• "Chest of Wonders" (mf mc md fd nc) (1/2)

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    Subject: {ASSM} <THM> "Chest of Wonders" (mf mc md fd nc) Voyer
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    Chest of Wonders
    mf, mc, md, fd, nc
    hypnovoyer@hotmail.com

    General disclaimers: This story is a hypnofetish fantasy. It
    contains adult language and situations, along with examples of
    adult fictional characters doing illegal, immoral and/or
    impossible things to other adult fictional characters as a prelude
    to sexual activity. If you 1) are under the age of consent in your
    community, 2) are disturbed by such concepts, 3)
    attempt to do most of these things in real life or 4) want graphic
    blow-by-blow sex in your online pornography, then please stop
    reading now.
    Permission is granted to re-post this story unaltered to any
    on-line forum, as long as no fee whatsoever is charged to view
    it, and this disclaimer and this e-mail address
    (hypnovoyer@hotmail.com) are not removed. It would also be
    nice if you told me you were posting it.
    Copyright Voyer, 2001.

    Specific disclaimers: Among other things, this story is my
    contribution to the Alt Sex Stories Text Repository's 5th
    anniversary celebration, in which I was assigned the theme
    `Behind the Newsdesk'. Please consider supporting the
    ASSTR's continued good work with a donation. If you like this
    story and want to read more of my work, you can find the bulk
    of it at the ASSTR-affliated site The Erotic Mind Control
    Archive, located at http://www.mcstories.com. I also have my
    own website, currently to be found at
    http://www.geocities.com/hypnovoyer.


    ************

    It started when Ted died, and it ended when *I* died.
    But no. It didn't end even then. And now...
    Well, we'll get to that when we get to it, won't we?
    Ted's death. To start with, I have to be honest here and admit
    that I wasn't *too* broken up the day I came home from work
    and found that long white envelope waiting for me in my
    mailbox. Yes, Ted and I had been room- and apartment-mates
    at Greson for three and a half years, and we had gotten along
    well enough, but we never were exactly what you'd call
    *close*, even when we had been living under the same roof. In
    many ways when we had decided to pair up halfway through
    our freshman year, it had been a marriage of convenience, each
    of us shoring up the gaps in the other's academic work. Ted the
    Science Geek and Will the Writingest Fool. First in one of
    Greson's cruddy frosh dorms, then as soon as possible in a
    small and not-quite-as-putrid-but-still-pretty-cruddy apartment
    just off campus, we lived separate lives, kept separate hours,
    our paths generally only crossing when we needed to pass the
    latest batch of hints and study notes back and forth, in the
    manner of drug dealers meeting in some alley.
    Still, he was a nice enough guy. We shared more than one
    round of beers at Clancy's. We got drunk together on more
    than one occasion. We talked about women and life and the
    universe and women.
    And when you're still young, (well... yeah, OK, *fairly*
    young) learning that someone your own age has died is always
    unsettling, one of those first taps on the shoulder from the Grim
    Reaper as he comes up to stand behind you, taps that come
    along harder and harder, more and more frequently, as the years
    and the decades race by...
    For that's what the letter inside the envelope told me. It was
    from a law firm back east. Ted had died. After passing on this
    news to me, the letter further surprised me by informing me that
    I had been included in Ted's will. I wasn't the main beneficiary;
    while he had evidently still been a bachelor at his death, he did
    had a couple of younger siblings and they got the bulk of the
    stuff, whatever money there was, whatever furniture and real
    estate and domestic chattel.
    I met one them once, one of the siblings, when she paid us a
    visit at Greson during our tenure there. Allison. I remember her
    now as a somewhat more attractive version of Ted, thin with
    that same messy black hair. (Of course at the time anything
    female moving under its own power was at least vaguely
    attractive.) They also shared the same regrettable taste in
    eyewear.
    Not that it matters. What I had inherited, all that I had
    inherited, was a trunk. No, I take that back. Not just a trunk,
    but *the* trunk. I had completely forgotten about it in the
    intervening years, but standing there at the counter of my
    apartment kitchen, the gutted envelope laying to one side, it all
    came back to me.
    You see, Ted had owned a old-fashioned traveling trunk, a
    really nice piece of work that *he* had inherited years ago from
    a relative, a great-uncle or somesuch, a somewhat shadowy and
    exotic figure (to me at least) who had evidently spent his entire
    long and quite eventful life in the merchant marine. God knows
    where Uncle... Hans... I think it was Hans...acquired the thing,
    but it was the absolute archetype of traveling luggage, a bulky
    rectangle with a high curving lid, well made of thick oiled slats
    of some exotic wood, and meticulously bound and cornered
    with pieces of hammered and polished brass. It sported sturdy
    handles on either end, a set of heavy latches and in the central
    place of honor, a stolid lock (more brass) that wouldn't have
    been out of place if encountered on the door of an armored car.
    The interior was nicely padded, soft leather the color of old
    wine. As a finishing touch of perfection, there were even a few
    stickers slapped haphazardly on the lid, from appropriately
    exotic ports of call. Palau-Palau. Bali Hai. R'yleh. Wuldercan.
    Ted had it sitting at the foot of his bed all the way through
    college, and from the relatively little I saw, he kept a rotating
    assortment of junk in it. Well. *I* called it junk. Bits of
    machinery he had scavenged somewhere, half-finished and
    half-abandoned class projects, old bank statements and student
    loan applications, `interesting' beer bottles, and so on and so
    forth. I liked that trunk, and I was vaguely annoyed at the time
    that Ted didn't store anything more important in it. On more
    than one occasion I had commented on how I wished I had
    something like it, so when I was firmly established as a
    World-Famous Author I could live out of it while traveling the
    globe on my colossal book-signing tours, store within it the
    dampened panties of my screaming female fans, all the usual
    crap that a drunk horny college student dreams up at 3:00 AM
    on a Saturday morning, deep in the fetid but thrilling quagmire
    that is his freshman year. Finally I must have worn Ted down,
    and one night at Clancy's he said he'd be sure and leave it to me
    in his will. We had both laughed, and I had then promptly
    gotten (more) drunk and forgotten about it. Ah youth.
    Obviously though, Ted hadn't forgotten.
    But then Ted, Ted the Science Whiz, he sometimes had a
    habit of remembering the damnedest things. At the drop of a
    hat, he could recite the all scores of all the games played by his
    favorite baseball team, (some AAA outfit in Detroit, his
    hometown) back for ten years. All the scores, and who they
    played. Even though he displayed almost zero interest in
    politics, he also knew everyone who had ever been tapped to be
    shipped off to DC from his Congressional district, all the way
    back to whenever it was that the Detroit area officially joined
    the United States. Every winner of the Nobel Prize in the
    various science categories. Stuff like that.
    Ah... I don't want to give the impression that Ted was some
    idiot savant. The guy was bright, brighter than me by a long
    shot, and I can say without false modesty that I'm not exactly a knuckle-dragging cretin. Ted graduated fourth in our class, and
    could easily have been the big numero uno, if he had had just a
    little more dedication and stick-to-it-tiveness built into his
    makeup. But then I suppose fourth was good enough. He
    quickly got snapped up by one of those high-tech
    conglomerates that does vague and expensive things for the
    upper levels of the US military, and he left the corn and soybean
    fields for good immediately after graduation, following the path
    east that had been laid down by those fools from his
    Congressional district.
    So why did he need The Writingest Fool (42nd in a
    graduating class of 1223, thank you very much) I hear you ask?
    Well, with some things, a lot of things, Ted's mind was like a
    steel trap. He latched on if they were unlucky enough to flit past
    and he never ever let go. Others... substitute the words `a steel
    trap' with `flypaper' and you get the basic idea. He could glue
    this second sort of ideas into place just long enough to pass his
    English 101 test, or whatever, but ask him about them a month
    after that... poof. Gone.
    Gone. Sort of like the rest of him, I suppose, ten years after
    we graduated, five years after we had last had any sort of
    contact. No more half-finished machines dripping oil on the
    floor by the sofa. No more stringy-but-bright girlfriends passing
    through the apartment at odd hours. No more horrific trombone
    solos greeting the dawn. No more sardine-laden pizzas.
    A car, a sudden rainstorm, a wet spot on the road, a
    guard-rail that didn't hold. Poof. No more Ted, leaving me and
    the Reaper reading a letter in my kitchen...

    * * *

    Hmm. Looking back on what I have so far here... I really
    didn't intend for this to turn into the Theodore J. Capotosto
    Memorial. Let's try and cut a little more to the chase here. The
    man lived, as far as I was aware his presence made the world a
    slightly better place, and then he died. He left me a trunk. After
    the ace legal minds at Summers, Austin and Goldstein tracked
    me down, I got in touch with them. There was the ritual of
    legalistic passwords and countersigns exchanged back and forth
    and about a month later, a burly delivery man with the name Hal
    stitched on his uniform in red thread turned up on the doorstep.
    Hal had a handcart and perched on that handcart was a
    good-sized crate. His burden was big and heavy, but somehow
    between the two of us, we wrestled it through the door and got
    it deposited in the living room. I signed the appropriate
    paperwork, gave the very last countersign, and like Ted before
    him Hal departed from my life.
    I scrounged up a hammer from the tool/junk drawer, pried the
    crate open, and sure enough, there was the trunk, right side up
    and looking pretty much like I remembered it. Whatever
    journeys it and Ted had made together in the last ten years, he
    had obviously taken good care of it; as near as I could tell the
    only thing that had changed was that the travel stickers had
    been (carefully) peeled off it at some point. It looked like it
    could easily have been shipped sans crate and have arrived
    without so much as a scratch.
    Ever since learning that I was going to get the thing, I had
    been trying to decide what if anything to store in it. To my
    utmost regret I didn't have all that many female fans to
    contribute dampened panties, so I'd have to come up with
    something else... I found the long heavy key sealed up in a
    hemorrhoidally-neat little plastic baggy. I cracked into the lock.
    Said lock turned, the latches popped obligingly when I pulled at
    them, and the lid lifted itself up. And within...
    Someone had beaten me to it. To the job of filling the trunk, I
    mean; I should have realized it from the weight. If only it had
    been full of gold bars or international barer bonds or something
    along those lines, but no such luck. What *was* there was not
    immediately obvious, as the contents were a jumbled mess.
    My first reaction was one of... you know, I'm not sure now.
    Annoyance I guess. I figured that if there was anything remotely
    valuable or personal in there, I would have to try and track
    down Allison and/or Sibling Number 2 and return it to them.
    Before proceeding a step further, I found that first letter from
    Summers et al and carefully re-read it. No hint where they
    might be found. However, a particular line jumped out at me:
    the trunk and *all of its contents* had been specifically willed to
    me. I made a snap decision. It was all mine now. Unless there
    were gold bars underneath the whatever, I would be keeping it
    all.
    Or maybe throwing it away, I thought, after I started sorting
    that whatever, pulling it out a piece at a time so I could savor
    the experience, a sort of Christmas in July. (Yes, this all
    happened in July, if you care.) Ted's taste in trunk-contents had
    evidently not improved in the intervening years. There was a
    large pile of Detroit newspapers, of various dates and with no
    other apparent common theme, all neatly bundled and tied
    together with a long piece of black electrical cord. A large
    heavy pair of sunglasses that Elvis would have been proud to
    call his own, a fairly nice green sweater that was too small for
    me, and a really ratty purple one that was too big; the tattered
    sleeves were so long they made me look like a moth-eaten
    gorilla when I lost control of myself and tried it on for a
    moment. At least I had a good Halloween costume ready.
    There were three trombone spit-valves. There were a couple
    of cheap-looking medals, tarnished metal disks on thin emerald
    ribbons, printed with some vaguely European language I didn't
    recognize and mounted in flimsy black display boxes. There was
    half of a cracked coconut shell with a circuitboard-like pattern
    thickly traced on the inner surface, most of the parts from a cell
    phone (I think), a couple of truly interesting beer bottles, a large narrow-mouthed jug full of shiny Indian-head pennies, six
    marbles, and...
    There was the other thing. The last thing. Even though it was
    bulky and filled a good portion of the chest, it seemed to lurk in
    the chest's shadows, avoiding my gaze. I tried to pick it up, and
    was shocked at how heavy it was; it clearly had been what was
    slowing me and Hal down. Finally with a tremendous struggle, I
    hooked my fingers under it, lifted it out and staggered just far
    enough to deposit it on the coffee table nearby, which I
    half-imagined hearing groan under the weight.
    So what was `it'? I'm afraid that I can't really give you an
    exact answer to that, even now. It was a mechanical device of
    some kind, but beyond that it was very difficult to describe. It
    had a sort of blobby appearance, as if its birth had occurred
    when several smaller devices had been methodically welded
    together into one solid mass. There were spinners and gears and
    skinny light bulbs and I don't know what all poking out through
    gaps and holes at odd angles. But at the same time, there was a
    definite *finished* air to the whole thing. It actually resembled
    its container in certain ways; there were tasteful brass fittings
    wrapped tightly around the outside, and all the various corners
    had been carefully rounded off smooth. It sat on four neat little
    legs, which even had bits of felt glued to the bottom of them.
    There were no sharp edges anywhere, and all the parts that
    appeared to need it gleamed with clear oil. I circled the thing a
    couple of times. There was no sign of labels or instructions or
    engravings. I had no intention at that moment of turning it on,
    but that evidently wasn't going to be a problem since there
    *also* didn't appear to be any sign of a power cord, or a
    battery compartment, or most vitally an `on' switch...
    Then I noticed the key. Not a key like the one that opened the
    trunk, but something you might find sticking out of the back of
    a mechanical windup toy, set into a recessed hole in the
    machine's side and folded down flat on a set of discrete hinges.
    Almost against my will, I gingerly touched it. Nothing
    happened, and I hooked my fingers again and pulled on it. The
    metal was cool and slick. With only a gentle tug it snapped up
    and locked into place with a competent little snicking sound. I
    gave another tug, pulling *out* this time, but it was anchored
    firmly in place. I didn't mess with that any further at that point,
    but went back to studying the rest of the Device. (It quickly
    acquired capital-letter status in my mind.) Studying the top
    closely, I noticed now that while there were no switches or
    knobs or anything, there were in fact two promising holes. The
    first wasn't really a hole at all, but a socket of some sort,
    evidently not for a power cord, but for the sort of adapter that
    you find on the end of the cord that is attached to your average
    set of headphones. This hole was ringed with a narrow band of
    color, the color of pine needles.
    Headphones. Cables...
    My gaze was drawn back to the bundle of newspapers, and
    more specifically to what was holding them together. Sure
    enough, on closer examination I could see that yes, the cable
    actually had connectors wired on to both ends. I untangled it
    from the newspapers and examined those ends more closely.
    One was a fairly standard looking thing, something that you
    might indeed find on a set of headphones. It had a pine-needle
    marking ring around it. The other end of the cord... It wasn't
    any kind of plug I was immediately familiar with; it looked
    something like a medium-sized three-pronged cocktail fork,
    each prong round and cut off smooth at its end. The center plug
    stuck out a little further than the one on either side. It had a
    marking ring the color of cooked salmon.
    Again moving almost unwillingly, I plugged in the Device-end
    of the cable. It locked in place with another firm click. I flipped
    the free end absently. It brought irresistibly to mind the image
    of a rattlesnake's tail shaking and finally I shook it from my
    grasp, letting the whole thing coil up in an untidy heap on top of
    the Device. Messing with this thing was stupid, even dangerous.
    Whatever it was, along with those pennies, it was no doubt
    worth some money, and my conscience wouldn't let me keep it,
    without at least trying to get in touch with Allison and S#2.
    I left it all there, and went to make some dinner.
    Or at least I tried to. The thing sat there on the coffee table
    and nagged at me, like the holes left in your mouth after your
    wisdom teeth are extracted. Feeling its presence pushing against
    the back of my skull, I fished a frozen dinner out of the freezer
    and nuked it in the microwave, my shoulders hunched over.
    Ping and done. A fork waited for me in the proper drawer. As I
    chewed and swallowed, standing at the counter, I stared at the
    Device. It stared back. Finally I could resist no more, and
    abandoned my half-eaten burritos to their fate. Pulled back to
    the coffee table.
    Maybe I was missing something, from the rest of the trunk's
    contents. I again studied them, spread out now before me.
    Newspapers. Sweater. Gorilla costume. Valves. Jar of pennies.
    A few marbles.
    Sunglasses....
    I really looked at them for the first time, then picked them up.
    They were better made than they had first appeared, with large
    very black lenses, surrounded by almost-square metal frames. I
    opened them-

    * * *

    Oh, fuck it. Again I read back over what I have written, and
    again I have to say to myself, Will, let's cut the crap here.
    You're stalling, going into all of these blow-by-blow
    descriptions. Or maybe it's the writer that I am? Trained by
    Professor Thunstone and all the rest back at Greson to try and
    build the suspense, maintain the narrative flow. But that's not
    why I'm here, and that's not why you're reading it, I imagine. If
    anyone should ever happen to be reading this.
    No. I'm just stalling. I should scroll back and cut out all of
    that crap about the Device, but since I've gone to the trouble of
    typing it all out, I'll leave it now, in case there is someone out
    there who is interested. Let's just summarize again.
    I found a magical machine in a trunk. To this day I don't
    know where the machine really came from, Ted or Hans or the
    trunk or the Device Fairy. It worked by winding a key in its
    side. You plugged a cable into the machine, and plugged the
    other end of the cable into a large pair of things that a first
    glance resembled some gaudy sunglasses. I plugged and I
    plugged and I wound up the machine. I put on the glasses and
    nothing happened. A lot more testing, a lot more poking and
    prodding, and I finally discovered that even after winding it up,
    the machine didn't run until you stuck a marble into that other
    hole in the top of the machine. I mentioned the other hole,
    didn't I? Yes. Just a plain glass marble, but it had to be one of
    the marbles out of the trunk; at one point in the process I
    managed to scrounge up one from somewhere else and it didn't
    do squat. When the marble was dropped into place and the key
    was fully wound up, the Device came to life. As the gears
    turned and the lights flashed, the marble spun madly in its
    socket for a short time, a mad twirling eyeball staring at the
    ceiling, and then abruptly shattered into dust, shutting the whole
    damn thing back down again. It took a long time for me to
    figure all of this out, but finally...
    I wound up the Device all the way.
    And I slapped in a marble.
    And I put on the glasses. I suppose it was stupid, but at the
    end of the day, I'm not sure I was actually given much choice in
    the matter.

    * * *

    How to describe what I saw? As the Writingest Fool, it galls
    me to have to say that I can't. Not really. I'm a man who has
    been blind his whole life, gaining sight for a painfully brief time
    and then trying afterwards to explain the experience to a bunch
    of other blind people. I saw things, experienced things, but you
    can't really understand it from my words.
    For a moment there was nothing, nothing at all. Then there
    was a swirl of colors first clashing violently with each other,
    then sorting themselves out into neat rows and columns. And
    then... Then...
    The world lit up and went pitch black. Things suddenly
    became sharp and distinct, and at the same time pale and hazy,
    objects seen from very far away through cold desert air. I could
    see the plants in the apartment growing, like a green spreading
    ooze, dripping endlessly from their leaves (Except for the
    couple that were dead, which dripped a sort of gray-brown). All
    of the electronic equipment turned transparent, allowing me to
    see the glowing swirling innards of the phone, the computer, the
    microwave, the TV... Naturally, I then had to look at the
    Device. It was glowing so bright and moving so fast that it
    bordered on the edge of pain. It wasn't radioactive or anything.
    Somehow I just *knew* that. I knew that if I had seen
    something that *was* radioactive, I would have been able to
    identify it as such, instantly.
    I said before I didn't know what the Device was. Maybe
    that's not really true. I've now had some time to think about all
    of this, and I wonder if the Device was some kind of... some
    kind of *filter*, allowing a tiny two-legged peon like myself to
    see a piece of the light that shines forever behind the curtain, a
    mirrored reflection of the most Holy of Holies...
    At the time, I just looked away from that light, staggering
    and half-blinded. I had instinctively covered my eyes with my
    hands, and now I looked at those hands, and I could see all of
    the life there, the skin cells forever forming and flaking off, the
    hoards of tiny parasites and symbiotes that we all have in our
    systems, squirming around and forming obscene but vital words
    with the trails of their bodies. This made me curious what the
    rest of me looked like...
    And so I discovered that while wearing the glasses made
    some things clearer, others were obscured. The most
    immediately obvious was that all other forms of glass became
    completely opaque (including mirrors; I never saw what my
    own head looked like while wearing the Elvis-glasses.) The best
    analogy I can come up with is that they resembled vertical slicks
    of oily water, or maybe a soap bubble waiting to be blown, but
    with *depth* to it, a sheet shimmering and swirling with a
    thousand different colors. I had discovered earlier, before
    actually turning on the Device, that the lenses could be
    independently twisted around, like on a set of binoculars. I now
    did this and I found could sort of see through glass, but it never
    was entirely clear; the view of the street two stories down from
    my living room windows was thin and hazy, a phantom, cars
    ghosting by, the clouds thick and black and choking. Mirrors
    never came close to working.
    Then my gaze was pulled back to the TV.
    Oh yeah. Forgot to mention about the TV. It was on during
    all of this. I usually let it run in the background while I worked
    on a project, writing or anything else. Usually had it tuned to
    one of those all-news channels; the resulting stream of utterly
    meaningless babble was always soothing somehow.
    When I looked at the TV again though the glasses, I realized
    that I could now see the screen, floating in front of the interior
    parts as they churned away. I wasn't surprised to learn that it
    was a blur of useless color, like all the rest of the glass in the
    apartment. Only... there *was* something different there...
    shapes moving that the rest didn't have...
    So I played some more with the glasses adjustments.. Just a
    little twisting, and suddenly the picture... well, it *snalled* into
    focus. If you want to know the meaning of the word `snall',
    well... it's what the picture did when I twisted the glasses. It's
    simply the only word for happened, and the only definition I
    have.
    It snalled up and up. *Giant*, *vivid*, 3D focus. At the same
    moment, the TV cabinet turned itself sort of inside out and
    collapsed to multicolored dust, followed instantly by the wall
    behind it. The resulting scene snalled up around me before I
    could even duck and scream...
    All of the things that followed... despite the continuing
    evidence to the contrary, it still seems at times that I
    hallucinated the whole thing, watching the TV while those
    glasses nuked my brain like a burrito, filling the rest of the room
    with things out of my own subconscious, or maybe off of the
    TV screen...
    But no. It was real. It was incredibly real. Especially one
    moment... but that came a little later.
    At first, when the world stabilized, it was a moment before I
    realized that I was someplace else. A new apartment, much
    bigger and nicer than the one I had just left. More specifically, I
    was standing in the corner of that apartment's dining room,
    with a kitchen on view behind a separating marble-topped
    counter. Unlike what it replaced, much of what was there in
    that kitchen was somehow flat and wrong. None of the
    electrical equipment glowed, everything was just empty shells. I
    only noticed this out of the corner of one eye because closer, in
    the room with me, there was something more important and
    interesting: a table. It was a nice wooden one and the scene was
    lit mostly by some candles sitting on it. I could see the
    streamers of heat rising from the flames, watch the wax flame
    and die, but again, it all seemed wrong somehow,
    stage-managed.
    Seated at the table were two people I had never seen before, a
    man and a woman, both about my age, but (to be brutally
    honest) more attractive and wearing much nicer clothes. An
    expensive black suit with a narrow red tie, and a dress that
    matched the tie. They were eating dinner. Well... to be more
    accurate, there was an array of food and wine spread out
    between them, but it was all rather incidental to what was really
    going on in that room.
    There was no sound, there was never any sound, the snalling
    had snuffed all of that out in a second. The man said something
    and the woman mimed laughter, showing white teeth and
    casually shifting her black hair into a new position. As she did
    these things, something flickered around her head, a half-seen
    butterfly. Neither of them paid the slightest attention to me.
    Even as part of my mind gibbered and ran in circles in panic, my
    hand went automatically to the lenses, and adjusted them again.
    The butterfly became real, became part of a flock, and there
    was another around the man's head...
    I was seeing their thoughts. I wasn't *reading* them, not
    exactly, not explicitly, but I could capture the general drift and
    pattern as it flickered and stormed along.
    The drift, the pattern, and most of all the conflict. Those
    colors were reaching out of those two people's heads,
    interacting with one another and making something new. But it
    wasn't the connection of lovers, I could tell that right from the
    first. They were fighting like swordsmen, clash and clatter and
    bang.
    Exactly like swordsmen. I was seeing not what the two
    people were pretending to be. pretending to feel, but instead
    what they actually though of each other. The colors, while
    glorious and addictive and nearly bottomless, still somehow on
    some level popped and fizzed tepidly. These two people were
    not in love with one other. If anything, they disliked one
    another. The woman laughed again at another comment from
    the man, and the colors behind her eyes shot daggers at the
    heart of his brain, which neatly parried them with a shower of
    splattering sparks. Suddenly they got up, intertwined their
    bodies and their lips, began moving towards the waiting
    bedroom, gracefully shedding clothes as they kissed. The colors
    did not grow any brighter.
    I followed, I was dragged along in their wake, and still they
    ignored me. It was all flat. Dead. The last pieces of clothing fell
    away, revealing the woman's excellent breasts and the man's
    quite-impressive sex organ. The wide white bed enfolded itself
    around them as he slid into her...
    I took another step, a step too far, and something snapped my
    head violently to one side. I had reached the end of the cord.
    Caught off-guard, I stumbled, and crashed into the nearest wall.
    It collapsed, pulling me an unknown distance and then reality
    re-snalled.

    * * *

    I was now standing beside a busy city street, with a steady
    stream of both cars and pedestrians going past under a row of
    elegant buildings and a cloudy sky. For a moment I looked at
    the cable that had snapped me, and I could just see it, a faint
    ghost, disappearing away from my head and into the wall of a
    nearby building.
    But then my attention was dragged elsewhere.
    The cars... Unlike with the electrical equipment in the second
    apartment, I could now see the engines churning away under
    the hoods. The multicolored pollution billowed out of their
    tailpipes, settling sickly over everything. The row of youngish
    trees along the street popped with color, greedily sucking some
    but not nearly all of the carbon dioxide out of the air.
    And the people. Oh my god the people streaming past,
    ignoring me entirely. *Real* emotions now, all emotions.
    Laughing and yelling and dancing and fighting. And most of all
    fucking. Really, it was all sex, even when in-and-out physical
    sex had absolutely nothing to do with it. Men and women,
    infants and the elderly, gays and straights, they were all on
    display here, walking and driving, and they all had very different
    colors, and they would lash out and merge together, prongs
    sticking messily but tightly into waiting slots and the both
    instantly changing into something totally new and different.
    Particularly connections between the (heterosexual) men and
    the women. Yellow and blue did not mix to make green, but

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