The Atomic Question Ch. 08 SciFi & Fantasy


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Dawson had always been something of a bully. Oliver had tried to teach her that the mere suggestion of violence could get one far, but once he was gone so too was all notion of restraint gone with him, and that was how she was for a long, long time.

Now on her knees with her bare stonehard thighs pressing to the sides of her young admirer’s head, Dawson supposed she was no different at her core. From her perspective, most people just wanted to be pushed in the direction that was best for them, picked up and carried there, or just sat on by someone who made them feel safe. A big enough bully would keep away others who didn’t have one’s best interests at heart.

But Dawson had Zelda’s best interests at heart. She leaned her weight back to press her stubbled mound against the satyr’s face and spoke in her Commanding Voice, “Lick.”

The shuddering whine that had been escaping the girl’s lips graduated to an overwhelmed moan as what was her first real kiss was taken by Dawson’s cunt. The horned ork’s mouth contorted into baffling shapes trying to engulf as much of the opposing lips as she could. Through their intermingled essence she could read the ork’s thoughts, such that they existed in her: This is my only food forever now!!

Dawson put one palm on the satyr’s forehead, possessively, assertively. “Eager little cunt eater, aren’t you?” The teasing praise caused Zelda’s already questionable mental faculties to devolve further, making of her mind a cacophony of sparks and pink fog. With minimal effort Dawson could push and direct these fireworks, wrapping her lover up completely until there was only her. Without any guilt Dawson pressed the immense weight of her desire onto the smaller figure as surely as she ground her pussy onto her mouth.

While Zelda ate into the space between her legs, Dawson reviewed in her mind what she’d surrendered, gently bucking back and forth on the girl’s gradually slickening face. It was indeed Calista behind this game, and this wasn’t the first she’d made. The dramatis regina had been making these simsense games based on Dawson’s recent exploits and when she’d run out of exciting stories to twist and been left only with the garden variety law enforcement with no spectacle, only the grim drudgery of mundane crime, she’d dug into the past for another way to glorify Dawson’s identity.

Why? Zelda didn’t know why. Try as she might to squeeze the young satyr’s essence and tease out some scrap of motive, Calista had kept her protege in the dark on that topic. And there was an overflowing adoration for Dawson in her, one that went far deeper than simple young lust. When Dawson had touched on that tense surface, emotional impressions had come to her in shudders: desperate acts with sharp regrets. Parents who should have been present and weren’t. A longing for a home…

Dawson had let off of that with the same gentleness she would use for a loaded gun, setting the safety back on and removing the clip. Those kinds of memories ought to be shared by choice, rather than pried loose from a helpless lover. What she got was enough to explain the infatuation, especially with the way Calista was portraying her. Had been portraying her, with the bloody tusk street theater and now these simsense games.

Zelda knew all about them, of course. The first was called Blood ProfiC and saw the player initially take on the role of legally distinct elven serial killer “Jules Gehenna,” a ritualist and junior executive working for the fictional “MayanCorp.” As Jules players had to perform brutal murders with a priceless orichalcum knife, and then at the conclusion of the act the player would become Dawson and have to examine what they’d done, identify evidence to be collected and gradually piece together the motive: that Gehenna was collecting blood to power a machine designed to manifest the will of his patron, The Adversary. It led to a tense confrontation where spiritpossessed corporate security had to be fought through, and Gehenna subdued by several shots from the legendary Ares Accelerator. Dawson felt that was a little charitable to the antagonist, considering the figure he was based on had fired two desperate shots at her before giving up.

Yet the game was a curious mix of brutality and reflection, making the player do something horrible and then making them contemplate the consequences in material, moral and metahuman costs. Most simsense games were just senseless violence and destruction.

Zelda had been drawn in right away and played it obsessively. She was first in line at the arcade when the second game showed up: Inferno Galore. It invited players to take on the role of a fallen priest called Sabbath, also in service to the Adversary, who sought to manifest through blood ritual a living firestorm in the heart of San Francisco, and it was up to Dawson to stop him. Later Dawson would make mention of this to Illich and describe the redrobed, revolverwielding priest gathering sacrifices, driven by terror and guilt, and he would say with a heartbreaking sadness in his eyes It is too kind a telling, mi hija. Too kind.

As Sabbath lay defeated he begged his god for forgiveness, only for the Adversary to appear as a smokey silhouette and drag his soul to hell before threatening Dawson with consequences for yet again interfering in his affairs. Dawson wasn’t sure how to think of thisthere was absolutely no doubt that the Adversary was a force in the sixth world but she couldn’t recall meeting such a force directly at any point in her life, let alone having a conversation with it. She was much more inclined to conclude that people who were victimized turned to any hand offered to them, no matter what it might cost them further on. The Adversary was simply the one selling them the proverbial rope used to hang themselves.

This portrayal of events completely misrepresented Sabbath, painting him as a mad zealot led astray by the corrupt culture of Aztlan even though the old man had been born in a time before Aztechnology and the state had become indistinguishable. He’d stolen technology and tried to harness the power of nature to force the world to change, not because the adversary had promised it to him in exchange for an arbitrary number of souls. As with the first game it made users create a problem and then made them solve it, and Zelda by this point had noted that this was creating a player attachment not only to Dawson but to what she was doingfixated on her not just for being hot and bossy (the satyr’s description) but building an appreciation for her role in San Francisco. Making them understand through vicarious simsense experience why Dawsonspecifically Dawsonwas important to their wellbeing and security. Impressionable and vulnerable virgins (like Zelda had been until a short time ago) soaked up what was effectively propaganda like sponges. It was devastatingly effective at instilling hero worship of her.

Dawson’s relentless inspection of the girl’s memory had caused her to enter a semivegetative state, barely moving her tongue. Reaching down, Dawson gripped Zelda’s forehead in one hand and squeezed. “Who said you could stop?” she growled. Zelda moaned into the shaved mound and resumed her furious lapping. No skill, but plenty of enthusiasm. The bully in Dawson enjoyed getting to set the bar by which all future lovers might be judged. To compensate for her inexperience, Dawson began to gently grind back and forth over the satyr’s face. It sent her fogged mind to an everdistant, evercloudier place.

The third game was a complete reversal, to the shock and awe of eager fans. Titled Burning Heart, the player was for the first twothirds of the game thrust into the role of the late Ivan Ionfist, beginning with his raid on the California Rangers armory north of San Jose. This was the event immediately preceding the gang war between the Bloody Tusks, the Cutters and the Ancients as they fought brutally across neighborhoods and streets, and the game delivered it in gritty detail as Ivan clashed numerous times with gang leaders: a lithe motorcycle riding maniac titled The Crimson Wheel and a guntoting pair of oafs from southeastern Canada dubbed The Trailer Park Boys. Constantly interfering was Lone Star’s TacDiv squadrons, including Riot Control, SWAT, and later on Irregular Assets. The cops were led by a toughasnails lieutenant the tusks called Iron Max, depicted as having metal on his face even though Sokoth didn’t get his facial reinforcements installed until after Ionfist had broken his jaw while escaping from prison.

Another bastardization, especially because it characterized Ionfist as some kind of warriorpoet waging a war on the sixth world’s “weakness and corruption.” Weakness WAS their evil, she recalled him saying in the cistern. Him, or some simulacrum of him. This game at least didn’t attempt to spin the tone of events, correctly showing how brutal and wasteful the gogang fighting had been. More often than not whatever they were fighting over was destroyed in the process and at its height it was beginning to approach the insanity of the occupation, which had been media sterilized in the years since but remained as fresh as ever in Dawson’s eidetic memory.

Ionfist had been smart to show himself only rarely on the street in that time, because if he had the bounty hunters working for Irregular Assets would have been all over him. The game carefully never showed him fighting Neon Justice until after he was apprehended by Iron Max and The Dark Star, the mythologized portrayal of Dawson that some of the tusks now sought to emulate. From prison he was freed by none other than The Adversary, inflicting him on the world to wreak yet more chaos and devastation. A culprit who was ironically more pure in his motives than the true perpetrators: Reymont at the behest of the Yakuza who wanted Ionfist in their debt again, helped by Ishikawa and a prison guard on the take whose name was public but whose identity was mostly unheard of because he’d turned evidence almost the moment that another witness with a SIN had materialized to testify against Reymont.

All those factors had been ignored in this and for what? To make Ionfist seem like some kind of underdog with the devil’s luck on his side, and to make Dawson look like some kind of hero.

And then this newest game. “Valkyrie’s Wrath.” Showing Dawson in her youth, every bit the war criminal she was. She bore down with her crotch on Zelda’s face, reflexively punishing her for being so fanatic about it. The ork muttered in halffright, halfjoy and Dawson let up. Suffocating her in cunt would teach her nothing, and anyway she would enjoy it making it an effective punishment.

For a moment Dawson wondered why this latest game would seek to paint her this way after all the others made people want to eat off of her lower back but holding Zelda by the head and testing her emotions revealed the reality: people in San Francisco still hated the Protectorate. The city bore the scars of the fighting in more than a few ways, and there were many people who were gone as a direct or indirect result of their actions. People who were still missed.

That part Dawson understood perfectly. Did pretending to be the living weapon Ares Macrotechnology used to drive them up against the wall, high out of her mind the entire time on kamikaze and every other drug Knight Errant’s paychecks could buy her, serve at all to make them feel better?

Zelda’s emotional memory suggested it did. It made them feel… complicit. Just like the other games, it invited them to take the final step. Be a monster instead of a victim of one. A destroyer with a benefits package. A killer on the right side of hi. The bigger bully.

Dawson let go of Zelda’s head, leaving the girl’s eyes vacant and faintly glowing pink. Her mouth meanwhile continued to serve, and having learned all she expected from this particular informant Dawson dedicated her energy to getting off using her fangirl’s face.

“What am I supposed to do with you, hm?” She pressed her bare thighs to Zelda’s head, putting firm pressure on it. “Crush your head like a grape? Would you like that?” The satyr nodded vigorously, lips still working. Dawson curled one corner of her mouth.

“I’ll bet. But no, not today.” She leaned away from Zelda and arched her back, allowing her to main the pressure on the ork’s head while beginning to slide back and forth. Not enough to give her prey fresh air but enough to make more use of her willing surface area.

“Lie still,” she instructed, “And be my sybian. Do you know what that is?”

Zelda shook her head no, as much as her prison of muscle would permit.

“It’s like a saddle,” Dawson explained, “With a dildo in it. Usually it vibrates. That’s you right now. Can you vibrate for me?”

Dawson lessened the pressure of her legs just a fraction and Zelda took the hint, beginning at once to shake her head side to side vigorously. Dawson gasped at the increased sensation, the sloppy search for her clitoris resulting in frequent hits on that most erogenous hotspot.

“I knew you had potential,” Dawson said approvingly. A hopelessly muffled moan was the satyr’s reply.

= = =

Dawson redressed herself, shirt and pants now sticking to her chest, back and legs with wellearned perspiration. She used both hands to run through her hair and straighten it a little, making it look slightly less as if she’d just ridden someone’s face for the better part of an hour.

The person she’d ridden for the better part of an hour was still lying dazed on the floor, her head propped up with a cushion taken off a nearby patchwork computer chair. Dawson squatted next to Zelda, immediately making the young woman’s breath quicken. She took the girl by the cheek in one hand to hold her gaze.

“Did you like that?” The ork nodded weakly. No doubt her body was sore for having been used like a toy.

“Good. You want it to happen again?” A stronger nod.

“Then you’re going to do something for me.” Another nod, automatic and thoughtless. No consideration of what that something might be… Dawson’s hold on this person was strong; now it was time to use it for good.

“You’re going to go to Callista and tell her I’m coming to talk to her. That I want to know why she’s making people worship me, even the bad things I’ve done. I want to know how she knows things no one should know.” It took some effort for Dawson to keep her grip soft and not let the frustration she felt towards the older satyr bleed into her tone. Zelda might be her protege but she was in the dark, no doubt because just this scenario could arise.

The ork nodded obediently as Dawson spoke. “She has time to think about how she’s going to answer my questions. She knows what I’ll do if I don’t like those answers.”

When she was done instilling the message, Dawson leaned down and kissed Zelda directly on the mouth, tasting the flavor that had been burned into her tongue and onto her lips. The girl immediately melted, starting to shiver from the affection. Breaking the contact left a small string of their mingled saliva bridged between them which snapped noiselessly.

Dawson couldn’t help smiling at the satyr’s gasps. It wasn’t every day a fantasy became a reality. Simsense could do some powerful thingssimulate drugs, simulate weapon recoil, simulate painbut it was only ever fooling the senses, and briefly. The muscle did not remember the way it did when one was truly touched. Now Zelda understood that.

She planted the ork’s head onto the cushion and stood up, stretching at her shoulders. It was convenient that no one had walked in on them while she was still naked. Convenient and unfortunate.

When she emerged into the dark of the gaming parlor the crowd was still thick, gameplayers still crowding around Valkyrie’s Wrath and squabbling over who would get to play it next. No one paid any mind to the hatandcoat clad figure upon whose life their new obsession was based.

She stepped out of the building slowly, eying the street in both directions and looking at potential vantage points above, although it was unlikely a lone hitman would try to kill her twice in the same day. Given where the first attempt had been she also surmised it was intended to be public, so they’d wait for an opportunity to arise where the news coverage would be immediate.

Getting back to the Firebird without incident, Dawson checked her messages for the first time since getting out of it. A short initial assessment of the shooter’s nest from Diana, where evidence was thin. No discharged shells, no fingerprints, no sign of habitation in the office for days prior. Diana correctly concluded this meant the shooter was a professional with no personal investment. A deranged actor seeking personal revenge would either be sloppy, or plant false evidence to muddy the trail. This person was merely pursuing a paycheck. They had no perceived score to settle.

That at least meant they weren’t likely to kill anyone they hadn’t been paid to. Other than a few more dozen messages from random people she didn’t know asking her to step or sit on their faces (or in some cases just break their neck with her legs), she had a message from Instinct.

AllNaturalDame: Gaines is back.

Dawson would have thought that was the kind of thing that would give her mixed feelings, given how they’d parted ways, but there was no mix. She felt only longing to see him again. To know him better than mere circumstances had afforded in the past. To be better to him. A tiny fragment of making things right.

Instinct had been watching to see when she’d read the message and quickly followed up.

AllNaturalDame: Someone wanted to kill him.

That raised one of Dawson’s eyebrows.

Det.Dawson: Someone tried to kill me too.

AllNaturalDame: Did they succeed?

Det.Dawson: Not this time. Looks like a hitman.

Only several seconds went by where Instinct was thinking along the same lines she had shortly after the shots had been fired.

AllNaturalDame: Aztechnology would send a team. Reymont maybe?

Det.Dawson: That’s what I was thinking. Ordered a public execution.

AllNaturalDame: Stay in. Make him restless so he makes a mistake.

Det.Dawson: Could be hard, trying to investigate Nuclear Winter.

AllNaturalDame: We have pussy to last the Winter.

Dawson couldn’t help laughing.

Det.Dawson: I have a few ideas I’ll share with you at home.

AllNaturalDame: We’re going to have company tonight. I can feel it in my tongue.

Det.Dawson: You feel everything with your tongue.

As soon as Dawson had sent her message, a new one came through.

RainbowRoulette: hey get ur fuck

Vayger could say a lot in just a few words. She was poetic like that.

Det.Dawson: Are you asking to spend the night with me?

RainbowRoulette: im TELLIN you GET UR FUCK

RainbowRoulette: need my oil changed so get the filters ready

Det.Dawson: I’m sure Avalanche will be happy to see you again. She talks about you all the time.

RainbowRoulette: tell her to SHUT UP

RainbowRoulette: her fukin job is to MAKE CUM FOR ME

RainbowRoulette: yours is to SUCK IT BACK OUT N SPIT IT

RainbowRoulette: IN MY MOUTH

Det.Dawson: Have you been doing what I’ve asked you to?

RainbowRoulette: save the mom shit for the girls, imp

That was Vayger’s way of saying ‘yes ma’am.’ With a movement of her finger on the screen she looped Instinct into the conversation.

Det.Dawson: Then we’ll be happy to see you.

AllNaturalDame: Going to give you a love bite unlike any other.

= = =

It was early evening when Dawson pulled into the parking lot.

A new or odd vehicle in the lot always stood out to Dawson, primarily because everyone living in the habitation building beside the Orchard was either a current or former Ares employee with multiple years in the company whose contractspast or presentincluded ownership of the unit they were in under the condition it couldn’t be sold to anyone except back to Ares, so they could sell it again as they saw fit.

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