[b]Neverquest - Part 101
Characters: Queen Isabella, Lord Dartemus
Location: ???
Time: Day 4 - 7:08 PM[/b]
The sea rocked back and forth. Waves came crashing down. Men scurried through the town like rats, crying out as they were swept under the fury of their goddess. Cold, girlish laughter echoed from above. She had come again. She had come to torment their peaceful lives. The few who were still standing stopped to look up, seeing her face cloud their once blue sky. There was nowhere to run. From all sides, the rising fingers of the ocean wrapped around them and swallowed them like breaths of air. Frothy suds filled their lungs. They screamed, thrashing their arms, as the torrent of spiraling water carried them out to sea. Still they tried to fight it, and still the waves came down, smacking them against the pavement like the iron hands of fate. One of them managed to reach higher ground by scaling the side of one of the buildings, but he was plucked up—by the great goddess herself—and flung into the bubbling sea.
“And another kingdom is destroyed by the mighty hand of Queen Isabella!” the goddess bellowed. Then she spread her arms and fell back into the water. A huge tidal wave rose from her body and struck the town, shaking the buildings and the trees with the force of a hurricane, and then all was still.
Except for the dozen Men flailing about in the waters of the royal bathtub. Isabella laughed at them as they swam for shore, which was a tiny island erected in the middle of her tub. The town itself was about as high above the sea level as the edges of the marble tub (without the glass sides and doors, which kept them escaping when Isabella wasn’t there), but there was a sloping shoreline, built sort of like a beach, that gradually dipped into the tub from three sides before breaking off like a continental shelf. The fourth side was composed of a high rock wall, which rose about two feet above the surface of the water before turning into a jagged overhang. The Men used that as a diving board sometimes.
As for the town, it was small, with only about six buildings, but each of them were finely crafted by Men carpenters. They used these buildings to sleep in or, more often, to hide from Isabella. They knew better than to hide from her when she was in one of her moods, though. They knew better than to upset her.
“Would you guys like to dry off?” she asked. They had heard that one before. Instinctively, they braced themselves as Isabella leaned over the sandy shoreline and blew them over with a single breath. Then she laughed again.
The royal tub was huge. It was big enough that Isabella could sit anywhere she wanted, relax her arms around the cushioned sides, and stretch her feet all the way out or simply put one over the other on the island’s shoreline. There was even a little stringed device with which she could detach the town from its base, allowing the island to float around the tub at her whim. She did that, sometimes, and delighted in trying to tip the whole island, which would cause all the Men to spill into the water before the little piece of land would bob right side up again.
“Isn’t this fantastic, Darty?” she asked, spreading her bare arms across the side of the tub. A frothy sea of bubbles sat below her, covering her up to her armpits in soapy suds. That was good because none of the Men wanted to see her in all her naked glory. In fact, Isabella forbid them from doing so, purposely entering the tub with a cherry-colored robe wrapped around her, which she would later remove and lay in a great alcove in the back of the circular tub. Also in that alcove, she kept her other favorite bath toys, which included a rubber shark, a bucket, a handful of silver rings, and an old frigate once used in a time of war by the Men of Penee. There used to be another frigate, but it had mysteriously wound up with a hole in its main rudder and now laid at the bottom of the tub with its captain sealed away in one of the lower cabins. His body had long since stopped moving. Every now and then, Isabella would step on the boat as she entered the tub or accidentally bump it with her leg, but they were all still waiting for the drowned captain to rise to the surface again.
Lord Dartemus stood in the alcove as well. He scowled at Isabella from under his layers of beard and hair, but she paid him no mind. In fact, she couldn’t even see him, as her back was resting against the alcove and her right arm was covering him like a wall of skin.
“This is so much better than that inane party happening downstairs,” Isabella said, closing her eyes with a warm smile. “This is so much better than rubbing elbows with people who actually matter. Don’t you think?” And she lifted her arm, a little bit, and rubbed her elbow against Dartemus’ face. He tried to dodge it, but he slipped on the soapy floor of the alcove and landed on his back. Luckily, Isabella didn’t see him to laugh and make him feel smaller than he already was.
“I could do this all night…” she continued, wriggling around to get comfortable. “You won’t believe the kind of day I had, Darty.”
“My name, Your Self-Proclaimed Highness, is Lord Dartemus. Like you, I—”
“So I woke up this morning, had my usual breakfast in bed, and I was just getting dressed when guess who wanted to see me at the crack of dawn. That’s right, my snotty, pompous, too-good-for-the-world cousin, Olivia. O-liv-i-a. Ugh, even her name sounds like a whore. Did you know she dresses like one? Oh, sure, she wears long sleeves and gloves in public, but I’ve seen her nightgown. Smutty. That’s what it is. I don’t know where she gets her tastes, but I know it’s not [i]my[/i] side of the family.”
“Your Highness…”
“Her mother is my mother’s sister, so I guess she thinks that makes her special or something. The whore. And she carries around this nasty little Man with her wherever she goes. You’d probably like him, Darty. He thinks he’s a ‘Lord’ or something, too. The grossest thing is she actually lets this…[i]thing[/i] eat at the table—and he’s not even on the plate. But that’s not all. No, I’ve seen her eat the food he doesn’t finish. Do you know how terribly disgusting that is? She might as well roll her bread in horse droppings. A Man, eating human food… Sickening.” Lazily, she lifted one foot out of the water and turned it over, inspecting her toenails. “So, anyway, Olivia bored me with her presence for a while and then practically invited herself to my Tournament of Champions. I guess she had nothing better to do in her little backwater town of Haledon, so she uses a sorry excuse like ‘belonging to the royal family’ to allow herself a seat in my royal box section. That would be like you asking for a room in my castle without bars on it. Completely ridiculous, right? I know. That’s what I said.”
Lord Dartemus sighed.
“But does Olivia listen? No, like a whore, she has to push harder. A bunch of Men—more annoying than most I have seen—decided to infiltrate my tournament. So I take them prisoner, right? Then you know what Olivia does? She lets them escape. But no, they don’t just walk out the door. She lets them. That’s…that’s…so typical of her. She’ll do anything to irritate me. I’m surprised she just doesn’t walk in the door right now because she knows how much I hate being disturbed while I’m taking a bath.” She lowered her one foot and lifted the other. “But on the other hand, do you remember those two Forsaken characters I met yesterday?”
“No.”
“Gena and Roxanne. They are very nice people—not like that whore Olivia. Actually, Gena won the Tournament of Champions. You should have seen her.”
“I couldn’t. I was locked away in a bird cage, forced to smell your dirty bed sheets for the past twelve hours.”
“Yeah, she was amazing. I made her a Lady. It’s about time I had some friends in the royal court. It gets so boring having to deal with such inferior people all the time. Know what I mean? Of course you don’t. You’re about as inferior as they get. Nobody will listen to you, will they? That must suck. You have to look up to everyone. What’s that like?”
“You wouldn’t—”
“Don’t care. See, I can do that. That’s my power. What can you do? You can’t do anything. You can’t even answer for yourself. You’re like a little, nitty, gritty twat. I don’t even need to make sense for you because you don’t matter. In the grand scheme of things, you’re nothing more than a smudge on my skin that I can wash away whenever I please. That’s the extent of your existence. Isn’t that sad? That’s all you amount to, Darty.” She dropped her foot back into the water. “Darty, Darty, Darty… Are you even deserving of a name? Maybe I could give you a number, like I do with my bath toys. You can be ‘Seven’ since he died last week. Very tragic accident. He swam too far out to sea and got lost in all the bubbles. But don’t worry, I found him. Smushed to my back. I guess he ended up behind me and I leaned back a little too hard for his flimsy bones. Yeah, it was funny, because I didn’t find him until the next day when I was undressing. I thought it was a mosquito bite at first. I was glad when I realized it was just Seven. He came off like magic.”
It took all of Lord Dartemus’ might to restrain himself. Facing him was Isabella’s back, a warm plane of wet flesh and clinging bubbles, and he wanted nothing more than pound against it. He could swear it was mocking him. But he knew better than that. He knew Isabella wanted him to strike her, to throw himself against her in blind anger. She would have loved to see him slip and fall into the bath, pinned against her back and the wall of marble. She would have loved to degrade him to nothing.
“Your trickery will not work on me, Isabella,” he said boldly. “I will not be reduced to one of your juvenile bath toys.”
She shrugged her mocking shoulders. “Don’t remember giving you a choice. Or are you one of those fools who believe in free will?”
“I am no fool. I am Lord Dartemus.”
“I am Lord Dummygus,” Isabella mocked, shaking her head from side to side like a puppet. “Look at me and my amazing biceps of bone-and-no-meat. I can crush pebbles and wince like a little baby. I think I’ll go cry right now. Waaah, waaah, waaah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I said ‘waaah, waaah, waaah.’”
The veins in Dartemus’ knuckles began to throb. Each cheerful shake of her head made him want to smash her face into the faucet more and more, and yet he knew that was impossible. Not only was the faucet the size of a carriage to him, but compared to the size of Isabella’s face, he was only about as big as her nose.
“Yeah, if I was a lesser person like you, I’d probably be a Bard. I have a beautiful voice, don’t you think? Oh, wait, I don’t care! I forgot. So sorry to give you that false hope. I really am a terrible person.”
“…Didn’t you mother ever slap you when you were a child?”
Isabella grinned. “Oooh, Darty…”
“What?”
“There’s a shark in the water! We’re doomed!”
“What? There are no sharks in there.”
“One just bit me! Oh, the pain.”
But her fit of laughter worried Dartemus. He began to back up in the alcove until he bumped into Isabella’s robe.
“Don’t you see the shark?” she asked, reaching into the alcove. Her hand passed Dartemus, though, and picked up the toy shark. She then waved it back and forth in front of Dartemus’ face, taunting him. “To me, it’s just a little minnow, but to you, it is a deadly eating machine!”
“Get your rubber plaything away from me. It’s not real.”
“But look what happens when I squeeze it.” She did so and the shark’s jaws spread, revealing an open mouth and a hollow tube-like stomach. “Many Men have been gobbled up by this fearsome creature of the sea.”
“I find that hard to believe. There’s barely enough room for one person in there.”
“Aye, but when that one person is trapped for a week at a time, there is no need to keep him in there for any longer. For that Man is dead, you see.” Then she squeezed the back of the shark, which opened into another tube that came out from the shark’s rear end. “And out he comes, about as worthless as he went in.”
“Wait… You mean you actually leave Men inside of there?”
“You’d be surprised how long than they can last without air. Or how hard it is for them to do something as simple as this.” She squeezed the shark’s mouth again. “I think it’s impossible for them when they’re inside the shark. Sad, really, but it’s funny to watch them try. All the way up until their last breath.” Then she laughed and tossed the shark into the water, letting it float around in the bubbly froth. “…I’d sure hate to see a member of the royal court of Penee wind up as fish food. How would I ever explain such a tragedy to King Krazykove? I guess by doing the same thing to him!”
“My brother’s name is King Kazekov,” Dartemus growled.
“Oh? And where would you like me to put that on my scale of I-Actually-Care? How about between your feelings and the food stuck in my back teeth?”
“Someday, Isabella, I swear…”
She put a foamy finger to her lip. “Shhh. Don’t you know? I hate disruptions while I’m bathing.”
Giantess World
