Two Tickets To Paradise

Shelley almost never won anything. She just wasn't the lucky sort. When she called the radio station, she was always either their ninth or eleventh caller. Sixteen years of always playing her lottery numbers had yielded a net loss of six hundred dollars. She couldn't even win at church Bingo night. So it was with a sensation of mild shock that she found herself boarding Northeast Airlines Flight 122, destination Maui, alongside her best friend, Clara.

The tickets had come in the mail, part of a special promotion run between the airline and her credit card company; apparently, every time she'd charged anything in the month of January, she'd been entered into the contest. "Who knew that those shopping sprees would pay off?" she'd giggled to Clara when she'd asked her to come along. She was just glad she'd convinced Karyn, their boss, to give them both vacation at once; she'd hate to have that second ticket go to waste.

They handed their boarding passes to the stewardess (Shelley knew they called them 'flight attendants' nowadays, but she hadn't flown since she was a kid), and walked down the ramp straight into first class. First class! She'd never flown first class, not ever. This was such an ultra-modern plane, too. It had a little TV screen set right into the back of the seat in front of her, so she could watch movies during the flight.

"They have 'Enchanted'!" she squealed to Clara. "That movie went out of theaters way too quickly, if you ask me."

"It's like that with every movie these days," Clara grumbled. "They just want to get them all to DVD in a hurry. Or to this thing." She tapped the credit card reader at the side of the screen. "Just a scam to get your money, that's all it is. I'll stick with this, thank you very much." She pulled out a battered paperback romance novel from her purse.

"Oh, you and those romance novels!" Shelley said. "Honestly, I'll never know what you see in those!" She chuckled inwardly at the thought of the other first-class passengers listening to their conversation. All these businessmen and jet-setters, and they were stuck listening to two forty-year old women bickering like an old married couple.

"They're sweet," Clara said, defensively but without any real heat to it. The two of them knew each other's foibles by now.

"'Sweet'," Shelley snorted as people continued to file by them, stowing bags and buckling seat belts. "Porn for housewives, that's all they are! Give me a good game show any day."

"They've probably got those on there too," Clara said, gesturing dismissively at the screen. "Anything to separate you from your cash."

Shelley giggled. "Maybe if I swipe my card through there I can win another trip! We can travel the globe, earning a new vacation everywhere we go."

Clara chuckled at the thought as the last of the passengers trickled on board. "I don't think we make enough money to go on that many free vacations."

*****

Once they were in the air, the stewardess came around. Shelley wasn't one to judge, but she seemed like exactly the sort of girl who would become a stewardess--a blonde, of course (assuming you counted "bottled blondes" as blondes), thin, with big breasts and a faintly confused look in her eyes, like she couldn't remember exactly what she was doing or why. Not that Shelley was jealous of the girl's looks. She was perhaps a little wider in the hips, and her boobs might not be so impressive, but she'd trade a few chocolates for looks like that any day. She was a brunette, thank you very much, and proud of it. Of course, Clara always said blondes had more fun, but Shelley didn't think those romance novels cared what color her hair was.

"Would you like a pair of headphones?" the stewardess said in a polite, distant voice. "You'll be pleased to know that as a special promotion on this flight, the headphones and the television viewing are complimentary."

Shelley beamed at the girl. "Why, thank you!" she said. "I'll take one, and Clara here--"

"I'm fine with my book, thanks," Clara said, putting on her reading glasses.

"But they're complimentary, ma'am," the stewardess said in a perplexed tone as she handed Shelley her set.

"Yes, dear, but that doesn't mean they're mandatory, does it?"

The stewardess blinked once, twice, three times. It looked like Clara's comment had broken her brain. Finally, she said, "I'll ask again later," and moved further down the cabin.

Shelley put her headset on and plugged it into the screen. The miniature television set lit up, but instead of a recognizable picture, it just fuzzed into blurry colors. At the same time, a throbbing noise played into her ears. Just her luck to get one that was broken. She pressed the button to signal for the stewardess again, although she frankly didn't know what the girl could do.

Shelley thought about reaching up to fiddle with the channel buttons to see if she could find one that wasn't showing static, but suddenly that seemed like an awful long way to move her arm. It seemed like all of the excitement of the trip suddenly turned into a crashing wave of exhaustion that sent her sinking into the soft cushions of the first-class seat. Let the stewardess change the channel when she got here, Shelley thought. She was just going to sit there, relax, and let other people do the work for a change. She was on vacation, wasn't she?

After what felt like hours of staring vacantly at the shifting patterns of color, the stewardess finally arrived. "Is there anything I can help you with, ma'am?" she asked.

Shelley heard her voice clearly, but the throbbing noise in her ears made the question seem distant, vague, unimportant. "No," she said, hearing the relaxed tone in her voice. "Everything's...fine." She distantly realized that the lethargy she felt was too intense to be explained away by simple travel stress, but the same sensations that made her apathetic about everything else made her equally apathetic about her own apathy.

"And you, ma'am?" the stewardess said, addressing Clara. "Would you like a pair of headphones? They're complimentary."

Shelley heard the throbbing in her own ears, and thought about trying to tell Clara not to put on any headphones, even thought about asking her to take Shelley's off. But that just seemed too much like work, and so she just relaxed bonelessly into her seat as Clara looked briefly up from her book and said pointedly, "No thank you." Shelley was happy to hear that Clara, at least, would be keeping her wits about her.

"I'll ask again later," the stewardess said, heading back down the aisles.

Without the stewardess to distract her, Shelley found her eyes drawn back to the shifting pattern of colors on the screen. She wondered what was happening to her. She could still think freely, she realized, but it felt like the soothing colors and the warm, throbbing sounds in her ears were sedating her, wrapping her brain in a blanket of cotton wool and making her docile and pliant and relaxed. She wished Clara would pay just a little more attention to something besides her romance novel for a moment, and perhaps notice that the show her friend was watching didn't have any characters or dialogue. But then again, if Clara looked at the screen for too long, maybe she'd get lost in those colors too. Shelley struggled to remember why that would be bad.

The stewardess returned, this time as part of a pair. The other girl was a redhead instead of a blonde, and tended more towards the willowy, but she had that same dazed expression in her eyes. Shelley knew it wasn't natural--it wasn't even the sort of placid look she was giving back to them--but she just couldn't summon up the effort to wonder what was going on. She just watched, half an eye on the women and half an eye still gazing vacantly into the screen. "Would you like a pair of headphones?" they said in unison to Clara.

Clara looked up from her book and said, quite sharply, "No thank you!"

"They are complimentary," the redhead said.

"I'm not interested!"

The blonde reached out and unbuckled Shelley's seat belt, then helped her to her feet. Shelley noted that she didn't seem to have any trouble moving when directed to do so; it was just summoning up any sense of initiative that seemed to be gone. She let herself be moved out into the aisle, the headphones still connecting her to the screen like an umbilicus, as the redhead moved into the space Shelley had vacated in order to stand directly next to Clara. "You might not understand, ma'am," she said. "These are entirely complimentary."

Clara set her book down on her lap and glared at the woman. "I know what 'complimentary' means, thank you very much! Perhaps--" Shelley couldn't quite see what was happening, not from the angle she stood at, but the redhead raised her skirt, and Clara stopped in mid-sentence, her face suddenly pale as chalk. She drew in breath to scream, but the stewardess simultaneously clapped a hand to Clara's mouth and straddled her crotch, the skirt spread out over their laps as the stewardess slowly ground her hips into Clara's.

Shelley wished she could do something, but at the same time, she felt detached from the event. It was like she was watching a stranger, not her best friend as Clara's expression slowly went slack, vacant, and dazed. The stewardess just kept whispering, "That's right," while rocking back and forth on Clara's lap and stroking Clara's cheek with the hand that wasn't holding her mouth shut.

After a few moments, she took her hand away from Clara's mouth. Clara didn't scream. She didn't even speak. She just sat there, a trickle of drool at the corner of her mouth, moaning very softly. "That's right," the stewardess whispered. "Soon, you will have one of your own. She will always be with you." The words made no sense to Shelley, but she couldn't make that matter to her any more than anything else.

"But for now, you need to be made ready." The blonde handed her a pair of headphones, and she slipped them onto Clara's ears with no protest at all. The blonde plugged them into the screen, and the redhead gently disentangled herself from Clara's motionless form. Clara mewled softly as the two of them separated, her eyes losing that dazed expression just a little, but they remained all too glassy as the screen captured her attention. Part of Shelley started to panic, then, but it wasn't a part that could break through the enforced calm the headphones induced.

The blonde gently pressed Shelley back into her seat, and she slumped into it as her eyes locked onto the colors once more. As her eyes moved from Clara to the shifting, swirling display in front of her, she noticed that her friend's fly had been unzipped, and her belt undone, and that the front of her jeans was now drenched in fluid. Something struck her as incongruous about that, but the screen kept her from looking back to study Clara, kept her from thinking back to remember exactly what the stewardess had done. The effect just kept intensifying, stretching time out into a mindless eternity of throbbing noise and strobing colors. It got harder and harder to care about Clara. It got harder and harder to care about Shelley.

Her endless reverie was briefly interrupted when a man burst out of the cockpit. He staggered forward to the front row of seats, tried to shake the people sitting and watching their screens, but got no response. He moved down to her seat, and Shelley managed to shake off the spell just enough to make eye contact with him. Even that, now, seemed like a Herculean effort.

"Please," he whispered, "please wake up, you have to help me! The pilot's gone nuts, he's changed our course, he said something about 'the colors showing him where to go'. I tried to take the controls away from him, but he wouldn't let me! You have to help! You have to do something!"

Shelley looked at him, trying to parse the concept through a thick wall of mental fog. Eventually, she reached out a leaden arm and pressed the button to summon the stewardess.

It didn't take long at all for the blonde stewardess to arrive. She walked up the aisle, heading implacably towards the co-pilot as he backed away. "Jenny," he said, "what's wrong with you? What's wrong with all of you people? For God's sake, snap out of it!" Jenny walked up past Shelley's seat, and as she drew closer to the co-pilot, she raised her skirt just as the other girl had. The co-pilot, though, did manage to scream. He screamed a long, girlish scream that none of the passengers reacted to in the slightest, and fell backwards in his haste to get away. Shelley managed to lean just a little to the side, just enough to see out into the aisle as Jenny flung herself onto the man, straddling his face with her crotch. She heard him scream again, but this time it was muffled, and after a few moments it trailed off into a gurgling noise, then into nothing. As his screams subsided, his flailing and kicking struggles also relaxed into stillness. Jenny stood up, and the co-pilot lay unmoving on the floor. Shelley could see a large red welt on the side of his neck.

Jenny turned and headed back to Shelley's seat. "Thank you, ma'am," she said, gently adjusting Shelley so that she was directly in line with the screen once more. "You did the right thing. I'm afraid it's Bill's first time on this route. He hasn't been told what to do." Shelley sank back into the soft colors, barely even noticing as Jenny took Bill's ankles and dragged him back into coach.

*****

Subjectively, it felt like an eternity before they landed, but Shelley recognized on some level that they hadn't flown nearly far enough to go from Milwaukee to Hawaii. She couldn't look out the window, though. Her eyes were locked onto the screen, and she had moved beyond the mere lethargy of the beginning of the flight to a total passivity. When the screen finally flickered off, she simply sat there, waiting for commands. They were not long in coming.

"Everyone, please disembark the plane," the redheaded stewardess said. Shelley felt her hands lift the headphones off, seemingly of their own volition, and her legs seemed to stand and march her out of the airplane and down the steps without any conscious effort on her part. Clara's pants had fallen down when she stood up, but her only reaction was to step out of them and keep moving. Soon, they stood with the other passengers on little more than a patch of cleared ground, miles from any sort of civilization. A small pond a dozen yards away was the only landmark.

A small crowd of perhaps twenty or so people awaited them. Shelley saw the blonde stewardess walk by, carrying the co-pilot's limp body with surprising strength. She headed towards the pond with him and set him down, then started undoing his pants. Before she could see what happened next, Shelley was guided to one of the people in the crowd.

She wasn't surprised at all to see the same dazed, blissful expression on his face that she'd seen on the stewardesses. "Hello," he said. "What's your name?"

"Shelley," she said, listening to her own voice as if she was an eavesdropper. "Shelley Lazlo."

"Alright, Shelley, I'm just going to ask you a couple of questions. First, is there anyone who would notice if you didn't come back from this trip? Friends, family, co-workers, that sort of thing?"

"Yes," Shelley said, thankful that it was true. She knew in her heart that she couldn't lie right now. "My boss would wonder what had happened to me, and so would my whole office. And the man next door is sitting for my cats. He knows when I'm supposed to be back."

"Alright," said the man, nodding. "That's just fine. And second, during the trip or when you get back from the trip, will you be able to avoid being naked in front of people, or be able to avoid wearing extremely skimpy outfits?"

Shelley felt her face blush crimson, but her voice remained placid as she said, "I will. I had planned to do some sunbathing in Hawaii, but I can avoid doing that if I have to."

"Alright, Shelley, thanks very much. That puts you in Group Two, then. If you could just head over to the pond, there, next to the stewardess with the red hair?" He pointed, and Shelley found herself moving effortlessly towards the pond.

As she walked, she noticed that the passengers were being split up into three groups. One large group sat in the middle of the field, with a man that Shelley assumed was the pilot speaking to them. "...you will not remember this unscheduled stop," he said as Shelley passed by. "You will simply remember the excellent service, and you will want to take another trip very soon, with your spouses or significant others. You..." Shelley wondered what he was going to tell them next, but she couldn't stop herself from heading to the pond.

The people at the pond were split into two groups as well. Shelley saw that she and Clara were both in the larger of the two groups. The redhead smiled at Clara when she saw her. "I'm so glad you didn't wind up in Group Three," she said to Clara. "After feeling her touch, I'd hate to think that you'd have to wait until your next trip to get one of your own." Clara nodded vacantly, and Shelley wondered just what they were talking about, just what the two of them had shared.

"It's time," the redhead said, this time addressing all of them. "If you could please strip from the waist down, now, we can get this unscheduled stop over with quickly." Shelley tried to fight it then, simply out of embarrassment over cottage cheese thighs, but she disrobed as though her resistance wasn't even happening. Three of the people who had been waiting for the plane waded into the pond then, reached their arms into the water, and pulled out...

Shelley wanted to scream. The things they held thrashed and flailed in their hands, purplish-gray tentacles writhing and coiling and uncoiling all along their arms. They walked up to three of the passengers. Shelley couldn't help but notice that Clara had maneuvered herself to be first in line. Each of them said the same words, like a benediction. "She will always be with you." Then they took the writhing, octopoid creatures and pressed them to the passengers' groins.

Shelley watched as her best friend shuddered in ecstasy at the creature's touch. It flattened itself to Clara's body, wrapping its tentacles around her in an effort to gain purchase. One of them, Shelley noticed, had a large, spiny stinger at the end of it. That must have been what had drugged Bill, the co-pilot.

Clara fell to her knees as the creature slowly inserted itself into her vagina, tucking itself deeper and deeper into the folds of her pussy. Shelley shuddered in revulsion, wanted to scream or run or lash out at the thing attaching itself to her friend, but just then, a man approached with another of the creatures. She noticed a faint undulating motion behind the fabric of his jeans, and knew that he must have one wrapped around his body as well. "She will always be with you," he said, and Shelley felt the cold, wet flesh touch her own.

It didn't stay cold for long. It felt like scarcely moments before it felt warm, blood warm. The tentacles pressed against the flesh of her body like a lover's, and Shelley let out a startled gasp at the sheer pleasure of the touch. The creature's touch seemed to stimulate every nerve in her body, not just the ones it touched directly, and Shelley suddenly understood the blank, dazed expression in the eyes of the people around her. They, too, felt the intense, gorgeous pleasure of the creatures' touch. Clara must have felt that same pleasure back in the plane, when the stewardess had pressed her body against Clara's and those tentacles had undone her clothing and pressed against her body. The very touch of the creatures was bliss. It was beautiful, not horrifying. She knew that now.

The pleasure became even more intense as the creature slowly insinuated its form into her body. Shelley looked down at her own pussy as the thing slid itself into her, its form undulating and rippling inside her cunt. When the pleasure became too intense to bear, she too fell to her knees like Clara had. It pushed its way deeper into her, now, some of its tentacles waving gently and relaxing their grip as it found purchase inside her flesh. She knew she was drooling in mindless bliss, but she didn't care. It just kept feeling better and better as it touched her deeper, more intimately.