Zoinks!

"Zoinks!"

Things had gone completely out of control again. As usual.

Every time the team set out to investigate a new mystery, Wilma swore that this time was going to be different. This time, she was going to say something when Rickey suggested they split up and look for clues. This time, she was going to put her foot down when Bongo went off to look for something to eat in the commissary of the 'haunted museum' and left her alone with just the gang's science project for company. (Admittedly, Bingo the Robot was probably smarter than at least half of Wilma's friends, and that was being generous to Rickey. But still.) This time, she was going to get one of those straps they sold at the drugstore to keep her glasses from getting knocked off by an overenthusiastic Bingo. This time, she was going to sit and wait for help when the world around her descended into a hazy blur of random shapes, instead of groping around and stumbling into yet another secret passage. This time, she was not, repeat not, going to succumb to her curiosity when she found a hidden floor full of mysterious Roman artifacts that matched the ones left behind after the appearances of the Spectral Centurion.

Needless to say, that hadn't happened. Wilma stumbled to her feet, pale fingers groping along the wall in the gloom for some kind of light switch to give her at least a fighting chance at seeing where the heck she was going. Bingo trundled along behind her, burbling cheerfully in its synthetic voice as it searched for clues. The glowing viewscreen that passed for its face gave Wilma just enough illumination to see that the passage went along straight for a little ways before... well, before fading into silent shadows that could contain anything from a hole in the floor to a whole legion of ghostly Roman soldiers.

Not that Wilma really expected it to be an actual ghost behind all this. "We're not falling for that one again, are we?" she murmured softly, as much to herself as to Bingo. It seemed like they'd investigated dozens of supernatural occurrences on behalf of Rickey's eccentric uncle, and every single one of them had turned out to be an invention of the old caretaker or the groundskeeper or a disgruntled former employee or a disinherited relative looking to spook their old man into changing the will. Wilma had become an expert at spotting the telltale signs of fake blood, luminous paint, and latex trickery by now, and even though she hadn't yet seen this Spectral Centurion, she was sure that he wasn't going to be any different from--

"Ahhh!" Wilma's train of thought was interrupted by the unmistakable sound of a pair of glasses bumping against her foot and skidding across the linoleum floor. She froze, terrified to take another step lest she accidentally crush them under her chunky, steel-toed shoes. They must have taken the same tumble down the secret trapdoor that she did, and slid down the hallway further due to their light weight. "Hold still, Bingo," she said, desperate to make sure that the robot didn't accidentally break them either. She didn't have a spare pair on her (another thing she swore she was going to do next time) and couldn't see a thing without them.

Carefully, Wilma sank down to her hands and knees in a posture that had become depressingly familiar to her. She hitched up her skirt to keep it out of the way and began feeling around for her glasses on the dusty floor. For once, she was grateful for the solitude and poor lighting; traveling the countryside in Rickey's van had its disadvantages, and one of them was definitely a lack of reliable laundromats. Wilma's thick, baggy sweaters and sensible tweed skirts were pretty easy to keep clean, but anyone standing behind her when she bent over like this was bound to notice that her supply of clean panties had pretty much dried up three days ago. (And it wasn't exactly like she could borrow from Laurel, either. Wilma wasn't judgy, but how a woman could wear a skirt that short without anything under it but a pair of thigh-high stockings was beyond her.)

She felt a momentary surge of triumph when her fingers brushed against something plastic, but just then Bingo squealed, "A-HA!" and launched itself forward excitably. Wilma's heart sank. Just once, just freaking once, she wished that the stupid robot she and Rickey designed together wasn't quite so desperately enthusiastic about providing assistance. She'd tried everything she could think of to balance its artificial intelligence with a little bit of calm wisdom and common sense to offset its drive to help the team solve mysteries, or at least to make it a little bit more graceful and better coordinated, but it was no good. Bingo remained a gawky, galumphing liability 90% of the time.

If it wasn't for the one time in ten that it absolutely saved the day, Wilma probably would have junked it by now, no matter what Rickey said. But the little wheeled cylindrical robot with the spindly multi-purpose arms continued to function just well enough to tantalize Wilma into trying to improve its performance... instead of just finding the nearest antique Roman gladius and dismembering the damn thing for knocking her glasses clear into the next room in its efforts to 'help'. With a sigh of frustration, she crawled carefully after them, her round thighs awkwardly rubbing against one another as she scooted her hands and knees across the cold tiles.

When she reached the threshold, though, Wilma heard something that made her think twice about crawling in front of the open doorway. She fumbled for Bingo, pushing it behind her before it could peer around the corner and give away her position with its lighted face. Someone was speaking, their low, husky voice echoing sepulchrally in the silence of the abandoned wing of the museum. "Watch the gold coin sway and dance," they said, "and you will fall into a trance." The smooth, menacing confidence in those resonant tones chilled Wilma to the bone... but it was nothing compared to what she heard next.

"Watch the gold coin sway and dance," Laurel said, her voice unmistakable even with all of the emotion drained out of it into a sleepy monotone, "and I will fall... into a trance." Wilma forced back a groan of frustration. Of course she'd gotten separated from Rickey. And of course she'd stumbled into the same hidden wing of the museum. And of course she'd bumped into the Spectral Centurion. And of course, of absolute freaking course he was hypnotizing her. Because what else was Laurel good for if not to be hypnotized by every single wicked caretaker or sinister groundskeeper they ran into?

And of course when it heard Laurel's voice, Bingo was bound to chirrup in excited resolve and attempt to charge into the room to rescue her, smacking square into Wilma's plump buttocks as if it didn't even notice she was there. Wilma sprawled forward, landing on the floor with a thud that was thankfully absorbed by her thick orange sweater. "Who's there?" she cried, hoping to make enough of a commotion to rouse Laurel from her dazed slumber.

"Right on cue," the mysterious stranger said. Wilma couldn't make out much, even with Bingo's face brightening into a warm glow that banished the shadows to the very corners of the room, but she saw a vague pink blur that she knew had to be Laurel kneeling helplessly on the floor next to a tall, imposing person wearing an iron helmet and luminescent armor. The Spectral Centurion, Wilma supposed. She could smell the glow-in-the-dark paint from here.

Wilma tried to struggle to her feet, but Bingo had rolled forward just a little and the hem of her skirt caught in its wheels just as she had stumbled halfway into a crouch that she couldn't easily recover from. The net effect was to yank the sensible tweed outfit back and down exactly as Wilma was moving up and forward, tangling it around her ankles and causing her to fall forward onto her face with her bare buttocks completely exposed to the stranger's view. "Jeepers," she muttered, her chubby cheeks flushing bright red with embarrassment.

Laurel didn't seem to notice. She hadn't moved since Wilma came into the room, still down on her knees with her shoulders slumped and her legs ever so slightly parted. It was hard to tell for sure--even from just a few feet away, her friend and partner looked decidedly blurry--but judging by the color of that blur, Laurel had already removed all of her clothing before kneeling down in the dusty darkness. It was hard to escape the implications of that fact, even harder when she realized that the Spectral Centurion's glowing armor had a distinct flesh-colored gap where the codpiece usually went.

"Please, don't get up on my account," the Centurion purred, removing his helmet to reveal a face that appeared frustratingly vague to Wilma's astigmatic eyes. "I'm enjoying the view at the moment, and it's not like you can stop my plans anyway. Not when you're going to be hypnotized just like your friend soon." His voice sounded deliberately low and breathy, as though he was concealing a more natural tone that Wilma was bound to recognize. Was it the curator? The janitor? The antiquities expert with the big weird eyebrows? Wilma had to keep him talking. It was the only way to find out.

"I don't think you're going to find it that easy," Wilma said, casting her gaze around for something, anything that would give her a chance to escape. Most of the room simply looked like a fog of vague, misty shapes, but as she glanced over to the right, she couldn't believe her luck--her glasses were right there, just inches out of her reach! If she could only squirm over to them without attracting her captor's attention, she could put them on and discover the Spectral Centurion's true identity. She rolled onto her side, squinting angrily in an effort to make it look like she was simply confronting the mysterious stranger face-to-face.

Whoever it was, they certainly didn't appear too threatened by her. "That's exactly what Laurel said," he purred confidently, his voice dripping with silky menace. "She thought she could resist my pretty gold coin... this one, right here." He made a flourish with his right hand, and a sparkly haze that Wilma presumed to be a Roman aureus with a hole pierced through it dangled down from a cord that she couldn't quite make out. Her right hand groped behind her for her glasses, so frustrated by her poor eyesight that she didn't even care what happened to her so long as she could see it. Why hadn't she gotten Lasik, dammit?

"But once she watched it spin and sway at the end of its string, her eyes began to get heavy and sleepy," the Centurion continued, his erection stiffening until even Wilma could see it bobbing and twitching between his legs. She felt uncomfortably aware that this position gave him a perfect view of her pubic mound. "She tried so hard to keep her thoughts from growing mazy... and foggy... and thick with drowsy confusion. But in the end, the coin caught her and captivated her and fascinated her into a deep hypnotic trance. Her mind softened into my inescapable control, and it felt so good." Wilma tried to let her expression slacken into what she thought a victim of hypnosis might look like, hoping to keep him distracted just long enough to--

She felt her fingers close around the stem of her glasses, and sat up in triumph as she whipped them onto her face. "Aha!" she said, the world coming into crystal clear focus through the thick lenses set in their chunky, black frames. "Now we'll see who HOLY SHIT IT'S YOU?" All of her typical euphemisms, from 'Zoinks!' to 'Jeepers!' to 'Jimminy Jillikers', fled her mind in an instant when she saw the face behind the Spectral Centurion's helmet. She forgot all about her missing panties, her openly displayed labia, even Laurel's motionless and dazed form still kneeling on the floor. She forgot everything except for the person in front of her.

Because the Spectral Centurion was Rickey.

"Y-you?" Wilma gasped, staggering to her feet in stunned amazement, her mouth opening and closing like a goldfish in shock between every astonished exclamation. "Y-you've been the ghost all along? But... but I thought we came here to find the real reason for the disturbances at the museum! Why, why would you bring us here if it was you behind it all? You, we... we always catch the ghosts in the end!"

Rickey chuckled. "And we will this time, too. By the time we leave, antiquities expert Oswald Fullerton will be unmasked as the Spectral Centurion, admitting to the world that he was hoping to scare the museum into closing so that he could have the Celtic artifacts relocated to Britain where they belong. And he would have gotten away with it, too, if not for us meddling young adults and our robot." Wilma had heard those exact same words, she realized, dozens of times. From every single wicked schemer and sinister con artist they unmasked. Line for line, syllable for syllable. Like they were reading from a script.

"You hypnotized them," she said dully, as the realization finally hit her. "You've been dressing up in stupid disguises, committing crimes while pretending to be a, a ghost or an alien or a sea monster, and then hypnotizing someone else into confessing for you. Why? Was it some sort of scam you've been running on your uncle? Did you need to convince him to keep hiring us to investigate 'ghosts' so you could debunk them?" Wilma couldn't imagine how she'd never noticed before. She understood now why Rickey always split them up, even when it made no logical sense at all. He was slipping away to impersonate the monsters.

He didn't seem a bit bothered by her deductions, though. If anything, his cock seemed to be a little bit harder as he watched her work it all out. "Tell me, Wilma," he said, still using that same low, breathy voice he'd developed for the Spectral Centurion, "have you ever seen my uncle? Have any of you? Or do I just show up with my junky old van and tell you all that he's hired us to investigate the old carnival or the haunted mill or something?" He laughed. "I made my money in tech stocks, Wilma. I'm not reliant on anybody."

Wilma's jaw dropped, her mouth gaping open in utter bewilderment. "But... but why, then? Why the robot, and the mysteries, and the, the gang, and... all this?" She gestured around at the abandoned wing of the museum, the absurd costume slathered in luminescent paint, the goofy little robot, the naked kneeling woman on the floor... really just the whole damn situation, honestly. Wilma's mind reeled at all the time and effort it must take to stage-manage an entire fake haunting within a fake crime, and for what? He didn't even steal anything.

Rickey paused, musing for a moment as though he'd never actually thought about it before. "Because it's fun," he said at last, his face once again breaking into that same mischievous smile he'd worn since unmasking. "Because it's funny, and because it turns me on so much to watch you all go through the same things every single time without even realizing it. I mean... come on, Wilma. You seriously mean to tell me you thought it made sense to go solving a mystery without any panties on? You really thought that Bongo wandered off and left me alone with the girls because he's just that hungry?"

His voice dripped with sweet, condescending malice as he spoke, each word slashing Wilma's comfortable certainty into dazed, whimpering confusion. "I programmed Bingo to steer you to me, the same way I programmed you not to notice anything unusual about his code. You never notice anything I don't want you to, Wilma. Not the similarities between all our cases, not the way you always go along with my crazy plans, not even the way you're playing with your tits right now through your sweater." Wilma looked down to find her fingers massaging her full, heavy breasts, finding the nipples even through the thick woolen fabric, and quickly forced them back to her sides.

"You're already hypnotized, Wilma," Rickey said calmly, holding up the gold coin. She could see it so much more clearly now. "You just don't know it yet."

Wilma shook her head, uncomfortably aware that her eyes remained firmly locked on the spinning, swaying aureus. "But, but I can resist you now that I know. Now that I'm aware of, of what you're up to, I... I can fight it, I can stay a... awake." She could feel her limbs becoming numb and heavy as Rickey swiftly crossed the distance between them, holding the coin higher and higher so that she had to strain to look up at it. Even speech felt like a tremendous effort, but she knew she had to struggle against the mesmerizing influence of the sparkling, swinging pendulum or she'd become every bit as helpless as Laurel.

"You already knew," Rickey replied remorselessly, the tip of his cock nestling gently in the cleft between Wilma's curvy thighs. "We've had this conversation forty-one times, Wilma. And every time, you tell me that this time you're going to resist. This time, you're going to remember. This time, you won't wind up down on your knees sucking my cock like a good girl while Laurel eats that creamy little pussy of yours. And every time... every single time, I tell you the same thing." He reached up and gently plucked the glasses from her face.

"You can't think without your glasses. Isn't that right?" He was close enough that Wilma could still see his smug, confident grin. And his gold coin. It sparkled even brighter now, the haze of her astigmatism turning it into a beautiful, coruscating blur of gleaming colors. Her mouth hung open in fascination as it swung before her mazy, glassy eyes, each arc making her feel more dazed and drowsy and compliant.

"Not... exactly...." Wilma murmured, her voice thick with befuddled confusion. Her head drooped forward with a sudden jerk, forcing her to struggle to keep it from slumping bonelessly onto her chest in mesmerized exhaustion. She could feel her fingers moving back up again, carrying the hem of her sweater with them and lifting it up over the shelf of her full, pendulous tits so that she could play with her nipples again. She was somehow unsurprised to find out that she wasn't wearing a bra under there, either. Wilma could hear all of the echoes of her programming now, becoming clearer and more distinct as her mind sank back into a deep hypnotic trance. All her strength, all her power had gone out of her with her glasses. She was helpless without them. Blissfully, wonderfully helpless.

"Watch the gold coin sway and dance," Rickey intoned, in the mesmerizing voice that she knew so well and forgot so easily. "And you will fall into a trance."

Wilma was already sinking to her knees as she began to respond, Rickey's cock brushing a trail of precum up her belly as it slid across her skin. "W-watch the gold coin sway... and dance..." she said, heat surging between her thighs as she was finally allowed to remember the ecstasy of surrendering to Rickey's will and fucking herself into obedience. It always felt so nice to remember, so much better to forget. She couldn't wait until he emptied out her mind and made her into a good girl again like all the other times. "And I will fall into a mmmmmphmmmmblmmm."

Wilma's mouth was too full to finish. But Rickey knew exactly what she meant.

THE END