You asked for it, so here it comes!

NOTE:

Original story and characters are Copyright © 2007 by OddOne. All Rights Reserved. No part of this story may be retransmitted in any medium or manner without the author’s express permission.



Disclaimer & Foreword

This story is intended to be pretty dark and gruesome, so if you’re easily offended by ideas like physical and emotional abuse, torture, maiming, death, and worse, you might want to skip this story.

It was inspired by a series of posts and pictures relating to fairies that was posted over at Gurochan, a board devoted to darker things. Not a place for the timid or the easily disturbed.

Although this story is pretty rough, don’t think it’s some telling peek into the author’s psyche. He’s probably more normal and at least slightly saner than you are – he just happens to have a rather active imagination. This isn’t intended to be a morality tale or a cry for help or anything but an interesting piece of fiction, so don’t read any extra meaning into it. It’s a disturbing story to be sure, but nothing more than a story.

Oh, if this offends you, (1) get a grip, and (2) find something else to read.


Props and shout-outs to some Gurochan posters: “Woodenrope,” “Scope,” “Zenith,” and at least two anonymous posters. They provided inspiration for either the overall story arc or specific means of handling the fairies in my stories, or both.

Phase Zero
In Our Last Episode...

It’s been over a year since my last discussions on my research on fairies, but oh what a year it’s been. I laughed, I cried, I learned a lot at the expense of the occasional fairy, and a good time was had by all. All except many of the fairies, obviously, but I’m sure I’ll touch on that later.


For starters, the previous year saw some real advances in fairy understanding, not the least of which was the official recognition of a new species of real-life fairy. The new species had been promoted actively by the UK’s foremost expert on fairies, who as it turns out discovered two of the five previously known species. He was working with the new species for a long time – even teaching some how to make cake – but official recognition was only a recent addition to his credentials.

As it turns out, the latest addition to the scientifically accepted fairy list was probably the inspiration for various European mythos’ small-elf and sprite variants, as this latest species is the new tiniest known, with average heights of about two inches. So the current size range across all species averages from two to nine inches for adult males, and although all have wings, the wing design and structure and mounting points vary by species as what works for the tiny ones won’t for the big ones and vice versa.

Fairy villages are being found all over Britain in particular and Europe in general, with the most unique having been found atop several high-rise apartment and office buildings in central London. The British government is already considering granting Britain’s fairy villages special preservation status in an effort to prevent their destruction by some of the more unsavory types that have also been finding the villages. And then there are the people that can’t understand how little the real fairies resemble the fictional ones – a group of townsfolk destroyed a village and killed every fairy in it from infant to elder because they were convinced the fairies were members of an unseelie court.

The United States saw the discovery of a village in New York’s Central Park, wherein the fairies there were pretty effective at killing pigeons as a means of preventing predation. I’m debating sending an E-mail to the city commissioner’s office to suggest employing them to help decrease the flying-rat population, as last time I was in the Big Apple on business the pigeon poo was absolutely everywhere. It’d certainly be cheaper than dealing with local government-workers’ unions.


Another amazement came from the discovery of an incredibly big fairy city in a previously unexplored part of the Amazon basin. It contains a mix of four species, consists of some three hundred thousand individuals, and is spread across twelve square miles of rainforest. They have a pretty complete city going, with its own basic infrastructure, supply systems, legal system with law enforcement, even a standing military with enough potency to discourage attacks, such as the loggers that felled a tree that happened to be on the city’s outskirts. When the fairy city’s army attacked them it stopped the logging operation in its tracks and the loggers themselves made the city’s existence known to the world. Apparently twenty thousand angry fairies armed with spears and surprisingly accurate archery gear can get a human’s attention pretty well.

Scientists recently announced success in establishing stable contact with the city’s leadership, and knowledge of human and fairy both is flowing across the liaisons in both communities. The fairies there are actually becoming more intelligent from their exposure to humans, and the humans are using the newly found city as a rallying point to help protect the declining rainforest in the area. So, everyone’s winning there.


On a personal note, my stock in fairy research went up quite a bit thanks to some kudos that came my way. My article series on fairy physiology ended up well received in scientific circles, and I even received an award from the Audubon Society for my fairy medical care information. I thought that was odd until I found out that the Audubon folks are also watching, and promoting conservation for, fairies, ignoring their “classification” as insects and treating them instead like they do birds. Personally I don’t think fairies really fit into any of the current classification categories but the higher-ups that make those decisions have their own opinions, wrong though they may be in my opinion.

I’d also heard that my revised fairy salve recipe has saved many a fairy from a premature death. As it turns out, the scientists doing the research in the Amazon have been using it on fairies there, as a gesture of friendliness, and the little butterfly-wannabes love the stuff. Fairies don’t get hurt often in the wild unless it’s from surviving a predator attack, so it’s mainly used there for bird peckings and similar. I received an E-mail the other day from one of the team there and he said they’re going through just under two pints of the stuff a week, which to me is shocking given how little it takes to do the job.


Despite all that exciting news, the one thing that has most directly enhanced my own work has been the acquisition of a new skill: I can now speak and understand the base language used by all fairy species, and can work with most of the regional dialects in use in fairy communities across the world. The info that granted me this newfound power came from a massive linguistics study carried out by teams of researchers working with a couple dozen fairy villages throughout the world as well as the folks working with the Amazon fairy city. They all found out that all fairies speak a common language although each area of the world has regional dialects. The funny part is that the language follows a mainly object-subject-verb layout, so a group talking in fairyspeak actually sounds like a bunch of effeminate staccato Yodas.

I expect this ability to come in very handy as I prepare to start up what for lack of a better name I’m calling my second sessions.

Phase One
Introductions

This time around I’ll be working with more than one fairy, as my goal is to do some research into fairy social behavior, concentrating on social interactions in crisis situations.

This should be fun. I don’t expect the fairies to like it much though.


To that end, I’ve “thawed” six test subjects from storage. They all came from the same village so they likely know each other. To make for uniformity I staggered the ages and toggled genders. I have an early adolescent female, a late adolescent male, a young adult female, a middle-aged male, an older female, and an elderly male. That should give me enough of a dichotomy to get some useful info from my experiments.

To add a new level to the experiments, two of the fairies in my test group are related – the youngest female is the oldest female’s daughter – so I can also see how maternal instincts work in fairies as well as getting some insights into who acts as protectors in small fairy groups, and in what capacity.

The males already gave me insights on the protector aspect, as both the young and middle-aged males were apparently some sort of warriors or guardians. When I caught them they were both armed and armored, and they were part of a larger group of males that actively tried to attack me when I hit the village. Both were wearing the fairy equivalent of plate armor consisting mainly insect shells tied together with grass fibers. Each also carried a somewhat round hewn-wood shield that resembled a Scottish targe, a feather-decorated five-inch-long spear with a nicely sharpened tip, and a dagger – or to their scale, a short sword – made from some sort of bone. Naturally I disarmed and de-armored my subjects prior to their wakeup calls, leaving them in their shorts. The last thing I need is to have a bone fragment jammed into my hand or something by a pissed-off fairy.

I’m not sure but I think the elderly male might be one of the village’s leaders, perhaps even the chief. His facial expression in stasis is more serene than that of most of the others, and he was the toughest one to catch of the adults. The old guy was crafty – he had hidden some of the children and was trying to lead me away with a feigned injury before I nabbed him and backtracked to find the kids he was hiding.

The young adult female was also caught with a bunch of children. She was trying her best to get them into the theoretical safety of a hollow tree branch when I caught her, and to get the kids I simply cut off the branch, gassed it with ether, and dumped them out.


I have the six fairies laid out side-by-side in my new test area, a three-foot-wide circular tabletop with foot-tall sides topped with electrically charged wire strips to discourage climbing out. This setup allows me to devote a space to the tests at hand without getting fairy crap and pee on my desk, and the lazy Susan built into the rig allows me to rotate the action to a more useful position without having to move myself or needlessly disturb the tests. Lord knows fairies under my care find me disturbing enough as it is, but now that I can turn “away” into “toward” I expect at least the occasional surprise reaction when I make use of this capability.

An interesting feature of the table is the shrouded power outlet in the center. This allows me to provide electrical supplies for some of the devices that need it, without exposing a cord that a fairy might exploit to escape or disable the device in question. Small covered holes in a grid around the power outlet also automatically lock an installed device into place unless I disengage it manually.


They’re all still in suspended animation, so I take this opportunity to prepare them. And of course by “prepare” I mean, “render incapable of escape.” This time, however, I get to try something new I’d read about online.

Normally, researchers damage or destroy a fairy’s wings in order to disable their ability to fly. This wasn’t exactly the best solution though, as you could easily kill a fairy trying to safely detach its wings, and most researchers preferred the “rip off with pliers or tweezers” approach over the “safely detach” one. Sadly, this made many experiments untenable and would occasionally kill the fairy outright.

An experimenter in Germany found a better way. He was playing around with a can of conformal coating spray, of the sort used to protect electronic circuitry from moisture. He found that coating the back of each of a fairy’s wings made that wing incapable of generating lift, as the coating changes the wing’s flexibility and destroys its aerodynamics. Better, it did so without damaging the wing or wrecking its appearance. Better still, it also locked the wing’s scales in place so the wing would retain its appearance, which made groups of fairies much less frightened than they were when they saw they were all clipped or ripped.

The weight difference is slight, but perceptible. However, since the stuff dries matte-clear it’s difficult for a fairy to see, and as a result they usually don’t know there’s something to remove. Of course they can’t remove it since it flows around wing scales to stick to the wing’s surface directly, but if they don’t know there’s something there to pick at they usually won’t try to.

While my little group is still in stasis I carefully coat the backs of each of their wing segments, allowing plenty of dry time and taking great care to prevent the wings sticking to themselves or the fairies’ bodies. Only after two days’ dry and set time do I feel ready to release them from stasis to begin the experiment series I have planned.

The German experimenter also noted that he derived a lot of amusement by only coating one wing for fairy species that have two, or both on one side for species that sport four wing quadrants like mine do. His blog post said that a fairy so modified would try to fly but generate lift only on one side, which made them spiral sharply up and over and into the ground with an amusing thud, usually headfirst. I might have to try that sometime.


I bring the six around so that they wake up at roughly the same time, and sure enough they do. While they’re recovering from stasis I simply watch. Once they’re sufficiently groggy-free to do so they then congregate into a small group and begin asking each other questions about their situation. None of them have even noticed me yet – they’re too distracted by waking up where they are. Since I’m also able to translate their language now I’m also listening in on their conversation, although it’s dull. There’s a lot of “are you alright?” and “where are we?” and variations thereof being punted around. It’s actually being said literally as phrases like “Alright you are?” thanks to the peculiarities of fairyspeak, but I auto-correct their Yoda-esque speech to more conventional English when I transcribe it into my notes.

The oldest of the group looks around for a moment and mutters, “This looks like a human’s home.” This silences the questions from the others.

Then the youngest one of the bunch notices me and jumps, startled. “Mom, what’s that?” she asks, pointing up at the looming monster looking down at them from just over the top of the pen they’re in.

The mother turns, as do the others. Now I have six fairies staring up at me. “I think that’s a human,” says the mother.

“Yes, it is a human man,” observes the oldest fairy. “Perhaps he can help us.”

The elderly fairy steps from the crowd a couple old-man style shuffling steps, looks up at me, and says “hello” in perfectly clear and surprisingly well-articulated English, albeit higher-pitched than his appearance might suggest as normal.

I say nothing, but instead stare at him with a slight smirk on my face.

He tries again. “Hello? Can you hear me? Can you understand what I say?”

I smirk a bit more but say nothing.

“Can you help us?”

I smile, and he shudders. I think he got a really bad vibe from me because I made no effort to mask the fact that I was thinking that he’s not going to like the kind of help I’ll be offering.

He turns back to the others and shrugs slightly. They start to develop nervous facial expressions. I suspect they’re picking up on his concern.

He turns back to me. “Where are we? Where are the others?”

I continue to smile. He stares up at me. These poses persist for an uncomfortable number of seconds.

He turns back to the others. “I don’t understand.”


He shuffles back to them, and as he does so I bring out the first rig. Time for some experimentation.

"Perhaps we should seek an exit.” He jumps up and flaps his wings to take off, but simply lands back on his feet, wide-eyed. “What is this?” he exclaims, concern strong in his voice. The others stand and try to fly, but nobody goes anywhere. “Why can I not fly?” booms the middle-aged male. Loads of pretty butterfly wings are on the move but everyone’s still being held very securely in the embrace of gravity.

Phase Two
Rack And Roll

I start by positioning the first rig, a lovely contraption I call the rack. Its basic purpose is to act like my old workbench, immobilizing a fairy’s arms and legs and allowing me to perform any type of experimentation I want on the fairy’s front. Since I’m not weighting the fairies down I had to design something to replace the workbench, so this is the rack’s first time to see use on a live fairy.

Viewed from above, the rack looks like the letter ‘X’, but with two extras: an additional flat area to support the head, and a small pedestal above the headrest portion with a ramp leading to it that contains four rollers, two LEDs, and one button. The rollers are machined steel, and each contains about forty lengths of wide rubber band mounted by one end. They basically look like miniature versions of the bristle rollers used in car washes. A clear acrylic shield wraps around the button and outside the rollers so that a fairy wishing to reach the button has to stand dead-centered between all four of the rollers. They all stare at it, trying to figure out just what the hell it is and does, suddenly and completely distracted from the inability to escape via flight. Fairies might be sentient but they’re easily distracted.

I line it up and press it into place, the pegs on its base snapping into some of the holes surrounding the power outlet. It also beeps once as it draws power – it’s motorized in a number of interesting and potentially useful ways, as the fairies are about to see. The LEDs are lighting up now, red for a few seconds, and then green for a few more, in a repeating pattern while a motor whirrs quietly somewhere within its casing.

I next place a carrot on the floor of the pen, off to one side of the rack but where they can see it. I then place the other piece I’ll be using, nicknamed the pincushion, onto it. I call it that because it’s a steel-framed plastic block, into which several thousand straight pins are mounted, points out, on a one-tenth-inch grid. As I release it, it sinks into the carrot under the effects of gravity on its half-pound weight. I pick it up, and pick up the carrot with it. They all start to look pretty nervous in response. I remove the carrot and place it, holes up, in front of them.

I then line up the threaded drive rods adoring the corners of the pincushion with holes on the base of the rack, and press it into position. I release it, and when the LED is red it motors down until its pins touch the rack’s surface. The light then goes green and it zips right back up to the top. I let them watch this for about thirty seconds before grabbing the pincushion, flipping a release catch that takes a lot more force to actuate than a fairy can muster, and pulling it off the rack. I set it next to the rack, pins down.

They’re much more concerned than curious now, and that concern turns to outright fear when I grab my FSG with one hand and reach into the pen with the other.

At first they all scatter, trying to take to flight and failing, and when it dawns on them I’m after the young female they all regroup and huddle to protect her from what they think is an impending attack. The two warrior males leap into action, trying to barricade me from reaching her. It’s amusingly ineffective at best – I sweep both aside with one hand movement. As I reach closer, the youngest male leaps at my hand. I reach down with the other hand and tap him with the FSG – short for Fairy Stun Gun – and with an electrical pop he tumbles clear. I then sweep my hand across the tight bundle made up of the other four, and as they roll across the pen floor I get a clean grab on the youngest female. She screams for her mother as I snatch her. Mom reaches for her, and both are obviously terrified, but I’ve already got the youngster laid out face-up onto the rack before they can react in any useful fashion.

I quickly flip her right arm close enough to pin down, and with one finger I hold her forearm down by just above the elbow against a rubber pad on one of the arms of the ‘X’ shaped rack. The arm of the rack is hinged halfway width-wise out its length, and as I press her arm down into the pad the end suddenly flips closed with a click. A hissing sound makes everyone stop for a moment – the rack has an air pump in it and uses that to inflate rubber bladders that form the restraints.

The next sound everyone hears is her screaming. As I release her right arm she struggles, but her arm’s already trapped quite securely. I repeat the move with her other arm and release her to deal with her legs, which are kicking frantically by this point. The others now try to rush in, only to be dismissed with sweeps of both hands, which sends them all tumbling. I then press her legs flat by pressing down on both knees and this flips both restraints down, and after a brief hiss she’s struggling but unable to move anything past the elbows and knees.

I sit back and let them try to rescue her, but her arms and legs are held tightly enough that they would have to rip her limbs apart to get them out. She’s crying almost hysterically from fear driven by the total weirdness of the situation, and mom is trying to reassure her with soothing words and playing with her hair while the others pull and yank at the restraints. I smile – the rack’s restraint system and casing is made from machined steel, and it’d take a human with hacksaw and about ten minutes’ work to extricate her. Or a human with a pair of wire clippers about three seconds, depending on how brutal you want to be about it.

I then make everyone’s blood run cold by picking up the pincushion, realigning its drive rods with holes in the base of the rack, and snapping it in place. The trapped youngster is now looking up at several thousand straight pins, each of which is almost double her body’s thickness, and she gulps. To scale it’s like staring at thousands of pieces of two-foot-long, sharpened, one-inch rebar, hanging over you in a way that’d make the Sword of Damocles look as threatening as a sprig of mistletoe. She’s murmuring now, a low semi-sob whining driven by terror, and asking her mother to help her in pitiful and hear-rending tones. Her mother’s becoming hysterical as all efforts to free her are failing.

I reach down with a small key and rotate a switch near her feet from “demo” to “live,” and as I do so a shrill beep comes from near the button, above which a red LED is flashing.


The beep from the button area spins everyone’s heads, and then the red LED switches to steady light. A motor leaps to life under the trapped female, and the pincushion begins to slowly but visibly – and quite menacingly – descend. Mom screams, “It’s moving down!”

As quickly as his age permits, the elder dashes to the LED and begins poking and prodding the LED and its surroundings, a look of quiet concern implanting itself onto his face. He bumps the button and gets a sudden green flash, stops, feels out the button’s edge, and then presses and holds it. The LEDs toggle their states, with red replaced with green, and the motor reverses, driving the pincushion back upward. Mom cries in relief and resumes comforting her now sobbing daughter.

Then, the pincushion reaches the top of the drive system. The motor sees a load change – a circuit detects this and the rack switches to part two of its operation.

The green LED flashes a few times, there’s a short beep, and the motor for the rollers turns on. As it winds up to speed the rubber band strips attached to the rollers become wonderfully effective flails, and he stays put for a few seconds before their slaps are enough to exceed his strength to resist their force. He tumbles backward down the ramp, the LED goes red, and the pincushion resumes its descent. Only this time it’s moving down a lot faster than it did before.

The other males and the third female all grab an edge of the descending pincushion and fight its movement, but to no avail – the drive mechanism puts roughly fifteen pounds of force into moving the pincushion and an adult male fairy of this species can lift at best about seven ounces of weight. It’d take thirty of them to stop it, and three is not even straining the drive gears and motor. “We can’t stop it,” shouts the middle-aged male.

The elder is by now back on his feet and trying to get to the button, but the now full speed rubber band strips slap and smack him relentlessly. He simply isn’t strong enough to muscle past them.


Analogy time. Picture standing between two car wash rollers spaced so that their bristles overlap slightly, only instead of brush bristles each roller has fifty bicycle inner tubes attached to it. And the rollers are spinning at about three thousand RPM, which makes each inner tube hit with enough force to rip clothing and leave bruises and friction burns.

This is what the elder’s faced with, except that he knows that unless someone somehow presses that button he can’t reach he and his fellows will be watching a child be killed in a slow and spectacularly grisly manner. He plunges in again, almost reaches it, and gets pitched down the ramp again.


The other males now rush over to help him up. He shouts to them, “the round shape must be pressed, it is the control for the machine!” With that, the youngest runs up the ramp and right into the brown blur of bands. He muscles all the way in, and claws desperately at the button. A solid push and he depresses it, triggering the green LED and reversing the pincushion’s movement. However, just as it moved downward much faster, it now also moves upward much slower, and this means having to hold the button for quite a while. He does so for a valiant ten seconds or so before losing concentration for an instant and getting slapped out of the button area, nearly bowling over the elder and other male in the process of being launched out by the rollers.

He leaps to his feet at the base of the ramp as the young female shrieks – some of the pins have now made contact with her woven spider-silk top and are a mere instant from making contact with decidedly more critical parts of her still developing breasts. He runs up and right into the brown blur again, this time with the middle-aged male and young-adult female right behind him. The middle-aged male leans in against the young, and the young-adult female against the middle-aged male, and all three press in with all their might. The LED goes green and the pincushion begins to rise.

Thirty agonizing seconds later the pincushion reaches the top of its travel and bogs down the drivetrain powering it. The controller circuitry sees this and reacts: the green LED flashes five times, there’s a short beep, and then everything turns off. The rollers suddenly lose their force and spin down as the drive motor making them work is also disabled.

The young male tilts his head back, raises both fists in triumph, and shouts “Yesssssssss!” before dropping to his hands and knees from exhaustion. The other two that helped him crawl down the ramp, also exhausted but not quite to the same extent.

Meanwhile, the restraints deflate with a slight hiss and a click announces that the young female is freed. Mom scoops her up and they hug, with mom planting all sorts of kisses on her girl while crying happily that she was spared.


I smile. Fairies are apparently capable of impressive feats of teamwork and self-sacrifice, hallmarks of truly sentient and emotionally active beings. I think I should see just how far they’re willing and able to stretch that.

Phase Three
Too Smart For Your Own Good

They all regroup by the ramp to the button, and the young female runs over to hug and thank them, starting with the male that did the button-holding. While she’s hugging the elder, the young-adult female notices the youngest male’s wings and gasps. “Your wings!” she calls.

He replies with “What of them?”

With that he turns to inspect them as best he can. I can see them better than he can from my vantage point and they’re pretty badly mangled indeed, with cracking and the loss of most of the scales on the front surfaces. Not bad enough for his body to reject them, though, but under other circumstances he’d nevertheless be flightless for a while.

He notes my observation and looks back to the others, obviously fuming. “Why does he torment us like this?”


With that, I grab him from behind.

I snatch him backward from the group so quickly none of them can so much as warn him, and at the same time I scare the hell out of him with my suddenness. I quickly fold his wings back to their fully closed and tips-touching position, place a padded plastic clip of the sort used to hold potato chip bags closed over them, and use the clip’s magnet to stick it and him to a microphone stand beside the test pen. He goes from sitting with friends to dangling by his wings from a clip stuck to a pole in less than two seconds. Like I’d said in my earlier writings, this is not my first ride in this rodeo.

While they call for him and cry out in concern for his well being, I study his condition thoroughly with a magnifying glass, applying my super-salve to his various cuts, scrapes, friction burns, and bruises with a fine-tipped artists’ brush. I check him over thoroughly, front to back and top to bottom. He stares at me, wide-eyed, but says nothing. Guess he’s braver – and mouthier – when he’s not looking through a magnifying glass at an eye that looks room-sized to him.

After I complete my checks and salve his wounds, I detach the clip from the stand and return him to the pen, unharmed but a bit unnerved. He touches the salve on his side with one finger and sniffs it, making a wrinkled “yuck” face. It’s made to heal you, I think, not to smell good.


The elder checks the salve as well. “This appears to be medicine.”

A few of the others all respond at once. I hear “What?” and “Are you sure?” and “You cannot be serious.”

The young male stares at the elder, unconvinced. “Medicine? Why would he harm us so, and then tend our wounds?”

The elder converts the semi-rhetorical question into a fully-real one by answering it. “He studies us.”

The mother replies, “Studies us?”

The middle-aged male chimes in with “What makes you suspect this?”

“Simple. Consider this evil machine. It can kill, but it can also be held at bay with a simple act on our part. Note that we had to solve a problem, and solve it quickly, but this problem had but one solution – that we work together to overcome the challenge posed to us.”

Nobody replied to this, so he continued. “Recall how we study the ant, so as to learn its ways and gain its wisdom. We occasionally place tests before the ant, and from its efforts to solve these tests we learn.”

He looks up at me, his eyes meeting mine, and says to the others, “I think this one seeks to learn from us, and to do so he must place tests before us.”

“If this was a test it was a very mean, evil test,” replied the mother.

“Indeed. However, would we react in a useful manner were it not a mean and evil test? Can such things be done politely? We do, after all, slay many of the ants we study, some of them during the very tests we create for them.”

They all stare at the elder but lost in thoughts instead of lost in the view, not happy at all with the ramifications of this.

“To a being that size, we are as ants, just as ants are tiny to us.”

I grin. This is the first time I’ve encountered a fairy that was mentally developed enough to have the capacity for abstract, out-of-the-box thinking.


So I grab him next.

Another blitzkrieg style snatch, only this time my quarry’s facing me and sees me coming. He’s still unable to avoid my grasp though, in part because he was shocked at the sight of something that big coming at him that fast. My hand is, after all, wider than he is tall and I bet he thought my outstretched fingers were the claws of the devil himself coming to get him.

Another two seconds from with friends to hanging by his wings. Of course, a fairy can hang by their wings safely for a good amount of time continuously, as they do precisely this while flying.

I check him as well, and he holds his arms out and legs apart, obviously to allow me to check him over. He’s less banged up than the youngest male, so he only needs a few spots salved. I return him to the others, and he looks up with a wise man’s twinkling eyes. I think I confirmed his suspicion.


I smile slightly, knowing now which fairy I need to kill off first. Time to see how fairy groups manage the loss of a clearly defined leader.


I remove the rack and pincushion from the pen, and head to the kitchen for a snack. I also bring my subjects some food and drink, in the form of a saucer of small fruits and several thimbles of water. The youngest two are mesmerized by the bounty they see placed before them, while mom and the middle-aged male eye the food suspiciously. The elder simply shrugs and wanders off to another part of the pen to ponder their plight.

Phase Four
Loss Leader

The next morning I pay my little test subjects a visit. They’re sleeping, but some burn marks on the two younger males makes me check my video recorder. Sure enough, they tried to scale the foot-tall pen walls, and found the metal strips that carry a few thousand volts when touched. One pop and there goes that idea.

I wake them up by snapping another contraption into place in the center of the pen. This one’s affectionately nicknamed the kneader. It’s a round machine with clear sides, through which one and all can see a larger hamster wheel style outer ring that spins slowly, and in the center are two solid rollers with tiny nubs sticking out all over them, and these also rotate slowly, gapped out by almost their diameter. A pair of angled conveyer-belted ramps directs anything falling into the top from the outer wheel into the rollers. In front of the contraption is another LED and button arrangement.


They fall back from it toward the base of the wall, and as they stare at it I grab the elder. This prompts a cry of “oh no!” from the young-adult female and “let him go!” from the middle-aged male. I comply with his request by dropping him into the base of the machine through an access hatch, and securing it – it’s solenoid locked so there’s no chance of fairy interference.


The males rush over to help him. The elder rides the wheel up only slightly before seeking to remain at the bottom, but high divider panels make the wheel a pocketed one and he’s quickly trapped into a pocket, and as the others watch he’s hosted up to the top and dropped onto a conveyer belt.

As was the case with the rack and pincushion they are merely spectators. Then, the youngest male presses the button, hoping it will stop the machine. Nothing slows down at all but the rollers in the middle begin to move toward each other, narrowing the gap between them. He releases it with a look of shock and just as the rollers return to their original spacing the elder falls onto one of them, gets rubbed and bounced around by them, and plops unceremoniously into the base of the machine, onto the wheel. Again, up he goes.

The females are by now screaming to the males to help, and the males are desperately trying to do just that, but all they can do is watch in horror as the elder reaches the top, falls onto the rollers, takes more of a beating, and plops onto the wheel at the base. The phrase “rinse and repeat” springs to my mind as he rides the wheel back up.

This time, there’s a short beep and the rollers move toward each other slightly. And this time, as the elder falls down he is briefly pinned between them, rubbed and scuffed by the nubs, and spat out more abruptly. A faint spatter of blood on the inside of the wall announces that this landing was a hard one. Meanwhile the other males search the outside of the machine, desperately seeking a means to open or disable it.

By now the youngest of the group is crying, and her mother is trying to keep her from seeing what they now suspect they’re watching, as the elder takes another trip through the rollers and loses part of a wing.

Another beep announces that the rollers are moved slightly, and this time one slows slightly compared to the other. As the elder gets pulled through the gap he gets stripped naked, his clothes ripped off him by the nubs and disproportionate roller speed. He’s also taking more damage now, from both the rollers and the ejection they trigger.


This goes on for about five minutes, and by the end of five minutes the elder’s a battered, bruised, bleeding mess. The helpless observers are all crying, the females over the abuse they’re watching and the males over their impotence in helping put an end to it. Everyone has stopped trying to help him by now, recognizing that this particular machine is beyond their ability to defeat and knowing there’s no way to rescue him.


A double beep announces a change to the situation, and the rollers suddenly move noticeably closer to each other. This time as the elder tumbles into them the others hear the nauseating cracking sound of things breaking, as the elder is slightly crushed by the trip through. He lands in a painful heap, grimacing, and his forearm and hand flops over in a sickly manner courtesy of the break in the bone.

The young-adult female looks up at me and shouts, “Stop this madness! You’re killing him!” I smile. She gasps in response. Yes, tiny one, that is indeed the idea.

She starts to sob, as the elder makes another trip through the rollers. Mom is now bawling, still forcing her daughter to look away. The males look on sadly, and the younger male is visibly fighting back tears.

After about three more trips the elder’s got at least one break in each arm and is pretty much abraded head-to-toe. He’s also missing three of his four wing segments. Although he’s in a great deal of pain by now he refuses to scream out. I admire that in him, really. I think he’s genuinely going to refuse to vocalize his pain, as though whether he does or not will matter to me. I suspect he’s thinking that he won’t do me the honor, but I don’t care either way.

Another double beep and the rollers move closer still. His next trip is more gruesome now that the gap between the rollers is about two-thirds the width of his torso. They all jump at the loud snapping sound as one of his legs breaks, as this time he went through feet-first and one leg got pinned against his body. He lands in a crumpled and bleeding pile at the base, turning white and obviously in shock.


By now the machine’s reducing the gap by a tenth of an inch once every ten seconds. Each time he goes through the rollers something new is broken. There’s also blood splatter all over the inside of the machine. The scene is gruesome enough that none of the females can stand to watch, but they all jump in unison at the snapping sound of breaking bone. He’s so messed up that the rollers are ripping his skin open.


The youngest male, the hero of the first machine, is now the most powerless feeling observer of the power of the second.

He lets out an anguished cry and holds down the button.

The rollers dutifully respond by closing the gap to only a quarter-inch.

As the elder falls down onto them this time, for an instant his eyes meet the youngest male’s, and then he goes headfirst through the rollers. The gap’s no longer wide enough for that, and with a wet cracking sound reminiscent of breaking open a ripe watermelon the rollers crush his skull, ripping his scalp and one ear off in the process. He’s pulled headfirst through the gap, crushing all of his ribs and then his pelvis, and spraying blood all over the inside of the machine. The now lifeless body lands with a soggy plop onto the wheel, chunks of brain leaking from the skull and ribs poking out of the torso. It’s hard to tell what part of his body used to be what.

The youngest male drops to his knees, places his head in his hands, and cries long and loud and hard at having to make the call to hasten the demise of the elder. The middle-aged male consoles him, adding, “That was the right thing to do.”


I’m impressed – that was pretty dark and very gruesome, especially for a fairy.

I shut off the power from outside the pen, and the machine goes silent. I remove it and take it to the bathroom to clean out the mess, provide another round of food and drink, and leave for the day leaving the remaining five fairies to their grief.

Phase Five
Fingers In The Dike

I return in the morning to see the remaining five huddled together, for comfort rather than warmth. The food was hardly touched. I suspect they had a pretty sad evening.

They begin to awaken as I reach in to grab one of them. This time it’s the young-adult female, a cute little pink-haired thing who if human would have an incredible body. Perfectly proportioned, even in miniature. Barbie would be proud. She screams, and thus awakens the others, as I hoist her into the air. I press a Lidocaine soaked cotton ball over her face and in seconds her eyelids flutter.

I quickly slip a segment of braided plastic wire abrasion protector over her arm up to the elbow. The other end is glued onto a piece of threaded nylon rod, and I poke this through a hole in a six-inch-wide metal hoop. A nut makes sure it stays in place and I repeat this on her other arm, and then on each leg. I carefully tighten the nuts, drawing her into a spread-eagled position centered within the hoop. I put just enough tension onto her limbs that she floats there in the center, but not so much that I’m pulling things out of joint, and jam nut the nylon rods to secure her.

I snap the two halves of this device into place. It’s code-named the globe because the halves resemble wireframe globes or spheres. However, attached to the latitudinal and longitudinal tubes that comprise the halves are hundreds of very carefully mounted and positioned pieces of stainless steel hypodermic tubing, each with a flat end exposed to the outside and a superbly sharp end aiming for the inside. The halves attach via six segments of threaded rod that poke from each side of the hub.

I snap the base of the globe into place in the pen. Over that I place a specially shaped metal plate with a hole in its center, and onto that I place the unconscious but recovering young adult female suspended in the globe’s hoop and between its halves.

The remaining fairies are all instantly trying to free her, but the braided plastic pulled over her limbs holds her securely. It works like the infamous Chinese finger trap puzzle, in that the harder you pull the tighter it grips. They can’t free her because they’d have to take the tension off her limbs first, and the jam nuts gripping the threads in the nylon rods make that impossible without a pair of small wrenches. Panic is evident on the faces of the two unrestrained females, and the males are concentrating strictly on freeing her as quickly as possible.

I now turn a knob on the top of the center hoop. As I do, gearing within rotates the threaded rods holding the globe’s halves on, and the halves begin to close up. She begins to wake up now, and as soon as she realizes she’s in one of my machines she gasps in fear before looking around wild-eyed and crying for the others to help her.

As I twist the knob, she watches the sharp but hollow tines approach, and she starts to panic. She then looks up at me with a terrified look, and mutters “please don’t kill me.”

I smile, and spin the knob until I see the hypo tubing tips are only a tiny fraction of an inch from her skin. She gets a deer in headlights look as she stares at the tines that are now so close she’s brushing them as she breathes.

I give the knob about an eighth of a turn and she screams, as the tines poke her just hard enough to feel uncomfortable. She looks up at me, her eyes pleading and imploring, and I smile as I give the knob an extra half turn.

Two hundred micro-sized hollow stainless steel tubing segments, each with a precisely ground puncture tip, dig into her body from the base of the spine to the backs of the feet and along dozens of pressure points. She tilts her had back and screams a bloodcurdling horror movie style scream in response. It’s intense enough that I bet Jamie Lee Curtis would be impressed.

I give the knob another half turn and the tines dig deeper, piercing the rest of the way through skin and into muscle, organs, and blood vessels depending on the location. While the tines are positioned to do maximum damage in terms of pain and gradual blood loss, they’re also carefully laid out so as to not hit anything that could make her bleed to death rapidly, and they won’t cause fatal organ damage either. She starts hyperventilating and turns white from the pain.

The others are screaming, crying, or yelling at me. The youngest male even threatens me. “Release her or I will find a way to kill you!” I admire his courage, but laugh at his ineffectiveness and lack of intimidation factor.

She passes out, and the mother shouts, “Look!” while pointing at the globe. A trickle of blood is making its way to the metal pan base. The tines, which are as was mentioned quite hollow, are letting her bleed freely. Some areas bleed more than others, of course, and some of the tines are positioned to hit moderately large blood vessels but miss major ones.

I place a small container in front of her and her cage. It’s full of very tiny stoppers. They’d better work quickly, as that many bleed points can drain a fairy dry in minutes.


The mother grabs one of the stoppers and stares at it. I see the light come on and she dashes over to one of the tine ends that has a fat blood droplet hanging from it, and she plunges her hand into the droplet to push the stopper into the tine. The others see this and it’s off to the races to plug all the holes before she dies.

It only takes the four of them about thirty seconds to plug all two hundred tine ends. One thing I didn’t mention about the stoppers is the fact that they’re made of compressed molded gelatin, the same material that capsules of the medicine sort are made of. A couple minutes later one of the stoppers melts enough from exposure to the moisture in her blood to fall out.

The fairy in the middle of this particular nightmare starts to wake up, and immediately begins to subconsciously writhe in pain. This only makes things worse by grinding the tines deeper into her flesh, and she screams and grimaces, unable to speak from the more pressing matter of getting enough air to not die. The worst part of the globe is that you’ve got to breathe, and even that little bit of movement acts to drill the tines into the body, widening and deepening the wounds it creates.


The middle-aged male climbs up and begins trying to work the knob, while the others tend to efforts at keeping the tines stopped up. The knob’s spring-loaded so it’s difficult for a fairy to work, but not impossible. At first he gets it to turn the wrong direction, worsening her problem by tightening the halves onto her even more and prompting her to shriek in pain as two tines scrape into bone, but he quickly realizes his mistake and turns it the other way. Several seconds of effort are ultimately rewarded as he manages to get the tines out of her. She’s hanging limp by now, staring blankly downward and panting heavily while starting to turn white again. It takes him a solid minute of strenuous effort to turn the knob enough for the halves to fall clear, and I reach in and snatch them up before they hurt someone else.

The next trick is to prevent her death from the blood she’s already lost.

As they run over to her I place two small plates into the pen. One of them is the usual food and drink assortment, and the other contains a bunch of miniature medical supplies and a dollop of my special fairy salve. The mother is the first to see this second saucer’s contents and recognize them, and she dashes over to fetch some gauze pads.

They still can’t get her down from her arm and leg restraints, so I go to my desk and fetch a boxcutter. I’m as precise as a surgeon with one of these if I want to be, but this time its purpose is merely a simple one: to snip the plastic over her hands and legs where it’s glued to the nylon posts. Two quick slices and she’s hanging strictly by her arms, and as I cut one arm free the two males grab her for the remaining cut.

They place her on her side on the floor and press her with gauze from both sides. She’s not responding to them very much but is pretty clearly alive, more or less. I can’t help but wonder how well fairies can handle that many deep-puncture wounds. I guess we’re about to find out.


By the time they all collapse from exhaustion the young-adult female looks like a butterfly-winged mummy, with gauze pads and wrapping covering her body. They managed to stand her up long enough to wrap he pretty thoroughly, and even put some fairy salve on her in places. I don’t think they quite understand the fairy salve though, as it wasn’t intended for internal consumption or use on deep cuts and punctures where it could get inside the body, but that’s hardly important now I don’t think. With her new attire in place, she’s curled up into a little ball and sobbing from the agony she’s still enduring.


I remove the remaining parts of the globe and leave them for the day.

Phase Six
Sandstorm

I enter the lab to get my next setup ready, and in doing so I wake the fairies up. However, while I’m getting some supplies from the supply closet I hear an “oh no!” from the pen and the sounds of crying. I walk over and look in to see four fairies huddled around a fifth. The young adult female has died overnight; her wrappings a bright red from continued blood loss.

Question on fairy survivability from multiple puncture wounds answered.

The two remaining females are holding each other and crying almost hysterically, the middle-aged male is holding her lifeless body in his lap and gently stroking her hair, and the adolescent male is on his knees again and crying, head in hands. They all glance up at me, and the sadness is heart rending, or would be if I cared.

However, the younger male is not looking up at me sadly. He’s glaring, with teeth clenched and hands curled into fists, turning a light pink. He’s angry. Beyond that, actually, more like incredibly pissed off. I suppose he had a teenager’s crush on the female. Can’t say I blame him though as she was indeed very cute, even by fairy standards. But oh how mad he is! He’s staring at me with such hatred on his face I bet he’s imagining setting my hair on fire or something.


I remove the empty saucers and return, snapping a round cylinder looking affair into the center of the pen. It has no buttons, but a vertical line of angled vent holes every inch or so along its circumference. They stare at it, concerned, and protest loudly when I reach in and gently take the dead fairy from them. After I autopsy her to see what damage was really done I’ll bleach-melt her flesh from her bones and preserve her skeleton. Their protests are amusing, and I laugh at them, which either annoys or intimidates them – depending on which fairy you’re looking at – all the more.

Next, I remove the screw-down lid from the center of my latest addition to the pen, and dump in roughly three pounds of beach sand taken from one of the local beaches. The beaches here have very fine, pure white sand, which actually resembles snow in its reflectivity. Folks here can get an all-around suntan by merely standing in one place and letting the reflected sunlight bake them evenly. I’d scooped some of it in an earlier beach trip, strained out trash and non-sand, and sterilized it, specifically for its upcoming use. It’s also very fine grained, and the grains are pretty sharp when viewed under magnification.

The center gizmo is a high-speed blower, and as it blows air out through the angled vent holes it constantly adds a little sand. For added effect the outside casing slowly rotates on a gear drive. The combined effect should turn the entire pen into a dust devil. It’ll be interesting to see how they react to it.

As the mother asks, “why do you harm us so?” through her tears of grief over the corpse now lying on my desk, I snap a clear lid down over the pen, which has a hole in its center to permit access to the device. Oxygen availability isn’t going to be an issue, but the sand needs to stay inside the pen, not blow all over my lab. I press the “go” button on the top of the device.

Inside the now enclosed pen, the fairies all huddle together, terrified. The device fires up, and the pen’s inside starts to get windy. As the wind speed increases they hold together tightly, and with the fan now making a five-mile-per-hour breeze it begins to mete out sand into its exhaust ports.

The fairies all shield their faces from the sand, and being the small particle sizes that it is, it’s getting everywhere. The middle-aged male coughs as he gets a mouthful, the youngest female sneezes from a nose full, and they’re all getting eyes and ears full.


I step the wind speed up to ten miles per hour. That should get things going, pun intended.

The sand’s already hitting hard enough to cause physical pain, and they huddle together while ducking into crouches to defend themselves against its onslaught. All this does is sandblast whatever parts of their bodies faces the wind, and I note some fairy backs are turning pink from abrasion. Worse, the sand is abrading away their silken clothes, removing what little protection they offered.

More amusingly, I also note that the sand is ripping through the coating on the backs of their wings, and dislodging a few scales where it gets through the coating.

I up the wind speed to fifteen MPH, and suddenly the youngest fairy of the bunch slides backwards from the group – the wind’s fast enough to offset her weight, so when some air gets underneath her or she loses traction with the pen’s floor she slides along it. The others can only watch, as they have to actively fight against the force of the sand-laden wind lest they be sliding along with her.

Eventually she gets blown all the way around and blows up against their backs. Unfortunately for her she’s facing the wind and getting beaten up frontally by the razor-edged grains of sand.

The two males are bearing the brunt of the assault, facing away from the wind and trying to cover mom as best they can, but in doing so the sand is destroying their wings. As the coating gets blown off, the scales go next, and then the sand slices into and subsequently blows through the clear wing surfaces. So, they don’t have the coating inhibiting their ability to fly any more, but the wing damage will attend to that.

I increase the wind speed to twenty MPH, and the fairies fight to stay put, The youngest female is pretty much stuck against the backs of the males, and already has a lot of red frontal skin courtesy of the abrasive winds pinning her against them. In a sense she’s protecting them though, by taking the sand for them, inadvertent though it might be.

I run the speed up to twenty-five MPH and as the fan winds up the younger male loses his footing and goes tumbling. This breaks up the group and the winds get them, sending all four rolling and sliding along the floor as the sand in the winds tears at them.

The time to test them thoroughly arrives as I up the fan to full power and the wind speed gauge climbs to forty MPH. At that speed the inside of the pen is basically a vortex of horizontal wind, with fairies and sand tumbling through it, occasionally airborne. They bounce along the floor, walls, and top, and the sand rubs all of them uniformly raw. After about a minute I see additional bits of wing and clothing swirling inside the pen along with fairies. I can’t help but think that this has to be what people caught up in a tornado look like, only with a lot of things like trucks and buildings also joining in the dance.


I watch for another two minutes, figuring this is enough time to get them all very thoroughly abraded, and then press the “off” button on the control for the fan. As it winds down the fairies drop out of the air and slide to a stop among the piles of sand in the pen, themselves also slowing to a halt.

The youngest female lifts her head and cries, still lying on her stomach. Her wings are totally missing and her entire body is rubbed raw by the sand. She’s also oozing blood from her breasts where the windborne sand did her the greatest harm, leaving the white sand under her chest a maroon color.

Mom staggers over to her, also missing wings and rubbed raw, and with some of her hair missing, angry red scalp visible above an equally angry red right ear. She helps her daughter to her feet and while the younger just stands there sobbing, mom wipes some sand from her face.

The males come from opposite sides of the center to regroup with and check on the females. They’re obviously hurting but fighting back the pain, and I catch glimpses of bleeding backs and bottoms on them. The middle-aged male is wingless but the youngster has managed to keep one wing segment, which I expect he’ll eject in the next hour or two. Everyone’s pink from friction burns where they’re not bleeding from really bad friction burns, and no skin was safe – even between their fingers and toes is rubbed raw.

One final coup de grâce remains, I think. I grab a spray bottle from a supply cabinet, remove the pen’s lid, and hose all four of them down with some isopropyl alcohol. Can’t have them getting infections from all that skin damage, after all. Although this form of alcohol is safe to use on fairy skin, just like it is on human skin, it stings mercilessly in abrasions on fairy skin, again just like it does on human skin. All four of them shriek deafeningly loudly in response to the blinding severity of the agony this causes them, and all four subsequently pass out.

I’ve noticed that fairies can usually only take so much pain at one time before they lose consciousness, and it’s a bit of an art to do this without killing them in the process. I’m really, really good at making fairies pass out without dying.


I scoop them out of the pen and into a smaller plastic tub with a ventilated lid, which I snap into place after providing another saucer of food and drink and second saucer of medical supplies.


It takes me five hours to clean all that sand and debris out the pen. Damn sand got into everywhere.

Phase Seven
Feeding Time

Dawn comes and I’m back in the lab. First off, I check on my little test subjects. They were already waking up when I entered, and I note that they’re all bandaged up and looking a bit rough.

I wheel over a large aquarium and place two clear acrylic dividers into it, and into one of the three spaces this creates – one of the ends of the aquarium – I place a recent acquisition: a fairly sizeable cane toad I caught a couple nights earlier. As toads go this is a fat little joker, about eight inches from the tip of its nose to the point at the base of its pelvis. It weighs a good four pounds. I bet he’d like a treat, and I just so happened to have something to that effect in mind.


The cane toad is an introduced pest here, but as it turns out they have a fringe benefit to creative druggies, in that they secrete a poison to protect themselves against predation and this poison is hallucinogenic in humans. As such it’s actually illegal to lick them. That is one thing I’d never think to do, but then again I’m as straightedge as they come. To each their own I suppose.

I bring the container o’ fairies over and set it atop the aquarium before removing its lid. One at a time, I reach in and grab a fairy, placing them in the other end of the aquarium from the monstrous toad. The first one I set into there is the mother, and as she surveys her new location she sees the toad through the clear dividers. She backs up against the glass and then backs into a corner, wide-eyed and clearly scared shitless. Toads can and do eat fairies – along with fairies they’ll eat anything that is small enough to eat that doesn’t try to eat them first – although in the wild a fairy can simply take flight if he’s not ambushed and eaten too quickly to respond.

In goes the daughter, who doesn’t share mom’s fear of the toad, and then the younger male. He sees it and stands before the females, looking like he’s ready to fight it off if necessary.

I place the middle-aged male into the center pocket, between the other fairies and the toad. He sees them first, turns to see what has them all so worried, and then jumps backward as he sees the toad eyeing him. Toady wants a snack, if its gaze at the fairy is any indication.

The older male fairy looks up at me and says “I will fight your monster if you release the others, human.” I grin, and drop a present into the pocket with him: his dagger. He picks it up, and at the sight of this the younger male beats on the divider and shouts “no!” Of course I have no intention of releasing jack-squat and he will fight the monster either way, but if he wants to delude himself otherwise more power to him.


At that, I remove the divider between the toad and the fairy. The battle begins!

The toad rushes in first, trying to get itself a quick fairy snack. The fairy leaps to one side to dodge the attack and thrusts his dagger at it, backing it up a bit. It then tries another rush and gets stabbed in the nose for its troubles. The toad backs up, wiping at the cut on its nose. He lets out a single “ha!” at his foe, as a gesture of defiance. The toad is now both hungry and mildly annoyed, though, and leaps at him.

Four pounds of toad thump against the back and bottom of the aquarium as the fairy rolls clear at the last instant. The toad turns, and the fairy leaps at it, landing on its top and stabbing the dagger between its eyes. This prompts a cheer from the other male fairy watching from behind the remaining divider.

The toad knocks him off itself with a quick swipe, and as the fairy flies backward in one direction the dagger flies off in another. He rolls to his feet and frowns as he sees the dagger land off by another corner. He runs over to grab it while the toad turns to leap.

Another leap but this time the toad out-thinks the fairy a bit, and the fairy tries to jump clear only to leap into the path of the giant green monster. He’s instantly knocked to the ground by the toad, which then tries to get a good angle to get the fairy into its mouth. As the toad tries to do so the fairy stabs him in the tongue. This backs up the toad and makes it grab at its tongue with its forelegs.

The fairy’s standing on one side of the enclosure, dagger held outward and standing in a combat stance, but panting. The toad stands roughly in the center of the enclosure, looking at the fairy.

He decides to attack again, running and then leaping at the toad. This time the toad’s waiting, though, and opens its mouth and rears up at the last second. The fairy lands across its top jaw and flips backward, landing on his back right on top of the toad’s tongue. “No!” shouts the younger male, as the toad snaps his jaw shut before he can bring the dagger into any sort of useful position. He’s sticking straight out of the toad’s mouth now, held across the upper back and chest by the powerful toad’s jaws. He tries to stab the toad with the dagger, but with no leverage to work with he only bounces it ineffectively off the monster’s leathery mouth skin.

It flips him sideways in its mouth and chomps down. He screams briefly as it crushes his ribcage sideways and breaks both legs. The younger male closes his eyes and beats a fist on the divider as he hears the older male scream again in response to another chomp from the toad, this time breaking more ribs, an arm, and his pelvis. The toad pulls him into its mouth now with its tongue, breaking his spine in the center. The next chomp silences him, crushing his chest and breaking neck and arms and legs. It chews its prey now, the breaking bones making tiny cracking sounds as the fairy is pulverized. One last time they see his face, skewed sideways and missing an eyeball because his skull is crushed. Finally, with a gulp he’s gone, and the toad looks happier.


The toad does its post-meal grooming, and then eyes the other male through the divider. I incite all three of the remaining fairies to terror by slowly lifting up the divider slightly, but I don’t plan to feed the others to the toad. I’ll keep the toad around though, as that was very interesting to watch.

I remove the toad and reinstall the divider, and then move the young male to the center pocket.


This time I place something far more amusing into the last pocket: a seven-foot-long Ball Python. The young male flushes white. One of the few things fairies have a consistent problem with are tree-climbing snakes, as they can get close enough to strike a fairy and most tree-climbing species strike fast enough to pick one out of midair.

Since this one’s a pet, no dagger will be provided this time. He’s going to be food for the snake, pure and simple, whereas the last encounter held no preferences on my part for either participant. Unless, that is, he somehow produces a minor miracle by defeating the snake barehanded, or is lucky enough to not be seen as a potential meal and thus be left alone.

I pull the divider and the snake tastes fairy in the air. As he backs away from its head it turns to face him. It strikes, grabbing him by the head and neck and whips a few coils around him. He screams at first, his scream muffled by the snake’s mouth – I bet he’s not liking the view down its throat – and after the snake applies a little pressure his screams fade. Again the sound of breaking bones fills the air as the python crushes the life out of him, and after a couple minutes it begins to eat its meal.

He’ll feed the snake for about three days I think. Fairies don’t have a lot of meat on them after all.

I place a plate of food down for the remaining two fairies and secure the aquarium’s divider and lid. They’ll get to spend the night with a predator separated from them by a quarter-inch of clear plastic.

Phase Eight
Lesser Of Two Evils

The next morning I enter the lab to find a snoozing but content-looking snake and two terrified and tired-looking fairies clenching each other. From the looks of things they were up all night watching – and in all likelihood being watched by – the snake. I grant them a reprieve by removing the snake and carting it back to its terrarium. Afterward, I install some new hardware into the pen.

I grab the two fairies and bring them to the pen. I set the mother down but hold onto the daughter – my plans involve her directly – so that mom can see what’s there waiting.

In the center of the pen is a guillotine. In the guillotine’s center is a carrot. I set her down and grab the cord attached to the blade, which is up at the top of the guillotine. I pull the safety pin while holding out the cord. It’s a straight pulley arrangement instead of a quick release, so as I move the six-inch-long dowel connected to its end toward the guillotine the blade moves downward. I slowly let the blade down to the carrot, and even thought it’s not being dropped abruptly the blade still slices cleanly through the carrot. I hoist it back to the top and reinsert the safety pin. Mom studies it, terrified, while glancing at my other hand, which still contains her terrified daughter.

I then remove the carrot and place the young female into the restraint below the blade. As she struggles and tries to get herself out of her predicament I grab one of her arms and slip some of that braided plastic abrasion prevention material over it down to almost her shoulders, leaving about half an inch of it hanging loose. She starts to claw at it in a panic to remove it but that makes it easier for me to grab her other arm and do it again. I then grab both arms’ slack and pull it across a clamp a few inches out from the base of the guillotine, which basically pulls her arms taut.

She struggles and achieves nothing, so I grab a leg and sleeve it up to her thigh, which starts her kicking wildly. I reach down and thump the back of her head with a finger and that stuns her long enough to get the other leg into some plastic and stretched to another clamp behind the guillotine. So, she’s stretched into a straight line by her arms and legs, centered into a guillotine. If the blade drops it’ll cut her cleanly in half just above the navel. There’s a joke here somewhere I think – no, not the splitting headache one, wrong part of the body for that.

Next to the guillotine are two candles on special stands, which contain angled bases with spouts. Each candle is already lit, so I adjust each so that the spout is centered over the young fairy’s back and bottom. I happen to have a pretty good idea of what the temperature limits for fairy skin are. Here’s a hint: less than the melting point of candle wax. As the wax begins to drip slowly down the candles I take the rod attached to the guillotine’s cord, hold it out to mother, and pull the safety pin.

At first she won’t take it, recoiling from me in horror. I start to move it slowly toward the guillotine, which causes the blade to descend in kind, and she overcomes her fear of me enough to take it. As I release it the weight jerks her forward and almost rips it out of her hand. In a panic she scrambles to recover her grip, does so, and pulls the blade back to the top. Good thing, too, because there’s no way I could have caught it in time to prevent her chopping her own child in half. While that would have sucked for them, and for the youngster in particular, the reaction might have been amusing though.

The blade assembly weighs about half an ounce, and she weighs just over one ounce, so she’s having to strain a bit to hold on against the pull of the rope. Worse, since the end is tied to a dowel and there’s no slack to make use of, she can’t tie it off to anything. She has to just hold on for all she’s worth, and hope this won’t be a prolonged affair.

She calls out to the young fairy in the guillotine, trying to calm her as best she can. Meanwhile, the terrified youngster is sobbing. I sure do make fairies cry a lot.


For a few moments all is tense but uneventful. And then the first drips of wax from the candles makes it off the spouts and lands on her back just below her wing base and her backside right between the cheeks. The droplets of wax are one hundred forty degrees give or take, and they stick where they land, so you get a prolonged burning sensation until the wax cools down a little or the nerves burn out, whichever comes first. She shrieks and her body goes rigid as the sensation of having back and ass-crack seemingly set on fire hits her.

Making the sensation worse is the fact that her entire body was pretty thoroughly sandblasted a couple days ago. The worst abrasions are scabbed over but her skin is still very sensitive to everything.

Mom starts to rush in to try to help but when she sees that blade move rational thought overrides the mother’s instinct and she stays put, holding the line taut. Mother cries to me to take her instead of her daughter. Sorry, mom, that’s not the plan.

The next drip lands on the little cutie-pie’s rear end and flows down to her anus before solidifying. This draws another scream of pain, and makes her flip her head back. Her back arches in spasm. Right after that the next drip lands up front, and since she’s got her head back it lands on her head between the forehead and crown, and flows down her scalp before hardening at the base of her skull. She screams again as the wax wrecks some more skin cells.

Mom cries out and then turns away with eyes shut tight and teeth clenched. She’s unable to handle watching her precious offspring suffer like this without being able to do anything about it.

Another shriek announces a drip landing on her backside, and this time there’s enough solidified wax in place to flow the liquid almost to her labia before it hardens. Almost at the same moment a drop lands on her back and puddles between her shoulder blades.

The candle wax is coming at a good clip now, about a drip’s worth every two or three seconds. As it drips on her it flows along the solidified previous drips and burns her where it flows onto unprotected skin. The next drop to land gets to flow all the way to and then across her labia, which produces pain so all-encompassing that it makes her pass out.

Mom sees her daughter go limp and cries, but doesn’t dare let go of the rod. Better to hope she’s still alive than to let go of it and guarantee she’s not, I suppose.

A few more drips shock her nervous system enough to jumpstart her consciousness and she wakes up, somewhat oblivious to the blinding pain she’s experiencing thanks to a flood of the fairy equivalent of endorphins. The wax is beginning to drip off her now, and starts to form stalagmites and stalactites.


Two minutes pass, which basically consist of daughter screaming in agony and mother crying in fear, and by the passing of two minutes there’s enough wax to form pedestals under her. The drips are now beginning to flow along her body as well as down it, adding fresh burns and building up more wax. Basically she’s being slowly entombed by the wax, one mind-meltingly painful drip at a time.

Five minutes into the experiment wax has encased her daughter from the guillotine’s restraints up to below her shoulders and down to her upper thighs, and she’s still screaming as the wax finds new surfaces to coat. Mom is starting to turn white and looks like she might pass out, but she’s visibly fighting that, knowing that if she does she guarantees a swift end to her daughter.

Time grinds by with slowness, and the youngster’s becoming a solid block of wax. It’s at the base of her skull now, and as she cries and screams she can’t lift her head up any more as a result. The next drip’s worth flow down and drip off her chin, indicating that there’s not a whole lot of time before she’s entombed enough to suffocate. The candles, on the other hand, have plenty of time and a great deal of wax – only nine minutes has elapsed and they are designed to burn for an hour each.

Another minute passes and suddenly as the youngster cries out from the latest round of burns she’s muffled in mid-scream as the drip flows across her mouth. She coughs and sputters and gets the rest of her scream out, but the next drip glazes over her mouth enough that she can’t clear it, and now her head is stuck in place with her mouth glued shut by wax. I figure she’s got about a minute before it starts to flow across her nose, and once that happens good luck trying to breathe.

Mom starts to panic again and looks up at me. I smile.

Mom looks at her daughter, eyes showing panic and muffled noises indicating screams are still going on through covered mouth. She then looks up at me, and her expression flashes to rage.

With that, she lets go of the rod. I suppose she figures this is the lesser of the two evils.

The blade drops, and stops at the top of the restraint block in the guillotine’s base. When I locked the daughter into place I used a solid restraint block instead of a split one, and it caught the blade as it was designed to do. No, little one, the solution is not that simple.

I turn the candles’ base spouts away, blow them out, and remove them. Then I remove the clamps holding the youngest’s limb restraints, and finally I lift up the wax-encased fairy and guillotine and carefully separate the guillotine’s parts from the wax. I use some of the still soft wax on the candles to fill in the gap made by the guillotine’s restraint, making both wax chunks into one, and then place the partially entombed fairy back into the pen, still in the wax and still screaming although muffled. Mom will have to extricate her.


I leave them with a saucer of food and drink for once the youngster’s freed from her prison.

Phase Nine
Mood Enhancers

I walk into the lab to check on my two remaining cutie-pies, and sure enough, mom managed to pick her girl out of the wax. They’re sleeping soundly amidst a sea of wax bits.

Very soundly.

I guess they didn’t notice the tranquilizer dose I added to the water.


I remove the youngster and place her into a small container. I have plans for her mother that she won’t need to know about.

I reinstall the rack after removing its add-on button and roller platform, and mount a second piece of equipment to the opposite end. This rig I call the thruster. It’s basically a specially designed fairy “humping machine,” a contraption with an appropriately sized artificial penis prosthetic mounted to a mechanism that moves it like the blade on a reciprocating saw. Only unlike a saw I can vary both the stroke length and repetition rate with a pair of knobs.

Mom is then carefully placed onto the rack and locked into place, and I adjust the thruster’s prosthetic to almost but not quite touch her labia. Some additional adjustments then ensure it’ll move correctly and it’s time to administer the tranquilizer’s recovery agent.

I give her the anti-tranq and she comes around. At first she’s too groggy to know where she is but the clearer her head gets the more concerned she becomes. When she’s cognitive enough to realize she’s in the rack her daughter was once in, she panics, trying to jerk her arms and legs free but failing. She whimpers, terror evident in her eyes.

I lean over to finish the setup and when she sees me she whines and struggles all the more. It’s adorable if ineffective.

I take out a gift I’d received, courtesy of the British fairy researcher I’d mentioned back in the beginning. It’s a small vial of a concoction he’d found that worked as a powerful aphrodisiac on fairies. It’s powerful enough, in fact, that he had scrambled a fairy’s insides with a cotton swab just testing the stuff.

I place a small drop of lubricant onto the prosthetic and then moisten a cotton swab in the aphrodisiac. As mom writhes and whimpers I swipe the swap tip across her face. She gags and coughs and then starts to flush red as it takes effect. Strange though it is to watch, she goes from terrified to horny in the space of about fifteen seconds.

So, repeating the start of the British researcher’s work, I carefully touch the swab tip to her labia, and she flinches in response before trying to grind down on it. I’m impressed by how well and how quickly the stuff works. So I satisfy her momentary desire by inserting the swab tip into her and giving her genitalia a good coating. As I remove the swab I drag it across her clitoris for that extra added something, and she shivers in response. Her eyes roll back in her head as the stuff kicks her sex drive into warp speed.

I slide the prosthetic’s drive mechanism into place and set both speed and stroke to their slowest setting. She starts to groan happily in response as the aphrodisiac dose to the lips sets the pleasure centers of her brain on fire and the dose to her genitalia cranks up their sensitivity. She actually starts to thrust in time with the prosthetic, and makes some rather amusing grunting noises.

So I turn up the speed slightly and the distance a bit less slightly, and she responds with loads of moaning. Apparently she’s having a good time.

So, I leave her to it for about five minutes to get her properly worked up.


I return and she’s sweating and moaning and already a bit tired. Out comes an eyedropper, and with it I drip a tiny bit of the aphrodisiac onto the prosthetic as it’s retracted. It reinserts, this time delivering another dose of potent stimulant to her genitalia. She moans again as it takes effect. I turn up the speed and stroke so it’s hammering her a bit harder than she’s probably used to.

I’ve heard that you can inflict quite a bit of pain onto a fairy being stimulated by this stuff, so I fetch a few packages of acupuncture needles and start to give her some pokes with them, deliberately trying to elicit a reaction. I get a reaction all right, as she bites her lip and groans louder during the initial pokings and launches into an orgasm as I stick a few more needles into her. Again she starts thrusting as best she can in time with the machine, and throws in some efforts at twisting motions to grind herself on the prosthetic.

I pause the machine, retract the prosthetic, and swap it out for one that’s two-thirds larger in diameter. I apply some lube mixed with the aphrodisiac onto it, and have the machine pick up where it left off. She’s now getting a pounding with a much larger pounder than the first one was, and this makes her orgasm again. Between the pain of being stretched out by it and the pain from the acupuncture needles sticking out of her she should be screaming, but instead she’s in arched-back sex-driven ecstasy. I dose her across the mouth with more of the aphrodisiac and increase the speed and stroke settings again.

The stroke length is approaching the length of her vaginal passage. Any deeper and there’d be the risk that the prosthetic would start hitting something important, like the top of her uterus.

I leave her for another three minutes.


I return to find a worn-out fairy still moaning between pants as the machine relentlessly bangs away. Time to up the ante, I think, as I place a small plastic rod on her chest, carefully positioning it to rest between her breasts and down to her navel, relocating acupuncture needles as necessary. Inside the rod is a tiny motor – the vibrator motor from a cell phone – and once it’s powered up she’s getting over-stimulated. Her eyes open and get wide with the realization that she cannot stop the machines on and in her.

I turn up the speed, tweak the stroke setting just a bit, and wipe more aphrodisiac across her mouth. She moans, but her face is now showing fear instead of pleasure – she knows she’s at her normal limits but nothing’s slowing down and she’s still being driven hard by the machine.

I leave her alone yet again, this time for about five minutes.


When I return she’s exhausted, crying from the pain and friction as the lube had already lost its lubricating properties and the aphrodisiac is losing its effectiveness.

I turn up the stroke setting slightly and she grunts with each thrust – the prosthetic is hitting the top of her uterus. It’s not fun to her any more being screwed by this machine, I’m sure.

I grab the stroke setting knob and start to increase it, ever so slowly, watching her abdomen jiggle with each thrust. She starts to cry as I have the machine treat her uterine wall as a punching bag, and after about twenty seconds of my gradually increasing the stroke setting she goes rigid and emits a sharp, shrill shriek. I suspect it just ruptured her uterus, so I turn up the stroke setting and sure enough the thruster’s prosthetic doesn’t seem to encounter the resistance. She’s crying and moaning, only now the moans are agonizing instead of ecstatic.

A little more stroke and the prosthetic encounters more resistance. She’s screaming by this point as the prosthetic is now drumming on her intestines.

Just a bit more stroke and I reach the end of the machine’s adjustment range. She screams again and chokes in the middle of the scream, coughing up blood and sputum. Interestingly, the British experimenter noted the same result when he wrecked a test subject’s insides during testing with the aphrodisiac.

I turn off the thruster and remove the vibrator tube and needles. She screams again as the prosthetic slides out of her, and about half of its length is streaked with blood. She’s crying and grimacing and groaning now, and trying reflexively to curl up in response to the organ damage but the rack’s restraints keep her in the much less comfortable position of flat on her back with arms and legs secured. Another cough and more blood comes up.

She probably doesn’t have much time left.


I release her from the rack and sure enough, she reflexively curls into a fetal position, moaning softly and coughing intermittently, as blood trickles from her vagina, anus, mouth, and nose. She’s just beginning to turn green and her breathing is becoming shallow and labored.

So I scoop her up and place her in a large beaker. She offers no resistance, which is hardly surprising. I drop a cotton ball soaked in sodium hypochlorite, a.k.a. chlorine bleach, into the beaker and cover it with a saucer. I’m not sure which kills her first, the injuries or the hypochlorite. Regardless of the cause she closes her eyes and expires as her skin melts off from the fumes.


A few minutes later I’m carefully picking her skeleton out of the gelatinous goop at the bottom of the beaker. Did I mention how nasty chlorine bleach is to fairies?

Phase Ten
Breaking The Fragile

I leave the last remaining fairy from my test group to sleep off the influence of the tranquilizer overnight, and she wakes up about an hour after I enter the lab for the morning’s work. This is fine, as I needed to do some things in preparation for her experiment session.

She seems worried – she woke up alone, with nothing but herself, a small silk handkerchief square as a cover, a small plate of food and thimble of water. She’s also not in the pen, which adds to her confusion. I hear her high-pitched and almost lilting voice calling for her mother as I finish my setup work.

I wheel over and retrieve the container she’s in, which unnerves her all the more as I slide across the lab. I love chairs with wheels. She’s whimpering audibly even though the lid’s still in place. I set the container down on top of a large box with a hole in its center, and remove the lid. She emits a short scream in response to seeing me peering down at her.

“Where’s my mother?” she asks, fear evident in her voice.

“You will be reunited her in a while,” I respond, in clear fairyspeak that’s even tweaked for the specific nuances of the local fairy population’s dialect.

Her eyes, which were full of fear to begin with, grow wide. “You understand our language?”

“A stupid question given the circumstances.”

She frowns, but despite her fear she just has to ask. “Why do you torment us?”

“Because I want to,” I reply nonchalantly.

This makes her whimper and sniff, the beginnings of a round of bawling.

“The others… you killed them…”

“A stupid observation as a follow-up to a stupid question.”

“But why? Have we wronged you in some way?”

“I have slain your fellows simply because I can. And I chose the methods of their death to be maximally cruel and painful.”

Of course this is wrong – the social interactions have proven very critical in understanding fairy behavior in a crisis, and for the most part I set up the life-or-death scenarios to be maximally disruptive to the fairies not being threatened directly, but not so much to the one that is. In fact, the machines were for the most part designed to kill a fairy pretty quickly. She doesn’t need to know this though.

She starts to sputter into a sobbing cry. In mid-sob she asks the one question she was dreading asking: “Are you going to kill me?”

“No, little one, your life will not be taken.” This seems to lift a slight bit of weight from her shoulders. I pile it right back on and then some with “However, you will discover that there are worse things than death.”

She stares up at me, sniffling, and sees no emotion as I’m forcing myself to stare at her as coldly and unfeelingly as possible. I’m trying my level best to make her think I’m looking down at a simple test subject and not a sentient, caring, feeling being that has seen a hellish week of torture. I succeed, and she sobs her way into a doleful cry, with long sobs full of fear and sadness.

I leave her alone in this way for about five minutes. She ain’t seen nothin’ yet.


As she starts to wind down from the cry and starts to get into the whimpering, I return, and without a word I reach in for her. She screams briefly and tries to run, but I slap her to one side of the box and grab her more forcefully than I have before. I pick her up with a nearly suffocating grip, feeling her efforts to breathe.

I open my hand after grabbing a small flyswatter, and give her a bunch of swift sharp swats with it, getting her good and tingly from the stinging hits. I even roll her over in my hand as I do so, so that I swat her uniformly on the front, back, and sides. I then resume my nearly suffocating grip on her.

She squirms fruitlessly in my tight grip as I place her into a cylinder in the center of the large box. I pick a remote control from my pocket and with a button press the lab’s lights go out. Home automation has its advantages.

She’s looking up and around her now eerily dark enclosure, whimpering even more in fear. She can barely see, as the only lights are some LED sconces placed throughout the lab and the wavelength they emit is more suited to my vision than hers. I have become the unseen terror, and that’s far worse than the terror I am when they can see me coming.

I reach in and place a preserved, vacuum-plasticized fairy skeleton on a stand in the center of the cylinder, and with a small flashlight shining down from above I illuminate it. She sees it and screams like a banshee.

“I told you I would reunite you with your mother, and here she is.”

She gasps, covering her mouth with her hands, and stares at the skeleton. She has no real idea if I was telling the truth or not, but to see a fairy’s skeleton is terrifying enough by itself to a live fairy. This sets her to crying hysterically.

I ditch the flashlight and then remove the cylinder, so she can see the rest of the box she’s in.

As she looks wildly around in the semi-darkness I use my remote to bring up the lab’s lights to about twenty-five percent brightness. In what to her is still pretty dark she sees another skeleton, and yelps, leaping backward. She backs into something, turns around, and stares eye-to-eye-socket at another fairy skull. Another yelp, another jump and she lands between two more skeletons.

She does a classic horror movie scream-scene pose – knees together, feet apart, hands clenched into fists and up in front of face, eyes shut, full-out shriek – and screams like she’s not screamed before, as a sea of skeletons on stands becomes apparent to her. She runs, desperately trying to get away from the seemingly endless collection of upright bones, and makes her way to a wall. As she backs against it I remove a blocking card behind the clear acrylic the wall’s made of, and when she spins round to see what the movement was she comes face to face with the cane toad that ate her friend. She screams, drops a little bit of the urine and feces she had inside her, and runs through the skeletons, screaming bloody murder the whole time.

She reaches the far side and I remove another block and she sees an emperor scorpion. She screams again, loses a little more of her bowel control, and bolts. She’s not running in any particular direction other than away. She ends up before another wall with a blocker behind it and when I pull that she sees a banana spider, one of the fairy world’s most feared foes because they can hit fairies inside their own villages, and indeed inside their own homes. She screams and runs again, and when she gets to the last still-blocked wall I unblock it to reveal the python that ate another of her friends.

She runs back toward the center, stopping by her mother’s bones on the stand, and looks wildly around. All she sees are bones of dead fairies, and predators intent on eating her at the first opportunity. She stands in place, knees knocking with legs and feet covered in urine and excrement as she dumps the rest of her wastes, and screams, her hands clutching her hair in white-knuckled terror. She completely and totally freaks out.

I grab her with a gloved hand this time, with her still in a hair-clutching screaming fit, and give her another swift series of smacks all over with the flyswatter, and then place her right back where she was. Her screaming didn’t even change its tempo or volume as I did so.

I grab the skeleton by the skull, lift it from the stand, and use it to knock her to the floor of the box. I then drape the skeleton over her as she lay there screaming, pinning her down. I grab a few more and drape them over her, piling up bones on top of her. I think I put about twenty of them onto her, piled on so that she has to look through ribs and legs and around skulls to see anything. She actually manages to scream louder, which I was until then convinced wasn’t possible.


They say that when someone’s had more than their minds can handle, if you’re observing them at the right moment you can actually watch them snap. I saw that moment as her brain unplugged the parts that maintain sanity. She lay there, screaming as long and loud and often as her lungs could muster, and then I see her eyes glaze over and eyelids droop, and her screams wind down to a continuous low moan.

I leave her under her blanket of bones for a moment while I prepare the next stop in her trip.


As I remove the bones burying her she curls into a tight ball, moaning a slow and soft moan. Her eyes are dull now, half-open and half-closed, and she doesn’t react or respond to anything any more. I pick her up by one arm without any resistance or so much as a complaint, and beat the snot out of her a third time with the flyswatter. She grunts from the hits but otherwise doesn’t react at all, which tells me the conscious part of her brain has pretty much shut down.

I place her into a small cubic enclosure, roughly a foot to a side, and padded on all sides except for a clear acrylic window. Behind that is a pocket, and into it I place her mother’s skeleton.

I put in some food and water, and place the perforated lid onto it. The lid’s largely opaque, but the pocket holding the skeleton is translucent plastic, and as a result the only real light source into the box is from behind the skeleton. It casts eerie shadows across the box and its lone living occupant.



She spends the remainder of her life in that box, and she has a long and physically healthy life… long even for fairies. She becomes the most thoroughly studied fairy of them all, as the box and its contents ultimately get passed around to fifty-four researchers over the next one hundred forty-one years.

I am, after all, a man of my word.


She moans softly and slowly to herself as the decades pass, haunted both within and without by the eternally eyeless gaze of her mother.

Reunited.



The End.

The guillotine scene reminds me of one of Zenith's bits of artwork. Also, the end is one of the creepiest things I've seen in a work of literature; an amateur writer like you should be awful proud of it.

This is the greatest thing in the history of ever.

Wow. You are a great, great writer.

You make the world seem real with the background info and thourogh descriptions. I love it.

The only thing I really don't like is that the main guy is picking on creatures smaller than himself. I don't really get much of a thrill from that.
Torturing human-sized being, sure- they can fight back, sort of. But incapacitating an already helpless creature isn't as much up my alley.

But then again, each to his own.

Holy fuckin shit. You sure got some writing skills!

Great story, even better than the last, though i missed the parts you compared your torture devices to things from "our" world.

Good, nevertheless!

Thanks for the positive reviews, folks! These turned out better than I had thought, and the end of the Second Sessions was so creepy that I rewrote it four times to get it right.

Quick announcement: A third installment will be forthcoming: a series of short stories and snippets cut from the first and second. Eventually I'll post all three somewhere online.

oO

Your writing skills are some of the best I've seen. And I've seen some rubbish in my time. I read both volumes with the kind of Awe I've read books such as harry potter with.

Despite that, I feel you fell short with the second one. Its not your writing. Its the sheer sequel = bad equaltion, I looked very, very forward to the follow up. Your originality had slunk somewhat, your creatvitiy rushed.

Take your time with the next one.

Well,
I didn´t even had the time to read this one yet. :(
I had only read Phase Ten, and from what I read the story is great. Don´t let some dumbasses get it to you.

Release when you´re ready.

Teaser from "Random Musings," the third installment of "The Life And Death Of Beauty"...

It was then that she realized her wings were free. She’d been so distracted up to that point by the horror of being limbless that it hadn’t occurred to her that I had detached the safety pin from her wingtips.

She fluttered them, found they were unrestrained, and then kicked up a strong flapping effort that sent her sliding along my desk like an inverted hovercraft. She eventually caught enough air under one to upright herself and tried to take off in earnest. It was then that she simultaneously did two things: discover how I’d booby-trapped her wings, and make me laugh my ass off. As she tried to fly away she continuously did sickeningly fast angle changes in all three axes, shouting with surprise as she tumbled every which way in midair a couple inches above my desktop. She was generating enough lift to fly, but couldn’t control her flight at all, as her wings were generating lift at variably oblique angles to what she was trying to have them do. After about ten seconds of nauseating tumbling coupled with shouts and screams, she plowed headfirst into my desk, rolling to a halt face down.

She didn’t move for a moment, which made me wonder if she’d broken her neck – a really easy thing for fairies to do in crash landings since their spines are very small. I knew she was in decent shape when I heard a low whine come from her. She cried for a good ten minutes straight, and I suspect only a tiny fraction of that was from the pain of her crash.

That was the funniest thing I had seen in a very long time. Thankfully I had my desktop camera set to record when she did it, and the researchers that got the movie file in their mailboxes have largely shared my sentiments.

I think the Gurochan crowd will like how it's turning out... :-D

oO

First I love the length of your fics, which is why this comment is so late. It takes me quite a while to read through them so I enjoy them a little bit each night.

It's an honor to see I inspired you in some way in this story. Once again well written and this one had a little more variety which was nice! I'm sure that everyone expected all of the fairies to die but they didn't for a good yet horrorific ending. Well done.


Oh, another story?! *GLEES*

Bumping, as series entry #3 is about to be posted...

oO

You writing is excellent, and I love your allusions to the other fairy guro out there <3

Hello, OddOne.

I've not visited /lit/ for a long time, and I couldn't have picked a better day to drop in. Reading these threads of yours is making me want to pick up Fairy Cake where I left off. After this weekend is through, and my friends have left town again, I might just do that.

Also, a humble thank you for the mention.

>>24

Do it... Doooo eeet! DOOOOOO EEEET!

(Side note: I have both of your fairy series to date stored locally, in their entireties.)

oO

Absouletly amazing. You should write a book, I'm serious! Really just scared the hell out of me. The ending was so sad too, but interesting in the idea that the fairy tester now is becoming better at psychological torments.

I don't know if anyone would have an interest in these stories outside of the people here, but I do think that the qualities shown in how the fairies try to save each other, does give sort of a glimpse of light in all the darkness.

It would be interesting if you wrote in parts about the tester's past. Not revealing his past all at once, but kind of revealing enough about him that you gradually through reading the stories understand what could've driven him to this. Then again, the most disturbing stories have no answer to the question "Why?"

You really seem to have great insight into human nature in general, and it's fascinating to see how that comes out in the stories. Heck, perhaps they should be asking you to write the next Saw movie.