Vesta - Painworld (16 page)

 

Lianne could not remember whether they had drugged her or not; certainly she had no memory of anything being administered to her, and the last thing she remembered was the two supposed nurses stripping the rubber bodysuit from her, after which...

She opened her eyes, trying to take in her surroundings. She was lying flat on a fairly hard surface, broad straps across her chest preventing her from sitting upright, yet revealing breasts that, even in their present position, were clearly a lot larger now than they had been before. She peered hard along herself, trying to determine if there were any signs of surgery, and then realised there was another change, something far more sinister.

Going nearly cross-eyed from the effort, she stared inwards towards where the tip of her nose would usually have been just visible, only to find something else there instead, something she could not identify, other than to say it was far larger than her usual pert proboscis.

‘She's awake.' The sound of the female voice made Lianne start and interrupted her effort to see what had been placed on her face. She turned her head to one side and immediately felt something wrong, something about the weight distribution that caused her head to loll far further over than she had intended.

‘Get her up and let her see herself.' This time it was a male voice and, as the speaker moved into view, Lianne saw a tall gaunt figure, wearing rimless spectacles and with a small goatee beard and receding hairline. Marlon's - or VESTA's - idea of a mad doctor, perhaps.

As the straps were unbuckled and the two nurses helped her to stand, Lianne expected to feel unsteady, and was surprised to find she was not, indeed, suffering from the usual after-effects of anaesthesia. Of course, there was no reason why VESTA should waste time on human weaknesses when she could cut to the chase, Lianne realised.

They were in some sort of recovery room, except that one end of it was tiled with flagstones and the far end wall was covered by a large wooden rack, from which dangled a bewildering array of leather straps and harnesses. There was little doubt in Lianne's mind that some of them were intended for her, but first they guided her towards the large wall mirror that sat halfway down the room.

Except that it surely could not be a mirror at all, for the figure she saw apparently reflected in it could in no way be herself... only it could, she knew, and indeed it was. Blinking back tears of disbelief and horror, she stepped closer, peering at the glass for a better look, her head shaking slowly as she struggled to take in what she was seeing.

The feet - how come she hadn't seen or felt them until now? - the feet were no longer human feet, but hooves, and as she dragged her gaze from the mirror to stare down at them through the valley between her huge breasts, try as she might she could see no signs of any joins that would indicate artificiality. Appalled, she looked back to the mirror again, only now beginning to fully comprehend the modifications that had been made to her body.

Her hugely inflated breasts - double G at the very least, she guessed - were made to look even larger by the impossibly tiny waist, which in turn was made to look even more extreme by the flaring hips and long, exaggerated thighs. Slowly, she raised the now useless hands, staring at the curious mitten-like appendages, oval pads where once there had been fingers and thumbs, until they reached her face.

Only it was no longer her face.

She tried to speak, but the only sound that escaped from the widened mouth in the elongated jaw was a low whinnying. Tears flowed from the almond-shaped eyes that sat between the elongated equine ears beneath the fantastic mane of bright pink that ran from the crown of her otherwise bald head to cascade down her naked back, a back which now, she guessed, like the rest of her body, was cloaked in a shining skin of dappled brown, black and white.

‘She seems a little bit confused,' the darker of the two nurses said. Her companion, whose hair was a more reddish brown, chuckled.

‘They always do at this stage,' she said. ‘Mind you, hardly surprising, is it? You'd be a bit shocked to wake up and find yourself transformed into a human pony girl.'

Slowly, the initial horror was abating for Lianne, as she realised that what she was seeing was no more real than anything she might encounter in a bad dream, even if there was no likelihood of her waking from it in the immediate future. Taking a deep breath, she turned away from the mirror and confronted her captors, thrusting out her immense breasts in a gesture of defiance.

‘Promising,' the second nurse murmured. ‘Very promising indeed. Better get her out to the handlers and see how she shapes up.'

 

Marlon peered into the security monitor, his features screwed into a mask of concentration as he studied the party that approached across the broad expanse of lawn from where the helicopter still sat, rotors beating steadily through the low whine of its idling engine.

He did not recognise the three escorts personally, although the massive blonde had to be the Danish sadist Lianne had told him so much about. There was also the hatchet-faced male, which was probably Naylor, and another fellow, a real heavyweight, probably some sort of minder. For the moment, however, Marlon's attention was focused almost exclusively on the fourth member of the party, the unmistakable auburn-haired figure of his half sister, Clarissa.

She appeared to be unharmed, no visible signs of mistreatment, and she was walking unaided, albeit with some difficulty, which when he zoomed the camera in on the height of her footwear, Marlon scarcely found surprising. Moreover, she appeared to be unhampered by any sign of bondage, although the hands in the pockets, he was astute enough to realise, were as likely as not camouflaging something a little more subtle than a simple pair of handcuffs.

Marlon reached for the switch on the microphone, depressed it and spoke, the sound of his voice amplified through the speakers above the rear entrance bringing an instant response.

‘That's far enough!' he ordered. The four figures, acting as one, came to an immediate halt. ‘Clarissa walks on ahead,' Marlon continued. ‘When I'm satisfied she's okay, I'll admit the rest of you. Now, which of you is Naylor?'

‘I am.' Hatchet face stepped forward, peering up in the general direction of Marlon's voice, looking straight into the concealed camera. ‘And how do we know you'll keep your word? You could grab the girl inside, lock the door and try to summon help, maybe even bring your friends out of the machine.'

‘How do you know I haven't done that already?' Marlon retorted. He saw Naylor's mouth twist into a sardonic smile. ‘But of course, you have Herr Koenig monitoring VESTA, I'd almost forgotten,' he lied.

‘And he now has control of all the failsafe keys,' Naylor reminded him, though Marlon needed no reminder. Three hours of frenzied activity had failed to produce anything that the German would not recognise as being an electronic trick.

‘Which is why you know that, once I have Clarissa back and we are allowed to leave unharmed, I will allow you access to VESTA directly,' Marlon countered. ‘Your continental friend will confirm that even if I were to try to double-cross you, it would take at least an hour for me to take back control, during which time he could inflict permanent damage on any or all of VESTA's current subjects.'

‘And during that same time we could force an entry anyway,' Naylor snapped. ‘However, there is just one small matter.' He turned to the bodyguard and whispered something to him. The big man nodded and scuttled heavily away out of range of the camera.

‘Frank has gone around to cut your telephone lines,' Naylor explained. ‘Of course, you have the radio phone, but that is now under the direct control of VESTA and Koenig, and the helicopter back there houses a small jamming device which will prevent anything operating on the normal mobile phone frequencies within three or four hundred yards radius.'

‘I told you,' Marlon snapped. ‘All I'm interested in is getting Clarissa back. No phones, no radios. You can have everything else that's here.'

‘A commendable attitude,' the blonde said, speaking for the first time. She reached out and pushed Clarissa gently between the shoulder blades. ‘Here, take your sister. You'll see she has suffered no permanent damage. But you will then have ten minutes in which to open the doors again, otherwise we shall instruct friend Koenig to begin frying the brains of all your little friends, starting with Ms Muirhead herself.'

 

The woods, or forest, seemed to be unending, though Ellen realised she could easily have been moving around in circles. More likely, she thought, the computer itself was operating on some sort of circular loop. She knew little enough about such things, but she had heard Marlon trying to explain something to Nadia the day before, telling her that the basic data was used like a sort of backing track, taking samples from a vast library to build the random scenes, but also setting up basic patterns upon which everything else was built later.

But why the delay? Did the absence of any real action signify a problem? Maybe VESTA had picked up a fault, some sort of bug that had jammed her own particular scenario on ‘repeat' - except there was nothing to repeat, not unless you counted trees, trees and more bloody trees.

And then, quite suddenly, he was upon her, exploding from the undergrowth in a blur of black and yellow, knocking Ellen sideways into a sprawling heap, paws and claws thrashing in the air, the breath forced from her lungs by the impact.

Rolling onto her side she lifted her head, turning to find her assailant crouching, snarling, poised to await her next move, a leopard boy, face hidden within a mask that must be mirroring her own, eyes twinkling from behind the tiny slits that allowed what little vision the outfits permitted.

Shaking her head, Ellen pulled herself up onto all fours, keeping the leopard boy fixed firmly in her gaze, and then slowly rose upright once again. The boy growled and began to circle. Crouching slightly she extended her arms, claws curled menacingly, and growled back.

 

The stable block that VESTA had created was archetypal Victoriana; rough brickwork, heavy timber stall partitions and bare stone flags under foot, or in Lianne's case now, under hooves, which clattered on the unsympathetic surface as the youth led her to her latest fate.

Appearing in the ‘hospital' in answer to the nurses' summons, he was perhaps seventeen or eighteen years old, with fair tousled hair, freckled face and a lightly tanned complexion, which extended to arms and legs left bare by the simple leather singlet and shorts he wore. He had arrived prepared for his charge; a tangle of straps draped over one arm, a tangle he quickly shook out to reveal a specially made bridle - specially made for human ponies.

With an easy grace borne, it appeared, of long practice, he threw the harness over Lianne's head, tugging the straps into position and buckling them snugly about her horsy features, then slipping a simple metal bit between her teeth and clipping it to rings situated to either side of her mouth. He made one final check of all the buckles, then clipped a lead rein to one side of the bit and gave it a sharp tug.

‘C'mon, horsy girl.' His tone was not harsh, rather that of someone who was used to being obeyed by his charges and who would encourage, rather than mistreat. But in many ways Lianne found this far worse. From the neck down, apart from her hooves, she was quite utterly human, albeit with considerably enlarged feminine attributes, yet this youth obviously regarded her as the equine her new features pronounced her to be.

She tried to speak again, but once more only the pathetic little whinny escaped her widened lips and the distorting bit, bringing a smile to her handler's face.

‘Steady, girl,' he soothed, turning to pat her flank. ‘This is just your new stable. You'll soon get used to it. Now, let's get you into a proper harness and then over to the smithy.'

The ‘proper harness' turned out to be a very intricate assemblage of heavy leather, the whole made even heavier by the fabulous display of horse brasses with which it was adorned. And once it had been buckled into place, Lianne felt as though she would hardly be able to walk a step in it.

The girth strap, as the stable lad called it, was in reality a leather corset, which encircled Lianne's already tiny waist and drew it in to even more fantastic proportions. Above it her breasts were left bare, though supported and lifted in part by two stiffened platforms of hide, and pushed forward by a curious circular harness that ran up from the top of the girth, adjusted tightly around each orb and then passed over the shoulders to buckle to the main corset at the rear.

Two further straps passed from the lower front hem, forming a V-shape which framed her naked sex, then joining and separating again so they in fact formed an X, the rear V buckling once more at the back and drawn tightly up so that Lianne's nether lips were compressed and thrust into prominence. Her rear orifice was also left unimpeded by the whole arrangement.

Next came two sleeves, terminating in stiff mittens, which laced the entire length of her arms, preventing all but the slightest movement at the elbow. And even that was then denied, when short straps on the inside of either forearm were drawn firmly through strategically placed rings at either hip of the corset girth.

Stepping back, the lad looked Lianne up and down appreciatively, nodding as he did so.