…change into the pirate attire and infiltrate the house proper.

Disguise it is. It’s just too good of an opportunity. If you sneak up otherwise then someone is bound to see you walking around. They may only see movement in the gloom or a black clad body disappearing around a corner but the less pirate you look the more they will investigate.

You snake an arm over the crate and pickup the material, first the shorts and then the jacket, intermittently checking on the group at the end of the room to see if they noticed. They don’t. You reach up and take off the black face mask, breathing in the musky and unfiltered air of the cellar. You look at them again. The scarred man has stopped moving his hips, though he remains embedded inside the other man, and has redoubled the stroking of the manhood beneath him. You note that it has grown several sizes as he pushes and pulls the skin that wraps it. The man in the stocks groans loudly. The man with the mess of brown hair still attacks the woman in his unfeeling expressionless way and the two other men laugh at something unheard. You pull back and slip off your top.

The stuffy air move across your exposed back and breasts, the sweat on both making it feel cooler than it is. You drop the top behind you and quickly grab the jacket. It’s hard to see anything in the dark, but holding it up to the limited light of the room gives a good silhouette for you to manipulate it. You thread your arms through the holes and fiddle with the button at the front to close it. It’s very short, really meant as a more symbolic jacket. You pull it down and make sure your breasts are properly covered. They are, barely, but your whole midriff is exposed. You would never usually wear this, and would balk at the idea if you weren’t busy dreading the shorts.

You check again.

The scarred man is panting and smiling, licking his fingers one after the other as he moves to sit down with the others. The brown haired man continues in the woman but she’s quiet again now, simply jumping slightly with each rough impact. You struggle to hear anything for a moment, but fortunately, another woman’s loud and un-muffled moans start to fill the room, echoing down from an unseen distance away. They carry the unmistakable tune of pleasure, which you doubt this cellar has heard much of in the feminine pitch, though it’s a somewhat baritone example of such. Vanessa and the large man most likely. The others talk louder to compensate.

“You gonna ‘op on?” That was the scarred man to the old man, you think.

“Nah. Gonna wait till she’s free. Get some cunt. Man needs some cunt now and then.” Your own clenches involuntarily at the old man’s words.

“Don’t see why ones better than tuther.” The scarred man says defensively, still licking something off his fingers. As you listen, you slide the black trousers over your hips and pull them down your ghostly thighs. They’re so pale you can almost see them in the absolute darkness. As before, sweat makes the air feel cool as an imaginary breeze plays across private places that are so rarely exposed to its attention, or any attention really. You struggle to step out of them, having left your shoes on distractedly. You have to sit down, and the stone floor seems shockingly cold against your bare behind.

You keep an ear on the room, struggling to hear as you struggle with the trousers. Your hands shake. Some part of you knows that it’s just nerves and tells you to slow down and take a deep breath. That part of you is evidently not the part sitting with her nethers on display, fighting a cloth wrapped tightly around her ankles, near a room full of rapists as they actively **** another woman. You freeze as you hear a few faint pops of stiches coming from the material. If they come over...

“Even Benji’s upstairs getting some puss tonight.” They didn’t hear. Of course, how could they?

“What? From who? Not the cap-“

“Nah, nah, nah; Maxaine. Girls prolly sucking rudder right now.”

You resume your struggle, finally pulling your shoes through the black material and dumping the trousers with your top. Strangely enough, freeing your ankles doesn’t calm you down. It may be because you’re now naked from shoes to too short jacket and to make matters worse, you hear the brown haired man make a series of strangled noises as he no doubt finishes his abhorrent task.

Your breathing is shallow as you grab the shorts.

“How she get upstairs with the captin up there?” You freeze again, feet just through the red material.

“What?” It was the scarred man who asked the question first, with the old man absently responding. The scarred man clarifies as you hold your breath.

“Maxaine. An’t no folk allowed up right? Save who the captain wants seein. Or are they just ‘upstairs’, not ‘up-upstairs’” The old man pauses, distracted by the sight in front of him.

“Oh. Err. Up-upstairs. Kitchen’s my bet.”

A breathless, toneless voice chips in, “Nah, not kitchen. Samia or Misty would get her up somehow.”

Eager to join the conversation, the voice of the bald man chips in, “They’re those two maids up there right? They get me up that’s for sure.” He laughs and the others chuckle politely. You’re too focused on what’s being said to understand the joke.

Benji, kitchens, Maxaine, Samia, Misty. They all feel like important bits of a puzzle; tantalising snippets of information. You pull the shorts up your legs, standing up when they reach your thighs and listen close.

Vanessa’s noises become ragged breathing as her own private engagement progresses, and the voices get fainter as a result. “So...you ever?” the voice of the bald man says. It getting harder to hear again.

“With Misty once” comes the voice of the toneless man. The shorts glide over the stiletto at your thigh. You’ll have to figure something out if you want to keep it hidden.

“Twice,” the old man responds, manoeuvring to the vacant spot behind the woman, “and I had Samia years ago when sh-, I mean, when we was both drunk. Tight as anything, recon I was er first.” You stand up straight and pull the shorts up all the way.

“Bullshit!”

A shiver runs up your spine, not from the words spoken but from the shorts themselves. The fit is poor; somehow, your hips are narrower than those of the giant woman, yet you’re flat behind feels twice as big, hugged close by the material! That’s not the cause of your shiver though. The crotch is...wet. Cold and wet. Wet from the crotch of their last occupant and cold from their stay on the floor afterwards. Did that damn woman wet herself!? This feels awful! You push aside your distaste and your own warmth quickly smothers the feeling of crotches past. You pull the drawstring tight at the waist and peek around the boxes once more.

The old man is now slowly humping the woman while the others sit, watching and chatting amongst themselves. The brown haired man starts to slowly rise, standing up from his chair and glancing towards your darkness. If he comes over…

He gets distracted by something the scarred man asks and you take your moment; in a few short paces you find yourself on the stone steps leading out of the cellar.

As you near the top you hear a sound; in amongst the slapping of the old man behind the young woman, the renewed moaning of the two distant giants and the echoing words of a poor conversation, one thing can he heard distinctly.

“Who the fuck was that?”

The normally toneless voice actually sounded surprised. You open the door at the top, step out into the hallway and promptly close the door behind you.

The corridor has wooden floors and ceilings, with plaster walls that are lined with doors and a worn carpet guiding your way. It’s a reasonably short distance to both ends, considering the size of the house. Bright lanterns hang from the those ends, which are simply turns that hide what lies beyond, but they are still too far from each other to give the middle of the hallway anything more than a dull flicker. You quietly move right, towards the lantern hanging on the wall, opening a nearby door and finding the room behind it to be pitch black and quite unoccupied. You duck in. The light of the lantern streams in through the door, cutting the darkness in two, and you stand in the light, hidden from all who may look down the corridor. You need to see yourself. You take a breath and look down.

You should go back. Your dark clothes may mark you as an intruder, but at least they were reasonably modest! You’re confronted by your pale skinny body in almost all its glory. The red shorts hide your crotch, save for the few black hairs of your bush that climb out over the waist line, but your legs are fully uncovered from the crotch down. Above the shorts, your flat belly is fully exposed and above that, your ribs are visible beneath your skin. That helps, you suppose; men find a full figure to be the main attraction on a woman and only the nobility find pale skin enticing, or so you’ve heard. When you’ve looked at yourself in the mirror, you’ve always seen a cross between a skeleton and a ghost. Hopefully, that’s what the men on the island will see as well, though it may be best to avoid them anyway. ‘Besides’, you tell yourself, ‘if you were as skinny as you think you are then the damn shorts wouldn’t hug your buttocks so much!’. You’ve heard of whores wearing garments like these. Gods, you hope that’s not where they come from!

You turn your attention to your ‘jacket’, such as it is, and immediately go red faced. It’s completely unsuitable of course. Like the shorts, the sizes are all wrong; its shortness barely covering your breasts while its wideness leaves it feeling completely loose. A small part of you huffs; even though men are built bulkier than women, the bald man’s chest must be significantly wider than your own. The embarrassing part was not the looseness, but the small hole in the front that your left nipple is peeking through; your small pink nub looking out at the world, visible to all who would want to look back. A stab of inspiration grabs you and you unbutton the tops central button and pull it tighter, pushing the button through the small hole instead. Now it hugs a little tight, the shape of your nipples visible through the poor material, but it at least it hides them and won’t leave you exposed if you lift your arms too quickly.

As you suspected, your stiletto is going to be a problem, and the poison as well. Held in place by two leather straps in the middle of your thigh, it would be very obvious to anyone looking that you’re armed. You look out the room and listen until your satisfied no one’s coming around the corner any time soon. You undo the bottom strap and drop it to the floor -the shorts will be tight enough to hold the weapon flat- then, you slide the shorts down to your knees, loosen the top strap that holds the blade and poison, before pulling it right up so the inside of the strap sits flush against the very top of your inner thigh. You tighten it and pull your shorts back up, sparing the empty corridor a suspicious glance as you do.

It’s not perfect as the tip of the knife points out the bottom of the shorts, and there is a slight bulge for blade and vial both, but it’s significantly less obvious. Looking down, you note that your legs look terrible; white as paper and thin, with knobbly knees. They get you where you want to go, but you doubt anyone would find them attractive. You have to remind yourself that this is a good thing, like the fact that your black sneaking shoes are covered in dirt from your time in the gardens, adding to your disguise.

Disguise corrected as much as possible, you walk out of the room and try to figure out where to go now. Upstairs is obviously the destination, but from the sound of it, that will only be accessible from the kitchens or with help from one of the two maids: Samia or Misty, if you remember correctly. With one direction no better than another, you continue around the corner and down the corridor, away from the cellar door. It’s not long until it ends in a wide open, utilitarian room; all counters and cupboards and hooks and work surfaces. It’s clearly a kitchen by design and is lit by several lanterns, though not used by anyone currently. How fortunate. You start to look for some hidden staircase or some secret way up and find it shockingly quickly: a dumbwaiter sits in the middle of the far wall, square hole still containing a suspended wooden tray, held up by ropes linked to a complex series of gears. Such things are designed to move food directly from the kitchen to the diners upstairs, with two ropes hanging down in front of the tray, and a light tug on one lifting it easily. You look up the shaft and see a slight flickering light coming from its connecting room. Anyone could be up there, but if the kitchen is empty then it’s doubtful anyone is.

A quick look down the adjoining corridors shows no-one nearby, and as you go to look out of another small entrance, you freeze. The backdoor of the house opens onto the grassy lawn and night air. You don’t see the guard, but you know he’s there. You back away quietly. With the back door as a point of reference, you can better orientate yourself with what you remember of the manors outside.

Looking for the maids and trying to get more of a lay of the land, you choose to backtrack to the cellar door and continue past it, down the hall until you come to a three way split. The way that goes directly left also leads into a part of the house your fairly sure is empty, and so you take the path straight ahead to avoid it. After walking a small distance down the lit corridor and past its empty rooms, you come to one large unlit room.

It’s a ballroom of some kind; a wide open space with large windows, currently filled with crates, boxes and thick darkness. A large open archway to the right of the room connects it to a much brighter part of the house; the front entrance by your estimation. The light, the sounds of talking and the anonymity of the ballrooms darkness all draw you forward.

You were right. The foyer is lit by multiple lanterns and has a decaying grandeur to it. High ceilings and fraying carpets, carved woodwork and flaking paint; not quite rack and ruin but its glory days are long gone. A vast staircase marches up from the centre of the room to a landing balcony above. Like the room you’re in, crates dot the middle and the sides, though to a much lesser degree. A gaggle of five finely dressed men stand at the base of the stairs, talking to one another in hushed tones that occasionally brake into angry mutterings. Merchants; though if they’re doing business here then fences may be a better term. Beyond them is another arch leading into the room across from yours. It’s also lit by lantern light and you see a woman wiping surfaces with a damp cloth. She wears typical maid attire -a brown skirt and a white pinny- and has her blond hair up in modest plaits.

You lean against one of the crates to consider things. Should you explore the downstairs any further? It seems kind of pointless. You need to get upstairs and you have two potential ways to get there already. You could ask the girl, maybe tell her your here to meet this ‘Benji’ you heard mentioned. There’s a risk that she could turn you in of course, if you don’t tread carefully. Or you could ascend in the dumbwaiter, with the equal risk of finding someone at the top.

You purse your lips and sigh through your nose. More choices. Still, better to have things to choose than **** at all. You shiver unconsciously, hugging bear arms to bare stomach. It’s a warm night, but you’ve never been so...naked, in public at least. You shake it off. Time to choose;