Post by oberonfrost on Dec 22, 2011 22:38:29 GMT -5
Ultimate Crimson Fox #3
Twenty Pieces of Silver Part 3
Coming and Going
Ultimate Crimson Fox Chapter 3: Coming and Going
The room exploded into a flurry of motion. Vivian rolled to the right, narrowly dodging a venom-filled syringe flung at her, with incredible precision by the latex and leather-clad Doctor Poison. The sharp needle embedded itself deeply in the metal wall of the lab, as the Doctor backed away from Vivian and readied herself to launch another projectile.
Vivian watched, unsure how to respond. She had never really been in a fight for her life, and here she was not only fighting to save herself from some kind of bondage-loving mad-scientist, but fighting for the life of the man, Reginald, bound to the table. As she watched Poison’s arm arch back, threatening to fling her next attack, Vivian resolved that this battle, her first battle, would not be the one that cost the helpless man his life. She knew, however, that she couldn’t risk trying to use her pheromones. Reginald was most likely in shock already, and filling the room with fear would do nothing to help him. This was a battle she would have to fight physically; a battle she would have to win tooth and claw.
With a jerk Poison released the syringe, sending it in a straight line for Vivian. Instead of dodging again, Vivian instead rushed forward toward the scientist. She let out a guttural yell as she launched herself off the cold metal floor.
Poison scrambled backward, extracting another two needles from her sash. The mad doctor laughed as Vivian landed where she had been standing moments before and flung twin hypodermics toward the costumed crime fighter. “I’ll have you tied to a table soon enough, pretty one,” the doctor screeched, between bouts of hideous laughter.
Vivian rolled again, toward Poison. As she neared, Vivian lashed out with her talons, clipping the woman in black across the thigh. Blood spurted from the wound, splashing against the metal tiles of the floor. It made a vicious hissing noise as it began to burn into the metal. Vivian barely had time to notice that the dark colored liquid was not the normal red shade she associated with blood, but was instead a dark emerald green, and obviously quite dangerous.
Vivian retracted her claws with a flick of her wrists, and fluidly leaped to her feet, nailing Poison in chin with a tightly clenched fist. The doctor gasped in shock, stumbling toward the wall behind her.
Poison had managed to extract yet another syringe from the belt across her chest, and stabbed downward at Vivian, as the Crimson Fox prepared to strike her again. Vivian barely noticed in time to slide her body back and to the left, and yet the villain’s weapon grazed her arm. The leather and Kevlar held, and the needle, and its venomous contents luckily didn’t make it to Vivian’s skin.
With a yell, Poison advanced, taking advantage of Vivian’s momentary disorientation. She stabbed again, over and over, a needle in each hand. Vivian backed away, dodging jab after jab from the needle-wielding psychopath. She was clipped when the doctor unexpectedly sent a needle straight for her unprotected cheek.
Even as she continued to dodge away from woman in black’s wild strikes, Vivian could feel whatever concoction filled the syringe burning under her skin. She dropped to a crouch, spinning and catching the doctor with her outstretched leg. The woman in black fell backward, her head bouncing off the metal floor as her weapons clattered away.
Vivian was dizzy, but her assailant was unconscious. Stumbling to her feet, Vivian sprinted toward the man strapped to the examination table. She slapped his cheeks lightly, trying to wake him as she wracked her brain to remember what her attacker had called him. She couldn’t leave him here, the ‘good Doctor’ would surely resume her horrors if Vivian couldn’t extract the man from the villain’s lair.
Strong as she was, Vivian was also injured and exposed to some kind of toxin. If this man, “Reginald!” she exclaimed, was to get to safety he would have to be complicit in the escape.
Reginald’s eyes fluttered, but he wasn’t fully conscious. “Reginald,” Vivian whispered to him, “you have to wake up.” The man’s head rolled from side to side and a clear drop of drool rolled down his chin. Vivian paused, checking over her shoulder to ensure her enemy was still disabled. She dared not try and use any of pre-filled needles, Vivian wouldn’t know a medical stimulant from a poison, and would most likely kill him. There was really only one choice, and even that wasn’t sure to keep him alive. Reginald’s heart was already racing like that of a marathon runner.
Taking a deep breath, Vivian concentrated as hard as she could on sending enough stimulating, sexually exciting pheromones into the air to wake Reginald, but not enough to push him into cardiac arrest. Reginald’s eyes opened, groggy and unfocused. “Allons à la maison,” Vivian said suggestively, asking him to take her home. His system was so week it was as though Reginald was in some kind of sexual trance.
With one hand on Vivian’s backside and the other arm hanging over her shoulder, Reginald stumbled out of the lab. Vivian steered him toward the stairs, and the two began a long slow trek back up to the ground floor, and ultimately their freedom.
***
The apartment was lushly decorated, full of flowering plants, and more humid than the streets that ran along the river Seine. Aliki Marceau lounged on an overstuffed divan, her long red hair draped over her naked frame like a blanket. A piano concerto played softly in the background as auburn-haired acrobat rubbed a moisturizing salve into her skin. She started with her toes, one leg kicked straight up into the air, working her way from foot to hip, then switching to the next. As she began to work the lotion into her shoulders, she heard apartment door slam closed as her sister arrived home.
Margot, the elder of the Marceau sisters, stepped into the greenhouse-like living room and shrugged off the brown overcoat draped around her, and hung it on the coat rack. She began to loosen the tie around her neck, thinking once again how much it reminded her of a noose, and still not understanding why men would willingly put something like that on every morning.
“Tough day at the office?” Aliki asked from her seat across the room. She continued to rub the unguent into the skin over arms, then her stomach.
Margot sighed heavily, her shoulders slumping. “How much longer do I have to keep this up?” she asked as she began to unbutton the collared shirt she wore.
Aliki traced her hands up her torso, the balm soaking into her skin. “Until daddy says otherwise, big sister,” she murmured as she cupped her breasts, rubbing the thick cream into the exposed flesh.
Suit pants fell to the floor, followed by a pair of men’s briefs. “Would you stop with the lotion and help me get out of my work clothes?” Margot said, obviously annoyed. She stepped toward the middle of the room, beer belly and hairy chest leading the way. She had been engaging in this ruse for months, and still couldn’t tolerate the swinging of manhood between her thighs for one moment more than she had to.
Tossing her head, Aliki’s hair fell down her back, and she crossed to the center of the room, standing before her sister. “Turn around,” she said, shoving Margot’s left shoulder. “It’s disgusting to see you like this!”
Once the chest hair and other undesirable parts were facing away from her, Aliki plunged the tip of her index finger into the skin at the back of her sister’s neck. She shifted the digit around, sliding her nail along a vertebrae in her search. Finally, she found the tiny ring, and pushed her finger though up to the first joint and pulled it free from the skin.
The ring, small and silver, with two vicious looking runes embossed on the face, was attached to a long silver chain. Aliki took the chain in hand, and gave it a sharp tug. As the flesh running along her sister’s spine began to rip, she jerked her arm downward, The skin split, ripping from the top of the spine down to the small of her back.
Margot didn’t scream as the skin was ripped from her back, nor did she cry out when her sister shoved a hand under the flesh, running it up under the scalp and pushing it forward. The pain was excruciating, but this was not the first time, or the last time, and Margot had gotten used to the irritation long ago. She grabbed the face by the nose and pulled. The skin slipped easily off her head, and then fell down around her, pooling at her feet, like so much fabric.
“I’ve never worn a heavier skin,” Margot said, standing there, a figured devoid of flesh. Muscle, bone and organ exposed to the world, Margot reached for the handle to the nearby closet, the knob smearing with ichor as she turned it.
Reaching into the darkened cupboard, she pulled out a hanging draped with her own, original skin, and slipped into it, wrapping it around herself, feeling like she was finally home. “Sew me up?” she asked, showing her sister the scabbed and gaping wound left when she had removed her own flesh that morning.
***
As they passed the last office before the lobby opened up before them, Vivian looked in on the security guard she’d encountered earlier. It seemed that her pheromone-fueled suggestion was still hard at work. The man sat on a desk that was not his, pants around his ankles, shirt open enjoying himself even without Vivian’s femininity there to keep him company. She dragged Reginald past, keeping as quiet as possible, so as to not snap the security guard out of his pleasures.
Reginald was losing strength the further they went, and even Vivian’s pheromones couldn’t keep him awake any longer. It was late, and it was starting rain beyond the great glass doors that led to the street. Vivian laid her charge down gently on the lobby carpet and, mustering all her strength, ran towards the locked doors, talons extended.
There was a loud crash as Vivian collided with the wall of metal and glass. She sank her claws into the metal of the doors frame and pulled. She no longer cared if the security guard came running. Given his state it would take him a few seconds to make himself presentable, and she would be gone by then. It took a few tries, but Vivian managed to wrench the door free of the frame, and throw it onto the sidewalk.
Vivian pulled Reginald out into the open air outside the Revson building. She left him leaning against the unbroken portion of the front wall, under the roof, to keep him dry. Then, she took off into the night.
***
Josephine Tautin arrived outside the Revson building at nearly midnight. The paramedics had already loaded up the injured man and taken him to the hospital. He had been listed as being in critical condition. His ID card identified him as Reginald Pickering, a British citizen. No link had been found between Pickering and Revson Pharmaceuticals.
The destruction to the entry way was minor, but something had ripped the door from its hinges and left what looked like claw marks in the frame. Tautin bent down, flashlight in hand, and studied the markings, running her gloved fingers along the gashes.
She’d been given this case because the victim, if that’s what he was, Reginald Pickering, appeared to have been poisoned. Her superiors felt that there may be some link between this crime scene and the one the day before at La Malefosse. Though no poisoning had been proven in that case. If the two crimes were somehow related, then something big was going on, and Josephine meant to find out what.
***
Vivian had fled as swiftly as she could from the Revson building. It didn’t take long to find a pay telephone and call in an anonymous tip to the police about the busted door and the injured man. She could only hope that Reginald would be safe.
Now she had taken to the rooftops once more, heading toward home. She was forced by her injuries to take a slower pace now, and the rain made keeping her footing in some places more difficult. Vivian’s body ached all over, and she would be glad when this night was over. The super-people she’d seen on the news in America made this seem easier than it was.
Still, Vivian knew that her first attempt at this vocation had been successful. She had beaten a criminal, who she hoped the police would find in their search of the Revson building. She had saved a life, assuming that the poisons in Reginald’s system didn’t kill him overnight. And, the icing on the cake, she had discovered a clue as to who was betraying her family’s company to their competition.
Yet there were many questions left unanswered. Who was the mole hiding behind the judas4314@freemail.org address? Who was the woman that had called herself Doctor Poison, and how was she connected to Revson? Inside, Vivian felt a burning desire to find the answers to these questions. As she finally reached the ledge outside her penthouse bedroom, she resolved to find out.
“Curiosity may have killed the cat,” she said, stepping through the curtains and closing the windows behind her, “but I am a fox.”
Twenty Pieces of Silver Part 3
Coming and Going
Ultimate Crimson Fox Chapter 3: Coming and Going
The room exploded into a flurry of motion. Vivian rolled to the right, narrowly dodging a venom-filled syringe flung at her, with incredible precision by the latex and leather-clad Doctor Poison. The sharp needle embedded itself deeply in the metal wall of the lab, as the Doctor backed away from Vivian and readied herself to launch another projectile.
Vivian watched, unsure how to respond. She had never really been in a fight for her life, and here she was not only fighting to save herself from some kind of bondage-loving mad-scientist, but fighting for the life of the man, Reginald, bound to the table. As she watched Poison’s arm arch back, threatening to fling her next attack, Vivian resolved that this battle, her first battle, would not be the one that cost the helpless man his life. She knew, however, that she couldn’t risk trying to use her pheromones. Reginald was most likely in shock already, and filling the room with fear would do nothing to help him. This was a battle she would have to fight physically; a battle she would have to win tooth and claw.
With a jerk Poison released the syringe, sending it in a straight line for Vivian. Instead of dodging again, Vivian instead rushed forward toward the scientist. She let out a guttural yell as she launched herself off the cold metal floor.
Poison scrambled backward, extracting another two needles from her sash. The mad doctor laughed as Vivian landed where she had been standing moments before and flung twin hypodermics toward the costumed crime fighter. “I’ll have you tied to a table soon enough, pretty one,” the doctor screeched, between bouts of hideous laughter.
Vivian rolled again, toward Poison. As she neared, Vivian lashed out with her talons, clipping the woman in black across the thigh. Blood spurted from the wound, splashing against the metal tiles of the floor. It made a vicious hissing noise as it began to burn into the metal. Vivian barely had time to notice that the dark colored liquid was not the normal red shade she associated with blood, but was instead a dark emerald green, and obviously quite dangerous.
Vivian retracted her claws with a flick of her wrists, and fluidly leaped to her feet, nailing Poison in chin with a tightly clenched fist. The doctor gasped in shock, stumbling toward the wall behind her.
Poison had managed to extract yet another syringe from the belt across her chest, and stabbed downward at Vivian, as the Crimson Fox prepared to strike her again. Vivian barely noticed in time to slide her body back and to the left, and yet the villain’s weapon grazed her arm. The leather and Kevlar held, and the needle, and its venomous contents luckily didn’t make it to Vivian’s skin.
With a yell, Poison advanced, taking advantage of Vivian’s momentary disorientation. She stabbed again, over and over, a needle in each hand. Vivian backed away, dodging jab after jab from the needle-wielding psychopath. She was clipped when the doctor unexpectedly sent a needle straight for her unprotected cheek.
Even as she continued to dodge away from woman in black’s wild strikes, Vivian could feel whatever concoction filled the syringe burning under her skin. She dropped to a crouch, spinning and catching the doctor with her outstretched leg. The woman in black fell backward, her head bouncing off the metal floor as her weapons clattered away.
Vivian was dizzy, but her assailant was unconscious. Stumbling to her feet, Vivian sprinted toward the man strapped to the examination table. She slapped his cheeks lightly, trying to wake him as she wracked her brain to remember what her attacker had called him. She couldn’t leave him here, the ‘good Doctor’ would surely resume her horrors if Vivian couldn’t extract the man from the villain’s lair.
Strong as she was, Vivian was also injured and exposed to some kind of toxin. If this man, “Reginald!” she exclaimed, was to get to safety he would have to be complicit in the escape.
Reginald’s eyes fluttered, but he wasn’t fully conscious. “Reginald,” Vivian whispered to him, “you have to wake up.” The man’s head rolled from side to side and a clear drop of drool rolled down his chin. Vivian paused, checking over her shoulder to ensure her enemy was still disabled. She dared not try and use any of pre-filled needles, Vivian wouldn’t know a medical stimulant from a poison, and would most likely kill him. There was really only one choice, and even that wasn’t sure to keep him alive. Reginald’s heart was already racing like that of a marathon runner.
Taking a deep breath, Vivian concentrated as hard as she could on sending enough stimulating, sexually exciting pheromones into the air to wake Reginald, but not enough to push him into cardiac arrest. Reginald’s eyes opened, groggy and unfocused. “Allons à la maison,” Vivian said suggestively, asking him to take her home. His system was so week it was as though Reginald was in some kind of sexual trance.
With one hand on Vivian’s backside and the other arm hanging over her shoulder, Reginald stumbled out of the lab. Vivian steered him toward the stairs, and the two began a long slow trek back up to the ground floor, and ultimately their freedom.
***
The apartment was lushly decorated, full of flowering plants, and more humid than the streets that ran along the river Seine. Aliki Marceau lounged on an overstuffed divan, her long red hair draped over her naked frame like a blanket. A piano concerto played softly in the background as auburn-haired acrobat rubbed a moisturizing salve into her skin. She started with her toes, one leg kicked straight up into the air, working her way from foot to hip, then switching to the next. As she began to work the lotion into her shoulders, she heard apartment door slam closed as her sister arrived home.
Margot, the elder of the Marceau sisters, stepped into the greenhouse-like living room and shrugged off the brown overcoat draped around her, and hung it on the coat rack. She began to loosen the tie around her neck, thinking once again how much it reminded her of a noose, and still not understanding why men would willingly put something like that on every morning.
“Tough day at the office?” Aliki asked from her seat across the room. She continued to rub the unguent into the skin over arms, then her stomach.
Margot sighed heavily, her shoulders slumping. “How much longer do I have to keep this up?” she asked as she began to unbutton the collared shirt she wore.
Aliki traced her hands up her torso, the balm soaking into her skin. “Until daddy says otherwise, big sister,” she murmured as she cupped her breasts, rubbing the thick cream into the exposed flesh.
Suit pants fell to the floor, followed by a pair of men’s briefs. “Would you stop with the lotion and help me get out of my work clothes?” Margot said, obviously annoyed. She stepped toward the middle of the room, beer belly and hairy chest leading the way. She had been engaging in this ruse for months, and still couldn’t tolerate the swinging of manhood between her thighs for one moment more than she had to.
Tossing her head, Aliki’s hair fell down her back, and she crossed to the center of the room, standing before her sister. “Turn around,” she said, shoving Margot’s left shoulder. “It’s disgusting to see you like this!”
Once the chest hair and other undesirable parts were facing away from her, Aliki plunged the tip of her index finger into the skin at the back of her sister’s neck. She shifted the digit around, sliding her nail along a vertebrae in her search. Finally, she found the tiny ring, and pushed her finger though up to the first joint and pulled it free from the skin.
The ring, small and silver, with two vicious looking runes embossed on the face, was attached to a long silver chain. Aliki took the chain in hand, and gave it a sharp tug. As the flesh running along her sister’s spine began to rip, she jerked her arm downward, The skin split, ripping from the top of the spine down to the small of her back.
Margot didn’t scream as the skin was ripped from her back, nor did she cry out when her sister shoved a hand under the flesh, running it up under the scalp and pushing it forward. The pain was excruciating, but this was not the first time, or the last time, and Margot had gotten used to the irritation long ago. She grabbed the face by the nose and pulled. The skin slipped easily off her head, and then fell down around her, pooling at her feet, like so much fabric.
“I’ve never worn a heavier skin,” Margot said, standing there, a figured devoid of flesh. Muscle, bone and organ exposed to the world, Margot reached for the handle to the nearby closet, the knob smearing with ichor as she turned it.
Reaching into the darkened cupboard, she pulled out a hanging draped with her own, original skin, and slipped into it, wrapping it around herself, feeling like she was finally home. “Sew me up?” she asked, showing her sister the scabbed and gaping wound left when she had removed her own flesh that morning.
***
As they passed the last office before the lobby opened up before them, Vivian looked in on the security guard she’d encountered earlier. It seemed that her pheromone-fueled suggestion was still hard at work. The man sat on a desk that was not his, pants around his ankles, shirt open enjoying himself even without Vivian’s femininity there to keep him company. She dragged Reginald past, keeping as quiet as possible, so as to not snap the security guard out of his pleasures.
Reginald was losing strength the further they went, and even Vivian’s pheromones couldn’t keep him awake any longer. It was late, and it was starting rain beyond the great glass doors that led to the street. Vivian laid her charge down gently on the lobby carpet and, mustering all her strength, ran towards the locked doors, talons extended.
There was a loud crash as Vivian collided with the wall of metal and glass. She sank her claws into the metal of the doors frame and pulled. She no longer cared if the security guard came running. Given his state it would take him a few seconds to make himself presentable, and she would be gone by then. It took a few tries, but Vivian managed to wrench the door free of the frame, and throw it onto the sidewalk.
Vivian pulled Reginald out into the open air outside the Revson building. She left him leaning against the unbroken portion of the front wall, under the roof, to keep him dry. Then, she took off into the night.
***
Josephine Tautin arrived outside the Revson building at nearly midnight. The paramedics had already loaded up the injured man and taken him to the hospital. He had been listed as being in critical condition. His ID card identified him as Reginald Pickering, a British citizen. No link had been found between Pickering and Revson Pharmaceuticals.
The destruction to the entry way was minor, but something had ripped the door from its hinges and left what looked like claw marks in the frame. Tautin bent down, flashlight in hand, and studied the markings, running her gloved fingers along the gashes.
She’d been given this case because the victim, if that’s what he was, Reginald Pickering, appeared to have been poisoned. Her superiors felt that there may be some link between this crime scene and the one the day before at La Malefosse. Though no poisoning had been proven in that case. If the two crimes were somehow related, then something big was going on, and Josephine meant to find out what.
***
Vivian had fled as swiftly as she could from the Revson building. It didn’t take long to find a pay telephone and call in an anonymous tip to the police about the busted door and the injured man. She could only hope that Reginald would be safe.
Now she had taken to the rooftops once more, heading toward home. She was forced by her injuries to take a slower pace now, and the rain made keeping her footing in some places more difficult. Vivian’s body ached all over, and she would be glad when this night was over. The super-people she’d seen on the news in America made this seem easier than it was.
Still, Vivian knew that her first attempt at this vocation had been successful. She had beaten a criminal, who she hoped the police would find in their search of the Revson building. She had saved a life, assuming that the poisons in Reginald’s system didn’t kill him overnight. And, the icing on the cake, she had discovered a clue as to who was betraying her family’s company to their competition.
Yet there were many questions left unanswered. Who was the mole hiding behind the judas4314@freemail.org address? Who was the woman that had called herself Doctor Poison, and how was she connected to Revson? Inside, Vivian felt a burning desire to find the answers to these questions. As she finally reached the ledge outside her penthouse bedroom, she resolved to find out.
“Curiosity may have killed the cat,” she said, stepping through the curtains and closing the windows behind her, “but I am a fox.”