Stealth Elf awoke in a haze, dazed from whatever substance that apparently knocked her out, and confused about exactly how her capture went down. The last thing she could remember was that Kaos and Glumshanks had attempted yet another ridiculous coup to break into the Academy castle. Unfortunately, they had somehow devised a way to counter her unparalleled evasion skills and flood with chloroform the surprisingly small room she was in at just the perfect time.
As she regained her senses a little more, she could feel a soft dark blindfold obscuring the entirety of even her light vision. Her arms were tightly secured to the cross on a padded wooden spread-eagle chair, each arm bound with two thick leather straps, and her comforting fingerless gloves had been replaced with tight latex mittens, effectively immobilizing the hands on top of the rest of her limbs. There were a few thinner straps pinning her exposed midriff and hips to the same wood structure, padded with a thinly-threaded wool cloth and some shredded memory foam, all over any inch of where she was restrained. She could feel as much with her legs, relieved that her lengthy combat pants remained on her nervous person. Her boots were also still on for the time being, though she could feel her ankles locked in a thick padded wooden stock.
Elf's first instinct was to poof out of this contraption and get her bearings. However, upon trying to do so, the magical energy she usually felt while performing this action just seemed to fizzle out. She tried one more time-no difference. She was somehow unable to summon the power she needed to escape this cold and dead-silent environment. Her level of anxiety immediately increased threefold, but she tried not to panic and kept her breathing at a calm pace. Hopefully, her always-reliable Skylander colleagues would eventually realize that she was missing, and thus start looking in all the normal places for her...right? Plus, she had to admit to herself that she was in a half-decent level of comfort in this current situation, though she stayed dead-set in her mind that this would not be the case forever.
Her ears were thankfully free to listen around, and with those shapely sonars she was able to catch a sudden rise in the volume of a conversation happening right outside the very room she was left in. One-no, two of the voices she could hear-were the chalkboard shrill of that dastardly evil and helter-skelter brat Kaos, and the monotonous mutter of his dispassionate troll servant Glumshanks. The third was a lower, more sophisticated, and almost-cheesy Scottish accent that was certainly new to her, regarding the good or bad folk. Despite this rut she was in, Elf thought she could perhaps entice this new man into joining the side of peace should he enter the room.
"Well, I think we've hired the best person in the universe for this job, Glumshanks," she could somewhat clearly hear the annoying, high-pitched voice of Kaos. "I simply cannot wait to see what he will do to that quivering shell of a Skylander. We'll extract all the information we need out of her so we can demolish the Academy once and for all!"
"Uh, sir, if I may…" came the mysterious Scottish voice. "I don't mean to interrupt your spur-of-the-moment monologuing, but I forgot to mention, I will need about three hours with her, completely alone, if I am to even get a sliver of the proper results you're looking for."
"Oh, blast it, come on!" fumed Kaos with that signature pestilence. "You must make an exception to your ritual just this one time. I want to see her cripple and fall to my will before her inevitable fate."
"Trust me, sir, you will. But I must be able to do things the right way. Surely, there must be something else that's on your docket for today."
"Oh, yeah! As a matter of fact…" chimed in the monotony complex of Glumshanks, "we have yet another totally not-mundane trip to the spa planned for today, or did you forget about that, sir!"
"Ugh...alright, fine then," the chaos lord let out, exasperated. "Three hours, Mr. Lotus. Then I better see her writhing!" And with that, a stomping impediment and some mild grumbling could be heard and felt as the wonder twins left the hallway. No sooner had this happened than the heavy linoleum door slowly creaked open, and no sooner did it shut with a loud thud.
As she heard the slow and sparse footsteps approaching her, Stealth Elf swallowed her pride hard and began to muster up what little charm she could for a last-ditch escape attempt. "Hey there, buddy," she chuckled half-heartedly. "Listen, uh, I couldn't help but overhear, and I can promise you, if you get me outta here right now, I'll gladly sum you ten times whatever they're paying for your troubles." She did not receive an immediate reply.
What she could hear instead was an utterance of some probably-Latin words that sounded like some sort of spell. At this point, she was at a bit of a loss for more words.
"Sensibilitas...incremento."
The words seemed to signify power as well as mystery, and after they were uttered, Elf could feel a chilling wave of energy coarse through her body for all of a second. Suddenly, the cold, dry air around her began to shift into a warmer, more humid air, which created light itches in random spots on her skin and caused her to shiver intensely for another brief second. "Heh...now uh, l-listen here, buddy…" she almost sputtered out. "You, uh...now, you really don't wanna be doing anything to me…" At some point, she adopted a better sternness in her voice. "'Cause I got friends on the outside who I'm sure would totally rid you of your rugged complexity if you so much as laid a finger on me."
At that, she received a soft chuckle from the man of an unknown form. "Believe me, as enticing as the money sounds, I simply have all but zero interest in such. All because you…" she could feel his hot, heavy breath as he leaned in ever so closely to her face, "my sweet desert cactus, are simply a Skylandic trove of gold, and three hours is more than enough time for me to extract some of that glorious nectar from within."
The implied metaphor having sailed right over her head, she swallowed hard again and refused to let her mental guard down. "Well, go ahead then, bring it on, fella. I've spent no less than two years with Master Eon preparing for this very moment. I can catch whatever you throw at me. Knives, shockers, alligators, you name it."
The man paused his pacing around her for a minute. "Now, just why in the known universe would I possibly do anything to harm such a top-shape body such as yours? Sure, your...perky voice may be powered by the likes of…" he seemed to cringe a spell upon reciting this name, "a certain Ms. Ashley Tisdale…"
"Who?" Elf rolled her eyes and tilted her head as high up as she could with her limited mobility, completely confused at this point and unsure if this would be the right moment to shut up. "Where-what are you even talking about anymore? I don't even know what you want to know specifically."
"...Nonetheless, I am most certainly going to simply relish this time that we'll have together. And that includes making sure you're as comfortable as possible." He began to sound somewhat more stern. "And I'm going to get all the information I could possibly need, regardless of what happens today."
Stealth Elf felt her eyes watering from all this uneasiness, and only hoped that this would be shielded from this monster's view with this blindfold. "Is that…" her voice cracked, revealing the humiliation, "Has my torture already started with that fake-as-fork accent of your deliberateness?"
She almost immediately felt his presence in her face again. "Now, you'd best watch it, girlie, or I'm gonna have to do something that you...really won't like."
"You know that'll be true for everything you'll do…"
"Oh, we'll see about that," he lowered his voice as he sat at her anxious feet. She let out a soft whimper as he briefly caressed her ninja boots and began to undo them. "Now then...let's get this show on the road, shall we?" He grunted as he tugged the boots fully off, "Yup...most definitely won't be needing these anymore."
At this point, Elf decided to turn on freeze mode in her mind in an attempt to brace for and block out whatever immediate pain might come to her. Still, she continued to feel confused and vulnerable as she felt her thick socks being peeled off as well.
It was immediately apparent that the shape of her feet out in the open was far different from the shape of those leather boots. While the footwear boasted a thin, pointy two-toed design, her actual feet shyly displayed a pale lime-green, four-toed Roman design that was quite even in symmetry and showed surprising signs of well-kemptness. It was a perfect combination of rich, plump toes, and a supple, high arch for each lime-green beauty.
Although she couldn't see it, Elf had a sneaking suspicion that the male known as Lotus was grinning with a gleam in his eyes at the sight of her now-helpless feet. And though she continued to feel perplexed, she was in fact starting to gain but a sliver of an idea as to what sort of plan was on his mind.
Nonetheless, it got neither any easier for her to bear, nor any less pervasive to think about. As he softly, deeply inhaled the musk that was built up over the last few days, she was for some reason compelled to hold her breath for as long as he took it all in.
"Mmhh…minty grass roots…" he muttered to himself as if he were this impossibly experienced musk connoisseur, "mystic river...and a bit too much lime. Oh yes, quite delectable indeed." He then pulled out something from his noisily cluttered toolbox, which she guessed more likely than not appeared from thin air after he entered the room. "And now, a lay of the land…"
Elf immediately gasped and tried to hold her breath again as her left foot tensed at the sensation bestowed upon it. Her smooth sole, scrunched as it was, could feel the soft bristles of a thin one-inch paint brush make slow, exploring strokes in every which way across the surface, causing a nervous sensation she had not felt since decades ago when she was but a child.
"Now this right here, my beloved morning dew blossom," came the taunting golden voice again, "is more or less precisely what I intend to do these next few hours. The one thing I've always found to be most effective in all the Skylands is none other than good ol' sadistic, relentless tickle torture."
Stealth Elf, the silent but deadly creature who had withstood a thousand physical and mental tortures to even be considered an elite Skylander, could feel both her dignity and resolve rapidly dissipating, along with the ability to hold her breath any longer.
Lotus beamed at her reactions afterward—the violent, darting squirms of her poor, helpless soles; the low-pitched giggling that occasionally turned over a high squeak. He knew that this girl would act no differently than any others he has had over the years, but nonetheless she overall seemed like a very special one indeed.
The paintbrush was gone almost as soon as it appeared. Elf was breathing as if she had done a mile jog. Some cardio workout, she couldn't help but silently remark, remembering that she had forgotten to get in her hours for this day.
It hadn't been but a few seconds before that bristly bastard returned, this time on her right sole, and even darting up to the stems of her toes for a spell.
What she felt throughout her body was intense and unbearable, yet combined with her surprisingly comfortable position, it seemed to be almost a little pleasurable for her. The knowledge of being completely helpless and bound to another's will (although it may have been more interesting to her if that other had been someone she knew and felt more comfortable with-mayhaps Spyro or Jet Vac), with the addition of this newer kind of stimulation—it was almost as if this were some twisted trial set up by Master Eon.
For the moment, fortunately, it seemed that she wasn't tipping off Lotus as to what went on in her mind—as evidenced by her begging for the torture to end—and she doubted she could bear the humiliation otherwise. Not that she wasn't at a very low point already.
After no longer than a minute yet again, the brush disappeared once more. The torturer broke from mesmerizedly staring at her feet to check on her desperate face, quite pleased to find a couple spots of light pink forming on her bright green, subtly-defined cheeks. "My my, you're flustered as all fork and it hasn't even been ten minutes."
Ten minutes? Unbelievable, were the only thoughts Elf could form in the moment. For the time being, she realized that protesting against his wishes was probably a foolish idea, and decided to simply remain silent as he continues to do who-knows-what.
Sure enough, an even higher level of disdain came to her mental opinion of him as she began to feel two very different sensations on each vulnerable foot. On her left sole, four exceptionally devious fingers with nails trimmed down were stroking, skittering, and ravaging that sole with any and all levels of intensity. Her right foot received a different story altogether, as all it could feel were the long, hard licks of a warm, slimy tongue that was coarser than a human's yet softer than a sheep's. This mix of bombardments had her moderately squealing with an immediately uncontrollable laughter.
It was the sweetest of music to Lotus's ears—almost as sweet a consumption as the wonderfully amazing taste of her rapidly sweating feet, which, sure enough, had just the perfect concoction of minty grass and lime all about it.
Eventually, he was able to compel himself to handle them a little more roughly. The light spidering and skittering to her left turned to more devious scraping and scratching (which he could only achieve by magically speeding up the growth of his nails and shaping them real nicely), whereas the soft licking to her right turned to animalistic nibbling and biting. Toes, ball, arch, heel—every square centimeter of that delicious foot was shown zero mercy.
Expectedly, the squealing laughter rose to breathless screaming. He also expected her to be able to take much, much more of this. However, he looked up at the massive clock, high on the taller wall of the dungeon room. Before he knew it, the first hour had already flown by, as if it were an ecstatic trip of flying around a mountain and through some clouds. Carefully, he slowed down his actions until everything stopped.
Elf could hardly remember what happened in the last several minutes, but based on the post-sensations she couldn't quite shake out of her system, she could fathom that most if not all of her toes had been in his mouth for quite a bit of time. She was at a loss for words when it came to her emotions in this moment.
"Drink." No sooner had she caught her breath than she felt her cheek get poked by a straw, to which she immediately complied. Cherry limeade with a citrus twist. Cheeky, she couldn't help but think. As soon as she began to feel grateful for this break, she heard him speak again, very close. "Never let it be said that I'm cruel to my guests."
Guests? She could hardly even begin to process how extremely unusual this person was. With that, he seemed to remain at her side for around a minute longer.
"I can't begin to imagine how you must be feeling right now," he broke the silence with, once again focusing more on maintaining his accent, "but I just want you to know that, from the first moment I saw you-not even really an hour ago-I made a solemn promise to myself...that I would never…" he paused as he couldn't manage to hide a little bit of compassion in his voice, " never do anything at all to possibly hurt you."
She couldn't help but let out a light, cynical chuckle. "Bit late for that, now aren't cha? Also, I know that you've probably been spying on me for a long time, I know there may very well be someone else on your radar-my buddy Spyro, most likely, or maybe Jet Vac too. I just have to ask you one thing..." she attempted to face where his face would generally be, "...why? Why do you have this weird, strangely particular obsession?"
Calmly, Lotus carefully formed an answer that was both truthful and probably had what she wanted to hear. "Well...I mean, I've pretty much always known that I was quite different from everyone else. Of course, I was never psychopathic-not to a serious degree, at least. It's definitely got something to do with my brain being...slightly altered from the norm. But I can assure you with sincerity," that somewhat unsettling sternness returned once again, "that nothing about me or what I've been through changes the fact that...I'm truly on your side here. I'm a real person, just like you, and I can only hope someday you'll understand."
"Well then, why even with that accent anymore? Why can't you just show your face to me, if you say you're a real person?" Despite continuing to put up a brave face, Elf was actually starting to feel an ounce of sympathy for this increasingly intriguing man.
He stammered a bit before coming up with a half-hearted yet valid enough response. "Well, I mean, you know what Kaos is like. If he just so happens to come back early and catches a whiff of even this right now, I'm toast ! And you are too, probably."
She let out a slow, deep, exasperated sigh. "Yeah, all right. I'll keep taking it, then." Then a real yawn out of the blue. "You sure are a very interesting dude."
Interesting in a good way, or interesting like my mental illness I stressed so hard that I don't have? He also breathed a sigh—but moreso of dissatisfaction—before standing up again. "Well, all right then. And with that…" the softer voice returned, "it's now time to move on to Phase Two of my plan."
For some reason, she felt compelled to hold in another deep breath. However, she couldn't do so for more than a few seconds, as she made an embarrassingly loud squeal upon feeling a strong, well-kempt hand caress and lightly stroke across her slim, surprisingly sensitive midriff. "Wait, stop, no! Ple-hease, I cha-hanged my mind! Can't we just get outta he-here and say that we di-hid this?"
"Please," his smirk audibly resurfaced, "you're asking me to stop doing the one thing that I love to do more than anything else in the universe. Plus…" he attempted to study her face intently, "I just can't shake off the sneaking suspicion that, well...you love this. By doing this, I've brought some real thrill into your life, and you're not ready to go home just yet."
Although she softly shook her head, Elf knew, deep down in the purest, most raw part of her soul, that everything he suspected was the absolute truth. This experience so far has been the most exhilarating one she's had in too many years, and that's saying something coming from a Skylander. Truly, despite all she had been taught by her mothers of nature, she most definitely did not want this sensation to end. Not just yet. Honoring that, she decided to keep her mouth shut and hope that Lotus wouldn't notice the darker blush on her lightly-sweating face.
He did. In fact, for a few seconds it was the only thing he could focus on. But he regained his composure and stood back up. "All right. Forget about what Kaos wants to know. What I would simply love to hear right about now...is you admitting to me that you're loving every minute of this." To this, he was again met with silence. "Very well then."
The next thing Elf could fathom was him somewhat sitting on her (he was either very tall or standing on some stirrups attached to the structure) and just letting it rip on her armpits from that moment onward. Sure, he started out with slow, light stroking, and eventually leveled up to full-on vigorous squeezing, but so many different things were happening interchangeably to these two spots on her cursed body that she simply couldn't be either alert nor predicting about what may happen next.
It hadn't been long enough or soon enough before she felt those half-hellish sensations coming down to her fairly toned yet baby-soft midriff. At this point, there simply wasn't much she could do other than sit here and try to withstand this massively complicated predicament. The way he squeezed, stroked, and prodded her skin with exceptional mastery was electrifying, excruciating, and nothing short of thrilling. The mighty Stealth Elf had truly never been in any juxtaposition as great as this.
For her, it must have felt like she had been here upwards of ten hours. For Lotus, however, time had flown by as he simply lost himself in her all-natural beauty. Ah, if only he could just stare into those unique, glowing white eyes, which are probably writhing in hysterical madness right now. But he knew for sure, always in the back of his mind, that now was simply not the right time to reveal his identity to her. Not a single minute passed, though, without him being super tempted to spill it all out.
At this point, Elf had all but completely lost track of time. As one could imagine, the rest of the second hour felt like a time paradox to her, meaning that it felt both like an excruciating stretch of time, and as if she could maybe withstand another hour or two, because, despite this completely surprising method of torture, her ninja training and instincts were just beginning to kick in and allow her to grow some sort of internal resistance to stimulation on some spots, though any real attempts at blinking out the sensation were all but squandered by this evil genius's talents of misdirection. In short, the tickling to both her hardly-ever-bare feet and her usually-this-exposed torso was excruciating and unique to her thus far, and this conflicting predicament on her feelings simply overloaded her senses and resolve to hell and back.
Eventually, at some point in time, the assault came to a halt, which supposedly meant the second hour had finished passing. However, her skin was so heavily tingling with phantom tickling sensations, she hardly noticed anything different until a minute or two after his hands and everything were lifted off her death zones. Her head was spinning so wildly, she could barely hear her strange captor begin to speak for the first time in a while.
"You're a ninja," he said quite assuredly as she heard him circle behind her. "You've obviously been exceptionally trained for a good number of years to…" he caught a breath as he seemed to struggle with his words, to her surprise, "to push your limits. To obliterate your walls of...doubt and cowardice for yourself. If I'm to be honest...I'm truly amazed—nay, astonished—that you've been able to last this long without spinning out." He then leaned in real close and spoke softly—not directly in her ear, just an inch or so past. "But you've clearly never been trained in this particular scenario, which you are very much about to regret a whole lot more now than in the past couple hours, dearie."
With that, all hell returned to her nervous system all at once again. It seemed as though the entirety of her nervous system was being immolated with the most extreme ticklish assault anyone could ever experience. All the different sensations- between the claws, the brushes, the pinwheels, and every other little thing- quickly became a blur, as the poor elf simply couldn't handle a single bit of it. Fully unable to even entertain the notion of begging for mercy, her laughter was hoarse and nearly silent, her sides were splitting, and everything was painless agony.
Somewhere in all the chaos within her mind, the questioning of exactly why Elf even decided to take the career path of a Skylander crossed her heavily-derailed train of thought. Such is usually not prone to happen more than once in a while, as she passed the Academy with flying colors and at the time seemed dead-set on doing whatever possible to protect the community that raised her to be this way. To say the least, this predicament tested that to the furthest limits. At one point, she also wondered for the 500th time if her colleagues had realized that she'd gone missing, and were on their way to look for her, starting in the most obvious place: Kaos' parents' castle. Perhaps it's a good thing they didn't yet know about this erratic man who held her tightly captive with nearly erotic intentions. If he had any idea of the existence of Spyro or even perhaps Jet Vac, he'd surely have just as much of a ball with them as with her. Though her feet, along with Jet Vac's, had only basic care taken to them, Spyro recently became quite attentive and extra careful of his supple reptilian peds. It was mildly annoying most of the time, and she had teased him about it quite a bit, attempting to make him fear an eventuality of karma knocking him down a peg just as it has a couple of times in the past, while ironically having never imagined this very hellscape-such an apt punishment-ever happening to her.
But eventually, pretty much all thoughts were drowned out by the incessant overwhelming tickling sensations obliterating all the resolve that ever occupied her soul. It certainly didn't help that her captor kept relentlessly wearing his mischievous aura on his sleeve. "Ah, I'm simply tingling with the anticipation of doing this with your friends very soon," she could barely hear him say smugly.
"Wh-what? What are you on about?" she ached out between breaths of giggly haze.
"Absolutely, I'd love to do this exact same thing with Jet Vac, and eventually, maybe Spyro as well. But, of course, you can't exactly warn them without revealing your little secret, now can you?"
Obviously, time was a very fuzzy thing if even real at all in her mind. She almost didn't notice the point in which all the tickling had stopped, because her nerves were still tingling with mirthful fire for a good while afterwards.
Quite satisfied with the level of breakage incurred upon his victim, the man turned his back to rest his senses for a spell. After a couple of minutes, he heard a flash and a whoosh . He turned back around to see that she had somehow successfully blinked out of her bindings. It must have been her adrenaline finally kicking in. His reaction time was well trained for this possible turn of events, and he quickly phased up a barrier in front of him with another incantation to wall off her throwing stars rushed in his direction. Wh-ting .
The still-breathless elven ninja stood hunched before him. "Who are you?"
"No one of consequence," he replied quickly, as if he ultimately half-expected her to somehow escape her chains.
"What does that even mean?" she aggravatedly followed up.
"I am simply not particular towards good or evil. In fact, the only reason I got any close to Kaos in the first place was so that I could find you…" his still-obscured eyes drank her up once more, "in a situation like this."
"Oh, so you're a pervert."
"I've got some anxieties with asking for consent, and I often grow very bored with all that dreck about waiting to bring it up naturally. But I assure you fully, I have always meant to simply have a little fun, and it was gonna be only this one time."
Elf was speechless for a second. "And then what, you'll just do this again with someone else?"
"Mayhaps… perhaps not. I mean, it's not like there's a scarcity of… delightful folks all over Skylands, simply begging for a wonderful tickling session. I was brainstorming the possibility of opening up a parlor downtown, close to the college, but…"
As he continued his attempt to excuse himself out of this situation, Elf's mind wandered for a second. All she could see was the hood— the obscured face of this polarizing man who had just assaulted her nervous system with a mixture of sensations. She started to retrospect on those sensations, but snapped out of it when he gestured to the far wall.
"Anyway… you are no longer captive to the whims of Kaos. You can go home now. There's a speeder waiting for you." Another incantation, and there appeared a giant hole in the wall leading outside.
At the same time, the door to the dungeon creaked open. Elf was quickly ushered to the speeder by the cloaked wizard, and though she was still tingling, she had enough cold shock to grab her shoes from the corner of the dungeon, throw them into the speeder, and revved it up to make a break for home.
The sorcerer waved a two-finger salute to the emergent exclaiming Kaos that had returned, and dropped down over the edge of the wall to his own speeder just below. As he sped off in a different direction from the green ninja, rambling thoughts of ways he could have handled the situation better plagued his mind. He nevertheless trudged on, hoping that she would eventually forgive him and they could somehow come to a more consensual agreement.
As Stealth Elf went her own way, she contemplated everything that happened to her in the last good while. Was it really torture that she suffered? Did she even truly suffer? It really wasn't painful or otherwise physically maiming in any way. In fact, it was actually cathartic in some weird, twisted way. She felt a wave of happy chemicals she hadn't felt in quite some time. Perhaps it would benefit her to find that man again, for maybe some regular workout sessions? Surely, her friends would benefit from such stimulations as well. Thinking about it all made her blush.