Come to Me, continues, part two

Chapter One...
Sordan: "We went through all that pain and it’s not chapter one yet?!"

The picture of Dragosh is passed around. There is much giggling.

Six years later...
Big L: "So the guy’s ass is even more saggy, now..."
This unpleasant mental image elicits more giggling.

Samira flew above the earth, its landscape a shifting panorama of blacks and grays, formed by the minds of dreaming mortal men.
The Loinfire Club commends the author on her conception of the shifting dreamscape. It is quite cool.
The Anthropologist: "Though they people of this kingdom are really well-adjusted if that's all they dream about. Or maybe it's a sign of them being all mundanely insane."

...it was a thrum, a vibration in the night that belonged to a single sleeping man...
Sordan: "He's vibrating in the night."

Her body hummed in response, a faint tingling pleasure vibrating through her, luring her toward this drowsing male who needed release in the form of a sex dream.
The Loinfire Club hums in response.

This was the main work of a succubus: giving sexual release to sleeping men through their dreams.
The Anthropologist: "So, hang on. Does she have different shifts, some of which she’s the punishment and some of which do wet dreams? Or does she do both at the same time? And how does she know if those who are sexually frustrated haven't sinned? This system..."
Big L: "Well, there's a big bag of armbands, some of which are green and some are purple. At the beginning of each night, they each pick..."

She had no existence apart from this work; no solid body on the plane of mortals, no lover in the Night World. She had no home or close family, no talents or skills beyond weaving dreams. Up until six years ago, that had suited her perfectly.
The Anthropologist: " You're a demon!"
Sordan: "Fail!demon! Wangst!"
(The Chronicler observes that this angst is very much like the Independent Working Woman Angst in contemporary romances.)

Lately, though, a bleak and depressive mood would sometimes steal over her.
Lady Miriam: "She hit puberty."

She would wonder— absurdly!—whether she was nothing more than a shadow of the mortals she visited; a poor imitation, making up stories for their entertainment, and pretending to herself that those stories were real. As if, somehow, telling stories could be the equivalent of living a true and mortal life.
Big L: "Wait a minute... She's a larper!"
The Anthropologist: "No, she's a romance novel author."
The Chronicler: "Can you smell self-insertion?"
(The Balance later points out that it's absurd for an incorporeal creature to lament that she doesn't have a corporeal existence. It's much like a corporeal creature thinking they're missing out by not being able to "feel" the Night World, especially as the denizens of the Night World are perfectly capable of interacting with each other. The author is physical-centric.)

As if a mortal life was something worth living! She was not like Theron, who wanted such a thing.
The Anthropologist: "He's even more fail! I was hoping he'd be the sensible actually demonic one."

Humans lived but a fleeting moment, the space between their birth and death no more than the duration of a sigh, and that sigh filled with mud, cold, fleas, disease, and great puddles of bodily fluids that Samira shuddered even to think about.
The Chronicler: "She's as squeamish as Satan from last week."
Sordan: "Fail!demon."

Humans were cruel and greedy and violent, and not half so beautiful as the creatures of Night.
Pillywiggin: "But they're demons!"
Sordan: "Why are these demons so morally superior?"
Big L: "She didn't read her brief properly."
The Anthropologist: "Which is why I suspect they used to be sex angels."

It was foolish of her to feel even a moment of envy for mortal creatures. And she didn't. Not for a moment!
The Anthropologist: "Obviously not, since she's not schizophrenic."

Who would it be this time? [...] An adolescent boy [...] Maybe a long-married man with a brood of children and an exhausted wife. Or perhaps it was a shepherd alone in the hills, far from his maiden fair.
Big L: "With only his sheep..."

Making up stories about sleeping men was about the only thing that still kept her interested in her work.
The Anthropologist: "That must suck. If you’re a sex worker and that’s all you can think about is your work."

Making up stories about sleeping men was about the only thing that still kept her interested in her work. Ever since that night she'd given the nightmare to Dragosh, nothing had been the same for her. She was no longer a virtuoso of vengeance. She'd lost her taste for the delivery of nightmares.
Lady Miriam: "I'm not sure she ever was a virtuoso of vengeance."
Sordan: "To be fair, if you did it every night. Boredom is a possibility."
Pillywiggin: "But she's a demon."

And what could she do about who she was now? She was a succubus. She could be nothing else. There was no escape from the Night World, for either her or for Theron.
Sordan: "Why do I think the rest of the book is going to contradict that paragraph?"

Better to chase intriguing rivers of male lust...
Lady Miriam: "That’s an Exalted name."

Change. A different life. A different world. A different her.
The Anthropologist: "Demon!"

You're just bored, she told herself. You'll snap out of it in a couple hundred years.
Sordan: "She's talking to herself."
Big L: "It's an italics monologue. That's much worse."
The Anthropologist: "It'd be among the first questions psychiatrist in these books would ask: How have you been feeling lately? Your monologues... Have they been in italics?"

She hovered where she was for a long moment, the forest of dream trees beneath her shifting from full leaf to winter bare to autumn yellows and oranges as dreamers dreamt scenes within it. The sky above filled with dark gray clouds, as thick as wool, and then parted again to let through streamers of moonlight and a twinkle of distant stars.
As said, the Loinfire Club does think the Dreamscape is quite cool.

A frown between her reddish brows...
The Anthropologist: "Has she dyed her hair?"
Sordan: "Reddish is such a nasty colour..."

There was a flavor to this sexual thrum...
Lady Miriam: "Sound effect please."
Pillywiggin thrummed the guitar behind her.

After three millennia of exploring the minds of men, all their sexual thoughts, their fantasies, she had seen it all. She hadn't come across anything truly new for at least five hundred years. The hopes were always the same, year after year, culture after culture...
Sordan: "Eeeeww! It's as though her brain contained the entire Internet..."
The Chronicler: "No. It'll just be endless vanilla sex."

Making love to a wife's best friend or her sister, or to the big-breasted woman who once passed in the street. Being ravished by an eager young wench, who could only be satisfied by his impressive manroot.
The Chronicler: "Manroot?!"
Big L: "Hoh yeeaah!"

Two women at once, pleasuring each other and the man with equal passion. Thrashing bare bottoms with a switch. Being thrashed in return, while wearing the wife's favorite chemise.
The Chronicler: "I stand corrected. She's done some research."
Big L: "If she had entire Internet she'd think of worse things."
Lady Miriam: "Well, those things were on paysites and she didn't think she needed to do that much research."

The Balance: "But Culture had not changed for five hundred years. For five hundred years, everything has been the same... all cultures, everywhere, in all times... the same desires..."
The Anthropologist makes many distressed noises.

She was overdue for finding something new.
The Anthropologist: "She was debating to herself if she wants to move into Paedophilia, which is dealt in a different demon department."
Sordan: "But they do. There was that fourteen year old."
The Anthropologist: "But she has breasts. In some cultures they have different values. Except for this time, of course."

She was repeating herself too much, often being so lazy as to simply give a man satisfaction with nothing more than a dream handjob.
Lady Miriam: "She's become the demon of mediocre sex."

The only time she felt her old enthusiasm rising up was when she came across a sleeping man who was deeply in love, and who needed nothing more than a dream of holding his beloved close in his arms and making love to her tenderly.
Lady Miriam: "She wants the girlfriend experience. Instead she wants to do the faking being his girlfriend..."

For that, she still took time and care, and would feel within her a shimmering of emotion that she could not name.
The Anthropologist: "Creepy mind rape."

In truth, she didn't understand love, except when it came as an intense sexual yearning. That she understood and could feel as she reflected it back to a man.
The Anthropologist: "Which as we said should make her gender confused. For all she knows women are functionally asexual."

Something inside her whispered that love might be more than that, though. It might hold treasures of which she was utterly unaware, and which she could never know.
(The Chronicler notes that that's the love not appearing in this book, especially as romance novels have a long history of using sexual desire as shorthand for deep romantic love... but we'll come to that. It's in here too.)

It made her want to weep, if only she was capable of it. Succubi had no tears, though, nor a heart to break.
Sordan: "Oh! The angst!"
Hands are duly stapled to foreheads.
Pillywiggin: "That's definitely a medical complication."
The Balance: "How are her eyeballs are not drying up and falling out?"
The Anthropologist: "That's why she’s so angsty. You would you be that way if your eyeballs are about to fall out constantly."

But maybe, after so many centuries of playing in the minds of mortals, she had become infected by their emotions. Maybe part of her was turning slightly human. Humanity might be contagious, like the plague.
Sordan: "If she were to turn human, it would raise the suck level of humanity."

She wasn't sure if that was an encouraging thought or a repulsive one.
Thankfully, the Loinfire Club are quite sure.
Big L: "We don't want to be the same species as her."

...tantalizing, unique thrum of male desire she was following, should not be passed by for so paltry a reason as fear...
Thrum! goes the guitar.

The thrum of desire from the unknown man was beginning to attract other succubi...
Thrum! goes the guitar again.

One, a blonde, approached too close to the stream of desire, and Samira bared her teeth, hissing, asserting her ownership.
Lady Miriam: "My desperate male! Fuck off!"

The blonde bared her teeth back, hissing in return, but then gave way, flapping off into the darkness, tossing her hair back over her shoulder with a pout and a glare.
The Anthropologist: "There should be a David Attenborough documentary on this... Hunting across the plains. We see the succubi in their native enviroment engaged in territoral combat..."
(She continues to narrate the rest of the scene in a David Attenborough voice.)
Lady Miriam: "Oh the corsets!"

Samira made a face at her, feeling disappointed. The coward. A territorial bat fight would have been fun.
Pillywiggin: "Bat fight?"
Lady Miriam: "They just throw bats at each other."
Big L: "Or they just scream since no one is Immune to Sonic."

The warning sounded yet again in Samira's mind, chasing a shiver down her spine. Something truly wasn't right about this thrum. Something wasn't natural.
Lady Miriam: "It needs tuning."

Three millennia of experience were telling her to slow down, to be cautious.
Pillywiggin: "She's been this stupid for as 3000 years?!"

Curiosity and the deliciously strong desire of the sleeping man lured her forward, regardless. Common sense fled, and she happily waved it good-bye. Boring old common sense. What use had she for it?
Luca: "Common sense twitched and then died."
The Anthropologist: "A demonhunter could just keep a horny teenage boy in a cage covered in fly paper to catch these things, you know, because they're as sophisticated as flies..."

She slipped out of the charcoal landscape of the Night World and emerged into the nighttime landscape of mortal men—the plane of the Waking World, they of the night called it.
This confuses some of the members of the Loinfire Club due to the drink the previous chapter had driven them to.
The Anthropologist: "But it's not the waking world... they're all asleep!"
Lady Miriam: "I want to be in the Drinking World."

Everything was real, everything was solid, and now she herself was the one who was not, and she could not be seen by waking eyes.
The Anthropologist: "Except we just broke that in the prologue."
Sordan: "I think the girl was half asleep..."
Big L: "Or she can only be seen if she's reflected in drool."
Sordan: "Or man-lust."
Big L: "Same thing."

A fragile wooden walkway led from the bank out across the dark water to an island. [...]As she approached the island, she made out the thick walls of a ruined fortified monastery, originally built for protection from invading Tartars and Turks. What was left of the brutal low outer walls was punctuated by two remaining stubby towers...
Big L: "How can you have a brutal low wall?"
The Anthropologist: "If you’re gnome..."

A massive square spire rose from one end, miraculously still standing, tall and strong. The spire dwarfed the outer protecting walls, thrusting upward like a spear, its roof a tall, tapering pyramid covered in red tile...
Pillywiggin: "Like a giant hyphen."
The Balance: "So a cock spire."
Sordan: "Why are these books so full of phallic architecture?"
The Anthropologist: "I'm just trying to imagine what the architect's pitch was like: Our new models are 50% more phallic than our competitors and 25% more phallic than our previous models... "

...the peak stabbing the night sky like a bloody blade that had pierced the belly of the moon.
The Anthropologist: "Is this what God was complaining about with Tower of Babel. Because now I can totally see his side of the issue and why I never want anyone to try that again..."
Pillywiggin: "There's a cock in my floor."
Big L: "Or maybe they're just scarred by what they saw through God's floor..."
Lady Miriam: "When they say we should never speak of this again..."

Samira flew up toward the windows, and then alit on a sill, her hands clinging to the stonework
Sordan: "But she's incorporeal..."
Pillywiggin: "She can touch anything that is actually a penis."

A shiver of anticipation ran through Samira, the last vestiges of rational thought flickering and dying under the pull of the unknown man's desire. [...]When nothing threatening appeared, she folded back her wings and inched through the opening scrabbling along like the demon she was...
Sordan: "The demon she barely was."
Luca: "The demon she wasn't."

She could have passed straight through the wall itself if she had so desired, but such passages through solid matter were painful and tiring for succubi.
Sordan: "AKA I want to have power but I don't want it to fuck up the plot."

A massive table dominated the room...
The Anthropologist: "Table fetish! Do we have a category for that?"
The Balance: "You need to learn to generalise. Sometimes it's all the same thing..."

The dark-haired man slept with his arm sprawled across one of the open books on the table, his face resting on his white sleeve, his black hair concealing all but a pale triangle of forehead from her view.
Pillywiggin: "What?"
The Anthropologist: "It's a freemason thing."

There is some discussion as to what this insight into the hero's appearance means, concluding with:
Sordan: "He looks like a hick, basically."

The Anthropologist: "You should never, ever fall asleep over a demonology book. Only bad things could happen. Especially if you drool on it."

His other arm was drawn up close to his body, resting atop his thighs under the table.
The Balance: "Implied masturbation."
The Chronicler: "That's a first... but if he's been masturbating, why in the world does he still have a miasma of unquenched lust?"
Lady Miriam: "In that case he wasn't doing it right."
The Balance: "The ancient art of masturbation has fallen by the wayside."
The Anthropologist: "Maybe he's being working twenty-two hour days and he fell asleep during."

Samira could feel it entering her as if through the pores of her skin, setting every inch of her alive with tingling, unquenched lust.
The Chronicler: "So she's feeling lust as though she was wanking her own cock, since she’s feeling it reflected from other men."

She stood still, soaking it in, helpless for a moment to do otherwise. She'd never felt anything like this, the man's unsatisfied desires coursing through her body with the sweetness of honey, pooling in her loins with a hungry anticipation of things to come.
Pillywiggin: "Eeew! Honey in loins!"

For the first time in all her thousands of years, she was vaguely aware of the danger of falling captive to the lust of a man. It had always been easy for her to weave her dreams and fly away, never losing control, never being tempted to stay.
Pillywiggin: "Why would that be a problem for a demon?"

Such thoughts of control were far from her now. Almost any thought at all was beyond her.
The Anthropologist: "I think my theory is proven. Sucubbi have the mental capacity of small insects. Like some sort of supernatural daddy long legs. Repeatedly flying into torches and lightbulbs."
Sordan: "Except it's not lightblubs."
Pillywiggin: "Basically she's a cock mosquito."

Her gaze flicked over them, almost wondering what this man had been doing...
Pillywiggin: "The gheys have returned!"
Luca: "We should write a book about that. A secret society of the gheys."
The Anthropologist: "They're like bodyguards. But different."

...her mind was drifting in and out of a welter of caution and sexual excitement, and she could make no sense of the things.
The Chronicler: "How could she not know? Doesn't someone have fantasies about that?"
The Anthropologist: "Because she's not a slut."

She came around behind the sleeping man, noting the strong line of his back beneath his simple white tunic and the broad line of his shoulders.
Pillywiggin: "So he's just made of two lines. He may in fact be two dimensional."

Midnight sun!
The Anthropologist: "That's the stupidest swearword."
Big L: "Not as bad as By the Stones!"

You'd think I'd never done this before...
The Loinfire Club drinks again for I'm not a slut!

She shifted from foot to foot, her bare breasts pressed against her thighs as she squatted beside him...
Luca: "That's not physically possible."
Pillywiggin (demonstrating): "No you just need bigger tits. It can be done."

She wanted to touch him so badly, the desire was making her weak and uncoordinated.
Sordan: "So why doesn't she? She's a bloody succubus!"

She looked at the broad expanse and quivered at the thought. She wanted to lay her breasts against him, to wrap her legs around his waist and to feel the total strength of his yearnings through every inch of her naked body. She wanted to melt into him, wanted to become part of him, wanted—
The Balance: "She wanted his hyphen."
The Anthropologist: "We need a new category for all these hyphens and ellipsis."
The Chronicler: "Surely if she's feeling his lust she'd be wanting to find something female to fuck... unless he's gay..."

Do it! she urged herself. Touch him!
No, there is danger.… a softer voice within her said. Think, Samira, something is not right.
The Balance: "Canon schizophrenia."

Energy crackled through her with the force of lightning, slamming into her and blasting her away from the stranger, her hearing deafened by a thunderclap of power even as her mind and senses reeled with a burst of images and emotions, blinding her to the room all around.
Pillywiggin: "I want to be able to lightning bolt demons that touch me."

She bumped against a spike protruding from a beam, the iron making her yowl in pain and sending her tumbling again through the air.
The Balance: "She has a weakness to iron, just revealed. Plot point!"

When she came up against a wooden rafter she clung tightly to it as the images and emotions from the man washed through her: Fury. Despair. Utter, soul-destroying loneliness.
The Chronicler: "If the soul is destroyed then it can't be worth eating."
The Anthropologist: "I'm not sure that's how it works in this system."
Pillywiggin: "The word system implies something that's consistent and functional..."

"Who's there?" he asked harshly, his deep voice bouncing off the stones of the walls. "I know you're here. Come out!" [...] His brows were dark and devilish, with points at the center of their arches.
Big L: "So, horns..."

...a splash of webbed pink that started below his left eye and then poured down the side of his cheek, broadening to the width of a spread hand along his neck and then disappearing into his tunic.
The Anthropologist: "What?!"

Big L: "Are we getting a picture of this man? A triangular forehead. Devilish eyebrows. V-shaped beard. A scar that spills."

The Balance disappears for a moment and returns, producing a multitude of Maltesers.
Pillywiggin: "I'm thrumming..."

In three millennia of being a succubus, she'd seen everything a human body had to offer, as well as a thousand vividly imagined things it did not.
The Anthropologist: "Except burn scars, it would seem."

"I am Nicolae. Who are you?" he asked the shadows.
Pillywiggin: "Perhaps you shouldn't have given it your name."
The Anthropologist: "Perhaps you should look it up in your demonological texts the blurb says you own."

"Or instead of asking who you are, perhaps I should ask what you are?" he asked, a brow lifting.
"I am not a what," Samira muttered, indignant, and then clamped her lips shut. It was stupid of her to make a sound.
Sordan: "Yes. Yes it was."

She saw that his eyes were a warm, clear brown, flecked with yellow, the iris rimmed by a darker brown that was almost black.
Sordan: "Those are shit eyes."
The Anthropologist: "With corn in them."
The Balance: "Turd eyes."
Lady Miriam: "And the black could be blood in stool."

Something small suddenly broke inside her at the question, for it was as if he were interrogating a loathsome beast he'd found hiding under his bed. She was a thing to him.
The Anthropologist: "She's a hateful thing on top of his bed, thank you very much."

The strange sadness that had plagued her for six years welled up once again, and again she wanted to weep like a human, with tears to relieve the ache inside her. [...] For what was she? The Loinfire Club: "You're a demon!"

A defiler of a brother's love. A soulless creature with no heart, and no future other than to look from her lonely vantage into the loves and lusts of others, doomed always to pretend to live and never to feel or grow or change.
The Anthropologist: "You're a romance author!"

The open pages were covered in dense black writing, and in the middle of one was a drawing: a naked female with spread black wings. Before she could make sense of what that might mean...
Big L: "What the fuck? She can't even recognise a picture of her own species!"

Nicolae touched the page with his fingertips, and suddenly Samira felt a powerful jolt of his sexual desire, the same as had drawn her to him in the first place.
(The Chronicler: "Aha! He was summoning her!")

Samira looked quickly at him, and found her gaze met by his own wide-eyed one...
The Anthropologist: "He has a gheys too! So they can be friends."

"Succubus," he said, the word as much a statement as a question.
The Chronicler: "It's not! There's no question mark! I can see the page!"

"Samira!" she said, throwing out her name in frightened defiance. She would not be a thing. [...]In a desperate bid to use his weakness, to gain control, she reached up and rolled one of her pink nipples between thumb and forefinger. His lips parted, and he stared at her moving fingers as if in a trance.
Sordan: "Hypnotic nipples!"
Luca: "They have little spirals painted on them."
The Anthropologist: "The real question is: Is there a sound effect for this?"

She was an individual, not just another demon.
The Anthropologist: "No you're not! You're a succubus!"

"Samira," she said again, firmly this time.
The Chronicler: "She really shouldn't be telling him her True Name."
Sordan: "Maybe it's not her True Name."

Even as the force of his desire ran through her, bringing every inch of her to involuntary, tingling arousal...
(The Chronicler: "Is it just me or does that imply she has a cock?")

She sucked in a breath, going as motionless as he was, her nipple in mid-roll. He'd heard her.
The Anthropologist: "Inexperienced fail!demon!"
The Anthropologist: "Maybe it's like you’re trying to do a coin trick but failing to remember what the next step is and you're embarrassingly stuck..."

...it was her name on his lips that she wanted most.
"Samira," he echoed, granting her wish as if he'd felt her demand.
(The Chronicler: "This is getting ridiculous.")

"Samira."
She swayed toward his outstretched hand and took one step toward him, drawn by her name spoken so irresistibly in his deep, mortal voice.
The Anthropologist: "It was her True Name. 'Tard."

He saw her. He knew her name. He spoke to her.
Sordan: "You told him your name five seconds ago! You 'tard!"
The Anthropologist: "She just has really low self esteem."

His fingertips were inches from her skin. If she took one more step, he'd be able to reach her. She remembered what had happened last time.
Lady Miriam: "She has g-spots all over her body."
The Anthropologist: "He's just realised he's not stupid enough to be attracted to you... or not..."

Inside herself, she felt a faint beat. It was an echo of his own heartbeat, she realized with wonder.
Sordan: "What the fuck?!"
The Balance: "She's hollow, then?"
The Anthropologist: "Am I the only one who thinks that hearts beating in unison should be a third or fourth date sort of thing or am I just conservative here?"

His heart might not beat much longer if he received another jolt such as that, she realized.
The Anthropologist: "I did biology once..."
Big L: "You don't need to have done biology to know repeated lightning jolts..."

Fear, shame, and an unnamed longing—for what? for his attention?—did battle within her.
Big L: "She's just a fail!person. Regardless of being a succubus."

The least she could do was give him a pleasant memory to take into his waking hours.
Sordan: "And raping him in his sleep is the perfect thing to do."
Lady Miriam: "It's not rape. It's surprise pity sex."
Sordan: "I'm not convinced she's more attractive than him. She has clashing hair and eyes."
Lady Miriam: "But he has a scar and a limp."

He was a handsome man, even when unconscious.
The Chronicler: "How does being awake affective attractiveness levels?"
The Anthropologist: "You know, this is the first instance of female on male rape in these books we've encountered."

She was here to give the man a moment of celestial pleasure.
Pillywiggin: "What?! Surely it's demonic."
The Anthropologist: "It's the flaw of the find-and-replace editing out of the sex angels."

She curled her toes in anticipation, reached out, and touched his brow.
The Loinfire Club descends into debate as to whether not the last sentence was alluding to a foot fetish as the chapter closes.