End: The Mole Queen Does Not Speak English

"Save your breath, sweetmeat," Angelica Blaze said as she pushed herself onto her knees. "M-mole people...don't speak...surface-world languages!"

On some silent cue, guards stepped forward. Spear-blades were pressed against Lois Lane's neck from all sides...and the reporter could do nothing but stand there as a slim figure slipped forward. A pair of sheers slid across the reporter's skin...and her clothing fell off of her in pieces. Naked before the gaze of the queen, who eyed the surface woman appreciatively as her arms and legs were chained together with cuffs and manacles.

"⟟ ⌰⟟☍⟒ ⏁⊑⟟⌇ ⍜⋏⟒. ⌇⊑⟒ ⟟⌇ ⌇⏁⍀⍜⋏☌. ⏁⏃☍⟒ ⊑⟒⍀ ⏁⍜ ⏁⊑⟒ ⏚⍀⟒⟒⎅⟟⋏☌ ⌿⟒⋏!" The queen said...and though Lois did not know her words, she could see the cruelty and lust on her face. The reporter blushed, suddenly embarrassed at her nudity, and tried to cover herself...which set off a titter of laughter from the queen.

A poke of a spear in the buttock guided Lois to shuffle forward...and she saw that Angelica had been similarly stripped and cuffed, and was on her feet and shuffling forward beside her.

"If they can't speak English...can you speak theirs?" Lois said. She had guessed by this point that there was more to Blaze than met the eye...not that there was much of the young woman that she hadn't seen at this point.

"I understand it. We're being taken to the breeding pens," Angelica said. "The mole-people have been in a genetic bottleneck for generations...their males don't even look human anymore, and a hundred years ago the women staged a coup and established a military gynocracy. Probably that's why they're drawing sperm from up above...to help replenish their genetic diversity. Of course, since you're a surface-world woman, they'll probably throw you to the males of the species..."

Lois felt dizzy as Angelica Blaze laid this out so nonchalantly, almost as if bored.

"What about you?" She asked. "Aren't you afraid of the same thing?"

At that, the dark-haired woman turned to look at Lois...and the reporter saw her eyes were now pure white, with no pupil or iris. "No. I'm a hybrid. Our kinds are...often sterile. The queen knows this. You know, I have to apologize. I thought I was having my fun with you, I had no idea the mole-people had established an operation so close to the surface...beneath my own club!"

"Your club!?" Lois asked. "Then the women who went missing..."

"Probably victims of the mole-people," Blaze said.

They were escorted through passages hewn through the solid stone, lit by pyramid-shaped glass bulbs at regular intervals...and natural caverns, beautiful and eerie...past chambers where Amazonian mole-women trained with primitive weapons...and a kind of prison where Lois saw naked surface-women kept, with empty eyes and swollen stomachs. Her mouth set in a firm line as she realized that Blaze's suspicions about what had happened to the missing women were true.

Ever downward they went, deeper into the Earth...and Lois sensed a certain tension among her captors, a wariness. All signs of civilization disappeared as they moved through ancient, half-forgotten tunnels where eyeless albino lizards gamboled among great piles of fungus...and all the time, Lois Lane stayed on the alert, waiting for her chance to escape. Even bound hand and foot as she was, if she could get her chain around the throat of one of the guards...perhaps they could make a break for it.

Then, the tunnel simply ended. Before them gaped an open pit. Dimly, Lois could make out a shallow stair worn into the inner curve of that pit, the individual steps worn down to mere bumps by the passage of countless feet. A spear-tip pricked her buttock and Lois turned and snarled, snatching at the mole-woman...only to get a boot to her chest for her trouble.

The impact sent Lois teetering...and then falling.

Downward, into darkness.

Her head flew down to see where she would land...and the soft masses there moved. They raised stubby limbs that could not be called arms. Opened toothless gashes that could not be called mouths. Strange pink stems grew from eyeless slits, and Lois had enough time to scream in terror as she recognized the males of the species.

Then she landed in the soft-warm mass of the bodies...and they rolled over her. Their scent a strange musk, their hairless bodies pressed close on her own, the soft pink pricks stabbing wherever they could. The mating-ball of the mole-people, where the female would not be free until every one of them had marked her, inside and out...

Blaze stared down from the edge of the pit. She ran her mind back over the events of tonight, the plans she had made to play with Lois Lane...and wondered at each decision point, where she had gone wrong. For now she was trapped, at least as long as the Mole Queen held the mystic ring...and Lois Lane now suffered a fate far worse than what Blaze had planned for her.

The demon allowed herself a small smile as Lois Lane's hands burst up from amid the thrusting bodies and stabbed one finger at the sky, as if to voice her thoughts on all the world and fates.

Lois Lane was prisoner of the mole people...for now. Her night out was over. Yet soon, Blaze thought, the resourceful surface-worlder would have her ****...

...but that is another story.