AnimeCon Harem 14: Naked Villainy (Patreon)

   Amidst the bustle of the LARP and battlegaming event wrapping up and closing down, Rebecca tilted her head back to face the atrium’s elaborate dome of glass and fought the urge to let out a scream of frustration. While the crowds were gone now, her remaining people were moving about with a purpose to and fro around her in the amphitheater. Less of these young men and women were in full garb now, with many of them having taken off their sword belts for the day or even changed into their more comfortable mundane clothing.

   “Are you guys flipping kidding me?” Rebecca growled under her breath. “Again?!”

   The sensation of her friends fooling around this time was faint, but no less distracting.

   Kelly and Brian, I think?

   The sheer sexuality of it wasn’t as overt as earlier in the morning, when Stephanie had been magnifying the desire into blinding brilliance, but that didn’t make the torment of passion any easier for Rebecca to bear. Rather than an unambiguous voyeurship into what they were experiencing, this time was half-heard whispers and subtle signals she could scarcely perceive. Maddeningly enough, this was even more distracting. Because as her dreamsense strained its supple branches out to perceive more, her imagination couldn’t help but flesh out lurid details of what they might be up to all on her own, simply in an attempt to make sense of it all!

   Hmph! You guys… Rebecca fought the urge to readjust her tunic. Maybe I should have just kissed him when I had the chance.

   The problem was, she was all too aware how dangerously close she’d come to tipping past self control and teetering over into a big, messy crash. The tracing tickles of distant red at the very edge of her perception teased maddening little umber vibrations up the roots of her being, and Rebecca tensed her abdomen to keep it from outwardly affecting her. She just knew they were up to something naughty, she could feel it.

   Oh, I can definitely feel it, but I don’t know how I feel ABOUT it, Rebecca thought with a sleepy smile, trying to shake away the licentious thoughts again.

   Kissing Brian is a no-no! For now. Kissing Brian would make me go colors, and… we’re maybe not ready for that. I think whether or not I’M ready, he isn’t, really—so, so playing with his bulge back there in that restroom, that was bad. What if I’d accidentally pulled down his pants and slapped myself in the face with that thick cockmeat I saw yesterday?! Heavens, I’d have been cramming all of that in my mouth before he could even ask me to stop! Which, really, is—it’s—uggGGHH YOU GUYS. Geez, haven’t they, haven’t they um, gotten all the hornies out of their system by now?! They’re completely just the worst! They’re giving ME the hornies, and I don’t quite need to have the hornies right now!

   As silly as it seemed, Rebecca felt like she’d subconsciously limbered herself up for a brutal bashing, and now she found herself annoyed at how unbattered and unbruised her body currently was. A certain kind of tension had grown up within her—and then not been addressed appropriately. A frustrating stiff mahogany sort of feeling that spread in rich hues, the kind of personal tension that just needed wetted and then pounded and worked over until things were satisfactorily… supple. Rebecca had always thought of Brian as a gentle guy, but that rugged shirtless physicality to him she’d witnessed firsthand earlier really suggested otherwise.

   Very suggestive. Sooo many suggestions. Just, just turns my head into a suggestion box, and crams in suggestion after suggestion after suggestion. Suggestively. Okay, it doesn’t even seem like a real word anymore. Whatever—he could have, Brian could maybe overpower me? If I um, if I just ATTACKED him, he would, he’d have to, wouldn’t he? But, maybe if we were both open to THAT kind of play, we could… wrestle? Sometimes? RASSLE. God, I want us to just duke it out, to really, to go at it and then have him… hew into me. I demand to be HEWN, if you please. Then, I’d also like to be HAMMERED, thank you very much. If it’s not too much trouble, I would also like to be clamped, jigged, and SCREWED.

   Events here were winding down and she needed to focus, because Dwelin, one of her few remaining helpers, was now making his way back towards her with some new headache or hiccup. He’d already changed into his civvies and had his Daegonhir tabard slung over his shoulders, but despite Rebecca feeling an unusual ardor right now Dwelin just… didn’t do anything for her. Not now. Not when she could still almost feel the muscular ridges of Brian’s abdominals on her lips when she concentrated hard enough.

   Few other ringleaders had remained this late into Sunday afternoon, some citing a need to leave before a certain hour while others as usual were simply absent of their duties without notice. The Order of the Sovereign Swords was a union of a half-dozen different roleplaying, battlegaming, or reenactment organizations somewhat local to the area. As the events concluded and volunteers started to leave, a baffling amount of each group’s stuff was left behind. Now, the onus was upon her to find someone associated with each of the appropriate hobby organizations to take temporary responsibility for orphaned material.

   That someone always seemed to be Rebecca.

   “So—the SCE knight armor we had up on display was Bones’, but he left early ‘cause he’s gotta two hour drive back and work tomorrow,” Dwelin began to explain. “He had Brick-Cloud take the armor with him when he left at two o’clock, but Brick said the mannequin the armor was up on belonged to somebody in one of the other groups. I mean, it’s obviously not a Stormheart thing, or I’d have seen it before. Leafy would probably know, but he’s nowhere to be found, and Marina said it’s too tall to fit in her car.”

   “You came in your truck, right?” Rebecca sighed. “Your truck has its topper? Hmmm. Can you take the mannequin for now and then hold it in the Stormheart shed for a week or two? I’m sure if it doesn’t belong to one of the LARP teams, it’s someone from the historical group.”

   “I mean I can fit it, but I’ve already got the pile of like, seventy loaner swords that still pass in the back of my pickup now,” Dwelin blanched. “Plus all my actual own gear’s gotta fit in there, too—we’d have to take all that shit back out in the parking lot, get the mannequin in beneath it all so that it doesn’t squash the foam and ruin any boffers, and—I uh, I told my girlfriend I’d be back home ‘round five.”

   “Then… don’t worry about it,” Rebecca threw her hands up in exasperation. “Get all the Stormheart stuff back. Someone took the big plywood signs, I see? Please tell me we know who they went with.”

   “Yeah, that new guy from Belltania had a van,” Dwelin nodded. “Sully, or Sulfric, or something like that. Said he was cool keeping them in his garage downstate there, and he can pass them back over to someone here in… a couple months, said he’ll be attending all the big Daegonhir campout season stuff.”

   “Can you note down somewhere to pull his contact information?” Rebecca frowned. “Marina should have it all somewhere, she took all the event waivers. Before the Gotterdamme festival mess—we’ll need to know who can transport signs that large. Bones might not even be there at half those events, and they aren’t fitting in your truck unless you leave a bunch of other things behind. Which just creates other problems!”

   “If it’s County Park Solstice weekend, I can make two or three trips with the truck, that’s super close to my place,” Dwelin shrugged. “Otherwise… yeah, I’ll make sure Marina gets in touch with the guy.”

   “Thank you,” Rebecca gave him a nod.

   “Are you, uh—are you alright?” Dwelin seemed hesitant to ask. “You seem kinda… I dunno.”

   “Oh?” Rebecca gave him an innocent smile. “I am feeling a little… floaty? But, I’m fine.”

   “Lightheaded?” Dwelin frowned. “Nobody clocked you, right? I mean I don’t think anybody here could even clock you, but—”

   “No, no,” Rebecca let out a helpless laugh. “I remain unclocked. Sadly. It’s just been a long day.”

   “Yeah,” Dwelin blew out a breath. “Great event, though. Better than I thought it’d be.”

   “It was!” Rebecca agreed. “Of all the cross-gaming events, this one—”

   The brrr-brrrr-brrrrr of Rebecca’s phone vibrating interrupted her thought, and Rebecca hurried to fish it out of the pouch on her belt.

   “Sorry, please excuse me for one second,” Rebecca chuckled, bringing the phone up and putting a hand over her opposite ear so that she could hear better. “Hello?”

   “Rebecca?” A small voice asked.

   “Chloe?” Rebecca quirked her bottom lip as Dwelin gave her a wave and moseyed on to supervise as one of the LARP people carefully began pulling up the tape they’d marked the dueling rings out with on the carpet. “Is everything okay?”

   “Is… is Brian with you?” Chloe sniffled. “Is he there? With you? I-I can’t get a hold of him and I thought—I forgot about his phone, with the thing. When I tried to call him. I, I need to talk to him. He doesn’t… he doesn’t have his phone, so…”

   “Oh, I’m sorry, no,” Rebecca answered. “He’s over with Emily and them, I think. If you—”

   There was a slight crackle to the quality of the audio, and then there was nothing, as if the line had been cut off. Rebecca blinked in surprise for a moment as her suspicions crept in, and when she checked the display—saw that Chloe had indeed hung up on her.

*     *     *

   Chloe all but snarled, again feeling the crusting blood blocking up her nostril as her features twisted. Shards of raw hostility glistened silver as the countless pieces and slivers cut and carved agonizing shatterpoint lines throughout her mind. It hurt, it hurt, the migraine was of a slicing, visceral intensity like she’d never experienced before and it felt like only the total unbridled hate that animated her being right now kept her from screaming.

   She stabbed through her phone to find her address book, each aggravated tap forceful enough to distort the pixels on her screen and sending twinges of pain through her finger. She scrolled through the listing in growing fury for an impossibly vexing moment before finally remembering what name she’d switched Emily Rivera to in her phone.

   The GOBLIN RETARD entry was jabbed with her fingertip hard enough to chip a nail, and Chloe bared her teeth in absolute rage.

   Her blouse was ruined with blood spots and a smear of dirty cream color—her pity me please I’ve been crying makeup had never been intended to hold up for actual tears and distress and the whole facade was a total ruined mess, now. She was sure she looked hideous, she felt hideous, and that infuriated her as much as everything else. Not being in total control of her appearance, of the situation, of the narrative was abhorrent to her on levels she never dreamed she would discover, and she hated it.

   “Pick up,” Chloe hissed. “Pick the fuck up.”

   The narrow lane of the access road between the convention center and the neighboring block of storefronts was desolate and provided long, bare walls of cinderblock to shield her from the view of any undeserving shitstain who would dare to judge her. This was the middle of the city, after all. Since she’d had the unfortunate luck to run for the exit doors towards the plaza rather than past that insufferable faggot Brian and his violent psychopath whores and down one of the concourses to the privacy of a restroom, this was the only secluded place nearby she could think of. A simple long alleyway, dotted with only dumpsters behind the respective businesses opposite the convention pavilion, loading docks facing that side, and the occasional pile of filthy pallets.

   “Pick up, pick up, pick up, pick up you wretched little shitstain,” Chloe murmured, glaring down with undisguised malice at her phone as it rang for Emily. “You’ll pick up the fucking phone if you know what’s good for you. If you don’t pick up the fucking phone, I’ll—”

   “What the fuck do you want?” The sound of Emily’s voice, impossibly gloating, dismissive, and annoyed all at once, made the deathgrip Chloe held her phone in tremble as Chloe involuntarily squeezed.

   She took a deep breath.

   “Is… is Brian with you?” Chloe sniffled “Is he there? With you? I-I can’t get a hold of him and I thought. I forgot about his phone… with the thing. When I tried to call him. I, I need to talk to him. He doesn’t… he doesn’t have his phone, so…”

   “Aw yeah?” Emily drawled out in indifference. “Huh.”

   “Pl-please don’t, please don’t hang up,” Chloe begged, biting down and gnashing her teeth for a moment simply to keep her performance from slipping too far. “Please, I—I didn’t mean for, for things to go like they did, and I… I just want to talk to him, to tell him I’m, I’m that I’m sorry…”

   “Well, who fuckin’ cares what you want?” Emily retorted. “Bye, bitch.”

   “Wait w-wait wait wait,” Chloe pleaded. “I know that, that you don’t, that you don’t care, at all, but—I’ve. I’ve never… apologized. To Brian. Before. For everything. For anything. And, and I thought that—I don’t know, that it might… matter. To him. Hearing it from me.”

   Silence stretched on, but before Chloe’s increasingly manic gaze the seconds of this call continued to elapse, because—predictably—Emily wasn’t able to hang up. You CAN’T hang up after THAT, can you? Because, oh, poor little pissbaby, you could never take away Brian getting his precious little closure. You’ve lost. You’ve all lost—you didn’t win, you CAN’T win, and everything you’ve done? How FAR you’ve pushed me?! It’s time to pay, it’s time to pay, IT’S TIME TO PAY!

   “Emily?” Chloe stifled a small sob of glee. “I’m… I’m scared. Can I… can I just talk to him? Please? Please?”

   “Well—well, you shouldn’ta fuckin’ trashed his phone, then!” Emily huffed out after a moment of hesitation. “He’s not even with us right now. So—”

   “Rebecca said he was with you,” Chloe cried. “She said he was. Can I, can I just—please? Can I talk to him? I, I need to tell him, I need him to know, I-I’m sorry, how sorry I am, for all of this, for everything. Please? Please?”

   “He’s really not here,” Emily’s tone remained sour and exasperated. “Fuck. Can’t you just—urrghhh, I hate you so fuckin’ much. Hold the fuck on, then. I’ll grab him.”

   The rustling of Emily adjusting her phone and some almost inaudible muttering indicated that the shitstain goblinoid midget was actually moving about in search of Brian.

   Perfect. Perfect. Perfect.

   The width of Chloe’s smile was clenched rigidly into place and her eyes were staring down at the display with such intensity that she could feel them straining. It didn’t matter—something was finally fucking working. A droplet of blood landed on the knuckle of the hand gripping her phone, and she sniffled again. Just an errant drop, the bleed hadn’t opened back up again. It was going to work this time.

   Silver shards ground themselves into a gritty snarl of glass within her head. The phantom edges of glinting light were collecting, coalescing, forming into a twisting knot the size of a fist. Whenever she tried to wrap her mind around whatever the fuck the unique feeling was, Chloe was forced to recoil back away from it as the silvery sharpness stung and cut at the probing thoughts. She’d never had a migraine that was so distinct in it’s flavor—this one had such a specific color to it that it made the roots of her teeth itch, the pieces of pain were so clear she could almost define the shapes of some of the larger ones.

   “Emily?” Chloe asked, fighting to keep the steadily mounting impatience out of her voice. “Please? C-can I just—can I talk to him?”

   “Fucken hold on,” Emily swore. “I’m finding him. Jesus.”

*     *     *

   “911, where is your emergency?” A dispatcher was on the line almost immediately after dialing in the number.

   “I think I—I need to—I’m reporting a rape,” Kelly fumbled the awkward words into something like a sentence, feeling her mouth go dry. The tears were back again, she could feel the hateful things making lines down her face as she fought to regain her balance. She felt sick to her stomach. She was going to throw up soon, and now it seemed like it was only a matter of when and where.

   The several gawking girls and the rubbernecking guy or two who’d apparently caught the tail end of the impromptu sex with Brian all overheard her words and physically recoiled from them. The grins of amusement and disbelief at seeing people fuck behind a vendor’s booth dropped away to looks of horror, and the vendor herself brought both hands to cover her mouth in disbelief. Kelly shoved past the small gap between booths and took a stumbling step down the aisle in their direction and they all backed up.

   “Where is this at, so that I can get help to you right away,” the dispatcher was saying. “Are you still there?”

   “I’m sorry, I’m—” Kelly let out a small sob into the phone as she hurried on through everyone as fast as she could. The people near enough to have seen what was going on parted in a wave and Kelly ducked her head and hunched her shoulders as she passed them, unwilling to let them see her distraught face. She hated this. She hated this. She was going to throw up.

   “I’m at the convention center, downtown,” Kelly cried as she stepped through an intersection and whirled in place, momentarily unable to get her bearings as to which way was which. She’d pulled her yoga pants up but everything about her still felt like it was in total disarray. “Can you send someone to the convention center? It’s the AnimeCon convention.”

   “Of course, I have the call started and help is already nearby and on the way,” the voice on the phone assured her. “Can you tell me where at the convention center you’re at, so that they can find you?”

   “It’s—” Kelly paused, took several steps past the intersection, and then backtracked, making a right and heading down another aisle as fast as she could, searching the sea of faces as her stomach threatened to spew its contents back up. She could feel her throat clenching up. “It’s just outside. Just outside the furthermost entrance, to the, uh, to the right, the west side. There’s an alleyway or something right between the convention center and where the next block starts.”

   “I’m seeing—there’s an access point just west of the convention center’s Hall D? Does that sound correct?”

   “It’s— yes, that’s correct,” Kelly managed out, brushing past a straggling group of shoppers and through the next intersection of aisles. Her free hand fought to unsmear the wet tears on her face and only seemed to make more of them spill out. “There’s a, there was a girl there, she. She was screaming for help, and I, I—”

   The pink warmth of attention fell on her, and when Kelly instinctively looked to her left, she saw Stephanie and Emily break into a run towards her. Bitter revulsion and shame washed through her with such strength that Kelly wavered and nearly fell to her knees at the sight of them, but she saw that Emily already had her phone out and up to her ear. She was going to throw up. She wanted to die, she’d never hated herself with every fiber of her being like this, and the sight of Stephanie’s shocked concern for her twisted her insides into a mangled mess, squeezing out a greasy film of guilt and rage.

   “What happened?!” Stephanie rushed to carefully embrace her, looking terrified and bewildered. “Kelly—Kelly what happened?!”

   Biting her lip hard enough for it to hurt, she ended the call to 911 and tossed aside her phone. It clattered away somewhere between their feet across the carpet of the vendor’s room. Emily arrived just a few steps behind Stephanie, so Kelly shouldered aside the pink-haired love of her life and snatched away Emily’s phone before the speechless girl could even form a question. More tears bled from her stinging eyes, and Kelly’s insides lurched.

   “Ch-Chloe,” Kelly said, swallowing back bile. “Chloe?”

   “Can I speak to Brian?” A plaintive voice called out through the phone. “Please? Please can I-I just talk to him?”

   Chloe’s vocal register was too flat and devoid of any of the thickness of emotion that actually made it a struggle for Kelly to speak. Of course it was—Chloe’s acting was fucking terrible. She had no ability to empathize with anyone who actually felt things. No understanding of what it did to a person, outside of this pithy caricature of what a real human being conveyed when they were in this state for real. Chloe’s attempt at vulnerability was so utterly laughably bad that for a moment rage and hate bubbled up past the throw up and kept Kelly from vomiting.

   “Yeah, he’s right here with me,” Kelly forcibly battered each word one by one into a calm speaking voice, working with incredible difficulty to enunciate them into clarity without allowing anything else to leak out. “What do you want?”

   “I-I want to apologize to him, for—for everything,” Chloe performed a melodramatic sniffle that turned Kelly’s inside. “It’s—I didn’t, I didn’t mean for any of this, I just wanted to, I want to—I want to apologize, for, for all of this. Can I just talk to him? Please?”

   “Where are you?” Kelly asked in a clipped tone. “I should—I should apologize too. That all went too far. Where are you?”

   “I’m—can Brian come alone?” Chloe begged. “Just him? For right now? So I, I can just apologize to him first? If that’s okay? I-I’m so, so sorry for everything!”

   “Yeah,” Kelly mechanically replied. “Yeah, of course. Maybe that’d be better.”

   “If that’s—is that okay?” Chloe cried.

   “Yeah,” Kelly said again. “He said—he said that’s fine. Where do you want to meet him?”

   What the ever loving fuck is going on?!

   Emily felt the steady stream of blue within her backflow, like a sinkhole had opened up beneath her metaphorical river somewhere upstream and was draining her feelings backwards into a discomforting mire of wrongness. As if rediscovering Kelly like this with tears streaming down her face and a trembling chin wasn’t insane enough, Brian was nowhere to be found, and crouching down to retrieve the girl’s phone she’d thrown showed 911 Emergency Services—call ended through a now cracked screen.

   The fuck happened? Where’s Brian?! What HAPPENED?! Emily was so completely stunned that she had no idea how to parse the fact that Kelly was speaking into the phone as if Brian was standing there with him.

   “Okay,” Kelly said, her beautiful face collapsing into a silent sob even as she maintained a steady speaking voice. “Yeah. Just outside, there? West side? He says—he’s on his way there now, said he’ll be there in like, a minute or two. Okay. Yeah, sure. Bye.”

   The taller girl stared down through her own mussed tangle of red hair in disbelief as she ended the call and held the phone out. It looked like she was going to be sick.

   “Kelly—Kelly, what happened?” Stephanie demanded, absentmindedly passing the phone from Kelly back to Emily. “What happened? Can you—can you talk to me? What happened?!”

   “I. Just,” Kelly screwed up her face and kept Stephanie at arm’s length. “I got a thing from the future. Again. Had to make a call. I mean a choice. With it. Had to make my call. I—so I made my call. I made the really shitty call. I just—I had to.”

   “Where’s Brian?” Emily asked, all at once feeling empty and cold. “What did you do?”

   “I—” Kelly broke down into another sob. “Sent him to Chloe. He’s on his way there. I already called the police. But we, we need to go to Rebecca. Upstairs, right fucking now. We need—we need to be as far away from this as we can.”

   “You sent him to Chloe,” Emily repeated. “You sent Brian to Chloe. Alone? No. No, why would you even—”

   “I don’t FUCKING like it either!” Kelly cried, grabbing Stephanie by the wrist. “S-so, so back the fuck off my case, okay? We need to go.”

   “Kelly, just, Kelly talk to me, can you just, can you explain what’s going on?” Stephanie asked, her eyes now wet with tears of her own.

   “I fucked it all up,” Kelly couldn’t even meet Stephanie’s gaze. “Told you all I would, I, I fucking warned all of you over and over and over that I would. Th-the us in the future, they had a plan to fix it, they had it all worked out! Well? FUCK THEM AND THEIR PLAN! They don’t, you—they don’t fucking control me! I’m not their fucking puppet!”

   “Kelly,” Emily’s breath hitched. “Kelly what did you do?”

   “I completely fucked it all up!” Kelly all but screamed. “I told you I fucking would! I tried to tell you! I tried to tell you this wasn’t gonna fucking work! I’m my own fucking person—and I make my own fucking future!”

   “Kelly stop, please!” Stephanie cried. “This isn’t—this—I know you wouldn’t hurt Brian. I know you wouldn’t. I know you wouldn’t.”

   “I’m the only fucking one who can hurt Brian!” Kelly sobbed out. “Don’t you see? This is what he wanted. All of you, fucking all of you trying to FIX it, going around behind his back?! Th-that’s not what he wants, and I’m the ONLY one who can fuckin’ see that and just—completely fuck over your stupid fucking plan. Yeah. YEAH. Had to. Had to be me. I’m the only one that even could. I’m my own fucking person.”

   “Kelly we don’t know what the fuck you’re even talking about!” Emily was unable to stop herself from stepping forward and shaking the incoherent girl. “What the ACTUAL FUCK is going on?!”

   “We, we—we need to leave now,” Kelly babbled. “Get further away before it’s bad, get to Rebecca. If we don’t, you both get hurt. I already called 911. We need to go.”

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