Neverquest - Part 106
Characters: Gena, Roxanne, Frankie, Duchess May
Location: The royal ballroom in the castle of Felwinter
Time: Day 4 - 11:06 PM
At the royal ball, Gena and Roxanne danced until they were dancing on blisters. Then they danced for a while longer. The whole time, the music never stopped playing. The ballroom was full of laughter and merriment, even as the hours neared midnight, because there was no one to tell the girls to go to bed. Even little Frankie, who had always fallen asleep before the moon could find his bedroom window, now stared wide-eyed at the twilight sun from atop Gena’s shoulder. He smiled and looked up at her. This was the way they always wanted it to be.
“I don’t think I can dance anymore,” Roxanne said as they finally took a break to visit the buffet table.
“It might be easier if you took off your armor,” Frankie suggested.
Then they all laughed.
“…No, I’m serious.”
Gena picked up a glass plate and began stacking it with slabs of cheese and bread. “Are you hungry, Frankie?”
“Yeah!”
“Well, too bad!”
They all laughed again.
“…No, really,” Frankie said. “I’m starving.”
“Me too,” Roxanne said, picking up a whole tray of food as her plate.
Gena smiled and began cutting up a sausage with a rather sharp knife. “What would you like, Frankie?”
He pointed to a large chocolate cake, dripping with bits of strawberries and whipped cream, sitting on the end of the table.
“Gee, I dunno,” Roxanne said. “That’s an awful lot to eat for such a little guy.”
“I want it!”
“Now, now… Is that the polite way to ask?”
“No…”
“And that’s why we love you, kid,” Gena said, stepping over and cutting off a slice of the cake that was at least twice the size of Frankie. She plopped it on the center of her plate. “Is that enough for you?”
His eyes widened.
“You can have it if I don’t eat it all first,” she teased, grabbing a fork and prodding the cake.
“My cake!” Frankie laughed, jumping from her shoulder headfirst into the cake. Warm chocolate oozed all around him. He sighed, inhaling the aroma for one sweet moment, and then began shoveling entire handfuls of cake and cream into his mouth.
“I don’t think you’re going to get a chance to try it,” Roxanne said, nudging Gena.
Gena grinned and began sprinkling her plate with lettuce. “At least have some healthy food.”
“Never!” he said from under a leaf of green.
“Have it your way then,” she said, picking up the salad ladle and burying him in a forest of lettuce and tomatoes. “You’ll have to eat your way out eventually.”
“No, I won’t! I’m in heaven.”
Gena finally finished cutting up the sausage and laid the slices next to the salad on her plate. “You won’t be for long.”
Roxanne picked up the rest of the sausage—a foot-long stick of meat—and sank her teeth into it. Chewing, she began to scan the ballroom and noticed about a dozen girls huddled into one of the corners with their eyes cast to the floor. She pointed at them with her giant sausage. “Hey, let’s check out what’s going on over there.”
“Get that thing out of my face,” Gena said.
Roxanne lowered the sausage. “Sorry.”
But they went over anyway. Standing just outside the circle, they noticed that all the girls were gathered around one girl in particular. She must’ve been important because she was wearing one of those expensive dresses that only royalty could afford. It was yellow, like the ribbons in her black hair, and glittered like the stars in the sky. Unlike the other dresses at the ball, her skirt barely skimmed her knees and the sleeves were just little puffs at the end of her arms. She didn’t look very old either—maybe twenty or twenty-one—but her lips, the way they smirked and spoke faster than they could move into position, were like those of a child.
“Any more bets?” she was saying. “Anyone? Come on, come on.”
“I’ll put thirty on thirty seconds,” one of the girls in the circle said, tossing three gold coins on the floor.
“Thirty on thirty. Triple your bet if you win on the six. Anyone else?”
“What are we betting on?” Gena asked.
The girl looked up and curled her lips into the kind of grin you don’t want to see on anybody. “Well, well, well… Lady Gena. I heard you knocked them dead at the tournament today.”
“My foot sure did.”
Smirking, the girl began rolling a coin between her fingers. “Spoken like a true noble. You wanna play?”
“What are you playing?”
“Just a little game I like to call ‘Time to Kill.’ I made it up when I was about five years old.”
“Sounds like my kind of game. How do you play?”
“You don’t. All you have to do is bet.” With a wave of her hand, she shooed her crowd to the side so that Gena could see what was on the floor. It was a Man, stripped almost naked, trapped inside the powerful jaws of a black hair clamp. His face was red and the clamp was gripping him in such a way that he couldn’t even move. The first arm of the clamp was resting under his head, but the next was pinning down his neck, and so on down his body, alternating over and under three or four times, so that he was incapable of even squirming. All he could do that was lay on his back, mouth open, and stare up at his fate.
“It’s very simple,” the girl said, sliding a clock underneath the clamp and positioning it so that the Man was in the middle with his arms and legs stretched out in a split. “The game begins when the second hand hits the twelve. Every ten seconds, I cut off one of the stupid Man’s body parts, working clockwise around him. First his right arm, then his right leg, then his…well, heh, I think you get the game.” She smirked again and licked the outer rim of her lips. “All you need to do is place a bet on the time you think he’ll die. If you’re closest, you win. If he survives the whole sixty seconds, I cut off his head and I win.”
Gena burst out laughing. “That’s terrible!”
“Terribly fun, I know.”
“But how do you determine if he’s dead?” Roxanne asked.
“When he stops screaming. Then I put my hair pin through his chest, it strikes the center of the clock, and time stops so we can locate our winner.”
The Man began gasping for air. “Please! Don’t do this to me… I won’t add so much salt to your food next time!”
“Tsk, tsk. You didn’t say, ‘Duchess, May I.’ I can’t let that go unpunished.”
“Please, May! I’m sorry! Oh, Duchess, forgive me…”
“Oh, boohoo, the little fa-reek is going to duh-aye.”
Gena beamed. “Duchess May, huh? I’m honored.”
“Yeah. You wanna bet or not?”
“I think we’ll just watch.”
“Whatever,” May shrugged, picking up a hairpin from the floor. She hovered it over the Man, poking the bridge of his nose and scratching it like he had an itch. Drops of blood began to stream across his eyes and he screamed. “I’m counting on you to survive the whole sixty seconds, so don’t let me down.”
“I hate you!” he cried, losing the hope he once had. “You selfish brat! For eight months, I’ve done nothing but wait on your every—”
To show her deep empathy for every word he was saying, she stuck out her tongue and began rocking her head in tune with the ticking second hand as it neared the twelve. The tip of the pin swung back and forth in front of the Man’s face, taunting him, making him bleed.
“Eight months,” he said again. “Eight months, May, that I slaved for you…”
“I guess you failed as a slave. Pretty pathetic, don’t you think? Couldn’t even wash my feet right.”
Some of the girls in the crowd giggled.
“Besides,” she whispered, leaning into his ear, “this is what happens to all my slaves. They’re just fodder for my playtime.”
The Man’s eyes widened just as the pin landed next to his neck. The cold blade touched his skin and he swallowed. One, two, three… Tick by tick, he felt the pin move towards his shoulder. Six, seven, eight…
“No, wait!” he yelled, but it was too late. On the tenth tick, the pin cut into his shoulder blade. It tore right through him, ripping through the muscle and tissue and bone like a slab of meat. He screamed, losing track of the seconds as the pin drifted to his legs and severed straight through his right thigh.
“Gross,” Roxanne laughed. The girls in the crowd were laughing, too, because they could see the expression on the Man’s face. It was frozen, twisted and gone, by the time the clock struck the seven. With a huff, May raised the hairpin and stabbed it through his chest.
“They always cop out at the six,” she muttered, brushing the coins on the ground to the feet of the girl who won. The girl clapped and giggled, scooping them up in her bare arms.
Sighing, May opened the clamp, brushing the Man away as casually and carelessly as she did to the coins. “Congratulations, peasant.”
“Thank you!” the girl said, starting to count her winnings. She was so happy that she didn’t even care May used her sleeve to wipe the blood off her clamp.
“Now then…” May said, putting her hair back into a bun. She clamped it shut and slid the hairpin through the bun, turning to Gena and Roxanne. “Lady Gena, it was a pleasure letting you meet me. We must do this again sometime.”
“Torture Men?” Gena grinned. “Any time, Duchess. Any time.” But she kept a careful hand over her plate, remembering that Frankie was somewhere under all that lettuce and cake. Probably shaking with fear.
Giantess World
