At first I had thought that I had been summoned to the distant past. The world was so much more primitive, harsh, and uncomfortable than the modern world I had been born into. I wasn’t cut out to be an adventurer, so the hero’s party that summoned me cut me off quickly.
“What do I do now?” I asked them. “How can I return home?”
“That’s not our problem,” the hero’s party told me. “We need to figure out how to beat the Demon Lord, we don’t have time to babysit dead weight.”
The village they dumped me in wasn’t much better. I didn’t look like the natives of this time so I was regarded with fear and suspicion, even as I felt myself weakening from hunger. I was quickly chased out even as I cried and begged for mercy, for humanity.
Left abandoned with no purpose, no resources, and no love for this world I’d been cast into, I took refuge in a cave, half wondering if I couldn’t at least make myself useful as food for some monsters. Maybe they’d then go and raze the village for me.
But the cave housed no monsters. As I ambled deeper into the darkness, I was just beginning to wonder just how deep the cave went when my fumbling hand fell upon something unexpectedly familiar.
“Beep. Biometric chip detected. Welcome, ‘Finian.'”
A light flash blinded me momentarily, but when my eyes recovered, I saw an opening in the darkness. It was then that I realized that I was neither in another distinct parallel world, nor the distant past, but instead, the distant future of my own world. Passing through the portal, I found myself in what I can only assume was a functioning relic of my era. Monitors flickered on, showing a comfortingly familiar script.
That was how I discovered my new home. Between the location and facilities equipped within, I gleaned that someone else from my time had lived here before in the present era. Whoever it had been had repurposed and preserved the familiar robotics to hide the small safe haven. There was an emergency rations vault that fed me in my time of need back then, and a cooking bot that could produce tasty meals through molecular recombination of surprisingly mundane raw materials. I also found a closet of a few skins originally for robotic drones. Remembering a scandal back in my time about a man wearing a female skin himself to scam people, I realized I could probably don one myself and start over in this world, free of the shackles of my present unwelcome appearance. An option to keep in mind, yet the hideout’s original inhabitant likely only used them for excursions into the world – the coziness and how well equipped it was, the hideout felt distinctly lived-in.
The last inhabitant had also even given it a guard – a “queen slime.” I must have walked past it unknowingly in the dark. Donning the control circlet and gloves, I spent some time learning to control it. With no purpose or goal and only a smoldering resentment for this world, I had all the time in the world to learn to control the queen slime. It was more powerful than it looked, able to carve rock from the walls of the cave with little effort. Even with my knowledge of technology long lost to the present world, I didn’t truly understand how it worked or how I could control it so freely via just a multitude of nearly invisible wires. The wires limited it to the cave, but as a guard, it would be effective enough.
Mastery without purpose leads to the development of some… odd proclivities however. Insulated and safe though I had become in the bubble of my own time, my brooding disdain for the world grew, as did my loneliness, and the two melded in a way I wouldn’t have been proud of had I still held much stock in morality.
At first, I attempted to satisfy more carnal needs by forming the slime into the form of a woman. The novelty was delightful, but as with all novelty, it grew stale over time. Then I remembered the skins and incorporated them into my hedonistic play – both wearing one myself and inserting the slime woman into one, and eventually both. Experiencing sex as a woman kept me entertained for a while, but eventually, even that ran its course. Finally, I decided to leave the cave.
Striking out as a woman with short fair hair, I called myself “Mara,” and found the village much more hospitable. I came in rags and was fed and clothed out of pity and mercy. Had that been my first experience with the village, it may have heartened me, but seeing the difference in treatment between me and “Mara” first hand only stoked my resentment. I was an awkward woman, having lived most of my life as a man, but one thing I learned was that the before the allure of an attractive body, the unguarded idiocy of men was timeless.
On a whim, I lured a male adventurer that I had become friendly with to the bedroom. It was a fun experience, laying with another for the first time, but I longed to be in control. Leaving him a note, I slipped out in the night and returned to my cave. As predicted, the adventurer followed, concern and confusion in his gait. “Why would Mara come to such a place?”
“Master Tarrow?” Mara’s voice squeaked weakly.
“Mara! Are you okay?” Tarrow called out, his eyes finally adjusting to the low lighting.
“Tarrow! She’s- Aaah! She’s cu- stop… don’t. No more! Tarrow, help me!”
It was a challenge, but I finally felt a rush that my life had been missing.
“The adventurer fancies himself a hero, huh? Heh… but are you prepared to face a slime queen!?”
I grinned. To the frantic man, it would appear as if his precious Mara had been captured by a female slime, her tentacles entangling the poor woman, several even in the process of violating her. Yet it was all a front.
Controlling not only the slime queen, but using her tendrils to fill out and puppet the Mara skin was the most technically difficult thing I had attempted, and yet, seeing how it riled up the adventurer made it the most rewarding. He drew his sword and jumped at his perceived foe only for Mara to get in his way. He couldn’t swing at her, so he tried to catch her, but only to be caught himself. She was far stronger than she looked, with a monster’s tentacles empowering her limbs and by the time a perverse grin had spread across her lips preceding a sudden kiss, it was too late for him to react to the thick tentacle sliding out of her mouth into his gagging him as her embrace restricted his movements. Pinned to the ground, I made him watch as Mara peeled her face off on top of him, using the slime queen’s other tendrils to fish out and tease his erect member, taunting him along the way.
I toyed with him till he passed out, shooting blanks. Even without touching myself, the experience, aided by tactile feedback through the slime queen’s mental interface, had pushed me to the best orgasm of my life. Literally screwing someone from the village I despised so much was a delightful combination of cathartic and pleasurable.
If only the slime queen were not restricted to the cave by the wiring necessary for controlling the complexity of her plastic form. Still, perhaps there was more that I could do once Tarrow brings back word of the monster in the cave. I was certainly looking forward to having new playthings, whether I had to lure them out myself or not.
This image was the first I drew in this pair, and initially I’d hoped I could convey the idea of [puppet master remote controlling slime monster that was in turn using tendrils to puppet a skinsuit to pretend to be a hostage], but as I was working on this image, I was already running into presentation challenges. I knew I could theoretically convey this telescoping cascade of puppeteering through a vanishing point perspective, looking over the shoulder of the hidden puppet master would show the hostage’s back so I could show the tendrils going inside her… but how clear would it be that that was what was happening? Not to mention, how could I effectively “hide” the real puppet master? I think my original thinking was still brainstorming with digital tools, such as opacity – something my skill with physical media can’t effectively emulate. Putting the slime queen and her hostage puppet and the adventurer on a screen isolated them from the puppet master, but since I value clarity, I chose to make the scenario less ambiguous by doing the first part.
Of course, even after posting that first part, with the second part already done, I was still doubting the clarity of the situation, so I ended up writing a short story to go along with it. Was it necessary for understanding? Maybe not, but I figured my fans would probably appreciate the extra content regardless.
Process wise, I actually drew the adventurer too small originally, but instead of trying to erase what I had, I redrew him bigger on a separate piece of paper, cut him out and taped him on top of the too-small version, then edited out the tape/seam artifacts in post production. Obviously also added the darkness of the hideout and the glow of the monitors in post as well.
I’m glad Joey commented on the wires I included in the first part on twitter, even if it wasn’t clear that’s what they were then. I try to include hints and foreshadowing and bits that offer extra context to the attentive viewer/reader but it can be hard to know if people notice so I appreciate when people comment about such observations.
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