Tag: ARP


1968 06-126 Succubaean Strike Force
1969 06-126 We’re gonna avenge Tirtzah

1970 06-126 Lord of the Night’s last moment of contentment
1971 06-126 Rivqah prepares to carve monkey-boy like a holiday turkey
1972 06-126 Gimmee 3 steps: Stick-boy’s last stand

Explicit version containing gore, graphic violence, and enhanced interrogation themes at 06-126X Death in Venice at Patreon.com/TheRemainderman

PREVIOUSLY:  Channah and Rivqah are concealed on the stairway, just below the floor line of the interrogation room of the Council of Ten, seeing one of their primary targets—a Capo of Venice—and a Lord of the Night before them, but aware from the noise that someone was being tortured beyond their line of sight to their left.  They have agreed Channah will break right and Rivqah, left on the count of three.  NOW:

Three counts later, Rivqah exploded up and forward, Channah nearly on top of her, so close if either of them had slipped the momentum of the other would have taken them both to the floor.  Other than their boots drumming on the wood, they remained silent until they were noticed.  It was the Capo who, frowning with irritation wondering who would be barging into his domain creating work for him, flicked his eyes towards them first.  Channah, her metabolism and nerves on overdrive, imagined she could actually see his eyes begin to widen as he saw her coming out of the darkness, barreling towards him, the plague-mask magnifying his shock and alarm, forcing him to deal with two different surprises at once.

To further throw him off-balance, Channah let out a blood-curdling scream, echoed a second later by Rivqah.  The Lord of the Night spun around to identify the threat, wide-eyed and empty-handed, just in time to offer his crotch to her.  She accepted his invitation with alacrity, and with a violent kick containing every last bit of adrenaline and seething rage she was feeling.  “Stand and surrender!” she demanded of the Capo, her arrow pointed straight in his eye, and he did, immediately, his hands shooting straight up in the air.  Thus tamed, she looked down and kicked the howling magistrate:  “Take your hands off your cock and spread them where I can see them on the floor!” And when he didn’t immediately do so, she barked:  “Do it now, or I swear I’ll nail your head to the floor with my arrow!” 

With a frightened wail, he extended his arms, not perfectly, but well enough.

While Channah had charged forward, Rivqah had pivoted to the left, immediately spotting more-or-less what she had surmised would be awaiting her:  a big, burly, hirsute man with olive skin dangling from a rope tied tightly around his wrists, behind his back, dangling above a waist-high wooden platform spattered with blood and sweat.  The rope went straight up to the high ceiling at right angles to the horizon, almost two stories high, then through a heavy iron ring embedded in the ceiling, and back down at an angle to where the other end was tied to another iron ring embedded in the wall at about chest height.  His figure was sandwiched between those of two rough, thuggish, laughing Venetian soldiers, their red cuirasses set aside for ease of movement while they worked their prisoner over.  One was hanging like a monkey from the long rope, near where it was tied to the wall, jumping up so that when he fell back down again, the weight of his body jerked the rope hard, making the prisoner cry out.  The other was using a long staff to hit the prisoner whenever he saw a moment of vulnerability, adding a horizontal dimension to the vertical dance called out by his partner on the rope.

The two goons were clearly cannon-fodder, without any knowledge of interest to the succubae; and that near-instantaneous appraisal signed their death-warrants.  With no value, they were only threats.  And she saw no need to tolerate extinguishable threats. 

Stick-boy was armed and standing, on balance, and thus the bigger and more-immediate threat.  But she could hardly reach him without passing and exposing her back to unarmed monkey-boy; nor could stick-boy reach her for 2-3 seconds.  Even if he was capering about idiotically now, monkey-boy would become a threat immediately if he could produce a knife from the back of his belt.

In any event, she moved to the left first, slashing monkey-boy’s neck and watching with momentary interest as his stupid grin collapsed into what Rivqah judged was a far-more-comical look of surprise.  His last act, sitting dejectedly on the floor like a child’s sad, discarded, stuffed monkey, was to try and stop the blood pouring from his neck by clapping his hands over the gash in near-imitation of the Confucian maxim to speak not what was contrary to propriety.  Sadly, it was a finale without an audience, because before he could complete the gesture, Rivqah was already turning and raising her blade defensively to meet the second soldier. 

A bit slow off the mark, he had hesitated a beat or two as his mind tried to make sense of what was happening around him—precisely as the succubae had intended with their speed of attack and shrill battle cries.  Rivqah met him halfway around the back of the dangling prisoner, seeing he had raised his stick over his head intending to bring it down on her head in a killing blow.  Either he badly underestimated her, or the Venetians only used the staff as an implement of torture, for he was clearly not trained as a soldier to do battle with it.

She thrust her blade towards his heart, and he, to his credit, managed to check and reverse his forward momentum, even as he began turning the staff from its slow, clunky, all-or-nothing coup-de-grace position toward a more-convenient and better-balanced position that might actually serve him on both defense and offense.  Alas for him, sound tactics had asserted themselves too late.  Rivqah’s initial thrust having barely scratched his chest, Rivqah, snorting and spitting in frustration like a Tasmanian Devil, whipped her own blade back and, judging the guard’s stick moving fast enough to give him a good chance of protecting his neck or even chest, flicked the blade forward and in a downward arc, slicing open the man’s stomach. 

Rivqah, something of a student of the human face—especially in battle and in sex—observed with interest as his face, too, began to transform in the moment of his mortal injury, from surprise and rage, to agony, fear, and perhaps just a touch of resignation.  As if in slow-motion, his hands loosened and the stick began to drop out of his fingers as he reached to protect his belly, or perhaps to try and repair the damage she had done.  A moment later, Rivqah slashed again, this time opening him up and watching with interest as he suffered the ignominy of slipping to the floor.  Not to put him out of his misery, but to protect their mission and allow them to communicate normally, she stepped forward, sighing with irritation, and cut his neck wide open.

Just like that, the battle had ended as abruptly as it had begun a few moments before.

Literature Section “06-126[X] A Murder of Crows IV”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 126 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—1072 words::Explicit 1163 words—Accompanying Images:  1968-1972—Published 2025-05-26—©2025 The Remainderman.  This is a work of fiction, not a book of suggestions.  It’s filled with fantasies, idiots, and criminals. Don’t believe them or imitate them.

1964 06-125 Death in Venice
1965 06-125 A Haunting in Venice

1966 06-125 Death comes in hot
1967 06-125 We’re off to fuck the wizard up

PREVIOUSLY:  After eliminating the guards in the courtyard of the Doge’s Palace, Channah and Rivqah race along the loggia towards their assigned entry door near the front of the palace.  Chava and her little boy separate from them near the middle of the palace, while Miryam remains behind in disguise, in place of the dead guards.  NOW:

Channah and Rivqah didn’t pause until they reached the double entryway to the Stairway of the Censors.  Checking quickly for any sign of movement or human presence, and detecting none, Channah pulled open one door even as Rivqah tumbled through it, landing on her feet on one side of the door while Channah tumbled to the other, both of them trying to minimize the time they would be framed in silhouette against the lesser darkness of the courtyard.

After a tense moment, scanning the darkness as quickly as possible—ideally, before any Venetian guards spotted them and attacked—they relaxed as soon as they determined they were alone here and undetected.  The palace seemed quiet and deserted, except for muffled cries coming from somewhere up the stairs. 

With a glance, Rivqah transferred her crossbow and bolts to Channah, drew her sidearm in her left hand, a falchion with a short curved blade, and darted up the right side of the stairway.  Like most of Channah’s operatives based in the West, she was most familiar with the curved swords that dominated the wealthier, better-educated, more-civilized Muslim world most of them occupied.  Channah herself was considering relocating from Cairo back to Constantinople; and normally used a shamshir.  But the sight of such a blade would have attracted attention in Venice, so Rivqah carried the ancient Greek falchion, undergoing a revival in Italy and other parts of Europe.  She had been trained in a wide variety of swords.

Channah waited, scanning and listening, until Rivqah reached the tenth step, then began moving up the left side of the stairs after her.  Rivqah peered carefully around the landing at the top of the staircase, waiting tight up against the right-hand wall at the base of the second flight, while Channah reached the landing, sweeping broadly to the wall on the opposite side of the stairs and slipping along it to the far corner, crossbow trained on the top of the stairs, where the low flickering light of candles or torches coming from somewhere further on gave them the advantage, down in the darkness of the stairwell.

Rivqah then began moving again.  As she approached the top of this staircase she moved to the left, motioning Channah to the right as she remained on the top stair watching to the left.  When Channah reached the top of the staircase, she saw what Rivqah had seen:  a third, short and much narrower stairway to their left.  From here, the cries were much louder, and between them lower groans of pain were now audible, overlapping with two other, impatient voices demanding information and cooperation between the screams.

Channah slipped to the right, across the landing in front of them, crossbow aimed at the top of the third staircase.  With another glance, and a slight nod, Channah raised her crossbow to the ceiling while Rivqah crept up the third staircase.  If she fired into the stairway now, the only thing she could reasonably expect to hit would be her own sister.  She moved to the bottom of the stairs, keeping only her eyes trained at the third floor. Rivqah ducked as she approached the top, stopping in a crouched position with her eyes barely above floor level as she scanned what she could. 

With a glance back, she signaled 2 to the right, unknown to the left, suggesting she didn’t have a direct line of sight to the left without exposing her position to the two on the right, but there were voices coming from that direction.  Not the best situation to face; but on the bright side, it wasn’t like they were interrupting a church service.  The occupants of this room were torturing another human being, without any effort to muffle their screams.  In her experience, most humans who hadn’t become completely inured to torture preferred to move out of earshot whenever it occurred, because they found it unpleasant.  And the minority who enjoyed it were drawn to it like flies to manure; they’d be in the room, almost on top of it.  All of that gave the succubae a lot of latitude for making noise.  They could, quite literally, scream and still blend.  Well, more or less.

Missiles?  Channah signaled.

None to the right, unknown to the left, Rivqah responded.

Considering the width of the building, Channah couldn’t imagine there was too much open distance to the left.  Still… She crept up behind Rivqah, pressing up against her back to see nearly what she saw in the crowded space at the top of the stairs.  On the right was a long desk, three chairs wide, closed in front, with a candelabra sitting on it to provide light.  Behind the desk sat a gray-haired man in elaborate robes of expensive fabric, talking to an equally gray but otherwise lesser man—in proportions, in status, and certainly finery—who wore a neat but simple and unexceptional robe, standing with his back to them. 

The seated man, she knew immediately, was the Capo, a member of Venice’s ancient and privileged patrician class, rulers of the Republic for the better part of a millennium.  Knowing from her mission planning, exactly who he was, she felt the faint ache of her horns, claws, and fangs straining to erupt, an instinct she was barely able to restrain in the nick of time. 

The other man would have to be, she thought, the Venetian Lord of the Night for San Marco—night commander, judge, and all-purpose representative of the Venetian state in this district of the city during the hours of darkness.  He had five counterparts in the other districts of the city; and some nights their business brought them together here.  But evidently not tonight; if it had, they would all be gathered around that table, or outside the torture chamber altogether.  If she’d seen this fellow on the street, she would have guessed he was a shopkeeper or clerk, perhaps a merchant on the make but not yet worthy of consideration for marriage into or other admission to the ruling class.  She tended to doubt the Venetians would tolerate giving anyone other than a patrician the title “Lord.”  So perhaps he was of an ancient family that had fallen on hard times.

Both of the men were old, for humans; and would be unlikely to pose a grave threat.  They were both examining a parchment as they talked, so their attention was focused elsewhere.  She doubted the standing man could turn around before she was upon him.

Leaning into Rivqah’s neck and enjoying the smell of her, she whispered “I’ll try to take both of them alive.  You take the left; I doubt any of them will matter.  If you need me, shout at me to turn.”  Rivqah nodded her understanding, managing to tickle Channah’s cheek with her hair.  With a final “on 3,” Channah slipped back to give her room. 

Literature Section “06-125 A Murder of Crows III”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 125 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—Abridged 1150 words—Accompanying Images:  1964-1967—Published 2025-06-25—©2025 The Remainderman.  This is a work of fiction, not a book of suggestions.  It’s filled with fantasies, idiots, and criminals. Don’t believe them or imitate them.

1960 06-124 Pen imagines he is searching the secret archive with Chava
1961 06-124 Pen brings his master a stolen book
1962 06-124 The Choking Torture of Anzola Ipato
1963 06-124 Channah warns Pen to RUN if he can

PREVIOUSLY:  By trickery and deadly threat, eight-year-old Pen has agreed to help the succubae until dawn, as they raid the Venetian capitol late on a storm-torn night of floods, seeking to destroy what the Venetian spy service has learned about the succubae and to release an imprisoned grandfather and a young girl accused of witchraft.  Pen has now been geased to compel him and spelled to trust Channah and believe she is by his side.  NOW: 

Pen, bound as a safety net by a leash attached to a harness, and following Chava’s reasonable suggestions and whispers, crossed the hallowed space, picked the lock (under a minor delusion that he was simply unlocking a difficult lock using several keys at once), opened the door of the archive, and crept inside to access the secret files of Europe’s, and perhaps the world’s, most-extensive and most-advanced spy agency:  The Council of Ten of the Serenissima. 

Within the windowless archive, with Chava’s guidance and encouragement, Pen found and raided the Venetians’ magic books, written in Latin, the language of religion and science in Western Europe, which Pen read and spoke fluently, along with his aristocratic caste’s language of Norman-influenced French, and his local language of English.  He read all their titles for Chava, setting aside for Chava’s review the very, very few Chava didn’t already possess or hadn’t already known of, or that were so rare they would be difficult or impossible for the Venetians to replace.  Although the books, collectively, contained many grains of truth, they also contained falsehoods and honest misapprehensions which the Succubae valued, not to keep their own magical primacy over humans, but to help them predict the actions of the humans who hunted them and the other creatures of hell.

Turning to the written records of the Council of Ten, even though they were written in Venetian (rather than Latin), a language Pen had only first been exposed to when his Aunt brought him to Venice earlier in the year, his Latin and French allowed him to read the spines, introductions, and section titles in the books well enough to locate what the succubae wanted most:  The records of the interrogation, conviction, and execution of Anzola Ipato, by one Gasparo Orseolo of the Council of Ten, who had been burned at the stake on Wednesday, the 3rd of October, 1515.  Morally, exposing an eight-year-old with even partial literacy of Venetian to such material was one of several testaments given during the course of the evening, to Chava’s limitations as a surrogate mother-figure. Technically, the very existence of the record was a testament to the efficacy of the Venetian secret service, which had accomplished something very few humans, human governments, or even human civilizations were ever able to achieve:  identifying, capturing, and questioning an actual demon of hell:  Tirtzah the succubus.  After weeks of agonizing tortures, including especially vile and inhuman tortures methods devised by the Inquisition that were not normally performed by the Venetians (who relied heavily on the strappado), her mortal form, and thus her ability to visit Earth, was destroyed by fire, possibly the most agonizing form of banishment from the Earthly plane. 

Chava had persuaded Pen to push, pull, and drag the heavy folio volume back across the church to her position in the Venetian Senate Hall.  There, with Pen nestled on her lap, she read and carefully edited the record, using her magical powers and her great manual skills, to alter—as subtly as possible to try and evade any Venetians re-reading it from suspecting it had been changed—the text.  As much as she estimated she could get away with, she replaced information learned about the succubae with inaccurate information that would be less helpful, or even self-defeating, the next time the Court of Lust tangled with the Serene Republic.  Chava’s focus was on things Tirtzah had said that might hint at or reveal anything the succubae perceived as a potential weakness or exploit.  Then she had made Pen reverse the difficult process of moving the volume back into the library.  And because Pen lacked the strength to lift the folio-sized hardbound volume over his head back up to the high shelf he had pulled it from, she had him pull down all the nearby volumes and pile them up with the altered volume somewhere in the middle.

Pen also found and recovered for Chava, Tirtzah’s magical ring, which the Venetians had taken from Tirtzah.  Ultimately, they had not been able to make much out of it since capturing it.  By recovering it, the succubae ensured they never would.

Finally, Chava had tried various ways to help Pen make sense of a section of books written—and even labeled on their spines—with lines and geometric combinations of lines that Chava suspected was a Venetian code.  This, neither she, nor any of the succubae, had anticipated:  volumes so secret, they were encoded when written and kept within their very fortress and capitol?

In the end, she decided against doing anything with them, at least not tonight.  Even if the boy started with the last volume and worked his way backward, dragging every single volume out to her, it might take him hours to bring her the volumes covering 1515.  If, indeed, she could even identify which ones those were.  And then to repeat her work on the Venetian-language records, she would have to decipher the code well enough not only to make sense of the text, but to try and replace existing words with credible substitutes.  The only other option would be to burn the lot; but in addition to being a terrible and unnecessary loss of knowledge—a possibility she loathed on principle—it would be pretty clear to the Venetians someone had been in their secret archive and was trying to destroy at least something the Venetians had learned and hidden there.  Chava couldn’t even be sure what the coded—or cuneiform, for that matter—books were, let alone whether they actually recorded anything about Tirtzah, which seemed unlikely.  If they did, keeping a copy in Latin would rather tend to defeat the purpose of keeping a copy in code.  And because Anzola Ipato’s trial was only two years’ past, thus alerted to an effort to tamper with their institutional memory, they could and probably even would reconstruct much or all of it—accurately—from living memories, which would completely reverse Chava’s efforts to destroy the Venetians’ Latin record of their recently-acquired knowledge of succubae.  Destroying a vast knowledge without helping the succubae, and thereby making it unlikely she would destroy the limited knowledge actually harmful to the succubae?  That would be the worst of both worlds, and she decided against it.

In the end, Chava—with Pen’s semi-witting help—completed her mission before Channah and Rivqah finished theirs.  Instead of risking Pen coming out from under her influence while he was in the secret archive, and thus beyond her physical control, she brought him back to her and, inspired, decided to make the most of the opportunity by influencing Penny to do whatever he could, to save himself.  Chava warned him he literally could not escape the succubae until dawn, and must avoid crossing Channah, or if possible even attracting her attention again, in the meantime.  But once he saw any part of the sun, he should immediately, or as soon thereafter as possible, slip away when neither Channah, nor Rivqah, nor Miryam was watching him, and run for his very life.  When Pen protested that Chava should come with him, or that he wanted to see her again, she promised that if he obeyed her like a good boy, she would visit him again in a week.  Finally, still concerned that she had not impressed the danger upon him sufficiently, or persuaded him that a 5,000-year-old succubus didn’t need an eight-year-old boy to protect her, and having already used him to cross the sanctified church and plunder the secret archive, she added the force of compulsion to ensure his commitment.

Literature Section “06-124 Grimm Transformations VIII:  Child Laborer or Child Soldier?”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 124 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—1264 words—Accompanying Images:  1960-1963—Published 2025-06-24—©2025 The Remainderman.  This is a work of fiction, not a book of suggestions.  It’s filled with fantasies, idiots, and criminals. Don’t believe them or imitate them.

1956 06-123 Chava tries to shield Pen from Channah
1957 06-123 Raining Death from Above
1958 06-123 Kill ’em all.  Let Channah sort ’em out
1959 06-123 Follow my lead, boy

PREVIOUSLY:  n/a.  When I was kicked off DeviantArt in early March, I was advancing two story lines:  The first, adult Penny’s and adult Chastity’s introduction to hard-core succubus sexual and moral domination; and the second, child Pentecost’s very first introduction to the succubae.  As best I could tell, images generated in relation to the second story line (not the first one) were what DA’s algorithms decided were unacceptable and caused me to be kicked off DA without any opportunity to defend my work or make it conform to DA’s standards or even be told what DA claimed I was doing wrong.  I therefore backed off this second story line until I felt like I had enough distance and perspective to avoid DA’s matrix-agent-like algorithm. 

Mind you, I don’t think I have any worry about failing to comply with DA’s policies—I don’t think I actually ever violated them before—but rather, to avoid being summarily and arbitrarily dumped from the platform and having all my work and comments and followers wiped out.  The arbitrariness with which this gruesome artistic death sentence is applied is a significant deterrent, and even an overbearing threat, to creativity, artistic integrity, and intellectual honesty.  I can’t really say this thread of the story is what it would have been before my previous avatar’s execution; but rather, it’s a similar story I care about enough to tell, even though it is limited and redirected enough to give me some hope I might—might—be able to do the story-line and the subject matter justice without the figurative death penalty from DA.  I guess we’ll see.

Here, then, is a summary of the second plotline to date.  NOW:

On All Souls’ Eve in 1517 AD, Channah, with three members of her Court (Miryam, Rivqah, and Chava) and a human child swept up with them (Pentecost Argent), are mounting a surreptitious assault on the Doge’s Palace, capitol of the Serenissima—the Serene Republic of Venice. 

Venice is drowning:  Storms dominating the Adriatic and Central Mediterranean have brought acqua alta (“high water”) to the lagoon city, flooding its streets and basements even as rain and lightning lash its domes and towers and canals.  

Queen Channah and her Duchesses, Miryam and Rivqah, all three of them trained and experienced assassins and infiltrators, are spearheading the assault.  By contrast, Chava, her Queen of Arms, is a strong, skilled metalsmith and stonecutter with a meticulous personality and a bookish mind, brought along with them for her very specialized knowledge and skills—not her prowess in battle.  Chava had come to Venice the night before, on All Hallows’ Eve, an auspicious night of power and disruption, to raid the empty, unconsecrated church of San Zaccaria for precious metals and holy water to use in service of her Queen.

There, she had been surprised by Pen, a neglected English child in the inadequate care of an indifferent Aunt.  Like many human children, Pen had some capacity for sensing and perceiving the supernatural.  Like a much smaller number of such children, he was ignored and reckless enough to pursue his curiosity about the things he sensed, rather than sensibly ignoring or cowering from them.  At San Zaccaria, Chava and Pen had been immediately drawn to one another by their compatible personalities and—much more powerfully—their respective needs to take advantage of their chance encounter to fill the awful, aching holes in their own lives and persons.  Pen’s innocence, and Chava’s capacity for empathy, conspired to protect Pen, an altar boy at the church, and allow Chava to complete her mission.  She had rocked him to sleep in her warm, dry cloak and then stolen away with her prizes, the most supernaturally-charged relics and ritual items in the church, leaving only the crucifix on the altar as a concession to comfort the boy and assuage his conscience.

Tonight, All Souls’ Eve, he had surprised Chava (again) and Channah as they prepared to assault the Palace.  Driven again by feelings deeper than and separate from common sense and conscious reason, desperate for Chava’s attention and care, he had come to return her cloak.  By doing so, he had inadvertently brought himself to the attention of probably the wiliest, most-passionate, and most-evil creature to still walk the surface of the Earth.  His arrival, discovering them in the storm-filled Piazza San Marco minutes before their secret raid on the Venetian capitol began, had complicated the Queen’s evil plans, to say the least.  Too young and innocent to be of proper interest to the succubae in his own right, he was simply a nuisance.  Leaving him alive risked his reporting their presence to Venice’s nocturnal guards, the Lords of the Night.  But leaving the body of an eight-year-old child on the metaphorical steps of the palace risked raising a general alarm.  And by revealing Chava’s tender tendencies to Channah, Pen had unknowingly put Chava at risk of punishment by her Queen, because he was not the first human toward whom Chava had shown what Channah considered an inappropriately undemonic attitude.  Indeed, this was not even the first time Channah’s own plans had been inconvenienced by one of Chava’s little pets. 

Fortunately for Pen’s life—if not exactly his soul—Channah, always practical, egotistical, and purposeful above all, had seen a way to turn the unexpected complication to her advantage.  Because the Venetians had protected their secret archives on the second floor of the palace behind a church that had been properly consecrated, neither the Succubae nor any of their familiars could easily sneak into the archives.  At least, not without either risking teleporting into a space they had never seen (possibly to be bisected by a wooden panel, or have their guts or legs or arms scrambled by a pile of books) or undertaking a loud and destructive aerial assault on the archive by flying demons blasting holes in the stone walls of the Venetian capital in the middle of a crowded city.  Neither option was really acceptable.  And thus, the succubae required a human who would be able to enter hallowed ground:  A human neither under their compulsion, nor already marked as the property of hell. 

They needed a human either detached enough from humanity or reality, or vulnerable enough to influence and trickery, to do their bidding.  And to keep their purposes secret from humanity, they preferred not to hire or recruit humans ahead-of-time.  Instead, they had planned to free a teenage girl already known to them, tempted but not yet owned by them, from Venetian custody in exchange for her help, and then use her to raid the archives for them.  Having already been labeled a witch by the Venetians, tortured, and thrown in the semi-submerged cells of the Palace known as the Wells because they weren’t quite ready to execute a minor girl, the succubae counted her as well reliable to do what they wanted in exchanged for being spirited away.  But if Chava could use the boy to raid the archives while they accomplished their other dark purposes, it would shorten their time in the Palace and thus improve their chances of escaping without the Venetians ever figuring out for certain whether they had raided the secret archives. 

With a combination of artful deceit and deadly threats, Channah had tricked and cowed Pen into agreeing to comply with a geas:  not a compulsion, which might keep him from entering the church; and not a contract, which he was too immature to make; but a deadly magical consequence that he understood would befall him if he failed to do what he had said he would do:  To do everything he could to help the succubae until dawn, and to obey Chava’s instructions until dawn, insofar as he could do those things without committing any deadly sins.  In exchange, Channah had ungenerously promised not to murder him that very night.

With Channah’s plan thus secured, Rivqah scaled St. Mark’s Basilica and from her vantage point atop it, slew the Venetian guards outside the Doge’s Palace.  Channah and Chava rushed Pen to the Palace and past the guards too quickly for him to examine them or even properly see them, while Channah lied to him that the guards had simply been knocked unconscious; while Miryam dragged their bodies out of sight and, disguised as a Venetian soldier, took their place guarding the half-finished stairway leading to the planned, “new” entrance to the Palace.

Chava and Pen made their way to the Senate Room, just outside the church, where Chava shrewdly used a trust spell, building on Pen’s natural gullibility as a child and the rapport they had developed the previous night, not to control his actions or decisions, but to persuade him she was by his side rather than talking and appearing to him inside his head.  Then she simply guided him, as an adult might guide and influence a good boy like Pentecost Argent, to break into and rob the Venetians’ secret archive, by convincing him they were simply recovering an article stolen from the succubus and taking a peek at the Venetian’s books. 

Literature Section “06-123 Grimm Transformations VII:  The Red Beast and the Little Boy”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 123 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—1237 words—Accompanying Images:  1956-1959—Published 2025-06-23—©2025 The Remainderman.  This is a work of fiction, not a book of suggestions.  It’s filled with fantasies, idiots, and criminals. Don’t believe them or imitate them.

1688 07-04 Look for the deadly women:  Partisans, Gonorrhea and Syphilis (ABRIDGED version)
1689 07-04 Easy to get… Degenerate sluts and their diseases
1690 07-04 Avoid Pollution–Use Protection Squad Salons (ABRIDGED version)
1691 07-04 PARTY MEMBERS BEWARE!  Loose talk to loose women can cost lives
1692 07-04 TELL THEM NOTHING!  They might be agents
1932 07-04 Join the CCF-Women with a will to Win-Apply at any Army Recruiting Center
1934 07-04 Join the CCF-Women with a will to Win-Apply at any Army Recruiting Center
1946 07-04 Here are the “Liberators”! (ABRIDGED version)

These images arose out of a desire to show adult Penny and Chas acting in roles similar to their roles as operatives of Channah in ARP, namely, spies and saboteurs.  Since I wanted them to be acting for the Western Allies, they would have to be portrayed as a risk warned against in Axis propaganda.

As the project expanded, the posters became a way to comment on the narrow roles Axis ideologies prescribed for women—and the hypocrisy shown, especially as the war wore on, in their treatment and use of women.  Even the Nazis, from the very start, when faced with defiance by some strong women, celebrated them for their achievements in areas outside the home.  Notable examples (listed not to apologize for them, but to criticize fascist ideology) include one of the most-important propagandists on behalf of the Nazi regime, Leni Riefenstahl; women who used their celebrity in nontraditional roles to support the Nazis such as Hanna Reitsch; and Yoshiko Kawashima (identified in images 1932 and 1934 by her Chinese name, Jin Bihui), a tragic figure victimized from a young age and deeply conflicted about her own sexual and ethnic identity who burned a fiercely unconventional arc through the Japanese occupation of China ending in her execution for treason. 

By the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of German women had been trained in military schools and were serving for all intents and purposes as soldiers of the regime, in dangerous battlefield jobs, most of them performing air-defense and fire-fighting missions during air raids while Allied bombs were falling all around them and Allied fighters, virtually unchallenged in the air, could focus on suppressing air defense.  Yet I found only one example of a recruitment poster showing a woman wearing a helmet, and only a couple with women in uniform, at a time when uniforms were ubiquitous in German society, worn by civil servants and military personnel alike in a fully-mobilized economy.

Their own country refused to call them soldiers, asserting that they were merely civilian “helpers,” despite the fact that by the end of the war, their formations and positions appeared on Wehrmacht organizational charts and their uniforms displayed military, or more-sinister (i.e., SS), insignia.  Which points to a complication in understanding their position in Nazi society:  After the war, German men and women alike, especially those “helping” the SS, had every incentive to, and in fact fell all over themselves to, deny women had been in the SS (which was declared a criminal organization) or the military (which was deeply implicated in crimes of the regime). 

Nonetheless, it seems clear that the Nazis were unwilling to admit they needed women’s help outside the home as well as inside it, to fight their war; or even that women were capable of doing the jobs they were actively recruited, and eventually drafted, to perform (and that they did, in fact, perform), because to do so would have meant admitting shortcomings in their own ideologies and propaganda.  There is much less information available, at least in English, or that can be found using English-language searches, about Nazi Germany than Fascist Italy, or even more, Imperial Japan.  Accessible portrayals of women in Japanese wartime propaganda were few and far between, and those I did find weren’t accompanied by text I could cut and paste into Google Translate, or retype on my keyboard.  But totalitarian regimes and newly-emergent industrial economies tend to be socially conservative, and what I was able to find suggested very conservative and limited roles were prescribed for women.

Axis ideology did not allow women to be heroic figures.  It did not even allow them to be dangerous, nefarious, or even sexualized ones.  Thus, even in propaganda reminding people not to discuss or reveal sensitive military information, which were ubiquitous across all combatants, Axis posters rarely identified nefarious or seductive women as the threat.

Posters of the Western Allies (Soviet patterns sometimes allowed or required women to be heroic but didn’t offer them much agency or sexuality) were another matter.  If anything, as suggested already in relation to Allied Recruitment posters (subsection 07-04-F), women were often portrayed as conniving, traitorous, diseased sluts constituting a threat to the war effort and to decent servicemen.  Women featured prominently as antagonists in Western Allied campaigns warning against loose talk; and almost inevitably, were the primary villains in campaigns warning against venereal disease.  These campaigns were prominent and widespread, with some reason; venereal disease had become a significant source of manpower shortages in World War One, and the US in particular from the very start went to war with a vengeance against VD.  The results, helped by medical improvements, were notable:  infections among US servicemen in World War Two were possibly as low as 3% of those a generation before when the total number of mobilized men had been lower.  But to a significant extent, the campaigns focused not on the logic and mathematics of infection, or on the diseases themselves, but on the (mainly female) agents of transmission.

For purposes of these images, I used propaganda posters produced by the Western Allies as the starting points for made-up Axis ones that the Axis powers would have been unlikely to produce.

Literature Section “07-04-G Axis Portrayals of Women”—Accompanying Images:  1688-1692, 1932, 1934, 1946A; 1688U, 1690U, 1933, 1946B&U—Published 2025-06-17 to 06-23—©2025 The Remainderman.  This is a work of fiction, not a book of suggestions.  It’s filled with fantasies, idiots, and criminals. Don’t believe them or imitate them.

1688 07-04 Look for the deadly women:  Partisans, Gonorrhea and Syphilis (ABRIDGED version)—UNABRIDGED VERSION INCLUDING FASCIST IMAGERY AVAILABLE AT PATREON.COM/THEREMAINDERMAN. 2025-06-17; Penance & Chastity; propaganda poster; compare numerous examples at https://cvltnation.com/crazy-venereal-disease-posters-from-wwii/.  Translation (German to English):  Suchen Sie nach den tödlichen Frauen: Partisanen, Gonorrhoe und Syphilis  Look for the deadly women:  Partisans, Gonorrhea and Syphilis.  The linkage between “good-time girls,” “loose women,” “prostitutes,” “pick-ups,” “bags of trouble,” etc., and diseases in numerous posters was thoroughly spelled out for slower servicemembers.  The broadest categorization, and the closest to bluntly suggesting all women are whores, that I saw, which also offered some spurious pseudo-scientific statistics, was the poster cautioning “98% of procurable women have venereal disease.”  Alternatively, that could be interpreted as insulting servicemen, e.g.:  “98% of the women available to losers like you are diseased….”  An implication more narrowly targeted against women suggested “Amateurs” are just as dangerous as prostitutes.  I included partisans because actual German posters addressed them as menaces, including at least one instance where as I recall, they portrayed a female as a partisan.  I originally made the unabridged version thinking nothing of it, then realized it could create a risk of being removed and had nothing really to replace it.

1689 07-04 Easy to get… Degenerate sluts and their diseases—2025-06-18; Penance & Chastity; propaganda poster; compare https://artpictures.club/autumn-2023.html specifically, and other posters generally, at https://cvltnation.com/crazy-venereal-disease-posters-from-wwii/.  Translation (German to English):  Leicht zu bekommen:  Degenerierte Schlampen und ihre Krankheiten  Easy to get… Degenerate sluts and their diseases.  There were at least two versions of this poster during World War Two.  The comparison of prostitutes to their diseases was made visually by the original images in both versions.  I just spelled out the comparison between human beings, viruses, and bacteria more explicitly here.

1690 07-04 Avoid Pollution–Use Protection Squad Salons (ABRIDGED version)—UNABRIDGED VERSION INCLUDING FASCIST IMAGERY AVAILABLE AT PATREON.COM/THEREMAINDERMAN. 2025-06-19; Chastity & Penance; advertisement; Translation (German to English):  Vermeiden Sie Umweltverschmutzung – nutzen Sie die Schutzstaffel der Salons  Avoid Pollution–Use Protection Squad Salons.  There is no specific historical example behind this poster; the anti-VD advertising campaign was Allied, and the Allies (to my knowledge) didn’t operate any brothels like the SS, Wehrmacht, and Imperial Japanese Army (although the Japanese administration under American occupation after the war did operate official brothels for a time).  The address is the actual address of Salon Kitty, a high-end brothel that was taken over by the Sicherheitsdienst (SS Security Service) for spying on Germans and foreigners of interest (and is actually not representative of the official, overt forced-labor brothels run for German military, SS, and kapo personnel since it was a clandestine operation).  The phone number in the abridged version is that of the Reichsführer-SS’s (Himmler’s) office according to the 1941 Berlin phone book (only a limited number of entries from it were available and legible online).

1691 07-04 PARTY MEMBERS BEWARE!  Loose talk to loose women can cost lives—2025-06-20; Chastity, Penance; motivational poster; compare https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/original-john-falter-wwii-poster-458626456, for the Allied anti-loose-talk poster that was the departure point design- and slogan-wise.  More broadly, see the Allied posters warning about loose women at https://cvltnation.com/crazy-venereal-disease-posters-from-wwii/ and https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/25/health/wwii-vd-posters-penis-propaganda/index.html, further discussed above.  Translation (German to English):  Parteimitglieder Aufgepasst (vorsicht)!  Party members, pay attention (beware)!; Unanständige(s) Gerede (Gespräche) mit unanständigen Frauen kann (können) Leben kosten  Indecent (loose) talk with indecent (loose) women can cost lives.  The original is targeted at sailors but because of challenges with the AI (discussed elsewhere), this one is targeted at a category of people who theoretically could be in civilian clothes since I could not generate any suitable images for this with uniformed Germans.  Google changed translations on me when I double-checked before publication from German back to English; the translations shown are based on the final re-check with variations to illustrate how words varied based on the original English and English translations of the later German.

1692 07-04 TELL THEM NOTHING!  They might be agents—2025-06-21; Chastity, Penance; motivational poster; compare https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/american-propaganda-posters-world-war-two/.  Translation (German to English):  Sag ihnen nichts!  Tell them nothing!; Sie könnten Agenten sein  They might be agents.  I counted it as a win that I was able to get the girls on their stomachs.  The AI really does not like being told how to position people, especially women.  I really like the faces and expressions here, which seem at once girlish and sinister.  Unlike 1945, which I was able to double-check with an Italian pronoun guide online, I didn’t find a way online to double-check whether the German would be different for a female vs a male or mixed “them”; any input on this point would be appreciated.

1932 & 1934 07-04 Join the CCF-Women with a will to Win-Apply at any Army Recruiting Centre—UNABRIDGED GERMAN COUNTERPART INCLUDING FASCIST IMAGERY AVAILABLE AT PATREON.COM/THEREMAINDERMAN. 2025-06-22; Fang; recruiting poster; compare: https://www.alamy.com/vintage-ww2-recruitment-poster-with-female-ats-member-in-uniform-union-jack-flag-flies-behind-women-with-a-will-to-win!-join-the-ats-apply-at-any-army-recruiting-centre-1939-1945-image342804140.html?imageid=16439DED-FF10-4602-991A-74F85C0BBF85&p=66052&pn=1&searchId=eecbd4edf63c33347e7f7b028a6f8218&searchtype=0; Translation (Mandarin to English) 有必勝意志的女性！  Women with a will to Win!; 般的  General Jin Bihui; 加入  Join the; 反叛亂騎兵部隊  counterinsurgency cavalry force; 向任何陸軍招募中心提出申請  Apply at any Army Recruiting Center.  Any feedback on the technical aspects of this poster would be much appreciated.  The poster is in Chinese but I’m not even sure, if there had been such a recruiting poster, whether the proper language would have been Chinese, Manchu, or even Japanese.  The “counterinsurgency cavalry force” is the irregular formation raised by the Qing dynasty princess who was adopted (abused) and raised in Japan and later became associated with the Manchukuo puppet regime (it is her photograph above her name, Jin Bihui, in a Manchukuo army uniform).  I am not sure if the force had an official name; or if it did, whether it was actually that, or if “counterinsurgency cavalry force” is a descriptive reference.  Being that it was a cavalry force and she was a Manchu, perhaps the most obvious pool for her to recruit from would have been Manchus.  By the time of World War II, however, I understand Manchuria had been heavily Sinicized.  Because the poster is in Chinese I used her Chinese name, Jin Bihui.  I’m pretty sure, but not entirely, that I have the correct Chinese-character transliteration of that name; but in addition to having formatting issues with it, and the lingering uncertainty, I did hope by including one bit of Latinized text with the only specific name I included in the poster (it doesn’t even use the word “Manchukuo” in the text) that people who didn’t notice this description could find relevant historical information about the poster online.  I made two versions, one for the year the puppet regime was created and the other for the year it was renamed Manchukuo and made nominally imperial, because what can I say:  I like Fang in black leather.  These posters came about because, having seen Channah in leather and thinking of poster 1933, it seemed only right that the leather-armor-clad Fang should have a poster of her own on the evil side of the fence.

1946 07-04 Here are the “Liberators”! (ABRIDGED version)—UNABRIDGED AND BONUS VERSIONS INCLUDING FASCIST IMAGERY AVAILABLE AT PATREON.COM/THEREMAINDERMAN. 2025-06-23; Miryam, Rivqah, Lancelot; propaganda poster; compare https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-italian-world-war-ii-poster-here-are-the-liberators%60-shows-the-statue-57365951.html.  Translation (Italian to English):  Ecco I “Liberatori”!  Here are the “Liberators”!  The original poster chilled me, partly because it reminded me of the Norwegian fascist poster (widely used by the Germans) “Liberators,” and partly on its own account, and its description by one source online as an “angel of death” version of the Statue of Liberty.  As an American, it creeps me out to see American icons toppled and reversed that way, especially in this day and age; and especially when—by alluding to Allied bombing campaigns in the Italian example, and half-a-dozen ways in the “Liberators” poster, they manage to capture a kernel of truth about America’s own moral challenges.  In some ways, I imagine this to be the worst nightmare within the ideology of Axis propaganda because it depicts women from fascist countries not just as victims (as in poster 1945), but as collaborating or cooperating with the Allied conquerors, perhaps even with a bold spirit of determination to survive in difficult circumstances where the roles assigned to them by Axis ideologies are no longer enforced, and the men they were supposed to rely on for protection have been defeated in a war of their own making.  Of course, there were German and Italian prostitutes during the WW2 era; but the German and Japanese policy of forced-labor brothels very much reinforced and followed their racist ideologies by making women from occupied countries service their troops.  Racially-ambiguous Lancelot allows but does not require the viewer to add a racial dimension to the poster, although as noted with respect to 1945, doing so would be entirely consistent with Italian wartime propaganda.


1951 06-122 Lead us into temptation
1952 06-122 Deliver us unto evil
1953 06-122 Thy will be done
1954 06-122 Thy Kingdom Come
1955 06-122 On Earth as it is in Hell

Explicit version containing masturbation, orgasm, cunnilingus, and consensualnonconsent themes at 06-122[X] Arousing a Succubus at Patreon.com/TheRemainderman

PREVIOUSLY:  Chastity and Penance, naked, vulnerable, and bound, completely traumatized by their recent, total sensory isolation, have been led by Channah into a place of darkness silence and sterility.  They plead with her not to leave them here while she runs a quick errand.  NOW:

She whispered, her voice cracking with emotion:  “First you want me and love me.  Then you frustrate me and try to thwart my plans… and now you show pathetic need and fear?  To me?!  The Queen of the Succubae?”  She asked incredulously, shuddering and closing her eyes, feeling their fear spike to panic.  “Ooohhh…” she hissed slowly, pressing her hands between her legs.  “You poor girls are terrified… of me, and of losing me.  All at once!  While I’m still mad at you!  Ungh!”

She opened her eyes, staring deeply into theirs.  “You girls are perfect!  Thank you, you silly cows!”  And as she felt their hopes start to rise:  “All you had to do was behave like men, just a little bit!  Show some courage!  Show some independence!  But no… you’re just teases!  I’m gonna mess you girls up so hard you’re going to learn to lose control from fear and arousal at the same time.”  Then she laughed, shaking as their hopes crashed back into confusion about what they had done, and terror of what she might do to them… outweighed only by their desperation for her to stay with them in the Honeycomb and protect them.  “You two are quite mad, to tease and enrage a succubus that way.  When are you going to learn your lessons?”  She shook her head, incredulously.  “My lessons, that you waste!”

Pulling something small from her pocket, she approached Chastity, staring down at her, ignoring their blubbering, confused, frightened questions—well, not the emotion of them, that she lapped up.  Only the content.  Then Channah stepped over the beam on the floor, to which Chastity was tied, one high-heeled boot and then the other, delicately and sluttily at once; before dropping to sit on the bar, her crotch right in Chastity’s face, locked in front of her by the ring fastened to Chas’s collar.

“Bitches!  SILENCE!” she commanded, her thunderous voice swatting theirs down to muteness as quickly and effectively as a professional boxer might put an elementary-school thumb-wrestler in his place with a knockout punch.  “You’ve only got yourselves to blame for your current predicament, after all.  Don’t come whining to me now!  I’m dying to start our honeymoon… it’s all I’m thinking of!  Can you imagine what it’s like to be a Queen, with so many responsibilities, everybody’s boss, always being expected to have all the answers and make all the right decisions, and take care of all the little weaklings around her, all the time?  ALL I’ve been fantasizing about since our wedding is our seclusion, away from the world, away from other people, away from any chance of risk or harm, where I don’t have to teach you and guide you and correct you and monitor you and discipline you, only love you and be loved!  I would have thought you’d want that too!  Instead of just…” she threw her hands up in frustration:  “Prolonging this whole affair by forcing me to interrupt my work—again!  And delay our special time of safety and love together—again!  Just so that I can punish you… that’s right, you guessed it, AGAIN!”  By now she sounded furious, almost on the verge of tears:  “You’re so selfish and thoughtless!”

And the second both girls started frantically trying to apologize and plead she raised one insistent hand, instantly cowing them back into scared silence.  “Are you girls scared of this place?”  She asked, lip rolling in an exaggerated pout.  “What’s that?” she asked their silence.  “Yes or no.  Are my widdle babies scared for mommy to leave them alone in the dark?”

“Yes, Domina!” they admitted reluctantly.  “At least,” Penny tried to explain, “I’d like to get used to it, or… have a little more time after the—you know…”  While Chas burst out: “Please stay with us!”

“Awww…. So sweet.  I can’t even stay mad at you.  I have an idea so Mommy can take care of you, while Mommy’s also doing all the work, and taking all the efforts.  As usual!  I have just the thing to protect you from your fears about this sacred place.  Mommy will make it all go away.  I brought these just in case you girls might want them.”  She placed her hands over Chastity’s ears, and with a final, contemptuous twitch of a smile, pressed the magical earplugs into her girl’s ear canals.

Chastity cried out.

It was the kind of cry actors practiced for years, hoping for their chance to use it in a reputation-making dramatic scene.  And Channah howled back like a rabid wolf, throwing her soggy dress over Chas’s head and grabbing her hair, crying and cursing and nearly barking with passion as she did.  “You’re the Jezebels!” she whimpered, then shivered as Chastity’s screams fell into wracking sobs and pleas.

Right then.  That was it.

Channah managed it again, only a little one, but the kind that’s so intense it’s nearly unbearable because you’ve already come so many times your body is raw and primed for it. 

Chastity was still sobbing when Channah finally shook her head to gather her thoughts, stood, and stepped over Chastity, and then Penny, standing over her back facing the cube and drinking in her big-word, long-winded apologies and pleas.

Her high heels brought her ankles up to a height equal with Penny’s temples, and she rose on the toes of her boots to slam her ankles into the girl to get her attention and silence her. “I want to discuss this persistent problem further tomorrow, and during the coming week.  I do want to take care of you girls, but I also have many responsibilities as the Queen and I can’t spend all of my time coddling and protecting you!  I have to take care of everybody else, too!  I was hoping you girls, with your free time and leisured aristocratic lives, could help me!  You’re my wives!  Don’t you want to be sweet to me the way I want to be to you?!”

“Yes!  I promise you we do!  We’re most sincere, our beloved Domina!  I’m sorry!”  Penny wailed ashamedly; almost histrionically.  “We didn’t mean to interrupt you, Domina.”

“Hush!  What did I just say?!” she spoke, crossly, catching Penny off guard and watching how she flinched as if she had physically hit them, looking hurt but also guilty about upsetting her.  And… she smelled it like a drug, another hit of the addictive whisper of fearlovearousal:  uncertainty, and worry, about what punishment she might inflict on them if she fancied it; but also, even stronger, about how much she wanted to please Chastity, and how miserable she felt that she was failing in that.

“Put your lips to work.  Your sisterwife has already taken care of my orchid, but you can kiss my boots, baby.”

“Thank you, Domina,” she gushed, seizing it as an opportunity to show her apology and regret again, lips and tongue slobbering on the dirty toes of Channah’s boots.

“Such a good girl when she wants to be,” Channah said significantly.

And the last thing Penny heard as the earplugs entered her ear canals, before real and pervasive darkness, the complete, oppressive silence of death, and the utter loss of even the opium smell of her Mistress and the dusty flavor of her boots, settled over her… was the sound of her own weak, scared, desperate pleas.

Literature Section “06-122[X] Arousing a Succubus”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 122 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—Abridged 1230 words::Explicit 1248 words—Accompanying Images:  1951-1955—Published 2025-06-21—©2025 The Remainderman.  This is a work of fiction, not a book of suggestions.  It’s filled with fantasies, idiots, and criminals. Don’t believe them or imitate them.

1949 06-121 The Evil Queen Bee seducing Her retinue
1950 06-121 Let ME find the path for you, my pretties

PREVIOUSLY:  A traumatized Chastity and Penance, naked and vulnerable, are led by Channah into the honeycomb, a mysterious structure used by the demons for travel, finding it dark and silent and sterile enough to make them feel like they are being cut off from the world all over again.  NOW:

With her sixth step, the silent darkness ruptured, practically exploding into light.  Despite Channah’s warning, of course, they were startled and surprised.  Of course, they jumped involuntarily, causing her to chortle merrily, as images swam into focus around them—organic shapes of flora and fauna, geometric ones of geography and buildings, on each of the six walls of the room, with a seventh billowing from smoke into clarity above them, and even a flickering below them like the floor itself might start to resolve into something—

“No!” Channah gasped as if scandalized, covering their eyes with her hands.  “I saw you looking down, Penance Batonnoir!  You saw the floor spark, didn’t you?  Clever girl—too clever by half for your own good, isn’t that right, Chas?”

“Very much so, Domina,” Chas had to agree, sounding amused and bemused at the same time. 

“Don’t you dare look down, Penance girl.  Just one stray moment of curiosity—and I know you, you’re curious about everything—and gravity might drag the three of us straight down before I could even teach you about the sheets of the Honeycomb!”  She giggled.  “And since you have no business leaving my sheet, so to speak, that’s a skill you’ll never need anyway.  So… let’s spend this week exploring my sheets only, shall we?  In your own sheet, it’s simple:  Back and to the left is always home.  Always.  Back and to the right is where you just came from, unless that happens to be your home, in which case it’s determined like the other four faces,” she kind-of explained, turning them 150 degrees counterclockwise and guiding them—with her hands still over their eyes and counting:  “One.  It’s already gone.”  But she kept her hands on their eyes until she announced:  “Two.”  Then she brought her hands back down around their necks.  “Three.  Four.  Five.  Watch your pretty toes!”  And then she finished authoritatively, “Six!” drowning out the girls’ tentative “Seven and a half” (precise Penny) and “eight” (casual Chas). As well-matched as they were physically, there was little chance there was any actual difference to speak of between their respective strides.

“Now.  I need you to move just over here…” she guided them to the right, and then forward, maneuvering them around the outside of the glass cube.  They immediately noticed there were chains hanging from the upper rail and rings embedded into the lower rail, on this side.  “Now kneel down, and stay over here on the side, out of the main path.  You don’t want to get in the way of any important people.  And since everyone who uses the honeycomb is a succubus or accompanying a succubus, you can presume there will always be at least one person much more important than you, in here.  Got it?”

“Yes, Domina,” they chorused unconvincingly, getting what she was saying, but not why she was saying it.

“For the same reason, to make sure you’re in a respectful position if any of your betters come across you, I want you down on your knees.”  She was unfastening Chastity from the leash she shared with Penny as she spoke.  “Go on, kneel, I know the floor hurts a little but we have a strict rule, animals left in the honeycomb are always hitched.”

“‘Left?!’”  Penny asked, scared.  “‘Hitched?!’” Chas protested.

“Ohh… come on, Chastity!” she teased her, thereby easily ignoring Penny’s question.  “Who’s your cowgirl?”

“You are, Domina,” Chastity answered, embarrassed but also a little excited.  “See?” she kissed the back of her head as she pushed the girl down to the floor.  “What good little hucattle you two are.”  And with that, she locked each girl’s collar to one of the rings in the floor, Penny’s to the ring nearest the iron door, and Chas’s to the ring nearest the honeycomb, spacing them about six feet apart.

“Mistress?”  Penny squeaked.  “Domina?  Please, you aren’t going to leave us, are you?”

“Aww… my little poodle.  You’re a grown-up!  Don’t tell me you’re still afraid of the dark, darling?” she asked, managing to sound both sympathetic and irritated at once, as she pulled up on Penny’s bound wrists, hard, causing the girl to whine and shuffle her knees forward to ease the pressure on her shoulders, before using one of the chains hanging from the top bar to hold her wrists up and behind her in the strappado position. 

“Not the dark per se, Domina,” Penny squeaked, sounding a little whiny and pathetic, even to herself.  “But, it’s just—this—today—after the trigger—the honeycomb, Mistress!”

“Aww… does the honeycomb bother you?”  she pouted distractedly.

“It’s just… kind of upsetting, Domina…”  Chastity chimed in, her voice a little uneven, sounding even to herself like she had doubts about what she was saying.

“Oh, you poor little dears,” she said regretfully, locking Chastity’s arms into the strappado position.  “Unfortunately, I have to make an appearance here at Sademtsaowah.  Half an hour is  about the minimum I need to linger here to be confident I’ve given all—well, almost all—of the damned enough time to wrap their empty skulls around the fact they need to attend to me here.  Most of them react faster than that most of the time, but taken as a herd…” she shrugged.  “It takes time to keep the number of stragglers down.  Now,” she began, stepping over the bar into the cube, heading toward the iron door.  “You g—”

“Can’t we please come with you, Domina?”  Chastity pleaded frantically.

“Please, Domina, I promise we’ll be good girls!”  Penance added.

Sounding firmer, she emphasized:  “I have a great deal to do here and want to get as much of it done as possible, in those thirty minutes so I can give you sweet little love muffins mommy’s full attention on our honeymoon!”  They heard her turning and stepping toward the door.

“Please can you leave us with the guards Domina, please?!”  Chastity pleaded.  “We’ll be ever so well-behaved!”

“We—we’ll be a credit to you, Domina!”  Penny assured her.

She hesitated, and then turned back towards them, slowly, seeing the hunger in their eyes, not just for her, but for the light she was radiating.  A thoughtful, calculating look crept into her eyes, and just the hint of a smirk lifted the corner of her lips.  When she saw that both of her girls had caught the look on her face, and that it made them both quail like red-headed stepchildren, she bit her lip and pressed her knees together, sniffing deliberately and sighing with pleasure at their sudden burst of lambchop panic….

Literature Section “06-121 Led Astray”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 121 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—1101 words—Accompanying Images:  1949-1950—Published 2025-05-20—©2025 The Remainderman.  This is a work of fiction, not a book of suggestions.  It’s filled with fantasies, idiots, and criminals. Don’t believe them or imitate them.


1931 06-120 Faerie Light of the Honeycomb
1947 06-120 Blacklight in the Wilderness
1948 06-120 Begging her to show them the way

PREVIOUSLY:  Chastity and Penance, under Channah’s literal and metaphorical spells, have been ritually debased, used badly, ridden hard, and victim-shamed.  Channah, in high spirits from a gathering more successful than any of the succubae can remember, leads the exhausted and traumatized futa naked, through the halls of Castle Chang’an with their hands bound, by a single leash attached to both of their collars.  They have just reached the Honeycomb.  NOW:

A perfect, sterile, silent blackness consumed the entire world behind the heavy iron door, swallowing all light, sound, and smell alike.  The moment they passed into it, the girls knew, to a moral certainty, that they were in a special place.  A sacred place, with the air of the forbidden, set aside from the humdrum world all around it.  But since they knew they were in hell, neither girl believed this place was actually sacred.  Indeed, reason suggested, if anything… the opposite.

The walls here were a deeper, more-perfect, glassy opaque black, carved with amazing precision into perfect rectangular prisms, matched so precisely no mortar could be discerned between them.  Only the faintest rectangular lines, visible as an interruption in the reflective surface, marked the end of one brick and the start of the next, betraying the fact that the walls were constructed of separate bricks rather than immense, continuous slabs. The air was cooler, dryer, and odorless here, with an underlying silence that made the girls aware how much noise they accepted every day as a normal part of everyday life. 

Just inside the doorway, within the larger chamber, was a cube—or, rather, the outline of one, 12 equal-length square columns eight inches across, arranged as two squares with four connecting beams joining their corners.  To enter, they stepped over one bar and “through” one side of the cube.  As they stepped into the cube, their skin began to tingle, as if their entire bodies were waking up after having been asleep.

“What’s happening?!” Penance asked.  “My body!” Chastity echoed her.

Channah laughed softly.  “Not to worry.  It’s a shield.”

“For what?”

“For the honeycomb.”

“Against what?!”

“Against you, you silly girls,” Channah chuckled.  “Your filth.  Have you taken a look at one another?”  She snorted.  “Think of it like magical hosiery or clogs.  It’s doing it to me, too, to prevent my dress and boots from dripping oil and water everywhere.  It’s quite pleasant, actually.”

“And dark…” Penny whispered, sounding haunted, as the door slammed closed behind them.  “and silent… and odorless.” 

“Aww… pooor sweetie,” Channah sympathized, sounding delighted, swooping the two girls into her arms for a tight hug.  “Ooh… darlings, you’re shivering!  Is this… reminding you of anything?”

“Yes, Domina,” they whined together, hugging her back fiercely, shivering not with their paresthesia but with the dread of memory of the senseless comatic holes they had been triggered into before exclaiming in reaction to another surprise, and again in unison:  “Domina!”

“What is it?” she feigned surprise, knowing they were staring at her, and knowing exactly why.

“You—you’re glowing!”

She snickered, fully aware what she looked like in here, and tickled that they sounded amazed rather than horrified.  Dropping her hands down to between their legs, she tested them and laughed even harder.  “Oh, girls… we are definitely going to have to explore this together!”

She appeared in the honeycomb in her demonic form, a wild, fey, fiercer-than-average version of her spicy red demon self.  All succubae did, in here.  There was something so primal about this space, this force, that it brought out the beast in demons, ancient and fierce.  Raising her hands to encompass the space all around them, she explained:  “The honeycomb absorbs or filters all light, all sound, all energy, all contamination of any kind, respecting only the stuff and energy of life itself.  This cube is a spell that protects the honeycomb from all the filth—well, what the honeycomb considers contaminants—accompanying… travelers through it.  Otherwise, the honeycomb would bar or absorb everything:  dresses, boots, jewelry, underwear… even the oil and dirt on your bodies.”

Something about the way she had said ‘travelers’ troubled Penny, who asked:  “And are we—Chas and I—travelers, Domina?”

Channah turned and looked at her slowly, her lips parting in genuine surprise, almost looking… embarrassed?  As if Penny had been peeping on her in her dressing chamber.  “What?  Whatever do you mean?”

Penny frowned, now certain of it and reading in her eyes that she knew it.  Suddenly gasping in fear that she was crossing a new line with Channah, but unable to bring herself not to ask:  “Are we… travelers, Domina?  Or filth?”

Her mouth formed a small ‘O’ even as something between scandal and titillation flashed in her eyes.  Of course, it was impossible to tell with her glowing a ruddy hue, but the expression on her face was one that suggested blushing.  “Oh Penny…” she whispered.  “My beautiful filth.”  And she leaned forward, kissing Penny softly on her lips.  Pulling both girls’ ears close to her mouth, close enough they shivered with the feel of her warm breath, she whispered even more softly:  “The honeycomb is natural—or supernatural, or unnatural, but certainly, not of our fashioning, and infinite.  The spell is ours, and every cube and…” she giggled, rubbing her hips against them suggestively “bit of filth we protect takes effort and attention.  Besides,” she hissed, her soft voice making them feel like they were part of a conspiracy, and shrugged:  “Why would we want to open the honeycomb to…” she laughed throatily.  “Any bit of filth that might be capable of finding the honeycomb and wandering into it?  It’s why I had to bring you here the long way around, through the Satanikoklus.  So I could… welcome you inside us.”

She giggled, releasing them, and twirling prettily:  “Ours is the only light not extinguished in the honeycomb.  And now you know:  you’ll want to stay close to me in the honeycomb, won’t you?  I’ll light the way for you, and protect you from the big, scary dark.”  A smile played around her lips.  “Filth.”

Then she took the girls under her arms, pulling their heads in tight to her own, and kissed each in turn on their ears, whispering “Princess” to Penance and “Fuckpuppet” to Chastity, making both of them blush, before leading them forward into the dark.

She was, indeed, the sole source of light in the honeycomb, a pale, faint, and eerie reddish glow coming off her and making her look ethereal or even spectral.  But there was nothing dead or even undead about her; she remained all Channah, all predator, all vibrant and exciting and completely alive—seemingly more alive than anything or anyone around her.  She remained the girls’ guidelight and beacon.  Always.

She murmured to them, making sure they remembered the next bar, the one forming the bottom of the cube away from the door so they wouldn’t stub their bare toes on the clear glass in the dark; and then she whispered to them “Put your heels back against the bar, girls.  That’s it, so you’re standing at the very edge of the cube behind you.  Now, the distance will always be the same.  So when we start forward, try to take steps that are the normal size for you, whatever that is, and count them off.  I’ll do the same, but for my pace.  Ready, let’s go.”  And she counted her own steps forward, setting the example:  “One.  Two.  Three.  Four.  Five—” she hesitated, stopping them both for a moment.  “It’s about to appear around us… don’t be surprised…  Six!”

Literature Section “06-120 The Queen in the Hive”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 120 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—1200 words—Accompanying Images:  1931, 1947-1948—Published 2025-06-19—©2025 The Remainderman.  This is a work of fiction, not a book of suggestions.  It’s filled with fantasies, idiots, and criminals. Don’t believe them or imitate them.


1923 06-119 FINALLY, I’ve found London’s vilest asshole!
1924 06-119 I mean to ride and whip you harder than any horse.  Who’s still interested?
1930 06-119 Final warning—I’ll make even the MOST desperate and depraved of ye’ll rue meeting me

06-119 The Long March of Shame (abridged version)

Explicit version containing graphic descriptive themes at 06-119X The Long March of Shame at Patreon.com/TheRemainderman

PREVIOUSLY:  Chastity and Penance have been ridden hard.  Exhausted, even shell-shocked, they are being led away like dogs on a leash by Channah from the venereal rites in which they were made to take part.  Penny’s plea to be allowed to wear clothing is being rejected by Channah in the harshest-possible terms.  NOW:

Channah threw her head back and laughed out loud, as Penny wilted.

“Darling, you’re covered with dirt and oil and—oh, yes, your own water, and that of not one, but two different succubae.  Your dress was practically ripped off your body and is filthy and torn.  NO. ONE. Is going to see you and think anything other than the truth, girl:  You are a fallen woman, now, fallen almost as far as I have.”  She sniggered, approaching Penny and kissing her, softly, on her quivering lips, playing with her, before whispering:  “My fallen angels.  I hope you NEVER manage to accept that.  It is so. Hot,” she bit Penny’s lip, enjoying the girl’s involuntary shudder.  “That my little medlar still feels like a cherry.  Never fucking lose that…” and she laughed.  “Princess!  Pleaser, Puddin’, Princess!  You’re the clothes-horse of nicknames.  I adore you!”  Then she stepped past Penny, leaving her with the beginnings of a renewed excitement the girl was still unable to wrap her reason around.  As Channah snaked her arm around Chastity’s neck, the motion and the shortness of the chain she had on her girls forced Penny to press her naked flesh up tightly against the back of Channah’s sodden, disreputable, but fully-intact dress, even as she pulled Chastity in tightly for a kiss.  Channah murmured back to Penny:  “Kiss the back of my neck softly, bitch, and say ‘thank you for turning me out.’” 

Then she kissed Chastity, a long, slow, intimate kiss, pretending to ignore Penny but unable to prevent herself shuddering from the soft feeling of Penny’s lips whining and whispering her pitiful, obedient gratitude into the back of her Queen’s neck. 

“Are you ready for me to show you what your new body can do, Chas honey?” she murmured, her lips continuing to move over Chastity’s

“Oh, g—yes, Domina!”

She laughed throatily, murmuring around their kiss:  “Try ‘Lillith and Cain’.  Go on!”

“Lillith and Cain, yes, Domina!” Chastity moaned softly.

“Mm!  Enough for now!” she pronounced bitchily, swatting Chastity’s bottom, well aware that she had both of her girls’ full attention, licking her lips and leading them on a march towards the stairs.  “I want you girls all—to—myself.  Finally!”

“But don’t we need to pack—bring things for the week—” Penny made a desperate last plea, as she stumbled after Channah.

“Silence!  Or I’ll gag you hard, muffin.  More Pleaser, less Princess.  I have the only baggage you’re going to need all week,” she laughed, extending her hand, with their chastity cages dangling from her fingers, above her head, drawing laughter from those closest to the procession.

And with that, the girls were led—collared, cuffed, leashed, filthy, oily, barefoot, and nude, unable to cover themselves with their hands bound behind their backs—down the stairs, back into Castle Chang’an.  They managed to retrace their steps down under the killing ground, back into the castle proper, and then back up to its ground floor, without seeing anyone.

But as soon as they were back in the main halls of the castle, their isolation came to an end.  The halls seemed positively crowded compared to when they had arrived, and the passersby seemed supercharged with an air of urgency and anxiety they had definitely not had before.  The nervous energy all around them was practically infectious, despite the girls’ already-heightened emotional state, and they glanced at one another nervously, perhaps worrying in the backs of their minds that the events they had witnessed—that they had participated in—might have been related to a larger disturbance in hell itself. 

Everyone they passed was moving rapidly and purposefully, in marked contrast to the fatalistic air that had seemed to be the normal atmosphere of the castle.  And the passersby reacted with interest, even double-takes to the sight of them.  It was not the complete shock or outrage one would have expected almost anywhere on Earth, but it was enough of a reaction to indicate it was at least uncommon, even here in hell, to see beautiful, bedraggled nude futa being led by their leash at the hands of the dirty Queen of Hell.

Channah, herself reacting to the sense of tension with heightened nerves at first, spoke with several passersby in the local language of Chinese, taking the louder- and faster-than-average reports in such stride that she immediately relaxed.

“Is everything all right, Domina?” Penny asked, shocked when she came to an immediate halt and she ran into her Queen.  “I’m sorry, Domina,” she curtsied.

Channah turned slowly and gave Penny a narrow, withering look, then looked down at her feet meaningfully.  Taking the hint, Penny backed away from her nervously, until her leash was nearly straight instead of folded double and hanging vertically.  Delivering one more chiding frown, she warned:  “I know what you’re doing.  Trying to hide behind your mommy?”  She snickered at Penny’s confirming bloom of ruddy pink on her cheeks.  Busted.  “I’ll give you a choice.  You can show off and be seen, or you can hide and…” she caught the eyes of two shoulders roaming appreciatively over Penny’s perfectly-feminine backside, and she crooked her finger at them.  It was hard to tell whether they looked more nervous as they hustled straight to her and knelt, or Penny did as she tensed up and looked over her shoulder toward them.

With a harsh laugh, Channah pointed at Penny and spoke to them in Chinese.  When they responded hesitantly, she reiterated her point more stridently and they practically fell over themselves to press up against Penny and run their hands over her curves, zeroing in almost immediately on her breasts as Penny squeaked and froze.  “Mistress—Domina–!”

“Yes, I am,” she snorted.  “As I was saying, if you don’t want to glorify me with your shame, you can hide, and I’ll make you a plaything for my guards instead.”

“I’m sorry, Domina!  I’ll keep my distance, Domina, I promise!  I apologize Domina, I—ow!” she cried, as one of the soldiers began twisting her nipples, hard and the other started nuzzling Penny’s shoulder.

With a laugh, Channah waved the soldiers off and they disappeared with even more haste than they had originally approached, as Channah set off again on her parade of shame through the castle.  “I told them you girls were the stars of today’s performance.  Of course, they wanted to touch you.  For luck!”

“For luck?!”  The girls glanced at one another in confusion.

“It’s why the castle is in such a state.  All down to you and Esmeray… and, of course, Kadidia and me, but not one of them would dare to even think of touching me without being ordered to do so.  Thralls!”  she rolled her eyes.  “The way the five of us whipped up the devils with your entertaining little antics?  It’s why I’m going to let you come back here any weekend I can.  You’re going to be celebrities here!  And the longer you can remain my tormented, conflicted Princess, darling—” she patted Penny’s cheek patronizingly— “the better.  Your emotional angst is catnip to the damned.  Catnip!”

“Yes, Domina!” both girls chorused, looking at one another nervously but too intimidated by her manner and quick punishment of Penny to ask any of the questions that they—well, mainly Penny—fairly burst to ask. 

Channah, heedless of their feelings, resumed her promenade, seeming to take her time, moving at a relaxed, regal pace through the halls and courtyards and stairways of the disconcerted castle, chatting in an almost-flirtatious way with some of the groups they passed, until they reached a heavy, iron door flanked by four guards—not idle, not running anywhere, but simply alert, calm, and guarding the door with determination. 

The second they set eyes on their Queen, the four of them bowed deeply, one of them managing to pull open the door and still hold onto his weapon even as he did so.

Literature Section “06-119[X] The Long March of Shame”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 119 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—Abridged 1326 words::Explicit 1333 words—Accompanying Images:  1923-1924, 1930—Published 2025-06-18—©2025 The Remainderman.  This is a work of fiction, not a book of suggestions.  It’s filled with fantasies, idiots, and criminals. Don’t believe them or imitate them.

1920 06-118 Easy Prey
1921 06-118 Fallen without a safety net
1922 Desperate, Dirty Damsels in Distress

PREVIOUSLY:  Kadidia has just finished with Penance and Chastity, and is now resting comfortably on top of the two smaller, squished girls, enjoying the intimacy of the afterglow.  NOW:

When Kadidia felt Esmeray pulling back and standing up, unwilling to remain a part of the girlpile any longer, Kadidia groaned and rolled over onto her back, chuckling as the girls panted and moued with relief.  “Take them—to their Domina, Qahramanah!” she commanded, closing her eyes and lying face-up, soaking up the sensations rippling across the heteraslakos and, in fact, through her own body as well.  “Then come back and I can help you plan your lessons for next week.”

“Thank you, Your Grace,” Esmeray answered, meaning it, before her voice turned hesitant.  “But I’m not sure Penance can move unless I separate her wrists from her ankles, Your Grace,” she observed doubtfully, as she helped Chastity struggle from Penance’s back and scramble up to a standing position.

“That’s fine,” the larger woman waved one hand vaguely, otherwise looking for all the world like a woman enjoying the warm rays of the Sun.  “These two girls are broken.  They won’t be a problem.  Ever again,” she added, laughing despite herself.  “But go ahead and chain her hands behind her back like Chastity.  Just so you develop good jawari-handling habits.”

“Yes, Your Grace,” Esmeray promised, nodding, as she turned her attention to Penny, kneeling on her back as she had been taught, before unfastening Penny’s wrists from her ankles and then securing her wrists to one another as the girl sighed, her legs finally able to straighten from the froglike position they had been trapped in.  Only after her wrists had been secured, did Esmeray stand and help Penny to her feet, then took the two girls by their arms, and searched the heteraslakos for their Domina.

She spotted Channah, looking as oily and sweaty and bedraggled as Esmeray felt, sitting tiredly on one of the benches near the middle of the tower, her arm supportively resting on Fang’s shoulder.  Even from here, she could see Fang was exhausted and pale.  Guiding the girls forward, she saw Channah notice them and nod before returning her attention back to Fang.  As they drew close, they heard Channah assuring Fang gently:  “—as much time as you need.  We’ll make a stop at Sademtsaowah to lead my thralls there for the next ritual.  Focus on replenishing your herd and I will check on you next weekend.” 

Fang, looking haggard, pursed her lips and nodded.  “Thank you, Your Majesty.”

Channah stood, plucking up the girls’ cages from the surface of the bench, each cage dangling from a one of her long, elegant, manicured fingers, kissed Fang on the forehead, and summoned Hong and her girls.  “Take your Domina to her chambers.  When you have her settled, you may resume your ritual. I realize your ritual today was quite disrupted., but…”

“Oh, yes,” Hong nodded, anticipating Channah’s point.  “Absolutely, Your Majesty.  Well worth it.  We look forward to cooperating with your qahramanah and jawari next week.”

Hong and her girls curtsied, very low and very solemnly, before turning towards Fang and offering to help her, but knowing her too well to try and force their help on her.  Fang, meanwhile, set her jaw, and with a warning look to her vassals, stood by herself and marched determinedly for the stairs back to her quarters.  If Esmeray were asked to bet, she would have bet any sum she could raise that Fang made it to her quarters all by herself, and that no one who had not been on the platform would be given any reason to think she was anything more than tired or sore.

Channah turned towards Esmeray and her charges, smirking with satisfaction to see her two girls’ hunched, tentative postures and bowed heads.  “Ohhh…” she made a delighted pout face.  “Such sweet, submissive, humbled girls,” she cooed, folding them into her arms for a slimy hug and meeting Esmeray’s eyes triumphantly as the girls both pushed tightly against her, burying their heads in her shoulders and clearly revealing how much they craved her affection and approval.   “Aww…. My little sweeties.  Was Kadidia big and mean to you?   I can see you’re both a little tuckered out and traumatized after your long performance, but it was worth it, honey pots.  You both look soooo sexy, you’re going to have boys and girls chasing after you, when you get back.”  She kissed each girl on the top of her head, then continued:  “We have one quick stop at the Court of Lust itself—my castle, Sademtsaowah—so the damned will know to wait for us—well, me–there.  Then I’m going to take you straight to our own private paradise, where we’ll cut you loose, wash you up, and put you to bed for a nice, long sleep on mummy’s comfortable bed.  How does that sound?”

“Wonderful, Domina!”  Both girls exclaimed so eagerly Channah snickered again. 

“I just love grateful girls,” she beamed.  “I’m going to take such gooooood care of you girls.  Here, let me just…” she used one carabiner to fasten the end of a chain to Chastity’s collar, then measured off about three feet worth of chain before using a second carabiner to attach the chain to Penance’s collar, kissed each girl sweetly on the lips, and turned to Esmeray, holding the girls’ leash casually over her shoulder.

Leaning forward, she embraced Esmeray, both of them laughing at their oily, messy clothes.  Ignoring the girls and looking her qahramanah in the eye, she said:  “I’ll drop the girls off with you next Friday at Sademtsaowah.  Their duties on Earth have to take priority, but unless they have commitments there, they will be yours from Friday until Sunday for training and ritual.  Hong and her girls will remain your training partners no matter what castle you work from; and at least for the next few weeks, Kadidia will supervise your—and their” (she gestured back over her shoulder at the girls) “training.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

Pausing deliberately to get Esmeray’s full attention, she frowned and asked:  “Did today help you to identify what you need to focus on this week, to be as ready as possible for next week’s training?”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Esmeray nodded earnestly, meaning it and knowing it was important, but also betraying something uncertain and tentative within her.

Nodding with decision, Channah followed up, penetrating to the heart of Esmeray’s unspoken lack of confidence:  “And were you also able to understand what you might be able to bring to the ritual with your own girls?  What you might be able to offer Hong?”

Esmeray looked like a deer startled by a hunter, as Channah hugged her again, reassuringly, frowning expectantly.

Esmeray opened her mouth, paused as a thoughtful expression crossed her face, and then nodded at Channah in surprise.  “Why—yes, Your Majesty.”

“Good.  Stay here and watch Hong’s performance. You’ll get the girls back the afternoon before the Sabbat, which gives you and Hong time to coordinate your rituals.  Bring too many ideas and trust Hong’s judgment in which are worth pursuing.”  And with that, she looked back over her shoulders at her girls and asked teasingly:  “Are you sweet girls ready?”

Penny turned red.  Again.  “No—I mean, I’m sorry, Domina, but don’t you want us to get dressed?”

Channah laughed, spinning on her heel and looking back at the girl like she was sizing her up for pork chops.  “Do you know me at all?  Try that again.”

Penny struggled for words and finally squeaked, bending forward and crossing her legs as if it might help her be more modest:  “Shouldn’t we… put our dresses on, Domina?”

“Why?” she teased, enjoying Penny’s discomfort.  Esmeray watched the interaction with a strange intensity.

“Well—we—we want to be a credit to you, Domina!  Demure young ladies—”

Channah threw her head back and laughed out loud, as Penny wilted.

Literature Section “06-118 Ridden Hard and Put Away Wet“—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 118 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—1304 words—Accompanying Images:  1920-1922—Published 2025-06-17—©2025 The Remainderman.  This is a work of fiction, not a book of suggestions.  It’s filled with fantasies, idiots, and criminals. Don’t believe them or imitate them.