SCI Stories: Book 1 - Tainted Victory

by Stuart Grosse

  “Ah, it was two years ago, when the first cases came to our attention. There were some missing persons cases popping up at the time, young women from decent backgrounds. All just disappearing in the middle of the street. No witnesses, no sign of struggle, no ransoms, no bodies found. We suspected a super was involved, but didn’t know how to track him.”

  “I had only been on the team a couple years, but I was still the strongest of the Defenders. I am what people call the ‘Paragon’ archetype. Flight, super-strength, durability, all that stuff. We needed a way to find the guy, and find out what he was doing with the girls. Rescuing them was our hope, but finding out where they were, and whether they were still alive, was our priority.”

  “So, we decided—I decided that we needed to lure the person into a trap. But a trap needs bait. I was the ‘logical’ choice. I was young, attractive, just the profile the perpetrator was going for. And I was strong enough that I could handle anything that happened, and it would take a lot to actually hurt me. Everyone else was too squishy, if he was killing the girls.”

  Victoria swallowed hard, trying to keep her voice even as she went back to talking about that night, and another wave of comforting warmth passed through her. Yes, that was better. Talking about it was so much easier now.

  “We were able to find out that the girls were all being taken from the area around Broadway, and always just after or during a show. So, dressed up in civilian clothes, and went out to see a show. We knew that he would likely get rid of my phone, and any trackers he could see, so we had to get creative. I swallowed a tracking beacon, since there wasn’t any way to implant one in my skin, and Psyonique placed a mental tag in my mind, something that would allow her to find me more easily if she scanned for me.”

  “I went to the show, and everything seemed normal. But when I left, I felt something like a pull, drawing me away from the building. I didn’t realize until it was too late that it was a mental attack.”

  She paused, trying to get her thoughts together as another pulse of warmth washed over her. So good. So much easier. “It was the villain Black Star. We had heard the report that he had broken out of prison, but everyone thought he would return to California. He ripped away the tag Psyonique left on me, and crushed my mind under his iron will. I was locked inside my own body, acting like his puppet.”

  “He took me back to his ‘lair’. It was no secret hideout, but a warehouse that he had converted into a… a brothel. The missing girls, they were all there, prisoners in their own minds. He made them do things. With him. With each other. With his ‘guests’. All the while you could see the fear and rage and despair in their eyes. The first girl taken, Rachel Tully, I could see her eyes. They were dead. She was dead inside, broken. There wasn’t anything left.”

  “He took me back to his personal room, made me strip, made me dance for him. He made me watch as he got naked. And then he made me kneel in front of him, and… service him with my mouth. I had never done anything like that before! I was always a good girl. And he made me suck him like a whore in one of those porn movies. I was mortified. I’ve never been so ashamed.”

  “And to make my humiliation worse, he told me why he was doing all this. He wanted to gloat, since he knew I was unable to resist him. His finances had been wrecked after the last time he was caught, with the robberies in LA. He needed money to finance his new venture. A bunch of mind-controlled whores were easy money, and wouldn’t bring attention like a robbery.”

  She paused again. This was the worst part of the story, the part she hated telling anyone. Another wave of warmth settled on her, and she felt the last vestiges of resistance, of doubt, of worry slip away. With a blissful sigh, she continued storytime.

  “He knew who I was. Plucked it out of my head. He had some friends, and they had money. Using my mouth was just a little treat for him, until his friend got there. He’d called him the second he knew who I was. I couldn’t stop as he finished in my mouth. He made me swallow it, and told me that he had sold all my other ‘holes’ for the night.”

  “Twenty thousand. That is what the bastard got for me. An executive who always wanted to pop a superheroine’s cherry was the buyer. He raped me, again and again. In every way. He didn’t use a condom, or ask if I was on the pill. I don’t think he cared. He kept saying horrible things about how he was going to knock me up. I was only nineteen! I was too young to have a kid!”

  “And then it was over. The Defenders arrived, but Black Star had already escaped. He realized when he grabbed me that he wouldn’t be able to keep me long. He sold me to his ‘friend’, who was more of a business associate, and skipped town. No idea where he went.”

  “Psyonique freed me, and the rest of the girls. I… I don’t remember much after that. Psyonique says I went into shock, once the mind control keeping me ‘locked’ allowed me to think for myself again. I was free, and the bastard who raped me was in jail, but I… I wasn’t right. I wasn’t pure. I was dirty, sullied. And Black Star had escaped.”

  She should be screaming. She should be crying. That is what always happened when she talked about these things, but right now, she just felt blissfully content. So warm and safe. Nothing to worry about.

  And then, the Voice spoke. The nice Voice that had started her talking. “Was that all that was bothering you with the incident?”

  She shuddered slightly. It would be so easy to lie. She’d told the lie so many times, she almost believed it. But no, she needed to tell the Voice the truth. The Voice was there to help her, right?

  “M-my body responded while it was happening. I didn’t want to, but the man knew how to make me respond. By the time I was rescued, he made me start to enjoy it.”

  “That must have been very difficult to say. You’re a very brave woman, Victoria. Very brave. Now, I want you to relax even further, and go to sleep.”

  Brave? Brave! It felt good. She felt good. The Voice was good. And the Voice wanted her to sleep. Sleep was good. Yes, sleep. Sleeeeep.

  Chapter 4 – Subtle Changes

  Mindcrafting, to the uninitiated, is the mentalist’s art of shaping and altering a mind to be more… suitable to the desired outcome. As with any art form, there is a wide range when it comes to quality and talent. You have everything from the equivalent of a child’s stick figure drawings, to the greatest works of the Renaissance masters.

  At its basest level, Mindcrafting makes changes in the target’s mind, affecting one of four areas. First, and most obvious, is the Memory. Whether it is simply stripping out unwanted memories, or tailoring false memories, or suppressing memories until a trigger happens, acting on a subject’s memories does not, in and of itself, affect the subject’s personality. While it can be used to change the person so that they forget their friends and remember being slavishly loyal to someone, for instance, that is a brute force approach, and is less than productive, as a general rule.

  Second, naturally, is the Id. This is the home of a person’s base, instinctive drives. The Id seeks pleasure and avoids things that do not bring it pleasure. So, a change in the id could make a vegan person suddenly gain pleasure at the thought of eating a hamburger, and loathe the taste of soy. Or it could make a smoker not desire cigarettes any more, if you wished to make that change. At a deeper level, it allows one to plant the seed of a new fetish, or to make someone more vanilla, if they wish.

  Third, we have the Super-Ego. While the Id is the home of desire, the Super-Ego is the seat of ethics and morality. Tampering in this area of the mind directly affects the subject’s sense of right and wrong itself. Not limited to simply deciding what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, it also affects how deeply one considers such things to be right or wrong. Most people weigh different actions according to severity, but if one were to make a subtle shift, and make someone’s sense of right and wrong weigh murder on the same level as most people see going 10 MPH over the speed limit, then that will have rippling consequences throughout their life.

  Fourth, and finally,
there is the Ego itself. This is the core of a person’s personality, how they measure Desire versus Morality, as filtered through the contents of their Memories. This is both the seat of conscious thought, and the birthplace of rationalizations, defense mechanisms, and coping methods. A change here does not so much change a person’s beliefs, or their memories, or what they enjoy, but it can make them convince themselves of something. A purely mundane example of this would be something like a battered spouse convincing herself that she deserved to be hit for whatever reason her abuser gave her. Change that small bit, and the woman refuses to simply take it the next time her abuser raises his hand to her.

  Now, changing any one of these four sections can have a profound impact on a person’s psyche, and affect their day-to-day life as well. However, when one starts changing multiple areas at the same time, you can accomplish far greater results than you could by just focusing on a single piece of the whole. This is where the artistry comes into the art of Mindcrafting. It is the difference between taking the individual instruments, and combining them into a symphony played by an orchestra.

  Such artistry is not about raw power, not really. Of course, power helps, but it is a secondary function, one that non-mentalists don’t often realize. An energy blast is stronger with more power behind it, so why wouldn’t Mindcrafting be the same, right? In truth, power simply reduces the time mindcrafting takes, and can allow you to brute force some changes if time is short.

  What is far more important than power, when it comes to Mindcrafting, is Control, and Subtlety. Like sculpting a statue out of marble, you have to be careful as you craft the details or you mar the entire work. Think Michelangelo’s David, but now have too hard a stroke at just the wrong angle, and the statue’s penis breaks off and falls to the floor, ruining what would otherwise be a masterwork. Picture the Mona Lisa, but with big, oversized anime eyes. That is the trap of power, when Mindcrafting, as power allows you to move quickly, when the slower, more reasoned approach would allow you to correct any mistakes in the finished work, preventing cognitive dissonance.

  Cognitive dissonance is the chief worry when Mindcrafting. If you do not balance the memories of an event with the subject’s values and personality, it sticks out, and may lead to the subject fighting against the programming, as what they believe to be real clashes against what is actually real. Worse, this inner conflict can often be seen by a subject’s friends or associates, and can cause them to get involved. This can potentially undo all your work. In the best case, that leads to the subject reverting to their former state. However, the more extensive the changes made, it can also cause them to dive headlong into madness.

  What this meant for me was that I needed to have a gentle touch while I was Mindcrafting Lady Victory into something and someone more suitable to my desires. Lady Victory was too prominent, too well known, for any radical changes to go unnoticed, especially if they were sudden. I couldn’t simply rewrite her mind and make her into my perfect pet, because the people around her would realize something was wrong. And with one of her friends being Psyonique, the risk was there that, if she changed too quickly, the other mentalist might pick up on the changes, and work to unmake them.

  The approach would have to be like a pebble falling on the mountainside, something small that leads to larger and larger things until there is suddenly an avalanche going the way I wanted. Well, perhaps not that violent, but the intent was the same. A bunch of minor changes, that I could add into the landscape of her mind, which would pass unnoticed, but would guide her, inexorably, to where I wanted her to go.

  First, the memories that plagued her had to be dealt with. If she had Psyonique check my work, then she would have to find the ‘surgery’ performed as requested. As I had told her, the idea was to disassociate the memories of Black Star’s attack, and how she had been used by him and his associate. This sounded simple enough, but it took a deft hand to accomplish. Gently, I went through the sleeping superheroine’s memories, and began plucking strands and reweaving them.

  The negative emotions, the shame, the embarrassment, the feeling of helplessness she’d had, all of those I carefully cut away, clipping the threads between those feelings and her sense of self. She would still remember that what happened, and remember how she felt, but it would be like watching an actor on the screen instead of being in the moment. There would be a little dissonance at first, of course, but this would minimize the impacts, and I could begin unwinding the trauma.

  The feelings of her body, as she began to respond to what had happened, I left. Without the shame and helplessness affecting her, those were just pleasurable sensations. And it would work to tie into the further changes I had planned. But first, I needed to unwind her trauma so that things didn’t come crashing down. This was a delicate process, more so because they weren’t directly attached to the event itself, but were bound up in her upbringing as a good Baptist girl. The dissociation helped, and from there I was able to gently unwind the whole mess, allowing it to become dissociated with the event. She would remember, but she could process it objectively, allowing the message that it wasn’t her fault to sink in.

  I put ‘markers’ around where I did my work. Like the psychic tags Psyonique used to try and track Lady Victory during the incident, these markers didn’t have any impact on her mind itself, but it was the equivalent of a bookmark, allowing a mentalist looking through her head to see where the surgery had been done. It was a common practice amongst licensed mentalists, so if there were problems down the road, someone would be able to check potential trouble spots easily, without having to search through her entire mind. It also meant that, if a mentalist found tampering outside those areas, there was a hostile mentalist acting against her. If Psyonique checked her, she would expect to see the markers.

  The next bit was where I needed to be truly subtle. First, in her super-ego, I adjusted things slightly. Her faith had already fractured after what had happened to her, so I just gave it a bit of a nudge, subtly adjusting the part where morality and sex were intertwined. She’d already had some thoughts about this as a teenager, but her attack had frozen those thoughts. With the trauma removed, I set those thoughts to thaw out. ‘So long as it doesn’t hurt anyone,’ would start to spread, along with the idea that, if the people consented, why should she look down on someone’s lifestyle. And from there, I opened a channel to evaluating her own lifestyle, and the possibility that a healthy sex life could be a good thing.

  In her id, it was a relatively simple affair. First, I did a couple brushes of discovery. With the trauma stripped away, the pleasure she felt remained. Before, she had been rather depressingly vanilla in her fantasies. Good man, a provider, white picket fence, a couple children, and so on. She’d heard of other things, but never thought about them before. So, I added the spark of discovery, the thought of submitting, allowing someone to control her, use her. Without the negativity of her mind being forced, but instead of doing it by her own will…

  I let that fantasy go, to start percolating through her mind, before I went to the next one. Her ideal man. She didn’t really have one. Tall, dark, and handsome. Not the most original, to be honest. So, I gave her a little nudge, shifting a couple features of the ideal towards my looks. Then I tossed a single thread to the other fantasy, linking them softly, and associating them both with her memory of being safe here, with me, as I helped her. That association would, in time, morph her ‘ideal man’ and her naughty fantasy, giving her the idea of my being someone she would like to ‘get to know better’, while her fantasy of submission grew.

  I wove the threads together, so you could not see where the new work began and the original ended. Unless one had gone and looked directly at this part of her mind before, the only obvious change would be the new fantasy of submitting to someone. But that kind of thing could be explained away. Would be explained away, actually, once I told her that she may experience some new feelings regarding the incident, now that it wasn’t locked up with her nega
tive emotions. It was a simple thing to simply tell her that these feelings, or fantasies, were perfectly healthy, and a sign that her brain was starting to work past the trauma.

  There was more work I could have done, but that would have been moving too far, too fast. Subtle changes were what I needed. Little things that would build to bigger things as she thought about them, and came to the conclusions on her own. After checking my work for the fifth time, I considered it well done, and doubted that Psyonique would note the changes. After a week or two, they would seem like a simple consequence of working through the trauma.

  With a smile on my face, I released my power over her, and waited for Victoria to awaken. This was not a sprint, but long-distance running. I just had to be patient, and she would give herself to me, of her own free will. Or so she’d think.

  Chapter 5 – Sinking In

  “—tory?”

  “Lady Victory?”

  “VICTORIA! WAKE UP!”

  Lady Victory startled as she looked up at the person who had just shaken her shoulder. It took her a couple moments before she recognized Psyonique standing there next to her. She looked around, and realized she was sitting in the dining area of the Defenders’ Headquarters in Manhattan.