Minerva

Author's note:

This is the edited second edition. This was the first story I ever submitted to Literotica, so it astonished me it wasn't as bad as I feared it would be.

There was originally going to be a sequel. Guess that never happened.

Original note:

This story is intended as humor, not as material for a quick wank, so be warned. It's not meant to be funny, either. Just amusing.

My thanks go out to all those writers who produce well written, will imagined, detailed and erotic stories on web sites and forums such as this. Without reading quality work, I wouldn't have bothered to submit my own. This is not otherwise consciously based on any one writer, idea or work. All characters are fictitious (unfortunately), and any similarity...

The Disclaimer: Read this at your own peril. You are hereby notified that if you are not of the right physical, mental, emotional and legal maturity to read this at your own discretion, I take no responsibility for the outcomes. If you get in trouble, it's your own fault. I can't be expected to know every country's, culture's and family's rules, that's your job.

* * * * *

"Minerva"

or: "A Mistress Manages her Realm"

Minerva Grolsch stood inside her bedroom doorway and pressed her palms over her eyes, then pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes until all she could see was dancing spots. It didn't help. But then, she knew it wouldn't. It never did.

She was dressed in the most practical variety of high-heel shoes, a dark gray pinstripe pants suit and a white blouse totally devoid of frills, ruffs and lace. It made her look efficient, powerful, composed and calculating. It made her look, in point of fact, exactly the way she had been intending to look.

None of which could hide the fact that she hated it. It was a constant, unavoidable reminder that when she was on the outside, she was on the Outside, surrounded by the dross, the scum and the drab rabble of humanity at its worst. More importantly it reminded her that she was no longer in charge of everything she could see. That never made her feel good.

But she put up with it, for reasons of necessity. Finances, for one. You couldn't get quite so much money out of venture capitalists through intermediaries; you needed to be there yourself.

Happily, she had won this round.

All of a sudden, Minerva was seized by a desperate need to be herself again and for that, she needed to look the part. Taking her hands off her eyes and clenching them into fists beside her face, she closed her eyes and screamed as hard as she could.

Then she stood in the dying echoes and smiled blissfully. All she had been intending to do was make her presence known, but there are few more satisfying ways of doing it.

A door opened on the other side of the chamber and a maid entered dressed not, as someone who knew Minerva's predilections might expect, in a French maid's outfit, but in an English maid's uniform complete with floor-length skirt.

Minerva demanded that every one of her employees be both good at their job and, as she put it, pleasing to the eye. Those who were excellent at their job were allowed to be merely nice to look at. Mary had been "stolen" from the household of a middle-ranking English lord and she was allowed to be frumpy if she so chose, a situation that her sense of professionalism would never allow - one reason she was allowed the honour she would never accept.

"You rang, madam?" She asked, a little icily.

"Mary, I need to look beautiful."

"Madam, you are always beautiful," Mary said with the stiff finality of the true expert who considers further discussion not just superfluous, not just inconceivable, not just a waste of time but also more than just a little insulting.

"Indulge me, Mary," Minerva said petulantly, childishly (is there such a thing as non-childish petulance? Mary had often wondered, with conspicuous lack of evidence for the case for), while attempting, but failing, to divest herself with majestic disgust of her so-hated business-woman outfit.

Mary, as was her custom, said nothing. She also, as was her job and her skill, stripped Minerva naked with a speed and proficiency that always left the Mistress startled and more than a little envious beneath her impressed respect. The clothes ended up on the bed without an extra crease or wrinkle in them, but that failed to even pass the threshold of Minerva's attention.

Minerva had already thrown open the doors of the wardrobe and was standing glorying in the contents, a happy smile on her face. Mary already had the discarded blouse on a hanger and neatly away before her Mistress had reached a decision about her replacement outfit.

Then her hand shot out with new purpose and the dressing process began.

A leather (but chamois-padded, there was no point in being needlessly uncomfortable) Y-string, buckled together at the sides, provided the minimum necessary genital decorum. Chamois-lined leather boots with 4" heels laced up over 3/4 of her thighs. Chamois-lined leather gloves zipped, snug without being tight, halfway up her upper arms. A moulded leather bustier (not chamois lined - A girl can like a little coarseness over her nipples, can't she?) laced up the front, leaving her breasts bulging up hard and even trying to escape between the laces. Finally, a mesh-work silver necklace held a large red jade in front of her throat.

Then she stared at herself in the mirror on the inside of the wardrobe doors, and sighed happily. Now she looked gorgeous, now she looked herself. And all of the leather gloriously, gorgeously maroon. Her favourite colour.

"Mary," she said happily, "Do I look beautiful now?"

"I dressed you, Mistress," Mary replied tartly. "What do you expect me to say?"

"Just say it, Mary," Minerva replied, still happy.

Mary clicked her tongue, whether in annoyance or exasperation it was difficult to say. "You are beautiful, Mistress," she said in an absolutely neutral voice.

"Yes, aren't I?"

Every Mistress has duties to perform, when suitably attired for the part.

Which left one more thing.

So it was that, riding crop in hand, she stalked regally through her palace, worshipful lackies at her heels.

Her destination was her throne room. She normally got most of her work done there, so after having wasted (no, she really mustn't think like that, there had been a very lucrative point to it, but she really must find herself a good negotiator so she didn't have to do - here she suppressed a small shudder - meetings) the morning outside, she needed to catch up.

As she swept in, her viceroy (it amused her to call him that. He was the only other close servant she had who was allowed to dress normally) was waiting for her with a clipboard and pen in hand. The fountain pen looked far better than he could possibly be made to, and cost more than Minerva's entire outfit. It symbolised, even more than his clothes, his value to her.

"Good afternoon Charles," she said cheerfully, rolling her tongue in exaggerated fashion over the soft vowel sounds. "We can begin now." She sprawled herself in her throne, one leg thrown over an elaborately carved wooden arm, her head propped on her hand, her crotch gaping wide at whoever was blessed, doomed or otherwise fated to stand in front of her.

Charles inclined his heard in her direction briefly. "Very good, Mistress. You have three scheduled supervisions, two matters of discipline and one extra-curricular consideration." Extra-curricular meant outside the grounds, which made Minerva's ears perk up, but not happily. She lashed her leather-covered thigh with the riding crop briefly, found the enjoyment of that recompense for having to think of the outside world, and calmed down again.

"Very well, supervisions first, I think."

"Certainly, madam." Charles made a complicated but quick hand gesture towards the doors, where an Adonis of a guard, wearing shorts carefully designed to get in the way of neither physical activity nor a good perve, while also being incredibly stylish, nodded, pulled open the door, and made a similar gesture outside. The door opened further and the head of development for Minerva's latest game strode briskly in, looking happy.

Minerva had long ago decided that the only way to indulge her fancies, her abilities and her desire to be left the fuck alone by the rest of the world was to run some sort of computer company, preferably (abilities) software. Minerva could program in seven languages, only three of them related to each other, and was a fully-qualified systems administrator. Her staff were well aware of this, and she encouraged a healthy competition in attracting her professional, as well as personal, praises.

Ziggy (not the name his mother knows him by) wasn't carrying anything, but his belt held his latest smartphone. On which, she was well aware, he had every detail she could possibly ask him for, either locally or via WiFi. For a laugh, she had tried cracking the encryption on that network once, and had personally (very, very personally) made her respect known to the administrator afterwards.

"Well?" She asked, happy to see him happy.

"Ahead of schedule, Mistress!" He replied cheerfully, before he had even finished walking. "The conversation AI has finally been finished, and is being fully tested, the last of the known bugs has been quashed and the beta testers are trying to find new ones, all the artwork is awaiting your approval and the rumors have been seeded on appropriate websites."

Ziggy was expensively and stylishly dressed, but not revealingly so and had chosen the outfit himself. He wore no tie. He wore glasses, but they were titanium-framed, cost $600 and were chosen in collaboration with Minerva herself. She was always happy to honour requests like that, particularly when she gave Ziggy more leeway than he took.

She raised an eyebrow "Beta testers?"

He nodded vigorously. "Yes!"

As he was talking, he was staring hungrily at Minerva's leather-clad, wide-open crotch. She liked that in her servants, and encouraged it, though without compulsion. Some could only think when they were looking firmly and unwaveringly at her face, some, like Ziggy, couldn't think if they were trying to expend the effort required to do so. A genius coder and fantastic manager, but satisfyingly weak-willed otherwise.

She gave a small squeal of delight, and clapped her hands. "Excellent! Excellent! Ziggy, you're a precious. I'll send word on the artwork this afternoon, and when you finish you may visit the harem."

Although Minerva employed married men, Ziggy was not one of them. "Oh, thank you, Mistress!" He said happily, his fog-free glasses beginning to steam up slightly.

When he had left, and the guard's muscles had moved out of the way of the muscles he used to close the door, Charles smoothly moved onto the next item. "Website development, Mistress," he said calmly. At her nod, he made another complicated gesture at the door.

This time the process resulted in a tall, unattractively thin woman with raven-black hair in a plait to her waist, a scarlet sports bra and a scarlet floor-length skirt, slashed to the waist on the right, revealing suspended stockings and, only just revealed by the length of the skirt, red high heels.

She strode briskly, also empty-handed, each nail painted a deeper red and each wrist encircled by a broad, etched band of gold. She was good at what she did, but was relatively new and had been given an important task to test her.

She also looked not entirely pleased to be there, a fact which could hardly escape Minerva's Holmesian abilities to read people.

"How goes the migration?" the Mistress asked with a raised eyebrow.

"I am afraid," the woman replied, choosing her words with care, "That there have been delays."

Minerva knew what that meant. No one in her employ, no matter how distant from her or how recently their employment, ever dared try to wriggle out of blame, so it was unlikely that Kate was responsible. "Such as?"

"There was a scheduled upgrade of the backup server, which was not quite finished when a cracking attempt was detected on the main server. That was defeated, all intrusion checks were run, then the kernel and the database server on the main server were upgraded for routine security announcements. So the scheduled upgrade of several minor utilities was bought forward while the main server was out of operation, and I was enlisted to help speed things up."

"Really?" Minerva replied, drawing the word out over several heartbeats. "So what is the damage to your work?"

"I should still finish on schedule," Kate smoothly replied.

"Excellent, excellent. So is your composure. Get yourself a massage this afternoon and say hi to your team for me."

"Thank you Mistress," Kate replied humbly, pivoted gracefully and retired. Say what you like about the woman's aversion to figure-building exercise, she certainly had grace.

Minerva shifted on her throne, bringing both knees together and up to her chest, letting her feet dangle off the edge and showing her ass in its full, nearly unrestrained, glory. She waved a hand at Charles, who waved his, in a fashion, in the direction of the door. "Infrastructure," he announced.

The manager in charge of the building-wide wiring, wireless access points, protection of same, email servers, authentication servers and the like was a short man, who might have attracted the designation "dapper" in any other circumstance but, believing that badges of status should be worn, was merely "scruffy."

"Report?" Minerva asked, slipping easily into Gryff's habit of stripping sentences of all inessential words, including some of the essential ones.

"Nothing at all, Mistress," he cheerfully replied, slipping just as easily into her occasional practised loquaciousness. "Nothing has happened to the wires, screws, bolts, whirring things or blinking lights. We haven't even changed anything."

Now that really was going too far, she thought, but let it pass. Instead, she shrugged and waved him off. "Okay then, you may go."

"Mistress," he replied, still cheerful, and left. Gryff was married, and was also almost unbribeable, unrewardable and unpunishable. There was nothing you could do to him that gave him greater delight than his job or his children, while he had never, in seven years, given any reason for anybody to get annoyed with that work. Minerva loved him dearly, and had already stymied three different attempts to head-hunt him in a way that dissuaded the hunters from ever, ever, trying anything like that on one of her employees ever, ever, again.

Minerva was finding her attention wandering, then she brightened up considerably. Hadn't Charles said something about two matters of discipline? But first the work.

She sat up straight and somewhat primly, laying her crop across her lap. "Charles," she said in a tone that he recognised and understood before the rest of the sentence had been complete, "What did you say about an extra-curricular matter?"

Charles smiled slightly, something that immediately perked up Minerva's ears, if not also her nipples. When someone who knew her as well as Charles smiled at her like that, it meant that she was going to enjoy herself after all.

"Last night," Charles began smoothly, "We caught a man trying to break in to the building. He was strong, fit, clearly very practised at what he was doing and equipped with an excellent array of tools. Unfortunately he wasn't expecting the technology arrayed in our defences to be as low as it was high and he was caught by the guards at their leisure. He rolled over when he saw the interrogation room," - which was why it looked so much more impressive than it was actually capable of - "Told us who his employer was and gave us quite enough to be going on with. He has no close family, nor pets. Here," Charles passed a sheet of paper to Minerva, "Are the relevant details of his employ."

Minerva raised her eyebrows at not just being told, then read the paper and smoothly moved through surprise, smirking, chuckling, giggling and hysterical laughter. Charles almost laughed with her, an extreme response for the controlled viceroy.

When Minerva had finished laughing, feeling rather weaker than when she had began, she mopped her eyes with a silk handkerchief thoughtfully provided by the female lackey who tagged along behind her for just such purposes, blew her nose on it and handed it back. The lackey put it back into her costume, much to the surprise of anybody who had seen how little costume there was to put anything into, even parts of her.

"Bring him forth," Minerva said grandly, with an even grander flourish of her be-gloved hand.

Charles gestured at the door, the door was opened and in sprawled the thief in the night, followed by a guard holding onto his collar. This guard was attired in the same manner as the one at the door, but was if anything even more chiselled in physique.

The prisoner was only wearing more than the guard because he was wearing restraints. Specifically, he was wearing cuffs, chained a mere two inches apart, just above his knees. His arms were encased behind his back in a leather sheath that zipped up to his elbows, and the expression on his face suggested that his shoulders weren't happy about this. He had been stripped to his underwear - black, perfectly fitting and sensible - but had been provided with accessorizing bruises at the guards' discretion.

At the guard's instigation he had been provided with a ball gag. The guard had also, coincidentally, provided the prisoner with a decent amount of neurosis by the simple technique of grinning at him. No matter how much he tried to avoid it, the prisoner found that a guard who clearly spent a lot of time in the gym, was only wearing a pair of what looked like lycra shorts and grinned at him, made him nervous.

Minerva also started grinning at him, but with more teeth and less dimple.

"Hello, you idiot," she said in a voice that still managed to sound cheerful and friendly. "You cocked that up, didn't you?" She asked, still cheerful. "Which is going to make the rest of your life miserable. No, don't bother trying to say anything," She added with a wave of her hand as the prisoner desperately started to say something through his gag.

"You've already condemned yourself, you can't make it any better or worse, so don't bother trying. We already know everything that we want to about your sordid little business arrangements, you pathetic excuse for a professional. We also know that no matter what we choose to do, nobody is going to miss you. which means that you are literally fucked, because I don't care to let people escape the consequences of their actions.

"So off you go, then. Enjoy your final moments."

The prisoner's eyes widened in terror as he foresaw the near future and what it contained and got it right.

His guard simpered, winked at him and gave the leash a tug, lisping "Come along, darling."

As he pulled the frantically struggling burglar after him, eagerly but not unkindly, Minerva raised her voice to call after him. "Josh!"

He turned back towards her. "Yes, mistress?"

"Be nice to him, darling," she said with a smile. "Use lube."

"Of course!" He exclaimed as he pulled the now frantic gimp after him, the doors closing behind them with a satisfied resonant clang.

Minerva lay back, feeling properly happy for the first time since she had arrived home. "what's next, Charles?"

"Two matters of discipline, Mistress."

"Oh good! Do tell me more, Charles."

"One lady and one gentleman, Mistress." It was Charles' affectation that he used formal terms of respect in such circumstances, something which Minerva found oddly endearing. "The gentleman stands accused of attempting to seduce a colleague's wife. The lady in question confessed after one assignation, tearfully and at length. Her husband has forgiven her but not his colleague."