Tales From the Fae – Part V: The Academy of Dana

Chapter 10 – Traps

As the weeks wore on, our classes became more and more intense. Every day we were learning things that continued to shock us, even when we felt completely unshockable. About a quarter of the class was going topless now, and a few had even gone with less. I know Candice considered, and rejected, the idea, sticking to the principle that clothes were meant to enhance, not to hide. She wore them like most women wore jewelry. Just enough to dazzle without being gaudy. Besides, Rachael was already sporting straight skin, and sporting it well, so a student doing the same was redundant, and quite often nearly laughable. When it comes to sheer naked arousal power, you don’t ever want to compare yourself to a nymph.

That particular morning, Rachael had us gather closer to the central stage so that we could all see clearly. The desk was gone, and a chalked circle was drawn on the floor in its place. It appeared that it wasn’t a magical line, but rather a marker of sorts. She was careful to warn us away from the stage area, and the circle itself, as we crowded up around.

“Today we are going to work on traps,” she said, with her hands on her hips. “Traps are used for a number of purposes, including, but not limited to, restraint or delay, capture, distraction, confusion, as an attack; both feigned and real, and even for recreation. A trap may have, as its sole purpose, a simple sleight of hand to get you to go a certain way or miss a specific bit of information, and nothing more. Or, it could be there to kill you.”

She paused in her lecture long enough for the point to hit home and then continued. “A trap is simply a bit of creative magic, usually concealed, that can act completely autonomously. Some are quite meager in their construction, while others possess incredible complexity, creativity, even intelligence. It’s the latter kind that you need to be extra careful for because it’s almost a certainty that you won’t see them coming. Anyone with the ability and time to lay down that kind of magic is going to put extra effort into hiding it from you. Simple traps can be located much the same way that the early military located land mines. You use something to trip them from safety. But high-level traps are smart enough to know when someone is trying to fool them, and will wait.”

“I need a brave volunteer,” she said abruptly. The room was suddenly so quiet that you could have heard each of us holding our breath and hoping that the professor picked someone else. I think my heart rate about doubled before a very soft female voice from the back whispered, “I… I’ll d-d-do it, Miss Rachael.” It was Penelope, a rather small and shy girl who seemed to enjoy her own company. She wandered forward through her classmates until she stepped out in front of the nymph and gulped.

Rachael was beaming with pride. It was quite a jump for the blond-haired girl, who I remembered was floundering a bit in her studies.

“I want you to know, that you will not be hurt in any permanent physical way, although what I wish you to do will be both terrifying, and highly embarrassing. I need to demonstrate how an actual sexually enabled trap works, and it can’t be faked. You won’t be in any mortal danger, but there is the possibility that you may pass out from sexual stimulation. Do you still wish to be my volunteer?”

The young woman paused for a good five seconds before slowly nodding.

“Good girl. In a moment, I will have you walk into the chalked circle I have drawn on the floor. Inside that circle is a fully active high-level trap. It will attack you, and you should do your best to escape. Fight it with all you have. I promise you, no one will be laughing if you fail. This trap is beyond most, if not every single student in this room at this time. I’m not expecting you to be able to beat it.” Rachael then turned to all of us. “You will notice that the trap within the circle is quite hidden, even from most detection spells and glyphs. The reason for this is that traps are almost completely passive until they are activated. I will now use a very special enchantment to illuminate all forms of magic in a given area. We will operate within this enchantment for the duration of this class, so that you can actively see what is happening. Be warned, you will rarely have the time or the ability to use such magic in a practical day to day sense, so don’t think that you’re going to be able to see such creations coming before you encounter them.”

Rachael then carefully drew a long series of glowing letters in the air and then abruptly swept her hands out as though she were sweeping open a broad window. There was a soft amber light which seemed to fill the room like water, and we could suddenly see every single magical creation within the confines of the classroom. Candice and I had worked in such an environment with Professor Brightly and were ready for it, but many of the students gasped in shock. Not only was everyone’s MOS suddenly visible, but about two dozen randomly floating glyphs as well. And then there was the brightly glowing mass waiting silently within the circle.

It’s hard enough to describe something that has no form in the normally visible world, but the trap looked like it belonged on the surface of an entirely different planet. Imagine a giant donut made of clear blue jelly, which is covered on all sides by a multitude of short appendages resembling the eye-stalks on a snail.

“Oh my god…” said Michelle next to me. Penelope just gulped and looked like she was about to run from the room, and to hell with bravery. I was fighting back a fleeing sensation myself.

“Will it hurt?” she asked, looking back at the nymph as she slowly inched closer.

“Possibly some,” answered our instructor almost at once. “But its purpose is not to cause you pain. Quite the opposite in fact.” I don’t think Penelope really heard the last comment, as she was steeling herself to take a final large step into the middle of the chalk circle. And then she did.

There was a quick flash of light, and what was once an inanimate blob was suddenly very much alive. Penelope cried out once and it seemed as though she would have jumped straight up into the air but someone had nailed her shoes to the floor.

“A trap of this kind has three main phases,” started Rachael, shifting instantly into her role as our professor. She spoke quickly, and with greater intensity, her eyes never leaving the girl or the circle. “The purpose of the first is to detain. It needs to keep you within its range of influence, which is comparatively small, so it usually uses some form of fast-acting, and highly kinetic spell to do so. In short, it grabs hold.”

I watched with increasing alarm as this very thing was happening to poor Penelope. I could see that she was trying hard to pull her feet free of the now semi-solid blob of magic that they had been engulfed in, without much luck. From the expression on her face, and the soft whimpering she was making, I was pretty sure that Penelope was the only one in the room not paying utter attention to the nymph’s voice at that moment.

“It’s at this time that you have your one real chance to break free of a high-level trap. And right now is when most make the mistake of trying to use brute force instead of brains to escape. When dealing with a trap, you will rarely win by fighting it with muscle. Remember, unless you use some form of magic, it’s unlikely that you will ever even see what’s going on, let alone break free before the trap moves on to the next phase… Distraction.

“Since the creation itself usually doesn’t have any magical defense against you, it must rely on rendering you incapable of completing any offensive magic. It does this by using distraction. If you can’t concentrate, you can’t fight it magically, and to this end, it will use a wide variety of methods to keep you as dazzled as possible. One of the best such methods is the use of sexual stimulation. The reason for this is that the trap is able to use the energy created by your own arousal to feed itself. With every orgasm, you further lock in your own fate. ”

My mouth dropped open, and next to me Candice gasped. At Penelope’s ankles, some of the stalks had wrapped around her ankles and seemed to be “growing” up and around her legs. The girl’s whimpering turned to panicked curses as she watched the slowly advancing tentacles creeping up her limbs.

“Oh shit…. Oh shit!! Noooo…” Reaching down, the girl tried to grasp the magical tendrils with her hands in order to physically pull them away, but it was quickly obvious that she could not seem to get a grip on them to do so. To make matters worse, the trap now looked like a wild biology experiment gone horribly wrong, and was sprouting dozens more tentacles that reached hungrily for her wrists. In just moments, they had snared her left, then her right one and were twining up her arms as well as her legs.

“Part of the reason you can not fight against a trap of this kind physically is that the animated construct you see before you is made of nothing but kinetic energy. It can push against you, and you surely do feel it around you, but it has no real surface to grasp. But don’t let its near lack of friction let you think you can simply pull away. Just because you can’t hold it, doesn’t mean that it can’t hold you.”

Penelope was groaning in frustration as she helplessly watched the bluish mass climb her trembling body. She was able to pull herself almost back to an upright standing position, but her arms were held down at her sides, and it looked as though they were being pulled by the tendrils wrapped around them with considerable force.

As the winding fingers reached the girl’s upper thighs, Rachael continued. “The trap will seek to get under your clothing, so that it may have access to you more intimately, and while clothing may provide you some minimal and temporary protection against such an attack, I highly advise you never to rely on that for anything other than a bit more time. It will eventually find a way in, and most high-level traps are even intelligent enough to strip you if necessary.”

I saw that that wouldn’t be necessary in Penelope’s case as she was wearing a short skirt and a loose blouse. The only thing between her and the magical automaton that was attacking her was her panties and a few cheap buttons.

“You will notice,” continued the nymph, “that Miss Fairchild’s arms have been secured. In this position, unless she has prepared some form of pre-compiled verbal defense against this kind of magic, her fate is almost certainly sealed since she can no longer use her hands to initiate a charm or other spell. She is now completely at the mercy of whatever the trap has in store for her.”

A moment later, we saw exactly what it was the trap had in store. The creeping ends of the blue tentacles slipped under her skirt, and were out of sight for only a few seconds before Penelope gasped sharply and stared down at her lap in terror and confusion.

“Ughnnn! Nooo…. Ummmm…. AHH!” The girl’s hips jerked spastically as she started to moan and twist in her bondage, and her face was torn between fear and what I recognized at once as intense pleasure. We all knew what the magical construct was doing just out of view, but it was the speed at which Penelope was seduced that frightened us. It took only about thirty seconds before her hips started to shift rhythmically back and forth, and the thought of escape was clearly not the most prominent thing on her mind. Oh, she continued to struggle, growing more and more vocal all the time. But her cries were no longer in terror. She was driven from a cold start to a screaming orgasm in less than two minutes, tops, and I gulped and blushed as we watched her toss her head back in sharp rapture.

When her knees buckled, she slipped downward into the mass of the trap itself, and whatever was being done to her must have increased considerably because her eyes flew open and her breath was almost instantly reduced to quick gasps that seemed in sync with the jerking of her pelvis. Her face took on the pained look of bliss and we held our collective breath as she peaked a second time.

To say that watching her struggle in this way was personally arousing would have been a fantastic understatement. My nipples were so hard I could feel my own pulse, and I’m certain, by the embarrassed looks on a few of my classmate’s faces, that Penelope wasn’t the only one in the room getting off that morning.

While the girl continued to gasp and moan in forced pleasure, Rachael went on with her lecture. Her voice was so cool and serious that it was like a splash of cold water.

“Miss Fairchild, as you can see, has been successfully distracted by the trap, which can now move on to the next phase in its programming, if there is one. Since she is unable to resist or defend herself, it’s now quite easy for the construct to do whatever it wishes to her. It may be there only to detain her, which it can now do for days if necessary. Or, its ultimate purpose might be far more sinister in nature…”

We watched as more and more of the blue tentacles wound around Penelope’s body. The ones at her arms grew up into the sleeves of her blouse and extended around her chest. We could clearly see them caressing her breasts with slow intensity. Others erupted out from under the waistband of her skirt and moved up over her belly and back. By the time they reached her shoulders and neck, about eighty percent of the girl’s body was engulfed within the twisting mass of the construct, and her eyes had taken on the half-lidded daze of near-constant ecstasy.

And then I saw several thin filaments wind around her neck. Others drifted up over her face, continuing the onslaught of seductive caresses, but the ones just below were very slowly tightening.

“Oh my god…” gasped Candice at my side. “It’s strangling her!”

“Yes,” answered Rachael. “And it’s doubtful that Miss Fairchild is even aware of it at this point. Eventually, her subconscious mind will realize that something is wrong, but by then it will be far too late, even to struggle. In fact, it’s likely that she would experience a series of highly pleasurable orgasms just before she passes into unconsciousness and death.”

The nymph was already moving forward as Penelope’s eyes started to flutter, her body still rolling in the subconscious rhythm of intercourse. Rachael merely touched her finger along a certain section of the living construct and it vanished at once, leaving the girl’s body as limp as a rag doll, which she caught before it tipped to the floor.

“We will take a short recess while I attend to Miss Fairchild, and then we will begin your lessons on how to disarm and defeat traps such as these.”