Before The Storm (Ch. 03)

Chapter Three

Despite her overwhelming size, Aliara was actually much lighter than expected, at least once they got the battle armor off her. Sketch hadn't been sure how to remove it, but Serena knew how to get it off the Y'bari soldier with almost no pause at all. Beneath the heavy armor, Aliara wore a sleek black bodysuit that had several prongs that connected to the mechanics of the armor itself.

With the armor off, he could see the woman's form better, and he was struck by how remarkably large her breasts were, each one of them having to be basically the size of his head, the fabric of the black suit so tight he could see the indentation of her nipples through the surface.

"How the hell did you know how to get her out of that armor?" Sketch said as he moved to grab Aliara's ankles while Serena was grabbing the woman's wrists, making sure to attach the soldier's case to her belt first, unwilling to leave it behind for whatever reason. The Y'bari wasn't too heavy, but the general size of her made her unwieldy to carry solo.

"I actually know quite a lot about the Y'bari, Sketch," she said to him. "Those of us within the Royal House had Y'bari assigned as personal guards for a while. I saw them taking the armor off and putting it on loads and loads of times. I even helped them take it off sometimes."

Once they had her on the elevator, they set her down and Helen began to move the shifter down two levels towards the brig. "This is only going to get us killed, Princess," Sketch sighed. "You know that right?"

Serena giggled a little and moved over to kiss him, her lips like a burst of sunshine on his own. "You need to trust me on this one, Sketch," she replied. "It's all going to work out fine. No, better than fine. Way way better."

The elevator stopped, and they moved to pick the soldier up once more, carrying her out of the elevator and into a portion of the ship that Sketch almost never walked through, which included the medical bay and the brig. He'd thought several times about retrofitting the areas to just be additional cargo holds, but each time Helen had talked him out of it, insisting that some day, he wouldn't be the only person on board The Praeteritus and that when he finally got a crew, he would need both of these rooms to function as they were designed to.

Despite the fact that he hadn't used the brig before, it was still spotless and dust-free, as Helen's army of micro utility droids would come through and clean the area up regularly. The last thing he wanted was to get caught up in some sort of fight between a deposed Princess and a member of the Starless Dominion's private army, but somehow, he was pretty certain he just didn't have a choice in the matter. The brig had a couple of cells to it, and as soon as they had Aliara's body in the center of the room, Serena set her down so she could unhook the case from her belt. "Gods below, that's fucking heavy," she said, setting the case on a nearby shelf. "It might be heavier than she is."

Because of the height differential between humans and the Tropage, Sketch had often found himself having to build sets of steps around commonly used portions of the ship, although Helen had done him the courtesy of having the bridge controls lowered to a more acceptable height for him. She'd offered to do that for the entire ship, but Sketch had pointed out he really only needed it for things he would regularly use. The doors were generally controlled by Helen anyway, so there was no need for manual buttons that he could use, but when it came to things like the brig, all of the tables were basically just above his shoulder height.

"Helen, open cell one, would you?" Sketch said aloud.

"Do you want the force shield translucent or transparent?"

"Transparent," Serena said, as they began to pick her up again. "I need her to be able to see through it. The force shield won't affect Sketch's empathic abilities will it?"

"No, m'lady," Helen replied. "We haven't found much of anything that will dampen them. If anything, the force shield might even subtly reinforce them."

"Good," Serena said with a broad smile. "That's just what we want."

"It is?" Sketch asked, as they lowered the Y'bari Centurion onto the floor.

"You bet your sweet ass it is," Serena chuckled. "Now where was it... ah! Here it is." She seemed to find some sort of latch or hook on Aliara's bodysuit, and after she unfastened it, part of it began to breakaway on the side, as Serena began to slowly pull Aliara out of the suit.

"What the hell are you doing, Serena?" Sketch said, unsure if he should look away or keep looking on. "As tight as that is, there's no way she could have weapons concealed in it!"

"Well," Serena said with a chuckle. "One, you're wrong." She reached into the back of the bodysuit and pulled out a single silvery tube about the length of his finger, which she tossed to him. "That's a universal solvent. She could've probably carved an escape hole out of the floor with that. And two, that's not the reason we're taking the suit off of her."

Sketch found himself a little unable to speak as the suit was peeled off Aliara's top, exposing those voluminous tits of hers, capped with nipples that would've been simply to-scale human analogs if not for the one slight difference in that they were a sort of muted pastel blue shade, not all that different from one of the shades of her hair.

"You may not know this, Walker," Serena said to him, "but the Y'bari are somewhere around an 83% genetic match for humans." She was starting to work on the unconscious woman's waist now, sliding the bodysuit down over her hips, exposing a sizable pubic bush, neatly trimmed and maintained, but with dark green hair the color of algae in bloom. "The Starless Dominion would never tell us anything about the Y'bari's history, and the Y'bari themselves don't know fuck all about their own past, but the royals theorized that maybe some alien visitor passing Terra in the early stages of human development abducted say twenty or thirty of our primitive ancestors and then kept them as pets, and they evolved on their own."

"Shame all the other royals except you are dead," he said, finally just accepting he was going to look on, as Serena tossed the now-removed bodysuit out past the edge of the cell. "So much lost information when they all died."

"Not as much lost as you think," Serena said to him a smile, raising her right hand up in the air, waving it at him. "You don't know what that is, do you?"

He looked on at her in confusion for a moment. "What what is?"

"On my bracelet."

He'd noticed she was wearing jewelry, but hadn't taken a particular interest in it up until she'd drawn his attention to it, stepping in a little closer. "Is... is that some sort of storage crystal?"

"Hey, put one point on the board for the old timer," she laughed, almost sounding impressed. "It's a royal information matrix. When the Starless Dominion took over, the royals didn't want to lose all the records and data they had, so they had a couple hundred of these made. And the archive itself was built into the walls of the House of Sanada, so anytime I walked through a doorway with the bracelet on, all the newest information would be added to my copy of the archive. There's tons of information in here that'll probably help you... I mean, help us loads... we might even be able to get an idea where we could track down an Ashaka for you."

"Why didn't you mention it sooner?"

She giggled again, rolling her eyes at him. "We've been a little preoccupied, you know? And I'm still more than a little cock-mad since you can't seem to dial it down a bit. If anything, since she got here, it's been even harder to focus."

"My abilities are working on two brains now, yours and hers, and I have no idea how that's going to play out," Sketch frowned. "I'm a little more surprised my head hasn't started to hurt. Maybe because I haven't had to use my abilities in so long they're tapping into a reservoir of built up energy."

"It's also possible she's amping you up even more," Serena said. "You weren't wrong about the Y'bari being especially sensitive to the empathic abilities of The Calm. That's the main reason the Starless Dominion had the order wiped out - they were able to influence the Y'bari in ways they didn't care for. Anything that threatens their control cannot be allowed."

Serena stepped out of the cell and reached high to push a button to turn the force wall on, a slight blue tinge in the air where the shield deployed. "She shouldn't be out too long... oh look, I think sleeping beauty's starting to wake up."

"The hell did you do to me?" Aliara said, rubbing her face with one of her large hands.

"Well, we-" Sketch started to reply before Serena cut him off.

"I shot you in the head with a stun round," Serena said, proudly. "You were checking out my man's ass, and I took offense to that."

'My man?' Sketch thought to himself.

"You two idiots have signed your own death warrant," Aliara grumbled. "Why the hell am I naked and why is it so hard to focus?"

"You don't remember me, do you Aliara?" Serena said, placing her hands on her hips. "To be fair, you didn't see me that often, but I would've thought I might have made an impression." She pushed her hair back out of her face, wiping some of the grime off. It took a moment, but the facial expression on the Y'bari shifted quickly once she seemed to recognize her.

"Princess Serena O'Quincy," Aliara said in a hushed, almost shocked tone. "How the fuck are you even alive? You were slain with all the others on the Parlor Day Massacre."

"See, I wasn't, not that most of our supposed Y'bari defenders did much to prevent that," Serena sneered. "Most of them were the ones doing the massacring. But you didn't have to get your hands dirty because you were off doing deliveries, much like you always were. You see, Sketch, Aliara here was technically part of the House of Sanada's Royal Guard, but because she had a tendency to question orders a lot, she had been demoted to courier duty. None of the royals wanted her for a personal protectorate, something I always thought was a mistake on my counterparts' judgment. Hell, I might have taken her for myself if I hadn't already had Rozo."

"Did Rozo make it out with you?" Aliara asked, seemingly with genuine concern. "Tell me it was some other corpse the strike team found and mistook for his?"

"Is that an attempt at camaraderie I'm seeing from you, Aliara?" Serena said, clenching her fingertips together into a fist. "No. He gave his life defending mine, defending all us royals, like every other bonded Y'bari did, fighting against their own kind who had come to slaughter all the human royals. It was his plan to incinerate the body of a servant girl who'd been killed in the crossfire and use that to fake my death, but Rozo had been too heavily wounded to come with us, so he decided to use his death to help sell the story of my own demise. It's good to know that his death sold the story."

Aliara slowly rose up to her feet, standing over them, looking down at them, as though she hoped her height might intimidate humans, although the fact that she looked unsteady in her stance didn't help sell the intimidation any. "You know I have to kill you now, Serena," the Y'bari said. "Orders are orders, and I have to follow them."

Serena chuckled a little bit. "What if you didn't have to follow them, though? You always struck me as a Y'bari who seemed particularly unhappy beneath the Starless Dominion. There's a way out, you know. A way for you to be able to ignore their orders entirely for now and all time."

"I have zero interest in taking the Final Solution, Serena," Aliara said, glancing around her cell. "Because not all is lost yet, and I can find some way to break out of this... out of this cell... and... and overtake... fuck! What are you doing to my mind?"

The Y'bari soldier's hands were rubbing along her hips, as if she was trying to keep them busy, to keep herself occupied, but her legs wobbled a little beneath her, as she turned to look at Sketch and couldn't help but moan a little bit.

"Fuck, he's doing it to me, isn't he?" she said, her voice dropping an octave, into an almost husky tone. "What the fuck are you doing to me, you thrice-damned human?"

"You've probably never seen one in your lifetime, Aliara, but he is a member of The Calm. He's a Storm, to be specific," Serena said, taking the box down off the shelf, bringing it over towards the door to the cell. "And because he doesn't have his Ashaka, his tool of control, his abilities are sort of running rampant, doing their own thing, without his say so. You feel it, don't you?"

"I feel... something," Aliara said, biting her bottom lip for a moment. "I don't know what the fuck I'm feeling right now..."

"Oh right," Serena said with a smirk. "Rozo told me about that. How the Y'bari don't know sexual pleasure or gratification unless they're bonded with someone. In fact, they have their sexual desires suppressed until they're about to be bonded. But the Storms could override that suppression, and let the Y'bari feel things like desire, heat and lust. Things you're feeling right now, aren't you Aliara?"

"Is... is that what this is?" she said, the expression on her stern face slipping into one of confusion and nervousness. "Is that why it feels like I can't think clearly? Like my body is too warm for its liking?"

"That's it exactly," Serena replied, opening the top of the toolbox that Aliara had brought from her ship into theirs. Inside of it looked like hundreds of small compartments, each with a symbol on it that Sketch couldn't read or translate, presumably the written Y'bari language, another closely guarded secret, if reports were to be believed. "When a Y'bari is about to be bonded to someone, they take... well, one of these pills in here, although I don't know which one. It removes the genetic inhibitors that keep the Y'bari from feeling things like love, lust, joy, sadness, regret... all the parts of their humanity that the Starless Dominion thought would just get in the way of their perfect warrior species."

"FUCK, why is it so fucking hard to think?" Aliara shouted, slamming a fist against the wall of the cell, her knees bending just a little bit.

"Because instead of the inhibitors coming down slowly and gradually, one of them got knocked down first and foremost and in a big, bad way," Serena giggled. "All you can think is how your body wants to be touched, to be fondled and caressed. How you feel like nerves you never had access to before are suddenly lighting up, and you don't know what to do with them."

"Rozo..." Aliara said breathlessly. "He was bonded to you. He... he was a friend of mine."

"Friend?" Serena sneered. "I thought you weren't allowed to have friends as a Centurion. I thought even the most casual of attachments was frowned upon by your superiors."

"Kept..." Aliara said, her massive chest rising and falling with eager breaths now. "Kept it secret... from superiors..."

"Oh ho," Serena said with a nod. "So you've always been a little troublemaker, but you've just kept it well hidden. If you were friends with Rozo, then you know what I'm offering you. If you're bonded, you know that overrides any control over you that the Starless Dominion would have."

"W-w-w-what?" Aliara said, dropping to her knees, her legs too unsteady to hold her up now.

"In just a little bit, after your body is so warped by lust and sexual desire that it feels like none of the muscles in your body will work, I'm going to open this door, and I'm going to give you a choice," Serena said. "Life and freedom, or death. Not much of a choice to me, but it has to be your decision. Unlike what the Dominion did, I believe in giving people a choice."

Sketch had been trying to exert some control over his abilities, desperately wanting to tamp them down or bring them back in line, but it felt like every time he pressed against that spot inside of his mind, instead of reducing his output, he only seemed to dial it up even more. The flush that covered Aliara's skin was evident, as was the damp slickness on the inside of her thighs. He'd decided to stop struggling against it, lest he make it even worse.

Some part of him wondered how the hell Serena had ever been with a male Y'bari, as the size and scale differences seemed almost insurmountable. A Y'bari male would have to have a cock the size of a human forearm, and even the most gifted of human men would have trouble giving a Y'bari female enough to notice.

"Princess, please..." Aliara whimpered. "Couldn't... couldn't you just let me go?"

"We're long, long past that point, Aliara," Serena said, reaching down, pulling the shirt of Sketch's that she'd borrowed up and over her head, leaving her dressed just in a pair of panties. At some point between Aliara's hailing and her arrival, Serena had apparently also removed the royal tag that had been affixed to the piercing through her nipple, not that it mattered much at this particular moment. The piercing itself still remained, though, a brass colored ring with a small ball to keep it sealed. "You can smell him, can't you?" she said before glancing over Sketch's direction. "Old leather, machine oil, sweat and a hint of persistent orange. You must love fresh oranges, don't you Sketch?"

He smiled a little bit, blushing just a little, trying not to notice the two nearly naked women in front of him, and failing badly. "My one vice. My fixer instructs clients to leave a bag of freshly grown oranges with each pickup, so I know she's signed off on the job. Most times that's only one or two, because they aren't always easy to come by, but sometimes it'll be a great big sack of them."

"Don't worry, Aliara," Serena said, pushing down her panties down to the floor, leaving her nude in the room. "When he fucks you, you're going to be so overwhelmed with orgasms that any hint of regret you have left remaining will simply be washed away with them."

He laughed nervously, looking away from them. "I don't think we're to scale for that to work, Serena."

"Oh? Oh! Oh, right. I didn't mention it. Part of the bonding process involves biomorphing, changing the sex organs to match and be to scale with the person or persons the Y'bari is bonded to," she giggled. "When I first saw Rozo nude, I thought to myself, 'my god, that dick won't fit in me no matter how much I loosen up,' but then he bonded to me, and a day later, his cock had shrunk down to what I considered the perfect size." She licked her lips, stepping towards Sketch. "Although clearly I had my sights set too low, because he was smaller than you are, and you fit just fine, don't you, Sketch?" She reached forward and dragged her fingertips across his chest through the layers of cloth he'd yanked over his form earlier to conceal his tattoos from the Y'bari Centurion. "I guess my opinions of what's ideal have changed over the past few years."

"She's... she's right," Aliara panted. "Whatever you... think... is ideal, that's what I would have. If I were.... If I did bond with you... which I won't..."

"It's actually in your genetic makeup, Walker," Serena said as she started to draw layers of cloth off of his body. "Although your mental state affects it too. It's kind of nice, having someone who has a sex part that's basically tailor made to exactly what your body thinks will feel right. Humans and Y'bari can even cross breed, I'm told, although we royals never had a chance to test that."