MAGNA-MAID and the League of Heroines
By Jeanne Thorne
(featuring characters created, and
neglected for far too long, by Jeb)
Daphne listened to the Queen of Clubs’ heavy, receding tread, her mind whirling. Then she turned on the table and with her free hand began unbuckling the other wrist-cuff. It fell away and she sat up, working quickly to free herself of the cuffs on her ankles. The last restraint undone, she felt a sudden flood of vitality returning to her limbs as the curse of being bound by a man lifted. By no means was she up to the power level afforded by her magic belt, but after days of utter helplessness, the return of even this much puissance was like the first thaw after a killing winter. She snapped the strap of her ballgag and spit the hated thing out.
Daphne rolled off the table and the remains of her outfit fell away from her magnificent body, leaving her naked except for her calf-hugging boots. She gave her nakedness little thought, however – on Elysium Island, Amazons never wore clothing except in war, and the outside world’s taboo against nudity had always struck her as odd. Besides, she had more important things to worry about, such as finding out where the Queen of Diamonds had taken Power Blonde before Clubs made good on her threat to harm Spellina.
Moving to the door of the Trophy Room, Daphne opened it a crack and peered out. Her eyes swept the main complex of the Queens’ lair beneath the catwalk leading to the “executive suite.” Henchmen, clad in their card-themed white uniforms, milled about, some loading large crates of some sort onto the back of a truck while others kicked back, taking advantage of their bosses’ absence to relax. Suddenly she heard one of the reclining goons shout to another, “Heyyyyy! Queen Butch just took the magician chick with ‘er, right? And Hearts took the Fox… and Diamonds took Blondie… which means…”
His partner bolted upright. “Which means Magna-Slut’s still up there… all alone…!”
The first thug grinned lasciviously. “Awwwww… you suppose she’s lonely up there, all tied up with her legs spread wide?”
“Real lonely, especially since Hearts has been workin’ them super-bitches up so much!” Goon Number Two stood up. “What say we go keep ‘er company?”
“What say we all go keep ‘er company?” the first goon leered. After days of watching the heroines writhing in sexual torment and being forbidden to touch them, the others needed no further convincing, and crates hit the ground on the spot. The company, all ten of them, fairly trampled each other rushing for the stairs.
Daphne stepped back from the door and to the side, assuming a martial-arts stance on the balls of her feet. The Flying Fox had often lectured her and her fellow Leaguers about not relying so much on their powers, but Daphne, warrior-born, had been the only one to take the lesson to heart. Now she gave a silent thanks to the Fox, along with a vow to rescue or avenge her friend, and waited as the goons jostled each other hurrying along the catwalk.
The first goon stumbled in and stopped as he saw the empty table and open cuffs. “Hey! The bitch is—“
“Right here!” Daphne snarled, grabbing the thug by his tunic front and flipping him bodily into the table. Before he had even landed, the Amazon had spun, driving an elbow into the second goon’s midsection, doubling him over before dispatching him with a neck-chop and tossing him aside. Wearing her belt, she would have simply thrown all ten men about like toys, but even her natural strength, fueled by her rage, endowed her blows with sledgehammer force. Hindered by the confines of the door, the henchmen were easy pickings for Daphne, who rendered seven of them unconscious or broken before the remaining three mustered the sense to run.
The Amazon leaped over the pile of bodies clogging up the doorway and ran the hindmost goon down, slamming his head into the catwalk railing with a resounding clang! She tossed his limp body aside and grabbed the next thug on the run, chucking him up and over the railing, enjoying his scream as he fell and landed onto a crate, splintering it.
The last remaining goon had fumbled a pistol from his belt and leveled it at the naked heroine’s head. “Hold it, bitch! Back off!”
With her eyes ablaze with battle-fury, Daphne’s grin was truly frightening. “Safety’s on, slick.”
The villain sneered, “C’mon, lady! That’s the oldest trick in the book.” Still, the goon’s eyes flicked to his gun… just for a split-second. More than enough time. Suddenly his gun was skittering across the catwalk and Daphne’s hand was crushing his windpipe.
“Stupid.” She brought his reddening, gasping face close to hers, her voice barely above a menacing whisper. “Such a stupid man shouldn’t be allowed to live.”
“Y-you…won’t… kill me…” the goon wheezed, his features taking on a bluish tint. “You’re a s-s—“
“A superheroine?” Daphne tightened her grip, teeth clenched. “That’s true, and ordinarily I wouldn’t kill you, but you see, I’ve had a really bad last couple of days, and you were about to rape me. So I’m not feeling terribly charitable. In fact…” Her free hand suddenly clamped hard between the goon’s legs and his eyes widened to saucer-size. “…I think I’ll start with this.”
“P-p-please…DON’T!” the goon gasped.
Daphne smiled unpleasantly. “Well… since you said ‘please’ I’ll give you exactly two seconds to start telling me where Diamonds took Power Blonde…”
#
The Blonde in question, meanwhile, was flat on her back and hard at work, fingers curled into claws as her legs and hips performed their inexorable task and she growled into her gag. She was not sweating – when one is able to stroll through the heart of a nuclear explosion unharmed, one does not sweat – but her powerful muscles had been corded for hours and she was beginning to feel the strain of her exertions.
Power Blonde lay on a platform of unbreakable impervium alloy, held fast to it by shackles of the same metal that held her wrists clamped at her sides and encircled her waist. Not that such measures were necessary to keep the heroine captive; the fine golden coils of Magna-Maid’s magic lasso that bound her legs at ankle and thigh performed that function ably. The shackles were there to give Power Blonde purchase while her bound legs maintained constant pressure on the giant vise at the end of the platform. Between the impervium plates of the vise solid rock popped and crunched in the grip of unthinkable compression.
The other end of the lasso was firmly in the grip of the Queen of Diamonds, who sat in a nearby folding chair admiring the jewels that sparkled on her fingers and wrists. Her brilliant baubles seemed to give off a light of their own, a light the villainess took comfort in as she sat in these less-than-opulent surroundings. Were it not crucial to her plans to be in this underground cavern, a mile beneath the hills of Kentucky, she would certainly have been anywhere else, preferably an anywhere that served Dom Perignon.
“HNNNNNGGHH!” Power Blonde snarled into the prod-gag that filled and covered her mouth, not from strain but from frustration. For the better part of a week now she had been under the thrall of the lasso, forced to do unspeakable things. That she, last daughter of Xenon, could be so utterly helpless and subservient to these fiends was unconscionable. And yet she had no choice. She could break mountains in two and approach the speed of light in flight, but even her limitless power was no match for the lasso’s will-sapping enchantment.
The Queen of Diamonds rose from her chair and strolled across the mine floor to stand over her captive. Power Blonde would have given anything to erase the smirk from the Queen’s face.
“What’s the matter, dear? Need to take a break? Oh, wait. You can’t, can you? My command was very explicit – ‘push the vise and maintain constant, even pressure until it closes.’” Diamonds crouched beside the straining heroine, admiring the lean but powerful abdominal muscles, flexing visibly beneath the tattered remains of her costume. “I had initially planned to have Clubs do the work, but she would have lost patience before long and stopped, and it is vital that this job not be interrupted.”
The glittering villainess stood again and lay a hand against the impervium plate above Power Blonde’s bound feet. “The age-old question, Power Blonde: ‘What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?’ The answer is ‘Nothing.’ But anything between them will be changed dramatically. Such as the half-ton of pure Kentucky coal you are currently compressing. Push too fast, it shatters. Push too slow, it crumbles. But squeeze it just right, emulating the pressure of thousands of tons of accumulated earth over eons, and what do you get?
“A diamond.” The Queen’s eyes glittered in the light from the hanging bulbs overhead like her jewels. “In this case the largest and most perfect diamond ever formed. And by forming that diamond, dear Power Blonde, you will have given me the key to absolute control of the world…”
#
CLANK!
CLANK!
Dangling high above the floor of the makeshift gym, Spellina tried in vain to shut out the sound of metal impacting metal, rhythmic as a piston in a machine, as the Queen of Clubs performed her devoirs with a massive steel barbell. The brutish villain, clad in a midriff tank top and bicycle shorts emblazoned with her playing-card symbol, stood on a broad metal plate with wires feeding off it to a small console that regulated a magnetic field. Without the field Clubs could have tossed the weight around like a whiffle-ball, but activated the contraption gave the barbell a simulated weight of countless tons. Clubs performed her standing presses with the relentless zeal of the true obsessive, her huge muscles cording grotesquely as she lifted and lowered, lifted and lowered. She had been at it for hours.
CLANK!
CLANK!
Spellina squirmed in the heavy ropes that wrapped her arms, chest, and legs, cutting into her and making breathing a chore. Clubs had bound her with only a small fraction of her strength, but it had been enough to make even the slightest movement a new experience in pain. It was even worse now, as Clubs had attached a hook on a chain and pulley to the cords crossing Spellina’s back and hauled her into the air to hang like a side of beef. She issued an involuntary moan into the gauze that filled her mouth, held in place by the wide leather strap that pressed tightly against her lips and cheeks.
Clubs snapped her head up at the sorceress’s muffled cry and dropped the weight with a resounding clang. “You made me lose count, bitch,” the villainess snarled, stepping off the plate. She glared at her captive for a beat, then her lips curled in a sneer. She lifted her arms and flexed biceps the size of basketballs. “You see that, magic lady? That’s power. Real power. The kind you can see and feel. No stupid gadgets or magic lassos or wimpy spells. Everything I need is right here in this body.”
The hulking female juggernaut chuckled, a sound that resembled nothing so much as two pieces of jagged metal grinding against each other. “Look at you, hangin’ up there like a freakin’ pinata. Can’t even get loose from a bit of string like that. Without your mouth, you’re nothin’. How’s it feel to be the – whaddayacallit – ‘Mistress of Magic’ and knowin’ you can be taken out by any random bozo with a pocket handkerchief? And you thought you could take me down? Me? What a joke.”
Clubs picked up a towel hanging across the magnetic-field console and draped it around her massive neck. “Nobody can take me, not even that slag Power Blonde, and we’re gonna decide that once and for all after your pal Magna-Maid sends her here. You better hope she does, too, ‘cause if the Blonde ain’t here to be my punchin’ bag in two days, guess who gets the job?” Clubs grinned horribly at Spellina and plodded out, leaving the heroine alone in the foul-smelling gym.
Finally. Spellina breathed a sigh of relief through her nose as the opportunity she had been waiting for arrived at last. Over the last few days the Siren of Sorcery had been attempting to put a plan into motion, but it required time and concentration. The almost hourly psychic ravishing by the Queen of Hearts had made that impossible back at the evildoers’ home base, and since their arrival here, the infernal clanking of Clubs’ workout equipment had been too potent a distraction.
Clubs had it wrong. They all did. Only another magician, like her father Spellino the Great who too had fought crime with his magic in an earlier day, could understand. The words Spellina uttered to wield magic were of little importance in and of themselves. What were they, after all, but phases in English pronounced backwards? If that was all it took the planet would be crawling with magicians.
No. The words were an aid to concentration, a focusing device to tap into the arcane forces that swirled all around like bright zephyrs that only the Initiated could see. Spellina would be the first to admit that she had come to rely too much on the ease of the verbal component to work her wonders, but it was possible to access the ethereal powers without it. Such a working, however, would depend on the strength of her will and time, precious time. Unfortunately, with her and her League sisters the helpless and tortured captives of the Queens, and the villains moving forward with their mysterious grand scheme, time was a luxury in very short supply.
Spellina shook her head, banishing the negative thought. She closed her eyes and began to will herself inward, shutting out the pain of her bondage and the threat of the Queens, searching her mind for the complex connections, like tumblers in a lock, that would open a channel to the awesome forces at her command…
#
“ ‘The Champion of Wertham City’… HAH!”
The blonde’s eyes glittered behind her stylized domino mask as she stared at the Flying Fox’s helpless form tightly strapped to the table. The Fox knew that look, the classic glassy stare of the dangerously deranged. She had seen it in the eyes of so many foes: the Jongleur… the Frost King… Deadly Sumac…
“Well, after today, the confusion is over.” The blonde leaned in close to the cowled heroine. “I’m going back to Wertham to take my rightful place, protecting the city, while you get what’s coming to you, you cheap impostor.”
The room was white and chrome, a rude parody of a doctor’s office, except that the gleaming, elaborate device that filled one corner of the room most definitely did not appear to be for any healing purpose. The Flying Fox lay on a padded examination table, naked but for cowl, gloves, and boots and swathed in leather straps that afforded her mere millimeters of movement at best. The straps cut into her flesh at shoulders and upper arms, forcing her breasts out between them as they crossed her chest, at elbow- and waist-level, pinning her arms tightly to her sides, and cinching her thighs, calves and ankles. Three wider bands attached to the table held her fast. Beneath the line of her cowl, the lower half of her face was a mass of white medical tape that sealed her lips and allowed almost no sound to escape. Still, the Fox’s eyes spoke volumes of defiance as they blazed up at the blonde.
The younger girl straightened herself, visibly unsettled by what she saw in the captive heroine’s eyes. She ran her gloved fingers through her hair and after a moment, the sneer of triumph returned. “Glare at me all you like, bitch. You lost. I won.”
“We won,” came the sultry purr of the Queen of Hearts as she entered the room. She gave the blonde a look as she approached the table. “And when you return to, ah, crimefighting, remember who your friends are.”
“Of course, Hearts,” the blonde said sulkily. “We have a deal.”
“Yes, we do.” Hearts bent over the bound, struggling Flying Fox, her full lips parted in a wanton smile. “Fighting to the last, are we? How noble.” Hearts let her eyes wander the length of the Fox’s naked body. “I’ve always been a fool for lost causes myself. I suppose it’s the romantic in me. Are you a romantic, dear?”
The villainess lay her hand upon the Fox’s engorged right breast and tweaked the helpless Fox’s mind. The heroine’s eyes widened as yet another wave of maddening desire swept through her body like wildfire from the point of contact, where her nipples instantly became rock-hard buds, southward to her sex, which gain became a burning thing with a mind of its own. Suddenly the straps on her thighs could not be tight enough as her nether muscles clenched like a steel trap. The Fox began to undulate in her bonds, straining against the leather and mewing into the unyielding tape. “Hmmmmmppphh! HMMMMPPPHH!”
Hearts smiled wider. “I guess you are.”
As her captive bucked and mewed, her head tossing from side to side, red hair spilling out over the table, Hearts could feel her own insatiable appetites surging to the fore. Over the years she had worked her spell over countless men and women, feeding on their lust even as she induced it within them, but never had she encountered such pent-up carnality as that which dwelt within the lithe form of the Flying Fox. Hearts felt like a lifelong junkie getting his first taste of the pure stuff… and wanting more. I’m a heroine addict, she giggled to herself as her hips began to grind against the table and her hand continued to torment the Fox’s hypersensitive breasts.
“Um… Hearts?” The blonde cleared her throat. “Don’t we have… work to do?”
The villainess sighed and made a face. Damn Diamonds and her Master Plan! She released her hold on the Fox, who collapsed in her bonds, breathing raggedly through her nose. Composing herself, Hearts looked down at the squirming Fox. “Sorry, little plaything, but she’s right.”
As she spoke, the blonde went to the corner and wheeled the fiendish-looking device over to the head of the table, where a sinister, needle-tipped probe came to rest just inches above the Fox’s widening eyes. Hearts stroked the captive heroine’s cheek. “We have a great deal of work to do… on you.”
To Be Continued… (honest!)