Chapter 9A

Day 14, Sunday

As I told Ma and Doug, I spent much of the morning alone in my room studying. Studying the bits and pieces on my models. Not the monster truck I'd bought though I'd use that as well but two slightly smaller versions, each with special qualities.

Each had a GPS unit -- MILSPEC settings for greater accuracy with ultrasonic transducers for supplementary radar-like imaging -- and a device for recording it all. The other nifty addition was a video camera; poor resolution but small enough to be considered a headlight.

A back channel to the controls allowed the signals to be linked to a computer where I could load a program to drive them over a set course.

Both were functioning in all regards and I had extra battery packs ready-charged. I packed them away in a shopping bag with the controls in a back pack ready for the afternoon and found a book to read as I relaxed.

Doug gave me a lift into town and I then grabbed a bus to where I'd arranged to meet Mark. He was alone and I naturally sat in the front as he drove me home.

"How was the club?" I asked, easing my hand along his thigh.

"I can't believe I haven't done it before. Picked up a girl, I mean. But you! Two!"

"That wasn't planned but I guess it didn't hurt did it."

"You didn't really fuck both of them?"

"Hell no. A little grope, they think you're wonderful. People smell a little pussy on you and hey! Stories get told faster than you could make them up."

"I don't think I could go as far as groping."

"So next time I shake hands with you and you don't wash it off until people have had a chance to get a whiff."

Mark thought about it. "Yeah! That would work. Thanks."

"You can thank me later."

Our entrance to Mark's home was not to be a repeat of the earlier visit. What would have happened if I had turned up alone -- especially if unexpected -- I can only wonder about. His father was at home and the servants seemed more servile and also more security conscious. I had no doubts they had performed adequately before but now they had to be seen to be giving their all.

Mark led me upstairs, making no attempt to introduce me to the other members of his family -- previously absent.

Mark called out from the top of the stairs. "Kyra! We're here!"

Anyone in the vicinity would have heard that I was here to see Kyra as well. She opened her door and it looked as though she had prepared herself specially for me. She was really something to see.

"Wow!"

We went into her room.

"You didn't 'Wow' me!"

"Buddy, you're a gorgeous hunk all the time -- even when you dress daggy -- but today... ," I indicated Kyra, "well! Stunning!"

"Thank you," she responded demurely before asking, as if I was Santa Claus, "What's in the sack?"

"Some toys of mine I thought we might like to play with."

"Kinky I hope! Can I see?"

"In a minute my dear. I have to thank your brother properly for picking me up."

Mark had been waiting to see if I was still interested in him; my activities over the last two nights had gone further than he considered necessary for cover. He certainly didn't want to listen to my answer when Kyra pushed to hear about what had happened even before we had stopped kissing.

"You tell her. I'll be back in a while."

"Don't be too long; there's not a lot to tell and I have some ideas I hope you'll like."

He got a briefer kiss before I let him go and then I concentrated on Kyra.

The school's dress policy was aimed at safety rather than modesty but there was no way Kyra would have been able to wear this outfit. Guys would have been trampled trying to catch a glimpse of her let alone the grave likelihood she would have been raped many times over.

I suspect the top was supposed to be worn with pants; I know it should have been worn with panties! It certainly showed how her high heels stretched her calves out. If Kyra had just stood still it wouldn't have mattered but she insisted on walking which caused the hem to sway and bounce, revealing a hint of muff.

Then again, bending over in front of me wasn't actually any worse than correctly bending her knees to pick something up while facing me.

And that wasn't considering how she looked above the waistline!

Her top had an open neckline -- not a plunging one; it has to actually be a neck-line for it to plunge. It was more that the two sides of her collar met somewhere below her belly button.

The loose folds of fabric hung across her breasts providing an adequate cover but non-existent protection.

I approached. "May I?"

Kyra just smiled. I stood a step away from her and took each lapel in a hand and opened them wide. Was the red collar and the cut supposed to imitate her labia? Closed more it might have been more accurate with her belly button a stylised cunt or perhaps piss hole and her throat a clit that drew one to kiss it.

Her exposed breasts ruined that illusion but I couldn't complain. Kyra had applied cosmetics. Rouge or lip paint? I don't know? The result was prominent red nips that drew my eyes; stop signs that conversely told me I should go -- and not out the door.

"Wow!" I might be getting repetitive but, really, there wasn't anything else to be said.

"Charmer! Tell me what you got up to then. I didn't see any scratches on you or either of the girls."

"I convinced them that fighting was beneath them..."

Kyra scoffed.

" ... and pointed out that I wouldn't ask either of them out again if we didn't come to a satisfactory agreement."

Kyra's breasts filled my hands and we kissed, her arms looped around my neck.

"I can believe that they were more concerned about missing out on you. How did you cement the pact? Fuck them both in the park?"

"Why the park? Just curious mind."

"Well it is the only place close by where you could but I don't really think you went there. The police patrol it regularly so you would have been taken back to the station while their parents were called instead of coming back to the club with stinky fingers."

"There are other places -- if all you plan on doing can be hidden by a table top." I let Kyra make her own assumptions.

"So you missed out? Aw."

"Or just conserved my strength for today. Are you interested in some serious loving later?"

"With you?" Kyra stepped back and waved her lapels at me by shaking her shoulders. "You need to ask?"

Mark tapped on the door and entered. Kyra easily recognised the difference between her brother and anyone else but I turned automatically to the left, ready to ungallantly swing Kyra across as a shield.

I relaxed. Mark had a couple of sodas and a bag of corn chips.

"Here" He handed us a can each and popped his own before sagging onto the end of his sister's bed.

"So what have you got in your packs?"

"You remember the remote control model cars I was telling you about?"

"Model cars! I thought it was something sexy."

"They will be -- trust me. Here, let me show you."

I released Kyra and gave her my can. The cars came out first and then the controls. In honour of Kyra's outfit I turned the red one on first and sent it spinning around the room.

"If it was life-size I might get excited but why do you think that would make me hot?"

"It is quite powerful. I can take it mountain climbing. Want to see?"

"Okay, show me." Mark gave the other car a close inspection while Kyra spoke.

"The only thing that's touchy is the antenna wire. If it bends you never quite get the kink out. Everything else is either unbreakable or doesn't matter. There's a switch underneath and then one on the side of the controls." Mark found the buttons while I took charge of Kyra.

"Put the cans out the way; where they won't get knocked over. Right now lay down here. No, I'm not kidding. Good. And can you spread your top. Nice! Very Nice!"

I made sure Kyra was aware that opening her front lifted a hem that wasn't successfully covering her anyway.

"Stay still."

I made the car perform a high speed circle, coming back to race up one side of her and then back down to race down the other -- she must have felt the wind pass her bare arms and legs. I brought it around and bumped against the soles of her feet.

"That tickles."

"Stay still!"

The best path would require I send my vehicle up Kyra's ankle, although climbing her wrist to her waist wasn't a bad alternative if I could get her to move her arm out from her side a little.

She giggled, reminding me of Rosalee, as I pushed the controls forward and it found traction. A little burst of power and a quick turn and it was on top of her.

"Keep your knees together."

I ran the car across her shins and onto her thighs. I had been carefully driving parallel to the meeting of Kyra's legs but now made a tiny diversion so the studded tyre crossed the underbrush rather than the bare ground.

Another giggle but older, sexier.

We hit the plains and Kyra was almost laughing.

"It feels funny."

It would feel something else in a second I hoped.

Kyra's eyes crossed as one tyre rose up her breast, tilting the vehicle precariously. I brought it to rest and flicked a couple of switches; the other three wheels were now locked. I pressed the accelerator lever forward just a fraction and the wheel began to turn -- alone. At higher speeds this would have been painful and could have been injurious. With my deft touch I kept changing the gear from forward to reverse so my barely moving tyre simply pushed Kyra's nipple back and forth.

Kyra burst out laughing from her joy at my ingenuity rather than to ridicule me. The shaking of her body threatened the stability of the car; I released the wheels and drove it off her shoulder, the back wheel following the front up and over the mound with it's hard spiky summit.

"Earthquake!" Mark teased and when Kyra laughed again he pointed to her shaking breasts and added, "It's off the Richter scale."

"Can they do anything else?" asked Kyra. I declined to ask if she was referring to her tits rather than the cars.

"I've got one trick that might be useful. Can I put a program on your computer?" I looked from one to the other.

"What is it?" asked Kyra.

"It uses the controls to drive the cars for us."

"It's safe?"

"I got the source from a hobby group and added some more smarts to it myself so I know it doesn't do anything else."

"Okay then."

I plugged in my mem-drive and copied across a simple program that did exactly what I said it did. The other files on the stick of RAM were exactly the mix of garbage and useful tools a seventeen year old hobbyist would be expected to have; my viruses and hacking tools were hidden away where only I could get them and I didn't need them for this job.

"Now what?"

I plugged the controls into the PC and initialised the interface.

"Okay, let me train them."

I made the red car perform a large figure-8 after pressing a couple of keys. Then I got the yellow car to perform an overlapping circle.

"Now watch this." I put the controls down and went to the computer desk instead.

The red car started around the track, the difference between my starting and finishing points smoothed out by the software.

I let it run slowly, not at all impressive to watch, until I had spotted when to bring the other car into play as well.

I wasn't perfect but that was why I started slowly. It gave me time to throttle back and then to accelerate once more. The computer controlled the path, I the absolute speed.

Now I had them synched I revved them up a little higher. Still okay, a little more. Now it was quite spectacular and I had seen it before! Still the sameness did get boring so I halted the program after a while.

"Not bad driving. What else can they do?" Mark was quite interested in them.

"Lie down on your back and he'll show you," teased Kyra.

"Well if we map out an area one car can find the other."

"How?"

I took up one of the controls and made the yellow car perform a circuit of the room.

"That's the included space; now we need to define the excluded spaces."

I drove the car in a rectangle around Kyra's settee, coffee table and recliner. As I did so the white shape that had appeared on the black background began to develop black holes.

"Okay Mark, drive the red car anywhere you like. I'll put mine against the wall where it will hide it's eyes and count to one hundred -- or five if we want a shorter count down."

Mark put his car between the coffee table and the sofa.

"Okay? You won't need your controls."

I clicked a button on the computer screen. My car backed away from the wall and began an odd journey. It turned around slowly then darted across the floor until it stopped just before the wall then span around again.

It appeared crazy but it was breaking the area up into a number of overlapping slivers. Pictures from its camera would be compared against slightly different ones where parallax allowed the relative nearness of an object to roughly calculated. It didn't even need to use the ultrasonics.

The system couldn't see as such, it could only pick up the boundary between light and dark or patches of colour. It wasn't bad at working out what didn't belong in the designated "empty" area.

Mark had given it pretty good cover but it was just a matter of time before my car found it. The bumper bar gently hit the stationary car on the side and the red car accelerated away to a neutral corner while the yellow car moved off more sedately to come to rest some distance away.

"What's happening?" asked Mark.

"The yellow car tagged the red one so it's gone to count while the red one is hiding."

"You're joking!"

"The computer is playing hide and seek -- with itself? Doesn't it cheat?" asked Kyra.

"It could but that would be no fun. The computer can know things with two different parts of its memory and not share the information. That way the second part, that's the red car now, has to find where the first part has moved to."

"How big an area can it search?" asked Mark.

"I've had it in a back yard with plenty of obstacles but it took more like half an hour."

"Our backyard is gigantic -- it would probably take a week."

There was a tap at the bedroom door and Kyra motioned for Mark to take it while she disappeared into her bathroom.

"I think I know who this might be..." Mark pulled the door open and a younger girl stood there.

"Hi Mark. What's the noise? Cool. Can I see them? Oh, hello."

"Hi there," I answered.

"Michelle, this is Roger from school, the cars are his. Roger this is The Brat, otherwise allegedly my younger sister Michelle or Shelly or Belly Button Breath or Sme..." He deliberately paused.

"Enough!" Michelle cried out. "I'll tell Dad you are picking on me. Where's Kyra?"

"You love it Brat. She's gone where all the good girls go. You know where that is don't you?"

"No."

"Oh, so you're not a good girl then. Maybe I should tell Dad that you admitted you weren't good."

Michelle poked her tongue out at him. It was a side of Mark he kept concealed.

There was the muted sound of probably unnecessary flushing and Kyra rejoined us. Loose floppy pants now covered her legs and an old sweater had replaced the designer top though I noted Kyra still hadn't bothered with a bra.

"You in my room again!"

"Mark let me in."

"Hey, I just opened the door."

"You don't mind me being here, do you Roger?"

"Don't involve guests! Now apologise."

"Sorry Roger."

"Forgiven Michelle." It was an interesting insight into the family's dynamics.

Mark and Kyra's mother had been divorced when they had been quite small and their father had remarried shortly thereafter to ensure they had someone to care for them. It certainly could not have been for his own needs (Ha!) and he certainly wouldn't let their mother take care of them.

She started seeing lawyers to improve her access and perhaps even get custody but she should have realised from the initial judge's ruling of her as unfit that her ex-husband was not to be trifled with.

Her suit was never filed. There was no-one to direct the lawyer to do so and a colleague suggested to him in passing that his career would not suffer by an absence of any missing person's report.

Beverley arrived at the alter with Michelle already prominent inside her. Thirteen years older than his new twenty year old bride, Adam Pringle didn't mind another addition to his family; it proved his virility to those who judged manliness by a person's motile semen count.

Kyra didn't mind her new step-mother at first but when Michelle was born and Kyra, not only displaced as Only Daughter but doubly now as Daddy's Favourite Female, began to feel an antipathy towards both her new sister and that sister's mother.

Mark on the other hand was in eager six year old mode, willing to follow his toddling sister around when his new mommy asked him to while managing to still stay close to his twin. With no stronger link than any other brother and sister except a greater degree of shared experiences, Mark and Kyra grew stronger through adversity -- a series of nanny types; child minders of one sort or another whose job was mainly to see that Daddy's kids were only there when he wanted them. He did a lot of his business from home and couldn't have his spawn underfoot.

That was with the exception of his youngest, and an only child for her mother. Adam didn't want to ruin Beverley's figure.

Michelle had been introduced unknowingly to some of society's scum who, since they were never told otherwise, believed her an only child. That doesn't mean they were disreputable lowlifes. No, scum floats to the top and so these were highly reputable lowlifes.

Adam found himself becoming a bigger fish in just the right-sized pond. There was enough wealth, power, and opportunity around to give him and his family the best of everything without the worry that others would be tempted to add his slice of the pie to their plates. That sort of thing was supposed to occur in the biggest population centres but here he knew his "rivals" personally and, since their interests only slightly overlapped, the city had remained strife-free and they had been similarly kept free of hassles thanks to police and DAs who owed them favours.

Adam could give his family the best of everything but he chose to send Mark and Kyra to the local state school. That might have actually been the best for them since, as their father's (often exaggerated) reputation became more widely known, their classmates saw it more as a matter of bravado and disobedience to befriend them. At a more exclusive school the "friendships" might possibly have been based on future opportunity.

But the friendships were platonic -- Mark not wanting a girlfriend and the boys generally steering clear of a girl who might be dangerous to dump. What they got from the others was unsatisfactory to their emerging sexual selves -- which put them at my mercy.

But I had to put my plans on hold a little longer while this youngster was here.

"You're still here!"

"Mark, would your father mind if we drove them around the back yard for a while. I was thinking on that lawn area we can see from the window."

Kyra looked disgusted with me.

"No, he's over the other side of the house so the noise won't bother him."

He too was puzzled. Going outside wasn't going to let us fool around and his pants kept getting crowded each time he thought of us together.

"I was curious how well the transmitters would work over this distance. We can try to drive them from up here." I looked at Kyra, "And perhaps then Michelle can watch them without getting into trouble."

Michelle looked at me as if I was a hero defending her from a grouchy old dragon.

"That would be great!"

"How about you race them down there, if it would be okay driving them inside?" I checked with Mark. "It will since Michelle will be involved," he admitted without rancour towards her. Any disappointment would only be with his father.

"Okay then, Michelle, don't run down the stairs -- they have to go slow so that would be cheating. Do you want red or yellow Mark?"

He took one set of controls after I disconnected them from the computer.

"Coming with us Kyra or staying here? We won't be long."

"I'll wait here -- where it's quiet!" She answered me while glaring at her sister.

"Okay then." I turned to instruct Mark. "Throttle back and brake gently on the stairs. If they don't have too much speed they should be okay. Don't worry if they tumble -- but try not to crash into the wall or anything valuable -- I don't want a bill for repainting or a replacement Ming vase."

Kyra opened the door and shooed her sister through. Eyes raised to heaven she sent us out as well.

I made my car move past Michelle to herd her.

"I'll race you to the top of the stairs -- but don't go down them. We'll start fresh at the bottom because the stairs are a skill challenge not speed. Right?"

"Okay."

The car raced towards Michelle's ankles and bit into the floor as it came to an abrupt halt without touching her. I gave the lever a little jab and the bumper hit the side of her shoe. Michelle moved, suddenly, and was off. I pushed the lever forward and it was off, following her with a shrill, small motor scream.

She sped down the corridor, pulling herself up short by grabbing the corner of the balustrade. My car raced past her, slowing and then performing a clumsy three-point turn to come back to where Mark had the red car waiting.

"Now just try to keep it straight and moving forward with just the back wheels braking. If it lifts up and the car is still moving the front will get out from under the centre of balance before it has a chance to flip."

"What?" chorused both Mark and Michelle.

"Just keep moving forward -- slowly!"

I demonstrated. It was really like running down a hill -- a controlled fall. You couldn't try to stop or you'd tumble, the best you could hope for was to keep your feet and try not to accelerate too much.

There was a turn I managed by taking it wide at the start and turning early so the angle never got too great. The bottom half of the staircase I had to manage by watching through the upright posts.

Mark crashed on the corner to Michelle's delight -- he hadn't done badly to get it there though but he had left his turn too late and built up too much sideways movement. His car didn't quite turn completely over but the wheels, spinning faster as they passed over the temporary top of the vehicle, skidded against the woodwork and sped it ever faster towards the bottom.

"Throttle back! Don't brake! Steer straight!" There wasn't time for me to pass on all the necessary instructions nor for Mark to heed them. The car toppled forward, catching and passing my yellow model waiting patiently at the foot of the stairs.

"I'm glad you manage your car a bit more carefully," I teased, giving him a punch to the shoulder.

Had his father been watching we would have been two guys fooling around with guy things and no suggestion of us being shy and sensitive soul-mates. A bit stereotypical perhaps but after Mark's earlier "adventure" that is how I read Adam Pringle's view of his son.

There was no sign of "Dad" as I was led through the downstairs hallway by a chattering Michelle. She kept going on about the spectacular spill and wasn't my driving fantastic and how she wished she could have a turn and...

"Enough Shelley. If you can keep quiet maybe Roger will let you try the controls." His eyes pleaded for me to grant her wish.