The monster called Lure turned off Mike's cell phone and staggered away from the guardrail he'd been supporting himself against ever since Mike and the others drove away. He retreated back into the forest, to the matted patch of grass and mud where a morbidly obese teenager slipped and fell on his ass. When Lure surrounds himself with his camouflage screen, it's not only able to stop people from seeing Lure, it can also prevent people from hearing him as well. This was fortunate, since Mike's fall was so hilarious that Lure couldn't stop laughing. But moments later, Mike helped Lure to stop.....by making him scream.
In Lure's limited experience, no one could visually differentiate between actual reality and the fake 3D reality within the screen. Mike did, and noticing the differences caused his mind to wildly correct those mistakes, which forced Lure to supply more and more mental energy to apply those highly-detailed, picayune corrections to the screen. It was psychically exhausting, but there was no way to stop the process except by turning the screen off, which would've revealed Lure. By the time Mike's headache made him stop sucking Lure dry, Lure was both literally and figuratively hanging on by a thread, unable to flee. In desperation, Lure tried to get Mike to quit by sending him another false thought, but that only succeeded in confirming Mike's suspicion that he was being mentally manipulated by an outside source.
But just when Lure thought that things couldn't possibly get worse, Mike Pearson closed his eyes and used a staggering amount of will- power to mentally assert his belief that when he opened his eyes, he would find that the entire world around him had turned bright white. Mike didn't actually believe this, of course, but he was able to fool himself more than enough to trick the screening process, which struggled to produce a false reality to match Mike's false expectation. It was a genius move, and if Lure had been fed and fully-rested, Mike would've opened his eyes to the sight of a huge white bubble, suspended by a violet strand, and containing a seriously pissed-off monster. But since Lure was exhausted, the screen simply collapsed under the strain, leaving Lure totally exposed.
This was a very bad development for Lure, and it was about to get much worse.
Mike wasn't aware that he'd already won, so he continued to over- load the psychic link connecting him and Lure with raw intention. But with no screen to accept and process the command, Mike's psychic tidal wave was redirected into another of Lure's telepathically-receptive abilities, his limited shape-shifting power. And once Mike inadvertently locked on, he unknowingly forced Lure to use it to do something that was far from limited.
Lure screamed at the sensation of being bathed in electrified acid as his flesh was forced to become impossibly, luminously white. But before the agonized sound could escape his mouth and reach Mike's ears, other forces took control and reactivated the audio dampening capabilities of Lure's screen. And before Mike could open his eyes and discover that he'd succeeded in revealing his supernatural opponent, those forces snatched his cellphone and flashlight, using the flashlight to temporarily blind Mike, leaving him unable to perceive his discovery.
Lure wasn't safe from Mike yet, though, since even beneath the canopy of limbs, the monster's body was now reflecting the scant moonlight, just enough for Mike to vaguely see what he was dealing with. However, before Mike's eyes could adjust, he received a simulated snake tongue to the lips, which was more than sufficient to send Mike fleeing out of the forest.
This didn't change the fact the Mike Pearson had thoroughly kicked the monster's ass. And just to make Lure's failure complete, in his desperate, delirius attempt to salvage the situation by preying upon Mike's compassion, he unintentionally said the quiet part out loud: "Feed".
"Why didn't Guile clear that up?" Lure thought to himself, so that Guile wouldn't be able to listen in. They could always hear Lure's voice, but they could only hear his thoughts if Lure wanted them to. As far as Lure knew, THAT was the only form of privacy he had left....that he would EVER have left. "I mean, how do you fucking convince someone to walk home in the dark...if they think that something's coming to fucking EAT THEM?!"
Guile was working against Lure. It was the only possible explanation.
"AARRRRRGH!!" Lure cried out, using his latest flash of rage to fuel another attempt to force his skin to return to its normal coloring. It didn't work, like all of the other tries. Crippling pain and further depletion were his only two accomplishments.
Everything was ruined. Lure was drained, Mike and Kenny knew of his existence, Mike was still in that fucking car, and Lure was far behind schedule. But worst of all, since Lure couldn't screen himself while in flight, his new skin color would make him stand out like a beacon against the night sky, reflecting the moonlight and begging for someone to notice him. That couldn't be allowed to happen. Exposure would cost Lure absolutely everything.
"Take....break....bake....lake," Lure mumbled miserably, pacing back and forth among the trees. "...wasn't s'posed to happen this way...all fucked up....gotta get this done tonight...I'm losing it...I can't...I just want...stop-stop-stop-stop...can't stop thinking...can't...can't go on like this..."
Lure scrubbed at his head, as if he could scratch away the itch of his growing insanity. When this failed, Lure fought to prevent himself from decimating the surrounding forest, which would waste what little strength he had remaining. And when that urge finally gave out, all that was left was the desire for Lure to sink to the ground and continue the emotional breakdown he'd been undergoing for months.
"Lure, do you require further assistance?" A voice asked from behind him.
Lure did not turn around to address the speaker, nor his companion, who was doubtlessly present and standing exactly where he needed to be in order for the three beings to form a perfect equilateral triangle. Instead, Lure just kept staring angrily at the imprint of Mike's ass in the mud.
"FURTHER assistance?!" Lure barked. "What the fuck do you mean by FURTHER?? I typed every goddamned word you told me to type, Guile, but Mike still didn't get out of the car!!"
Guile stepped forward, passing through the trees and shrubs, as did his companion, Lecher. The triangle was closing in.
"STAY AWAY!" Lure screamed. "I can't DEAL with you two right now!"
"You mean you can't LOOK at us right now, don't you?" Lecher taunted.
Guile silenced Lecher with a stern glance. It wouldn't last longer than a minute or two, but hopefully that would be enough time to deal with Lure's latest emotional crisis.
"I know you're upset that your plan fell apart, but there was basically nothing I could have said that would've motivated Mike to risk encountering you again. I tried to influence him, but even guile has its limits."
"I should've told him he wasn't the target!" Lure protested.
"And you really think he would've just walked away and let you kill his best friend?" Lecher scoffed.
"He hates Kenny now," Lure reasoned.
"No, he's angry with Kenny now," Guile corrected. "There's a difference. Besides, he wouldn't have believed you in the first place."
"Okay. Well, why didn't you explain away me asking him to 'feed me'?"
"How? With the truth? He certainly wouldn't have believed THAT either! I supposed I could've tried convincing him that an 'invisible, telepathic forest creature' was simply asking him to pick up some fast food take-out, but..."
"You could've said that I smelled food on him. He's HUGE, so he's gotta have something to eat in his pockets."
"He doesn't. Perhaps we can have the police pull over Tom Daggen's car and have Mike arrested for his failure to comply with your stereotype. You can kill Tom Daggen, Grant Anders, and Kenny Miller while Mike sits in a holding cell, eating his court-mandated pies and cakes."
"I'd rather you explain why you told him my name is 'Lure', smartass," Lure spat contemptuously.
"Because Mike is a friendless, three-hundred pound, closeted homo- sexual with a genius-level intellect. He feels that no one understands him, and nobody wants to. I tried to prey upon his self-pity by presenting us as a fellow misunderstood creature. Just because it didn't work, doesn't mean it wasn't an excellent play."
"That's not what I meant!" Lure clarified. "You could've lied and come up with something better....something less...scary. And by the way, as you already know, my name isn't 'Lure'! Stop calling me that! 'Lure' is just a stupid nickname that you two use to piss me off. I already have a fucking name!"
"Wrong!" Lecher corrected. "That name....that identity....is now just a disguise that WE use to pass for ordinary. When you accepted your new role, and all the powers that come with it, you also accepted the fact that the transformation would add a Lecher and a Guile to your mind, each of us occupying a separate level of your new, three-tiered consciousness. There are THREE personalities in OUR mind, LURE. It's no longer all about YOU! Every decision YOU make has consequences for ALL OF US! And since you refuse to accept this fact, and force us to manifest ourselves externally just to be taken seriously, the last thing Guile and I intend to do is call you by your former name, thereby supporting your delusions of autonomy and individuality. You are NOT a schizophrenic, Lure. The voices in 'your' head are actual living beings, and we WILL...BE...HEARD!"
"And you MADE yourselves heard, so what's the fucking problem?" Lure asked with exaggerated puzzlement, spreading his shiny white arms out and flexing his upper back muscles to display the extent of their success. "You didn't want me to get revenge, you don't want me to find any fucking PEACE, so you ganged up on me and ruined everything."
"Oh, for Christ's sake..." Lecher groaned, making the nose and ears of his optical-illusion body appear to bleed profusely.
"Lure, we didn't do anything that caused the plan to fail," Guile said with incredulity.
"You unscreened that branch!" Lure yelled, "You made Mike hear it! If Mike hadn't heard it, my skin would still be normal. I'd still be able to fly without being THIS FUCKING VISIBLE! But you just had to make it creak and creak and CREAK and CREAK and FUCKING CREAK!!!"
"There was no way I could've stopped that branch from creaking, Lure," Guile claimed.
"Bullshit! You help me manage my mind-based powers, so you unscreened that branch! Stop LYING to me!"
"Lure, as you know, I am incapable of lying to you. I couldn't have unscreened that branch, considering that you took away my power to screen it in the FIRST place."
"How did I-?"
"Just before you tried to trick Mike into hiding in the forest, you told Lecher and me that we shouldn't interfere."
"I didn't mean that the two of you should stop maintaining and directing my powers!"
"Then perhaps you should have told us that," Guile informed Lure, treating himself to a little sarcasm. "We are governed by what you SAY, not by our own personal interpretations of your wishes, nor by your unexpressed exceptions."
"Why DID the branch creak, then?"
"Because when I am unconstrained, you can count on me to stretch the screen across every squeaky hinge, every loose floorboard, and every creaky tree branch. But when I am ordered...by you...to do NOTHING, and you activate the screen, it automatically extends from your core to a distance of eight feet, nine and three quarters inches. No more, no less. So if you, for example, lower yourself from a tree branch, the screen follows you down. And once the branch is no longer contained within the screen-"
"Okay, I get it!" Lure interrupted. "But then how did Lecher grab Mike's-"
"Because you were on the verge of being exposed, you didn't have a plan to deal with it, and your mental power reserves were depleted. Under those circumstances, Lecher and I can overrule you, briefly. I screened your howls of pain, and Lecher prevented Mike from seeing you. Then he scared Mike out of the woods to get him as far away from us as possible. That is exactly what happened."
"Wait...Lecher, if you were free to act on your own, why didn't you stop Mike from hurting me?"
"Because I didn't want to," Lecher hissed.
Lure almost spun around instinctively to confront Lecher face-to- face. Fortunately, he was able to repress the urge.
"Can you fix my skin, Lecher, without pain?"
"You were designed to be able to achieve any possible skin tone for someone of your race," Guile interjected, "but Mike forced you to exceed your limits. The Thrall Master will be able to set things right, though."
Guile and Lecher watched Lure's back, ass, and leg muscles tighten and quiver to an impressive degree.
"FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
It took about a while, but Lure's body gradually relaxed. Moments later, his head and shoulders slumped. Guile expected that once again, Lure was switching from manic to depressive. Excellent. 'Depressive' was much easier for Guile to deal with.
"fuck," Lure repeated in a whisper.
Guile smiled at Lecher. Another childish Lure tantrum had been averted. Others would doubtless come, but for tonight, there would be a measure of peace within the conflicted head of the Thrall. Guile and Lecher would have to push Lure into doing some hunting tonight, of course. Hopefully, they would be able to find enough prey to bring Lure back to full strength and feed the Thrall Master. These precious, warm nights had been mostly squandered, but there was still time to take advantage of the odd weather trend before the snow and freezing temperatures---
"Guile, despite what Lecher thinks, I DO listen to what YOU say to me," Lure informed him, straightening up a bit. "I listen to every word, paying attention for any glaring omissions or tricky phrasing. Y'see, you may always have to tell me the truth, but you're so good at getting around that rule that I have to keep on my toes."
"This is a stupid waste of time," Lecher protested, accidentally regurgitating a sentence he'd heard recently.
"This is NOT a stupid waste of time," Lure whispered in a perfect reproduction of Mike's voice. "Guile, are you sorry that the plan failed?"
"It's not really as simple as-"
"Yes or no!"
"No," Guile uttered, seeing no advantage in stretching out the inevitable.
"Now," Lure continued, "you told me I ordered you and Lecher not to interfere, but what actually happened is that YOU asked ME if you and Lecher could assist, and I said: 'No, stay out of it'."
"Fine," Guile confessed, feigning an appearance of contrition, "I tricked you into dealing with Mike without us managing your powers, in the hope that everything would go awry. I take no joy in the fact that Mike accidentally hurt you, and I tried as hard as I could to block his mental onslaught, but I was taken completely by surprise. And if I hadn't been so busy fighting to get the screen back up, I would've ordered Lecher to deal with the agony Mike was subjecting you to."
"I see," Lure replied, trying to fight off an emotional reaction by coldly embracing his feelings of betrayal. It was a tactic he'd been forced to use quite often over the years, especially THIS year. "Guile, you told me to try to trick Mike into hiding in the woods until the others left. I order you to tell me how you would've gotten Mike to stay behind if you'd WANTED the plan to succeed."
"I would've instructed you to take out a one hundred dollar bill," Guile sighed, indicating the money strap around Lure's ankle, "and told Lecher to create a wisp of fog so that I could use it to carry the bill to Mike's feet. He has a ride-share app. on his phone, but he doesn't have any money to make use of it."
"You son of a bitch!" Lure spat. "The Thrall Master PROMISED me I could do this! He promised me again and again! You're defying His will!!"
"No, we're not," Guile retorted. "When a Lure wishes to do some- thing that risks exposing us, like unsanctioned, unnecessary murder, we are tasked with quietly working against him until the Thrall Master arrives to deal with the Lure Himself. In this case, had the Master blessed your intentions, He would have told us personally to back off and allow you to accomplish your goal. He has not. If you spend the rest of the evening feeding in Timbersburg or Johnsport, the Thrall Master will doubtlessly come to you to at some point to feed from you. When He arrives, you could ask Him for permission to carry out your-"
"Guile," Lure interrupted, dreading the answer he was about to receive, "I order you to tell me whatever instructions the Thrall Master gave you concerning my revenge."
"The Thrall Master told me to do everything in my power to prevent you from attaining your goal while simultaneously making you think that He was actually honoring His promise," Guile confessed, not even bothering to use consoling facial expressions, body language, or tone of voice. Nothing could help soften the blow of what Lure had just learned.
"I...don't believe you."
"Really?" Lecher broke in with a cruel smile. "Which did you detect, a glaring omission or tricky phrasing?"
"You fucking DICK!!" Lure screamed.
"I'm sorry. I shouldn't be a dick. If your service to the Master is any indication, being a dick might result in you ignoring me worse than you already do!"
"STOP LAUGHING AT ME!" Lure ordered. "GUILE JUST TOLD ME THE THRALL MASTER LIED TO ME! I WAS TRICKED INTO BECOMING A FUCKING SLAVE!"
"How could I possibly NOT laugh at you, Lure?" Lecher asked. "Thanks to the Thrall Master, you're ageless, beautiful, and powerful. And contrary to your histronics, your vengeance is not being denied. You can still inflict endless torment upon those three, with no chance of exposing either ourselves or the Thrall Master. Entangle them. Make them come back to the scene of their crime and force them to join the other Entangleds at those wonderful weekend get-togethers you've been having. Have the boys shower them with attention....and other things. Wouldn't that be revenge enough?"
"No, it isn't," Lure replied, "I can't move on. I know you two don't believe me...you think I'm overreacting, but...I'm stuck...I can't... get out...I can't...MOVE THE FUCK ON...unless they're....FUCKING...DEAD!!"
"Then go to the Thrall Master and tell him you wish to be Unenthralled," Guile challenged, "because that's the only way you're going to get your wish! But you still won't be able to kill them, since once you're Unenthralled, you'll be neither PHYSICALLY nor MENTALLY capable of doing it!"
"Or the three of us could work together and do exactly what I was promised," Lure proposed. "I'd shoulder the blame, and in exchange, I'd let the two of you control my...OUR body for an hour or so every day.
"Absolutely not," Guile said firmly.
"WHY NOT?!"
"Because in spite of His stupid decision to make you a Thrall, Lecher and I serve the Thrall Master, and He said NO! And even if I were willing to defy Him, I'd never help you carry out your plan, owing to the fact that even I don't have enough guile to convince the FUCKING FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION to ignore the bloody slaughter of three BOYS under the age of EIGHTEEN!!"
"They wouldn't be the FIRST boys killed in Faggot Forest, and they sure as hell won't be the LAST!" Lure countered, determined not to give an inch, "Twenty-seven gays have been killed there, and most of those cases were NEVER SOLVED!"
"I looked out through your eyes while you were doing that research, Lure, so I know that the majority of those unsolved cases were from the sixties to the nineties," Guile shot back, determined to prove to the snotty little prick that you cannot bullshit a bullshitter. "Since you've only had same-sex attraction for a short time, allow me to educate you about the realities of gay life back then: Nobody cared about a couple of DEAD FAGS! Those cases remain unsolved to this day because of shitty initial investigations that were hampered by homophobic investigators, an apathetic public, witnesses who never came forward for fear of being outed, and families of victims pressuring law inforcement to end investigations in an attempt to spare the family further embarrassment! But things have CHANGED, LURE! All THREE of the murders that have occurred in Faggot Forest since your birth have been SOLVED!"
"Yeah, because of D.N.A., fingerprints, shoe impressions, dropped personal items, cell tower pings, found murder weapons and tire tracks. I don't have D.N.A. anymore, my prints randomize daily, I'm not driving, I don't have my cell phone, my murder weapons are undetectable parts of me, and I'm naked except for my ankle wallet. So how could they POSSIBLY solve the case?"
"The police might find the murder weapons if they force you to undergo a cavity search," Lecher snarked, "but since there's no chance of them getting your head out of the way..."
"Well, you might leave something traceable behind from your on-site supply backpack," Guile speculated pensively, "but since you're FAR too smart to make a mistake like that, I'd wager that the state's case will have to rely heavily on MICHAEL PEARSON'S WITNESS STATEMENT!!"
"Thanks to the two of you, I'm going to have to make it so that Mike will never be able to talk about the things he'll see."
"In addition to his intelligence, Mike's brain is somehow unique. I have trouble just reading his mind, and I'm barely able to send messages to him, even at close range!" Guile scoffed. "And even if Lecher and I work together to physically AND mentally invade his brain, there's still the matter of him having years of memories of you, of the person you used to be. Each of those pre-existing remembrances will be a pre-existing crack in whatever shoddy psychic dam I manage to stuff into his mind.
"Yeah, I know." Lure said dismissively. "You've been very good about boring me with lectures on your telepathic limitations, even long after I'd learned it all."
"Doubtful," Guile seethed.
"So," Lecher began, his mood lightening as Guile's darkened, "which sad, undeserved fate have you chosen for Michael Pearson, Entanglement or death?"
"Entanglement," Lure sentenced coldly.
"Really?" Lecher asked with a wide grin, "You're going to Entangle Mike? Excellent! The worst part of your constant revenge obsession has been your goddamned self-righteousness! I feel much better now that you intend to shit all over your moral superiority by violating the mind and body of someone who never knowingly hurt you in the slightest, and never attended that FUCKING PARTY! And better still, you terrified the poor boy, right where we're standing, and then lied to him about being safe from you. I love it! It's just so perfect...you pathetic, self-deluded hypocrite."
"Mike would've been safe if Guile hadn't ruined things. And I didn't guarantee Mike's safety, Guile did! Mike's fate is Guile's fault, not mine!"
"No," Guile rejected solemnly. "All I did was find ways not to assist you, and gave you texting suggestions that you could've ignored, like every other suggestion I've ever made to you.
"Lure, momentarily setting aside the issue of law enforcement investigations," Lecher began, "I'd like to ask you some questions concerning feeding."
"Wow, that's a real fucking surprise."
"Just like the Thrall Master, who is precariously tethered to this reality, we are tethered, too. Except in OUR case, we are tethered to the Master Himself. We cannot stray more than approximately 47 miles from wherever He happens to be. This means that our hunting is limited to a circle that contains a little under 7000 square miles. Now, in an area of urban sprawl, or a lot of major population centers, this would not be a problem. However, for reasons known only to the Master, He has settled in an area with just THREE accessible cities: Timbersburg, Johnsport, and Mawklynd City. With the possible exception of Johnsport, none of those cities is all that impressive in size, and all of them lack significant suburbs. Do you know what they have instead of suburbs, Lure? TREES! Oceans and oceans of TREES! Although we subsist on a sticky liquid, allow me to assure you that it is not SAP!"
"Is there, like, a point to all this, or are you writing a travel blog or something?"
"Yes, Lure, there is," Lecher answered darkly. "May I get to it?"
"Free country," Lure said flippantly.
"I believe that was established in 1776, right? On July Fourth, if I'm not mistaken."
"Just make your damned point and stop antagonizing him!" Guile shrieked.
"My point, Lure, is that you want to STARVE US! Homosexuals are our easiest prey! Thanks to the recent weather, you've gotten the tiniest taste of what awaits us this summer. You won't be able to STAND the amount of pleasure you'll experience as we drink and drain an endless number of them for the Thrall Master. Their pitiful rate of recharge won't even matter, because there will be sooooo MANY! With the three of us working in symphony, playing our parts perfectly, we won't even have to SPEAK to a straight male until fall....if even THEN! But instead, YOU want to fuck it all up by staging a massacre in FAGGOT!!!!! FOREST!!!!!"
"No one even goes there anymore," Lure reasoned.
"You've only been gay for TWO AND A HALF FUCKING MONTHS!" Lecher yelled, driven nearly insane by Lure's tendency to blurt out his ignorant knee-jerk opinions as if they were all proven facts. "How the FUCK would you even KNOW that?!"
"Technically I'm not gay, so...," Lure needled.
"More to the point, Lure," Guile jumped in, "In our tiny, little hunting circle, it doesn't matter which gay cruising area you choose to drench with blood! Exactly like what happened tonight with Mike Pearson, the gays will incorrectly assume that THEY'RE being targeted."
"Technically he IS targeting Mike now, so...," Lecher shot back at Lure.
"KNOCK IT OFF!" Guile ordered. "Lure, you've promised the Master that once your personal vendetta is complete, you will show your gratitute by focusing on nothing except hunting, keeping the Master constantly sated."
"Absolutely," Lure affirmed, "and even though the Master lied to me, I STILL intend to keep my word. My mind will finally be clear enough to do exactly-"
"Yes, yes, yes, yes," Guile dismissed, flopping his raised hand in the air as if he were swatting flies, "but how achievable will that be, once you've FREED your damned mind FROM your damned mind, when you find that feeding is next to impossible? Every single hunting area within our tiny circle will dry up, whether they're nicknamed 'Faggot Forest' or NOT, because who wants to go somewhere secluded for a sleazy hook-up when they're afraid it might end with them WANTING the police to suddenly jump out of the bushes?"
"That's IT, Lure!" Lecher shouted while pointing his finger up in a eureka gesture, "You could use a hook-up app! After tonight, it certainly wouldn't be the dumbest idea you ever had. Be sure to include a recent photo for your profile."
"And since THAT isn't a possibility," Guile continued, politely acknowledging Lecher's useless remark and finding a way to make it fit into Guile's argument, "all that leaves, as far as homosexuals are concerned, are casual encounters. But as much as I love speaking through your mouth and using it to lie, beguile, and seduce, it takes far too much time to be an efficient feeding strategy."
"Are you guys done talking at me yet?" Lure asked impatiently.
"Almost," Guile said pleasantly, masking an ocean of bitterness. "Please continue pretending to listen for just one more moment."
Lecher almost added another unproductive comment, but instead winced at the piercing telepathic scream of "NOT NOW!" that Guile sent directly from his brain section to Lecher's.
"If you do what you're planning to do," Guile summarized, "everyone, be they gay, straight, or bi, will exercise extreme sexual caution to avoid a serial killer who doesn't exist. They will no longer be stupid and reckless, as we require. Instead, they will all become good little police informants, flapping their lips about anything strange that happens to them. And in addition to what they ate for lunch, and the shape of their subsequent bowel movement, they will all post about a gorgeous young man with platinum blonde hair who passionately sucks off any male, regardless of age, weight, or appearance, and does it without any expectation of money. Lure, they WILL find you. And in His rage, and to avoid you 'outing' Him, the Thrall Master will Unenthrall you. I know you don't care if Lecher and I go back to the oblivion that spawned us, but I think you do care about the living death that awaits YOU, should the Master allow you to live at all. I'm done."
"Good," Lure dismissed.
A large tractor trailer drove down the two lane road, traveling at a very dangerous speed. Tom Daggen would've been impressed,...for the three seconds it would've taken for the big rig to slam into the back of his car. It would not have had enough time nor road to change lanes and pass by on the left. Guile was so preoccupied by Lure's potentially disastrous next move that he didn't even bother lamenting the loss of the twenty-three year-old driver, who was so full of semen and Soul-Creation Energy that Guile ordinarily would've wept at the thought of it.
"Well?" Lecher questioned Lure when the noise of the truck subsided.
"Well what?" Lure asked, his voice tinged with emotion.
"Our logic-based arguments couldn't possibly have dissuaded you," Lecher explained, "because reasoning with your entitled ass is futile. So why haven't you slingshotted into the sky, formed those ridiculous wings of yours, and flown off to Faggot Forest like a big, bright, bleached bat out of hell?"
"Because it wouldn't work," Lure murmured, suddenly sounding utterly defeated. "I'm too fucking weak to make the trip."
"You could use Mike's rideshare app," Lecher jeered, "If you explain the circumstances and the urgency of the situation, I'm sure the driver would hurry."
Guile wanted to silence Lecher again, but he chose not to. His interactions with Lecher were starting to become too similar to his exchanges with Lure, and surely there should be at least one professional relationship within the Thrall's trisected brain. Thus, Guile remained silent while Lecher got one last shot in, even if it meant jeopardizing Lure's apparent surrender.
"So what now?" Guile probed, creating a safe choice for Lure to make all by himself, in order to counteract any feelings of helplessness he might be experiencing.
Lure said nothing.
"Lure, let's just call tonight off, go home, and talk to the Master in the morning," Guile proposed while modulating his tone to sound sympathetic and conciliatory.
"So he can confirm my enslavement and prevent me from EVER killing those fucking bastards? No thanks."
"He has a lot of affection for you, and you know it," Lecher disputed. "If he didn't, he would've killed or canned your underperforming, undeserving ass by now. Just respectfully call him on his bullshit. He'll probably give you what you want."
"Guile, without using any glaring omissions or tricky phrasing, tell me if you agree with Lecher."
"I do not," Guile stated, "In spite of all the paternal attention and love the Thrall Master has shown you, I think it's all a lie. He's using you. He promised you bloody vengeance this summer, but I think it was a ploy to stall you until you became dependent on the various mind- scrambling, hyper-intensified pleasures your altered body is capable of. The Master probably never counted on you barely scratching the surface of those pleasures, as He probably didn't foresee a day in January warm enough for you to carry out your overdramatized revenge scenario. Once you confront the Master, it will go exactly as poorly as you just predicted."
"Why did you just TELL him all that?" Lecher demanded. "You could've just said 'no'."
"Because I'm betting Lure thinks he can act against the Thrall Master's wishes, but sweet talk his way out of punishment. Don't count on it, Lure. To borrow a phrase from Mike Pearson's mind, the Thrall Master is NOT a 'new and better' father. He's a REAL monster, one who took advantage of your bad situation. Don't LOVE him, FEAR him! Accept your new life, adapt to your circumstances, and punish Tom, Grant, and Kenny in the way Lecher suggested. That's all you're going to get."
"It's not enough," Lure whispered, and promptly started to sob.
Lecher looked over to Guile, expecting to exchange an eye-roll or an exasperated look with him. Instead, Guile was fixated on Lure, watching his shoulders shake in his grief. As unreadable as Guile's face was, Lecher nevertheless plainly saw terror.
"He's just being melodramatic again, Guile," Lecher sent out with his mind. Guile didn't appear to hear him. He seemed too preoccupied with Lure to bother reading Lecher's thoughts.
"You're supposed to have supernatural cunning and yet you're falling for more of his bull-"
Lure turned around and faced Guile.
It wasn't possible for him to do that.
"Hey...Lure!" Lecher mocked, realizing how dangerous this situation had just become. "Bet you can't look at ME!! C'mon!! You wanna prove how tough you are?! Turn your fucking head to the right and let's-"
As Lure approached Guile, he seized control over his own eyes and ears, preventing Lecher from manifesting by altering Lure's ocular and auditory input. Lure could've made Guile go away too, merely by making his brain ignore Guile's telepathic signals, which enabled Guile to materialize in the form of a hallucination, but he chose to allow him to remain. Lure and Guile needed to have a talk.
Lure stopped about five feet in front of Guile. In spite of the coldness and determination he was trying to radiate, Lure's beautiful face twitched and spasmed at the deeply disturbing sight of Guile, ...but he did not flinch.
In the two and a half months since Lure's transformation, Guile's face had been a useful weapon to snap Lure back in line on many occasions. But now, as Lure stared directly into it, albeit reluctantly, Guile was the one who was experiencing anxiety and discomfort for once.
"Guile, can you send a message to the Thrall Master?" Lure asked, sounding unsettlingly free of emotion.
"No," Guile admitted. "Long-range telepathic communication with either the Master or the Entangleds won't be possible until we've fed."
"Of course not...," Lure exhaled.
"Why do you need to contact him?" Guile asked, fishing for confirmation of what he suspected Lure might do now.
"I'm not really sure," Lure laughed, wiping the moisture out of his eyes. It was not a happy laugh. "I mean, part of me wants to tell Him to fuck Himself for tricking me into becoming....THIS. But now that I'm finally able to look at you, Guile, I remember what it was like being you. I guess I should thank the Thrall Master for giving me two and a half months of not being a brain-damaged husk, shambling around my home like a goddamned zombie, wearing a piss-soaked adult diaper, and repeatedly soiling the robe my mother gave me on the last Christmas we spent together before she died."
"Would she want you to do what you're obviously about to attempt to do?"
"Faggot Forest?"
"You know what I mean, Lure."
"You're right," Lure answered with sarcastic melodrama. "If my mom was still here, she'd LOVE the idea of me going on living as a...a...a..... fucking...CUM...VAMPIRE!"
"You are not a vampire, Lure. And in spite of the monstrous things you've done to your Entangleds, and what you want to do at Faggot Forest, you are not the monster you think you are. I believe your mother would agree with me."
"You never fucking MET my mother, so you have no fucking IDEA what she'd think!"
"Perhaps not, but I'd be willing to bet that she would be happy to know that her child's longevity would far eclipse her own brief life. And I'm certain that although she might have some questions about your new status, she would accept and support you, especially since the alternative was you living as 'a brain-damaged husk'."
"Yeah, I'm sure she'd prefer having a son who goes out looking for dick all the time."
"Since it's a necessity, and there's either little or no chance of you ever being beaten, killed, infected, or arrested, I think she'd learn to live with it. Although you never talk to me, I've heard your conversations with the Thrall Master. You told Him your mother wasn't homophobic, so in spite of you thinking your mother would stop loving you because of what you are-"
"I never...I never said she'd...stop loving me," Lure stammered. "I just meant that she'd....she'd.....I don't know."
Guile was getting through, but Lure did what he always does in the face of words he doesn't want to hear: he changed the subject.
"Would it kill you to fucking close that robe," Lure spat, "so I don't have to be constantly reminded of that fucking piss-soaked diaper whenever I look at you?"
"Only the Master can authorize me to close my robe," Guile explained. "Tomorrow, when you speak with Him, I could-"
"Why would you need His authorization?" Lure cut in, refusing to let Guile segue into an attempt to trick Lure into not committing suicide.
"I am obligated to look exactly as you did on the evening of November 4th, when you stumbled to the back patio door to see who was knocking. Had your diaper been clean, or you robe closed, then that is how I would have to appear."
"Why?" Lure asked, turning around and scanning the trees as if he were looking for something.
"The Thrall Masters decreed it so, to remind the Thralls of how unappealing, underdeveloped, malnourished, disabled, disfigured, or poverty stricken they were before entering into the service of a Master. Sadly, in your case it didn't work. All I've ever done is remind you of what happened to you on July Fourth, and fuel your need for revenge. If the Masters ever summit again, I could suggest a change to the policy, ...provided I am still alive."
"You won't be," Lure confessed, "but if it makes you feel better, neither will I."
"It does not," Guile replied. "Since you seem to be looking for a limb strong enough for one of your 'take-offs', may I assume you're going to commit suicide by falling from the sky? You're incredibly durable, Lure, and very hard to kill. You're more likely to spend the evening in agony, writhing on the ground while your depleted physical reserves struggle to heal you. It won't be pleasant."
"No. That's not the way I'm going to do it," Lure admitted before letting out another humorless laugh. "I guess I was always meant to die of a head injury. Sucks to be me, huh?"
"Could we talk about why you feel you need to do this?" Guile inquired, grasping at straws in a desperate attempt to keep Lure talking, hopefully long enough for him to rethink his intentions. The conversation was becoming circular, but spiraling the drain was preferable to plunging into it.
"Because I'm a straight guy who was promised revenge in exchange for calling a man "Master" and sucking strangers' cocks for all eternity. But I was tricked, and no matter how much you and Lecher laugh at me, tell me how grateful I should be, and puke self-serving arguments all over me, it doesn't make the lie go away."
Lure stopped looking around the woods. His altered vision, which enabled him to always see the world in perfect lighting conditions, as well as to zoom in on distant objects, found exactly what he was looking for.
"The Thrall Master listened to me talk for hours, Guile, let me bawl on His shoulder while I told Him how much I hated my father. The Master criticized him for not tracking those guys down and killing them for what they did to me, or, at the very least, prosecuting them. But in the end, my new and better father turned out to be a lying, manipulative bastard, just like my real one. And from what you've just told me, the Thrall Master probably loves me just as little."
"I could be wrong about that," Guile said in alarm, realizing that in spite of his cunning, he might've actually dug his own grave.
"We're done talking. I'm not sorry about Lecher, but I am sorry that YOU have to die along with me, Guile," Lure said with sincerity.
Lure opened his mouth and spat out his tongue like a frog. To Guile's alarm, it wasn't shooting upwards at a high limb, it was zipping horizontally through the trees. Endless amounts of additional material flowed from Lure's mouth, extending the reach of the tongue as it streaked towards its target at a velocity that few crossbow arrows could match.
"LECHER, GET CONTROL OF LURE'S TONGUE!!!" Guile screamed.
The tongue found its target, a distant sequoia. It smacked into the tree and, being both a solid and a liquid, forked and flowed around the sequoia, meeting and fusing in the back, making it appear that the tree had been lassoed.
"Why?" Lecher asked. "What's he going to-"
"JUST DO IT!!!" Guile yelled. "I WASN'T GIVING YOU A SUGGESTION, I WAS GIVING YOU AN ORDER!!!"
But it was already too late. Lure concentrated with all of his might and ordered his tongue to retract as fast and energetically as it could, in spite of being anchored to the sequoia. Lure's body was yanked into the air and pulled through the forest, crashing through branches and banging against trees that were in his way.
Just before impact, Lecher turned towards Guile, seeking further guidance. All he received was a narrowed glare of irritated contempt.
"Crack!!!!!!"
Lecher let out a cry of agony that continued even after his view- point was forcibly returned to his brain section. Towards the end of the scream, though, Lecher's voice suddenly cut out, and Guile could no longer feel him telepathically, or even access the common point connecting their brain sections. It was disconcerting as all fuck.
Over a hundred feet away, a being capable of lifting well over a ton, struggled to his feet. Lure's skull hadn't fractured, but he certainly managed to give his reconfigured, tri-sected brain a concussion. Everything was spinning, his balance was shot, and Lure felt a very familiar pressure in his skull. It wasn't as bad as the last time he'd experienced it, but since Lure turned his head to the right at the last second before impact, Lecher had received the brunt of it. Even as he sought to end his life, Lure's PTSD would never allow him to willing take another blow to the left side of his skull.
Keeping his tongue wrapped around the sequoia, Lure drunkenly looked for a direction leading away from the tree, with as few obstructions as possible. He would need a clear, straight shot, with nothing to slow him down, if he were going to end his life.
To keep himself focused, which was nearly impossible at that point, Lure contemplated the horrifying possibility that he might only succeed in rendering himself unconscious. He envisioned the Thrall Master locating him, unenthralling him, and putting Lure right back where He originally found him. Lure would be staring vacantly into space, only dimly aware that he'd been returned to the lake house. He'd be wearing his black robe, which used to always smell like his mother, but now only smelled like shit and stale piss, no matter how often it was dry cleaned. Lure's diaper would be full, as it so often had been, leaving Lure to sit in the unpleasant squishiness until his assistant Alan noticed.
Lure let out a little sob of frustration upon realizing that he could've used Mike's cell phone to say good-bye to Alan. But it was too late. The cell phone was sitting in Mike's butt print, along with his flashlight, and Lure was too addled to find it again.
"Lure!" Guile cried out, suddenly materializing in his way with the hope that the collision had dazed Lure to the point that Guile's face had regained its power to emotionally shatter him and leave Lure despondent and unable to focus on ending his life.
No such luck.
Lure walked straight through Guile and continued with his suicidal trek.
A small tree stood in the middle of Lure's "runway". Lure strained and repeatedly slapped himself across the face until he managed to achieve just enough presence of mind to activate one of his many powers. There was a flash of silver in the air, and the top part of the tree slipped off of its trunk and crashed to the ground, creating an even larger obstruction. Without Lecher to guide the lethal silver glint, Lure couldn't make it slice the tree at its base. Further attempts only succeeded in filling the air with sparks, silver flashes, and a high-pitched, metallic whistling sound. Those noises were muted by Lure's savage scream of rage and frustration and the subsequent cacophony of cracking and grinding as Lure chose quantity over quality and hacked wildly at the tree, eventually turning it into a pile of sticks and wood fragments. Lure continued walking.
While Lure vanquished his wooden adversary, scoring a hard won victory against an inanimate object who's only sin in life was getting in the way of Lure's suicide, Guile marshalled his meager telepathic talents and the even-more meager energies left to fuel it, and screamed for the Master as hard as he could. It was no use. Guile didn't feel the Master grab the telepathic signal and enhance it with his own immeasurable might. Guile was completely on his own, with only his wits to bring this situation to a satisfactory conclusion. Sadly, wits were mostly useless against someone who'd just smashed their head into a tree and rendered themselves witless.
Guile cursed Mike Pearson for stripping him of his ability to reach out to the Master. It was ironic, since up until a few moments before, he'd been praising Mike for unknowingly helping to sabotage Lure's plans.
"Lure, please listen to me!" Guile begged. "I have an idea! We can kill them, but we have to do it under the Master's radar! For instance, we can entangle Kenny Miller's father and have him beat Kenny to death! It'll be perfect, and no one will suspect anything out of the ordinary. We can arrange accidents for all of them!"
Lure didn't respond. He continued lumbering forward, trampling a small thorn bush. As he passed over it, several of the jaggers hooked onto his legs, stomach, penis, and scrotum. Lure ignored them and kept going, tearing the thorns from their stems, or the stems from their roots.
"Lure, talk to me!" Guile pleaded. "What do I have to do to get you to STOP?"
"Thagguh Thorruss," Lure mumbled, his speech made indecipherable by his concussion and the fact that his tongue was tied to a tree that was several yards behind him.
"Lure, I can't understand you," Guile lied. "Maybe if you pull your tongue back inside your mouth."
It was an utterly pathetic ploy, completely unworthy of a being created primarily for the purpose of manipulation. Guile realized that maybe the concussion was affecting him, too, because he was unable to think of anything better.
"Lure, we're all injured! Flying is out of the question, and I can't reach any of the Entangleds for a ride! It's over! Please understand that!"
Lure walked up to a huge Sitka spruce that was directly in his intended flight path. He tried walking around it to the left, but he could feel his tongue come in contact with something solid far behind him, probably another tree. The same thing happened when he tried to go around the Sitka spruce to the right. Lure had multiple capabilities that could've quickly felled the massive spruce, but Lure was far to jumbled and depowered to do so, especially without Lecher's assistance. Like it or not, this was where Lure would pull himself into the air for his final high- velocity trip back to the sequoia.
"OKAY, WE'LL DO IT!" Guile screamed.
Guile had one last gambit to try, but since he wasn't able to directly lie to Lure, he would have to keep his word. It wasn't a play that would serve the Thrall Master's interests, though. This was a selfish attempt by Guile to survive the next few minutes, and hopefully enjoy another six months of life before being obliterated by the Master's wrath.
"I PROMISE you that during the summer, we'll lure them back to Faggot Forest, or somewhere else, and you can execute your plan. I PROMISE you that neither Lecher nor I will inform the Master, and as you know, I CANNOT LIE TO YOU!! You'll get what you want, Lure! I PROMISE!!!!"
Lure babbled something so incomprehensible that Guile needed his telepathy to assist in understanding it. Lure's response to Guile's offer had been: "glaring omission or tricky phrasing".
"But there weren't any....this time," Guile whined as he watched Lure's body suddenly rocket forward, flying unobstructed through the woods and gaining a terrifying amount of velocity.
"Even guile has its limits," Guile sadly intoned, choosing his last words. "Even Guile has his limits."
CRACK!!!!!!!!
It took Guile a few minutes to pull himself together and remanifest outside of his battered brain section. Once again, though, Lure's inability to willingly take a blow to the left side of his head saved Guile from the worst of the damage.
Standing above Lure's unconscious body, Guile looked down on him in every conceivable way. Lure had slammed into the tree head-on, which meant that his own brain-section took virtually all of the resulting damage. His skull was still amazingly intact, but Lure's slackened expression, gaping mouth, and vacant eyes told Guile that considerable harm had been done. It also gave Guile the unsettling feeling of looking in a mirror.
"All you lack is my-"
Guile flinched in surprise as Lure's beautifully styled hair, which was short on the sides and wildly untamed on top, started to grow and droop until it hung from his scalp, straight and lifeless. If Lure had been able to stand, his hair would've reached down to his shoulders.
"Lecher!" Guile cried out telepathically, directing the signal at the bruised right side of Lure's head. "Are you doing this?"
"Yes," Lecher responded weakly, "I was...trying...to get...your... attention."
"I wish you could've found a better way than giving him my hair style."
"Better...than him...having...mine!" Lecher snarled. "Bastard did.. ..serious damage, but I'm...okay, now...mostly. Managed to...stop the... ...bleeding in my brain section and minimize the...bruising and...swelling. But if he...does that again...."
"He cannot," Guile assured. "As fast as he can heal, he can't recover from this amount of damage, probably for at least twelve hours, given our depletion."
"What do we do now?" Lecher barked, pulling himself together and demanding instructions.
"Now? Now we enjoy the last few hours of our lives before the Master shows up and decides whether Lure will be sentenced to real death, or just a living death. In either case, our fate is sealed. Oblivion awaits us."
"Can't you or the Master...fix him?" Lecher croaked, his telepathic voice conveying his despondency at Guile's bleak prediction.
Guile honestly thought Lecher would take the news better. He'd been so miserable serving as this Lure's Lecher that Guile expected...well... ...relief.
"Fix him?" Guile asked, helping Lecher to manifest his point of view outside of the failed, doomed Thrall. "What do you mean by 'fix him'?"
Guile really didn't feel all that conversational at the moment. He would've rather spent his last few hours drifting though the forest as far away from Lure as his psychic leash would allow, hopefully far enough to reach the road, where he could watch the trickle of passing cars, full of men with a special kind of energy clinging to them. An energy that Guile would never again have the opportunity to trick them into donating to the Master. However, before Guile left to torture himself at the roadside, he could spare a few moments to help Lecher accept his fate.
"I mean, why can't you go into his mind and FIX HIM!?" Lecher babbled irrationally. "His psychic defenses are down. Go in and change his personality or something. Make him not care about that fucking party! MAKE HIM DEVOTED TO OUR PURPOSE!"
"Lecher, I'm sorry but that's not possible. A Guile is designed to be manipulative and conniving, to encourage his Lure to hunt. But to keep that ambition in check, and to prevent Guiles from taking full control, certain checks and balances were installed. You already know I cannot lie to Lure, but I also cannot tamper with his mind."
"Well," Lecher proposed, wanting to evade the hopelessness of the situation, "then the Master could do it. He's a stronger telepath than you, right?"
"Firstly, Lecher, I am not a telepath at all. I merely have a collection of psychic abilities, some major and some minor, all of which come with a laundry list of special requirements and an even longer list of limitations. Even if Lure were vulnerable to my mental touch, and you and I worked together to manually patch into Lure's brain section, I only know how to make changes to 'human' brains. Our Thrall brains are mostly a mystery to me."
"But the Master-"
"The Master's telepathy isn't a scalpel, it's a sledgehammer. If he tries to even contact a human, it's like plugging an American hair dryer into a German wall outlet. BOOM! He can only contact the three of us because you and I were designed for his telepathy, and Lure was redesigned for it. Regular human minds are just too...alien...for the Thrall Master to contact or control.
"But that doesn't make any sense!" Lecher protested. "During my 'birth', I was given some special memories handed down from Lechers who were created hundreds of years ago. One of those memories is of a Thrall going to an Eastern European village in the middle of the night, lying naked on his belly in the main square, extending his tongue, and fanning it out to create a large, two-foot tall ramp...."
"I don't have that memory," Guile confessed, "and I can't bear to have you painstakingly describe it to me in detail. I'll enter your mind and take a look at it."
Since Guile wasn't asking for permission, Lecher didn't bother giving it.
Guile watched Lecher's hand-me-down memory play out. Doors all around the village opened, and naked post-pubescent males wandered hypnotically into the street. They all walked up to the Thrall's tongue- ramp, found a spot, and began to openly masturbate alongside their fathers, sons, brothers, friends, co-workers, fellow congregants, and neighbors. Row after row of men and boys took their turns, filling the quiet evening with soft groans and sighs, and quickly turning the ramp from pink to white. Semen, in all of its various consistencies, from chunky to watery, sluiced its way down into the Thrall's eager, open mouth.
One especially lusty individual, a good-looking, husky man in his mid-forties, ignored the ramp entirely and lay down on top of the Thrall. Understandably unable to speak, the Thrall greeted the man by spreading his legs, and gave unsolicited consent by moaning through his nose as the man's erect penis slid through his tight, frictionless asshole. The Thrall fought mightily to continue swallowing fast enough to consume the onrushing male secretions, but the man on top of him was rutting like a sex-starved dog, subjecting the Thrall's hyper-sensitive pleasure center and jacked-up reward system to an almost unbearable amount of gratification. To prevent jizz from overflowing the ramp, the Thrall widened his mouth and stopped swallowing altogether, allowing the slimy flow to simply pour inside him.
In spite of it being an apparent distraction, the Thrall seemed disappointed when the handsome stranger-with-benefits climaxed all too soon, with a series of satisfied, thrusting grunts that attracted the dreamy attention of everyone gathered. Thunderous applause and profane shouting broke out as the randy crowd joined together in their approval of the perversity playing out in front of their eager, sexually-repressed eyes.
The mothers and daughters of the village heard nothing. They continued sleeping, unmolested by the raucus, well-attended debauchery occurring just outside.
The applause died down quickly, owing to the fact that the men were impatient to get back to playing with themselves. A few men were able to continue clapping, however, since a growing sentiment of community fellowship inspired bystanders to lend their free hand to anyone whose penis was being neglected. This led to several incidences in which a man would suddenly have to rush the ramp and squeeze in to avoid his seed being wasted.
After basking in the approval of the crowd, the husky man had no further use for the Thrall. He tried to pull out, fully intending to get up and wander back home to bed, only to find that his deflating member wasn't going anywhere. When a man fucks a Thrall to completion, and his ejaculatory pulses die down, the Thrall's mutated anus, which is much more complex than a mere single ring of muscle, tightens against the shriveling penis, preventing its premature escape. Aiding in this process, the Thrall's colon, which no longer serves its original purpose, constricts while absorbing any air that may have been fucked into the Thrall due to piston-action, turning the Thrall's ass into a cock-imprisoning vacuum. Once secured, the complex, well-muscled, altered anal cavity acts like a milking machine, aggressively massaging the softening erection and squeezing out every last drop of cum.
The Thrall's "date", seeing that escape was momentarily impossible, simply rested upon the Thrall's back and, much to the Thrall's delight, began to urinate inside of him. He was thirsty, you see. As a Thrall is designed for extreme survivability, and he can no longer excrete waste, a Thrall's digestive system is capable of breaking down and tearing nutrition out of virtually anything. Thus, internally filtering the spent man's urine into potable water was quite simple for a creature designed to do the same thing to sea water.
When the Thrall finally, reluctantly allowed his paramour's spent penis to slide out of him, he felt an unbearable emptiness. Fortunately, a small group of the most thuggish and feared men in the village had lined up behind the husky man, intending to take turns filling that emptiness, whether the Thrall wanted them to or not. Fortunately, this Thrall had a very good Lure. He would whine and whimper as much as his gushing banquet would allow, and use his limited shape-shifting talent to make his skin appear bruised in response to the men "making hate" to him, but he wouldn't resist. Partially because he didn't want to, and partially because unless the men found some way to actually hurt the Thrall, or disrupt the Thrall's booming "aqueduct", he couldn't resist.
"Always allow your prey to believe that they are your predator." -Ancient Thrall saying, attributed to Master Spurius Septimius Praetextus (126 AD - present)
As enticing as the spectacle would be for a Lecher, a Guile is a creature obsessed with manipulation, not copulation nor ejaculation. He was far less interested in WHAT was happening, and obsessed with knowing HOW it was happening.
Guile turned away from the activity at the ramp and scanned the village, looking for some sort of explanation. The Thrall's Master couldn't possibly be responsible for the decadent feast that awaited Him once His Thrall's body finished extracting the Soul-Creation Energy contained within the continuous, runny, gelatinous deluge, ...so who or what was?
Knowing that a Master would never debase nor reveal Himself by being present for the Thrall's glorious display of utter self-degradation and depravity, Guile scanned the surrounding hillside. Repulsed as He may have been, His Thrall could not possibly store this amount of Soul- Creation energy for very long, so the Thrall Master had to be somewhere nearby, close enough to feed from His Thrall, but far enough away to protect His anonymity and dignity. Sure enough, Guile spied the Master in question, much further up the hillside than He needed to be. But as inhumanly magnificent as this Master was, He was not the most interesting being up there.
Standing near to (but respectfully behind) the Master was an Asian young man, probably Korean, approximately twenty years old. Because of the psychic energy emanating from the kid, Guile initially mistook him for another Thrall. But seeing as how he was not helping his Thrall Brother in the square, and considering that no Guile could produce the amount of psychic energy that this kid was putting out, Guile was dissuaded of that notion.
Although the memory was recorded by a Lecher, and passed down through history by other Lechers, it contained information that none of them could properly interpret, since they were of the physical, and not of the mental. Masters and Guiles, however, could view that borrowed memory and see a whole host of psychic anomalies to which the Lechers were not privy. Adjusting his sight, Guile replayed the whole memory fragment, and saw something truly mind-boggling.
In the moments before the first naked man left his home to approach the Thrall's "altar" and rub out a sacrifice, the air was filled with psychic manifestations, "ghosts" composed of mental energy. Unlike Guile, who was merely a projectable point of view who clothed himself in a hallucinatory "skin", these were actual free roaming telepathic entities, each containing far more mental potential than Guile could ever match.
Like a phantasmagoric swarm of bees, the ghosts flew through windows, doors, and walls, entering the various village dwellings. Shortly thereafter, the unclothed men and boys filed out, but this time, Guile could see that each male had a ghost floating behind him, with its incorporeal hand phased through the back of their head.
Guile stood behind one of the ghosts who was slowly leading an elderly man towards the ramp. The ghost was completely transparent, except for its face and hair, which appeared deceptively solid. The features were Asian, belonging to someone who was probably Korean. They were identical to the faces of all the ghosts, as well as to the living, breathing man who was standing behind the Thrall Master.
The ghosts in the air were all powder blue, and they were all surrounded by a bright yellowish-white light. Looking at the elderly man's spectral attendant, however, Guile quickly figured out that the ghosts in the air weren't actually powder blue, they were human-shaped virtual reality lenses, or moving windows, that were showing Guile a blue sky that existed at some other place, and some other time. Their ghostly aura was the blazing sunlight of the bright summer day they were "windowing".
Guile dropped his gaze and examined the old man's "puppeteer". Since it was at ground level, it was not windowing a powder blue sky. Instead, as it floated closer to the ramp, it windowed row after row of corn stalks, all of them taller than the ghost itself.
Knowing the way the Masters think, and considering their stringent rules regarding the appearances of Guiles and Lechers, Guile guessed that whatever the Korean man had been transformed into, it had occurred in the very cornfield, at the exact moment, that the ghosts were displaying.
Guile stopped viewing the memory and returned his attention to his bleak reality.
"Well? Did you watch all of it?" Lecher demanded.
"Yes," Guile confirmed. "I found it extremely interesting."
"Well....do we ask the Master about it?!?"
"I'll try to broach the subject if he doesn't kill us right away," Guile offered, seeking to end the topic before Lecher wasted Guile's last few hours by talking about it endlessly.
False hope would ruin Guile's intention to run out the clock by bitterly fuming about the cruelty of the cold, uncaring universe, ....to be stuck with the worst Lure in history.
Most Guiles lived to be at least three hundred years old before their Lures retired. He, unfortunately, would only get a sum total of two and a half months....and he really felt like brooding about it while watching carloads of untapped, brimming men drive by.
"Don't you think you're giving up too easy?!" Lecher accused, indicating to Guile that he probably wouldn't leave Guile alone to enjoy his roadside 'entertainments'. "I mean, you ARE a master of manipulation, RIGHT?! Surely you must have SOME idea how to save us!!"
"Yes," Guile snarked. "I plan to show the Master a useless memory of one of the many experiments the Masters performed upon humanity as they sought to perfect the Thralls. That minor distraction should save us, provided that the Master's attention span suddenly lowers to that of a goldfish."
"How VERY appropriate," Lecher growled. "FIRST, I get stuck with the shittiest Lure who ever LIVED! And NOW I find that I'm also stuck with the shittiest GUILE who was ever CREATED!"
"Our Lure is a homicidal, suicidal FUCK-UP!!" Guile raged. "And our Thrall Master is an UNFORGIVING PRICK!! In addition, I'm now temporarily punch-drunk from YOU QUESTIONING MY ORDER TO DISABLE LURE'S TONGUE INSTEAD OF FUCKING ACTING UPON IT! As a result, I find your criticisms of my job performance to be LAUGHABLE!!!!!!! Even the LEAST 'shitty' Guile who ever LIVED couldn't save us, so what do you expect ME to do!?!? THERE ARE LIMITS TO GUILE!!"
"Are you even passingly aware of how often you say that?" Lecher pointed out. "Maybe you should embroider it on your robe, just so people stop expecting you to be clever!"
"Perhaps you're right," Guile volleyed, "because I was certainly unable to stop the shittiest LECHER ever created from constantly picking fights with our Lure, making an intolerable situation even-"
Lure coughed, spraying lilac-colored fluid into the air. Promptly, his body started convulsing, making him flop around on the ground like a dying fish.
Guile saw his remaining hours instantly turn into minutes.
"What do we-???" Lecher began.
"Fire his tongue at this tree!!" Guile yelled, slamming a mental overhead picture of the area into Lecher's mind. An "X" marked the desired tree. "It's the reverse-route of Lure's first trip through the woods, so we already know it's mostly free of obstructions. Drag him there!!"
"But then what will we-?"
"WE HUNT!!!!!"
Lecher pulled Lure's thrashing carcass across the grasses, mud, pine needles, and soggy leaves of the forest floor until he reached Mike's butt-print. Lecher retracted Lure's tongue and left him there alone to enjoy his well-deserved death-throes while Lecher joined Guile at the guardrail.
Guile was so panicked at the prospect of nothingness that he didn't even bother to criticize Lecher for the missed opportunity that drove by just before Lecher had Lure in position.
"If Lure can be turned stark white, can he be turned true black? Without any pain, to keep his condition from worsening?"
"Since I'm doing it right now, am I permitted to ask why?"
"Yes. If he suddenly regains consciousness during the forty-odd minutes he can survive without air, and he panics and runs off, I want him to be as invisible as possible to make it easy for me to screen him."
"Just so you know, my power levels are pretty low, too!"
"Yes, but Mike didn't drain you as badly as he drained me. I need the screen to hunt, and I'm burning FUMES here! If I have to fully screen Lure TOO, especially while he's thrashing around, I'll burn myself out."
"Wait, I thought motion was only a problem when it's place-to-place motion, like when Lure is flying. So if Lure fucks a guy at hyper-speed, will the screen-?"
"Do you HONESTLY want to discuss that NOW?!?!" Guile snapped. "Can't you darken Lure any faster?!"
"Yes, if you want him to be in agony again," Lecher explained tersely. "The reason Mike was able to hurt him so bad had less to do with the extremity of the transformation, and more to do with how FAST Mike forced him to change. Of course, I could've spared Lure almost all of the pain by telling him to stop fighting and submit to Mike's command, but where's the fun in THAT?"
"Thank God you allowed Lure to suffer, which cost us the majority of the physical energy you're suddenly so concerned about!" Guile hissed, frustrated at the enduring absence of passing vehicles. "Now shut the fuck up and let me hunt!"
Guile looked to his left and reached out with his mind to sense any approaching males. The rise was blocking his view, and like the speeding big rig, any vehicle that approached from that direction would zip by long before Guile could prepare for it. To the north, Guile's right, any car coming from that direction would be visible for quite a while, therefore Guile wouldn't have to waste any of his remaining mental energy until it got close enough.
Before the confrontation with Mike, Guile could've stretched his telepathic awareness over a mile in both directions, which would've been more than adequate to hunt for prey. And within that two plus miles, Guile would've known the age, sexuality, telepathic susceptibility, sex drive, present level of arousal, erotic vulnerabilities, sexual morals, kinks, fantasies, sexual flexibility, and most importantly, present level of Soul-Creation Energy of every male occupant of every vehicle. But now, unfortunately, all Guile could do was sense the presence of sexually mature males within an extremely short distance. This would be tricky.
A carload of young men came over the rise. In spite of Guile's impaired telepathy, their loud, blaring radio, with its thumping base, announced their approach soon enough that Guile would've had plenty of time to act. Instead, he let them pass by.
"WHY DID YOU LET THEM-?" Lecher started.
"Because there were five of them, and they were all rowdy and either buzzed or stoned. I wasn't confident I could herd them all. They were also going way too fast, and probably would've driven right through my screened road block."
"You STILL should've risked it!" Lecher scolded.
"They also had a dash cam," Guile added. "which would've given them proof of their encounter with Lure. And if they couldn't stop in time, and plowed through whatever imaginary barrier I created for them, they would be able to review the footage and discover that it never existed. They could upload the footage on the internet, explain what they saw at the time, and get people to believe them."
"Fucking technology!" Lecher grumbled, "I wish the Masters would get their shit together and give us a few abilities to counter it before gadgets and gizmos make hunting impossible! I mean, they haven't gathered since WWI, for Christ's sake! We're all due for major upgrades!"
"If it makes you feel better, Lecher, after tonight, technology and a dated power set won't affect us at all."
"STOP....REMINDING ME!!"
Headlights came into view to the north. Guile focused all of his attention on it. Paydirt. Two males, one female.
"THERE, THAT'S THE ONE!" Guile cried out, "BE READY!"
Guile placed a screen across the road. When the occupants of the car approached, they would see several deer milling about, filling both lanes. They would stop and either wait, flash their high beams on and off, or blare their horn in an attempt to get the nonexistent deer off of the road. Guile would then target whichever male carried the most Soul-Creation Energy, unless that male was driving, in which case he would be disqualified, since he was less likely to leave the vehicle. Guile would enter the mind of his chosen candidate and make him think he had to piss. Then, as he left the car, Guile would steer him over towards Lure. Once the boy had his dick out, Guile would screen him. For his part, Lecher would then pacify the boy and subject both him and Lure to extreme sexual arousal. Hopefully, Lure would instinctively take care of the rest, and absorb enough energy to save the three of them from death.
The car slowed down for the imaginary deer, revealing a young black man at the wheel, a young white woman in the passenger seat, and in the back, behind the driver, with his window conveniently half open, was a young black male in his late teens.
"Back seat," Lecher suggested to Guile, "but his bladder is mostly empty."
"Yes," Guile confirmed, "but the girl is smoking, and our target is wearing loose shorts, he's going commando, and his penis is pointed straight down the right leg. We can switch plans and do this the easy way."
"Finally, some GOOD news," Lecher beamed.
This same thought would soon be echoed by every major media outlet in the United States and beyond.
End of Chapter 2