The Chalifoux Experiment

“I… must have misunderstood your relationship with her,” Tricia suddenly declared, breaking John’s concentration on Lily, “because I had assumed that, although she was a permanent manifestation you could not dismiss, she was already your summon.”

John thought back to that confusing exchange he and Tricia had after the orgy. He had hid the fact that Lily was a servant gifted to him by the Extinction King, and Lily called him “Master” too readily; combined with her being a demon, manifesting on Earth, and being John’s concern… well, what else could Tricia have assumed?

“Do you mean to tell me… she had manifested without your intervention? Or are you capable of enslaving creatures without your brand?”

John no longer flinched at the word, but he still wished she wouldn’t call it that. “It’s… complicated. Point is, she’s no longer anyone else’s ****… and she wants to be mine-” John’s words trailed off as he felt his hand being taken into Lily’s… until she quietly put it on her head. Confused, John rubbed her head softly… warming the tiny succubus’ bright pink cheeks. C-Cute…

“Well, she’s an Abyssal monster of little apparent utility, but if that is your wish,” the Gorbachev declared with a shrug, “then I have to presume she would only be safer, and apparently happier, to be sent to your ‘temple’ instead of left to blindly grope around this place.”

At “grope” Lily took John’s hand again and, quietly, guided it down her back, making him peel her robe down her sweaty little body as he did so. He felt the ugly scar tissue there on those two, thick slits where wings may once have been anchored; she persisted in moving his arm lower past them.

“You… are fine with it, because you still think she’s just an illusion,” John sighed.

“You know my position,” Tricia retorted, her arms folding, “and whatever the Cabalist’s desires, or the Hellbat’s pride, it matters not: either one is fully, or in part, an illusory being once brought to Earth solely thanks to potent sorcery.” She glanced back at Botuk who, before Zalla, Collide, and the Bitter Nines, was answering every question about the Lawmen that Zalla could not answer. “I do not ignore their plights cruelly, as so many mages do, nor believe their independent expressions of sentience is not worth some level of consideration… but in the end, they are creations of the human mind... or else of something that inspired their form with the same hand that inspires our thoughts. I understand the moralistic debates to be made about what rights an Abyssal creature could own, if they were capable of existing on Earth without intervention. I believe it’s apt to compare it to one particular episode of Star Journey: The Following Generation; I even empathized with the plight of the android, Info, and his right to exist.”

John smiled at the reference; it seemed so bizarre to make so far from home. “Then why not Lily? Or them out there?”

Tricia slowly contemplated telling him. Her pause was heavy in the air between them.

Lily pushed John’s hand down to the small of her back. He withdrew before the lusty succubus could take him to her rump; she groaned in frustration into his leg until he returned to patting her head, earning another round of mewling. “M-Master,” she moaned.

Tricia looked back with a raised eyebrow, but just as suddenly asked, “Have you ever seen an old movie called Who Blamed Harry Hare?, from the late eighties?”

John nodded, unsure of how they arrived at this topic. Did I miss something? “Y-Yeah?”

“Do you recall how… the real people in that film interacted with the cartoons, even though they were so clearly separated in nature?”

John shrugged, unsure of her point. “Well yeah, and they even had separate worlds; you got to see the cartoon world through a wall or something at the end, right?”

“Just so,” Tricia agreed, “and the two kinds of people—humans and cartoons—were both physically real, possessed of independent thoughts, and treated one another as real. They even mixed in their realities, despite how distinct and divorced from one another they had been.”

John smirked as he recalled bits of the film. “Well, that sounds like a good comparison for treating them like they’re real, right? The Abyssal creatures, I mean.”

“On the contrary,” Tricia retorted, turning her attention back to the Bitter Nines, “that movie helps highlight the limits of that kind of respect. The humans and ‘toons’ were of the same reality, just constructed from different matter: the ‘physical’ and the ‘cartoon’ bases for their existences. They shared that root reality… and they were each unique... unlike creatures of the Abyss. Creatures of the Abyss are more akin to thoughts, dreams, nightmares…” She glanced down at the succubus on John’s lap. “... or fantasies; things that bear no rights beyond what the conjuring, real being makes for them... and they can be repeated ad nauseam by that real creator.”

“Who decides that?”

Tricia nearly jumped at the words and glanced back up at John’s face, momentarily unable to believe it came from him… but John was still staring at her softly, albeit perplexed. Lily continued to purr with closed eyes as he rubbed her. So strange… what was…? “The reality of things decides that, John: without someone on Earth to imagine or create them, Abyssal creatures do not exist… nor do their thoughts, wants, or hatreds… or plights.” She looked back out and watched as Botuk unwillingly made models of the Ascension Bridge using the Bitter Nines’ strange visualization platform. “Unlike the ‘toons,’ the will and existence of an Abyssal creature is not uniquely real; they are mere facsimiles. Their natures are elemental, and their desires and beliefs singular in direction. No matter the appearance of sentience, of the wisdom of self-recognition, of some apparent ability to learn… they are nothing more than programmed responses to stimuli without a real will--or existence--to drive or change themselves.”

“That’s… that doesn’t sound significantly different from the human experience.”

A noise came from Tricia. Did she just… tsk at him? “It makes all the difference.”

“I mean, let’s say their free will isn’t enough… what proof is there of a lack of uniqueness? There isn’t any, is there?”

Tricia nodded softly. “The Chalifoux Experiment.”

“The… the what?”

Tricia took herself deeper into the hole, crossing her legs as she sat before John in her glittering armor. Her body blocked most of the light from outside. “It is... a regrettable piece of research, but it was the most definitive proof of this. The Chalifoux Experiment was a 19th-century study conducted by Serena Chalifoux, a mage of some infamy. She used a very specialized barrier: one designed to repeatedly summon only one particular kind of Abyssal creature: a single, weak, and male elf. ”

John cocked his head at that. “A-An elf? What kind?”

“Unknown; the descriptions lend themselves to moon elves, given highly pale skin and blonde hair, but that could just as well have been one of a number of other sub-species identified in the past. They never described anything other than that they were backed by hundreds of their own kind and of far greater **** than them.”

“How weak are we talking?” Thumalk immediately came to mind.

“Barely stronger than a young adult human,” Tricia replied, “they were incapable of magic beyond fixing damage to their own being. Chalifoux could terminate them with ease once she had her results.” Tricia paused as if annoyed at that. “Each time they were summoned, they were presented with a sealed room without exits, save through Chalifoux herself. Therein, she presented them with the same facts and choice: a table with six packages, colored red, blue, yellow, orange, green, and purple, and with that instructions to pick one.”

John already disliked where this was going. “What was in the packages?”

“Each elf was told that one box contained a gold coin, another a white coin, and the other four black coins. Then they were told that the gold coin they could keep, the white coin would give them freedom, and the black coins would mean their extermination.”

John felt he knew where this was going. “So what, this mage kept calling the same kind of elf, and they each picked the same box no matter what?”

“Oh, no,” Tricia said with a chuckle, “the results were not statistically anomalous: anywhere from 200-260 of the subjects chose each of the color of boxes. If anything, it proved the appearance of free will.”

“T-Then what’s the point?!”

“The point, Mr. Newman, was two-fold: first, that Chalifoux was a monstrous woman who enjoyed tormenting Abyssal creatures.”

“Christ.”

Lily thought to open her mouth, but the head pats were too good.

“Second, each elf was interviewed before being **** to make the choice. They all said the same thing: that their people numbered in the hundreds, that their warriors back home were far more powerful than the elf before her, and that the elf’s matriarchs would sunder the Earth with their magic if the humans ever dared test them.”

John had never asked Tita or Thumalk about their original world… nor had he any interest after seeing their attitudes towards other beings.

“Notice what doesn’t add up there?”

“... Wait… but you said 200-250 per…”

“Exactly,” Tricia finished with a nod, “so that is impossible. Over 1,300 elves were killed in the experiments, all of them equally weak and perfectly conforming to the barrier’s demands… and each claimed to come from a civilization of less than a thousand people of varying strengths and genders. It bears mentioning that each did not just superficially appear the same: each was almost identical to the last, down to their names--Ios, each and every one--with the only differences ever being noted in the positions of their hairs or the initial dilation of their eyes upon manifestation.”

“Each…?” John took a moment to consider the report; over a thousand copies of the same elf? How was that possible? But another fact in Tricia’s recounting of the experiment drew his attention. “Wait, if that many… did virtually all of the… Ios… pick black coins?”

Tricia shook her head. “No, Chalifoux was… needlessly coarse with her experiments. There were no gold or white coins.” John’s expression turned too grim for Tricia to bear. “S-She was later discovered to be with a defunct coven of heretics and killed by the…”

“The Order?”

“Well, yes.”

“Are you able to make this barrier? The one she used to...?”

“What? No,” Tricia quickly denied, “Chalifoux was only ever public about her results, not her means; it was replicated by several Gorbachev scholars after the fact, however, and was used by many mages to explain the ephemeral nature of Abyssal creatures.”

<The Chalifoux Experiment is WIDELY discredited by REAL mages, and your lankey little lancer of lies lacks a lick of lucid lunacy if she buys into that infamous harlot’s research! To think I waited until now to speak up! Oh, when next I get to grab that gangly girl and goad her up from ignorance-!>

The regret John had--in reinstating Juniluny to the psychosphere after realizing how “hands-off” child-rearing was to be for her--melted away a bit, now. “Juniluny says this Chalifoux woman was discredited.”

“Perhaps in her circles; but this study was repeated by Gorbachevs, and their methodology was published, as I recall.”

<Of course they were; the Order needs that to be the truth, but they don’t want it coming out of a heretic mage; best make the pet Gorbachevs mimic their monstrous malevolence and make manifestations to the same tune! Did you really marry a woman this daft?>

John struggled to talk past the yammering in his head, but he was too curious to stop it. “So if… the Order made the Gorbachevs claim the research was… good, even if the first source was a warlock or heretic or...”

Tricia opened her mouth to interrupt… but her eyes were cast down. She had no reason to doubt anything the Opekuny told her… at least, until just a couple of days ago. Could she swear it was true now? Could she denounce their research, though, when she had replicated some of it--computations, medicines, languages--herself…?

A bit of guilt hit John for making Tricia visibly struggle with his question, so he did his best to break the mood up with a chuckle. “At the end of the day, I guess you think I’m ridiculous for being mad at someone for being cruel to illusions, huh?”

“No…” Tricia sighed; she was, perhaps unconsciously, grateful for the distraction. “No, no more than if she had been cruel to animals. Cruelty is… unwarranted, even with Abyssal creatures. No matter my ultimate understanding of them, I only bring this experiment up for its discoveries… and would never sanction such practices myself.”

“I’m sure the moon elves will breath a sigh of relief at that.”

Tricia almost bit her lip to stop her from repeating her belief. “I’m… I’m just trying to explain to you the nature of Abyssal creatures.”

“Right… and I’m trying to channel your hatred of cruelty,” John whispered back, “to explain why you should still feel for them when they become my slaves... just as if I had enslaved a ‘real’ person.”

Tricia gave John a perplexed glare. “To what end?”

John opened his mouth to answer… except he didn’t know. Why did he want to convince her of this? That only made his crimes so much worse… and the prospect of enslaving Lily so much less palpable. What the Hell was the point in me arguing against her explanation?!

<Because it’s the gods-damned truth, Master… not that it ever stopped me, of course.>

It sounds like someone didn’t get punished enough.

<N-Now then, there’s no need to be hasty with your… methods, Master!>

John let the thread go as he refocused on Tricia. In truth, there had been no point; something in John simply wanted to refute the Gorbachev’s… and Chalifoux’s… conclusion. It had just felt… wrong to him. “I… I don’t know.”

They shared another awkward moment of silence before Tricia stammered, “W-Well, in any case… the succubus directly approved your proposition and seems bound to your command anyways, so… at most, all you change is that she is kept safer than she is now in exchange for… well, nothing unless she has some use in combat.”

John cleared his throat audibly; he wasn’t about to explain Lily’s role as a server for Extinction King bounties. “I guess all this explains why you never really worried about Zalla or Botuk as people...”

“Nor as lovers, since we’ve long since crossed that bridge,” Tricia interjected with a smile, “so I won’t blame you if you add yet another succubus to your… roster.”

“That sounded… a bit blame-y.” Yet John welcomed the change of tone.

Tricia huffed before sitting down, putting her back to John. “Well, I hardly enjoy competing for your attention against demonic entities constructed for sexual promiscuity… but I have kept my ground so far.”

“So what about when I sleep with other humans?”

“I believe my assets fair better overall against such… opponents.” Something like a competitive spark seemed to light her face up. “Besides… we’ve had this discussion many times now, and I’m starting to suspect you don’t believe my answer.”

John scratched the back of his head in embarrassment. “Sorry… I guess it just seems too good to be true.”

“That I let you sleep with others as you wish? You are immune to venereal diseases and do not carry-”

“That I get to love someone like you.”

Tricia froze in place… and slowly melted as her cheeks began to burn. “T-That’s an absurd thing to say… e-even if it feels right, we have known each other for less than two weeks… I-I-”

“Now who’s repeating herself?”

John slid forward inside the hole in the wall, and Lily nearly clipped her chin on the padded floor below where his leg once was. He gently reached for Tricia’s neck and rubbed the sides of it as he drew close; the rest of her was in armor, but this stimulation was enough to earn a sharp inhale from his lover. “You mentioned another trip to the barrier…” he whispered before leaning forward and gently kissing her lips.

Her eyelids fluttered as he withdrew from her after a moment’s connection… and she licked her lips longingly before answering, “Finish your business here, first. I don’t want you distracted when we… commit to further research. And… I’m sorry, for ruining the mood earlier.”

“It’s fine… except for that one example, I love it when you talk science to me.” Tricia could only reflect her lover’s grin and lean in for another kiss in their private little hideaway.

Behind John, Lily tapped her fingers impatiently on the mattress as she waited her turn. John watched the Gorbachev rise to leave when at last they broke their kiss and followed her pert little ass as it sauntered away…

“M-Master,” grumbled a jealous little demon, “Lily isn’t of ‘little apparent utility,’ right?”

John blinked down at the sour-looking succubus. Of all the things for her to focus on after all that... “We’ll have to see,” John replied, “once I brand you… that is, if you really want this?”

“I would love it, Master, but you can’t,” Lily sighed, “not while I’m under my other Master’s control.”

“Yeah… well, you’d love it, anyways?”

“Absolutely!”

“Even though… it’s slavery,” John whispered.

“I’m already your ****, Master,” Lily giggled, “and I wouldn’t want it any other way… especially if Master would finally… f-finally…!” Her little cunt squirted towards the back of the chamber in anticipation, painting the fringes of the robe she had bundled up around her crotch. She rose up on her arms, letting her flat, small-nippled chest do its very best to try and entice the Gamer.

“Where would you want the brand to show up?”

Lily, a bit too eagerly, threw her simple white robe off her crotch and sat up on her knees. Her fingers grabbed either side of her hairless pubic mound and pulled up, bringing her fat little clitoris up before John’s view. “Right there, so every time I masturbated, I would be touching you,” she moaned with another visible squirt at the thought. “Oh Master, I’ve… I’ve been ignored this whole time, and I’m so ****… and no one wants me, Master… d-do you… want me…?”

Surprised Miles hasn’t taken advantage of this… surprised and thankful. “I do,” John sighed lustfully, unable to ignore the sexual display, the promise of more with Tricia, the promise of rest after a day’s mission done… after a day of slaughter…

No. Just focus on this... for now. “I’m going to brand you, Lily… and then you’re just going to be mine. Is that what you… really want?”

“Yes!” she cried, her fingers struggling to not let go of her skin and dive for her aching pussy. The sheer fantasy of it, the ecstasy of being his… and receiving his attentions at last!

"But... why?"

"Because then... Master would use me!" she exclaimed. "Master... would use me, right? Please?"

John gritted his teeth as he wrestled with the offer. I know not all demons are this fucked up; Yulie wasn't one bit happy with being caught, after all, so why Lily is so... He shook his head and **** a smile. "Alright... then that'll be the trade."

"T-Trade?"

"You'll let me brand you... and in exchange, I'll give you more attention. Is that what you'd like?"

Biting her lip, the pink-skinned girl nodded eagerly as she thrust her hips at him. Without any more hesitation, John’s finger pressed on Lily’s sensitive button, surprising her as she squealed with ecstasy… until a purple light consumed her body.

Succubus Minimus captured!
Capture was willing; no XP or loot awarded.

Achievement unlocked! “You See These Shackles, Baby, I'm Your ****”!
Enslave someone without threatening, fighting, or disabling them. Quite the smooth talker, huh?
+5 CHA
+2,000XP