Love As The Darker Binding Ch. 10

***Abi decides to set up a listening outpost, and he knows just the perfect place. So he plans to move out a team of specialists who work for him.

There is a term here which might confuse some readers. A "LARP" is a Live-Action Role Play - a game for adults where to quote the mighty Wiki,

"a form of role-playing game where the participants physically act out their characters' actions. The players pursue goals within a fictional setting represented by the real world while interacting with each other in character. The outcome of player actions may be mediated by game rules or determined by consensus among players. Event arrangers called gamemasters decide the setting and rules to be used and facilitate play."

Got that? Good, since the land next to Carrie's old homestead is often used by those role players, who are known as "larpers" to her and others.

Some names in this:

B'Naht - like "bknot"

Temma ought to be easy enough and

Darett'h - like Darrett-HH - the last 'H' is a second syllable.

For those who have REALLY weird thoughts, this is a FANTASY, ok? If you can't figure that out, your 75 year-old mom wouldn't want you to be reading this anyway. 0_o

***

*****

Out in the sticks, Colorado

Carrie listened to the sounds of the others sleeping. It had been a long weekend of fun for the larpers who'd come up from whatever city they normally resided in. For this weekend, it had been a chance to shed their boring, normal lives and live in the adventure a little, fighting as knights and warriors of some forgotten realm or other.

Carrie wasn't all that much into their scene, though by now, she was fairly well-known among them and accepted by many. She was even a friend to about a dozen or so. It always seemed that somebody had forgotten something or other in their haste to be at least temporarily out of their normal trappings. She'd made it a point to sort of 'stock' a lot of the things that might have been forgotten. From Pampers to condoms, from bug spray to sunblock, if somebody was out of it and nobody had any nearby, they usually drifted up the path to Carrie's door sooner or later.

The need for condoms had brought a young woman to her door the first evening of the previous long weekend. From that smiling conversation from Carrie's side of it, she'd been introduced to the needs to have the contraceptives. The girl had come with her girlfriend and three male friends. One thing had led to another of course, and now Carrie was the only one awake in the jumble of sleeping bags in their tent.

The introduction and the quiet little tent orgy afterward had happened the previous long weekend and Carrie had been fucked and fondled all the way through, as well as the next few weekends when the larpers came to play. This was the second long weekend now and she lay thinking in the darkness, listening to their breathing.

There had been a time in her life ... well, many actually, when something like this would have been all that she'd have ever wanted. The sex had been really good and there'd never been a shortage for her. The girls had shared their boys freely and there had even been one to spare. When the battles were going on and the boys were in them, Carrie had the two girls to herself. One of them had never done it with another girl, but she'd finally let Carrie be her first. The whole thing had been so fine.

For the first time in so long, Carrie Willis had been so well licked, sucked and fucked.

So why wasn't she happy?

She lay there in the darkness thinking about it as she felt semen slipping from her anus and vagina. She smiled a little to herself at the thought. Two of the boys had taken her at the same time as the rest had watched in amazement.

And yet she felt this strange sense of feeling unfulfilled, as though it hadn't been enough in some way - which was a little odd, since a lot of her body parts were telling her that she'd had a good time. She had an idea, but had been determined not to throw a chance like this away.

Not long after getting the place a little fixed up with help from her parents, they'd been killed in an accident as they drove back home. Carrie didn't find out about it for a couple of days. As upset and distraught as she'd been, she had everything dealt with and was now waiting for the final judgement on the will. She stood to gain quite a lot, but that wasn't the thing.

She'd held herself together through it all. Her parents would have been proud of her for it. She'd only given in to her grief in quiet moments, such as at her apartment back in the city.

But it brought something to her attention. As stalwart as she'd been through the whole nightmare, she'd have given a lot right then to have had someone to lean against. Carrie was a big girl and she was very strong physically as well as emotionally. But she'd been alone through it all and ever since, her singleness had begun to really bother her.

She'd managed to put a great face on whenever the larpers were up. She'd had more than a few flings with other women even before she'd met the ones she was with now. A few had joked that they'd have liked to see her take part in the battles, just to kick some male ass out of the park. Not that there had been anyone there who'd needed that especially, but still...

Carrie had smiled along and ignored the comments. They only pointed to her new and sudden loneliness the way that she saw things.

In her heart, she wondered if she'd ever find someone for her.

In the deepest corner of that heart, she was coming to at least the idea of what she might like on a wild day when the planets lined up in whatever way that they'd need to in order for it to happen.

She decided that the one for her would be a male. And she wanted him to be big. The reason for that was obvious to her. She was no little thing herself, after all. She wouldn't care what his skin color was or the nationality and/or culture that he came from. All that she cared about was what she wanted - and that was that he looked a little nice, was polite, loved her and treated her well. Everything else was just a list of details to Carrie, things which could be worked out.

If she knew where a man like that was, Carrie would have bought the ticket there already.

But she didn't have that. All that she had now was the realization for her feeling as she lay among the warm sleeping bodies.

She took her time, but as she could, she got up and put her things on by feel, mostly. The moon was half-waning, but at least it was up there when she stepped outside and zipped the tent closed after her. She walked home and had a shower before turning in.

---

The next day was Tuesday and Carrie drove back to the city to take care of some more matters for her parent's estate. She mowed the lawn and later, as she worked her way through the house where she'd been born and grown up, she asked herself if she wanted to live there and decided against it. That necessitated a complete clean-out and more than one yard sale, most likely.

As she thought about that, she found herself looking at her father's gun cabinet, hidden in an alcove of the cellar. She knew where he'd kept the key, so in another minute; she was looking at weapons which her father had owned because he liked them and very seldom took any but two of them to the range.

More money for her, after she'd sold them off, Carrie said to herself. But then she looked at a couple of the pieces and reached to pick them up, one after the other.

There were things here which she knew that she didn't want to sell. Her father had never really been a gun collector and his own time in the military had weaned him away from the allure of owning military hardware. But there were things here, two of them especially, which Carrie knew that he loved, and one which had at least a little practicality to it that Carrie saw instantly.

One was an ex-Australian Army Belgian-made FN rifle. Her father had let Carrie use it at the range a few times and she liked it for a lot of reasons. She didn't like plastic grips on most rifles. The FN's stock was made of light oiled wood and it felt good in her hands.

The next was a 12 gauge pump action shotgun with a shortened stock. It was legal in that length, though barely. Her father had bought it for protection in the home, but soon realized that it was a pain in the ass for all but the paranoid, so it had always lived in the locked up cabinet. Carrie wanted that one too.

At last, her eye fell on the one which had always fascinated her even when she'd been a child, watching as her father cleaned it. It was a Remington XP100 pistol. As a pistol, it was long and heavy, not suited for most of the uses that anyone might have for a handgun. It was a single shot target pistol, first produced in the early 1960s.

Most people not familiar with things such as this tended to stare at it, because it looked more like a very short rifle with no shoulder stock, though it was actually a pistol. The grip and what stock there was to it had been made from nylon and it still looked rather futuristic even today. As a regular handgun, it was awkward as anything. It held only one shot and it was a bolt action piece with the bolt on the right side, so a right-handed shooter would have had to abandon his posture totally to re-grip the thing to reload, though Carrie and her father had learned to reload with their left hands.

But it was famous for a couple of things.

It was legendary for its accuracy out to maybe 300 meters - which is a slightly absurd range to even be thinking about using a pistol. But she'd seen her father drill out the bull on many paper targets, right next to rifle shooters who had trouble putting two shots into the same piece of paper on their best day - for all of the money that they'd spent - and that had been at two hundred yards. Two hundred yards for serious target shooters with a rifle was a walk in the park - unless there was a tornado going on, she supposed.

It had taken some time, but Carrie had gotten a little good with the thing as well.

The other thing which the XP100 was famous for was that it chambered the .221 caliber Remington Fireball, which had been developed in parallel with the pistol in the beginning. It was still the fastest commercial pistol cartridge ever produced by a major manufacturer and it rivaled its big brother for accuracy, the .222 Remington, though like that one, the Fireball could also be used in rifles made for it.

The Fireball's bullet was just two thousandths of an inch narrower than the .223 ammunition which the M-16 chambered. When you took up the slack on the match trigger and squeezed just a little after that point, that bullet screamed out of the muzzle at nearly two and a half times the speed of sound; twenty-seven hundred feet per second.

You couldn't hit anything out that far with any hope of accuracy, but aside from some slowing due to atmospheric friction, that's more than a mile...

In two seconds.

XP100 pistols were a little rare and though she'd wanted one of her own, Carrie had never found one for sale in good shape for any price which wasn't stupid.

She smiled as she held it and opened the action just enough to see that it was empty. She took the lens caps off the pistol scope and held the pistol up for a moment to look through it.

Every little girl who is lucky enough to have a normal life tends to love her father. Now she had one of the things which she'd associated with him since she'd been old enough to know what it was.

She found cases for the three things and locked everything up again. She was still a little upset, still very sad to lose the ones that she loved so much, but at least she had the one thing for which she'd always remember the man.

----

Upon his return one night, Abi looked into the cave and saw that it was still relatively clean and dry inside by then. The altar was still there so that was fine, he thought. But it needed something.

He hadn't come alone this time. One of the others helped him make a few alterations and the rest managed the little details as well as the constant clean up so that there wouldn't be too much of a mess to clear away all at once when it was done. After an hour of slow and careful work, there were several stone arches in the place, set there to look as ancient as the rest.

Abi turned to look at his companions.

He's acquired them over time here and there in his travels. All of them were slight oddballs for what they were among their kinds, though the word carried too strong a connotation of defect. If anything, their deviations from the norm in the places where they'd originated might not have been seen as desirable there necessarily, but together and working for Abi ...

They were very effective in several roles as a team. They'd worked well for him many times before as reconnaissance scouts ... as spies ... as assassins if necessary... or as he intended to use them here for a little while, as a team of listeners.

A cave was a good place to think, but it was also an exceptional place to listen to the soft and quiet murmurings of the demonic worlds since any world resonated with them. He turned to look at the three of them for a moment.

B'Naht was from a very wet plane and her features reflected the aquatic adaptation from her head to her slightly wide and webbed feet. Depending on the light, she could look gray or green, though her long hair remained a deep tone of green in a shade which was evocative of stringy seaweed, though in texture if it was dry, it was similar to human hair.

Her face wasn't wide as say, a frog or a toad's would have been. She had cheekbones under her large yellow eyes. If one thought about it, she'd have to have cheekbones, since her eyes weren't like an amphibian's on this world. They were set in sockets in her skull like most creatures here, and they weren't huge, only larger than one could expect to see in that face.

She wasn't an amphibian. Her kind was adapted to live in, on or around water. They could hold their breath for an hour or more, but they did have to breathe eventually.

Her nose was wide and long, though it ended above her full lips. Where she was from, she didn't need the huge mouth which a toad might have. Her ancestors had left that behind eons ago. They brought their food to their mouths by using the fingers of their webbed hands.

When she stood, she was a little over five feet, six inches tall and she was shapely in a thin sort of way with swells on her chest which told in one glance that her type was warm-blooded and nursed their young.

Everything about her form spoke of an ability to swim in the warm seas of her world. It wasn't apparent at first, but if one looked for a moment and watched her move in any way, the long muscles of a swimmer came to be noticed. She didn't often come into contact with large bodies of water these days, but she could swim seemingly forever, sometimes dozing a little watchfully as she rested her limbs and propelled herself slowly with her powerful tail.

Her problem was that the others where she came from lived in a rather crude male-dominated society and it was oppressive to her for many reasons, the single most unsavory one was that feeling attraction toward another of the same gender was justification for execution if the preference was found out. Like a good number of the females there, B'Naht had hidden this aspect in her.

But she'd met another female who was attracted to her and though B'Naht had been fearful at first, it had turned into a very deep love between them. They'd tried to leave to find a place in the wilderness for themselves but they'd been hunted and her partner had basically sacrificed herself to save the one that she loved.

The anguish of watching the dismemberment in glimpses over her shoulder as she'd fled deeper into the weeds changed B'Naht. Several days later, she returned to the colony late at night and silently slew every male she came across. She had many talents and one which she used that night was the ability to crush another as though by an invisible hand at a little distance.

These days, she felt much better, having found a place for herself with the others in her unofficial and odd little group.

Next to her stood Temma, who topped out at about five foot, eight or so - if you discounted the horns on her head which resembled those of the pronghorn antelope on this world. Her thoughtful and attentive eyes were a little goat like as were her short and soft ears. There was a longish snout to her face which led the eye of the observer to her small and pretty mouth there just under her cleft upper lip.

In fact, her entire shape bore strong similarities to an antelope in many regards. She was long and willowy, covered in short fur with a dark brown, longish mop of hair on her head. She stood on what looked to be impossibly long and slender legs which ended in hooves and just above her shapely bottom, she had a tail, also evocative of an antelope.

She could run like the wind and she tended to be a little quick in her movements at times. At other times, she looked nervous and she had the tendency for a reason. On her home plane, the top evolutionary slot had been contested for ages. But over time, a clear winner came to the fore and it hadn't been Temma's kind. She and her mother had been the last and Temma was orphaned at a young age.

She was the last of her kind, and she was rather haunted in some ways from her having to grow up alone and hunted at times. The only reason that she'd survived at all was her ability to cause combustion to occur in the ones she wanted to kill. She could cause madness in others with a thought, or she could just stop the passage of signals from their minds into their brain stems long enough for asphyxia and cardiac arrest to occur. When Abi had found her, she was traveling from settlement to settlement, doing all of those things to as many as she could all at once.

On her world, the last of her kind had become someone to fear.

She tended to be quiet, friendly to those she liked, and often very sweet. But she had her moments.

Both of the females were distant relations of demons, though they wore few of the outward signs, other than Temma's horns. But if they opened their mouths, one could see that their evolutionary paths had taken them far from strict vegetarianism.

Abi's gaze shifted to the third member of his team.

What stood before him was about seven and a half feet tall and carried a few scars from his years in the fighting pits where Abi had first seen him. Tall, heavily muscled, and narrow-waisted, Darett'h was one of a sort of demon made to be a killing machine among demons.

More correctly, he was made to kill other demons.

He had a face which was vaguely horse-like, until he moved his lips in any way which would reveal his teeth and he had goat's eyes which revealed to any with enough courage to look into them that he was no stupid beast. The little tuft of hair at his chin combined with his eyes gave him a rather whimsical look, though most of those who saw him tended to fear him.

Though he'd never lost a fight during his time in the pits, Darett'h had been spawned too late. It was something which he'd always regretted. He was six hundred years old and he was a proven veteran in Abi's legions where he was a little famous for his vast strength and speed - and vicious fighting ability - even among those beasts. He didn't know what he weighed and he cared even less. As he stood prepared to listen to his lord's instructions, he was in his prime.

He'd never been here walking the surface of this world before, other than his time in garrison at the abbey and that had been fairly recent. For the last hundred and seventy-five years on this world, he'd been teamed with the other two, but mostly, their tasks had taken them to other worlds.