A Different Kind of Dungeon Master

(Note: This story contains graphic sexual descriptions, including some very lighthearted, affectionate, responsible roleplaying of a non-con fantasy. The actual participants are enthusiastically consenting and, of course, over 18. It's m/f femsub, and the most intense elements are some bondage so light that it's literally imaginary, and a brief moment of self-administered pussy spanking. Starts out as a slowburn romance and gets hot and heavy about halfway through. For the reading pleasure of interested adults only.)

***

My improbable adventures in sexual domination started completely without warning, on a Saturday night a couple years after college.

I was sitting on the couch in my apartment, with my arm around my best friend, Rachel, who was sobbing into my favorite Renaissance Faire cloak.

"This is pathetic," she said, sitting up, blowing her nose, and putting her glasses back on.

She had done this three times already — said something final-sounding and started cleaning herself up as if she intended to change the mood, but none of her previous attempts had lasted long enough for us to make a start on the new RPG campaign I'd designed for us.

I was kind of glad she wasn't set on playing the game. I'd put a lot of work into it, with the expectation that her boyfriend, Cameron, would be joining us. I'd put in lots of little moments where the two of them would have to work together, and although it would be possible for Rachel to just play multiple characters to get through it, I suspected it would be more of a painful reminder than a distraction from the fact that Cameron was, for whatever reason, not here.

Rachel hadn't gotten around to sharing the details yet, and knowing her, they'd be sparse when she did.

Another wave of tears hit her, she took the glasses off, and I put my cloak back around her. I would have liked to hug her properly, head on, but then she might rest her ear on my chest and hear how rapidly my heart was beating.

This was not the first time we had gone through these motions.

Rachel had had eight boyfriends over the course of the seven years I'd known her, and every single one of them had left her sobbing into one or another of my costumes somehow.

It felt like I was going to die, every time. Partly because it hurt so bad to see Rachel in pain, and partly because whenever she broke up, it meant the guy was going to disappear from my life too. It almost always happened once I'd come to think of him as at least a casual friend, which I didn't exactly have a ton of.

These guys weren't the stereotypical red-flag-athons you'd expect to see with someone who'd had eight serious boyfriends in seven years. I never knew what happened between them behind closed doors, but Rachel always seemed, at least from an outside perspective, to have pretty solid taste. Cameron had been my favorite so far. He'd shown up to my mom's funeral with a bouquet of daffodils, which I think I'd mentioned her liking maybe once before.

But I'd be lying if I said that was what was bothering me most.

The truth was, Rachel's breakups sent me into a cold sweat, because her having a boyfriend made things... simple.

When she had a boyfriend, I could tell myself that that was it. The current guy across the gaming table from me was the one who would be her permanent, endgame partner. Any window where I could have been that guy was closed and gone, and that was just the way things went.

It was fine.

It was good.

It was better that way, in fact, because it meant Rachel and I could stay friends forever. I'd always have her in my life, for this one sacred gaming night, every two weeks.

There was no risk of ending up a footnote on her list of exes.

As long as Rachel was with Cameron, I was safe.

But if she told me right now that Cameron was fully out of the picture, or had done something that meant he should be out of the picture, there was a very real danger that I might try to kiss her, and end up making everything worse.

Rachel blew her nose again, and let out a long sigh. My heart hammered in the silence.

"I wish I could just feel normal things," she said, clutching her d20 die to her chest. "Want normal things. If I could just do that, maybe I'd be happy by now."

"I'm... not sure what you mean by normal," I said honestly. "Are you... are you trying to...?"

My stomach tightened with the opposing hope and horror of finding myself truly, permanently safe.

"Because, I mean..." I forced myself to say it. "If you were gay, you could tell me. It wouldn't change—"

"I'm attracted to men," Rachel stopped me, firm and confident, and the pressure on my stomach lifted, or at least shifted angle. "Trust me, if all I was missing in a partner was boobs, I'd have gone and found someone who had them by now. What I want... I'm starting to think it may not be out there."

"Oh," I said. "Um, well, what do you... If you don't mind—"

"I know you want me to tell you, Seth," Rachel said flatly. "How it ended. How it always ends."

My breath caught in my chest. So it had ended, then.

"I know I'm being cryptic and ridiculous," she said.

"No!" I said. "But I mean, if you wanted to tell—"

"I feel like I'm taking such horrible advantage of you," she said. "By not telling you. It's like I'm tricking you into not making fun of me. But I just don't know if I could take hearing it from you too."

"I wouldn't make fun of you," I said.

"Oh, you would," she accused. "You'd say, 'That does it, Rachel. You're living proof that women have an insatiable appetite for asshole, metaphorically and possibly literally, and it's your own fault you can't ever be happy!'"

"That doesn't sound like me," I said. "Or like making fun of someone. More like a prelude to violence."

"Well I don't have an insatiable appetite for asshole!"

"Okay."

"I can't stand it. When a man treats me like he thinks I'm something other than a person, I literally want him dead."

"I'm aware," I said. "I was there when you punched Codey. It was dope."

"And then I want to vomit all over his corpse," Rachel ranted on. "Does that sound like an insatiable appetite?"

"Nope."

I paused a moment, in case she wanted to keep going.

When she returned to silence, I asked, "Did Cameron turn out to be an asshole?"

Rachel sighed again, heavily, winding her braid around her fingers.

"No. I don't know. I don't think so."

I watched her, helplessly, for some scrap of anything that I could say something intelligent about.

Rachel watched me watch, snorted grimly, and shook her head.

"Fuck it," she said. "I asked Cameron to try something in bed that he... wasn't up for."

"Oh," I said, nodding in what I hoped was a reassuringly adult manner. "Like, a different position, or-"

"I asked him to pretend," Rachel winced at herself and kept her eyes screwed shut as she spoke, "that he'd kidnapped me, and, like, was going to do whatever he wanted with me, until he found a way to make me like it."

"Oh! Oh, wow. Okay." I strained for another dose of reassuring maturity. "I mean... cool. So, you said that, and then he...?"

"He said something like, 'you know I'm not that kind of guy,' and I said, 'duh, of course I know, that's literally the only reason I'd trust you to act like one!'" Rachel rolled her eyes. "And it seemed like he almost understood that, for a minute, because he actually kinda tried for me. But it was just..."

"...Bad?"

"It was so bad," Rachel confirmed. "He was all self-conscious and uncomfortable, and he kept asking what I wanted him to do. And when I said I wanted him to tell me what to do, he kind of threw up his hands and said, 'Can't we just do the usual?' And then I told him... maybe I shouldn't have told him. It made him really mad."

She put a hand over the bright pink splotch of shame blooming on the cheek closest to me.

"I told him I'd been faking with him all this time," she said softly. "It's not his fault. He tried so hard, and he had no way of knowing that I wasn't turned on enough for any of it to work, because I never told him before. But I couldn't just let him know he was getting nowhere when he touched me, without letting him know why! And I couldn't tell someone this shit about me, when we were just starting out together. And once I started lying...."

She folded her arms on top of her knees and buried her face in them.

"Maybe I should have just kept faking my way through the sex," she said. "He was so good to me, in so many other ways. I could have just gritted through—"

"You deserve better than having to 'grit through' your whole sex life," I said.

Rachel shrugged and let out a snort of air. "What if it's not about deserving? What if the kind of, you know, sex god I've got my heart set on, what if it's not actually possible for him to overlap with the kind of man I can trust and respect? The kind who doesn't expect to be treated like god of everything all the time."

She sat back on the couch and wiped her face.

"I just want sex to be..." she turned her d20 thoughtfully in her hand, "to be like this, actually. Like playing one of your games. I want to give myself over to a magical world, where I don't know exactly what's going to happen, but I do know that I'm going on an adventure run by someone who wants me to have fun. Someone who gets that it won't be fun if he makes it too easy for me. I want someone who makes me argue. Like, I'll say, 'I should be able to do the thing because xyz,' and he'll hear me out and sometimes say yes, but he won't be afraid to say no when I'm bending the rules too far. When I'm making it less fun. And then, I want him to be able to switch it the fuck off and just be my normal, equal friend again when we're done or need a break. That's what I want. I want my sex life to be run by a good DM. Is that so much to ask?"

She looked up at me, her bloodshot eyes wide and focused, one eyebrow lifted inquisitively upward.

Jesus Christ, if that's not what a window looks like, I'll never recognize one.

"Give me ten minutes," I said.

#

It was the fastest, most slapdash setup I'd ever done, for the most important game of my life. I was going to have to improv so much stuff on the fly.

Yet from the moment I sat down at my bedroom desk and started sketching characters and writing out stats, I felt calmer than I had at any point on the couch that evening.

I knew exactly what I was doing.

When I returned to the living room, Rachel burst out laughing, and I didn't even care.

I had changed out of my wizard's attire and into a black roughspun shirt, with a lace-up neck which I left deliberately loose. I'd done my eyeliner too, something I'd never done for anyone but myself before. I hadn't yet learned how to be the most precise with it, but I didn't need to be, to get that sunken, punky, ambiguously undead look I was going for.

Rachel put a hand over her still smiling mouth.

Laughs always came first for new characters, and then all the other feelings.

I sat in the folding chair on the opposite side of the coffee table, where I would have been sitting all along if Cameron had been there on the couch with her.

"You remember that young human spy character you were working on?" I asked.

"Arianna Brighton?" she said.

I tossed her the character sheet.

"You, Arianna, have just been sacrificed to the demon prince, Bastidio, as his latest virgin bride."

Rachel giggled again, and her eyes glinted with joy, as well as amusement.

"It was your own idea, a way of infiltrating his home in Hell," I went on with the setup. "Getting yourself on the bride roster was the easy part. This guy goes through 'brides' on a monthly basis, so even the regions that worship him unquestioningly are in constant short supply. The real challenge starts now. Your top-secret mission here is to search Bastidio's personal files for the sins of one particular dead man, one Earnest Kniles. As a failsafe, your handler sent you in with a magic escape word: flutterby. If you so much as think this word with intention to use it, you'll be instantly transported back to Earth. The longer you spend in Bastidio's presence, however, the more you expose yourself to his infernal gifts of persuasion. It would be easy to lose yourself here, and forget that you ever had a will of your own."

Rachel rubbed her palms together in anticipation.

"After you allow Bastidio's Earthly acolytes to kick you through the sacrificial portal, you materialize in a palatial dining room, sitting at a table long enough to host a hundred people. All of that space is empty at the moment, except for yourself, and, on your left, at the head of the table, the prince himself. Right now, he looks basically like a man. Very handsome, in a sickly, malnourished, Burtonesque kind of way. But he does have a prominent pair of ridged horns, and when he moves, you notice that the speed and effort of his motions don't quite line up with what you'd expect for the dimensions of his body. There's clearly something bigger and incomprehensibly more powerful controlling this form of a man in front of you."

"Uh huh. So, am I dead now?" Rachel asked.

"You're, like, provisionally dead," I explained. "You could theoretically just stay here like this and be immortal if nothing changed, but you still have the ability to return to Earth in your own body as a living person. You can also be injured and killed just like on Earth, and potentially end up in a different part of the afterlife."

"Okay, cool."

"Prince Bastidio leans forward to take your hand," I said, and leaned forward to take Rachel's. "'Welcome home, Ms. Brighton. I know this may not be the existence you imagined for yourself, but please believe me when I tell you, all of Hell and Earth salute your sacrifice.' And he slides out of his chair, onto his knee, and kisses your hand."

As I narrated, I did the same, holding Rachel's gaze as I took one knee and pressed my lips to the soft skin between her knuckles.

During an everyday game, I tended to get pretty into my gestures as I strove to embody all of the NPCs the players interacted with. While caught in the moment, I might reach out to hold someone's hand, but that was about all the contact I'd go for.

To my relief, Rachel watched me cross that line and grinned, like it was exactly what she'd been hoping for.

Okay. So, this game wasn't going to be just words and dice and paper.

Rachel squeezed my hand, held the moment a little longer, and then said, "So, I can roll for insight on this guy, yeah?"

"Go for it."

She rolled. "Sixteen plus two... eighteen."

"Eighteen? Nice. You don't sense any direct deception from Prince Bastidio. He has secrets, for sure, but he honestly does seem to want you to feel comfortable and appreciated, if possible."

"Do I have my weapons?"

"No. You were sent through the portal in just ceremonial, like, baptismal clothes."

"Are there knives at the dinner table?"

"...Sure, you see some steak knives lying around."

"I stab him in the neck and run for his office."

I laughed. "Already? We're going right from hello to neck stabbing?"

"I came here to do a job, didn't I?" asked Rachel.

I'd had this whole simmering dinner scene sketched out in my mind, but frustrating as it could be, this was a big part of why I loved playing with Rachel. Stories were much less interesting when they played out unchallenged, exactly the way I'd predicted.

"Roll to attack," I said.

Rachel rolled. "Natural twenty, baby!"

"Seriously?" I laughed. "Roll for damage then."

She did.

"You plunge the serrated blade into the meat of his neck, right about where his carotid artery would be flowing if he were a living human, dealing seven points of damage and taking him completely off guard."

Rachel acted out my narration with a thankfully imaginary knife, and I gurgled and stumbled backward.

"So now you're running down the completely unfamiliar hallways of a palace in Hell, I reminded her. Roll for perception."

"Seventeen," Rachel rolled and checked her character sheet. "Plus... that makes twenty-one total."

"Unreal," I said. "There's a door up ahead on your left that says, 'Prince Bastidio's Office, please knock before entering.' It's slightly ajar."

"I investigate the room, to see if I can figure out how he stores his files on individual sinners."

"Awesome. Roll for it."

Rachel tossed the die and winced. "Ooh, natural one. Do I, like, give myself a horrible papercut rifling through his files?"

"Files? What files?" I joked. "You see arcane instruments, indecipherable runes, nothing that says 'filing system' to you."

"Hmm. Okay. No, wait." Rachel pointed to a line on her character sheet. "I'm going to use 'indirect breakthrough.' When I fail at figuring something out, it makes it so that I instead stumble on some unrelated but significant information."

"Nice. Let's see...." The sparseness of the scenario I'd planned out gave me a narrow range of breakthroughs to offer her. "What you do see is a map of Hell on the wall. You see Prince Bastidio's territory demarcated within it. That territory is labeled, 'Pits of Casual Cruelty.' There are spots marked around the border, showing the wards that contain the souls that dwell here, the souls condemned for just everyday but relentless, remorseless shittiness. Each ward has its current strength level marked, kind of like the battery symbol on a cell phone. None of them are doing great. Below the map is a leger. You can't read most of what's in it, but there are lists of names, written in their original Earthly tongues."

"Are they women's names?" Rachel asked.

"They are women's names," I confirmed. "And there's a column of what look like numbers on the right side, which shift from black to red as the pages go on, as if an enterprise is sinking slowly into debt."

"The virgin sacrifices hold the damned souls in place!" Rachel deduced with satisfaction. "Can I tell who set up that bullshit system?"

"There are more legers in this room, dating back to time immemorial, basically."

"And how old is Prince Bastidio?"

"From your preexisting research, his cult only came into being about three hundred years ago."

"Ah, so, he inherited the whole deflowering virgins to keep the wards of Hell in place job."

"For his particular region of Hell, yes, that seems to be the case."

"Got it. I love me a complicated fictional badboy."

"I know," I said, smirking.

I'd based Bastidio largely on the characters Rachel had most enjoyed hitting on in past campaigns, and I felt the warm little glow that came with eliciting exactly the reaction I'd been aiming for.

"Prince Bastidio unhurriedly catches up and enters the office behind you," I said.

"Hey, so, hubby," said Rachel. "What you do looks super fascinating. Before we get down to business, could you maybe walk me through a day in the life of a royal demon?"

I couldn't help laughing at her innocent face. "Roll for persuasion."

"I've got plus ten to charisma, baby," Rachel said, and rolled. "Ten plus... oof, that's a three. Thirteen total."

"'I safeguard damned souls,' says Bastidio." I arched one eyebrow and filled Bastidio's voice with regal, no-nonsense condescension. "'Do you think I've never heard someone stall, before?'"

Rachel drew her chin sheepishly down toward her chest.

"He snaps his fingers," I said, doing so, "and instantly teleports you both to a lush bedroom, all furnished in red and black, with a huge four-post canopy bed."

I stood up from my chair.

Rachel stood up with me, die and character sheets in hand.

So slowly, eyes locked to each other, like that game where one person pretends to be the other one's mirror, we walked from the living room into my own less than lush bedroom.