The Windsword Clan

Story 29: Nelonn on Tifar part 3

Mark started Nelonn out in the morning with some flogging on the back. The same thing they had done in their surreptitious play when they were in training together.

Nelonn was nervous at first because of where he was, but that faded after the first few minutes. The sharp snaps focused his mind on the here and now.

When Mark moved on to the sucker wire, Nelonn realized there was a great advantage to where he was. These shabby old buildings were isolated from the area being used by the garrison by nearly half a kilometer of muffling snow and baffling wooden and metal structures. No one was going to "catch" them, no one was going to interrupt them, no one was going to hear them. Nelonn could scream as much as he liked.

Nelonn lost track of how high Mark had turned the rig up. The wonderfully focused mental state he had enjoyed the past few hours turned to confetti and chaos.

Mark dialed it up again and Nelonn dissolved. He saw the red flicker of hyperspace.

There was a ship moving in it. Living beings within walked or sat at their stations. And two ghostly forms drifted through the walls. Carla?

She saw him. They both did, two human women.

Nelonn wanted to reach out to Carla and reassure himself that she was out there and he was in here, and she was dead and he was alive. That was what coming to Tifar had been all about, after all.

He tried to reach out a hand and found that he could not move his mental hand because his real hand was bound to a table.

In the real world, the pain ramped up one more time. Nelonn screamed. His vision went out in a swirling image of the two women looking startled and disturbed.

He was somewhere else, somewhen else. Some formless, timeless place.

The pain stopped. Nelonn lay gasping on a creaky platform. Not the one he had put an elbow through the day before, but an intact one that he had not been able to quite get all the rust off of on his 'work detail'.

Mark patted Nelonn's stomach. "That was all the way up. Level 10. You've been afraid to try the higher levels, you told me. See, it was nice, wasn't it?"

Unlike a human in that state of mind, Nelonn had not lost the capacity to think in words. Minbari did not fall into animal consciousness as easily as humans did. They were an old race, and far removed from the trees.

"Mark?" he grated, and immediately regretted speaking. That was the bad kind of pain. His throat was raw from screaming. So he just nodded.

Mark gave him some water, and then a little soft food.

Nelonn's breathing returned to normal. He felt completely wrung out, and was starting to fall asleep when Mark shook him.

"Did I say it was nap time? It's barely noon. There is a long day of torture yet to come. I'm just getting started."

Mark removed some of the wires, but not all of them. He just repositioned a lot of them onto Nelonn's balls, onto his member, and that little space between the sac and the perineum. There were two wires left. Mark left them off for now.

He started the sucker wire torture back up again, on random program. The jolts came in unpredictable places, in unpredictable intensities. Nelonn writhed.

He tried not to scream because it hurt to scream. But he could not hold his breath until he got dizzy like a human could. Mixed screams and gasps and choking sounds erupted from him.

Mark shut it off. He repositioned Nelonn's legs, binding them high, wide, and apart to give him access to Nelonn's arse.

Mark showed Nelonn a giant metal dildo. Nelonn did not say anything, but he thought clearly, That's too big. That's going to hurt more than I like.

Mark blinked, and patted Nelonn reassuringly on the inner thigh. "Don't worry, I'll be careful."

Nelonn realized his telepathic shields were down. Mark was hearing his thoughts.

Mark lubed Nelonn up with a finger inside. Then he moved on to an array of insertables of increasing size, taking his time, working them in and out ever so slowly, over the course of an hour or two, until he worked up to the metal dildo.

By the time he reached it, Nelonn was so stretched out and relaxed that it did not hurt at all going in. Nelonn was vaguely disappointed.

Mark chuckled and gave Nelonn the most sadistic smile. "Oh, don't worry, it's going to hurt a lot, very soon."

He stripped off the suction cup from one of the two unattached wires and wound it around the handle end of the metal dildo.

Then he turned it on.

The sensations were incredible. Nelonn was torn apart and blasted into space, and his mind looked down on the world from above. The white, shining world blanketed in snow, and the stars up above, down, all around.

Mark added in the rest of the wires that went to Nelonn's genitals. He screamed, he roared, the sounded deepened and roughened until he barely sounded Minbari. More like some beast of the mountains.

Mark stopped it again, and Nelonn whimpered. He wanted it back, he wanted more, he wanted to be zapped until his mind expanded to encompass the whole universe.

"Oh, you'll get more," Mark said. "Enough more to satisfy you for the next year, at least."

Mark stripped the suction cup off of the last wire. Then he opened the sterile box of sounds.

He grasped Nelonn's penis firmly, and positioned the end of the slender metal rod in the little hole on top of the penis.

Nelonn was suddenly afraid. He had never even heard of this torture.

Then Mark let it slide in. The sound inserted itself in the urethra by gravity.

Mark wrapped the final wire around the protruding bit of rod.

Nelonn burst into terrified tears and snivvled incoherently.

Mark turned it on.

The electricity went through the rod inside Nelonn's member. It was like nothing he had ever felt before. Like nothing he had ever imagined.

He was aware of himself as exquisitely, horribly, painfully, wonderfully male.

It worked, Nelonn thought at Mark. I'm never going to picture myself in Carla's body when I think of Tifar anymore. It worked. You can stop now. Mark? It worked.

Mark flipped a switch. But he did not turn it off. He added back the rest of the wires. The electricity flowed everywhere, all at once: the two metal insertables, the outsides of the penis and balls, the soles of the feet, the nipples, everywhere.

Nelonn shrieked once and then fell silent, struggling to breathe, then suddenly hyperventilating and spinning away from the world in vertigo and sudden mental expansion.

For a moment he thought he was going to stretch to encompass the universe, just as he had wished. Then he was back in the room and staring past Mark—at Carla.

Oh no. Mark. Now I'm seeing things! I've gone completely insane!

Mark shut down the rig, and Nelonn nearly fell unconscious in relief. But he wanted to see what happened next, so he struggled to stay awake.

Mark turned around, and took a step back.

"Who are—" Mark began. But no Ranger could fail to notice her uniform, and the Anla'shok pin worn proudly over her heart. "Are we needed for something?" Mark asked, assuming the grey haired woman Ranger had been sent by Entilza.

"What the hell is going on here?" Carla demanded. Her eyes flashed in anger, and her white wings unfolded from her back.

Mark dropped the control box and backpedaled in panic, putting the platform on which Nelonn was bound between him and the creature whom he had thought was human.

Carla started forwards grimly, and Nelonn realized she was really there. Mark could see her too.

No. Stop, Nelonn thought at her. Don't hurt Mark. He tried to break his bonds and stand up, but he was too exhausted. He knew that he could have busted out of them this morning when Mark put them on, but right now they were the only thing keeping him from sliding off the platform onto the floor, because he was weak from taking the torture.

Instead, Nelonn opened up his mind to Carla. He showed her everything. Hielanni, and the Serati clan chief, and Entilza Delenn, and Venmer, and then backward, back, back, Nelonn and Mark sneaking around Tuzanor trying to find a private playspace, Nelonn's training at the hands of Brinon, everything, all at once.

Carla staggered and put out a hand as if to steady herself. Her hand went right through the end of the platform. "I see," she whispered.

She turned to Mark, understanding in her eyes now. "Get him out of that. It's over."

Carla looked over her shoulder and called, "You can come in now, Lyta. I haven't whirred anybody into little bloody chunks."

Lyta strolled through the door without bothering to open it. White wings, white dress, flawless white arms: unlike Carla, Lyta looked like a classical painter's angel. Except for the red hair; that was slightly devilish.

Nelonn heard Mark think, fallen angel.

"Do you know what we have here?" Carla asked Lyta. "A pipeline. A way to get what you find out when you spy on the PsiCorp successor organizations and former members into the hands of the powerful. You said yourself you were tired of trying to contact telepaths, and having them be unable to do anything with what you found."

"The organization Garibaldi set up is becoming quite rich and powerful," Lyta said.

"Not like the Anla'shok," Carla said. "Nominally under the control of the Alliance, but answering only to themselves, to their own leader. Above any local security forces. You couldn't ask for a more perfect vehicle."

"Why not just appear to Sheridan and Delenn, then?"

"Because," Carla said. "I would end up working for them instead of being in control of what we gate through. I know myself. If I appeared to Entilza I would start acting like a Ranger again instead of an ascended one. It's too much a part of who I am. And anyway, Jeff warned us both not to hang around people we were too close to in life. Just visiting Firuun at the clan fortress was bending the rules, even though he never knew I was there."

"You always cared about Nelonn, too," Lyta reminded her softly.

"Hell with the rules. This is too good an opportunity to pass up. Nelonn called out to me in his mind. Across space, across time – it took us a week to get here, and he only called out to me a few hours ago – and across the gulf of death."

Carla turned to Nelonn, who was free of his bonds now, and being helped to stand up by Mark. "Your talent is amazing, Nelonn. Do you know how rare it is to be able to communicate telepathically with one of us? Only we ascended ones are expected to be able to do that. I think you could become one of us someday. Lyta and I will share the Middle Races' gift with you. As they shared it with us."

"Yes," said Lyta. "That's a great idea. She's right, I think you could learn how to ascend, if you work at it. You have a very powerful mind."

"Me?" Nelonn asked. He glanced at Carla, and thought, I've come a long way from the stupid bonehead kid I used to be.

It was strange to see an angel blush. Carla had no physical body, so it was purely an illusion.

"Yes, you have, Nelonn," Carla said. "And I think you can go a lot farther."

The End