
Cindi can relate. She remembers her own early days at the secret government research center in Arizona. After Simon was lost in the Battle of Crete, Kynthia had reacted not with mourning, but with rage. She should be out there, fighting the Nazis, defending beleaguered Europe, saving lives. But she was thinking about one life in particular.
It was about 3:00 am the next night, the night after she had received word of Simon’s death. It was during the umpteenth retry of a test to measure her night vision. Stupid things kept going wrong with the test. They had been at it for hours, no closer to getting the data they wanted than they were at the start.
Once again something went wrong with the measuring apparatus. She lost control. She broke an innocent researcher’s jaw. After that she was labeled a “hormonal woman” and a “loose cannon”, and that was just in the official reports. It took another four months of patient bridge-building on her part before they allowed her into combat.
«That night I must have looked just like Claud does now.»
Blake puts a hand on Claud’s shoulder, but Claud shrugs it off with enough force to make Blake’s hand seem to leap back.
«Time for Majestic Woman to step up.»
She flies slowly over the crowd and alights next to the pair.
“... Four days, Blake. It’s been FOUR DAYS!”
“Claud, were gonna find her. But we need time and CLEAR HEADS to do it.”
Cindi interrupts, “I don’t think he’s trying to help at all, Claud. I brought that can of whoop-ass that I was saving up for you. Maybe we should open it up together on Blake?”
Claud rounds on her with wild eyes and gritted teeth, and, seeing her sardonic “Church Lady” smirk, suddenly bursts out laughing. Blake and Cynthia gather their friend into a hug as the big man’s laughter turns to helpless tears.
Cindi stage-whispers, “Somebody wanna tell me what’s going on here?”
Claud points to Blake. In his best “Just the facts, ma’am” voice, Blake begins, “Powerhouse is missing. Sadie was last seen by her roommate at Cornell Friday morning before classes. She was supposed to meet Claud for dinner Friday evening in Cosmopolis, but never showed. They had had some...heated moments of late, and she was,” glances at Claud, “’feeling her oats’ lately, being away from home for the first time since the Wilsons adopted her. So Claud just assumed she had stood him up. He was annoyed,” another glance, “but put it out of his mind. Her mother tried to contact Sadie’s roommate Monday morning, after Sadie missed the family’s regular Sunday evening call and wasn’t answering her phone. Sadie’s roommate, Carol, finally called back late Monday evening. Sadie’s cell phone had been in the charger on her desk all weekend and all day Monday. Her bed was made and hadn’t been touched all weekend. Carol said, rather indelicately, to Mrs. Wilson, ‘Sadie really likes rush parties. I just assumed she had met a guy.’ The Wilsons asked Carol if she knew any students who were in any of Sadie’s classes. Carol checked around the dorm. She called the Wilsons an hour later, now worried herself because Sadie had missed all her classes. Sadie never missed class. That was when the Wilsons contacted the police...and Claud. And that brings us all here.“
A last look at Claud, who nods back.
“So,” Cindi recaps, “the second most powerful person on the face of the Earth has been missing for four days. Call me an idiot, but what about her locator?”
Claud fields this one. “In her dorm room in Ithaca, in the bottom of her sock drawer. That’s what we fought about the last time I saw her. She never did learn how to adjust the communicator settings. One day it went off in her English class, loudly. It embarrassed her, all the more so because the professor made a big deal about it. She’s been leaving it in her room ever since.
“She said she doesn’t mean to leave it behind when she’s in uniform, but she’s gotten out of the habit of carrying it, and she forgets. She said,” Claud pauses, gathering himself, “She said she didn’t see what the big deal was, and she wished I would ‘get off her back’ about it.”
Cindi tries her best now to ignore his struggle to keep his cool; he’s clearly winning. She probes further, “So was she wearing her uniform?“
The two men look at each other. Blake says, “I teleported in before the police got there. I picked up the communicator and did a fairly thorough search. The uniform is not there.”
“So she was probably—”
Blake interrupts, “—wearing her uniform and en route to Cosmopolis when it happened. Or someone knew who she was and kidnapped her from her room with rheanite and stole her uniform too. Or she took a side trip somewhere and got into trouble there. But I agree that the line between Ithaca and Cosmopolis is the first place to look. Almost 600 miles with Carthage City right in the middle of the flyover route.”
“Shit.” Carthage City, Motown, Blake’s hometown, is easily the biggest criminal cesspool in the entire USA. If she got into trouble there...
“All caught up now?” he asks.
“Yes, but what are we going to tell them?” she says, gesturing to the assembled hundreds of the LoH.
“That’s what Claud and I were, um, discussing when you joined in. Thanks for that, by the way. Claud, are you ready to let me handle this?”
Power Man nods his assent. The Wraith turns to address the assembled Legion. The simulation of Majestic Woman that my Cindi inhabits silently reaches out to her Lord.
«My Lord?»
«“I’m trying, baby bitch, but it’s not gonna be quick, and it’s not gonna be easy. Do you have any idea how many millions of people, of minds, there are between to Ithaca, New York and Cosmopolis, Illinois?“»
«So you don’t stay...connected to other heroes? Only me?»
She actually has a rush of warm feeling at that thought, that she is special to me. Well, she is, But I certainly don’t want to encourage this ‘love’ obsession of hers. So I’m not sure how much I should reveal to her.
Rheonians are not human. In general I can’t read them. Or track them. Or swap with them. Believe me, I’ve tried everything. If you were me wouldn’t you want to swap bodies with “The Most Powerful Man on Earth”? Even if only to see what it feels like? But therein lies the problem. Power Man is actually not enough “Man” for my powers to work well on him, and the same applies to Powerhouse.
I’m not completely shut out. Rheonian thoughts tied to strong emotions are not hard for me to see. When Claud was about to launch Blake into a different orbit a few minutes ago I was reading him loud and clear. Now I can barely tell he’s there.
In any case, to find Powerhouse I will need some serious luck. Like noticing a mind communicating with a mind I can’t sense. Or noticing someone thinking about the fact that they kidnapped her. Or...something. Maybe now that the police are involved I can find the last person who saw her in Friday through them. Maybe someone saw her in the air. Something.
So what do I tell Cindi?
«“Look, Cindi. Remember how Themiscyra was to hard for me to enter alone, but we made it through together?“»
«Yes...»
«“Well, aliens, like the Rheonians, are hard for me in a different way. That doesn’t make it impossible for me to find her. It just makes it harder. You can help me by thinking of regular humans that would have been likely to see her on Friday.“»
Her response is so immediate it startles me. «Air traffic controllers, My Lord. They might have seen her on radar.»
«“What? Bodies don’t reflect radar. Oooooooh! HUMAN bodies don’t reflect radar. Rheonian bodies probably reflect everything in the electromagnetic spectrum.“»
«Well, not everything, My Lord, but close enough. Claud has told me many times that he prefers to fly outside the atmosphere if he has to travel very far, because otherwise countries tend to scramble fighters after him when he pops up on their radar.»
«“That’s fantastic. We can work with that. Good girl, Cindi.“»
«Good girl. Reward!»
«Um, thank you, My Lord, but if you want me to stay in character you might want to avoid that phrase. Now would not be an appropriate time for Majestic Woman to be visibly aroused.»
«“Um, I think you’ll be fine, babydoll, but I’ll be more careful.“»
«Thank you, My Lord.»
Now I’m finding and probing the minds of ATCs that cover the Great Lakes region. JACK-FUCKING-POT.
Canadian border-watching ATCs had seen a small, fast, low-flying blip, not matching any flight plan, over Lake Ontario, three Fridays in a row. The first time they saw it going westward across the lake shortly after 6:00 pm, then back eastward at around midnight.
When the same thing happened the next Friday at 6, they we’re ready for the return trip, even though the east-bound return blip appeared at 8:30 this time instead of midnight.
They scrambled interceptors after the bogie and discovered that it was Powerhouse. She seemed lost in her thoughts until she noticed the planes. When she did see them, she smiled and blew kisses at the pilots then shot away from them much faster than they could follow.
The third week they noted her westward journey across the lake again, again shortly after 6. This time they let her pass without sending fighters. That third Friday was last Friday, the day she was lost. There was, needless to say, no return trip.
So she made it at least as far as Carthage City. No ATCs monitoring the American parts of the flight path noticed anything though, not on any of the three Fridays. For me the trail goes cold there.
«“I hit the jackpot, baby bitch, but we have to make this look natural. I’m going to give this to Blake, but we want him to think it was his idea, okay? Let me handle that.“»
«Yes, My Lord.»
Now I’m seeding Blake with the air traffic controller idea. He stumbles a bit in mid-speech, but recovers. He was finishing up anyway. “...It is even possible that she decided that she no longer wants any of...this,” waving his hands expansively as if to encompass the whole Legion, “and just left it all behind. But that’s not the way we should bet. So we will be vigilant. We will be thorough. We will do everything we can to find her. However, we will not tear up half of the North American continent in the process. We’re the good guys. Never forget it. That is all.“
Everyone is gone except the duty officer, the Wraith, Magic Lamp, and Majestic Woman. Blake has already talked to the Canadians. He asked better questions than I’d thought of in my probing. He got better answers. He really is an incredibly good detective. But ultimately he hits the same brick wall that I did. The trail ends at Carthage City.
“Guys, what we could really use now is some magic,” looking at Cindi, “or some technology indistinguishable from magic,” looking at Hamish MacLean, the 4th human Magic Lamp.
Hamish speaks up first, “The Uenans never get involved in intraplanetary affairs. The only reason they have helped the Legion as much as they did was that they thought my predecessors were spending too much time patrolling Earth and not enough time patrolling their assigned sector of the galaxy. But I’ll ask. The fact that she could possibly destabilize the whole sector if she were corrupted may help.”
Cindi’s turn. “Blake...you know my Gods don’t work like that. The last time they appeared to me was when they made me into this,” sweeping her hands downward from her shoulders, framing her luscious body. The men can’t help but take a long, appraising look. As Majestic Woman she’s a bit flustered, but she has to admit she invited it.
She continues, “I pray to my Gods for help and strength constantly. I have done so several times since I received the emergency call. I have prayed to them while we were all assembled here.” She had. I almost always let her prayers pass unnoticed. I’m not ready to challenge her beliefs yet.
“I came to the conclusion long ago that they took all the direct action with me that they ever intended to take on that night in Themiscyra.” «But my new God answers my prayers immediately!»
Blake must have noticed something in her expression. “Do you have any other resources that might be helpful here.” He’s thinking about Majestic Woman’s mysterious new lover. He’s thinking about how Majestic Woman found every victim in that apartment fire so unerringly. DAMN, he’s good.
And then it hits me. The intuitive leaps, the nearly superhuman observation skills, the way he noticed the things no one else notices. He’s a god damned genius. CRAP!
I should probably explain that reaction just a little bit. I have a sort of love-hate relationship with human genius. I’m fascinated by geniuses. Who wouldn’t be? I love to get I’m their heads to see what makes them tick. I love the amazing ideas they come up with. I love the surprising, sometimes shocking intuitive leaps they make. I love the wonderful arts and inventions they create.
Unfortunately they can also be quite maddening as well. Case in point, Isaac Newton. Brilliant, brilliant man, but for years a source of nothing but vexation and frustration to me. He totally escaped my notice until 1685, when he published a little tome called Principia Mathematica, in which he singlehandedly invented both calculus and physics.
I had to see what was going on inside that head. When I found him, I was shocked. I had expected to find a bookish, shy man, with his head full of esoterica about planets and motion and numbers. What I found was a paranoid Machiavellian of the first order.
He was consumed with plots and intrigues, with the idea, not entirely baseless, that others wanted to steal his secret knowledge. My God, he was a fucking alchemist! How had this happened? Over the course of several months I probed deeper in his mind.
It turns out that most of the genius that shocked the world in the Principia was old hat to him, things he had worked out in his college days. He only released the book at all to throw the rest of the burgeoning scientific community off of his real work.
What does the man who discovered the sheet music for the Harmony of the Spheres do for an encore? He was after the meaning of life, or, more precisely, the mechanics of life. In much the same way that had tied the motions of the planets to the simple idea that “things fall”, he had made the amazing intuitive leap between the mystery of life and “alchemical” chemical transformations.
It truly was an amazing insight, but there was a problem. I had the perspective to see that the relationship between life and chemistry had to be much, much more complicated than that between heavenly bodies and gravity. He had begun a truly hopeless task. I knew he would never make headway in this research for the rest of his life.
So I tried, foolishly, to redirect him back to math, back to physics. It was a disaster. Every seed that I tried to plant, however subtle, he rooted out and killed. He came to believe, true enough, that some evil spirit was trying to turn him away from his research. It caused him to dig in his heels and resist even his own natural interest in physical science. My every attempt to turn him away from fruitless research and toward fruitful research backfired and blew up in my face. I was utterly stymied by his perceptiveness, by his keen self-awareness, by his genius.
Eventually I gave up.
So now I look at Blake Warren with new eyes. I see the Isaac Newton of criminology. I see a man too smart for his own good.
«“Send him away, baby bitch. Slam the door. Hard.“»
“No, Blake. I don’t know anyone with clairvoyance or,” a comically wide-eyed expression crosses her face,“mysteeeeeerious psychic brain powers, except possibly my patrons. And again, they don’t come when I call. Rather the opposite.”
He laughs. “You’re pretty sceptical for someone who can fly. Then I guess we’re done here. Cynthia, you and Claud know what you need to do. I expect you to coordinate with each other. And...keep an eye on Claud. Please.”
“Of course, Blake. I will.”
We’re back in Themiscyra, Cindi is packing her things while she talks to Hippolyta.
“So it wasn’t the invasion.”
“No, Mamá. Sadie is missing.”
“Oh, no!”
Hippolyta knows Sadie. Several years ago the Magic Lamp Corps discovered her, another survivor of the Rheonian Holocaust. Her rescue capsule was drifting in space; she was still in stasis. They eventually got her to Earth and to Claud.
Unlike Claud, who was an infant at the time of his civilization’s suicide, she was equivalent to twelve “Earth years” old. And before turning on her stasis unit, she had watched in horror as every person, every place, every thing she had ever known was destroyed.
Needless to say, when released from stasis she was an emotional wreck. An emotional wreck with unearthly power. Claud did everything he could for her, but she was inconsolable, and, well, out of control. Bouts of listless, heavy sadness were interspersed with fits of rage that could—and sometimes did—level buildings.
Besides that, there was just no plausible way for Claud, the young single librarian, to keep a twelve-year-old girl in his home permanently. So Cynthia had suggested that she spend some time in Themiscyra. The Amazons were quite expert at helping traumatized girls become empowered women. Claud agreed.
Sadie thrived in Themiscyra. Every single one of the Amazons understood unbearable pain, and yet they were so strong. They helped her learn to cope, to stand, to find joy, to imagine the future.
The day came when she was ready to face a new world, the world Claud lived in. Claud had found a family to adopt her, his own aunt and uncle—his own adoptive father’s sister and brother—in Wyoming. The day she left Themiscyra, Sadie had cried her farewell in Hippolyta’s arms.
“What can we do to help?”
“What, Mamá?”
“They were all words of one syllable, Kynthia. We 75,000 Amazons stand ready to do whatever we can to rescue one of our own. What can we do?”
“Well, I hardly think that 75,000 Amazons invading Michigan will help much, Mother.”
“Then what will? My best military strategist has been unavailable for the last 72 years. Things have gone downhill a bit.”
“Well, to start with, let’s think more ‘detective’ and less ‘military’.”
“Fine. Five of us are currently on detached duty working for Interpol. Should I have them come in? They can be here by this evening.”
“Have them contact the Wraith via Spyglass. Have them identify themselves as, um, ‘Sisters of Sadie’. I’ll make sure he is expecting them.”
“This ‘Wraith’ is a man?”
“You need to get out more, Mamá. Yes, he’s a man. One of the finest men in the world.”
“It will have to do. Is there anything else? Anything at all?”
“I can’t think of anything. I’ll be spending my days scouring her flight path for clues. Pray for me, Mamá.”
“Always, Kynthia. Always.”
Cindi dons her field pack and flies away. Again she picks a random direction. Again she flies until she hears her communicator warning beep telling her that the locator has switched on. She immediately calls Spyglass for pickup.
Claud, Blake, and “Cynthia” sit down to plan out an initial search pattern. Cindi and Claud, both with super-eyesight and the ability to fly, will be responsible for primary search along the flight path. Others will do on the ground follow up for items of interest they point out. But now, Blake and Claud need to rest. They all teleport to their respective homes.
Cindi drops her baggage in her laundry room. She now has a 10-hour time shift to absorb with no preparation. She doesn’t want to try to stay up all night to “reset her clock”. Not when she needs to be her best for the first day of the search. So, she writes a note to Annette apologizing in advance for drugging her, she drops the Shield of Athena, she takes a fairly potent sleeping pill, she curls up in the doggy bed, and goes to meet her Lord.