Saturday, July 13, 2013

Snared, Sucked and Slurped - Pt3: Slurped

It's the final part of the little Sea Anemone girl tale.  And now we're onto the... er...  Well I guess this screen from Monster Girl Quest might be appropriate:


If you see this very bad things are happening to poor Luka

Yep, time for the Sea Anemone girl to get her delicious breakfast.  If vore ain't your thing you might want to look away now and imagine your own ending with Rob having plenty of naughty happy-happy joy-joy fun with his new gal on the sea bed.


Snared, Sucked and Slurped - Pt3: Slurped

Rob watched and felt it happen through a thick, comfortable fog.  Like it was nothing more than a weird erotic dream.

She gently kissed his nipple and tickled the nub with a moist tongue.  Her lips left behind a tingling warm ring of pleasure.  Lascivious tentacles turned inwards and rubbed against his body in lewd caresses.

“Time to gobble you up.”

The fleshy base of her body swayed and pulsed.  Rob slid around inside a moist elastic cavity as bands of muscle squeezed and manipulated him.  His erection pressed up against an indentation that gave and drew his entire length into a warm tunnel lined with a thick layer of flesh as soft as the most luxurious of cushions.  Muscles squeezed and he felt peristaltic suction ripple up his engulfed member.

His gasp of bliss was caught by her mouth as she wrapped her luscious lips around his in a kiss.  Again he felt that strange prickling pleasure, like microscopic needles were injecting an aphrodisiac drug into his lips, causing them to swell and magnify the pleasure he felt a hundredfold.  He felt the same sensation across his chest as she pressed her soft boobs against him.  His body went slack and she held him in her arms as the stub of her sea anemone body swelled and gulped more of him down into the fleshy sac within her.

She pulled back as the thick cushion of flesh lining the orifice at the center of her body stretched over his shoulders and then contracted to form a collar around his neck.  Rob felt strangely relaxed, as if he was wallowing in pleasure.  Her warmth and softness enveloped him completely.

“All caught now,” the girl said.  “Time to suck out your baby juice.”

Her lower body swelled and he felt a rippling pull on his cock that travelled down his shaft until he felt it in his balls.  His penis was buried in a fleshy cuff that squeezed and tugged and took him to peaks of pleasure he hadn’t known existed.  The sea anemone girl’s black eyes shone in triumph as she lay back on a round fleshy stump that resembled a bed.  She rocked and swayed with the pulsing motions as her inner walls massaged and caressed him.

He heard gurgling sounds as warm wet mucus was secreted from her inner walls and rubbed into his naked flesh.  More fluids trickled out of the moist lining, forming puddles around his feet.  It felt like a luxurious bath.  He was sitting in a luxurious hot bath and fucking a gorgeous girl with big round titties.

The girl moaned and her big breasts rocked and swayed with her body as she thrust against him.  The fleshy base of her sea anemone lower body swelled and throbbed with greater force and frequency.  Rob was rocked back and forth by its motions, but barely noticed as the sensation of his aroused cock plunging in and out of a deliciously juicy vagina overwhelmed everything.

The girl threw back her arms and head and released an unfettered cry of climax.  Rob’s cock sank all the way into the fleshy cuff and was held there as rippling undulations of soft pressure tugged at him...tugged and sucked until a dam broke and a wave of ecstatic pleasure flowed from his balls and he emptied their contents into her quivering flesh.

And that wasn’t the end of it.  The sea anemone girl sat up on her elbows and stared at him with eyes like black pebbles.  Her upper body rocked with the motions beneath her—slow steady throbs that enveloped Rob’s sex and pumped semen out of him with irresistible pulses.  His body convulsed with helpless ecstasy as each pulse triggered another orgasm.

* * * *

The sea anemone girl lay back and relaxed.  The human quivered helplessly within her as her venom seized control of his reproduction organs and stimulated them into overdrive.  Her body pulsed with slow, rhythmic throbs as she pumped the semen from his body.

Good seed.  It would give her many young.

His body empty now, she expanded and drew the rest of him down inside her.  Her tissues secreted other fluids and she throbbed and churned as she rubbed them into his flesh.

Seed wasn’t all she needed.  She needed meat, to give her children strong bodies.  The human would feel no pain.  His mind was already gone, burnt out by the pleasures she’d induced in him.

She curled up and folded inwards.  To the outside eye she looked no different to any other boulder lying on the sea bed.  Even the coastguard retrieving the wreck of Rob’s boat didn’t notice she was there.

After a month of lying dormant she opened out like a flower.  Her central cavity gaped and a jet of tiny wriggling motes was expelled up into the water column.  They formed a cloud spreading out across the bay, each looking for an inviting spot to settle and grow.

THE END

*burp*

Saturday, July 06, 2013

Snared, Sucked and Slurped - Pt2: Sucked

Onto the naughty stuff (NSFW, go away if you aren't 18, other appropriate warnings, etc, etc) as the Sea Anemone Girl (sort of) gets her own monmusu delicious breakfast.

Snared, Sucked and Slurped - Pt2: Sucked

Rob kept trying to swim.  He had a big pair of lungs and he’d filled them full of air, but it was running out.  He felt a tickling sensation in his chest and throat, one that would grow and grow until his pipes burst open and he gulped down a lungful of salt death.

His foot brushed up against something that felt soft and squishy.  Reflexively, he kicked out, but that unpleasantly pliant something had already wrapped around his ankle.  As he thrashed, another sinuous tentacle circled his waist.  Another curled around his wrist and more were unfurling hungrily to reach up and snare his limbs.  Lying at the center of the nest of writhing tentacles, arms outstretched as if to hug him, was the girl with eyes like black pebbles.

Panic raced through his blood.  His lungs were burning.  His feet were tangled.  He was going to die here—caught and drowned by a thing that shouldn’t even exist on this planet.  He glanced up at the blue surface, so far above him.

Uncle Bob, Sheriff Kamen, the coastguard...please someone be up there and looking down.

He knew there wouldn’t be.  It was too early.  No one was around at this time.  It was why he’d taken the boat out in the first place.

Rubbery tentacles wound around his ankles, binding them together.  Others slithered behind his back and cuffed his wrists together.  His feet landed on a soft and yielding surface that gave like a trampoline.  It opened up beneath him and Rob felt something soft, fleshy and muscular wrap around his feet and ankles.  He was tugged down with a peristaltic jerk.

Caught, drowned and eaten, he realized with horror.

Another gulp and he was inside up to his knees.  Warm slippery flesh smothered his feet.  It was like his legs were being wrapped up in an elastic bag, one that gripped and expanded to take more of him in.

At least he’d be spared the horror of being eaten alive.  He was out of air.  It was getting harder and harder to resist the automatic reflex to open up his windpipe and gulp down sweet air.  Only there wasn’t any air there, just ocean.

The fleshy lips beneath him swelled open in a wide gape.  He felt the internal membranes vibrate against his calf muscles.  She was belching up another big air bubble.  He felt the bubble membrane tickle over the hairs on his chest as it welled up around him.  He dimly registered it rolling up past his neck.  His consciousness wavered.  His mouth fell open...

...and he gulped in air.

He coughed and spluttered as he expelled sea water from his air passages.  After that he was surprised to find he could breathe normally, although there was a strange tang to the air.  He looked around and saw he was standing in a large bubble.  This time the sea anemone girl had caught the bubble with her tentacles rather than letting it float up to the surface, and it formed a silvery dome above the both of them.

Rob looked down and saw the girl lounging on a bed fringed by her own tentacles.  She was beautiful, with a pair of naked breasts as good as anything he’d seen on those rare, furtive occasions when he’d snuck into the T & A club.  But there was also a badness to her—like an evil film seductress about to sink her talons into unsuspecting prey.  Dangerous sexy.

Even more so considering she wasn’t human and he appeared to be standing up to his knees in her vagina.  Or mouth.

“I couldn’t let you drown.  Not before we’d had a chance to have some fun.”  He was surprised when she spoke to him in English.

Rob wondered if he had drowned and these were the last splutterings of oxygen-starved neurons slowly dying in his brain.  What did they call it—narcosis of the deep?

“Mmm, but you’ll breathe the air I’ll allow you to breathe.”

She writhed on the soft bed of orange-pink flesh like a cat in a shaft of sunshine.  As she murmured in pleasure he felt shudders run through the flesh gripping his lower legs.  He felt more bubbles of gas well up.  Around him, smaller, slender tentacles opened blind mouths and began to hiss.  He was enveloped in a thick stew of scents—cheap perfume and the musky aroma of women in a state of arousal.

“It comes with certain...taints,” she smiled.  Suggestive and seductive.

The musky odors reminded Rob of the T & A club, but much much stronger.  Overpowering.  It was like one of those girls had come right off her pole-dance routine and sat on his face, smothering him in her sweaty ass and filling his nostrils with the thick aroma of her pussy as she ground her crotch against him.  The scent saturated the dome until Rob could breathe nothing else.  In defiance of his current predicament he felt his cock swell within his cutoff shorts.

The girl noticed the growing bulge.  “I see you like it.”

She sat up from her fleshy bed.  Rob flexed his arms against his bonds and twisted his body in an effort to wriggle free.

The girl chuckled.  “Useless.  I caught you.  You’re all mine now.”

Her fleshy orifice—mouth, vagina—clamped around his legs, holding him in place.  Her light fingers started work on the button of his shorts.  He couldn’t stop her as his hands were bound behind his back.  Unbuttoned, his sodden shorts slid down his legs.  The girl saw his lengthening erection and gave a throaty murmur of appreciation.

“What do you want?” he asked.

At first he thought she wanted to eat him.  Now it seemed like she was more interested in satisfying other desires.

The sea anemone girl looked up at him and smiled.

“Babies,” she said.  “I want you to give me lots of babies.”

Her hand lightly pumped his cock as it swelled up to full erection.

“And after that, you’ll let me go...?” Rob asked in hope.

The girl didn’t answer.  She pouted plump lips, leant forwards and pressed them against the bobbing head of his cock.  He felt their soft pressure and then felt them give slightly as she opened her mouth.  Not enough to admit him, just enough for him to feel her warm breath tickle against his urethral opening.

Then a strange prickling sensation.  It felt like pins and needles, but lighter—gentler—more like a whispering crackle of static tickling all over the exposed helmet of his cock.  It was followed by an odd sensation, as if some substance was seeping under his skin.  He thought she was going to blow him and part of him was disappointed when she withdrew her soft lips after giving a delicate little kiss to only the tip of his cock.

“Did you feel it?” the girl whispered.  “The gentle pricks as my little venom cells injected their poison?”

Rob felt something, but it didn’t feel like poison.  It was like the opposite of numbness—a tingling warmth spreading increased sensitivity across the whole of his glans.  Blood surged to his groin, and his manhood, engorged and swollen, bucked like a wild stallion—out of control and running wild.

“I give my prey pleasures they can only dream of,” the girl said.

Rob felt so horny.  Her kiss, the suffocating perfume of sex saturating the air around him—he was finding it hard to think clearly.

Crooning with desire, the girl hugged his lower body.  She rubbed the soft bulges of her breasts up his thigh and pressed them against his groin.

“My breasts are just like my lips,” she breathed.  “Would you like to feel them?”

Rob did, but he knew it was wrong.  She wasn’t human.  She was some kind of monster—a giant sea anemone with the upper body of a sexy woman.

The girl didn’t wait for an answer.  She pressed her breasts together, sandwiching his cock between two big soft, fleshy pillows.  He shivered in pleasure as he felt that strange prickling sensation all along the full length of his shaft, and more importantly the pleasant heightened sensitivity that followed.

“Like that?” the girl asked in a breathy sigh.  “Let me sting you some more.”

She rolled a tongue around her luscious lips as she stared up into his eyes.  She squeezed her tits together around him and he felt a second wave of prickling pleasure.  Rob shuddered involuntarily.  He closed his eyes and a squeaky little gasp escaped his throat.  His erection twitched and bucked.  He felt as hard as the first time he’d figured out how to find porn on the internet.  Harder.

“Sting all the fight out of you,” she breathed into his abdomen.

She leaned forwards and kissed him lightly on his exposed belly.  Her lips left behind a lipstick stain of tingly pleasant warmth.  The soft flesh wrapped around his lower legs was in motion again.  Her lower body, the sea anemone part, pulsed slowly and peristaltic contraction pulled him deeper into a warm elastic bag.  The plump lips lining the fleshy orifice reached up to draw in first his thighs and then his hips.  He felt cushioned bands of muscle contract around his legs.  As he was pulled lower the girl’s lips moved higher up his body, leaving behind a trail of tingling kisses.  He felt a weight settle on each shoulder and realized it was her legs—far more flexible than a human’s and bent in a way that should not be possible.  They pressed down, helping him into the gulping maw at the center of her body.

Rob watched and felt it happen through a thick, comfortable fog.  Like it was nothing more than a weird erotic dream.

She gently kissed his nipple and tickled the nub with a moist tongue.  Her lips left behind a tingling warm ring of pleasure.  Lascivious tentacles turned inwards and rubbed against his body in lewd caresses.

“Time to gobble you up.”

to be...uh oh...slurped...

Tuesday, July 02, 2013

Snared, Sucked and Slurped - Pt1: Snared

A while back I covered this little appetizer to Monster Girl Quest 3.  I mentioned they’d missed off this...

Don't I get breakfast too...
...monster girl from MGQ1 and said I’d write my own short story to make up for it.  Then I wrote five pages in one of my notebooks and it stayed like that for a while until I decided it was blocking up other stories and finished it off to get it out of the road.

Here’s that story.  It’s not really a Monster Girl Quest fanfic.  I took inspiration from the Setouchi artwork and dropped a similar sea anemone monster girl into my hell-space series of loosely-connected stories.  It’s also a throwback to my earlier stories (I needed to write something simple again), so if the plot looks like it’s little more than a flimsy excuse to throw the protagonist into the sexy clutches of a weird monster girl, um yeah, guilty as charged.  Sometimes you think up a sweet monster and there’s no available story to slot her into.

Lengthwise it breaks nicely into three parts and I’ll be posting parts two and three over the next couple of weekends.

I wouldn’t get  too attached to Mr. Sommers...

Snared, Sucked and Slurped - Pt1: Snared

Rob Sommers was sailing around the point when his boat sank.  It was the last day he’d have expected an accident like this to happen.  A warm sun was rising up into the sky.  A gentle breeze carried the scent of sea from the east.  The blue waters were as flat as a piece of glass.  Seagulls flew overhead in search of early morning snacks.

Then his boat sank.  Just like that.

Weirdest thing Rob had seen.  There was no reason for it.  It was like an invisible pit had opened up before him in the sea and his little sailboat had plunged right into it like a Viking barge going over the waterfall at the end of the world.  Yet the sea here was just as flat as it was everywhere else in the bay.

Rob’s boat went down and he was pitched—coughing and spluttering—right into the cool waters.

Other than his struggles the sea was completely still.  It was one of those days where the water was so clear you could see right down to the bottom about twenty feet below.  He watched as his little sailboat, tipped vertical now with the prow facing downwards, sank beneath him like an anchor.  He couldn’t see any sign of damage to the hull.  His poor little Cali-Mari was sinking like she’d been torpedoed and he couldn’t see a mark on her.

And he was following her.

That couldn’t be right.  He was young, fit, healthy.  He’d been born on the coast and lived here his whole life.  The sea was like a second home to him.  He was a strong swimmer...

...and he was sinking just as surely as his boat.  No matter how powerfully he moved his arms and legs back and forth the bottom loomed closer and the surface rose further away.  He was sinking and he couldn’t understand why.  He was not caught in a whirlpool, there were no weights in his pocket.  Hell, the only clothes he had on were a frayed pair of cutoff shorts.  It was like the water had become unable to support his weight.  He moved his arms and legs back and forth in powerful strokes and still continued to sink.

He saw a silvery wall rising up to meet him and then he understood.

Gas.  The seabed had belched up a big ole bubble of gas.  He’d heard about this phenomenon.  Gas deposits were occasionally released from the bottom and bubbled up in such quantity the water became saturated.  It lost its buoyancy.  Things that should float stopped floating.  It was one of the theories to explain the Bermuda Triangle.  He’d seen it on the Discovery Channel.

And now he was caught in the same phenomenon.

The Cali-Mari settled on the bottom below him, kicking up a small cloud of silt.  Not far from it he saw the body of a naked girl lying on the seabed.  A real looker as well.  She sat amongst the coral with long red hair drifting out behind her like a fan.  Serene.  Like one of the mermaids of lore.  She must have gone out for an early morning nude swim and been caught in the same phenomenon.  Damn shame.

And he’d be joining her if he couldn’t kick out of this gas pocket.

He frowned.  Something wasn’t right.  That wasn’t coral she was sitting in.  It was moving—waving in the gentle current—like tentacles.  Like a sea anemone, he thought.  But that couldn’t be right.  Sea anemones were tiny blobs of tentacles kids poked at in rock pools.  This was the size of a man and with orange-pink tentacles a few feet long.

The girl’s eyes opened.

Rob’s mouth opened in shock and bubbles of precious oxygen escaped his lungs.

Her eyes were black like marbles made out of coal.  Shark-eye black.  Blacker.  She looked up and stared at him with naked hunger.  Full lips more suited to a swimwear model turned up in a smile that chilled Rob to the bone.

Wraith.  One of the drowned dead seeking out someone to join it on the sea bottom.

No, worse than that.

Fuck.  Bottin was right.  His crazy cousin was right.

As he drifted lower he saw it was impossible to tell where the girl ended and the giant sea anemone began.  She tipped her head back and she convulsed like a woman pleasuring herself to the point of climax.  Her pussy flared wide, wider, impossibly wide—a glistening pink maw opening up where a woman’s sex should be.  A huge silvery bubble expanded outwards and rushed up to meet him.

Rob wasn’t swimming now, he was falling.

Falling and drowning.  The worst of both worlds.

The girl put a hand to her mouth and her shoulders shook as if she was giggling.  The fleshy orifice between her legs contracted and pulled down, as if preparing to shoot another big bubble.

Rob knew what she was.  Bottin had told him, even though he wasn’t supposed to.

Stephen Bottin was Rob’s older cousin.  He was the cool kid that hit adulthood first and became the one all the other kids went to when they wanted alcohol or cigarettes.  He even used to sneak them into the T & A club, so long as they hid in the shadows at the back and didn’t stare too obviously at the naked girls like the wide-eyed virgins they were.

Bottin used to be the biggest hound dog going.  If he wasn’t chasing skirt he was down at the T & A club slipping dollar bills into the cleavage and butt cracks of sexy strippers.

Until he came back...then Bottin didn’t seem all that interested in naked flesh anymore.

Everyone said it was the PTSD.  While he’d been out in Eye-raq or some other hell-hole, one too many bangs had gone off too close and now Bottin’s nerves were scrambled for good.  Bottin didn’t contradict them.  It was only later, after a few drinks too many, he told Rob another story.

‘Wasn’t Iraq, or Afghanistan,’ he’d said.  ‘Wasn’t even Earth.  Fuck, I shouldn’t be telling you this.  Don’t be going on telling anyone else.  The ones that don’t know will think you’re crazy.  The ones that do will take you away and lock you in a box and you’ll never see the sun again.’

Bottin told a wide-eyed Rob the craziest shit he’d ever heard.  Inter-dimensional gates...hell-space...nightmare creatures that looked like sexy chicks crossed with unimaginable abominations and used sex as a weapon to kill men.

‘I saw one of them.  Had a rack you could put on the cover of Hustler.  Hot as hell, until you looked down and saw she had a body like a giant slug or grub.  I watched her slurp a guy right into a pussy that was as big as a door.  Her skin was transparent; I could see right through it as she sucked that dude up like a carton of juice...sucked until he was all crumpled up.  And he’d moaned in pleasure the whole time like a porn star getting all jiggy.  Moaned like he was getting blown by all of Charlie’s Angels at the same time.  Moaned right up until his skin stretched taut across his skull and his eyes fell in.

‘Haven’t been able to look at a pair of tits the same way since,’ Bottin had muttered morosely into his drink.

Rob had thought his cousin was fucking crazy.  PTSD...to the max.

Not now, not with one of the monsters Bottin had described waiting below him with arms and tentacles outstretched.  It wasn’t a story from a far-off dimension.  It was in the bay.  Men like Bottin had returned and brought their nightmares back with them.

Rob kept trying to swim.  He had a big pair of lungs and he’d filled them full of air, but it was running out.  He felt a tickling sensation in his chest and throat, one that would grow and grow until his pipes burst open and he gulped down a lungful of salt death.

His foot brushed up against something that felt soft and squishy.  Reflexively, he kicked out, but that unpleasantly pliant something had already wrapped around his ankle.  As he thrashed, another sinuous tentacle circled his waist.  Another curled around his wrist and more were unfurling hungrily to reach up and snare his limbs.  Lying at the center of the nest of writhing tentacles, arms outstretched as if to hug him, was the girl with eyes like black pebbles.

to be sucked...

Sunday, June 16, 2013

#52Books - May

Time for some more booky-wooky stuff (Just in case the midweek rant explosion hasn't already drove everyone away - I'll try and make it up by getting back to some good ole-fashioned succubus smut next weekend).  This is my #52Books (let's be realistic - #30Books) project caught up to May.


#9: Brian Keene - Earthworm Gods

My favourite book of the year so far.  Then I am a sucker for old-fashioned monster stories and Earthworm Gods is a big brash monster story with the possible end of the world (Again, Mr Keene?  How many Earths is that now?) as a backdrop.  It’s been raining constantly for the past forty days, the world is flooding and monstrous worms are coming to the surface to pick off survivors.  What’s not to love?

The book is broken into three sections.  The first concerns Teddy, an old man living up in the mountains, and sets the scene with first the unnatural rain and then racks up the tension as the predatory worms appear.  Teddy is joined by some survivors and the second part is their account of escaping a drowned city haunted by other monstrous threats.  The third part returns to Teddy’s house and an epic stand against a threat even worse than the eponymous killers worms.

I really enjoyed this.  Teddy is based on Keene’s grandfather and is an interesting and well-drawn protagonist.  With some of Keene’s other books I felt the focus drifted near the end, but here he’s on brilliant form, with some superbly executed set pieces.

Plus...monsters.

Stuff ‘realistic’ horror with serial killers and other dullness.  Nothing beats some good old-fashioned monster scares.


#10: Brian Keene – Earthworm Gods: Selected Scenes from the End of the World

This is a collection of short stories set in the same universe as Earthworm Gods.  The characters are all real people who paid for the privilege of Keene writing them into a story and killing them off in imaginative ways (an interesting concept—anyone fancy being made into succubus fodder?)

It does impose some restrictions on the stories—Keene shows no qualms in sending his sponsors down the maws of various hungry worms, but is obviously not going to depict any of the characters in too bad of a light.  After reading the first few stories I had some doubts.  They’re a little too short and follow a similar pattern of potted character history, setup, and then the fade out as the character meets an untimely end.  However, the collection does settle into a kind of rhythm and while the stories are short, in accumulation they do a good job of describing the doomed, drowning world.  Overall I enjoyed the collection, but wished the stories weren’t quite as short as they were.


#11: Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw – Jam

Yahtzee Croshaw is probably more familiar as that dude who speaks really fast on the Zero Punctuation videos.  Aside from reviewing games and creating point-and-click adventure games he also writes books.  Jam is his second.

This is the point where I could rant about useless legacy publishing is and how the only way someone born after the mid-seventies can get a horror book out is through spending a decade becoming famous at something else first, but that would feel like leaping onto a mammoth to attack it with a chainsaw when the mammoth is already sinking beneath the surface of a tar pit.

I picked this up because of the interesting premise—An apocalypse (or jampocalypse) where Brisbane gets buried beneath three feet of carnivorous jam.  The ‘jam’ is a voracious blob-like monster that absorbs all organic matter on contact.  The narrator sees his flatmate get slurped up on page two and the book maintains the same pace throughout.

The book is a parody and leans more towards Bizarro than outright horror (You might have already guessed this from the whole ‘carnivorous jam’ thing).  It follows the British comic tradition of characters trying their best, but getting distracted by trifling concerns (such as the narrator’s insistence in carrying around a Goliath birdeater spider) and continually undermining their efforts with sheer incompetence.  Think Shaun of the Dead or Red Dwarf.  Croshaw’s Jam isn’t quite as sharp as those, but it’s a fun read that might make a decent TV mini-serial (6 episodes, obviously).


#12: Dante Aligheiri – Divine Comedy I: Inferno

It’s time to get all classical with one of the most famous depictions of hell—Dante’s Inferno.  I picked this one up from the Gutenberg project, although I thought it contained all three parts of the Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) rather than just Inferno.  It did, however, contain copious notes for which I’m grateful as following classics without the historical context is really hard.

I knew about the structure of hell as Dante created it—the nine circles each punishing different sins—but this is the first time I’d read the source (okay translation of the source).  It’s pretty much Dante dissing everyone he’d ever disliked and imagining various scabrous torments to be inflicted on them in hell.  Drown in rivers of boiling blood!  Be submerged in pitch while demons stick forks in you!  Great fun.

“...and he had made a trumpet of his ass.”

Lovely stuff.

Friday, June 14, 2013

Now Exiting the Holier-Than-Thou Wars...

Anyone following my twitter feed might have noticed an increase in the rant-quotient of late.  Yeah, getting involved with the latest SFWA kerfuffle over sexism in their Bulletin magazine...probably not the wisest of moves.

The teeth-grindingly annoying part is I'd like to think I'm on the side of 'good'.  Greater diversity of voices and perspectives leads to a greater number of interesting and imaginative stories, which can only be a good thing.  And frankly, some of the shit women writers had to put up with in the past was abominable.

But I also subscribe fully to freedom of expression, and the chilling effect of censorship, whether it be the dictionary definition of the word or the quasi-censorship by mob that essentially results in the same outcome, scares me greatly.  My publisher, eXcessica, was nearly shut down when our payment processor, an organisation with an effective monopoly, had a sudden attack of morality.  So yep, censorship, or rather the not-quite-censorship we don't have a proper word for, concerns me a lot.

The problem is whenever someone tries to voice these concerns they usually get a battering.  Some of the people reading this (who am I kidding, I'm a grotty horror/porn writer, no one is reading this) are probably already rolling their eyes and thinking:

"Here we go again, another stupid SWM that completely doesn't get it.  All 'Blah blah Art! blah blah Fantasy! blah blah Censorship!'  Thinking it's all about him, him, him.  People are offended!  Our souls are hurting!"

I'm just a little concerned about the whole burning of stuff.  Can we not just create more cool, imaginative stuff to please a bigger, more diverse audience?  That seems better to me than taking stuff away from the audience that's already there.  Is a picture of a warrior woman in a bikini really that--

"Sexist!  Disrespectful to woman!  And totally unrealistic.  She's a fighter, not a glamour-puss sex symbol."

Um, isn't unreality sort of the whole point of fantasy, a precious little glimmer of escapism from humdrum lives.  It might not be your fantasy, but the imagination is a really big thing.  When you can create anything, it seems a bit mean to stomp all over someone else's fant--

"It's wank fodder for sad inadequates who don't know how to deal with a real woman!"

That's a little harsh, but so what if it is.  It's their fantasy, their little glimmer of escapism. Can they not--

"Oh shut up!  You're just another spoilt geek.  Go back down to your basement and take your neckbeard and bad hygiene with you!"

Ironically, despite my earlier posts expressing 'silly' concerns about censorship, I was Jim Hines'ing one of many comments like the one above to show how offensive it would look if you gender-flipped the terms, when The Guardian censored me.

Yep, that fluffy bastion of liberalism, The Guardian.  Achievement unlocked: Censored by The Guardian.

They didn't need to shout "Shut up!" at me.  You don't need to tell people to "Shut up!" when you can press a button and, poof, they are shut up.  Funnily enough the original comment is still there.  Yep, a quote of it with "men" switched to "women" was deemed to offensive to exist, but the original is fine.  I guess it's perfectly okay to describe the gaming/sci-fi/fantasy community as having a high number of "unattractive, unhygenic, neckbeard types", with a "complete lack of ability in finding a partner".

Gee whiz, why is there this backlash from the gaming community, I wonder?

I did point out the double standards.  That comment did well.  It nearly lasted a full half hour.

shut up

They don't need to froth and rave, "Shut up!"  They press a button and you are

shut up

But it's not censorship.  It's their paper.  It's their choice over what comments appear in the discussion.  They have that right.  It's fine.  I won't be reading it in future.

This was not a debate or discussion.  It's diktat.  "You will think and say what we think you should think and say, otherwise you can go and stand in the shit with the other bigots and misogynists."

No.  I'll take a third option.  I'm out.  I'm exiting the Holier-Than-Thou wars.  I'm disengaging.  It's that or let the radioactivity build up until one morning I wake up and find I'm standing in the shit with all the other frothing loonies.

Tell the truth, I'm a little concerned I might be standing in it already.

I hope not.  I quite like that whole diversity thing of people of all stripes letting their imaginations spill out without some mean fucker standing in the way and telling them they can't.

Not that what I think matters a damn jot.  After all, I'm

shut up

Well not entirely.  I'm not truly censored.  I can write this and post it to the great dark outerness of the internet.  It might not be lost forever.  It might even bubble up to the heady circles of the twitterati, where the fully evolved elite can point and laugh at another frothing neckbeard ape.  Ooo, if I'm really lucky I might even get to be described as very special.

Then again, it might be best to not hit that post button.  Not good to speak out of line.  Might jeopardize the...actually it's really more of hobby than a career.  Still, there's always the worry of my writing being

shut up

Urp.  Sorry about that.  You know how it is, sometimes you have something you really need to cough up off your chest.  In this case it's black, sludgy and I think those are eyes.  I'll kill it with fire later just to make sure.

Don't worry, I'm not going to make a habit of this.  I'm out.  Weight lifted.  Shits no longer to be given.

Time to get my head down and back to the stories.  That's what it's all about.  Create fantasies...provide escapism...entertain...delight.  Fuck the other shit.

Monday, June 10, 2013

#52Books - March (sort of...)

Yeah, that #52Books thing of reading 52 books in a year.  I posted about it in January and then approached it with my usual chaos.  I'm currently on #13 (and also #14, #15, #16 and maybe a #17, because...chaos), but for some reason got tangled up in putting reviews together.  The book reviews get the lowest hits here of everything, but I feel obligated to review them because I write 'em myself.  Here's what was on my Kindle around Feb/Mar.

#5. F. Paul Wilson – The Keep

So that’s what the film’s about.

I remembered seeing the film of this back in the late eighties/early nineties as part of Alex Cox’s late night Moviedrome series.  The film is a bit of a cult classic, but largely incomprehensible after executive meddling hacked it down to a far-too-slim ninety minutes.

German soldiers are stationed at a creepy Romanian keep in WWII and are picked off one by one by a malign presence.  A Jewish professor and his daughter are brought in to try and explain the mystery, which deepens as a powerful stranger arrives to resume an aeons-old conflict.

The book is a clever mix of influences, including an extremely unexpected one that lies at the heart of the whole story.  It’s a little baggy in the middle while it develops a romance between the leads and layers on the misdirection as to the true nature of the evil entity, Molasar, but not enough to sink a thrilling tale.  It’s a shame loopy epics like this have given way to endless serial killer/police procedurals on the horror shelves.

After reading the book it’s fairly obvious film never had a prayer of doing the book justice.


#6: Brian Keene – Jack’s Magic Beans

Not a novel but a novella with some extra short stories added to bulk it out to an appropriate length.  If I wanted to be especially harsh I’d describe it as the leavings off Brian Keene’s writing desk packaged together.

The novella details a typical day at a shopping mall gone horribly wrong as everyone suddenly goes homicidally insane.  The title comes from the reason why the few survivors are immune, but then that immunity starts to wear off...

Gory fun, but it reads like the opening chapters of a book Keene never got around to finishing.  The short stories are fairly solid with “’The King’, In: YELLOW”, Keene’s gory riff on Robert W Chamber’s The King in Yellow being the highlight.

It might be scraps and leavings, but they’re fairly tasty scraps and leavings.


#7: David Wong – John Dies at the End

David Wong is the pseudonym of Cracked.com editor Jason Pargin.  It is also the name of the narrator of John Dies at the End, used as a device to play it up as a faux ‘true story’.  John Dies at the End recounts David and John’s fictitious adventures in the town of Undisclosed, where after being injected with a strange drug, Soy Sauce, they gain the ability to see the things humans shouldn’t see and become embroiled in a sinister plot involving alternate dimensions, weird artificially-engineered life forms and a whole heap of craziness.

The book is broken up into three vaguely linked adventures and veers wildly between crazy gross-out humour (such as trying to get a dog to shit out some plastic explosives it had swallowed) and darker moments designed to make the reader pause and think, including a deftly understated moment from Wong’s past that involves no extra-dimensional weirdness at all, which makes it all the more horrifying.  There are plenty of twists, including an absolute gut-puncher in the middle that reveals why that innocuous little philosophical question about an axe with a replaced blade and handle was asked at the beginning of the book.

Overall the book is probably a little too madcap zany for its own good, but is packed full of imagination and never dull.


#8: David Wong – This Book is Full of Spiders

The follow-up to John Dies At The End, this continues the adventures of John and David in Undisclosed.  At the start Wong is attacked by a extra-dimensional arachnid parasite only he and John can see (because of the Soy Sauce from the previous book).  Other parasites escape Wong’s house until a full-fledged outbreak threatens Undisclosed and maybe the whole country.

The sequel has tighter focus than John Dies At The End and is better for it.  Wong (Pargin-Wong, not Wong the character) takes some well-aimed swipes at cozy zombie apocalypses and the exploitation of fear by authority.  It’s only near the end, with the introduction of a reality-warping fur gun, where things start to get a little too silly and some inconsistencies creep into the story.

Thursday, June 06, 2013

Hentai Game Review: Monster Girl Quest 3

It’s been a year and a half, but now the final chapter of Monster Girl Quest (Monmusu Quest) is out.  Was it worth the wait?


tl;dr: Yes.  Buy it now.

Here are my previous reviews of chapters one and two.  That should give newcomers an idea of what the game series is about.  The third chapter is a continuation of the same: a visual novel interspersed with RPG-style turn-based battles.  This is a hentai game, so the enemies are all female, use sex attacks and losing results in the main character, a hero named Luka, being subjected to various imaginative sex acts. (and then enslaved, eaten, dried up like salted fish...)

At the end of chapter two Luka had found the four elemental spirits and proved himself to his demon lord companion, Alice, by defeating the four heavenly kings and then Alice herself.  Unfortunately for them, the happy ending was interrupted by the previously benevolent deity, Ilias, going batshit insane and invading the world with an army of Angels and hideous artificial Chimera with the intent of wiping out all ‘unclean’ life and beginning anew.

Chapter three kicks off with a short intro showing the cities and towns Luka passed through under siege and then immediately pitches Luka into battles with angels (yeah, they’re just as sex-crazed and perverted as the other monster girls).  Then unfolds a truly epic story.

You know how people say “It’s not just porn, it has a great story,” and you think, yeah right, pervert.  Well...

It has a really great story.

Mermaid lovers, Torotoro Resistance has not forgotten about you

My first attempt at writing this had to be scrapped as it was too gushy.  I really enjoyed the plot, despite only being able to follow it through the vagaries of machine translation (AGTH + TranslationAggregator) as I can’t read Japanese.  Early on the game goes into a chunk of back story that explains who Luka really is and how the world ended up the way it is.  A mad god tricked and imprisoned all its rivals and then lied to the whole of humanity.  It’s weightier fare than normally would be expected for a porn game and the game is all the better for it.

Take Promenstein.   The name is clearly a portmanteau of Prometheus and Frankenstein.  Normally that would be that, a clever name for an evil scientist.  RPGs have been borrowing from classical mythology to populate their bestiaries right from the beginning.  Then Promenstein’s background is revealed and the name takes on much greater significance...

Porn is usually derided because most creators don’t give a shit about anything other than the fucking.  The creators of Monster Girl Quest clearly do give a shit about story and characterisation and it shows.  The game is packed full of strongly drawn characters, brilliant moments and clever little touches.  I think fantasy and manga lovers will enjoy this game just as much for the story as the sex.  Avoid the spoilers if you can.  The game has to be played through to be fully appreciated.

Okay, so it’s not going to win any literary awards, but plot-wise it matches up favourably with other mainstream RPGs and you could probably take all the sex out and still be left with a decent game and story.  If Torotoro Resistance’s aim was to create a hentai version of something like Berserk or Claymore, they succeeded admirably.

It’s not all perfect.  The end is maybe a gambit twist too far and some of the plot points are clearly there to add something cool to the game play.  Which is fine.  When making a game, what’s good for the game should always take precedence over the story behind the game.

Luka: From buttmonkey to badass

I was interested to see where they’d take the combat.  By the end of chapter two Luka has all the four elemental spirits under his control and is extremely powerful.  The story provides a solution to this and the game keeps combat from going stale by tweaking and changing the abilities available to Luka.  The main shift from the first two chapters is a greater prominence to the attacking skills.  In the previous chapters they weren’t really needed—Meditate to regain health and whichever spirit stopped the enemies one-hit-KO was usually all you needed to defeat most enemies.  That won’t work this time.  Luka’s basic attack doesn’t really do enough damage and most enemies hit so hard the long game plan will usually end up with Luka running out of SP and losing.  Some monsters can also use elemental spirits as well, which adds an extra dimension to the RPGesque battles.

Okay, Hydra, this is all well and good, but what about the sex?  You know, the whole purpose of a sex game.

To be honest I was a little less enthusiastic for this instalment.  From the spoilers on Torotoro’s website I knew angels were going to feature prominently and angels are kind of dull.  I like my girls sexy bad and angels are a little bland compared to some of the other creatures that have graced the monsterpedia.

Yeah, needn’t have worried about that.

Halo, check.  Fluffy white wings, check.  Definitely an angel.

The artists appear to have been in a competition to outdo each other in terms of weirdness and the end result is a monsterpedia that makes one of Chaosium’s monster manuals look like a petting zoo.  At one point I was fighting a zombie dragon with a sexy girl for a tongue.  Midway through the battle she vomited out a pair of stomachs shaped like naked girls and told me these were designed to digest a man while fucking him senseless.  Seriously, where else are you going to get this level of weirdness!

(and yeah, I think I will be ‘borrowing’ that concept for a future story ;) )

". . . . ."

As with the previous chapters, they’re trying to hit a wide variety of fetishes.  Some are going to hit the spot and others are going to call for a sick bag, but with around 90 separate encounters most monster girl enthusiasts should find something that nestles right in the sweet spot.

The art is again variable in quality, but mostly fine.  This time the work appears to be divided so that each artist is responsible for an area or a creature type, which overall makes for some good consistency.  New arrival Xelvy in particular appears to have been very productive.  While their various cyber/droid monster girls aren’t really my thing, the sheer number of CGIs they’ve provided is above and beyond expectations.

There are many many variations on this scene.  So many...

The game gets most things right, but there are a couple of disappointments.  One is the addition of scenes in each location where a chimera girl gets to do the naughty with some of the local civilians.  Just when you’re wondering what sexy moves the girl has in store for you, Luka shows up and one-hit-kills her and a potentially interesting fight doesn’t happen.  Given that these are some of the ickiest monsters, some might argue this is a good thing!  And these scenes are some of the voriest.  In one scene a chimera-succubus sucks dry three men and they’re graphically drawn as shrivelling up into grey husks.  While this is frequently described as happening to Luka in some of the Bad Ends, the artwork at least largely leaves him intact before the fade out to black.

The XX-7, for all your male milking needs. Comes with a 3 month warranty.

The other disappointment is the heavenly knights play a much reduced role.  Granberia and Alma Elma don’t even make an appearance until the final quarter of the game and you don’t get a sex scene with any of the four until right near the end.  It does make sense in the context of the plot but I suspect it might leave their respective fans disappointed there wasn’t more.

Overall, this is a very well put together hentai game.  Violated Hero 2 might just shade it on the quality of artwork, but other than that Monster Girl Quest is simply better at everything than all of its rivals.  Torotoro Resistance delivered and brought their epic to a satisfying close.

If fiddling around with text hookers and garbled machine translation doesn’t appeal, never fear, RogueTranslator is working on an English translation.  You can check their site for regular updates.

And, if you’ll excuse the sneaky plug, if you’ve finished the game and fancy some... ahem... further reading, please allow me to make a suggestion or five...