It's My Party

"Answer my question!" he hissed.

Amber blinked. What question? Oh yes. Memories came flooding back, Amber aroused and on all fours, Neto panting in eagerness and lubing his cock before mounting her doggie style and taking her in her ass, fucking down into her bowels until Amber would scream at him to stop. Amber had found the couplings painful and she rarely submitted to the ordeal. She finally answered Ricardo's question. "Once a month maybe, maybe less."

"Humph." He mumbled back, and he then pulled her ass cheeks so far apart it was painful. "Yeah. It looks it. I bet he used lots of lube too. Did Neto have a large cock?"

Amber sucked in a deep breath. "Huh? I guess… I guess I don't know."

Ricardo paused. For the first time, Amber had puzzled him. He would have disciplined her for any defiance, and the current bruise on her butt was nothing compared to what he could raise. But he could hear from the tone of her voice that she was genuinely afraid and trying her best to be honest and speaking in simple truthfulness. Still… "How could you not know?"

Amber trembled. "Neto was the only boyfriend I ever had."

"That's impossible!"

"I mean he was the only boyfriend I ever got physical with."

"Really?"

"It's true Ricardo."

"So he took you as a virgin?"

Amber sighed. "Yes."

"And you never saw another man's cock?"

"Not erect, no."

"But what about the Internet?"

"Oh, I don't know. There I guess, but I never thought to make comparisons. Please Ricardo, I'm trying to cooperate. Will you let me go?" She grimaced as she felt a tug on her tampon string.

"When did you start?"

"Butt sex?"

Ricardo started tugging again, almost hard enough to pull the tampon from her vagina. Amber felt a squishiness inside her and thought Ricardo's manipulations were stimulating her menstrual flow. And in truth her womb was quivering from her terror. Without warning Ricardo slapped her hard on her right butt cheek, so loud it sounded like a pistol shot in the quiet store. Amber was surprised that after the initial sting, there was surprisingly little discomfort. Her adrenalin was suppressing the pain.

"Don't get smart with me Amber. Your period." he whispered the deadly calm voice. Strong fingers pulled on both outer lips of her labia and separated her. Amber guessed Ricardo could probably see the red wet part of her almost saturated tampon, and then she felt the cheeks of his face pushing in and pressing against her thighs. Amber was hit with a wave of revulsion as she realized Ricardo's head was between her legs. He was smelling her. After a few moments there was also a soft wet touch unlike a finger that was running in a circle around where the tampon entered her vagina. Ricardo was tasting her too.

"Yesterday," she whispered with a squeak.

The tongue paused for a second. "Are you regular? Do you flow a lot?"

Amber blinked at how bizarre the conversation was, talking to a man whose face was pressed up against her sex and licking her menstrual flow. She could feel him tugging on her tampon to release more of her discharge, and it felt as if he had worked it about halfway out of her vagina. A hand came up between her legs and gripped her hard in the front abdominal area directly over her uterus, compressing and releasing, compressing and releasing. Amber felt her uterus cramp and spasm from the rough stimulation, and she felt like spitting in disgust. Ricardo was pumping her uterus to increase her menstrual flow, and it was probably working.

Amber blinked. She was ignoring his question, and that was extremely dangerous. She tried to calm herself, resigning herself to her fate. "I used to be regular. This cycle my period was two weeks late. Please Ricardo…" She took a deep breath and added, "Maybe it's the stress."

"And?" The simple word was spoken sharply, a quick rebuke of her incomplete answer.

"Huh? Oh! I guess my flow is about normal."

"Hmmm…" Another pull, and Amber could feel the tampon sliding out of her. There was more lapping, and then the tongue stopped at her urethra opening. Amber sighed and trembled in despair. She could feel what he was doing. He had one hand pressing against the center of her butt. Amber guessed it was holding up the string on the partially extracted tampon. With the high arch she had in her back, her entire genital region was easily accessible. Ricardo had discovered her urine duct.

At first he just probed the slit opening lightly with the tip of his tongue, causing Amber to shiver from the contact on the super sensitive tissue. Then his lips pressed in and he sucked the urethra slit area into his mouth. He began to suckle her.

Amber was almost in tears trying to decide what to do. Was he trying to send her a message? Did Ricardo want her to release her bladder and let him taste her urine? Is that what he wanted? Guessing wrong either way would probably get her killed.

Amber gasped. His tongue was now trying to enter her urethra duct. It wouldn't fit of course, but the tip of his tongue was pushing in and stretching the end of her duct, and the sensations were that of tiny electric shocks. The suckling was causing an intense need to urinate, and Amber was horrified to think that she was about to lose control of her bladder. And just how would Ricardo react if she urinated into his vigorously suckling mouth?

Amber whimpered as she fought a rising tide of panic, and then without warning Ricardo released the suction on her pee slit. "Date of birth?" he asked calmly.

Amber almost cried in dismay. There it was again, that surreal feeling of an office exam. Her life was a living nightmare. "February 2nd, 1999," she whispered obediently.

The mouth and fingers left her labia and butt, leaving the tampon almost but not quite all the way out of her body. Amber could feel it dangling, the sticky wetness unpleasant against the folds of her labia.

"You're a groundhog girl?"

"Uh, yeah, I guess." A timeless period passed as Amber waited for the next insane question or insult against her body. The suspense from waiting caused an almost unbearable urge to urinate, but she bore down on her bladder valve with all the control she had left and kept it closed. And still there was no response from Ricardo. She finally dared to lift up her head and look back.

She was alone. Or at least, she appeared to be alone. Was Ricardo still in the room, watching her from some hidden spot? The man could move like a ghost. Amber fought to keep herself from crying as she completed the removal of her soiled tampon and retrieved a new one from her discarded backpack. A moment later she pulled up her pants.

So many questions, and none on them seemed to have answers. This had been by far her strangest experience yet with Ricardo. Why did he do it? And why did he stop? Did it have anything to do with her birthday? Her period? Games within games, was he really sexually interested in her or just teasing? Or perhaps there was some other motivation, something so completely foreign to normal thinking it would be forever beyond her comprehension. Would she ever understand? With one last fleeting look around the silent store, Amber shivered and headed down the stairs and back towards the Mall.

"Wait," she thought to herself, "I never got the Bowie knives." She forced herself to go back and put eight of the gleaming knives in her backpack. She took one last look around the store. A strange place, she decided. It had almost everything for land or river wilderness exploration, but there were no bows or arrows. Uno and his entire group found that extremely frustrating. For all the Mall's opulence, there wasn't a projectile weapon or a wheel in sight. Wheels would be incredibly useful for transportation, and Uno had promised her many things if she were the first to find one.

Uno… Would he keep his promise? Should she tell him of her encounter with Ricardo? Would he protect her? Amber frowned. Hell, she had seen Uno talking to Ricardo in the lounge last night just before C-team's shift started. Did Uno put Ricardo up to this? Games within games, was this Uno's sick idea of a good cop, bad cop routine? Amber had no proof, but somehow it felt possible. Uno enjoyed having people dependent on him.

Amber entered the spiral corridor and paused to consider. The urge to flee along the spiral away from Black Mall home was very strong. But Ricardo was probably watching her, and what would he do with her if he caught her in an obvious escape attempt? There was also Whitney. Uno had made it very clear to both of them. If either betrayed him, the other would suffer. Fleeing home would likely get Amber killed, and almost certainly doom Whitney to non-stop rape and other tortures.

There was only one choice that her conscience would accept. Amber steeled herself and briskly marched towards home.

Time: Tuesday, January 29, 2019 11:36 AM

"How are your knees Charles?" Madison asked as her group started to take another short break. Charles was carrying their heaviest load, and Tom wasn't far behind him. The three women's backpacks were half the weight of the men's.

Charles had just finished taking off his enormous backpack and was leaning up against the white corridor wall opposite Madison. He gave her a kind smile and sighed. "Just this last flight, I think I'm starting to notice a bit of protest. I'm okay though." He reached with his hands and started massaging his kneecaps.

Mandy was sitting right next to him, and after a few seconds she asked, "What some help with that?" Without waiting for a response, her hands came across and began massaging his right knee. Charles gave her a shy grin and then relaxed completely, sighing in contentment. He then turned to Mandy and they made eye-link contact without either of them meaning to.

"That feels really nice Mandy, much better than what I was doing."

"I was hoping you'd like it." Mandy blushed within her mind. In addition to the simple thank you, Charles was offering her a great deal of affection in the link, much more than she was expecting, and she hiccupped and broke the connection. Mandy kept her eyes averted as she continued the gentle massage.

Charles sighed and closed his eyes and then verbally asked their leader, "Madison, how long will we rest here?"

"Yeah, that is a question. Fifteen minutes I think. We need a good rest." Madison was sitting next to Tom. She locked eyes with him, making an offer in her mind. Tom smiled happily. A moment later Madison was massaging Tom's knees.

Emily and Madison shared a brief mind link that left Emily grinning and Madison blushing, and then Emily spoke into her Leophone. "Yo Mark! Can I ask you a question about the stairs at your complex?"

From within the mirror diamond array of Black Mall fifty kilometers distant came the response, "Sure Emily, what do you want to know?"

"The stairs descending to your vegetable park, what are they like?"

"It's a spiral staircase, identical in characteristics to the stairwells at the home complexes except it goes much further down. There's an eight-meter radius for the well with a four-meter annulus on top. Then there's the two-meter wide staircase. In the middle of the tread, it's a 30 cm run with an 18 cm rise. The staircase makes almost nine complete revolutions before reaching bottom. We measure our depth as 233 meters. And that looks about right as the height of the fake sky in our park."

"Uh huh. Hey Mandy, need any help with that?" On a whim Emily who was sitting on the opposite side of Charles began to massage his other knee. Mandy looked across and gave Emily a friendly nod.

Charles sighed happily at the sensations of being petted by two women at once. "Ah, heaven is such a nice place…" He reached under Mandy's arm massaging his knee and gently petted Mandy's knee, all the while keenly feeling for any nervousness on Mandy's part. But he felt no rejection of his offer for contact. He opened his eyes and offered to link with her again and she accepted.

"Your forgiveness of me is complete, isn't it?"

"Yes, I guess so. You can feel my emotions, can't you? This link is so amazing. It's almost as if… Charles, do you understand my emotions better than I do?"

He didn't answer her question, not directly. "To feel your emotions like this… I see your gentleness Mandy, lots and lots of gentleness and forgiveness. It feels wonderful… Thank you…" Charles sighed within the link and drifted away as he closed his eyes again.

Emily got back to her conversation with Mark. "It's interesting. The run and the rise, thirty and eighteen are divisible by six I guess, but you say there're not an integer number of revolutions?"

"No, it's a little short, maybe by about fifty, sixty degrees, somewhere in there."

"Ah, curious. The builders of this place abandoned their fixation on mathematical completeness."

Mark laughed. "Well, I don't know about that. I was talking to Jada yesterday. She told me about the 311 steps per flight in your stairwell. It got me to thinking. So last night Frida and I climbed back up to the top of our staircase for some exercise, and then counted on the way down. We both counted a total of 1,296 stairs."

Emily blinked and laughed back. "Holy shit, six to the fourth?!"

"Uh huh. I doubt it's a coincidence."

Emily nodded and then repeated what she had already reported. "Well, the stairs here are interesting too. Same rise and run as yours but straight stairwells. I've been trying to find the signature six-fold symmetry the builders are so fond of, but so far I'm stumped. Twenty-five-meter corridors, 311 stairs, nothing fits."

Emily paused and added, "We've been sighting the stairwell with the surveyor modules. The lasers can't pick up any deviations at all. It's a little frightening. Sometimes I wonder if this place was constructed to the precision of optical wavelengths. How do you build like this Mark?"

He was silent for a moment and then answered simply, "Yeah, no idea."

Mandy stretched her tired legs and wiggled her toes within her boots. "Wouldn't it be nice if these were escalators and not stairs?" She said with a shrug.

Charles' eyes blinked open. "Oh, hell Mandy, don't wish for that! What if this is our only access route?"

Mandy looked at him and then shivered as she recognized his point. The expedition had just spent the last hour and a half carefully hiking down sixteen extremely long flights of stairs. Each flight was the equivalent of walking down the stairs of a fifteen storey building. "What do you think student-of-architecture Emily?" Mandy asked playfully. "Would walking up against sixteen flights of down-moving escalators be physically possible?"

Emily grinned back. "Ah, a fun question, thank you. Let's see… Wow. I don't think anybody ever came close to building an escalator with a 56 meter rise, but assuming it's feasible… Let's say the escalator is moving at 0.5 meters per second. That's a typical value. The incline is a little over thirty degrees, so let's say it's dropping a vertical meter every four seconds. That means you'd have to lift your body weight one meter every four seconds just to stand still. Hmmm…"

Emily frowned as she stared at the stairwell they had just descended. "I don't know. You'd have to be able to run up thirty commercial flights of stairs in four minutes, or maybe forty flights in a common home. Could I do that? Run up a flight of stairs in six seconds, forty times in a row? I don't know. Keeping your balance as you ran against the moving stairs would be tricky, and pausing to catch your breath would be…" Emily shrugged. "I don't know if I could do even one, certainly not packing anything. Sixteen flights would be out of the question."

Madison stretched as she considered Emily's musings. Her expedition was now almost 900 meters below the surface level. And unlike Mark's spiral staircase, the combination of linear staircases and horizontal corridors was providing no clue as to the ultimate depth of the stairwell. Madison thoughts turned to the past summer, when her family took their summer vacation in Paris. She remembered gazing across the city from the Eiffel Tower and being told the observation deck was 300 meters in height. If they turned back now, her team would have to climb the Eiffel Tower three times in a row.

Her mind drifted. "My gosh, my parents, my sister, my cousins, all my family, all those people, all over the world! They were all alive back then!" The feeling would still take her occasionally, an overpowering urge to grieve. But this was not the time, not when she was leading an expedition. Madison frowned and pushed the thoughts from her mind.

Mandy meanwhile was finishing taking a drink from her water bottle and she interrupted Madison in her thoughts. "Uh, Maddy, I need a toilet break."

Madison sighed and nodded. The group quickly exchanged eye-contact with each other and went into their pre-arranged plan. They had toilet bags with them, somewhat to make the cleanup job easier for the servos but mostly because they all disliked the idea of leaving their excrements where others of the opposite sex could see it. With final nods all around, the two men went to the downstairs end of the corridor and the women to the upstairs end. There the two groups did their toileting in peace, secure in the knowledge that the other group would not peek. Any cheating would be visible in future links.

Madison decided her bowels were fine and simply relieved her bladder into an inflating plastic bag. As she wiped herself dry, she had to smile in amusement. Tom! He had tried to hide it, but he had a playful curiosity in wanting to watch Madison pee or defecate. Not that he would cheat. Madison trusted him completely. Still, his interest in female bodily fluids and waste seemed to be limited to her, and not to Emily or Mandy. Madison wondered for a moment how she felt about that.

As the two groups were returning to their gear, Cassidy gave a report from what had become their central surveillance center for the Mall, the Hilton complex at the terminal store of Green Mall. Cassidy was currently working a Mall monitoring shift with Ashley. "Jada, both installation teams are running about twenty minutes ahead of schedule. Expect Blue-Mall and Yellow-Brick to be completed by 1 PM."

"Excellent, thanks Cassidy. If you get a chance, blink a good-job approval to the teams."

"Sending the code now…"

Jada leaned back at her console at the White Mall library and grinned. What a key improvement! The use of the Matrix sensors for signaling had enabled their society to run multiple missions at once and still maintain critical communication between the different teams. Lynn's and Akiko's recent breakthrough showed how the built-in monitoring system at the Hilton center could be used to eliminate the 64-channel limitation of the mobile system units.

By 1 PM today, they would have almost the entire Mall visible from their command center. The only parts still not covered were the terminal 12.5 kilometers of Black Mall and the small parts of the spirals around Hex Hall. The first 240 degrees of spiral rotations lacked the critical stores on the outside arc. All six spirals had their last sensor at spiral-mark meter-191, leaving Hex Hall and the first 160 meters of each spiral still unmonitored.

After the teams finished their work, their quickest route home would be through the trap-door in White Mall connecting to the lounge directly above Jada. She would be able to smile hello to all of them as they came down to the library on their way to returning their bicycles to Blazo's Art Gallery at the Green Mall sky-bridge.