The Book of Masks (Vol. 2)

An Army of One

Previously: "Too Many Dumbasses" 

Build your own fembot? It's a really tempting thought, so tempting that after only a minute or two of feverish speculation, you mutter "Later" at the three asshole-amigos and run for home.

* * * * *

You don't have a lot of homework, so after getting that out of the way and practicing the viola, you make an early night so you can make an early start in the morning.

In fact, your start is so early that your parents have been in bed only ten minutes before you're stealthily dressing again. You leave a note for them to find when they get up, saying that you had to go out for an early soccer practice, then sneak out with the grimoire. You make a beeline for the old elementary school, and set to work as soon as you get there.

You had looked over the next spell as soon as you got home from the water towers, in case it had features that would help with your burgeoning plan for a squad of fembots, and it intrigued you enough that you wanted to try it out as soon as possible. You already have all the ingredients, and it's the work of only two minutes to dump them into a bowl and set the bowl onto the open book. You light the pile, and after it fizzles and burns for a minute you find you've made a black, tar-like paste. You lay back and pull Chen's mask off your face—

* * * * *

—and wake with a start. When you have rubbed away a sudden rush of exhaustion, you coat the inside of the mask with the paste, then snip off some of your own hair (as the spell prescribes) and burn it inside the mask. It flares and burns out, and when it's done the masks' inner surface is the color of the stony thing you made with four hundred pounds of graveyard dirt. It's still standing in the corner, and you glance speculatively between it and the mask before setting the mask onto the book.

The page now turns. There's a large paragraph on the reverse side. After you've hashed out a crude translation—

Okay, the book doesn't use the word "rockbot," but that's the name you privately give the kind of thing you've been making the past couple of weeks, and this spell (as you suspected) has made a new kind of one.

So a "rockbot" is a servant that has to obey its maker (assuming its maker was smart enough to use his own hair in the spell) and it now comes in three varieties. The basic model, which took you a week to make, is just a lumpy thing onto which you set a mask. It then turns into the person whose image is inside the mask, and that "person" will obey you. The first variation, which you used on Grandfather, transforms a person into a rockbot, but otherwise it behaves exactly like the first kind.

The third kind, though, is a lot more compact and convenient. It's a rockbot-inside-a-mask. When the mask is placed on someone, it turns them into the duplicate of the person copied by the mask. But because there's also a rockbot inside the mask, they have to obey you the way a rockbot would.

So now you don't have to spend weeks making rockbots after hauling thousands of pounds of dirt around. Nor do you have to petrify your victims or otherwise get them out of the way. All you have to do is carry a rockbot-mask around, find someone who can conveniently disappear and—

Pop! You put the mask on them, they go away, and in their place is a doppelganger who will obey you.

At least, that's the way you interpret the spell. You'll have to test it out, and on a hunch you work until three in the morning making a new mask and a new brain band. Then you crawl into the abandoned sleeping bag for a few hours of sleep.

* * * * *

You feel ragged and bleary the next morning as you trudge into school. But despite your exhaustion, there's a quickness to your step, for you are keenly anticipating the minutes between 9:00 and 9:10, when the apparition of Andrea Varnsworth is due to appear outside the windows of E wing. Yes, it's Joe Thomason now inside that lovely body. But still, that means you'll be able to talk to that body now, to stare at it openly when you meet to talk about business. So with increasing impatience you shift in your seat as the clock edges closer to the usual time. The tension become nigh intolerable.

And then she appears. Walking slowly, eyes down. She's wearing light purple shorts and flip flops and some kind of sweatshirt. Her hair, as always, gives the impression of being damp. What's her schedule? you wonder, for now you can ask why she always appears this way at this time of day. Does she have study hall first period, and she spends it in the natatorium? But if so, why does she always take this route back into the school? It would be the long way around, wouldn't it?

"Gary, Steve," says Ms. Gladstone. "Put your eyes back in your heads and turn them this way."

* * * * *

She's not the only girl that you watch for. You watch for all of them, any of them, and your cock passes the day in a tense state of trembling anticipation for what you plan to do.

You're going to make a fembot. Lots of them. And you're going to sell their services in the Warehouse.

The Warehouse! That's a party scene that Chen has been to only a couple of times, even though it's exactly the kind of place where he'd fit in. It is what its name implies, a looming, abandoned warehouse in the city's decrepit industrial district, that has been taken over by the wilder elements of the city's youth and turned into a depraved party spot. Raves, underage drinking, illegal drugs, fights ... it all happens there, outside of all and any adult supervision. Armed security (such as it is) is provided by the high schools' athletic squads—football players, mostly, but any beefy kid who can swing a heavy stick can get a job as a bouncer there—and all the foods and drinks and drugs are sold by underage vendors. Music is also provided by high school garage bands and dee-jays.

But it's the sex angle that has you slavering. There's a row of private rooms upstairs—spaces that used to be offices, you suppose—furnished with grimy, crusted, disgusting mattresses that can be rented (along with a clean set of sheets) for thirty minutes by up to two people at a time. (For three persons or more, the charge is extra.) How much does Oscar Cantu, who runs the operation, make off the rentals? You've no idea, but you assume it's at least several hundred dollars per night.

He could make more—a hell of a lot more—if the rooms upstairs were furnished with beautiful whores. Then there'd be a line to get up and in and out of the second floor instead of a trickle of couples looking for a place for a drunken fuck.

And it would be safe as could be. The masks—you haven't forgotten—allow you to mix one or more body/face types inside of them, to create "new" people. So ... Mix Lin Pol and Yumi Saito, or Lin Pol and Cindy Vredenburg, or Andrea Varnsworth and Eva Garner ... or mix Lin and Yumi and Cindy and Andrea and Eva all together ... and you would have a completely "new" girl inside of a mask. Outfit the mask with a copy of the brain of a girl who likes sex—a Molly Shaw or a Faith Becker, say—and you'd have a gorgeous, eager-to-fuck whore ready for taking up the ass. You'd just have to put the mask onto a rockbot, and it would come alive and obey you, and at your command it would sell itself a dozen times in a single night and pass the money to you. At fifty bucks a pop ... or seventy-five ... or if you set up a bidding system or a lottery ...

You lean back in your desk, eyes shut and a smile stretching across your face, as you think about it.

Seven rockbots, cold and lifeless, lined up in the elementary school basement. One by one you go down the line, putting masks onto them, and they come to life as a line of soft, sexy, sexually eager girls. They smile at you, and giggle and caress you lovingly, then get dressed. They troop out to an SUV you've borrowed for the drive out to the Warehouse. Each is given a stack of clean sheets, and they march upstairs to wait, each in a room of her own. A line of sexually eager boys starts forming at eight each evening, and all night long they sprint upstairs for their turn, pressing a hundred dollars each into your hand as you direct them to a room. They emerge twenty minutes later, weak and groaning with sexual satisfaction, and telling everyone they know how hot and luscious and awesome was the fuck they bought.

Seven customers every twenty minutes, for seven hours a night. A hundred and forty-seven customers, at a hundred per, for two nights, and you wake up Sunday morning with twenty-nine thousand, four hundred more dollars than you went to bed on Thursday night with.

You prop your feet on the back of the desk in front of you, and let your knees fall apart as your cock makes a hard fist inside your shorts.

* * * * *

But that's a long-term play, one to start after you've deployed some rockbot-masks. Because if those work out, you won't even have to share the loot with Oscar Cantu.

Or with the original Gary Chen.

But you need to test it out first.

Next: "The Pleasant Phucker" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 2)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 2)"