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Tales of the Ubermensch:
The Sorceress's Apprentice
Chapter 1: An Unexpected Meeting
By Gamera Obscura

(Author's Foreword: This story takes place in the universe of the free eBook "Tales of the Ubermensch: Hack dot World", approximately a year after the completion of that tale. All main characters are as faithfully adapted from that work as I could manage and still tell my story.)

[Trigger Warning: This chapter mentions child molestation, but does not depict it or describe it in any way.]

"People who truly want to change actually do change. They work at it. They improve themselves. You want to
be able to perfect yourself without feeling that you have to sacrifice anything. You're lazy. The world is filled with
people like you, and that is the part of the problem. You don't actually want it enough to do anything about it."

-Delilah Hanson (The Ubermensch) – Tales of the Ubermensch: Hack dot World

It was a sultry July evening in 2011; I had been out of the psychiatric hospital, my third stay, for almost a year now. Karen had left me and moved out, and I was living alone in a three-bedroom, 2000 square foot condo that was immaculately appointed, with everything in its place. Part of the reason for this was my need to keep an orderly space, but the other reason was that the only rooms I used in my home these days were my bedroom (or more specifically, the bed), the desk in my office, and the toilet. Showers were a luxury; it had been over seven days since I'd taken one. In the old days, I took up to three showers a day, but since my troubles began, I had practically stopped bathing or brushing my teeth, or doing anything about my appearance at all, short of having Karen over to shave my head with the clippers once a month. I just didn't see the point.

This probably sounds grotesque to you, a man who's given up on life and doesn't bathe, brush his teeth, or shave, or care about his appearance at all. My grocery shopping was done at 5 in the morning, so I could have contact with as few people as possible. Again, a strange methodology, but I assure you, there was a method to my madness.

You see, over a decade before, I had first encountered the Ubermensch, and that encounter served to both send my fate spinning off in a radically new direction, and it also was the preamble to the ultimate destruction of my life.

My name is Marcus Jones. I was 40 years old. I had no friends. I had no job, or hope of resurrecting my career. I sat all day in my high backed leather office chair, playing World of Warcraft. I didn't actually play the game; I used the game as a social outlet, connecting instead on a social level with my guildies and other players. She had said that was okay, that it was safe.

For them.

I used to be a different person. While I was never particularly stable, I had a high paying career in the IT field, making over $150,000 a year. I was meticulously dressed and scented, and was what most would have considered "metrosexual". My head was shaved, more an affectation than out of any sign of encroaching baldness, and I wore a $1000 outfit every day. A pair of $200 jeans, a $150 shirt, $50 socks, $250 shoes, and a $1500 watch along with a $15,000 white gold diamond ring on my pinky as my only jewelry.

I was heavy-set, but I was tall and handsome, even then, and had once been considered a catch, despite my weight. In my day, I'd had nearly 200 female sexual partners, and nearly 50 male partners, and virtually none of the female partners were one night stands, as I hated one night stands and anonymous sex, and had given up on those sorts of encounters in my very early 20s. Before the Ubermensch came into my life (and even after), I would often juggle as many as twelve women at once, with a different woman (or pair of women) in my bed every night of the week on a set rotation. This made me happy, and made me feel as though my life was an enviable and fulfilling one.

In short, I was a fool.

The Ubermensch first got her hooks into me in 1998, I know this much now. She uses hypnosis to get what she wants, and has spent over twenty years spreading a hypnotic "Virus" from person to person in what will likely be a successful attempt to subjugate the entire world. She had already controlled billions, and said she would control everyone by 2016. She had declared herself the God of a new world, and as I understood it, she spent the intervening time punishing the wicked. That was how she had gotten to me, by discovering that at age 10, I had molested a 2-year-old girl. Now, while that's a shocking and despicable admission, most people would wave it off by saying that I, too, was a child at the time, and that tens of thousands of children experiment in the same way every year. The Ubermensch – Delilah Hanson, as she presented herself to me – did not see it in those terms.

She said that had I not known that my actions were wrong, I would not have taken the painstaking steps that I had to hide what I had done. And my actions were my actions, and my choices were my choices, regardless of how old I was. I was old enough to Know Better. Old enough to know that what I was doing was very, very wrong.

The worst part about it was that she was absolutely right in everything she said. She always was.

So she programmed me to ruin my own life, using hypnosis, and then with that same skill, made me forget everything she had told me. She had come into my life as a lover, and we spent years together. She punished me for my actions while were a couple, always making me forget what she had done, at least for the time being. When she was particularly angry with me, she would force me to eat my own feces, which always shattered my psyche and traumatized me in ways that my history of childhood abuse could not hope to compete with. Then she would make me forget, and it was like nothing had ever happened.

Finally, on March 22nd, 2006, months after she had programmed me to dump her, she invited me over to her apartment, and spent several hours programming me in what I would later remember to be the last and most recent time she had hypnotized me. The endgame of our little play proved to me without a shadow of a doubt that she was controlling the world, and that finally, when she took over everyone, she would kill all those crippled by another kind of "Virus", a Virus of abuse and violence, and create her own version of a perfect world.

You see, she explained that our ethos of abuse and violence was a life form, a living thing, a Virus of the mind, that sought to reproduce by causing the victims of violence or abuse to inflict further violence or abuse on others, infecting them with this same Virus. This particular Virus had spread from person to person, crippling the human population for tens of thousands of years, since the very Dawn of Man, and she was going to stamp it out once and for all, using her hypnotic control.

Because I was a Jew, she would kill all the Jews, and make everyone believe that the Nazis had won the Second World War. Additionally, everyone that had ever laid eyes on me would be killed, including everyone I had ever met, and then she would erase everything I ever loved from the collective consciousness of the world, beginning with Star Trek, Harry Potter, and the collected works of Stephen King, all gone, as if they had never existed.

So now, you know why I shopped for groceries at five in the morning. My sense of morality wouldn't allow me to walk through a crowded grocery store at four in the afternoon, killing as many as a hundred people just because they looked at me. The only safe way that I could interact with people was online, and through MMORPG gaming guilds in particular.

When your mere appearance can mean death, you cease caring what appearance is. You cease caring what you look and smell like. My degradation and collapse should be not only be understandable under these circumstances, but obvious. I doubt that you, my dear friend, would have fared any better than I, were our roles reversed.

The problem is, she lies. Many of the things she had predicted to me over the years had not come to pass. Most would say that this was a sign of a self-reinforcing delusion, but I knew better. She would predict things well in advance as I sat, frozen, in a hypnotic state, aware of my surroundings and what she was doing to me, at least until she made me forget again. Most of her old predictions – or prophesies – from our most recent prior encounter would have already come to pass, proving to me for certain that she was manipulating world events. She had foretold the downing of the twin towers on 9/11, the deaths of Anna Nicole Smith and her son, the death of Michael Jackson, and the disgrace of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, among many other things.

But following early 2008, when she had programmed me to begin to remember what she had done to me in dribs and drabs, while everything she had predicted to happen prior to that moment had occurred precisely as she had prophesied, everything that she had prophesied to happen after my remembrance had failed to occur, with one notable exception: The financial crisis of 2008, and that had only happened because one night she had asked me the question, "What kind of era would you least like to live in?"

My first answer, "A post-apocalyptic era" had been too extreme for her purposes, so after a few other answers that were equally unacceptable, I finally came up with the answer, "An economic depression". Whether or not the economy degenerated into a full-blown depression still remained to be seen, however.

So, as I said, she lies. I suspect the false prophesies were to make me appear as though I was insane, and to discredit me as I foretold the future I believed without a doubt was going to happen to my family and the friends that had not yet abandoned me.

Another element of my decline was the discovery of things that she had left behind for me in popular media. One of her tactics was to create works or leave Easter eggs for her victims in movies, television shows, songs, video games, and more. The song "The Pretender" by Foo Fighters, I would learn, was about my sexual addiction, the need to make women fall in love with me and wrap myself in a cloak of their affection and adoration, and told from Delilah's perspective, who said "What if I say I'm not just another one of your plays; you're The Pretender, what if I say that I will never surrender?"

Another song from her to me was Shinedown's "The Sound of Madness", which led me to believe that her method of spreading her control was through the use of a hypersonic tone that her proxies used to place their victims into a suggestible state.

I looked at the chain tattoo on my wrist, a reference to the video game Bioshock, which was not only created for my benefit, but was also a morality test for me and every other player of the game as well, layered directly into the gameplay. The tattoo had been forced upon me as a reminder of my enslavement to a woman of monstrous cruelty and Godlike intellect.

It was 5:37 in the afternoon on this, the 21st of July, 2011, when the message first appeared on my screen:

VelvetRose73: Hi there.

I blinked, surprised that a person I had never spoken to before would contact me out of the blue.

Shion414: Hi. Who is this?

The messages were coming through on Yahoo Instant Messenger, which I used almost exclusively, as Facebook Messenger and Skype were not yet as popular as they have become in the intervening years.

VelvetRose73: My name is Rose. How are you?
Shion414: I'm fine. Good to meet you. How can I help you?

My first impulse was this was a bot, which was not unusual for Instant Messenger platforms, even in 2011, but I quickly discovered that I was speaking to a real person.

VelvetRose73: I saw you live in Milwaukee too, and saw your profile picture. You're cute. I was wondering if you'd like to get together for dinner.

My blood ran cold. This was almost identical to the method in which Delilah had contacted me back in 2003 for our seventh and final "first meeting". Even the year, "73" was the same year of Delilah's alleged birth, when she went by the Yahoo Instant Messenger handle "Tarnished_Angel73". I decided to respond the same way I had back in 2003.

Shion414: That sounds nice, but I generally like to get to know someone before I meet them in person.

After a pause:

VelvetRose73: I find that people usually have chemistry in person or they don't. I don't like to waste my time talking to someone when there's no chemistry. I'd much rather meet in person to determine if there's any chemistry before moving forward. It's up to you, though.

Once again, this was all very familiar. Was this a third party acting on Delilah's behalf? She had left my life half a decade before, and made it clear in my programming, now recovered as a memory, that she would not be returning. But she lied. She almost always lied. The only thing I knew about her for sure was that she was controlling the world with her hypnosis. I didn't know if it was a trigger phrase she had used on me, folded into one of her instant messages, or if it was genuine curiosity, but I wanted to know if it was her. I wanted to be sure. Once again, the program was moving, and I had to get into this bumper car once more, and ride this ride until it was over.

Shion414: Sure, we can get together, if you want. Where and when?
VelvetRose73: Do you know the Chancery on 27th Street in Greenfield?

Of course I did. I'd been there several dozen times over the years, and I told her so.

VelvetRose73: Then meet me there at 7:30 tonight. I'll be in a black pants-suit with a red and gold striped blouse. I am 5'3" and have long, dark brown hair. Find me in the bar.

That cinched it. It was Delilah. Those were her stats. There was only one answer to her order.

Shion414: I'll be there.
VelvetRose73: I'll see you then.

Once she terminated the discussion, I lit a cigarette and began shaking in anticipation. This was a woman who had done horrible, grotesque things to me over the years, but despite it all, either because of her programming or the awesomeness of the power she wielded, I loved her utterly and completely. I smoked in silence as my hand shook and my body quaked. This evening might signal the start of a whole new chapter of my life. It might also be a portent of the beginning of the end of it, as she had promised repeatedly to kill me one day.

Of course, that death, as prophesied, was supposed to be in the shadow of a nuclear mushroom cloud following the destruction of Milwaukee, as a crowd of hundreds, possibly thousands of people circled me, waiting for me to move a muscle, at which time they would descend upon me and rip me limb from limb. In the meantime, I would be absorbing enough radiation to kill me from rad-sickness over the course of the next few weeks, assuming I could avoid moving for the next ninety minutes. She knew, however, as did I, that with my back problems, there was no way I could manage such a feat. I could not stand still without rocking back and forth for more than a minute or two. I would make a wish, that this cup would pass, and then snap my fingers and give myself to the crowd.

Of course, as I had learned over the last three and a half years, this was probably a lie as well, but it didn't stop me from being scared shitless at the prospect for several years, until I made peace with this possible fate.

I finished my cigarette and stepped into the shower, now that I had a reason to take one. I shaved my head and face, except for the tight goatee I wore around my mouth, which I would later trim with electric clippers, and scrubbed my entire body five times to make sure I was completely clean and smelling fresh. When I had dried off, I sprayed myself liberally with one of my favorite colognes; one of the holdovers from my old ways was to keep a collection of over 25 large bottles of various scents, which had cost me well over $1000. As my favorites were depleted, I still bought more.

Even though I was living on Social Security Disability, the ample income that Delilah had provided for me in the years prior to my breakdown had ensured that my benefit from the Federal Government was close to the maximum allowable rate, which meant that even though I was on disability, I still made enough to live quite comfortably.

I rubbed some cologne into my pubic hair, which I used to trim in the old days. While the growth between my legs was now a tangled mess, I still liked to apply a scent on my mound, in case I was fortunate enough that someone might want to bury their face there. I chuckled sadly to myself as I thought of the prospect, as I had been impotent for years, ever since my breakdown. Even Viagra and Cialis had been powerless to give me an erection, which made it likely that my problems in that area were psychological in nature. Still, old habits die hard, and I remembered that I had done the exact same thing before going to one of my many "first meetings" with Delilah.

I dressed in fresh, clean clothes, and when the time was right, I headed out the door and drove the fifteen minutes to the restaurant. The parking lot was nearly empty, and I pulled my Toyota Solara convertible, a holdover from my days of expensive toys and lavish vacations, into a spot next to a brand new, cherry red Lamborghini.

As I entered the restaurant at exactly 7:30PM, I noticed that there wasn't a single diner in sight. I made my way to the right, towards the bar, and saw a short, heavyset woman in a black suit that had her back to me. As I made my way up to her, I wheeled around and saw her face.

Sure enough, it was Delilah Hanson, my arch nemesis, the woman who had utterly ruined my life, and the woman I would give up everything to be with, that I would do literally anything to win her favor.

"Good evening, Delilah," I said to her reverently.

"Who?" she asked innocently. "My name is Rose, as I told you online."

Okay, so she was going to continue with the pretense of being another person. She was good at playing games, and even better at playing dumb. I could play along easily enough.

"I'm sorry, you look exactly like someone I used to know," I said to her.

She smirked sardonically. "I get that a lot," she said. "Just one of those faces, I guess."

I sat down at the round bistro table across from her. Her days of wearing ugly bangs and slovenly clothing was obviously over. She was dressed in a designer outfit, and her hair and makeup were done to perfection. I had never seen her look so beautiful, in all the years I had known her. The Lamborghini outside was almost certainly hers as well. I wondered what made her change her style so radically; the trappings of wealth and success had never seemed to matter to her before.

A waiter came over and she ordered a couple of glasses of Jonnie Walker Blue Label on the rocks for us. The drink was $30 a shot, so the order must have easily been over $200. "Drinks and dinner are on me," she said, to my relief.

"So, 'Rose', what is it that you do for a living?" I asked her.

She reached into her Versace purse and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a gold lighter. "I'm a project director for the Rand Corporation," she replied.

"You work for a think tank?" I asked, incredulously. "What kind of projects do you work on there?"

"I'm afraid most of my work is confidential," she said. "But much of it is political in nature. Political strategy, mostly, as well as economics. I have degrees in political science and economics, you see."

Of course you do, I thought cynically. She was the smartest person in the world. She probably held the combined knowledge of the entire human race between her ears, the equivalent of hundreds, if not thousands of advanced degrees in every field imaginable.

She lit a cigarette, a Marlboro Menthol Gold 100, exactly like the kind I smoked, and offered me one. I took it, and she lit it, in clear defiance of Wisconsin's laws against smoking in public buildings.

The waiter came over, clearly perturbed. "I'm sorry, but it's against the law for you to smoke in here," he said to both of us.

"Bring us an ashtray," she said, and the waiter wandered off, looking confused. He returned a minute later with our drinks, as well as a glass ashtray. She must have had them buy one for the evening.

"How did you manage to get them to back down on the smoking?" I asked her, already knowing, or at least strongly suspecting, the answer.

"I find that if you're confident enough, people will do anything you ask," she said. She opened her menu and began to scan the offerings. I moved to do the same, but she ordered me to close my menu. "I will be ordering for you," she said.

This almost made me laugh, but I held it in. "Of course," I said. I was already her slave, why shouldn't she have the right to decide what I ate and drank? I took a sip of the thirty-year-old Blue Label, and understood immediately what it was that made it so expensive.

As we drank, ate, and smoked over the course of the next two hours, the conversation was free and easy, at least on the surface. There was clearly "chemistry" between us, but there was also an underlying ribbon of tension at the table; despite enjoying my evening, and Delilah's – "Rose's" company, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. No one else came into the restaurant, and I thought this would be the perfect place for her to trigger me and lay down some new programming. This seemed to be a set-up, and while I was powerless to prevent her from doing whatever it was she had in store for me, I also could not help but feel a certain degree of apprehension because of it.

Finally, the check came, and Delilah pulled out a black American Express Centurion card from her wallet, and placed it in the bill folder, handing it back without looking at the price.

We lit one last cigarette as we waited over coffee for her card to be returned. "Well, Rose, what happens now?"

Rose smiled at me. "Now we finish our cigarettes and coffee, and you get into my car and come back to my home," she said.

"As you wish," I replied. "Your merest whim is my command," I said with a tone dripping with irony.

We drove to the waterfront in silence, and she pulled into her spot in the parking garage inside one of the newer lakeside high rises. We took a private elevator up to the penthouse, and I marveled at what must have been an 8000 square foot monument to unlimited funds. It was a far cry from the conditions she was in when I met her, living in another woman's unfinished basement and babysitting in exchange for rent.

She undressed in the foyer, and I knew without knowing how that the lingerie she wore was a $4000 ensemble by Agent Provocateur. The thong alone cost over $600, and had golden chains across the cheeks of her ass, as did the bra, which draped several strands across the exposed skin of her ample chest. "I didn't think Agent Provocateur came in your size," I said.

"I had them custom make sets for me in my size," she said. She looked radiant in the outfit, which was black and purple, and had a garter belt. The bra was truly unique, and just barely covered her enormous breasts; the bra was almost completely sheer, and her brown nipples and olive skin were visible through the fabric.

She led me to the bedroom, and we spent the next three hours making love and exploring each others' bodies. To my surprise (although I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised at all), impotence was not a problem on this night, nor has it been an issue since. I've always liked bigger girls, and while I had found her somewhat unattractive when we had dated in the early 2000s, I found myself excited and thrilled to be in her opulent bedroom, with my arms wrapped around her. When we dated, my unconscious hatred for what she had been doing to me had prevented me from kissing her, but on this particular night, my mouth remained firmly planted upon hers for much of the experience, as my hands roamed her generous body and as I entered her, which felt like coming home again at last. From the orgasms she had repeatedly through the entire encounter, clearly I was not the only one who felt that way.

When we were finished, she asked me if she could whisper something in my ear.

I tensed up. Here it comes, I thought. She was going to trigger me, bring down the hammer, drop a proverbial anvil on my head, whatever you wanted to call it, and probably make me forget the entire encounter once it was over.

"Of course," I said casually.

She leaned in close, her mouth next to my right ear, the ear she always spoke into when she wanted to do intricate, long-term programming on me.

"I love you, Marcus," she whispered, and then triggered me, exactly as I had suspected she would.

She then spent the next hour laying down programming unlike anything I had ever experienced before. She unlocked every potential I could imagine. I could quit smoking any time I wanted to. I would only want to eat when I was hungry, and then only in moderation. Weight loss would become a breeze for me. Then, she removed my PTSD from various traumas in my past, and finally, gave me instant and total recall of every moment of every day of my life, effectively giving me a perfect memory, just like her own, save for the sections she had previously made me forget. She was turning me, word by word, into something more than human, something more like herself. When she was finished, she put me to sleep.

A man climbed into her bed that night, but what emerged from it the next morning was more than a man, more than human. I would never be the same again.

And the adventure had not even yet begun.

(Author's Note: Obviously, after the darkness and murder of the story "Tales of the Ubermensch: The Series", this is a much lighter and (hopefully) happier tale. I am finding it is not a chore to write, now that my week-long break is over following "Firefly: Deleted Scenes", but I look forward to every keystroke, and find the creation and creative process free and easy. I hope you have enjoyed this preamble to what is likely to be a 3-4 chapter story, and I hope it is every bit as fulfilling as "TOTU: The Series".)