“Can I use Lady Longblade as my sword?” someone else in the hurrying gamers shouted, and there were whoops of agreement.
“Offer the Laura human—the Lady Longblade player—her own posters and T-shirts,” one elf elder murmured. “Be generous, do a contract, and get it down clearly that we control the images.”
“We’ll want her bare,” an elf too old to ever have been a princess agreed. “ ‘Milk it,’ I believe is the human expression. Milk it good to the last slice, or something of that ilk.”
“Drop, Illuandra, drop.”
“Drop what?”
“Never mind. I think it’s more important to find another two Lauras—thin human females who are good gamers, love to fight, and don’t mind kissing and embracing each other and every she-elf they see. Young Rularion’s right; that’s what we need to gain real power.”
“Now who’s being greedy, Emyndriel?”
“Nobrandrel, tease me not. I’m not fretting and striding about and waving my fists, as he was. I am sitting here calmly planning for times ahead. After all, there is one tiny way in which we are just like humans: over time, our needs grow ever larger.”
“Yes.” Nobrandel sighed and waved a dramatic hand at all the glowing spellwebs the elder she-elves were seated over, and the seeing eyes among those webs that displayed scenes of humans in T-shirts and rumpled jeans hurrying along corridors, and more humans sitting around tables littered with dice and soft drinks and rulebooks, and still more humans in cardboard armor leaning wearily and weatily on sword-shaped wooden sticks as elves swarmed around them, adjusting dreamhelm settings and reattaching the inevitable loose electrodes.
“And see what our needs have brought us to and what we are becoming.” He sighed. “If I were as young and restless as Rularion, I’d stride grimly out, now.”
“Wasting power we can put to far better use,” Illuandra said sharply.
Nobrandel raised one eyebrow. “Now did I go striding anywhere?”
Her voice lost none of its bite. “In your dreams, high haughty lord. In your dreams.”
“Their disguises are so good, they give me the creeps,” Aaron the Chainsaw of War—or so the ample, food-stained front of his T-shirt proclaimed him to be—grunted to the highest-point gamer at the table, Tom Bone.
Tom followed Aaron’s fat finger past his nose and on to what it was pointing at: two approaching Elf Incorporated employees walking and talking together. Two pointy-eared, slender, impossibly graceful, big-eyed elves. One was almost certainly the venturemaster for this table . . .
Suddenly, Tom Bone realized something he should have known long ago. Those strange whiffs of cinammon when some of the elves rose from their chairs to act out character movements: they were farts. Elf farts.
The younger gamers’ wild stories were true. These weren’t actors in suits or surgically-altered members of a cult of humans playing at being elves.
Most conventions were run by gamers, but the DancingDellCons and Moon Revels and Faerie Ring Moots run by Elf Incorporated really were run by elves.
“They aren’t human,” he said hoarsely, staring at the two elves.
Who were much closer now, and staring back at him.
“They’re not freakin’ human!”
“Oh, please!” the female one said, rolling her eyes wildly. “Isn’t that joke a little tired? Bad enough we have to wear these suits! Can’t you give it a rest, Mister—” She peered down at his badge. “—Bone?”
Tom managed a shaky smile and reached out his hand as if to shake hers.
When she extended her own, he twisted his fingers to pinch her.
She gave him a disgusted look. “Look, Ma, no zipper!”
Her skin felt warm and smooth and, well, normal . . .
“Hey there, gamer!” The other elf, the guy, was suddenly looming over Tom. His badge, right at the level of Tom’s eyes, read “Alaerndorn/Elf Lord.”
“No groping the venturemasters!” Alaerndorn said sternly. “Not even if you’re a high-pointer! We have rules about that, y’know!”
“Yeah,” Aaron joked. “Isn’t it my turn to grope the venturemaster?”
“Huh,” one of the two tiny twin sisters on the far side of the table commented archly. “Just ’cause it’s a girl for once!”
The male elf gave Tom a wink and beckoned him with a wave. “Hey, grognard, a word for a minute? We’re looking for real gamers to help us with something new—it’s still a little secret—for the next con. It’ll just take a minute, really; Haelcyele won’t really get things going before you’re back at table, promise.”
“Promise,” the she-elf echoed with a smile, and Tom let himself be led away and around a corner.
Into the waiting faerie light that saw right down into the depths of his mind and shone its terrible brightness right into the places that made him scream.
“Another one?” Lord Nobrandel sounded weary. “Or are you just starting to see watchful eyes under every rock?”
“No,” Alaerndorn snapped, his fingers still glowing from the spell he’d just cast. “Listen.”
He waved his other hand, and the human who was standing staring vacantly past them both, eyeballs afire with mind-magic, murmured, “You’re aliens or something. Elves. Pointy-eared elves. For real. And you’re hosting and staffing this convention . . . always have. To suck our . . . suck us. Drain the life out of us. Our energy, our enthusiasm, what we imagine . . .”
“I see.” Alaerndorn might have been a bored, calmly professional human doctor. “Tell me, Tom, why do we do that? Suck life energy out of humans, that is?”
“Because . . .”
Tom Bone turned his head as quickly as a snake, so quickly that Alaerndorn stiffened and Nobrandel sprang back and reached for the hilt of his sword.
“Because,” the human gamer hissed, staring as deeply into Alaerndorn’s eyes as the elf mage had stared into his, “you need us. Our vitality, the . . . the life energy of these smelly, lumbering, arrogant, and foolish humans allows you to remain alive . . .”
His voice dropped in wonder, as if awed by what he just understood. “Our life force is the raw energy that keeps you alive and powers the magic you use on us. You even guide countries—real countries, in our world—by watching the decisions we gamers—we humans—make when we’re playing your table-game scenarios. I thought it was just a freakin’ sf horror cliché, but you do!”
Nobrandel sighed. “Well, they’re not stupid. Not these gamer humans, at least.”
He gave the staring Tom Bone a warm smile. “You’ve figured it all out,” he said warmly, shaking the dazed gamer’s hand. “So I might as well confess: yes, the disguises are hot and uncomfortable. It’s such a relief, a few times a year, to strip them all off and be comfortable for a weekend.”
The elf lord was still smilingly explaining this when Tom Bone stiffened. Alaerndorn’s slender blade had slid smoothly up his backside, right to the hilt.
Magic flared around the human, its brief and searing flames silver and silent, as the elf lord and the elf mage together lowered the body gently to the floor.
Alaerndorn promptly laid himself down beside the dead human, and started to shift his body to match it perfectly. Nobrandel started carefully removing Tom Bone’s clothes for the elf mage to put on. There was no blood or leakage of fluids; the magic saw to that.
“And now,” Alaerndorn told the ceiling disgustedly, “I’ll have to impersonate this idiot until well after he returns home when the con is done and then disappear.”
Nobrandel nodded. “At all costs, all suspicions have to be kept away from our conventions. Human police are such persistent nuisances.”
He turned away, sighed, and told the dark room around them, “Elf or human or scaly monster, we do what we have to do.”
The tallest and most breathtakingly beautiful elf princess—even to the eyes of other elves—burst out of the room in obvious pain, shuddering and hugging herself and wincing. She was larger than she should have be
en, and her skin glowed from within, but she was moaning softly in pain, moans she could not quell.
Even elf goddesses have wry senses of humor, it seems: at precisely the same moment, the tallest and grandest elder elf lord emerged from another room with distress clear upon his face.
The two elves almost crashed together.
“Eluadauna!” the lord said soothingly, enfolding gentle arms around the princess. “You fairly bulge with human vitality. What ill befalls? Was the human cruel to you?”
“I—as agreed, I laid with the strong human—the one who plays Kraug—and—oh, he gave me much power but—his seed within me is like unto acid!”
“I feared as much,” the lord replied sadly.“For my part, I have just coupled with the young and pimply human female who calls herself Saeralil the Velvet Viper. The seduction was too easy, if such a thing can be said, but I fear I have almost slain her with my draining.”
He raised one hand and made his fingers glow. When the air cupped between them was full of tiny whirling sparks, he murmured into them, “Phaerl? We have need of your healing. Eluadauna, here with me, in the south corridor.”
He let his hand fall and held the pain-wracked princess more tightly, rocking gently back and forth as she clung to him, shuddering in pain.
“I was afraid this would happen,” he murmured, feeling flowing vitality prickle his lips as he brushed her hair with them. “Until we come up with something better than the dreamhelms, we’re just going to have to go on holding conventions.”
“Surrender, Lady Laurautha Longblade, or feel your every private place invaded by my tentacles!”
The voice was a horrible mucus-filled slobbering, filled with hunger and lechery and glee. The tentacles, however, were all too real. Warm and wart-covered and thin, they curled and coiled and thrust.
Calling forth every iota of magic fire my sword possessed so that it flared into blue and blinding flame that rent the very air with tearing sounds in its wake, I hacked and hewed and then swung again, slicing and slaying.
I was alone this time, the chantings of the two priests among the Brothers faint and far-off across the great stone fang-filled cavern that was the unholy temple of the tentacle things. Kraug and the Velvet Viper were missing, probably already torn apart by the horrific monsters.
It was all up to me.
As usual.
Another tentacle tore away yet more of my armor, leaving me almost bare but for my boots. I was slick with sweat, my suppleness covered with tiny scratches, but the very lecherousness of the beasts had thus far saved me from worse harm. I knew those tentacles could pierce or coil and tighten; long ago they could have impaled or strangled me, but instead they had busied themselves with tearing off my armor as I’d hewed them almost at will, struggling through thigh-deep tentacles and their slimy, purple-green ichor. Now only this last great tentacled giant was left.
I swung my blade again, and a writhing tentacle sprang off into the darkness, severed and spasming.
Beyond it, hidden from me by stalagmites, stalactites, and the monster’s own unspeakable bulk, was another altar. Of course.
“Give me a prince,” I panted furiously, in the heart of my swinging steel. “Just once!”
The last three tentacles came for me, two reaching to encircle my bared breasts, and the third dipping down to—to—
I freely offered my upper body to the slimy embrace of the tentacles so as to put all my strength behind the slash that lopped off the larger, darker tentacle seeking to violate me from beneath.
Severed twice—no, thrice!—it twisted and heaved and spewed gore in all directions, fountaining dark and disgusting warm, salty ichor as I grimly sawed at the straining tentacles now wound around my front, drawing my feminine curves forth into obscenely pointing, purplish things . . .
Then, quite suddenly, it was all over. The tentacled thing collapsed into a shapeless mound, hissing its last, its warm grasp falling away from me. I swung my sword like a disgusted golfer striking aside long grass, stepped free of the last of its foulness wearing only my thigh-high boots, and strode around the great pile of carrion and the stony fangs and pillars beyond.
To almost stop in disgust.
Another stone block altar and on it, in the familiar chains, another nude, writhing-for-me elf princess.
“Take me, Longblade!” this latest prize moaned, arching upward in her chains. Her eyes were larger and darker than any of her predecessors. “I’ve been waiting for you so longingly! Awaiting your rescue! Dreaming of your strong arms! Your kisses!”
“I know you have,” I told her, more than a little wearily. “You elf princesses always do.”
Leaving her chained for now, I bent and kissed the mouth offered to me.
“Mmm. Cinammon.” I said in surprise, watching fires kindle in those darkly welcoming eyes. I liked cinammon.
As I bent and kissed those warm lips again, a distant roar of approval seemed to resound faintly from all around us.
ROLES WE PLAY
Jody Lynn Nye
The middle-aged gentleman caller was so agitated the parlor maid had to clear her throat gently twice to make him surrender his silk top hat. He snatched the offending object from his head and thrust it at her without looking. She exited the room silently, her prize in hand, and closed the door behind her.
“Herr Ernest, you cannot be serious,” the man continued the diatribe he had begun at the door. “All of Zurich is laughing at you, if not all of Europe!”
“Please sit down, Herr Dromlinn,” said Professor Gerhard Ernest, a stocky, bearded man in a brown tweed suit. His large, gray eyes were deceptively placid behind the pebble lenses of his spectacles. “I am serious about all my researches. About what may I enlighten you?”
Dromlinn did not sit down. Instead, he paced. He stopped to stare at the brown, paisley-patterned wallpaper, then out the window at the carriages and narrow-wheeled horseless vehicles, and spoke without turning around. “I am your friend, so I am the one sent by our other colleagues to warn you. They say that you will not be permitted to present a paper at the Science Foundation. What you have sent as your proposal is nonsense.”
“It is not nonsense,” Ernest said, with a smile. He leaned back in the upholstered armchair and folded his hands together on his knee. “You know as well as I that the study of psychoanalysis takes on many shapes. We are learning the pathways of the mind. I knew it would sound strange when I wrote my proposal. I thought at least that my colleagues would be open to yet one more means of investigating those deepest secrets we yet lack knowledge of.”
Dromlinn turned and made a noise as if he was spitting. “Make believe is for children.”
Ernest shook his head gently. “We are all children at heart, Herr Dromlinn. Are we not the sum of our parts?”
“But this is playing, not psychology. We believed you to be serious about finding a cure for mental disorders. This is 1910, not the Dark Ages. You seek a return to the primitive days before science?”
“Play is often a way children work through their problems. If you have never listened to your daughter scold her doll as she herself has just been scolded, then you do not understand that. I seek to use such a tool to unlock disease. I believe the mind is a powerful force against the disorders of the body.”
“We have had Doctor Freud’s cigar and Doctor Jung’s dreams. Now you seek to make us play with dolls? Bah. I will say no more. You have your answer. Until you have more science on your side, do not approach the foundation again. They will not hear you.”
“That is a shame, Dromlinn,” Ernest said, dismayed. “I had hoped that you at least would see where I was headed. It is a world of wonders, indeed.”
“My friend,” Dromlinn said, abandoning his indignation for a moment. “What I may let pass in private I cannot espouse in public. You know that.”
“Then I will seek to give you a science to which you can give credence. Now,” Ernest said, indicating the two young men huddled nervously up
on the settee under the window. “If you would be so good as to excuse us. We were in the midst of a session.”
Dromlinn shook his head. “My dear Ernest, I despair of you.”
“Do not, my friend,” Ernest said. Dromlinn turned to go. Ernest felt a pang of loss as Dromlinn stepped into the shadow in the hallway. He put on a brave face before turning to the two young men. They were both just twenty-one or twenty-two. One was dressed well in the vogue of the day, a tight, ornate waistcoat with a fancy watch fob looping from pocket to pocket underneath his well-cut Prussian blue frock coat. His friend wore a more modest and outdated style: a black fustian coat over a plain brown waistcoat and no watch in sight. Ernest began to analyze what those details told him and smiled at himself. No sense in behaving like a storybook detective, he thought. Facts were his tools, as he had told his dear friend.
“Never mind him,” he said to the young men. He turned to the second youth. “Herr Bachan, you first. Now, please describe for me the creature that haunts you. Give me all details.”
“I am not troubled by a creature as such, herr doctor,” Bachan said, looking sheepish. “Only . . . worries.”
Ernest smiled. “Let us then put a face to those worries, shall we? Give me something that you can identify when you look at it. Give it characteristics. When I look at it I want to think what you think.”
The youth’s face reddened. “My curse is poverty, good doctor. I would not be here at all to speak with you if my friend here had not assured me you do not seek a fee.”
“That is true, I do not,” Ernest assured him. He uncapped an inkwell, dipped a pen into it, and set a leather writing desk with a piece of paper ready upon his knee. “Rather, my goal is mutual enlightenment and, in achieving such, to drive away those curses, as you say, that trouble us all.”
The boy stared. “You, too, Herr Doctor?”
“Of course. Not poverty, my friend, by the grace of an illustrious family who would not let me fall into that place—but I will not seek to give a face or name to that which stalks you. Reach into your imagination and tell me all that you see.”
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