Chapter III
"Why don't you lie down right here, Ms. West?" The friendly masseuse patted the table for emphasis. The masseuse's nametag read "Angie" and she looked average, happy, and under nobody's control. None of the employees Sparkler encountered had seemed suspicious.
"Oh, right. Sorry, this is my first time. Getting a massage," she amended. Blushing a little, she congratulated herself on her acting skill.
Angie's smile turned indulgent. "We get that all the time. But, if you need a distraction, you could put on these." Angie retrieved a pair of headphones from under the table, giving Sparkler a good look at her butt. "We've got a small TV right under the head support too. It'll play scenes of waves crashing onto a beach, midday in the forest, that sort of thing. Supposed to help the customer relax."
With an impish expression she added, "or get you to forget that a perfect stranger is laying her hands on you."
Sparkler eyed the setup and her heart began to speed up. It could be perfectly innocent, or it could be one of Mesmeri's inventions. Either way, there was only one way to find out. "Yeah, I think I'll use them. No offense."
"None taken," Angie assured her as she put the earphones back. She gave Emily her space as she climbed onto the table, laid down on her stomach, and finished by unwrapping the towel.
Only when it seemed she'd gotten comfortable did Angie move towards her. "Now, before we start I've got to ask you if you filled out your form truthfully. No old injuries you forgot to mention or did you change your mind about the kind of massage you want?"
"No and no." Emily couldn't help but a smile a little too. Angie's bright personality had an infectious quality.
Angie nodded. "We have to ask. Can't be too careful. You can put the earphones on now. Got any preferences?"
"Hmmm, I like the beach."
"Beach it is." Angie bent her knees a little to reach for something underneath the table and faint sound started coming from the earphones. Emily put them on and settled back into position. Less than a meter away was a small TV-screen indeed showing the ocean's waves meeting a beach. The sound of the roaring waves and the screams of seagulls filled her ears.
But Emily was careful, listening intently for a hint of something more and looking away from the screen every few seconds. 'So far there's no-' Her thoughts broke of when she felled an oiled up hand lightly touch her shoulder. Her muscles tensed in reflex, but the hand didn't move and Emily got herself back under control. 'Attacking the masseuse would not help me blend in,' she reminded herself.
It wasn't until those muscles relaxed that the hand moved to her back. There it was joined by another hand and the massage began in earnest. A sigh involuntarily escaped Emily's lips as those strong fingers began to delicately skim over her muscles.
'Pay attention, Sparkler,' she berated herself. 'If more is going on, now would be the time when something happened.' So she tried to ignore what was happening to her body and focused on discerning anything amiss in the recording.
But nothing changed. She was still surrounded by the sounds you could hear on the beach; the waves still crashed on the beach. Emily looked at the screen for a few seconds, then looked away for the same amount of time before returning her gaze to the TV. It was repetitive, boring, and a necessary precaution if there was something nefarious in that recording.
Angie's hands were another story. Finished with skimming, they began to softly knead the muscles in her back and neck. Emily stopped herself from moaning her appreciation but not from relaxing under those slick digits.
Her eyes began to droop as tension that had been building for more than a week melted away. The minutes ticked by, and Emily began to accept that nothing was going on after all. There were no hidden messages in the relaxation tape, no drugs in the massage oil. Sparkler was sure she would have noticed any by now. It was the most important part of the League's resistance training, after all. You couldn't resist something if you didn't even notice it was going on.
'At least this is not a total waste,' she thought with a smile. 'I'm feeling better already. I should have gotten a massage sooner. I wonder if Joseph knows how to give one?'
She missed those hands when they left, but a minute later they appeared on her calves and all was right again. There was too much going on for her to fall asleep, but her lack of rest had caught up with her. She was floating, really, drifting on an amorphous cloud of contentment. Sight and sound mingled into a hazy presence in the background.
As the hands traveled to her thighs, that presence changed subtly. The sound had grown increasingly indistinct; now it came back as a soft murmuring with a very familiar beat. Equally familiar colors began to dance on the edge of her vision.
Something inside Emily told her this was unusual, but she couldn't fathom why. They were always there, after all. Yes, there was nothing wrong. There was nothing to be suspicious about. The beach sank into two dark pools of whirling water, and Emily's gaze went down with it.
The undercover crime fighter hadn't thought it possible, but she relaxed even more. A tension deep inside her loosened and Emily didn't fight the moan that came out of her as Angie's hands began to knead her butt. She didn't think that was appropriate, but the pools murmured that everything was fine, and Emily had no desire to contradict them.
The towel glided off her back; leaving her completely exposed to those mind-melting hands. On the TV, the dark pools were sinking, too, sinking into dark brown eyes as the murmuring water morphed into a soothing voice massaging words into her psyche.
The face on the screen was familiar. Sparkler knew it, she was sure of it. But putting a name to it meant remembering. It entailed doing something and, at the moment, she had no desire to do anything. Because everything was perfectly fine, absolutely perfect.
"You can still see the whirlpools in your mind," the warm voice described it and Emily saw it, "feel it tug Sparkler down into the deep where she can rest, safe and secure. Where nothing can touch her or disturb her. Leaving Emily floating, just drifting. No fear, no worry, no desire. Just happily gliding on and on with my voice guiding you to even better places."
That sounded nice. Emily liked going to better places. "Because, with the whirlpools busily spinning in your mind, all you need is my voice. You trust my voice to guide you safely to a better place. So when you turn over, you still see the whirlpools even when your eyes do not. Because my voice has firmly lodged them in your head. Turn over Emily."
