In midnight darkness, the fourth story window silently opened from the outside. A shadow slunk inside like the nimblest of cats and the quietest of mice. It carefully closed the window, then surveyed the room it had just entered.
Determining that all was well, the shadow moved forward without sound towards a door on the opposite wall from the window. An investigation of the door ensured it was solid and offered no visibility from the hallway outside to the room within. Once again assuaged, the shadow flipped the light switches to the right of the door.
Rows of overhead fixtures instantly illuminated the room. No longer a shadow, the form revealed itself as a human being, clothed entirely in non-reflective black from head to toe. The shape of the person pushed in purely feminine ways against the nocturnal cammo that had hidden it.
Over the next several seconds, the person removed a hood, night vision goggles, and finally a ninja style mask from her head. Now freed from its coverings, her face displayed as youthful and attractive beneath tightly bunched auburn ringlets. She sighed and shook out her hair, which then fell in cascading curls down across her shoulders.
“Much better,” she said. “Ah, there it is.”
A large metallic cube rested on the floor nearby the wall to her right. She quietly walked over to it, then around it, assessing it up close but not touching it.
“Well, Kelly Ann Templar,” she said, addressing herself as was her way, “this is by far the weirdest thing you’ve ever been paid to steal.”
The cube stood waist high to her. Though appearing solid from a distance, Kelly Ann could see that each face was comprised of dozens of individual pieces. Her client had warned her that in its current state, she would likely have problems removing the cube from the building. But, the client had told her, she could press one specific spot on one specific side to break it down into much smaller and more manageable components.
So Kelly Ann searched for the one side and its one spot. After a couple of minutes, she saw what looked like a tiny raised square--the size of her pinky nail--at the bottom of the side facing the wall. She took a breath, held it, and reached out to touch the cube there.
The square yielded without her applying any pressure to it. Immediately it sank into the cube. Kelly Ann waited for something else to happen, but nothing initially did.
“Seriously? What am I supposed to do now? Kelly Ann, my girl, why did you take such a crazy job? Why? I’ll tell you why. Because it paid half up front, and that alone covered rent, food, and new gadgets for the next--oh! What’s this?”
In various seemingly random places all around the cube, little squares like the one Kelly Ann had pushed sank into the sides. Then, a low-level hum sounded from within the object. A few seconds after that, wire tendrils emerged from each of the depressed spaces. Extending out to longer and longer lengths, the tendrils quickly took on eerily serpentine qualities.
“Um…” Kelly Ann said, moving slowly along the wall away from the cube.
The tendrils tracked her. Then they started reaching for her. And when she broke into a sprint for the window--having decided that this was one large, weird cube she wasn’t going to steal after all--they surged forward. Before she knew it, the impossibly long and fast filaments had wrapped around her arms and legs. Crying out in fear, she found herself lifted off the ground and brought back through the air towards the cube.
“Think, Kelly Ann, think! How does one get out of a bizarre, sci-fi cube deathtrap?”
She had no answer for herself.
Now that she was caught, the tendrils took their time in moving her. She could hear clicks and whirs and pings behind her. Looking over her shoulder, she saw that the object was no longer a cube. It had transformed into a frame of some sort, with four open cuffs that looked to her to be in the just the right positions to house her wrists and ankles.
She struggled but was held tight. Slowly, ominously she moved closer to assured imprisonment. Finally, the tendrils placed her up against the frame, pulling her arms and legs back until her wrists and ankles did indeed fit into the awaiting cuffs. With a click, the cuffs locked her limbs into place. The tendrils around her arms then let go. Those around her legs did, too, though they immediately moved down to her feet.
Kelly Ann watched in wide-eyed shock as the agile wires deftly untied her boot laces, then began pulling the shoes off her feet. Once she had been unshod, they pierced her socks and tore them off her feet, without so much as nicking her flesh underneath.
Though still fully clothed, Kelly Ann now felt utterly naked and exposed as she stared out over her bound body and bare feet.
“This isn’t good. This so isn’t good at all. And the million dollar question is...what now, Kelly Ann? What now?”
As soon as she had asked herself the question, the answer to it formed in her mind. She didn’t like the answer, nor the images that accompanied it: a feather, brush bristles, long fingernails, and her trembling feet and squirming toes.
“No. No they wouldn’t do that, Kelly Ann. They wouldn’t torture you that way. And besides, even if they did, you could take it. It’s just tickling. No big deal. Tickling? Really? Ha! That’s hardly torture.”
But as she spoke, her feet involuntarily scrunched up to make themselves as small as possible.
An electronic chirp sounded from the door, followed by a click. Kelly Ann knew that an access code had been entered, and the lock undone. The door opened, and a woman entered the room. Slender and pretty, only the few random greys in her dark hair and a single, prominent laugh line gave away that she was any older than Kelly Ann. She wore business casual clothes beneath a lab coat and open-toed high heels. In her right hand, she carried a satchel akin to an old fashioned doctor’s bag. In her left hand, she carried a collapsible stool.
“Good evening,” she said.
“Look, there’s no need to do anything rash,” Kelly Ann said. “We both know that--”
The woman walked up to Kelly Ann, smiled, and shushed the captive with both her voice and a hand gesture.
“All you need to do is tell me what you know, and everything will be fine. Just fine.”
“Everything I know about what?”
“About who sent you and why.”
“I...I can’t tell you that. Anything but that.”
“Of course you can, you gorgeous little thief. You just need some assistance getting the words out.”
Smiling to make a crocodile’s grin look inviting, the woman set up her stool at Kelly Ann’s feet. She calmly sat down, then held up her hands for the captured thief to see. A long, immaculate manicure graced each finger.
“Look, I wish I could tell you,” Kelly Ann said, her eyes locked on the woman’s hands. “But I really, really can’t. Maybe there’s something else we could work out. Maybe-eee-eeeee!”
The woman withdrew her hands from the soles of Kelly Ann’s feet, where she had just wiggled her fingers spider-like across them. Kelly Ann panted out an exasperated breath.
“I’m quite sure,” the woman said, “that you really, really can tell me who sent you and why. I’m equally sure that you doing so now will save you a lot of grief...although it will cost me a lot of fun.”
Kelly Ann squirmed and tugged uselessly within her bonds, trying to get any amount of space between her naked soles and the woman’s fingers that slowly moved in again towards them. The woman waited several seconds for a verbal response that didn’t come, then with a shrug she took to her captive’s sensitive feet.
“Heeheehee! P-please! P-please, n-n-no! Heeheeheeheehee!”
Over a minute passed. The woman tickled the feet before her from heel to toe, then back down again. She garnered peals of laughter and shrieks of protest, but gained no information from her prisoner. At last she stopped, leaving Kelly Ann gasping for air. With a shrug, the woman reached into her satchel.
“No, no, oh, no!” Kelly Ann said, watching as the woman withdrew a long, silken feather from her bag.
“Yes, yes, oh, yes. Unless you tell me what I want to know. No? Fine”
“Heeheeheeheeheehee! Hahahahahaha! Heeheeheeheeheeheeeee!”
The feather brought tears to Kelly Ann’s eyes, but no information to the woman. Next, a hard-bristled brush caused Kelly Ann to weep and laugh at the same time, but couldn’t make her divulge her secrets. Finally, a hand-held mixer modified to hold a rubber spiked roller instigated a series of warbling guffaws, the volume of which surprised both the victim and the the tormentor. But even that failed to break Kelly Ann’s silence.
Sighing, the woman stopped.
“WAHAHAhaha...haha...uhhhh…” Kelly Ann said in exhausted relief, as the sensations eased.
“Well, that’s enough of that,” the woman said. “It was fun, if not productive. But there’s work to be done now.”
“Wh-what are you going to do to me?”
“I’m going to stop playing around and get the information from you that I want.”
“That was playing around?”
“Of course it was. That was purely for my benefit. If it broke you, great. But I didn’t think it would. No, that was pleasure before business. Now it’s business time.”
Kelly Ann tried to steel herself for whatever was about to happen, but she had little strength left with which to make an effort.
“Relax,” the woman said, noticing her captive’s distress. “This will be much easier on you than the tickling.”
“What are you going to do?” Kelly Ann asked again warily.
“I’m going to brainwash you.”
“What?”
“You heard me: I’m going to brainwash you. This lovely device that I’ve created isn’t just an overgrown bondage rack. Though it does work quite well as one, it’s main purpose is as a brainwashing machine.”
As the woman spoke, Kelly Ann heard mechanical noises coming from directly behind her--whirs, clicks, and a persistent humming.
“In a moment, a helmet will cover your head, and through it, various electronic stimuli will be applied via your scalp into your brain. It’s all very technical, and I doubt you’d understand it. But the short version is you’ll experience something akin to hypnotic induction, which will render you highly suggestible and wholly compliant. Once in that state, you’ll readily accept an intense regimen of mental conditioning. In the end, you’ll tell me everything I want to know...as well as do anything I tell you to do.”
Kelly Ann’s jaw dropped, and she stared at the woman in utter shock.
“Nothing to say to that, my dear?” the woman asked smugly.
After struggling to think of something--anything--to say, Kelly Ann finally responded.
“Why did you put me through all of that tickling if you had the ability all along to make me talk?”
“Why? Because I could. Because you’re helpless, and I can do anything to you that I want. Because I like to have fun with my prey. Because...any one of countless other reasons that won’t matter to you in the next couple of minutes.”
From behind Kelly Ann, a helmet rose up on tendrils like those that had grabbed hold of her earlier. Slowly and gently, the tendrils lowered it over her head.
“No!” she cried out. “No, please, don’t! You don’t have to--ohhhh…”
The electronic induction had begun. An encompassing sleepiness washed over Kelly Ann. She fought it, trying to stay awake and aware. But within just a few seconds, she found herself neither wanting, nor able to struggle. Her eyes glazed over, and her determined expression eased into a dreamy smile.
“Who paid you to steal my cube?” the woman asked.
“I don’t know the person’s real name. They used an alias. Green Tiger.”
“How did Green Tiger pay you?”
“By electronic transfer into my account.”
“Did Green Tiger give you a way to verify their identity when you communicated?”
“Yes. They gave me a code phrase.”
“Is that code phrase cat to cat?”
“Yes.”
“Because I know that code phrase, what does that tell you?”
“That you are Green Tiger.”
“Very good, Ms. Templar. Now, tell me what security holes you exploited to break into my facility this time.”
“Your grounds are poorly lit. Your guards’ visibility is limited. And their rounds are too regimented. It is easy to memorize their patterns. And then sneak past them.”
“And your circumvention of my alarms?”
“I used a Tek-Brek 3400 to disable the window alarm. It’s expensive. But not hard to find.”
“I see, I see,” Green Tiger said, thoughtfully tapping her chin. “After your previous visit, my security team should have done a better job. Well, my new security team will have to get right to work fixing those weaknesses, as soon as they escort my old team out the door. Ah, but back to you, my lovely burglar. Here is what you’re going to do: You’re going to forget everything that happened this evening. You never went on this job, you never broke into my building, you never got caught, you were never tickled, and you were never brainwashed. Do you understand?”
“Yes. I understand,” Kelly Ann said.
“Good. You also never received payment or even heard from a client named Green Tiger. I will cancel the payment to your account, and you will be none the wiser.”
“I will be none the wiser.”
“Next week, you will receive a call from Green Tiger, who you have never heard of or been contacted by before. They will offer you an extremely generous sum to steal a cube from this facility. They will give you extensive intel on the security measures and systems that you will need to bypass. You will readily accept the job, and you will do your best to accomplish it without getting caught. Is that clear?”
“Yes. It’s clear.”
“Excellent. We’re all done here. Except for one more thing...Next week, your feet will be even more sensitive than they were this week, so being tickled will drive you even crazier than it did tonight. At the same time, you’ll be even more determined not to break, no matter how much tickling you must endure. Understand?”
“Yes. I understand.”
Green Tiger smiled. Everything was in place. Next week, her security would get another grade-A test, and she would get to have some more fun. Not that her fun for tonight needed to be over just yet. She had never had the opportunity to tickle a hypnotized person before. She might as well sate her curiosity on the subject.
Her smile widening to make the Cheshire Cat envious, Green Tiger reached out with wiggling fingers towards Kelly Ann’s feet.
“Heeheehee...heeheeheehee...heeheeheeheehee...HEEHEEHEEHEEHEEHEE!”