Outsiders Pt. 03

He grabbed her hand and effortlessly dragged her back to the den. "Ben!? What's wrong!? Let go of me! You're ripping my arm off!"

He tossed her on the couch and said, "How many?"

"How many what," she barked back at him. "How many crazy Bens does it take to rip my arm out of its socket? Just the one!"

Ben grabbed her by the throat and lifted her off the couch. Even with his forty percent bump to strength, he was feeling the strain of lifting a person that was only a little lighter than him. His whole back was locked up under the strain and even his legs were clenching up. "How many people did you kill for your looks," he spat out through clenched teeth. "How many people did Simon kill to try and get power?"

She clutched at his hand on her throat and tried to croak out a reply. He tossed her back down on the couch. She coughed to clear her throat and recover. "How many!?!"

She flinched and swallowed heavily. "I don't know what you're talking about," she said in a hoarse voice. She sounded genuinely terrified.

"I'm done with playing games, Raven," he said. "Either you tell me the whole truth and go to the cops to face the music, or I take your mind, right here, right now!" He clenched up his fists in rage. "And, sweetie? You really don't want to find out what I've got in store for you."

Raven looked even paler than usual as she said, "I don't know what you're talking about."

"There is no win for you, Raven. You can only choose how badly you lose. I'm on to you. You can talk freely and do the time for your crimes, or I will take your mind and make you talk. And if I take your mind, I won't see any reason to keep back from hurting you in the most horrid ways I can imagine."

Raven shivered on the couch and hyperventilated. "I don't know what you're-"

"Perhaps you need a demonstration," Ben said. He sent Lisa the order to tell them all something incredibly embarrasing, something like her most closely kept secret. "Listen to Lisa! She's going to tell us her darkest secret and that's the least I'll do to you!"

"I climaxed when the paramedic raped me in the van," Lisa calmly said, shocking Ben. "I had never had an orgasm before that and I would dearly love to try and be someone's sex slave, tied up and used for pleasure, cause I suspect that I would really, really enjoy it. Sometimes, I used to touch myself and think about-"

Ben finally snapped out of it and sent her the order to stop talking. His ears burned red with what he had done to the girl. First he had taken her will in a panic and now he had her reveal her most intimate secrets in a rage. He decided to postpone beating himself about it until later. He had a mass murderess to deal with, first. "That's what you'll be doing, Raven," he said. "You'll be spilling your guts in a minute, one way or another. This is your last chance to confess your crimes and keep your mind intact!"

Raven shook her head in a blind panic. "No," she said. "I am not lying to you!" Ben sent Krista the order to hold Raven down and then sent Lisa the same order. He began to cast the spell of Dominate Person on Raven. During the six seconds he chanted and gestured, Raven tried to fight the girls off, but they held her down with single-minded strength. Ben's spell slammed into her mind and completely took it over.

He sent each of the girls the order to relax and calmly sit down on the couch, starting with Raven. Now that he had four slaves under his power, three of whom were right in front of him, he was acutely aware of the limitations of the spell. He could only issue one order at a time to just one mind. Even if he wanted all three girls to do the exact same thing, he needed to issue three separate orders and he couldn't do anthing else while he sent the orders.

He sat at his desk and took a pencil and piece of paper. He sent Raven the order to tell him exactly how many people she had killed.

"None," she said. Ben blinked twice in surprise and then sent her the order to tell him the truth about how many people she had killed. "None," she said again.

Ben gaped at her without comprehending. He sent her the order to tell him the truth about the ritual that transformed him into a level nineteen sorcerer. She failed to resist his order and told him what she had already told him, only this time she confessed to scurrying away from Simon precisely so he wouldn't botch his ritual. He sent her the order to tell him about her transformation spells, both the initial one and the one that he dispelled. She told him that she hadn't been disfigured, merely ugly, and that both the spells had been cast at once, on the same night that Simon's ritual had transformed Ben.

Ben struggled to reconcile what he had learned about freeform magic with the fact that she was obeying his orders to tell him the truth. She had only tried to resist the first one. She continued to explain how she had performed her ritual of transformation and said that she hadn't drawn any of the symbols or spells, Simon had.

Ben sent her the order to recall and draw the spells that she had seen drawn that night. She hadn't seen any of the spells drawn on her, but she had seen some of the spells that Simon had drawn on himself and she took his sketch pad and pencil and began to draw them.

Ben read the spells and quickly saw that she had been telling the truth. The price for all the transformations had been paid in advance, mening that Simon had been the one that had killed a whole bunch of innocent people. He sent her the order to tell him the truth about whether she had ever suspected that Simon was killing people.

"No," she said. "He had a collection of odd knives, but he said they were antiques. Just for show. He did draw our blood for some spells, but he used a needle to the elbow for those." She paused drawing to mime a standard phlebotomy procedure.

He wiped his face in frustration. He now knew how to transform people's bodies, or give them magical power, but only if he was willing to kill other people. He knew, in his heart of hearts, that he couldn't ever do either ritual, or even the minor spells from Raven's website. Even if faced with transforming someone's severed spine into its healed form at the price of a serial killer's life, he wouldn't make the choice. He just couldn't.

All his efforts of the day were starting to feel evil. He took two innocent minds and gained terrible knowledge. "Best case scenario," he thought, "is that I never use any of these spells and today is a complete waste of time and effort."

He put his face in his hands and shook his head in bewilderment. He had set out today to find out why Simon had been killed and by whom exactly, and he wound up wanting to join the three dead catholics in their fell crusade. He probably would do it, if he hadn't seen them try to kill an innocent without so much as a questioning beforehand. He groaned out his disappointment.

"Ben," Raves said with a trembling voice, "why did you just order me to tell you if I had killed people?"

Ben looked at her face, scrunched up in fearful anticipation of his answer. He asked himself if he could share his burden with her and tell her the truth about the thing that powered their transformations. He decided that he couldn't. It was almost too much for him to bear and he suspected she would be rendered catatonic by the revelation. "Some things are best left hidden," he told himself. The other two girls looked very interested in his answer, too. He focused on all three links to their minds to see if they fall for his bluff.

Ben smiled, hoping to draw all of his Charisma modifiers and Bluff skill into his voice and expression as he said, "No particular reason. I just wanted to know for sure that I wasn't dealing with a murderess. Can't have that, you know. Evil cultists, sacrificing people and getting away with it." He sensed the three of them felt relief at his words and knew they fell for it. "I want to know about these Outsiders your trigger spell mentioned. Who are they?" He sent her the order to tell him the truth about them.

"The Outsiders are beings that exist outside the confines of time and space. They are the source of all magic. If one wants to do magic, one has to do it according to their rules and rituals."

"I don't," Ben said. "I do it according to a different set of rules."

Raven nodded. "The ritual that was meant to give Simon magical power was meant to allow him to form his own rules of personal magic. When the power went to you, it was formed according to your own rules, but the ritual to draw upon the power in the first place had to be done according to the rules of The Outsiders."

"Well, what are they," Ben asked.

"The Outsiders are unfathomable," Raven said. "I don't know anything else about them. All I do know is what Simon had told me. They are on the other end of every magical spell that's been drawn here today."

Ben closed his eyes and hung his head. The one thing he knew with utter certainty was that whoever these Outsiders were, they were utterly evil. They demanded death as payment for casting their spells and they had consumed all of Lisa's friends when the first one fell down and gave power to the spells they had drawn upon their faces with her own, unfortunate demise.

"Ben," Lisa said. He lifted his eyes to look upon her frightened countenance. "Can you dispel whatever spell is on me?" He frowned and gave her a questioning look. "The spell that makes me see the writings after they had been cast. Can you dispel it, please? I don't want to die like my friends. Please!"

"You're not going to die," Ben said. "There is no spell on you. You're safe!"

"Then why can I see the spells after the blood that drew them vanished?"

"It was the first spell you saw, the one that Cassie had drawn on her face," he said. "It didn't have its circle around it."He swept his hand over the mess of drawings on his desk. "See how each and every spell is inscribed inside a circle? That circle contains and focuses the spell on a single target, or purpose. It's also what makes the writings vanish after the spell is activated. When you saw your friend die, you saw a spell activate without containment and the raw magic of it appears to have left its mark on your retinas. Kinda like staring at a bright light does. Except that, instead of blinding you, it makes you see active spells. So it's actually nothing like a bright light and that was the worst analogy I've ever made."

"Why did my friends follow Cassie in death?"

Ben was nearly moved to tears by the despondent look on Lisa's face. "Cassie had drawn a spell on her face that would bequeath her inner power to The Outsiders after her death. However, she drew it without containment so it activated all Outsider spells in the vicinity."

"I don't understand why that would make the rest of them die, too," Lisa said, sounding like she was on the verge of tears.

"Because they miswrote the spells and offered themselves up as willing sacrifices," he said.

Lisa burried her face in her hands and cried. Ben felt the grief and loss his words made her feel all over again. They also made it more horrible by revealing how banal the cause of their deaths was. A typo. He wished he could give the girl some comfort. He wished he knew what to say.

"I'm sorry, Lisa," he said. "If I could bring your friends back in any way, I would, consequences be darned. But I can't. I don't have the power. I can't change what's been done, just like no one else can. All we can do is look to the future." He felt bad for the stream of platitudes that were coming out of his mouth, but he could feel them resonate in Lisa's mind, so he kept them coming. "We have no choice but to accept the past and learn from it. We now know that these spells are extremely dangerous and that even the smallest mistake can have the gravest of consequences. I will see to it that your friends haven't died in vain. I'm going to make it my personal mission in life to extinguish all knowledge of these Outsiders and their spells."

He felt his last statement light a fire in her soul. She stopped crying and raised her head. "And I will help you do it," she said.

Ben found himself admiring her quiet resolve, but he said, "No," all the same. "I'm setting you free and sending you home. All of you." He felt his words made Krista and Raven feel scared of losing him, but he felt Lisa's anger rise and focused on that, instead.

"If you set me free, I'm staying right here, next to you," Lisa said. "You need me. I can see active spells. You need my eyes."

"No," Ben said. "I'm not going to keep any of you as my slaves."

"You have to," Lisa said. "If you keep me enslaved, you can order me to recall with perfect clarity even something I had only seen for an instant out of the corner of my eye."

Ben clasped his hands plaintively in front of his face and said, "While that is true and I appreciate the offer, Lisa, this is going to be a dangerous quest and I think it might be best for you to go home. All of you."

"If you let us go," Raven said, "we'll tell on you."

"And who will believe you," Ben asked. "One of you is, at the moment, an escapee from a mental health facility where she had been placed against her will by the FBI. The other probably has all the local police forces in the nation looking for her under various aliases and the third transformed her body on Saturday night and doesn't have any valid ID that resembles her anymore. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that exactly no one will believe a single word you say about me. No one would even bother coming here to see if you really had been with me for a few days. It's like Lisa's rapist said, no one listens to crazy people, no matter what they say.

"Now, here's what's gonna happen! You are going to tell me things that you would really, really hate doing and I am going to order you to do them until you've had too much and your minds break free of my control."

"That's terrible," Raven said.

"Yeah, what's your game, here," Krista said, "torture us until we break? How does that set us free?"

"No, no, no," Ben said, "I'm not going to torture you. You see, my spell of domination allows you a chance to break free if you're given an order you really don't want to follow, that conflicts with your most dearly held beliefs, like all the orders I've given you to be civil to Raven." Raven frowned and looked incredulously at Krista. "If they allow you to break free, you're free! If not, I order you to stop and no harm comes to you."

"If we know that you'll reverse the orders and no harm will come to us," Krista said, "then why would we try to break free of them? It makes no sense."

"Can't you just end the spell," Raven asked.

"No, I can't end it," Ben reluctantly said. "Once I take your mind, it's mine for nineteen days unless you break free. But it's ok! I do have a spell that can release you and we can try it that way. It's just a long shot and takes a lot of time. Honestly, with the orders, you can be free in no time."

"But we'll be free anyway," Raven said, "in nineteen days?" Ben nodded yes. "Cool. Then let's do the nineteen day thing!"

Ben felt Krista feel threatened by Raven's words and was confused by it. "Yes," she said, "I would like to be kept as your slave for nineteen more days, too, please!"

"Sixteen," he said. "I took you on Tuesday evening." He was baffled by Raven feeling threatened by Krista's suggestion. The girls looked to be on the verge of starting a cat fight over which one got to stay with him. He pointed a finger at Krista. "You wanted to be let go last night. You practically demanded I release you from slavery."

He felt Raven pleased at hearing his words. "Not every girl is suited for the lifestyle," she smugly said.

"I've since changed my mind," Krista said in a very deliberate tome of voice. "And I didn't want to be sent away from you, I just wanted to adjust our dynamics as a couple."

Ben felt Raven be insulted with Krista calling the two of them a couple and he sighed in annoyance. The whole thing was getting out of hand. "Shut up, both of you," he said. "You are a con artist that took my money from me and tried to do so again after I took your mind." He felt Raven's glee at hearing that so he pointed at her. "And you are a dupe that Simon used as a guinea pig and you kept lying to my face even after I confronted you about it. Neither one of you is the type of person I'd like to hang out with under normal circumstances so what makes you think I'd want to keep you around now?" Both girls looked to be at a loss for words. He could feel them be concerned that he would truly send them away. "You've got nothing, huh?"

He sent Krista the order to tell the truth about why she wanted to remain his slave.

"Because you're exciting and new, Ben," she said. "You're different from literally every other guy on the planet. And in a good way. The time we spent together on Wednesday in Italy and on that island in the Pacific was the best time of my life. If being your slave is the price for it, then I gladly pay it. I want excitement and adventure in my life and I want them with someone I can trust. And that's you, Ben. Also, I fucking hate this blonde bitch for being prettier than me with her giant, perky tits and her perfect ass and... I want to defeat her perfection by showing you that I'm the girl for you and inspire you to be with me and not her. We can have so many fabulous adventures together! We can see the whole world!"

He sent an insulted and beligerent Raven the order to tell the truth about why she wanted to remain his slave.

"Well, aside from the excitement and adventure Krista mentioned," she said, "you're also the most powerful man in the world and just being around you makes me feel safer than any other place on this Earth could. I think that you wouldn't abuse me and that I'd be completely safe under your command. I'd prefer to be free and with you but, if being your slave for three weeks is the price of staying near you, than I gladly accept it! Also, it's because I think that you will decide that I'm the hottest chick in the world and the only one worthy of being your main squeeze. But, mostly, it's because I'm afraid for my life and you're the guy that can protect me."

"Oh, please, keep me, too," Lisa said, plaintively. "I don't want anything, I just want to be treated as a sex object!"

"What," Ben barked out. "No! No way! I'm not keeping a single one of you crazies!"

"Why not," the three girls asked in unison.

"Because it's wrong," Ben said.

"But, if we want to," Lisa said.

"I don't want to," Ben said, cutting her off.

"Bullshit," Krista said. "I've seen the way you look at her udders." She nodded towards Raven. "You can't tell me your dick doesn't get hard just thinking about them."

"That's beside the point," Ben said. "I am not going to use you as sex toys and that's final!"

"You already did it with me," Krista said.

"You started it the first time," he said, "and the rest was part of your punishment for stealing my money. Punishment that your sick, sex-obsessed mind came up with on its own, might I add."

"Sick," Krista said, disbelievingly. "Sex-obsessed? Oh, please, don't tell me you subscribe to the misogynistic belief that women have no sex drive or fantasies! Or that, if they do have them, they shouldn't!"

"No," Ben said, offended. "I'm not a misogynist! I'm a feminist and I respect women! I just... There's right and there's wrong, ok? And I'm not gonna..."

"Nothing can be wrong between consenting adults," Krista said. "We're all adults here. Right, Lisa? How old are you?"

"I'll turn nineteen in October," Lisa said.

"There you go, Ben," Krista said, "four legal adults trying to come up with an intimate arrangement between themselves. There can be nothing wrong about that."