Chapter 12. In which pressure takes its toll

Time flew by for Cindi in Themiscyra. Days were spent with her mother exploring the limits of each other’s secrets. Cindi learned more than she had ever imagined there was to know about the early history of the Amazons. But she never found out that Hippolyta’s fondest desire in life was to run off and find her lost love.

Hippolyta learned of her daughter’s first love, separated from her almost immediately by an ocean and the better part of two continents, killed just scant weeks later before she ever saw him again. But she never learned more about her daughter’s mysterious new God-slash-Lover.

They exchanged story upon story of victory, of defeat, of survival, of fallen comrades. They learned how alike and how different they were, both in ways they never would have imagined.

Evenings were spent with Kalliope and other friends, reliving century after century of grand adventure and little mundane jokes that only they understood. Even so, ever-perceptive Kalliope began to suspect that her offhand comment that first night had hit the mark. Her beautiful, smart, passionate, courageous friend was saying goodbye — to her friends, to her mother, to the Queendom of Themiscyra itself.

At “night” Cindi spent mornings and early afternoons with me, pushing the limits of taboos and exploring the depths of her submission.

Scene:

She was eating her lunch from a plate on the floor, naked in a posh restaurant, of which there were several in my twelve block “clothing optional” zone. Other patrons were shocked, not necessarily by the nudity — people other than Cindi could and did come here naked sometimes — but by her wantonness.

With her head down in her plate on the floor and her ass pressing against my side, she sighed, moaned, squealed whenever I touched her. Women, and some men, were livid and embarrassed. Other men, and some women, were aroused and unable to take their eyes off of us. Cindi was putting on a show, hoping I would reward her performance. Later I did.

Scene:

I brought Cindi to the gym — naked, collared, and leashed, of course; the gym was within my twelve blocks — and introduced her to the three guys, all “Ten Thousanders”, with whom I/Greg played basketball most days after work.

Instead of our usual two-on-two, I suggested a game of H-O-R-S-E, with Cindi as the prize for the winner. To make it more interesting I added the rule that Cindi would grant the winner up to five “wishes” with one less wish for each letter the winner had accrued. I played to lose of course. The point was for her to be a party favor for someone else.

For her part, Cindi got creative. She knelt and sat back against the wall behind the hoop doing her best to distract the shooter. Whenever one of the guys missed a shot, Cindi rose up on her knees, cupped her breasts, tweaked her nipples, and moaned loudly.

After about an hour, the winner, Julia’s husband Fred, claimed his prize with a score of H-O-R. He and Cindi disappeared and came back almost two hours later, both disheveled with broad satisfied grins, having put his two wishes to very good use. Cindi walked home heeling behind me with someone else’s cum dribbling down her chin and chest.

Scene:

Cindi was the “hostess of honor” at a nyotaimori luncheon for Western Australia’s wealthy and powerful. Chopsticks played across her body. Sushi disappeared revealing the skin beneath. Cindi remained perfectly still except for facial expressions, all of which reflected respect, desire, happiness.

This stillness became difficult when the sushi was gone and the men and women amused themselves by applying the chopsticks to her directly, but she persevered. She visibly warmed when she saw me nodding and smiling at her.

After the party was over, the sushi chef, a minor celebrity in his profession, took part of his payment in services, which Cindi happily rendered, still unmoving except for head and mouth.

Every degradation met with smiling approval and “good girl” affirmations from me. These expressions were at variance with my actual feelings though, to say the least. For example, at the gym I had been annoyed with Cindi’s happiness at “meeting my friends”, her ready willingness to play the whore for them.

And when the sushi chef had been fucking Cindi’s face my stomach was churning. At one point when he paused overlong with his member fully thrust down her throat, I seeded him loudly, in Japanese, with his mother’s voice, «“Let the poor girl breathe!”». He looked around startled, maybe even a bit frightened, and pulled back.

On the walk home I had been torn up about what he... what I had done to her, but Cindi saw none of that.

Through all this Greg’s body seemed to be coming down with something. One day during Cindi’s “Themiscyra” time I had a doctor come over. Yes, doctors still made house calls ... for billionaires. His diagnosis: “stress”.

I was livid. “That’s the best you can do?”

“Mr. Wolfe,” he replied, calmly, evenly, “I’m very good at what I do, otherwise I would not be here now. I know what I’m talking about. Something has you so keyed up that your body is rebelling. If you know what it is, you need to deal with it. If you don’t know what it is, you need to figure it out, and deal with it. In the latter case, I can refer you to some excellent psychiatric experts, but I suspect the same person who found me could give you as good a list, if not a better one.”

I calmed myself, thanked him, and showed him out.

On the morning of the fifth day of Cindi’s Themiscyra vacation Cindi and Hippolyta were having a late breakfast and planning their day. Then she heard, in her room, buried in her rucksack, the unmistakable sound of the LoH communicator’s emergency beacon. Hippolyta was surprised when her daughter stopped talking in mid-sentence and ran upstairs.

When she returned she was wearing her Majestic Woman togs, now minus the crown, of course.

“It’s an ‘all hands’ alert, Mother.”

“But you’re on leave. Surely they won’t miss —”

“Mother ... In the history of the Legion there have only been three all hands alerts.”

“Well, Kynthia, this could be the first without you.”

“Two of those were alien invasions.”

“But that doesn’t mean —”

“We’re expecting an alien invasion, the first one we’ve ever anticipated.”

“Even so, that doesn’t mean you have —”

“I wrote the defense plan. They’re all counting on me.”

“Go,” said Hippolyta, exasperated, flummoxed, but somewhere under it all, proud, “I’ll be here when you are done.”

Then something changed on Hippolyta’s face. Pride had risen to the surface. She hurried across the room. She grabbed her daughter in a fierce hug. “I love you, Daughter of Heracles.”

Tears suddenly welling in her eyes, Cindi responded, “I love you, My True Queen.”

And with that Cindi was gone. She picked a random direction and flew at top speed for about ten minutes. She was obscuring the location of Themiscyra from the LoH.

During that flight time she tried to pump me for information, but I reminded her of Blake’s “demonstration” a few days ago.

«“Think how suspicious it would have been if you had been expecting it. I can’t tell you what it is. But I can tell you that it’s a matter of life and death, every bit deserving of an all hands alert.”»

Her locator turned itself on. She was the only LoH member with an “off” switch for her communicator’s locator function, and it only worked within a two-hundred-mile radius of Athens; it had been her negotiated condition for accepting the thing in the first place.

As soon as the locator came completely online she signalled for pickup.

The familiar tingle of the teleporter gave way to the unfamiliar sight of the main concourse of Spyglass packed wall-to-wall with heroes. Catching Blake’s eye across the impassable room, Cindi mouthed a silent question, “Betelgeuse?” Blake frowned slightly and shook his head “No”.

Cindi watched as he turned his head to the extremely agitated gesticulating hero standing next to him. It was Power Man. Even her hearing couldn’t make out what they were saying over the general murmur of two hundred voices. But even without hearing them, what she could see of them told a story.

She had never seen Claud this upset before and with good reason. Life had taught the Rheonian superhero to keep a tight rein on his emotions. People got hurt when he lost control.

Cindi could relate. She remembered her own early days at the secret government research center in the Arizona desert.

War Department, Washington, DC, May 8, 1941

It had been weeks since she had first made her pitch to that British air marshal to join in the fight against the Nazis, and yet she was further from the front lines than ever. These “Americans” weren’t even in the war yet, but here she was separated from the action by an entire ocean. It made her furious. She had done everything they asked of her.

First she had gone to Allied Command in London, far from the front lines. She had to give them the same demonstration that she had given Prestridge in Crete. When they were finally satisfied with her bona fides, they sent her all the way across the Atlantic ... to the cowardly Americans who hadn’t even joined the fight!

It turned out that the disdain was mutual. When they had interrogated her about the source of her powers, they openly scoffed at the truth!

“Look honey,” the chief interrogator had finally said, “You don’t have to make up some nutso story about Greek Gods. If you don’t want to tell us how you got this way, don’t tell us.”

She nearly killed the man, but the Compassion of Aphrodite ultimately saved him. Holding him in the air by his throat, she decided that ignorance, even invincible ignorance, was not a capital offense. She dropped him and let him scurry away. She let him live. Hours later, when an older, gray-haired man entered the room, he seemed more ... respectful.

“Look Miss ... Kynthia. We really don’t know what to do with you. The Brits are in the middle of the fight of their lives and so they don’t have the time and the resources to study a, uh, phenomenon like you. They are proposing,” he waved the envelope holding Prestridge’s Project: Majestic letter, “that we study you to see if we can replicate your powers in regular troops.”

Kynthia began to shake her head.

“Now, now, ma’am, just hear me out. You alone would be an incredible help to the war effort, but imagine the impact that ten of you would have! A Hundred! A Thousand!”

Wearily Kynthia responded, “Look, Mister —”

“Colonel, uh, Colonel Johnson”

“— Colonel Johnson, you just don’t understand —”

“Please, ma’am, just give us a chance. Our egghead types are doing some amazing, magical things. I talked to a team in New Mexico the other day that thinks they can turn a radioactive pile into a bomb that could wipe out a whole city! Who is to say that they can’t reverse engineer whatever science ... or ... or-or magic these, um, ‘Gods’ used on you, and turn it into something that could benefit the whole army? C’mon, yes, I admit it’s a one-in-a-million shot, but if we did it, wouldn’t that be better than having just one wom- of-of-of you?”

Ignoring the typical male smugness that he was trying so hard to suppress, she had to admit he was right. She had seen first-hand how science had transformed the world in the last two hundred or so years. She had to admit that she would not be terribly surprised if their scientists could figure out how to mass-produce her Gods-Gifted powers like so many automobiles. She agreed to give it a chance, on the promise that if they hadn’t made any progress in six months they would ask Britain to give her some kind of sanction to fight within the Allied command structure.

Project Majestic, Arizona, May 17, 1941, and after

So, there she was at some secret US Government research facility in some Gods-forsaken place called “Arizona”. Actually, the place had kind of grown on her, the desert had a kind of rugged, austere beauty that was different than the Arabian and African deserts she was more familiar with. She even had a kind of grudging respect for the “eggheads” who treated her like some sort of lab rat. Truth to tell she had learned a great deal about her new powers from their methodical probing. But she yearned to get back to Europe, to join in the fight.

Not long after she arrived, news came down that Crete was under siege. She pressed the military heads of the science base for information about Crete, and about her lover, Simon Tremaine. After another two weeks, well after the Nazis had overrun the island. Kynthia finally got word about Simon. Apparently when Nazi paratroopers landed in the infirmary compound, Simon, in hospital pajamas, had taken up a rifle and a helmet from a dead soldier and fought off the devils until he ran out of ammo. They had rushed his position and killed him immediately.

Kynthia had reacted not with mourning, but with rage. She should have been out there, fighting the Nazis, defending beleaguered Europe, saving lives. But she was thinking about one life in particular. One life that she would never see again.

It had been about three AM the next night, the night after she had received word of Simon’s death. It was during the umpteenth retry of a test to measure her night vision. Stupid things kept going wrong with the test. They had been at it for hours, no closer to getting the data they wanted than they were at the start.

Once again something went wrong with the measuring apparatus. Kynthia lost control. She broke an innocent researcher’s jaw. After that she was labeled a “hormonal woman” and a “loose cannon”, and that was just in the official reports. It took another five months of patient bridge-building on her part, and corresponding failure on the part of the researchers, before they allowed her into combat.

Well, the attack on Pearl Harbor helped move things along too.

«That night when I lost control I must have looked just like Claud does now.»

Blake put a hand on Claud’s shoulder, but Claud shrugged it off with enough force to make Blake’s hand seem to leap back.

«Time for Majestic Woman to step up.»

She flew slowly over the crowd and alighted next to the pair.

“ ... Four days, Blake. It’s been four days!”

“Claud, were gonna find her. But we need time and clear heads to do it.”

Cindi interrupted, “I don’t think he’s trying to help at all, Claud. I brought that can of whoop-ass that I was saving up for you. Maybe we should open it up together on Blake?”

Claud rounded on her with wild eyes and gritted teeth, and, seeing her sardonic “Church Lady” smirk, suddenly burst out laughing. Blake and Cynthia gathered their friend into a hug as the big man’s laughter turned to helpless tears.

Cindi stage-whispered, “Somebody wanna tell me what’s going on here?”

Claud pointed to Blake. In his best “Just the facts, ma’am” voice, Blake began, “Powerhouse is missing. Sadie was last seen by her roommate at Cornell Friday morning before classes. She was supposed to meet Claud for dinner Friday evening in Cosmopolis, but never showed. They had had some ... heated moments of late, and she,” he glanced at Claud, “she was ‘feeling her oats’ lately, being away from home for the first time since the Wilsons adopted her. So Claud just assumed she had stood him up. He was annoyed,” another glance, “but put it out of his mind.”

“Sadie’s mother tried to contact Sadie’s roommate Monday morning, after Sadie missed the family’s regular Sunday evening call and wasn’t answering her phone. Sadie’s roommate, Carol, finally called back late Monday evening. Sadie’s cell phone had been in the charger on her desk all weekend and all day Monday. Her bed was made and hadn’t been touched all weekend. Carol said, rather indelicately, to Mrs. Wilson, ‘Sadie really likes rush parties. I just assumed she had met a guy.’ The Wilsons asked Carol if she knew any students who were in any of Sadie’s classes. Carol checked around the dorm. She called the Wilsons an hour later, now worried herself because Sadie had missed all her classes. Sadie never missed class. That was when the Wilsons contacted the police ... and Claud. And that brings us all here.”

A last look at Claud, who nodded back.

“So,” Cindi recapped, “the second most powerful person on the face of the Earth has been missing for four days. Call me an idiot, but what about her locator?”

Claud fielded this one. “In her dorm room in Ithaca, in the bottom of her sock drawer. That’s what we fought about the last time I saw her. She never did learn how to adjust the communicator volume settings. One day it went off in her English class, loudly. It embarrassed her, all the more so because the professor made a big deal about it. She’s been leaving it in her room ever since.

“She said she doesn’t mean to leave it behind when she’s in uniform, but she’s gotten out of the habit of carrying it, and she forgets. She said,” Claud paused, gathering himself, “She said she didn’t see what the big deal was, and she wished I would ‘get off her back’ about it.”

Cindi tried her best now to ignore his struggle to keep his cool; he was clearly winning. She probed further, “So was she wearing her uniform?”