Standing in her living room now, directly in front of an old mirror she’d purchased from a market on the outskirts of the city, she let the towel drop so she could admire her nude body for a moment.
Nadine looked good and she knew it.
She’d trained hard to maintain her body weight, and while her breasts could have been a little bigger, that was about the only thing she’d change about her form. That and the scar on her side, which stretched from the bottom of her armpit down to her hip bone.
Nadine dressed quickly, placed her blond hair in a bun, put on a small amount of makeup, mostly eyeliner, and mentally arranged for a teleporter to arrive in a few minutes.
The teleporter appeared, a woman in Centralian government clothing, and their forms took shape in front of the immigration office seconds later. Dark clouds overhead signaled that a rainstorm was coming, but that wasn’t what got Nadine’s attention.
“Roman?” she asked, taking a step back as the mysterious white-haired man came to a stop. Maybe “mysterious” was a bit much, but there was something unique about him, something that made him different from the others.
Which was why she’d wanted to use him as an asset.
“I’m sorry about last night,” she said, remembering she’d stood him up. “Just, things came up. That’s all. No excuse.”
Roman wore a collarless shirt under a jacket with a stiff collar, the lining of which was a light golden color. He looked good. A little shaken up—Nadine didn’t know what that was about—but good nonetheless. She didn’t always like the people she planned to use as assets, but Roman would be different.
“Looks like we’re both late today,” he said.
“Ha, I didn’t think of that.”
Even as they shook hands—a handshake that Roman initiated—Nadine was reminded of Lisa Painstake, the super she’d dealt with earlier who could travel via Soul Speed.
Her newest assets, while limited in number, were beginning to shape up. And if Paris wanted Roman, he must have something hidden that she could exploit.
“I really owe you,” she told him. “I mean, that was just vile to not show up.”
“It’s fine, really,” Roman said, for the second time since they’d greeted each other. “Things happen.”
“No, I insist on making it up to you. What about dinner?”
“I can’t tonight.”
“Not tonight, and I’m not talking about dinner at any old restaurant. Let’s do something interesting.” She smiled at him, her green eyes darting up and down as she took in his form. “Tomorrow night.”
Roman looked up and to the right. “Yeah, that should work.”
A light drizzle picked up, and rather than stand outside and chat, the two entered the immigration office together.
“You okay?” Nadine said as he turned toward his office.
There was something different about him, something off. It was times like these Nadine wished the Eastern Province tech designers could crack a way to create artificial telepathy.
“Fine. Just a long night.”
“Want to meet at lunch and talk about it?” she offered.
“Lunch?” Roman cracked a grin at her. “I’m three hours late. It’s practically already lunch time.”
“Good point.”
“Why are you late, anyway?” he asked her.
Nadine shrugged. “I got tied up. See you tomorrow night.”
With that, she turned toward her office, making sure his focus would be on her moving hips. This was part of her plan, and even if Roman knew what her plan was, he wouldn’t have protested this part.
Roman didn’t mind being seduced, for better or for worse.
Chapter Seventeen: Reinstatement
Roman sat at his desk for a moment, just getting used to being back in his office. It was hardly noon, but a half day off was a half day off, and it had been a hell of a day thus far.
He glanced at his power dial and saw that the red bar had some activity.
“Please, I can’t breathe,” the pair of scissors said as Roman took it out of his pocket. He placed it on his desk and examined it for a moment.
The scissors, which had taken on a woman’s personality, now stood with the shears wide enough to hold the weight of the handles. The handles were metal, the pivot point polished silver.
“I’m going to put you away now,” Roman started to tell the pair of scissors. “I have work to do.”
“This stack of paper? Please, honey, if you want me to work on that paper for you, it’d be my pleasure.”
Roman didn’t know why it spoke in such a sultry way. He hadn’t told it to do that, but the point remained: he was wasting power by animating a pair of scissors.
“Sorry,” he said, and with that, the scissors fell onto his desk, lifeless as ever. He checked his power dial and saw it had returned to its baseline.
From there, his eyes darted to the things he had posted on his cubicle wall, including the power classification cheat sheet created by Kevin, of all people.
He had already missed his first meeting, another one of Kevin’s leftovers, and the next was scheduled for just a few minutes later. After pushing everything else aside, he briefly went over this particular exemplar’s case.
Catherine was a Type III Class C from the Northern Alliance who specialized in air manipulation. He briefly went over her bio and then moved to her known skills, which each contained a brief explanation:
Aero-telekinesis: The ability to use air as the user sees fit, from floating, to flying, to building structures to advance to higher levels of altitude.
Electrical Immunity: User is able to insulate self from electrical attacks.
Pressure Manipulation: By controlling air molecules, user can generate, put pressure on, and otherwise modify most structures.
Enhanced Sensing: User is able to sense and feel things nearby through fluctuations in the local atmosphere.
Atmospheric Adaptation: User is able to adjust to various atmospheres and control the atmosphere around them.
From there, he moved on to her immigration issue.
Apparently, Catherine Blaine had let her Student Visa expire, and she currently needed to go through reinstatement. She would have to provide a reason for why she’d let her S Visa expire and hadn’t maintained minimum enrollment at…
Roman looked at her records again.
Centralian Southern.
He was familiar with the university. Even though he was pushing thirty, Roman had recently hooked up with a co-ed from there, something he was both ashamed and proud about.
After skimming through a few notes Kevin had left, most of them semi-legible, he moved to Catherine’s pictures and examined those as well.
He saw her passport photo with the various markings they put on the passports in the Northern Alliance, and he also saw her visa, and the fact that it was expired.
“Hi.”
Roman looked up to see Catherine. She was a shy girl, a bit mousy, petite with broad shoulders and a windblown look to her. Her hair was white like Roman’s, aside from a braided red strand behind her right ear.
“Did you take a tornado over here?” he asked with a cheesy grin.
Roman couldn’t help it. If a woman was beautiful, or if he could find even just a small part of her that was cute, his flirting game always made itself known.
It was a coping mechanism, a part of him that hadn’t been there two years ago, before the incident. He swallowed hard to forget his past just as Catherine responded to his cheeky joke.
“Nope, took a teleporter. Sorry, I’ve just been so busy, and then I got the message that I need to come here because my visa had expired, and it’s really stressful, and my parents are concerned.”
“They should be,” Roman said as he closed her case file. “Reinstatement isn’t an easy process, and before we can begin, I need to know how you fell out of status. It seems that you were enrolled full-time at a university, correct?”
“No,” sh
e said, looking down at her hands. She still hadn’t sat down yet, which was making him feel a little uncomfortable.
“Please, sit,” he said, a smile still on his face.
“Sorry.”
“No need to apologize, just sit and relax a moment so we can work through this.”
After she was seated, Catherine crossed her arms over her chest and leaned back. “Confession: I didn’t enroll full-time this last semester. I know I was supposed to because of my visa situation, but… some things came up in my personal life. I don’t want to go into too many details here, but my ex-boyfriend was dealing with some mental issues. He’s a non-exemplar, and there were some jealousy issues, and then he tried to do some heroic act. The fucker. Sorry.”
“No need to apologize.”
“And then he got arrested, so I was in and out of jail to see him, and then I helped him register for Heroes Anonymous, and he hasn’t been able to work, so I had to ask for money from my parents in the Northern Alliance, and then we broke up, and here I am.”
Roman knew the people who administered reinstatements would not accept these types of personal excuses. And normally, regardless of the fact she was cute, he would have been firm in telling her this and he would have denied her reinstatement.
But something was urging him to go ahead and do it, to figure out an angle she could use. After all, it wouldn’t be long until he was done with his lowly immigration advisor job.
“Look,” Catherine said, “I know I screwed up here. I know there’s nothing I can do. I just wanted to come in, and be honest, and find out the next step. To see if there’s any hope for my case.”
“Well, I think you may be in luck.” Roman cleared his throat. “I’ll see to it that your reinstatement is approved on the grounds that you fell ill. I want you to go back to class and finish your degree. You need to be enrolled full-time next semester. No exceptions. And just in case you’re thinking otherwise, dump your loser boyfriend—and yes, I know you said you already did that, but seriously, he doesn’t sound like a great guy.”
Her eyes softened. “You’ll do that for me?”
“Yep. Us supers have to stick together.”
She smirked. “You’re an exemplar? I thought all the advisors were half-powered.”
“It’s a job.”
“Okay. Well, thanks. And…”
Roman gave her the smile he’d perfected over the last several years. “Yes?”
“I would love to know more about this job, and what it’s like working with so many different supers. I mean, I’ll work in a similar field when I go back to the Northern Alliance, so if you ever want to grab coffee…”
He appreciated her sudden transformation. She had gone from distraught to cute, her brow unfurrowing and the stress leaving her body as if it had been a blanket draped over her shoulders. Still, that wasn’t the reason he’d granted her reinstatement, and he didn’t want her to think she could just flirt her way out of most situations.
Even if she could.
“So, coffee?”
“We’ll see. Thank you, Ms. Blaine.”
The next person to show up at his office was the last person he wanted to see. Roman was finishing up Catherine’s paperwork when the woman barged in, her hands on her hips and a furious look on her face.
“Your little stunt this morning left us without coverage,” Selena told him, practically snorting fire. “With Kevin gone, we’re short-staffed, and you have to just disappear some morning without any reasoning. Short-staffed! What part about that word do you not understand?”
“Hey Selena,” Roman said, noticing she wore a frumpy dress demarcated by a belt that was partially covered by her belly fat.
“You know, I keep hoping you’ll improve as an employee, but you never do. You’re practically useless; you’re the slowest at processing paperwork in our department, and you kind of make your own schedule. How is that okay? You knew Kevin died—you knew we’d have more work to do, especially because you’ve taken on his caseload, but here you are, coming in three hours late!”
“Sorry about that,” Roman said, focusing on her belt.
Selena continued to bitch him out, and as she did, her face grew red.
His hand under his desk, Roman rubbed his fingers together, tightening his manager’s belt.
She didn’t notice it at first, but once it started to squeeze her belly fat, sending the blood rushing the other way, pushing her breasts up like she was wearing a corset, her bulging eyes filled with embarrassment. Selena stormed out of his cubicle, letting him know this wasn’t over.
“See you,” Roman said, the blue bar on his power dial flashing.
Chapter Eighteen: Kevin’s Reward
“I told you we would reward you,” Turquoise said as Obsidian sucked Kevin off. Somehow, lying out of his ass had rewarded Kevin with a blow job.
The last few hours had gotten progressively better with each lie he told, each scenario he made up.
The cat girls let Kevin go to the restroom, they let him eat, and as he continued to fabricate reasons as to why Centralia was set on invading the Western Province, he found himself in the position he was in now: relaxing on a white fur carpet, his head on Turquoise’s lap while her counterpart went to town on his only claim to fame.
“Thanks…” he said, not sure what else to say. “Thank you!”
He was still scared shitless, and he was pretty sure the two cat girls were definitely unstable, as evidenced by the scratch marks covering his body. But they’d believed his lies, and there was no way he’d turn down what Obsidian was doing now.
Turquoise continued speaking over the slurping noises.
“We talked about it, just a little bit, and we thought you would never come clean,” she confessed. “But since you have, we think you would be an asset to have on our side.”
He heard her prayer beads clinking against the ground as she cycled through them. That was another thing he’d noticed, especially about Turquoise—she practiced some type of religion that had her cycling through mantras every hour or so. She kept her prayer beads wrapped around her left wrist to make it easier to utilize them.
“An asset?”
Turquoise’s tail dropped onto Kevin’s face, tickling his nostrils. He sneezed, which caused him to lunge forward a little bit and nearly knock Obsidian off his knob. She recovered and kept going, using her soft hand—no claws!—to jerk him off as she focused on the tip.
All of this was unpredictable, and Kevin was a man that liked predictability. He was a creature of comfort who did everything by the books, and now he was not only selling out his brother of the same name, he was selling out his government.
He’d said a lot of things in the delirium he’d been in earlier, a delirium he believed had been caused by some excretion from the sadist sisters, and while much of what he’d said was false, some was true—or at the very least, speculation.
“Are you going to finish soon?” Obsidian asked. “It’s hurting my jaw.”
“I’ll show you how to do it.” Turquoise set Kevin’s head on the ground, relaxed her prayer beads, and joined the other cat girl just below Kevin’s waist.
Not that Obsidian was bad, but when Turquoise took over, Kevin moaned in response.
He glanced down at her as she went at it, watching her perky ears move up and down. His belly was too large to see all the action, but he got the picture.
And a picture was worth a thousand words, or possibly, a single orgasm.
There was a lot to his impending orgasm, considering that he hadn’t been with his wife in quite a while, and that he was too prude to jerk off.
“So much!” Obsidian said in astonishment as he finished. Turquoise stood with her hand over her mouth and then moved towards the restroom.
After a moment to come down, Kevin tried to send a mental message. For some reason, this wasn’t working, and he couldn’t understand why.
It should work. He’d only been in a few situations where a mental
message hadn’t worked. But here he was, lying on a fur carpet in someone’s large bedroom, at a loss for words.
The strange part about all this was that aside from the fear, Kevin felt good. It felt good being wicked, good going against his perfect brother and their overreaching government, good getting his body covered in scratches and then sucked off.
Kevin was afraid, sure, but he was also afraid of the thought that kept flickering at the back of his skull: Join them.
And he knew it wasn’t some telepath hiding in the shadows—this was all Kevin.
While he didn’t show it, Kevin knew more about superpowers than most people at the immigration office. He was an expert. And no, he didn’t have some fancy Exemplar Studies degree or anything; his expertise came from constantly dealing with supers, from actual experience.
And he knew what a telepath in the area would feel like, even a Type I.
No, this thought at the back of Kevin’s mind was his own; there really was only one option in this scenario, and luckily for Kevin, he liked it.
Turquoise returned and cuddled up next to him.
He placed his hand on the bottom of her ass, his fingers probing at her tail a little bit, the place where it met her skin. Obsidian came on the other side and got in an equally comfortable position.
“I want to join you,” he said, still a bit breathless from his orgasm, “but I don’t have a super power.”
Turquoise laughed. “I think that’s something we can take care of. What do you think, Obsidian?”
“Sounds like fun.”
“Even without a superpower?” Kevin asked.
“Your power is information,” Turquoise said, purring softly now. “And there are ways for us to give you some type of power, but we’ll need to talk to our handler. She would have to approve it.”
“Your handler?” Kevin hadn’t considered this aspect. “Who’s that?”
“Paris,” said Obsidian. “Her name is Paris, and she’s the one who told us to take you from the hospital.”
“Paris, huh?” Kevin searched his mind, hoping to remember meeting someone with that name. When it was clear he wouldn’t find anything, he returned his attention to the two cat girls. Obsidian had pressed her head next to his, her ear lightly touching his cheek.
House of Dolls Page 7
