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.


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Phase One
Introductions

She was an adorable little thing, standing maybe three and a half inches tall, with iridescent butterfly-style wings in pastels of pink and purple. Her face was as a child’s but odds are she was probably a hundred plus years old given how fairies are with respect to the passing of time. She sported a mop of wavy shoulder-length brunette hair with a few tiny flowerlike objects woven in for decoration and some curls along her bangs that looked self-applied, proving that girls of all size like to mess with how their hair lays naturally. She had medium-toned skin, slightly tanned, a wonderfully expressive face, and brilliant blue eyes, nearly sky blue in fact. She also sported pointed ears of the sort more commonly associated with elves, and they stuck out a good quarter-inch, which was the borderline between long and comical given the size of her head and their proportion to it. All in all, she was definitely adorable.

She was adorably upset at me, though, for she was standing in the middle of a giant round bowl of the sort usually associated with goldfish. The opening was capped by a saucer upon which I had placed a large soup can -- she was a strong little thing when she had the mind for it and had nearly freed herself before I could finish my prep work. So, knowing she couldn’t lift the weight now keeping her trapped, she resorted to alternating her facial expression between anger and sadness, perhaps hoping to scare or cute me into releasing her. Oh, she’d be released, that much was certain, but not on her terms to be sure.

She was clothed, and that I used to think was somewhat strange. Apparently fairies were adept at weaving and primitive textile manufacturing, and could produce amazingly beautiful if fragile clothing out of natural fibers. She was wearing a halter-top and pair of shorts that looked to be made of blue-dyed silk stitched together and tied into place with tiny strands of grass fiber.



I figure she’s actually more than a sprite than a fairy in terms of mythology, but as it turns out in terms of genetics there are actually five species of "fairy" known to exist and she’s a prime example of the smallest of the five. Officially she’s categorized by science as an intelligent, sentient insect with humanoid form, which to me was retarded on the part of the scientists doing the classifying. Personally I think that was science’s attempt at not looking stupid when a mythical creature turned out to have real-life inspirations. The fact that they are all endoskeletal alone means they’re not bugs, but that’s an argument for another day.

Every now and then she’d get tired of standing there looking aggravated or puppy-eyed and would try something. Sometimes it was yelling in whatever language she spoke, other times it’d be some sort of physical effort, and I think she tried magic a time or two since fairies are known for that sort of thing. Still, there she was, standing in the center of the fishbowl, wings slowly opening and closing like an idling butterfly’s while she glared at me with arms crossed.



My preparations were now complete, so I make for the saucer acting as door of the prison, lift it the slightest amount needed for my task, and push in a cotton ball soaked in Lidocaine and Menthol. She watches it plop next to her feet, and as it dawns on her what it is -- and more importantly what it contains -- she freaks out, first running and jumping and then flying randomly in any direction that carries her away from that little ball of nastiness I’d introduced. She’s literally going insane trying to get away, shrieking, screaming, crying, hitting the bowl hard enough to make the odd tinkling sound from the impacts. Once I think she flew into it with mouth open in mid-scream and hit a tooth on the glass, leaving the bowl’s interior scratched in one spot and her lip puffed and bloodied.



After about thirty seconds of this the Lidocaine vapors carried by the Menthol work their own special magic and her freakout begins to take on the speed and tone of a drunken stupor. Another forty-five seconds and the flights are reduced to uncoordinated staggers, driven more by desperation than acuity. And at the two-minute mark she collapses, sliding down the bowl’s sloped side and coming to an unconscious rest in a heap next to the cotton ball.

Time to go to work.

I quickly remove the injured, limp little cutie-pie and placed her spread-eagled onto my work surface. With some tweezers I wrap each limb with a thin piece of silicone rubber strip, at each wrist and ankle. Over that I center a small loop made from twisting a short length of Teflon-insulated #18 solid wire. This was high-dollar stuff -- interconnect wire for aerospace applications -- nothing but the best for my little cutie-pie. Each pigtail hanging from the twist before the loop went around a limb at least one complete turn, and where they met in the middle after a total of three passes I carefully bend the leads toward each other. Some quick wrist turning with two pairs of needle nose pliers twisted the wire shut around the limb in question. I snip off some of the excess wire, flatten the twisted portion against its limb, and apply a drop of cyanoacrylate glue to fuse the wire and silicone, which acts as padding, into one mass.

Earlier, I had threaded a small swivel of the sort used in fishing onto the two wires used on her legs. Each of these is installed and then receives an ‘S’ hook and a two-ounce lead sinker. My hook pliers made sure the hooks were closed properly, and this time a couple drops of quickset epoxy made sure she couldn’t force a hook should she gain some literal form of leverage.

Her arm loops receive short lengths of steel leader, also twisted and epoxied, and to them one-ounce sinkers are mounted. The leaders give her enough slack to raise her arms to roughly her shoulders’ height before encountering the weights on their ends.

She starts to come around as I attach the last sinker. My timing is ideal. I finish that up and remove the decorative crap from her hair. I even pull the artificial curls straight, just to be thorough.



I now have a perfectly healthy and alive, if not at all happy, cute little fairy that has about five times her body weight in lead weights attached. She isn’t going anywhere under her own power unless she can somehow bite through what to her scale would be three-quarter-inch rebar attached to truck tires attached to her extremities.

I sit back as she rolls her head, moaning softly. The wearing Lidocaine will leave her the gift of a monster headache for a few minutes.



She next rolls over to her side and curls up into a fetal position, still so unaware of her surroundings that she hadn’t noticed that she pulled her body to her legs thanks to the lead attached to her ankles. Normally when one curls into such a ball they bring legs to body, knees up to chest. She did it quite the other way this time as the act of drawing knees to chest slid her body instead of her legs. I smile -- the longer it takes her to notice her predicament the more amusing her response will be when she does.

She rolls back over onto her back now, and covers her face with her forearm, still moaning softly and occasionally muttering something in her form of fairyspeak. I can only imagine it to be something along the lines of "Oh my God my head hurts." Mental note: one of these days I ought to learn fairyspeak so that I can add taunts to my repertoire.

She goes stiff and still as she draws her forearm across her face and feels the weird thing on her wrist. She extends her hand and stares at her arm’s new jewelry. Up comes the other hand. She’s now staring wide-eyed at her fetters, trying to figure out just what the hell they are.

Still grasped firmly by the pain of coming round from an anesthetic, she puts her hands down and sits up. She’s still quite a bit out of sorts and looks around in confusion at the stuff on my desk left from the construction of her fetters. She rather quickly seems to realize she’s not in a container any more.



Then she sees me, leaned back in my chair so that I’m more of a background fixture than a massive looming giant in the immediate foreground. Her mouth opens and her eyes grow huge as her brain connects my face with her plight.

She shrieks in abject horror and literally springs to her feet. A quick jump up but slightly away from me, some furious wing flaps, and she’s off!

Or not.

She gets about half an inch of air before the gravity of those lead sinkers makes an impression. Or maybe it was falling flat on her face that made the impression. Either way there’s an impression on her forehead from my desk in the form of a flat red splotch. That tabletop material’s pretty resilient, after all, and fairy forehead skin’s not exactly thick and springy.

She picks herself up onto all fours, shakes off the stars and sparkles, and looks back at me, still horrified. Another launch attempt follows but this time she’s aware of the weights and heads off at a sharper angle. She struggles mightily and flaps her shiny, beautifully colored and patterned wings for all they‘re worth, and succeeds in standing one sinker up on its end. Her face is turning red by now and her wing-beats’ staccato is losing its pitch.

When she drops back to earth she’d succeeded in moving one sinker about a quarter of an inch.

She’s on all fours again, this time heaving and panting, wings lying limp and prone with their tips touching the ground by her sides. She looks back at me and whimpers, puppy-eyed. I laugh in response. That makes her pretty upset if her expression is any indication.

She now moves into a seated position, between the sinkers affixed to her legs, and starts studying the fetters that bind them to her. I can see a little redness around her ankles but no bleeding -- that silicone padding did its job. If not for the padding I’m sure she’d need a little medical attention for the damage that surely would have resulted from the Teflon wire insulation against her bare skin during that last flight attempt. Oh well, guess the rubbing alcohol will have to wait until later.

She tugs at the fetters on her ankles. Given her size and what I put on her, it’s akin to trying to unbend a handcuff made of rebar and welded into a solid piece. All she does is break a nail, which prompts what I suspect is a round of cursing and swearing in her form of fairyspeak.

She works her way from ankles to sinkers and back, trying to find some weakness in the connections that she can exploit to get the weights off her. She does this for a solid ten minutes before sitting back in a huff and whining quietly in annoyance mixed with concern. She looks back at me again, and does the most pitiful doe-eyed sad baby face she can muster given the swollen lip and red forehead. Again I laugh in response, and that sets her to crying in earnest, sitting Indian style and head in hands. I see tears starting to streak down her arms as she gets into the deep meaty full-breath sob part of her melancholy.

It’s heart melting, or at least it would be if I cared. She stops briefly and looks at me, her eyes meeting mine and saying without words "please, please let me go." My smile and eyes tell her "you’re not going anywhere." Back to crying she goes.

I think it’s dawned on her that I could release her but have no intentions of doing so, and all she can think to do at this point is vent some frustrations.



She cries for about three minutes, and gets her arms and tops of legs good and wet with tears. She reaches the post-cry sniffles stage of her bawl and resumes probing her restraints, now uncomfortably wet in addition to being unyielding and impossibly heavy, in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, some tears in the right places would let her slip free. Not a chance, though, as the soft, low-density silicone I used grips skin just as well wet as it does dry.



She glances at me again, this time looking pissed-off instead of sad. She stands up, makes some strange motions I’m not familiar with, and points at me while shouting what sounds like Latin. I watch as she gets wide-eyed -- apparently that was some sort of fairy magic and it didn’t do a damn thing. So she tries it again, with the movements more expressive and the shouting more forceful. Still, nothing happens. I’d tell her she’s in the middle of a negate field powerful enough to deny all of the magic she has at her disposal and then some -- a precaution I always take before beginning my work -- but I don’t think she understands English and it doesn’t really matter if she does. Another mental note: assemble a list of gestures and incantations used by fairies so I can know what they’re trying to cast, and if I know the right fairyspeak, to make fun of them when their casts fail.

She tries several movement-and-point-and-utter-sacred-words combinations, and tries each several times along with various permutations and mashups, and after several minutes of this she finally stops, standing there looking around with a dejected expression. The next thing to dawn on her is that there’s obviously nothing she can do about her situation.



I place a thimble in front of her, and with an eyedropper I fill it with filtered water. She eyes it suspiciously, and eyes me considerably more suspiciously. So I use the same eyedropper to squirt some of the water onto my tongue right in front of her. She’s still suspicious of me (sarcasm on) for some strange reason I cannot fathom (sarcasm off), but tries a handful of water. It’s cool, cleaner than anything she’s used to out in the wild, and when you’ve had a terribly long cry and are all dry-mouthed and scratchy it’s the best drink in the universe. She drops to her knees in front of the thimble, grabs its rim, and buries her head into it in an effort to gulp down the precious fluid. For a brief instant I wonder if she’ll drown trying to drink, so I watch, ready to save her -- no shortcuts will be allowed on my watch. I didn’t know something as small as she is could hold that large a volume of liquid!

She flips her hair back, flinging a little spray of water, still grasping the rim of the thimble with both hands like a hangover sufferer riding the porcelain bus, and lets out a deep, satisfied sigh. Aaaaaahhhhhhhhh. Apparently that hit the spot. With her hair wet she’s almost impossibly adorable to an extent that would make little girls squeal with delight, but that doesn’t matter in the greater scheme of things. She still hates what I’m doing to her but manages to flash a weak smile as if to thank me. Don’t thank me yet, little one, for this is just prep work -- the real game is yet to be played.

I turn aside to fetch some ice water for myself. While I’m gone to the kitchen she dunks both arms into the thimble and wages a valiant but futile effort to slip her hands out. When I return she tries to hide her red hands and forearms behind her back, but gets only my laugh in response. I bet she already hates that laugh. She’d hate it even more if she knew I watched the whole event on the TV in the kitchen, which was getting a live feed from the camera atop my monitor -- I pointed that at my desk before she was even brought into the room.

To her I am the all-knowing, all-seeing, evil god of death and destruction, although she’s not aware of the death and destruction part yet.



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Phase Two
Mild Discomfort

I leave her alone for a good half-hour while I have lunch. Since there's no clear-cut info out there on what fairies eat I bring her a single sample of each of the fruits I had on hand. She stares at the bounty before her with obvious hunger in her eyes, looked at me, and then takes out a blackberry like it was nothing. Of course, to scale it's like watching an anorexic model eat a ten-pound bunch of grapes in mere seconds, and she ends up with purple hands and mouth as a result.

I reach in with my napkin, and with the gentlest movements I can manage given the size disparity, wipe some of the bits of fruit from her face. She smiles as a seeming thank-you, and again she's clearly trying to be as adorable and endearing as she can. I snip out a small square of paper towel with the scissors on my desk and hold it to her on my fingertip. She takes it, and with a sudden evil look on her face she bites me right on the tip of the finger.

That was a mistake on her part, obviously. However, how that move manifest itself to her as a mistake was priceless.

I had eaten some fajita tacos for lunch, and I like my Tex-Mex to pack a wallop. To that end I'd applied a little hot sauce to them. When she bit my finger, she got a mouthful of capsaicin crystals courtesy of a microscopic droplet of hot sauce in some of the folds of my fingerprint. Again to use scale as a basis for an analogy, what she did was essentially chug a bottle of pepper spray, as biting the crystals of raw capsaicin suspended in the droplet gave her instant appreciation for what sixteen million Scoville Heat Units tastes like. One hint: it tastes like pain. Pure, unadulterated, "my face is melting off" pain. Her entire universe exploded into perceptible colors of pain. She let out a bloodcurdling scream that sounded a lot larger than its origin would suggest.

It was the funniest thing I'd seen in a very long time, but then again I am a heartless bastard if the opinions of others have any degree of credulity.

She turns so red so fast and radiates so much heat I fear she might catch fire. I can literally feel her body heat radiating onto my finger, even though it has a nice ring of tiny teeth marks on it now and is doing that "dull ache on every pulse beat" thing.

She plunges her head into the thimble again, and comes up gasping, still red and screaming. She apparently didn't know capsaicin was not water-soluble but found out fast that water won't quench the fire in her mouth. By this time I can see blisters starting to form on her lips - the capsaicin is chemically burning her skin in addition to making her tongue feel like it was on fire. Time to go to the kitchen again.

I return to find her alternating between screaming in pain and wheezing from the swelling. I grab her, forcing her arms - which were grasping desperately at her face and throat - to her sides with a downward movement of my hand, and quickly eject a drop of milk from my trusty eyedropper right onto and into her mouth. She chokes and coughs and tries not to breathe in the milk, but gets wide-eyed as the pain subsides. Capsaicin isn't soluble in water but does bind to fats, which is why a small bowl of ice cream helps a hot-sauced mouth much better than a glass of ice water. She spits out the now fiery milk, its fats heavy with bound capsaicin, and starts to recover.

After some more milk and a lot more water, she was looking kinda rough - random bruises and red marks from her fishbowl collisions, red forehead with a little bruising starting to show, purplish stained face and hands, redness under the fetters binding her to the sinkers, and a blistered and obviously burned mouth. Life was really sucking for my tiny little cutie-pie.



As she calms down, I release her, and she gasps as she sees some of the pattern of her iridescent wings on my hand. I'd rubbed some of the scales off her wings, and now I had some pastel pink and purple spots on the palm of my hand.

I see her lower lip quivering and her entire demeanor changes. I grin.

I grab a napkin and with one quick movement knock her to the desk, pinning her facedown with a finger centered over her spine just below where her wings emerge from her back. I then use the napkin to wipe her shiny pretty butterfly wings, to remove every last scale that gives them their color and pattern. She understands immediately what's going on and launches into a screaming crying foot kicking and fist pounding tantrum style fit. With the backs of all four of her wings (two to a side arranged in quadrants, like a butterfly's) wiped clean I flip her over and hold her to the desk, this time face up, to get the other side. As she cries she keeps muttering something - I suppose she's begging me to not destroy her beautiful wings. Again, I really ought to learn fairyspeak - I bet some of the conversations I could have would be worth recording for posterity.

When I let her sit up her wings are clear except for the veins, and I now have a very colorful napkin.

I hold a small front-surface mirror in front of her and when she sees her wings she gives me a look she'd not used before. I'd taken something from her and it was very, very personal. The injustices she's suffered to this point were apparently not as personal as this. She apparently felt violated by this action, more so than for anything else I'd done to her thus far.

I'd stripped her of one of her forms of beauty. And to a fairy, and a female one especially, that's a big, huge deal.

She rears her head back and slides into a doleful, morose, deep cry. It wasn't the cry of the injured of body; it was the cry of the crushed of spirit.

Excellent.

I leave her there, crying on my desk, until the next morning.

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 Phase Three
Mind Games

I awaken and meander into the lab to check on my tiny little cutie-pie. She's asleep, surrounded by the lead sinkers, and next to her is a small plate containing what used to be individual fruits. I'd seen her eat the blackberry, but during the evening and night she also polished off the three blueberries and took a few good scoops out of the small watermelon wedge. The thimble was empty as well.

She has a little potbelly from her food and drink, and is sleeping soundly enough that my breathing directly on her as I inspect her and her surroundings doesn't faze her. Since I hadn't brushed my teeth yet I'm surprised my morning breath didn't melt her wings off.

I grab my desk lamp, which is one of the magnifier types that sport the round fluorescent tube around a large glass lens, and study her physical condition for my notes. She's obviously fattened on the fruit and water, and aside from fruit-juice stains I can clearly see her injuries are minor and healing nicely. Still, if she were a full-sized human she'd look like a cute girl that lost a fistfight, but fairies are pretty resilient, as I'd come to understand through my experiments over the years.



I'd been staring at her like a giant voyeur for a few minutes when she suddenly gets a pained expression and begins to convulse as though trying to fight or fight off something. I note her eyes are closed but the eyeballs below are twitching crazily. Interesting, fairies have a REM sleep mode. That might prove useful later.

Even more interesting, she's clearly still asleep and is having a nightmare. I wonder if I'm starring in it, I think, and chuckle quietly at the thought.



Suddenly she bolts upward with a shriek, sighs as she realizes she was dreaming, and rubs her eyes. Then she looks up and sees me through the magnifier, which I imagine must make me look like I'm a hundred feet tall and about to eat her. She screams in terror. I cop a menacing look, open my mouth and lean in, moving the magnifier down toward her as I do. From her perspective it must look like she's about two seconds away from becoming some monster's morning snack.

She just about comes unhinged. A total freak-out that's so strong that she faints. I literally scared her unconscious. This is almost, but not quite, as funny as her finding that hot sauce yesterday.

While she writhes in semi-comatose shock I go about my morning rituals - including tending to my teeth and what I'm sure has to be some really atrocious morning breath - and grab some breakfast. I have a big day planned for my tiny little girl.



When she comes to, I have another sampler plate of small fruits and thimble of fresh chilly water to greet her. When she sees me she's startled - her experience is definitely fresh in her mind - and shies away from the food. I wonder if she now thinks I'm fattening her up for dinner. One, she's way too small for that, and two, fairies are tough and gamy, and their meat is definitely an acquired taste that I personally have no interest in acquiring. Still, I hear that fairy-kebabs are great aphrodisiacs. But, I digress.

I leave her alone with the food for a good couple hours. When I return I see very little evidence of her having eaten. Then it dawns on me that she's probably still full from last night. It's not like I didn't see her distended stomach earlier. Oh well, it's time to get back to the grind anyway.



I place a spool of thread in front of her, and this act draws a puzzled look from her. I then place a picture on the desk, facing her, using the spool as a stand. For me the pic's three-by-five, a standard photograph. To her it's a wall-sized poster. And what it's a picture of makes her flush white.

It's a picture of one of my test-subject storage boxes. This particular one's full of fairies, each in a small compartment of his or her own, and each bound mummy-style with only the wings and head visible.

She gasps, raising her hands to cover her mouth, and tears literally start to pour out of her face. She's shocked, appalled, and repulsed at the picture but it mesmerizes her like a really bad car wreck mesmerizes humans - you know you can't bear to look but can't turn away either. Only in this case making the car-wreck analogy work would require that you recognize cars involved in the accident as belonging to people you know and love.

The fairies in the case are her kinfolk, relatives, and neighbors. When I caught her, I also caught everyone in her village. So she gets to see everyone she knows, all nicely wrapped and neatly stored and clearly quite dead. She starts babbling and crying and touching the photograph, caressing individuals she recognizes. I assume the babbling includes the names of fellow fairies she knows.

Of course they're not dead, but she doesn't know that. I've been experimenting with fairies for a long time and while I don't know their language I do know a great deal about their physiology, including how to put one in suspended animation, theoretically for years if need be. I also know how to efficiently catch fairies en masse, and it's surprisingly easy. A basic butterfly net dipped in ether does the trick, said ether quickly knocking out every one caught in it, and at the same time expunging about the last hour of consciousness from their memories thanks to a currently unexplainable interaction between ether and fairy neurotransmitters. When a fairy I caught wakes up they literally have no memory of having been caught, placed into suspension, wrapped for display, and stored. All they know is one moment they're in the woods being themselves and the next they're in a strange room trapped in a fishbowl even though weeks, months, or even years have elapsed between these events. It's maximally disorienting and disconcerting, which works to my advantage.

When I found her village I moved through it like a tornado, catching every adult in moments and going back for younglings once the elders were secured. Out in the wild their magic is active and relatively unrestrained so I have to work quickly or I'm screwed, so it's a case of hitting the grownups hard and fast. If one were to get off a transmutation spell, for example, I'd find myself in miniature in a human-sized fairy's hand instead of the other way around. Fortunately fairy magic is acquired via oral instruction and that doesn't start until late adolescence, so once I have every adult the juveniles are pretty much unprotected. Nabbing them then basically involves smoking them out of their homes or simply peeling the home apart to reach them if they're really young.

Just in case, I also have an ace up my sleeve: a small amulet that has a potent negate spell bound to it. It negates all magic within a circle of about twenty yards in diameter. I simply toss it into the center of a village I intend to clear out, and pick it up when I'm done. As long as I have it on my person I'm pretty much invulnerable to anything they can do unless they all start packing guns or something.

Her village netted me 153 adults and adolescents, and 29 juveniles, with four of the juveniles being infants. Although she thinks they're all dead, she's the first one from that haul that I "thawed" from storage to experiment on. I have a picture with her in the box as well for the next one, and the crop from her village will give me probably about three years' worth of research material, assuming they each survive long enough to provide useful data.

The picture I showed her was only about a third of the adults and none of the juveniles, but it got the job done. She was now absolutely terrified of me. When her eyes met mine after a little while in front of the picture I see horror in them. Total, white-knuckle, bad guy jumping out of the darkness and stabbing you, horror movie horror. I had become in her eyes the god of death. Next to come would be the destruction part.


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Phase Four
The Workbench

I put away the picture and leave her alone with her thoughts until after lunch. I did after all have errands to run, and all that. When I return I find her exhausted and panting, and a quick review of my recording - that camera that drives the kitchen TV is also piped into the computer - showed her frantically trying anything and everything to free herself. She even managed to get hold of my smallest screwdriver and tried to force the hooks on her leg weights. Ah, the marvel that is quickset epoxy - like I said before, this is not my first ride in this rodeo.

She recoiled from me with another look of sheer terror which told me her thoughts in my absence were not happy ones.

I head over to the closet and bring out my specially designed workbench for fairy research. I sit down at my desk and place it in front of her. She stares at it; her look of horror at me only slightly subsided. It's a strange looking contraption really, consisting of a rounded portion made from machined plastic attached to a metal box base at a 45-degree angle. The base had two knobs for controlling the height and angle of the rounded portion, and on either side of the base were two holes, lined up along the rounded portion when viewed from above.

While she stares at the workbench I grab the weight affixed to her right arm. This makes her spin round to see what was happening, and when she sees me pick up the weight she suddenly starts pulling away, shaking her head and flicking tears around in the process. She was muttering something repeatedly and with increasing concern, and given the context and body language I imagine it was "no" repeated endlessly. I grab the other arm's weight and begin taking up the slack in the leaders between them and her wrists. She's trying to back away and pulling with both arms but obviously that won't make any real difference.

She knows what was about to go down I think, and cries while repeating what I think is a "no" and adds repeats of what I think is "please." Still, I lift her arms up over her head and slowly began to pick her up by her arm weights. I have to do this slowly, as a sudden lift would rip her arms and/or legs out of their sockets, and I don't want to do that kind of damage this early in the game.

I get her lifted up enough that the leg weights are starting to move, and her crying is being replaced with groans made through clenched teeth as her joints and muscles strain under the load. I have her suspended in space now, her limbs and body pulled taut by the weights locked in gravity's unforgiving embrace. The less than an ounce little body's got four ounces of lead dangling from it, and to scale that to human terms it'd be like getting picked up by your wrists by a crane while five hundred pounds of weight dangles from each ankle.

I slowly swing her over the contraption that is my workbench and lower her slowly onto it so that the weights attached to her ankles slide to opposite sides of the rounded post in the middle. I lower her until she's sitting on the post, and I then take the weights I'm holding and lower them behind the upper part of the post, pulling her down onto it. I drop the left arm's weight into the hole on the right side and vice versa, which pulls her arms behind and across each other so that they touch at the wrists. I then position her leg weights into the remaining holes and flip a steel crossbar over each of the holes that now held the lead weights, latching them in place.

She's now spread across a round plastic rod, grunting, crying, begging, and pleading. So, I start to turn the knobs. One of them raises the post, increasing the pressure on both arms and legs, and the other varies the angle, which manages the tension on the arms only. As I turn them I'm drawing up the slack and pulling her arms and legs tight, and along with them pressing her spine forward into her body and spreading her ribs outward as she bows across the rounded surface she now lay upon. Her legs are being pulled up and back, and her arms toward each other, and this pretty much immobilizes her. She can't move anything but her head - even her wings are pinned back, and the angles of her arms are putting creases in her top wings.

I reach a point with the tension adjustment where she's grimacing with the slightest turn, so I know she's bound tightly enough. She's breathing heavily now, her breathing made harder thanks to the way she's being pulled into an outward curve by the workbench.

Not at all coincidentally, the workbench gives me complete and uncontested access to her front, top, sides, and bottom. She grimaces and moans and struggles and tries to move and cries and complains, all to no avail.



So, what do I want to do to my hapless little victim today? I have an arsenal of things I know work on fairies, some of them painful, others fatal, and still others that make fairies want to die in the worst way without actually killing them. I've got bullet ants here, which are excruciatingly painful to humans and hideously painful to the point of death to a fairy - bullet ant toxin makes fairy nervous systems literally explode, and it's a rough way to go that's pretty gruesome to watch and takes about five minutes to happen. I've also got a few spiders here that like fairies for food. There's also the Emperor Scorpion in the terrarium in the other room - he's so docile that he's actually a pet but his sting will kill any animal with a body weight under about 20 pounds. Or I could go fetch a mantis from outside, but they have an annoying habit of eating their meals head-first and there's just not much fun in the meal dying at the start. And then there are mechanical and chemical means of instilling variable degrees of discomfort from minor to lethal.

Ah, mechanically induced discomfort, that's it, that'll do nicely. I grab my rotary tool and kit from the closet. She's too busy groaning under the strain to her joints to notice me chucking up a small lateral-bristle disc onto the rotary tool. These are great for polishing as they're made of microgrit-impregnated plastic tines in a spiral but flat disc. To human skin they're fine enough to be suitable for polishing, but to a fairy it's like getting beaten with a high-speed jump rope coated with sand. My rotary's a cable-driven handpiece connected to a motor via flexible shaft, and it's controlled by a foot pedal, so I have total control over the tool. I can work that puppy into any opening I want, and make the opening first if necessary.

I grab my mini scissors and carefully snip off her clothing by cutting the fibers that hold the fabric panels together, being careful not to snip off anything of hers in the process. She's clearly frightened by this, and starts babbling something new. I'm guessing she's asking why I'm harming her.



Fairies look young even though they're often ancient, and to an extent this youthfulness also applies in terms of thought processes. Although they're very intelligent most hundred-year-old fairy folk function at what to humans is about the level of an eight-year-old. And one of the things they do when in trouble is wonder why they're being treated badly. They want to know why because they cannot understand why unless it's explained to them, as they don't naturally think in abstract terms. Most of them don't know that there are people out there that would harm fairies at all, and this is generally because someone that would harm a fairy won't let one live long enough to report this back to their kin. So it comes as a real shock to find out there isn't really a reason, that they're being tormented simply because they were caught and stored and picked out of storage. They literally don't comprehend that there are sick fucks out there who'd crush them underfoot without so much as a blink of the eye, and certainly don't know how to cope with being handled by one - let alone handled by me.



As she cries and begs and pleads for me to not do whatever I'm doing or about to do, I tug her clothing out from under her, giving her back and bottom some light friction burns in the process. I then fire up the tool, whose high-pitched whine makes her eyes get really big and makes the now inaudible begging come fast and furious. I laugh in response, and that upsets her all the more.

I approach her with the polishing disc whirring in the handpiece, and touch her right side at roughly waist level lightly with the very outermost portion of the whirling circle of pumice-plastic. It immediately rubs the skin red and she lets out a scream I could hear over the scream of the tool. I start working her side over, making the skin a uniform shade of bright pink but being careful not to actually burn into it or rub it raw. She's struggling like mad to get away but achieving nothing.

I get up to just below her armpit and suddenly there's a sharp cracking noise. I quickly draw the handpiece away and let up on the foot pedal to spin down the tool a bit, in an effort to find out what that noise was. She stops screaming for an instant, her eyes as big as they can get them; she inhales fully, and lets out a scream that could probably be heard outside. I look closer and see that she's struggled enough to dislocate her right shoulder in an effort to pull away from the precisely applied friction burns I was giving her.

Well, crap. I lift my foot off the foot pedal and the handpiece quiets as the disc spins down to a stop. I lower the angle a bit to loosen the tension on her shoulders, grab her arm and chest, and with one quick movement and one loud pop plug the bone back into its joint. She screams another bloodcurdler and cries loudly. I've had that happen to me and know what it feels like, so for a brief instant I empathize with my tiny little cutie-pie.

I fire up the tool and work over her left side now, making it as bright pink as the right, and making her scream and shriek and cry and who knows what else that I can't hear over the tool.

I've only worked her over for about thirty seconds and she's already too exhausted to cry. She's panting heavily, looking at me and between breaths weakly asking something in a language I don't understand. I say nothing, but imagine how I'd answer if I spoke fairyspeak. No, little one, there is no reason why you're suffering so. Yes, I will be hurting you some more. No, I will not be releasing you yet. Will you die? Not yet but assure you you'll wish you could. And no, I'm not letting you die of your own accord just yet. Death is not on your itinerary right now. Perhaps later, if you amuse me sufficiently, I shall allow you to feel its embrace, but if not, it shall elude you. Yes, I am every bit the heartless and unfeeling bastard you're thinking I am, and then some. No, you've not seen anything yet - your experiences are just beginning.

I fire up the tool again and burnish the skin on her abdomen to a bright pink.

My light touch has paid dividends - she's uniformly the bright pink of a friction burn but not rubbed raw, and I didn't cut her anywhere. Despite this she's nearly unconscious, so I depart for a few to let her recover. Time is, after all, my ally and her enemy at this point.

I come back after about twenty minutes to find her moaning and sobbing. She sees me and gets fidgety and talkative, again in a questioning but decidedly frightened manner. By now I'm sure she's detected a pattern to my skin treatments and has a pretty good idea what areas are next.

I pick up the tool and she gets really excited, and not at all in a positive way.

So, I put her fears to rest - by confirming them. I carefully friction-burn her breasts and chest up to her neck and out to each shoulder. If you thought she screamed when she popped her shoulder out of joint, you ain't heard nothin' like how she went off when I worked on her areolae. I swear she could have broken my safety goggles. She wasn't that loud when I burnished the swollen skin over her reset shoulder as she did when her breasts, tiny though they are, were being brightened up. She finally has all she can stand and passes out as I finish up along her miniscule collarbones.

I back off the tension on her arms and legs, and leave the bright-pink and out-cold fairy on the workbench. Time to go meet a few friends, so she gets to recover from her ordeal. But before I depart I set up a hamster water bottle on a stand beside her so that she could hydrate while I'm gone. I'm sure she's dry again from all the crying.



When I return late in the evening she cries and moans and begs and pleads at my mere sight, which yet again draws that laugh of mine that I know she has to loathe by now. So, I grab a pair of needle noses and make another Lidocaine cotton ball.

As I reach toward her with it she smells the Lidocaine and the begging and pleading start, only much louder and more fearful in tone. She tries desperately to avoid it, to turn her head away, but all I do is move it to whatever side she's facing. Then, I press it onto her face and she struggles mightily, trying to wrest her head from the embrace of the poisoned cotton, and with her loosened restraints she arches her back in a fruitless effort to gain a slight opening through which to breathe untainted air. She's suffocating, or at least is acting as though she thinks she is. The Lidocaine does its dirty work with quickness despite her efforts, I see her terrified eyes glaze over and half-close, and yet again I have a limp little cutie-pie.

I remove her from her stressful position and place her on my desk, with another thimble of fresh water and small assortment of food. As I pick her up I note how stiff her shoulder and hip joints were and note several popping sounds as things shift back into their original positions. Since she's now buck-naked, I also provide a small square of silk fabric snipped from a clean handkerchief for her to cover with should she get a chill during the night.

And with that, I leave her for the morning.



God, check. Death, check. Destruction, check.

-------------------------------------

Phase Five
Thinking Inside The Box

I meander into the lab just after sunrise to check on my tiny little cutie-pie, and find her laying on her back with her hands under her head and the silk square pulled around her body like a blanket, gazing upward. She's sad-faced, and I can only guess that it's because instead of seeing sky and stars she gets to stare at a popcorn ceiling. I also imagine she's probably trying to figure out what the justification is for the torments with which she's been subjected thus far.

When I enter her field of vision she slowly and methodically pulls the silk over her head and lay as still as she can, as if she could hide from me. How quaint. I think she's even holding her breath in the hope that I somehow didn't notice her presence.

I head to the closet and return with another of my homemade contraptions. This one's a clear box, solvent-welded quarter-inch-thick clear acrylic, with a platform in its center that has a series of motors and small paddlewheels on it. When power is applied, the platform rotates slowly and the paddlewheels spin quickly. There are twenty of these paddlewheels, and each is set at a slightly different angle.

The lid, which has a gasketed hole in its center, is removable separately, and I do so. I then unlatch some latches and the lid splits in two save for a hinge at one side. I then dump the active ingredient into the box itself: airsoft ammunition. Roughly a thousand rounds of it in fact.

I gently grab the silk square by an exposed corner and snatch it off, prompting a short screech of surprise from the body it hides. I grab her next, and as I scoop up both her and her weights she helplessly drums her fists on my hand in protest and shouts in terror. I grab the lid and roughly line up the hole with her neck, and start to carefully close it with one hand while holding her as still as I can with the other. She of course will have nothing to do with any of this and tries her level best to wiggle free. Naturally, her efforts are amusingly ineffective as I draw the lid's halves together with her neck centered in the gaskets lining the hole.

A quick snap of the three latches and I have a fairy mounted by the neck in an acrylic plate, head sticking above one side and body hanging below. The hole and gasket are sized perfectly to hold her without choking her, and it does this as intended. She helplessly attacks the thick acrylic from underneath, at first trying to hit it, which hurts her hands. She then claws desperately at it, which is pointless since I made the halves close seamlessly once it's latched. While she's doing all this I'm bringing her to the box and carefully lowering her weights into it.

The box has an adjustable pedestal upon which its guest can stand, so I adjust it so that she can stand roughly tiptoed with the lid in place, which prevents the weights from pulling on her legs. She looks down into the box as best she can though the clear lid, unable to tilt her head below the horizontal. She whimpers in fear - she has no idea what this device is but can't imagine it's going to be pleasant based on experiences so far.

I plug in the wall wart that powers the box, and flip the power switch. The motors within spring to life. As the turntable slowly spins, the paddlewheels spin far faster, each slapping the airsoft ammo up and at her body. The impacts trigger an "oof" from her from the first few hits. She flails her arms wildly in an effort to fend off the airsoft ammo, but the effort only nets her some extra hits to the arms.



Time for another human-scale analogy. Imagine being restrained in place by the neck while fifty high school students pelt you from the neck down with basketballs at whatever speed they decide to, or are able to, throw them at. And they can, and do, hit you anywhere and everywhere, without concern for the cumulative effects of being hit lightly to moderately forcefully in the same spot. They're also indiscriminate, hitting privates and publics with equal measure.



The paddlewheels don't impart any real velocity or force but she's getting belted by probably twenty of them a second at random places from above her ankle fetters to below her neck. And since the platform upon which the paddlewheels are mounted is slowly turning, she's getting nailed from all sides. As if this isn't bad enough, the airsoft ammo is six millimeters across, which is about double the width of her arms.

After about the first five seconds she's groaning in pain as she suffers being pelted endlessly everywhere by the airsoft ammo. She doesn't cry, as she's too busy grunting from the impacts, but there's definitely some tear-gland action going on. She's also experiencing the extra fun of getting hit in areas I know fairies are sensitive at, such as her genitals, her breasts, and the bases of her wings. Those hits make her scream thanks to that extra special pain they deliver when struck. She grimaces and grunts, gritting her teeth while tears stream down her face, as the machine pounds her mercilessly from all sides.

The view into the bottom of the box is a quick-moving cloud of airsoft ammo, moving at a slow blur in all directions within. I can't even see her body for all the flying plastic pellets.

I head out to do a few of my quicker morning things, leaving her in the box with the motors running.



I come back about fifteen minutes later to find her unconscious. I shut off the motors and she hangs limp, dangling from her neck. Her body is literally one giant bruise - I cannot see any part of her that isn't purplish-red. She's even bruised on the backs and palms of her hands, and a few fingers on each hand look to be either broken or dislocated. Oh, how much that must hurt. No wonder she's out cold again.

Adding to my amusement is the sight of her wings. One of the four is missing from her limp body, broken to bits and scattered throughout and among the airsoft ammo. The remaining three wing panels are bashed to hell and back, with chunks knocked off and portions of the clear parts perforated during the onslaught. Given how bad the remaining wings look I bet her body will jettison them shortly, as fairies can eject damaged wings and regrow them in about two weeks.

What next catches my eye are her legs. Specifically, the yellow and dark blue streaks down them. She took so much of a beating that she lost control over her body functions, defecating and urinating all over herself. This annoys me, as it means having to clean the box, its mechanisms, and all that ammo.

I unsnap the lid halves and simply slide it open without lifting it, and she falls into a crumpled purple heap among the bright yellow airsoft ammo. So I scoop her out, lay her out face-up and spread eagled on my desk, and inspect her with my magnifier desk lamp. A closer inspection confirms that she was beaten quite evenly over her entire body, with a clear demarcation line at the neck and feet that look untouched. She was so evenly pounded that I can't make out individual impact marks, which tells me my design worked flawlessly as intended.

I flip her over and inspect her backside, and sure enough, a tiny red line at the base of the most damaged wing tells me her body is already unplugging the wing's blood supply in preparation of detaching it. She'll probably lose them all before she even wakes up. My tiny little cutie-pie will be traveling by foot for a while, assuming I decide to permit this.

I set the fingers - they were indeed dislocated - and reach for my wire cutters. Some careful snips and her fetters are removed. She's not going to be flying anywhere and trying to get off my desk will likely kill her, so it's safe to remove her bonds. Then again there's also the idea of being a free prisoner - she'll probably see their removal as a release but quickly realize she's still inescapably under my complete control.



I leave my customary bit of food and thimble of water for her, put the box away after cleaning it out and cleaning and storing the ammo, and head out for a long day's errands. I expect she's going to need quite a while to recover from the box. But before I go I leave her two additional presents: a small pile of lead sinkers and her cut-off fetters, and a small plastic handheld mirror that to her will be full-length. If she doesn't see her wings are missing before then, she will when she gets up.



I return a few hours later and she hasn't moved. She's still alive, but still unconscious. I set my computer up to monitor the camera and alert me to any movement, and with that I leave the lab again to do some housework.



Roughly two hours later a beep announces that the computer has noted movement. I switch my TV to the video feed from the camera, and sure enough, her position has changed. Then, it changes again - she's twitching and convulsing intermittently, as her consciousness tries to reassert itself.

Suddenly she sits up with a start, wide-eyed and screaming. I smile, as when she sat up suddenly her remaining wings stayed where they were on my desk. She ditched them all in her coma and is now not only beaten to a near-bloody pulp but also completely wingless. Oh how she'll react if merely removing the coloring from her wings violated her like it did - if that was personal, this was unspeakable, a taboo to fairydom.



Her first act is to draw into a tight ball, moaning, grimacing, crying. She's hurting everywhere. It's not as intense a pain as the hot sauce dealt her but it's almost as bad. Her entire existence is pain. I imagine it's probably so bad it's affecting and possibly even overriding her other senses. And as if the pain from being beaten like she was isn't enough, she's at the stage of injury where your every heartbeat causes changes in pressure on the injured tissues, and subsequently makes the pain pulsate.

She slowly rolls from one side to another trying to find one that hurts less, and failing since she was flogged very evenly. She changes position again, grimaces, and launches into a deep long sob. Her tears begin to form a puddle around her desk as viewed from the camera above her.

She's so messed up that she's totally unaware of being unfettered and wingless. Again I laugh, knowing that the longer it takes for her to make those discoveries the more amusing the reaction to them will be.

And to think, all the damage done to her thus far is not fatal in its severity even cumulatively - she's going to survive it all, and if given enough time she'll recover fully. Her mental state, however, is never going to be the same. To her all humans will always and forever be hideous monsters, and as far as she'll be concerned I am the aforementioned evil god of death and destruction.



I set the TV to picture-in-picture mode and watch some prime-time programming on one of the learning style channels, keeping a wary eye on her via the inset display from the camera feed to make sure she's not going to try to kill herself. It's pretty late at night before she's able to do much moving aside from the roll around and moan thing.

She finally manages to crawl slowly to the thimble and plate, drags herself up onto the thimble's rim, and gingerly sips the cool and refreshing water within. She's not even fazed by the little extra something I added to the water - a few nutrients that were discovered that promote healing in fairies, and microdoses of a couple anabolic steroids that work safely with fairy metabolisms. Not only will she survive it all but she's going to recover faster than normal, and be slightly stronger as a result.

She's been bawling nearly continuously from the pulsating agony of her airsoft-induced beating for about five minutes when she notices there's no fetter attached to her left arm. She stares at her now unrestrained arm, sniffling and moaning quietly, and then checks the right. Nope, nothing there either, so she next slides from knees to rump. This prompts a yelp from the transfer of pressure from one bruised area to another, and with it, a shift in where the pain is most intense. But now she's caressing her now bare ankles, still sniffling and moaning quietly.

She looks over at the pile of weights, and next to it the mirror, and sees herself. Her jaw drops open as she suddenly realizes what's wrong with the image of herself that she's seeing. Back her head goes, and she lets out a single deep morose moan, and with that comes more crying.

She's free of the weights, but still very much a prisoner. And she appears to know it.


-----------------------------

Phase Six
Adding Insult To Injury

I enter the lab after leaving her to recover overnight, and as I do so I note she's nowhere to be seen. Being the god of death and destruction I happened to have a good idea where she is, but I take my seat and grab the keyboard from its vertical holder next to the monitor, and bring up my notes on my tiny little cutie-pie.

After making some edits, I've actually amassed some interesting data thus far on her physical resilience in terms of survivability, but comparative weakness in pain tolerance. So far I've scared her unconscious once and subjected her to enough pain to pass out twice. She might be able to survive a lot of abuse but she apparently can't or won't do it awake.

My notes also reflect that thus far I've beaten her to a pulp, de-winged her, and friction-burned her torso, but her other injuries such as the forehead bruise and now-healed fat lip have been self-inflicted. My to-do list is still unsatisfied, however, so she will remain with me for a little longer.



I glance around my desk while checking my E-mail, noting that although my desk is very sparse it does have a few potential hiding places for an intelligent creature her size. I know of them all and they're marked with optical sensors that pop lights on a small LED panel on top of my monitor, so I can tell at a glance if one of the hidey-holes is occupied. I don't see any of the LEDs lit though, which tells me precisely where she is.

I press on the top of the monitor with one finger, slowly rocking it backward on its stand, and as I do so I feel resistance earlier than normal. A little more pressure and I suddenly start to hear a groan. A wee bit more, and a scream fills the air. I release the monitor and out behind it spills my tiny little cutie-pie - she was tucked up under the monitor behind its pedestal, so when I pressed the top and tilted it backward I crushed her in her hiding place between it and the pedestal. Like I said, this is not my first ride in this rodeo.

She rolls to an ungainly stop, caressing one arm which bears a purplish mark of the sort skin makes when pinched between blunt objects, and as she sees me she tries to run. It's just the kind of run I was hoping for, a desperate clamoring klutzy trip-over-your-own-feet affair devoid of any intended direction other than away. She has nowhere to run to, but runs nevertheless, and it's strictly to get away from me, not to head toward some goal. Her entire focus right in this instant is putting distance between herself and me. Her pinched arm and yesterday's beatdown are not even entering her mind. I grin. Perfect.

I don a rubber exam glove and reach for her, and she shrieks in horror as she sees me coming. The running gets even more desperate and erratic and she's falling to her hands and knees more than actually running. Of course her inability to run well is partially due to her having wings, as fairies only use their legs to stand and walk short distances, and almost never need to run since they can fly. She's so scared that she even clamors on all fours in desperation. The look on her face is also one of abject terror - eyes at maximum size, pupils as big as they get, mouth open in screams of fear. It's like watching a claustrophobic bolt from a windowless elevator.

After about fifteen seconds of her trying to evade me I back her into a corner. As I reach to grab her she screams bloody murder, fists clenched and up by her neck. She spontaneously wets and soils herself as well, all out of fear, which is in part why I donned a glove first.

As I pick her up I have her held so that only her head peeks from the top of my hand. She's screaming like mad, and I suddenly see her look down at my hand. She rears back and opens wide to bite but stops short - a few sniffs tells her the glove has a tiny strip of hot sauce rubbed on it. Experience tells me to be prepared for certain actions, and biting is definitely one of the more common things a fairy in the hand will try. The scent instantly reminds her of her first run-in with the sauce I like and she goes back to the screaming-in-terror thing.



I take her for a walk into the bathroom, as I have my next little surprise there waiting. I drop her into a narrow but tall container she can't quite reach the top of, and adjust the temperature of the water in the sink to slightly above room temperature. She's bawling and utterly terrified but watching, hands and nose pressed to the milky plastic so she can sorta kinda see what's going on. The glove's served its purpose so I remove and dispose of it.

I grab the plastic container and place it under the faucet, blasting her with far more water than she's used to being hit by at one time. I fill the container up to about her waist, and set it back on the counter. Off with the water, out with a knife and a small soap bar of the sort used for traveling. She's standing very still in the warm water, terrified of what might be coming up next, as I whittle off some soap shavings into the container. She picks up one and sniffs it before dropping it and making a disgusted face. I guess that means she doesn't like my choice in soap. Oh well, I didn't ask for any opinions.

She's going to really hate this part I think, as I snap the lid onto the container. She's got about two hours' worth of air in there if I was to leave it alone, but that's not the purpose of this exercise. I pick up the container with its fairy and water and soap shaving contents, and start to shake and swirl the water around inside. The container's only about two inches in diameter and six long so she's able to extend her limbs and keep herself centered as the water and soap swish around and foam up. I tilt it back and forth, give it short brief gentle shakes, and even do a maraca impression briefly, until all I see of the insides is some nasty looking water and a lot of foam.

I pop the top and replace it with a special strainer style top, and then upend it to dump out the water. She emerges from being hidden from view by the foam and gets just about dumped onto her head, landing upside-down on the lid while coughing and sputtering. I turn the faucet back on to get it to the same temp, and hold the container underneath its stream, this time filling it up. The look on her face as she realizes the water will reach past the lid is priceless - nobody in a horror flick has ever conveyed that much fear via facial expression alone. Sure enough, my tiny little cutie-pie is suspended in a container full of water, cheeks puffed out from the lungful of air she's holding, beating on the side of the container for all she's worth.

I upend it to drain it, and do the fill-and-drain a few times to get all of the soap out. Each time, she ends up upside-down on the lid, half choked on water and coughing it out.

But at least now she's cleaned of her excreta and the last few days' worth of grime. Even her hair looks nicer. And she smells like the chemical equivalent of a quiet meadow instead of having the weird form of fairy funk that she'd been slowly developing since being brought around from storage.

I pop the lid and dump her out onto my hand, making sure to prevent her from making a break for it. In here there are no protections to prevent her falling to the tile floor, and that'd surely break her legs and kill her in a hurry.

I press her onto a small chamois pad at the waiting on the counter, and she's silent but sniffly as she notes that I am in fact drying her off with it, holding her face-down with a finger between the small of her back and where her wings attached. I'm holding her down with a finger while using a corner of the chamois to towel her off, and when I release her she flips over of her own accord, still apparently terrified but at least understanding now what was going on.

I fold her into the chamois and head back to my desk, unloading her from it with the somewhat inglorious act of releasing one side and rolling her unceremoniously off onto the desk. This prompts some shaky-voiced protests and yelping, which I silence with a glare.



I next grab her again, and once again I hold her with only her head peeking up from the top of my hand. She notes the glove is missing, does a quick sniff, and bites down hard on the middle of my index finger. I make no noise but I'm sure my expression is indicating that she's suddenly inflicting pain on me, an act for which there will for a certainty be consequences.

With my other hand, I reach for a small nose hair trimmer. As I hold it up and turn it on, its sharp buzz makes her look up from her efforts to carve a chunk out of my finger. As soon as she lets go, I rock my thumb forward, essentially pinning her head in place by pressing on the back of her neck, and start to carefully shave off her hair with the trimmer. I feel her trying to struggle but I have more muscle tissue working my thumb than she has in her entire body, so her efforts are amusingly futile at best, or would be amusing had she not annoyed me by biting my hand.

She sees the first clump of hair fall off and again her lower lip starts to quiver. In about thirty seconds she's a fuzz-topped, wingless fairy. I drop her unceremoniously to the desk from a height of about five inches, which clearly hurts her ankles and makes her spill sideways. She looks up, and then looks at the piles of her hair scattered on her desk.

To add insult to injury, I get the mirror and show her what a bald fairy looks like. Her expression tells me all I need to know - I just stripped another form of beauty from her. Compared to how she looked when we started our time together, she looks absolutely horrid, a tiny shell of that tiny little cutie-pie in the fishbowl. She drops to her knees, buries her face in her hands, and mourns her loss.



I step out of the lab and make a quick trip to the kitchen. When I return I set a bottle in front of the still sobbing little cutie-pie. She looks up, hands still up to cry into, and as she does I wipe a large drop of my favorite hot sauce from that bottle across her face. I hit her eyes and lips, and in the process inadvertently push a little up each nostril and some into her open mouth.

She starts to gasp and choke. She screams long and loud and deep as the capsaicin burns into her face like battery acid. Her pain is so intense and so all encompassing that she doesn't even try to stand - she just claws at her face and screams as continuously as her lungs' air capacity permits. It's a gurgling scream, partially from the swelling and blistering and partially from obstructions courtesy of the inactive ingredients of the hot sauce.

I give her about thirty seconds of the special kind of torment that is hot sauce before basically half-drowning her in milk. Once she starts to recover, I leave her to contemplate her actions and the response they garnered. Hopefully for her sake she doesn't try something that dumb again.


-----------------------------

Phase Seven
Swan Dive

After leaving her alone for a few hours to give myself time to become non-annoyed, I check on her via my camera feed, and sure enough, she's curled up into a tight ball and sobbing inconsolably. How much of that is from her face full of hot sauce is debatable but I'm certain at least part of her sorrows are physical in inspiration. Having been exposed to pure capsaicin I can attest personally to its affects, so yet again I can empathize with my tiny sad hairless wingless little cutie-pie.

As I walk into the lab she hears me and I see her head poke up and whip around to seek me out, but even though I can see her clearly she's not reacting to the sight of me. As I step closer I see why - the hot sauce has blinded her. Well, in a sense anyway - her eyelids have swollen shut. As I pull my chair back to take a seat I also note she's breathing through her mouth and crying between breaths because her nostrils have also swollen shut. She stays deathly still with her head up, listening, as I take my seat and roll up to the desk. I laugh, and my laugh at first startles her and immediately thereafter sends a visible shudder through her tiny frame. She's deathly afraid of me and that was bad enough when she could see me, but now that I am an unseen monster making noises in the darkness I'm frightening multiplied by untold orders of magnitude.

She shrieks once and starts another desperate flight to get away from the sounds of my laughter. This time, however, she makes no attempt to run but gropes out in front of herself to feel the route she faces while trying to crawl away as fast as she can given the circumstances. She's whimpering and whining as she tries, a sure sign of the fear gripping her mind as the bogeyman in the darkness haunts her imagination as well as her reality. An idea flashes into my mind, and I roll backward in my chair over to the futon against a nearby wall.



Yes, I have a futon in the lab, even though the lab is a converted spare bedroom in my house. The reason? Well, sometimes I conduct research that requires regularly timed action on my part or requires I be close enough to intervene in a hurry. My home's pretty big and my bedroom's upstairs, so at best it would take me a couple minutes to dash to the lab from there without braking my neck coming down the stairs. By keeping a tolerably comfortable bed in the lab I can be seconds away from anything that requires that kind of response time. Normally I leave it in couch mode, but keep some soft, comfy pillows and a folded blanket on it so that when I need to do so I merely unfurl it to bed mode and crash. I grab one of the pillows, place it on my lap, and roll back over to the still blindly groping along little cutie-pie.



By this point she's almost out of easy reach, so I reach out and grab her by the hips with my thumb and index finger. As I do she lets out a scream. I drag her slowly backward, and she claws at the desk while kicking wildly, trying to gain some traction and hopefully shake her tormentor loose. I've got her back to just about where she started when I cease my pull and loosen my grip ever so slightly. She gets some purchase and scrambles free, and takes off like a shot. Well, more or less. This time she's not groping first to feel out her path, she's doing a full-bore crawl as fast as she can in a somewhat straight line. She's whimpering loudly now, the desperation heavy in her noises.

I reach out and grab her left foot by the ankle as she's crawling away. She shrieks in horror again, and as I drag her backward again I hear the scraping of her fingernails dragging on my desk's surface. This time, though, I rotate her as I pull her, slowly turning her round. When I loosen my grip again she's headed more or less toward me instead of away. Again, by my permission she gets free and scrambles forward, only this time forward isn't the direction she thinks it is.

Suddenly her right hand finds free space instead of desk and she stops abruptly. She feels along and discovers she's at an edge - the edge of my desk. From there it's thirty inches, or about eight or so times her height, to the carpeted floor. If it were tile a fall would be very likely fatal, but she's at risk of a survivable but crippling injury falling onto Berber carpet with three-quarters of an inch of padding under it. The stuff might feel good underfoot but it's really bad to land on.

I toss the pillow from my lap onto the floor under the desk where she's hanging onto the edge. As I do so she's holding onto the edge with her left hand and reaching blindly with her right for something, anything, to indicate she can continue her flight from the unseen monster.

Time to drive her over the edge, methinks. In this case, literally.

I reach past her and pretend my hand is a great and evil five-legged spider that jumped down to the desk from above, and I convey this image to her by dropping my hand fingertip first onto the desk, my fingernails making a sharp clacking sound against its surface. This makes her stop reaching and turn back, looking with blinded eyes. She holds her breath, head slowly panning back and forth, listening.

I move my fingers like a spider's walk, tapping my fingernails on the desk as I do, and move my hand slowly toward her. She whimpers once as she hears the sound.

I tap faster and more forcefully, and while I still move toward her slowly the tempo change and increasing strength of the vibrations she feels makes her think a monster is running toward her, with what she can only imagine as malice on its mind.

She screams, whines once, grabs the desk edge with both hands and launches herself off the edge for all she's worth. As she starts the descent into the unseen and unknown she shouts something in extended and terrified tones, and I can only imagine it being fairyspeak for "oh-h-h-h-h shi-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-it!"

At her scale it's about a two-second fall to the pillow below, but if time dilates to stressed-out fairies like it does to stressed-out people it probably feels like a minute's freefall to what has to be in her mind a certain death.

She plops into the soft comfy pillow with a yelp of surprise. The yelp is rapidly replaced with screams of pain, however, as she lands hands first and instantly dislocates that shoulder again. I reach down and grab the pillow and screaming blinded fairy, and quickly reset her shoulder. She rolls around on the pillow screaming from the pain of that for about ten seconds, before passing out again. My tiny little cutie-pie definitely has a limited pain tolerance level.



I place her spread eagled on my desk and do another inspection for my notes. Her bruising is already healing nicely and is now probably just a dull ache and a really, really bad memory. At this point her only real concerns revolve around that shoulder that's popped out twice now, and of course her swollen face thanks to a case of capsaicin induced chemical burns. All in all she's in decent shape. I even note the beginnings of wing buds on her back when I inspect that side of her.

Her emotional state is nowhere near as good as her physical state though, injuries notwithstanding - she's a nervous wreck and so scared of me it's difficult to describe accurately. She's been crying to various extents for about a week now, and only partially due to physical pain. And my laugh, oh how she must loathe my laugh with every fiber of her being by now. I bet if I were to record it and play it back on a continuous loop she'd throw herself into a whirring blender to get away from it. Mental note: I need to make a sound file of my laugh and see how she likes a few hours' exposure to it on replay, assuming she doesn't kill herself before then that is.



I build up a cage of sorts by building walls around her with some plastic building bricks I keep on hand for amusement and light-duty robotics construction, and a trip to the kitchen nets some food and drink for her when she comes to. The walls are eight inches tall and porous due to the bricks I use, but no opening is large enough for her to fit through. Ledges around the top dissuade climbing, and with that I leave her to recover from her latest round of injustices.

The water's spiked again, this time with anti-inflammatories in addition to the vitamins, nutrients, and steroids I fed her earlier. Hopefully a little reduction in the swelling will come from it.

This time I give her a whole day off, only showing up to replace her food and drink, and by nightfall she can see pretty well again. My tiny little cutie-pie was rapidly heading back to semi-normal.

--------------------------

Phase Eight
The Chamber

After giving her more time without my presence than she's had since coming out of storage, I wander into the lab. As is now the norm, my mere presence makes her panic, only instead of trying to run - which has never worked for her up until now - she's taken to curling into a tight sobbing whining trembling ball and hoping beyond hope that I'll not torment her.

I head to the closet, this time to fetch my largest creation, a one-foot-cube monstrosity affectionately named "the chamber." The top two-thirds of the cube are clear, aside from a myriad of wires and parts visible under a layer of polycarbonate.



Viewed from the top down, it's a clear box with its walls and floors studded with brass tacks laid out in a tight grid. A clear perforated lid secures to the top, and attached to it are additional electronics, with a ribbon cable tying the lid into the control circuitry below the gridded floor.

I plug it in - it doesn't use a wall wart, it has its own on-board power supply that accepts home AC for power - and a small LCD panel on its sloped control panel displays software and hardware versions while an illuminated red button to the right of the LCD flashes invitingly.



She is now recoiling in sheer terror from me, and seeing a new gizmo she's recoiling from it as well. I can't blame her really, as thus far every invention I've shown her ended up harming her greatly in some way.

I remove the lid and reach for her, and this naturally prompts panic and screaming and efforts to escape. Also naturally the efforts are futile as I grab her and drop her somewhat roughly into the box. I put on the lid, snap its catches into place to secure it, and plug in the ribbon cable hanging from it. Meanwhile she's dashing around the box, searching for an exit with sheer terror in her eyes and a fear-filled whimpering coming from the depths of her soul.



I set a few options on my chamber's digital controls and press the invitingly illuminated button. A few beeps announces a self-test and then the floor begins to glow green, lit from beneath by a grid of tiny LEDs each set diagonally between the brass tacks poking through the plastic floor.

She looks at the floor, a look of deep concern replacing her initial fight-or-flight style panic. And as she stares, a section of the floor roughly centered under her turns yellow as the controller located a few inches under her feet sees, by way of electronic eyes in the lid, that something is there and hasn't moved lately. After about ten seconds the section is now glowing red and both she and I hear the telltale rising-pitch whine of a capacitor charging. She's looking around - only the part she's standing on is red; the rest is green.

Suddenly, the floor section under her flashes red twice and a single sharp ticking sound announces the delivery of fifteen hundred volts to the grid of tacks. This instantly shocks the soles of her feet and makes her launch straight up with a terrified and pained shriek, hitting the top of her head on the rather tightly secured lid. She lands on her ass with a painful-sounding thump, and whines. She plants her head in her hands and starts to bawl, and I'm sure her feet feel like she's gone for a walk on freshly deposited lava. Without warning, the floor around where she's sitting suddenly glows yellow instead of green.

She catches a glimpse of this, leaps to her feet, and steps quickly off the yellow portion of the floor, and sure enough the yellow area reverts to green. She stares at it, standing very, very still as though hoping whatever it is that was going on somehow couldn't see her, and when the part floor currently under her switches to yellow she looks up at me through the lid, whining and babbling something in terrified fairyspeak. She steps off the yellow again, and again it reverts to green.

I see the light come on in her mind, and she walks around the box slowly, staring at the floor. Because she's moving, none of it changes color.

She walks around like this for a moment or two and then stops, and sure enough, after a brief pause that spot of the floor turns yellow. I smile, knowing she's testing the chamber to see if it works like she thinks it does. Presently it changes to red and we both hear the charging again. Then, two flashes and a pop and she just about does a back flip from intense electrical shocks to the feet. Idea confirmed, I think.

She lands in an ungainly manner on her stomach, starts to sob, notes a sudden color change beneath her, and springs to her feet. She starts to walk around the chamber, still sobbing.

I laugh, and the sound of my laughter sends shivers of fear through her like shockwaves from a great explosion. I can actually see her react physically to the laugh she hates so much.

Her long march has begun.



I set up the computer to record her marching in both real-time and time-lapse forms, and head out to leave her to the chamber's care. I have quite a bit to do today and most of it will be away from the house. Besides, she's got a long walk ahead of her.



I return roughly ten hours later, worn out from my day's activities. A quick check of the video feed shows me that she's still trudging around inside the chamber, so I grab a shower and see to dinner.



After another hour or so I drop in to check on my tiny little cutie-pie. By now she's been walking almost constantly for twelve hours. A faint acrid smell, ozone mixed with burned flesh, tells me she's stopped several times throughout the day, and the zap counter on the chamber's LCD reads 21, so she's already been nailed quite a bit. As she walks I note her right arm is curled up close to her body and she's dragging one foot slightly, and on closer inspection I see that her right foot is missing its pinky toe.

Her demeanor is the worst it's been thus far. I've seen happier emo kids. She's also physically exhausted, and at this point is dragging herself along purely on willpower. Every step with her right foot triggers a grimace, and she's letting out long and deep moans as a result of her pain, both physical and mental.

She looks up and sees me peering down into the chamber. She stops, stares up at me for a second, and drops to the floor of the chamber into a tight ball, letting out a shriek at the same time that would make a banshee look for earplugs.

The floor almost instantly goes yellow. What she probably didn't know is that the longer the chamber is powered up, the shorter the trigger timer delays are. As the fairy walking around within tires and slows down they are actually more likely to be shocked, as the chamber drives its prisoner to move faster and faster over time.

In two seconds it goes red and I hear it charging. She does as well, and inhales for another scream. Before she could fire it, though, the floor flashes and pops her pretty much all the way down one side of her body. She screams in agony and the acrid smell of burned fairy punctuates the air. The impulse causes her muscles to spasm so violently she throws herself across the chamber, landing facedown on the far side.

Instead of getting up, she lets out a long sob. The floor goes yellow. She looks down, still in mid sob, and it goes red. I'm impressed - she's gone so long that the timers are currently running at 1.5 seconds to yellow, 2 seconds to red, and 1 second to shock. It flashes and nails her up and down her entire body. It pockmarks her cheek, singles her jaw, and burns a grid pattern across her breasts and abdomen. Her entire body goes stiff and straight for that instant, and I'm not sure but I thought I saw a wisp of smoke.

She screams in pain, but again starts to cry instead of getting up. The floor goes orange now, which prompts an uh-oh from me - orange means it's kicking in a second charger circuit and that ups the power delivered to the grid. She and I both hear a relay engage and the charging resume, and when it nails her again it does so at four times the power of the impulses it was delivering before. This time it pops while she's looking down, and thus blows off the tip of her nose. I also see the third finger on her left hand pop like a firecracker as the pulse of high voltage turns it into a fuse. The muscle spasms this time fling her up to the ceiling and she lands on her back, grimacing and moaning. This I think is far worse pain to her than the hot sauce.

The floor is still orange and I hear another charge. She tries to roll over to get up, and as she's halfway through that move she gets nailed again. This time I definitely see wisps of smoke as she takes another powerful jolt across large parts of her body. She tries to sit up and gets nailed yet again, this time across the butt cheeks and backs of both legs. The spasms this causes pitch her into the wall with surprising force, and she hits the floor of the chamber upside-down, sliding down into a crumpled heap. Her body's littered with electricity burns now, and as she finishes falling the chamber nails her yet again, burning her in several dozen more places and destroying another finger while muscle spasms launch her. This time though she simply ragdolls across the chamber, unconscious.

She lands in a heap and it fires again after another few seconds, blowing off about half of her right ear and left thumb and flicking her across the chamber again. Another hideously bad landing, another pop after a few seconds, more damage and bits blown off and her limp body ragdolling across the chamber. The smell of charbroiled fairy and ozone hangs in the air. She's basically ping-ponging around the chamber at this point, and the chamber's dumping strong enough shocks to hurt me pretty well, so she's got no chance at all within its prolonged embrace. This is obviously the point in the chamber's programming where it begins efforts to finish off its victim.

I reach down and press the red button, and the chamber powers down. I think it's done its job rather well.

The question now is whether my tiny little cutie-pie survived it.

I undo the lid catches, remove it, and scoop out my cuie-pie for another full body inspection. She's got loads of spot burns now, and is missing most of one ear, a chunk of her chin, part of her nose, a thumb, four fingers, and two toes. The soles of both feet are practically burned to the bone, which makes it surprising she was still walking. She's also got two burn marks I bet are memorable assuming she survives - one on the left breast's nipple and the other almost dead center over her labia.

On the upside, since high voltages blew off her missing body parts, the wounds are all cauterized and none of them are bleeding. There's no telling how much nerve damage she took though.

Amazingly, I check for and actually find a pulse. She's alive, more or less. She's a tough one, even though she's out cold again.



I clean and bandage her up and leave her to recover on a soft pad, under a small silk handkerchief fragment that will serve as a blanket for her. She's going to need some attention in the morning. Fortunately for her, though, the same mechanisms that allow her to regrow wings also mean she'll regrow the parts that were blown off. They'll just take longer. Hopefully my additions to her water over the last few days will speed that process up a bit. Can't have her dying of an infection or being permanently crippled this late in the game, after all.


----------------------------------

Phase Nine
Convergence

The next morning sees me entering the lab bright and early to check on my charbroiled tiny little cutie-pie. She hears me enter and does nothing in response but try weakly and unsuccessfully to draw up into a ball. She does manage to get about halfway into round before the agony of electricity-damaged muscles alerts her to that being a bad idea. She grunts and grimaces and slowly returns to lying relatively flat.

As I take my seat she's staring up at me with utter fear in her eyes but a blank expression on her face. She's either too far gone mentally to care whether I kill her or is in far too much pain to worry about being scared of me. Either one works for me, actually.

I pull back the "blanket" and start to check her. She seems to either understand this or is too weak to fight, and just lays there limp as I prod and probe and check. Those eyes are still screaming in terror though, even though the body's silent and not putting up any sort of resistance.

I remove her bandages and check her wounds, applying a light dab of a homemade salve I whipped up that's fairy-friendly. It's got a tiny bit of Lidocaine in it to numb an injury, a little anti-inflammatory action to reduce swelling, some antimicrobial ointment mixed in for fending off infection, a cocktail of vitamins to promote healing, and some other odds and ends to help out harmed fairies, all mixed into a petroleum-jelly base. I dab it onto her facial wounds very gingerly, and the smell of the Lidocaine makes her fidget, but it's oh so soothing to burned flesh and that calms her down pretty quickly.

She lies there and allows me to inspect her fully, and makes no effort to prevent my applying that wonder-salve to her various burned spots, and once I complete the wound care I dress her damaged hands carefully, making sure the tiny stubs that were fingers yesterday morning are wrapped separately. Otherwise, as she grows new fingers they'd grow together, effectively ruining the usability of her hands.

I roll her over and do the same to her backside, and note something potentially worrisome for her: the base of her wings is missing - when she took a hit across the back it blew off the wing base, leaving a crater that only barely covers her spine, and from the looks of things wiped out two of the muscle bundles that operate the wings. I give that area a little more salve.

She might not ever regrow her wings. Wow, is she ever going to be upset when she figures that out!

I roll her back over and leave for a few. When I return I bear the now-customary fruits and water, and of course the water's tweaked a bit to give her recovery a boost.



This wound management process pretty much becomes her life for a while.

It takes three days before she can sit up, and another two before she can attempt to walk. She's marginally functional in a week. I didn't kill her but apparently came damned close. I think I need to tone down the super mode in the chamber, and add a separately invoked "finish you off" mode to its programming.



After about two weeks of work she's back to herself enough to cower in trembling fear at the mere idea that I might be coming into the lab. So, I Lidocaine her to sleep and prep another rig. She's going to really love what I have in mind, in part because it's the final entry on my to-do list for her and once it's done she's retired from my testing regimen.



She wakes up from the Lidocaine, and is greeted by the lovely headache she knows so well. It's dark but she can see somewhat, and quickly determines that she's in a fishbowl with some sort of cloth over it.

Suddenly the cloth is taken away and the brightness momentarily hurts her eyes. Yep, it's the same fishbowl she was in all those days ago, down to the small scratch she made with a tooth.

What catches her eyes once they adjust to the light level is that there's a large white foamboard panel just outside the bowl, and it's blocking her view of part of the desk. She sees me, shudders, and if her body language is any indication seems to note that I'm doing something behind that foamboard. I see her watching me with a look of grave concern and laugh, and although the sound's muffled by the bowl and its weighted saucer lid, her reaction tells me she heard it more than well enough.



Satisfied with my work behind the screen, I remove the foamboard.

She sees a second fishbowl now, and inside it is another fairy. She flushes white.

It's her sister. Or at least I think it's her sister since the new arrival looks very much like my little cutie-pie did in the beginning.

At first sis doesn't recognize her, which is hardly surprising given the partially-healed face, missing wings, and various other injuries, but as she presses against the bowl she screams and cries and beats the glass with her mangled fists and tries desperately to communicate with her sister. Recognition comes after a moment, and at first sis is happy to see her. The happiness quickly turns to shock as sis notes how badly hurt she is. Both fairy sisters are by now very pale and scared and crying, and try to shout to each other. I squelch any efforts in that direction with a small fan, its noise neatly obscuring any sound that could otherwise get from one fairy to the other.

I let them stare at each other, each with hands and nose pressed against her respective fishbowl - for a few moments while I prep my next surprise.

I lift the lid on the bowl holding my tiny little cutie-pie, and drop in a cotton ball. This one's soaked in sodium hypochlorite - a.k.a., chlorine bleach. She sees it coming and jumps clear of it, and sis watches her try to get away from the cotton ball, somewhat confused.

After about five seconds the bleach fumes start to do what they do to fairies, which is to dissolve everything but bone. Chlorine bleach is very, very nasty to fairies. Something about their body chemistry reacts violently to it. It's roughly akin to human skin reactions to exposure to sulfuric acid, except that even the fumes are incredibly destructive. To make matters worse, my cotton ball is soaked in pure sodium hypochlorite, not the heavily diluted watered-down "bleach" sold in stores. This stuff came from a chemical supply company, and I had to jump through some pretty annoying regulatory hoops to get it. It can give a human a pretty nasty burn, so a fairy stands not a snowball's chance in hell against it.

At first she screams as the bleach fumes begin to blister her skin, and once the fumes start attacking her lungs and mucous membranes the screams are so intense I can hear them over the fan. At the thirty-second point her by now bubblewrap-esque skin is peeling off in sheets, and as she stands there screaming the agony of the end moments of a horribly painful death, the fumes work their way into her muscles and internal organs. As sis and I watch, her muscles begin to break down and she collapses, expiring with a sad gurgle and terror in her eyes just before they rupture. It only takes about two minutes for her to melt into a pile of bubbling, semi-fibrous goop draped over a pile of tiny bones in the bottom of the fishbowl, with sis watching in horror the entire time.

Like I said, chlorine bleach is very, very nasty to fairies. When I clean out the fishbowl I'll save and preserve the skeleton.



My tiny little cutie-pie is now officially retired.



I head out of the lab for a bathroom break, leaving the two fishbowls next to each other. When I return there's fresh vomit in sis' bowl and she looks green.

I lift the lid on sis' bowl and drop on a cotton ball soaked in Lidocaine and Menthol. Time for the next tiny little cutie-pie to begin the experiment regimen I have planned.





Phase One
Introductions



The end.

----------------------------------


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.


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