Alternate Angels 10

Jaynaece and Amane gazed keen-eyed through the bamboo forest, and marked two other women in stealthy approach.

One woman stood beside but sightly in front of the other. The front right woman bore into Jaynaece and Amane with a piercing stare of ice blue eyes. Chaotic but glamorous hair, a red of bright arterial blood or shining ruby, blossomed and cascaded down around her terrifyingly gorgeous face and bare supple shoulders. She walked with a confident yet relaxed and alluring gait, body sashaying gently, the effect quite visible beneath a tiny scarlet gown.

The garment, matching her hair, had a lazy pair of shoulder straps which widened just enough in front to cover the center of each breast. They connected behind her neck, and joined again just beneath her belly button. Her skirt hem bounced upon her hips. She seemed to be not so much wearing her tiny dress, as letting it ride and bob upon her body, which was lithe and slender, yet powerfully sculpted from end to end.

The other woman, to the left and just behind the first, had darker hair, a crimson-tinted black like dried blood or a ruby by starlight. Her eyes blazed green but were lined with black kohl. Her lips were rouged to a volcanic black-red glisten, with deliberately streaky lines underneath the lower eyelids and lip, as if she cried kohl and bled rouge. Her outfit was black snakeskin, long and slinky in the suggestion of a serpent, with a skirt sliced open on both sides. The slits revealed flaring glimpses of slender, sculpted, and powerful legs, and even the string-thin straps of some lower undergarment.

Her off-the-shoulder gown ended above the breasts, save for two straps which converged to a collar. Long black snakeskin gloves matched the outfit in both material and horizontal line, also ended just above the breasts and elbows. Her gloved fingers tapped idly upon the handles of katanas sheathed at each side of her narrow waist. Her outfit was studded with some sort of metal bolt, as were her high black boots.

"Such fine beauties in such a place," the lighter-redheaded woman hailed Jaynaece and Amane, in a voice of spiced ambrosia. "Are you of the Sunite temple just up the mountain?"

"That's funny," Jaynaece laughed with a shallow politeness. "I was about to ask you the same."

The woman smiled. "Forgive us; in fact it's quite a pleasure to introduce ourselves first. I am Alandra, mistress of lust. Karla is my servant of lust. The servant of lust."

"My," Jaynaece raised an impassive eyebrow.

Karla spoke, her voice darker than Alandra's, like her hair, and just as sensual for it, "It is thus natural that we should make a pilgrimage to a temple of Sune, the love goddess of Faerun, or so the conventional wisdom goes."

Amane asked, "That you might learn of the ways of lust? There is more to-"

"Not quite," Alandra interrupted and smiled smugly.

Karla stepped closer to Amane, almost able to breathe on her. "That you, that all the temple, might learn of true lust from us."

Jaynaece cocked her head. "You might teach us of eros?"

Alandra smiled, sashaying up to the strawberry-blonde ranger. "Not just any of the passions, but the most raw. You sound curious then, girls of the forest?" She looked deeply into Jaynaece's eyes, and slowly reached out, and took her hand. The ranger was unyielding as Alandra lifted Jaynaece's hand to her face. Alandra kissed Jaynaece's fingertips, first close-lipped, then pursing her lips to suck and nibble the tips. Jaynaece's breath slowed, her eyes lidded, and she sighed rhythmically. Alandra slipped two of Jaynaece's fingers into her mouth, sliding them between her canines.

Jaynaece shivered. She slowly turned to Amane, and whispered, "Perhaps they can teach us a thing or two after all."

Amane's muscles were taut as Karla reached out, sliding a single finger up the black silk form-fitting kunoichi garb Amane wore.

Something snapped in Jaynaece's mind. Over the past several years, across Jaynaece's adventures with several allies from her island home of Lantan and spanning the lands of Chult, Chessenta, and Amn, Jaynaece had trained herself specifically to fight off fey and other practioners of enchantment and illusory magics. Her will was strong, and her mind slippery, sometimes able to slip out of an enchantment even after it had first taken hold. Her mind snapped as such now. Her eyes focused and narrowed on Alandra. "You reached out not with your wiles, but your mind, straight into mine. You've some hypnotism at work." Jaynaece drew back, swatting Alandra's cheek with her hand after slipping it from her lips.

Alandra's reflexes were preternatural; she lightly bit Jaynaece's fingers after the swat, drawing blood. Jaynaece winced and drew her hand back to her own mouth, sucking the finger's broken skin. Alandra licked her lips for Jaynaece's flecks of blood, and swallowed with relish.

Amane palmed Karla's sternum, pushing her back firmly. She stood defensively, holding up the wooden pracitce wakizashis she still held.

Alandra swept her ice blue yet hot gaze from Jaynaece to Amane. "Graceful kunoichi," she husked, "Will you not learn of the depths of raw element of lust? Whatever you think you know, whatever you have seen or experienced, is but the surface of the pools of evergold." Amane's eyes riveted to Alandra's, tranfixed. Alandra moved up to her in an eyeblink, raking her fingernails down Amane's chest, cupping breast and thigh. Amane relaxed and shuddered, dropping her weapons, receiving Alandra's mouth over hers in a swift crushing kiss.

Jaynaece concentrated, and focused on Amane. She willed one of the divine magics bequeathed to her by her goddess, the Red Knight, seeking to dispel any magical hold Alandra might have just established over Amane, as Alandra had against her.

Amane drew back as Jaynaece had a moment before. "Jaynaece is right!" she exclaimed. When Alandra pressed her seductive advance, Amane lifted a leg, pressing the bottom of her sandaled foot against Alandra's midriff. Alandra reached out, and Amane pushed harder. Alandra went back slightly off balance, swiftly caught by Karla.

Jaynaece hissed to Amane, "Don't look into their eyes!" She refused to meet the gazes of Alandra or Karla as she demanded, "What is your purpose!?"  Her instinct, and her old habit, was to outright attack anyone at such attempts. Such was her nature since, on her native isle of Lantan while still teenaged, her beau had been seduced by the song of a siren, and never seen again.

Since joining the adventuring company of Sephranaena, Helene, Faralas, and the others, she had tried to learn some temperance. Perhaps traveling grifters like these two, who used enchantment magic for their own twisted enjoyment and seduction, or to steal off with purses, did not necessarily deserve to die. "If you desist now, it need go no further."

Alandra purred, stared back, and smiled. "I hope you and I shall go much, much, further, Jaynaece Athena..."

"How do you-" Jaynaece's pulse quickened. She wondered whether Alandra had read her mind with the same psychic trick with which she had briefly dominated it, or whether she truly knew of her, perhaps here seeking some sort of revenge, this bamboo forest path-crossing no happenstance.

Karla sighed. "It's sad you don't remember me,...but then, the mind can be so weak, suppressing the memories of greatest import. I remember you very, well, Jaynaece. I was as familiar with you as any other when you were a guest of the Moondown House."