Quaranteam - North West Ch. 08

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QT:NW continues the official Spin Off for the Quaranteam universe originally created by CorruptingPower. You do not need to have read the original series to enjoy this one, but you really do need to start with Chapters 1-4 (I really suggest you read the original though, it's great!). Fans of the original should be pleased to know CP has approved the story and the continuity. This chapter includes elements of mind control through chemical substance, a deeper look into what's happened to Vanessa, and some steamy MF moments.

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"There is no official precedent for this yet, Mr Black, so we're just going to go ahead and keep you in the loop," Dr Charlotte Varma said. "In short, you and Ms Peters show all the signs of having gone through the vaccination bonding process."

I nodded slowly, letting out a long breath as I tried not to think about the ache of my black eye.

The office I'd been left in was little more than a whitewashed box of walls with a few chairs and a little round table. The plain walls were only broken up by the single door, which I hadn't bothered to check was locked or not, and the big flatscreen over which the doctor was talking with me.

"I don't understand how though, Doc," I said. "Vanessa didn't get the vaccine shot, and everything my current partners were told about the vaccine was that our... activities should have been safe."

"And that's the concern we have," Doctor Varma said. "Another member of my team is currently running further numbers on the blood samples that were sent down to us. But even the early tests done up there are showing the markers for the imprinting process occurring in Ms Peters body. Itshouldn't have happened. That's why I requested this chat with you. The report on the matter that we received was somewhat... vague in certain areas."

I flushed but nodded. I'd hoped this wasn't where we were going, but had figured we'd end up here eventually no matter what.

When I made the call, Miriam jumped into action. She'd remained calm on the phone, but the speed with which she organized the helicopter to come and pick up Vanessa had told me this wasn't just her concern for me or concern for a woman she had met in passing for a couple of minutes. While Erica and I had waited for the helicopter to arrive we'd done our best to get Vanessa cleaned up - she'd been soaked in the squirt that Ivy and Erica had sprayed her with, so we used a wet cloth to wipe her down carefully and then got her dressed again in everything except those steel toe boots she always wore. Then we'd had to just wait.

I'd been expecting a doctor or two on the helicopter wanting to come to check her over, but we got a couple of air corpsmen instead who immediately began to strap her to a gurney for transport. Getting Vanessa from the compound to the helicopter was a bit of chaos - there were construction workers gawking, and the other foreman who had taken over the site for Vanessa's day off had demanded some answers. I'd just told him she'd come to hang out for the day, and I needed Brent Peter's number to let him know what was going on. He'd given it to me and said he needed to call the site General Manager himself.

Erica and Ivy had both wanted to come with us on the helicopter, but the airmen had only allowed me to travel. I kissed Erica and Ivy, trying to reassure them in a rush, and hopped onto the helicopter.

I didn't get any answers from the crew other than that we were heading to Portland, and I couldn't make a call with the noise of the helicopter engine and blades, so it was pointless to answer when Brent Peters called me. I texted him instead, telling him where we were headed and that Vanessa seemed OK, but was unconscious and needed medical attention.

We'd landed on the roof of a building in downtown Portland that looked like it had been retrofitted for the helicopter pad. We were met by a quartet of labcoats in full hazmat gear, which seemed to put the airmen who had only been wearing medical masks on edge a bit, and Vanessa was wheeled in one direction after we stepped off the elevator while I was escorted in the other.

Looking back over my shoulder at her getting taken away on that gurney was heartbreaking in a way I wouldn't have expected.

The labcoats interviewed me and took blood samples a few times. The only reassurance I got was when Miriam stepped into the observation room I'd been placed in, her Command facade dropping for a moment as she pulled me into a quick, tight hug and she told me Vanessa was fine, and we weren't in trouble. She couldn't stay though, and had to leave back to work.

They'd taken my phone when we entered the building for security reasons, and I spent what I had to guess were several hours in that observation room, mostly alone and with nothing to do but think.

When I was finally escorted out of the room and down the hall to a nicer waiting room, I assumed because they decided I wasn't infected or contagious or something, I saw Brent Peters through the waiting room door. I steeled myself for the conversation I was about to have, but when Brent saw me he jumped to his feet and rushed me. It was chaos for a long moment. Brent landed a solid punch to my face, leading to the black eye that was now throbbing, and I didn't fight back. Several airmen kept us separated, and I was brought back to the observation pod without even being able to apologize to the man.

"How detailed do you want me to be?" I asked Doctor Varma. She was an attractive woman, even looking haggard from work and lack of sleep. I could only assume if she was a specialist with the vaccine that she was working some pretty heavy overtime hours. Her french accent, different enough from Ivy's that I could tell she was French and not Quebecois, didn't help with downplaying her attractiveness.

"As detailed as you can," Doctor Varma said. "Let's start at the beginning. You woke up this morning and initiated a sexual encounter with your partner Ms Lacosta, correct?"

"That's correct," I said.

"What was the nature of the encounter? Oral? Vaginal?"

"Vaginal," I said.

"And did she orgasm?"

I blew out a breath, trying to control my embarrassment. "When I finished, she did."

Doctor Varma nodded and took some notes, seemingly unfazed by the nature of the conversation. "And where did you finish?" she asked.

"Uh, vaginally," I said. "Inside her."

She just nodded along and kept prompting me. I explained about Ivy initiating a second round, beginning oral sex on my penis. She asked if I had been cleaned between encounters, which I hadn't. It hadn't seemed important at the time, since Ivy and Erica liked to play with each other almost as much as they did me.

Then it got worse, as I was prompted to explain in detail the nature of the sexual encounter between the four of us. How Ivy and I only did anal by her request. How Erica was particularly wet when aroused. How Vanessa had eaten her out and been squirted on. Then I was answering questions like 'Approximately how much of the female ejaculation did Ms Peters ingest compared to being exposed dermatologically?'

And that, of course, led to explaining the 'female bukake' scenario. And fucking Ivy's ass while the squirting was going on. And finally,finally, we got to me engaging directly with Vanessa.

"To the best of your ability, Mr Black, please consider the events as carefully as you can. When you entered Ms Peters vagina with your penis, did you clean yourself off at all?"

"I... did," I said. "I had just been having anal sex with Ivy, so I wiped my penis with a wet washcloth."

"Mmm," Doctor Varma nodded, still scribbling her notes. "And when you penetrated her, did you notice any particular emotions or events occur with Ms Peters?"

"I think- yeah," I said. "Before penetration, I had encouraged an orgasm with my fingers and some, um, light choking and dirty talk-"

"You digitally manipulated her vagina, or something else?"

"Her vagina," I clarified. "So she had only just orgasmed when I penetrated her, and I believe she had another one almost immediately."

"Mmm," Doctor Varma nodded and held up a finger to ask me to wait as she scribbled an extra-long note to herself. "Alright, continue. Once the initial orgasm from penetration had occurred, does anything she did or said stand out?"

"All of us had been pretty vocal with dirty talk," I said. "She, um, you know. The usual? Directing me to have sex with her in a specific way. Complimenting me on how it felt."

"Anything else? Particulars may be important," Doctor Varma prompted me again.

"Um, she offered me anal sex as well, but I told her I wanted to take my time if we were going to do that and I was close to finishing. That excited her, and she encouraged me to ejaculate inside of her and got kinky in that demand."

"Kinky in what way?" she asked.

"Well, she'd told us before about having a hysterectomy as a young teen, and she was talking about how she wished she had a womb I could, ah, fill. It got a little primal at the end, encouraging me to take her and make her mine. Caveman kind of stuff."

"I see," Doctor Varma nodded again, taking more notes. "And I assume you did? Ejaculate inside her, that is."

"Yes," I nodded. "She orgasmed again at that point, pretty hard, and when she didn't respond to a compliment I paid her I realized she wasn't awake and was mumbling."

"She was repeating 'imprinting,' correct?" Doctor Varma asked.

"Well, yes and no," I said. "I'd heard the 'imprinting' thing when I bonded with Erica and Ivy. Vanessa wasn't as clear, it was like she was saying it over a choppy connection if you know what I mean."

"Hmm, interesting," Doctor Varma frowned. "You didn't happen to record this, did you?"

"No," I shook my head. "That wasn't really the important thing on my mind at that point."

"Understandable, Mr Black," the doctor said. "Alright, hold tight. I need to consult with some of my staff here." And she cut the video call.

I was alone for a bit, left to my own thoughts. I should have known, or seen it, as it was happening. Vanessa had been horny, but was she 'I'd let you get me pregnant if I could' horny? Erica hadn't dropped that, our first time together, but she'd said other things that were similar. 'Take me' and 'make me yours' and that kind of stuff. And so had Ivy, though she'd been babbling in french half the time so it was hard to say for sure.

Erica had gotten a mental flag on the play, though. She'd heard it more than I had. Heard the tone of Vanessa's voice, or the words. Maybe one or the other had echoed in her, and she'd remembered how she'd felt. She hadn't tried to stop me, stop us, but maybe it had been too late at that point.

The TV flashed, loosing a digital telephone ring, and I grabbed the remote from the table and accepted the call.

"Hey, Harrison," said the man on the other end. He was another labcoat, and as best I could tell from the blurry background he was likely in the same facility or even the same room as Doctor Varma had been. This guy looked like he'd stepped right out of a corny television show though - he was blubbery in the way that a guy could be after a couple of decades of slow physical decline, with a burst of thinning silver hair that just needed the black streaks and some smudges on his face to look like he'd been catoonishly blown up. The bit of scraggly, messy scruff on his chin that looked unplanned made me a little self-conscious of my own currently messy beard. Erica had wanted me to grow mine out a bit so she could decide if she liked it longer or shorter, and Ivy didn't care, so I was looking even more like a mountain man than usual. "I'm Doctor McKenna, but you can call me Bill," he continued.

"You're on Doc Varma's team?" I asked, putting two and two together.

"Yep," he nodded. "I was supposed to do the follow-up interview with you but got caught up with some of the numbers in your case. Charlotte and I have both reviewed the content. Sounds like you had a bit of a wild time, huh? And don't worry, we're all getting pretty used to the graphic nature of our work these days so you didn't offend or embarrass anyone."

"Well, that's something at least," I said. "I never thought I'd be having a conversation like that with a doctor. Or anyone."

He got a wry grin at this and held up a hand to ease me. "Believe me, Harrison. I've been with the team from the start and we have had more than a few of these sorts of conversations based on the nature of the vaccine. Yours is definitely up there as a novel case of details, but it's only personal for you, not us."

I just nodded, not knowing what to say. I hadn't considered how often sex must come up in their day-to-day work if they were specialists.

"Now, I have - well, I can't say it's good nor bad news," Doctor Bill said. "Interesting for us, for sure. As I'm sure you're aware, as you have two partners already, the vaccine is supposed to only be transmissible from women to men for the purposes of diluting the effects on men. To be frank, no one here on the team had considered the possibility of transferring and initiating a bonding process from one woman to another through female ejaculate. It doesn't help that most of the science community, those that would even think of it, haven't exactly spent time studying female ejaculate to begin with. So your situation wasn't tested for, but as far as we can tell it still shouldn't have been able to happen."

"So what does that mean, doc?" I asked.

"It means that you, or one of your current partners, or some combination, integrated with the vaccine and imprinting process in an exceptional way. A variant response is how we're categorizing it at the moment, and to be frank it's not even one of the most surprising ones we've encountered as the testing continues to broaden. As best we can tell from your interview, it's likely that Ms Peters was vaccinated through the oral ingestion of the female ejaculate - all the markers of a normal imprinting process occur when you began actual sex together.

"Now, the really interesting part of this on my end is obviously the fact that this happened at all, but following the results of the blood tests from the Testing facility up where you are, and the preliminary tests we've completed on the samples that got flown down to us here, we've found that it isn't likely to be a phenomenon that is worth pursuing. Unfortunately, while Ms Peters is certainly going to be imprinted on you to some degree, it also seems that the efficacy of the vaccine in her system will be well under our current rates. Right now our projection is that she will only have an efficacy rate of about thirty-five to forty per cent, while a woman who has undergone our current best practices has an efficacy of somewhere around the eightieth percentile."

I had to rub my forehead and close my eyes for a long moment as I tried to parse everything he was saying. "So what does that mean, Doctor Bill?" I asked.

"It means that Ms Peters is now part of your 'Team,' he said. "That's what I've been calling the groups of imprinted people colloquially around here, anyways. But where your other two partners have a high likelihood of staving off the Duo Halo virus, if Ms Peters is exposed she is about half as likely to resist initial infection or gain serious aid in fighting off an infection she catches."

"So we've put her at risk by having casual sex with her," I said. "Fuck me, this is exactly the kind of shit that I was worried about when she asked to join in with us."

"Yes and no," he said. "To be frank, it's entirely possible that her integration with the vaccine will grow and normalize over time with repeated exposure to you. The staff up there will book some follow-up blood draws to check in on that. One of the many things were are trying to understand about the vaccine is how sex bolsters imprinted partners. Generally, we haven't seen that happen for women, since they can't have more than one imprinted male partner, but the more partners men are in contact with the more efficacy we're seeing."

"So you're saying she's stuck with me," I said. "She asked for no-strings-attached, and she got trapped into a sexual relationship."

"You could look at it that way," he said. "But-"

"But," Doc Varma said, coming into view on his end of the call and hovering over his shoulder. "I would remind you, Mr Black, that shedid choose to initiate a group sexual encounter with you and your partners. And once she is awake from the imprinting process, I would not be surprised if she feels content with the overall situation following any initial panic or shock."

I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling for a moment. "You know, when I first heard about this from Erica, I told her it sounded like some sort of brainwashing mind control shit? I couldn't believe she'd gotten the vaccine. But then everything was going so well that I stopped thinking about it. And Ivy was happy, and Erica's brother was partnered and they were both extremely happy. But this-" I sighed heavily and looked at the two scientists on the screen. "This is some fucked up, B-movie supervillain kind of shit. You guys realize that, right? Like, where is James Bond in all of this?"

Bill frowned, but Doc Varma smirked just a little. "Yes," she said. "We are aware of how inappropriate many of the factors of the vaccine are, Mr Black. It is a marvel of modern medicine, but we are still grappling with the necessities that come along with it."

Together they ran me through what I needed to expect moving forward. Vanessa was going to be monitored until she woke up, so I would be spending the night where I was at. She'd get a complete physical, and they'd take more blood for testing before she'd be released into my care and we were brought back home. Then, depending on what she wanted, she would either be able to live with Erica, Ivy and I, or she could maintain some distance for the time being and only come to see me for the sexual encounters she would require. We would both receive follow-up check-ins from someone on the Vaccine testing team to draw more blood periodically to check if Vanessa's efficacy was changing, or if mine was.

The Docs signed off, leaving me alone in the little meeting room again. Not knowing when I would be able to leave, I decided to try and fall back on one of my old military instincts - sleep when you can. So I got comfortable in the chair, closed my eyes, and let myself drift into a fitful, not-quite-soothing sleep.

"Harri," someone said, and I woke with a start as my shoulder was touched.

"Mmf," I grunted, and sniffed in a breath as I blinked rapidly and looked around. I was still in the room, and Miriam was smiling at me. She was dressed in fatigues here in the military office complex instead of her service dress blues and her hair was up in a standard military bun hidden beneath the standard issue cap.

"Just like a grunt to take any reason for a nap," she grinned at me. "Come on. We can talk in my office."

I stood, yawned and stretched, feeling something pop in my back and my shoulder from the uncomfortable position I'd been in. "Lead the way, Lieutenant Colonel," I said.

She rolled her eyes at me a little but didn't say anything, just opening the door and walking through. I followed her back into that hallway where Brent had clocked me. He wasn't in the waiting room at the end of the hall. "Is Brent-" I started to ask.

"He's waiting on another floor," Miriam said. "Refuses to leave until he sees his daughter is alright. It's making operations slow down over at the construction site, but I can't blame him."

"Neither can I," I said, touching the tenderness of my black eye.

Miriam led me through several very plain corridors lined with doors. None of them had windows to see in, and most had nameplate mounts but lacked names, and instead were labelled with numbers. It struck me as secretive, and that meant I was probably in the Air Force part of the building and not the Vaccine Test Center part. If they were trying to make people feel at ease joining an experimental program, these plain walls and doors forming a maze were not the way to do it. Confounding an enemy trying to sneak through this part of the building, though? It was perfect.