Most wild animals confined to a cage for an extended period of time are prone to abnormal behaviors without proper enrichment.
Sophie Ryder was no different.
Her inner beast was calm, now that it was no longer confined to a prison of her own making, no longer without any enrichment or outlet for its wild urges. Ever since she had made up her mind about her plan to betray the paladins by letting the tiger out of its cage, so to speak, the distress that had built up in her mind over the years—which had caused her to act so abnormally, so robotically, so coldly, as she fought against her natural urges for most her life—felt like it finally had a release, like opening a valve on a pressurized air tank.
The beast inside was given a direction, a purpose, and the agency to choose how to execute it. She was still terrified of what the tiger would do—it was a dangerous wild animal, after all—but compared to the harm and neglect she now clearly saw her mental cage was doing to herself and to her loved ones?
She would take freedom any day, and let the tiger devour whomever was unlucky enough to stand in its way.
Maybe this new-found mental freedom was why, despite its necessity to her plan, the thought of having to visit Mac in her cell made her feel … uneasy.
She stood frozen at the top of the stairs, gripping the railing with white knuckles, almost enough to bend the steel. Just a few flights below her was the entrance to the secret underground prison complex beneath Abraxas Paladin Academy.
Her stomach lurched. She felt vertigo take hold as she looked down the chasm of the square-spiraling staircases and landings below.
She leaned away from the railing, took a deep breath, and closed her eyes. Remember why you’re here, she thought to herself.
One thing that motivated Sophie was the knowledge that, despite being stuck there for about a year now, Mac had managed to stay calm and collected for her entire imprisonment thus far. If a wild beastess like Mac—wild enough that Sophie had to half-shift in order to sneak up and knock her out from behind when she kidnapped her, luckily without her victim noticing—could keep herself enriched and maintain such mental fortitude while locked up in a cage for that long, Sophie had no excuse to not face her own fears.
… The other thing that motivated Sophie was that this was another opportunity to see that absolutely beautiful woman in person once again.
Bolstered by both her courage and her desire, Templar Sophia Ryder opened her eyes. She swished her auburn ponytail to one side, dusted off the front of her templar uniform, pulled her shoulders back, puffed out her chest, and confidently descended the concrete stairs without further hesitation.
After scanning her access card on the magitech lock on the door, a series of mechanisms whirred before the door opened with a click. Unlike other underground areas of the academy, which typically had at least wood paneling or other decorations, this secret area was composed entirely of stark and barren concrete. There was a small intake room lit by a single fluorescent light overhead, a desk with a security guard sitting behind it wearing a typical paladin uniform and armor while reading a magazine, and basically nothing else. Sophie showed him her ID and credentials, and he got up from his desk lazily to scan his ID on the magitech lock on the opposite door to wave her through.
Right before she could walk through, however, someone else walked out at a busy, determined pace, so fast that Sophie bumped into him and had to catch herself.
“Oh, pardon me, Presbyter!” Sophie said, surprised.
“Kindly mind your surroundings, Templar Ryder,” the presbyter replied with a frown, despite being the one who nearly bowled her over in the first place.
Presbyter John Talbot was a tall, lanky, and bespectacled man who, despite being around the same age as Bishop Ironside, looked far older, perhaps from the sheer stress of his studies and dedication to his work, or more likely from his all-white hair. His presbyter robes were equally white with a gold lining, along with a badge on the lapel of a golden yellow Almighty Sun with a red ‘P’ in the center. Except when he was conducting Sunday Mass, Sophie seldom saw him without his magitech gloves on—black with cyan runes—which, along with other equipment, allowed him to safely interact with magic, and craft or alter magitech devices.
“Noted,” Sophie replied curtly.
“If you’re here to interrogate the pagan subject again,” Presbyter Talbot said frigidly, looking down at Sophie as he adjusted his round glasses, “I’ll have you know it does seem to be less receptive to my testing today than usual. You’d be wasting your time on it. Don’t even bother.”
“I appreciate your concern, Presbyter Talbot, but I will be continuing with my inquisition of her today regardless,” Sophie replied equally coldly, emphasizing the pronoun. “I will also kindly remind you that you do not hold rank over me, Presbyter, and thus you do not give me orders. I’ll have you written up if you do so again.”
“I will kindly remind you that we both work for Bishop Ironside,” the presbyter said, lowering his voice and grinning ear-to-ear, “and, from what little information he has told me about you recently, you do not want to risk making Saul angry by threatening his most trusted magitech scientist.”
Sophie pretended that scared her. She squinted, then smiled back.
“Have a lovely day, John.”
Presbyter Talbot nodded with a smug self-satisfied expression and left the intake area through the door leading to the staircase. As he walked away and she entered the door leading to the cells, Sophie indulged herself in a thought that the God she once revered would most certainly have frowned upon, a thought that a few nights ago would have made her feel guilty enough to seek a confession booth:
Fuck that asshole.
The door closed and locked behind her. Ahead of her was a concrete hallway lined with six cells on one side, facing the blank concrete wall on the other side. Despite the claustrophobic vibes of the underground complex, each cell was actually quite large and spacious. Each one contained a bed with a mattress, a toilet, a sink, a shower in one corner on a timer, a small bookshelf, a table, a straight-backed chair, air vents too small to crawl through, and fluorescent lighting. All of the furniture was metal, reinforced with magitech, and bolted to the floor.
The wall of each cell that faced the hallway was a single clear pane of bulletproof glass lined on the top and bottom with small air holes, with seemingly no doorway leading into the cells, nor any windows letting in light from above. Other than the lights being on a schedule to turn on and off at regular intervals, there was no way to know whether it was day or night down here. On the side of each cell was a control panel with various buttons, a small loudspeaker, and a gold metal Almighty Sun logo at the top just below the ankh of Gnosis Industries. Just below the control panel was a rotating dumbwaiter, used to deliver food to the inmates or give them documents to review or sign. At the end of the hallway were locked doors leading to three rooms—Presbyter Talbot’s clinic, the inquisition room, and the utility closet between them.
All of the cells were empty save for one at the very end. As Sophie approached the occupied cell, she could hear the echo of a tennis ball bouncing off of the concrete walls.
Ba dum dum. Ba dum dum. Ba dum dum.
Before she had even reached the cell, a rough-edged voice from inside of it said, “That guy sure is an asshole, huh?”
Sophie stopped, then shook her head with a smile and continued walking. That damn woman sure knew how to get into Sophie’s head sometimes—and especially into her dreams. But that was just a coincidence, that’s all. When she arrived in front of the last cell in the complex, she had dropped the smile and resumed her cold demeanor.
With her hands behind her back, Sophie stood up straight and said in her best templar voice like she did every time she saw her for the past year, “Hello again, Mackenzie. Are you finally ready to confess your sins today?”
It took all of Sophie’s willpower to suppress the butterflies in her stomach that threatened to escape every time she saw Mackenzie Fiero in the flesh. The woman was six feet and ten inches of pure butch muscle, crammed into a white tank top and an orange half-unzipped prison jumpsuit tied around her waist. Her thighs could crush skulls, her arms could bend steel, and her overall build looked superhuman. She clearly did bodyweight exercises in her cell all day long to keep up her physique, and it showed. Sophie couldn’t help but trace each and every curve of Mac’s body with her eyes.
Mac was a were-jaguar, and she was currently half-shifted, a form she maintained for most of her imprisonment so that her instincts didn’t overwhelm her from being suppressed. The black rosettes and golden-tan fur on her arms, legs, back, and face partially covered up some of her scars and tattoos, but only just barely. Every time Sophie saw her there was a new nanobot injection site or scar somewhere on her body, which she now knew was from Presbyter Talbot’s wild magic experiments. Mac’s hair had grown out over the past year as well, from her initial extremely short haircut to the rough wavy locks that now covered up her pointed pierced ears, brushing the sides of her chiseled jaw.
Her wrists and bare ankles were both kept in magitech shackles that would manifest holographic chains if she got too aggressive. She wore a magitech muzzle strapped to her feline face as well—for practical reasons should she try to bite anyone with her fangs (jaguars being well-known for their powerful bite), but also as a humiliating joke at her expense. The magitech was all Gnosis brand, of course, but the set-up was … janky. No doubt the restraints had been custom-cobbled together by Presbyter Talbot just for beastesses like Mac.
The jaguar beastess was seated on the floor of her cell, leaning against her bed and tossing a tennis ball against the far wall before catching it again over and over. She had some books on her shelf and a CRT TV bolted to the table for entertainment, but obviously she wasn’t interested in them right now.
“Am I ready? What do you think, sweetheart?” Mac scoffed.
She didn’t even bother to look over at Sophie with her amber eyes. She just stared straight ahead, just focused on bouncing and catching that tennis ball. Over and over.
Ba dum dum. Ba dum dum. Ba dum dum.
“Well, ready or not,” Sophie said, “get up. We’re going to the inquisition room again today.” The templar walked away to retrieve the guard from the intake room, and by the time they had both returned, Mac had reluctantly put her tennis ball down and stood up in front of the glass.
The guard and Sophie both kept one hand on their magitech blades as the guard scanned his ID on the control panel and pressed a few buttons. After a few moments, cyan-colored lines traced the outline of a door onto the large glass wall, which opened like elevator doors to allow Mac through. The guard immediately pressed a button on a remote attached to a keyring on his belt loop, which caused holographic chains to appear between Mac’s wrist and ankle shackles to keep her restrained. Together, Sophie and the guard escorted Mac down the hall in silence.
The butch woman towered over Sophie by a good eight inches. To Sophie, though, there was something so oddly seductive about Mac’s stoic and intimidating presence. Despite her obvious resentment over her kidnapping, since day one Mac had never even tried to harm Sophie. In Sophie’s fantasies late at night, alone in bed, she imagined another lifetime where the roles were reversed—Sophie was the captured damsel needing to be freed, and Mac was her strong protective knight in shining armor coming to her rescue …
But this isn’t a fairy tale. And rescuing Mac probably wasn’t going to be as straightforward as slaying a dragon.
The inquisition room was even more sparse than the cells. It was a bare concrete room with just a table off to one side, two security cameras in the top corners, a few lights in the ceiling, some folding chairs stacked against one another in the corner, and a single metal straight-backed chair towards the far end of the room—bolted to the floor and facing the door. The straight-backed chair had attachment points on the armrests and front legs. When the guard told Mac to sit in the chair, her shackles auto-magically bonded to the attachment points as the holographic chains rearranged themselves.
The guard left the room for a minute and came back with a couple of cups of water, setting them on the side table.
“Hey, Reggie,” Sophie said when he came back in, “Could you do me a favor?”
“Sure, Sophie,” the guard responded. “What do you need?”
“Do you think this time you could turn off the cameras and microphone?”
Reggie eyed Mac suspiciously for a moment. Mac looked at neither of them and just sat there with a thousand-yard stare.
“Hmm …”
“C’mon, Reg,” Sophie said. “She knows you’ll be just down the hall. Presbyter Talbot’s … ‘tests’ lately have been especially hard on her.”
“If I turn them off, you can’t use anything she says as evidence. You know that, right?”
“Of course. But she deserves to speak freely without being recorded.” Sophie looked at Mac and gave her a wink. “We’re just gonna chat for a bit. A reward for good behavior, y’know?”
Mac broke her stare to look up at Sophie.
Behind her muzzle … was that a smirk?
If it was, Reggie didn’t notice.
After a few moments of silent consideration, Reggie said, “Fine. Shout down the hall for me when you’re done.”
Reggie left the room and closed the door after that. The red light on the security cameras turned off.
Now it was just Sophie and Mac.
Only … it wasn’t just them.
There was no click from above.
The microphone hidden in the ceiling light was still on.
Fucking hell! Reggie lied to her!
God above, what was she going to do now? Reggie will be listening in anyway, and he’ll be able to hear pretty much anything they say! Who knows what Bishop Ironside would do if Reggie reported her betrayal?
Sophie needed to revise her plan, right fucking now. She might never get an opportunity like this again.
But how the fuck was she going to convince Mac that she wants to defect from the paladins and help Mac escape, when they can’t even talk privately?
“So, princess,” Mac piped up, “what’s on your mind?”