This is a story with dark themes: sex slavery, sci-fi tentacle monsters (and human monsters), captivity, mental conditioning, etc. Be warned! And, obviously, don't be like these characters.
* * *
DAY 1
"Holy shit."
"She's cute."
"She's...huh."
Rhune blinked away the pleasant haze of the fading stasis field. Curious faces peered down at her.
"Are you okay?"
It was a young man, about her own age. A face she didn't recognize, soft and round, tinted green by cholorphyll treatments, framed by long, midnight purple hair.
Her blood froze. Memories cut through her bones.
"Hey, hey," said one of them, gently, touching her arm. He must have seen the panic in her eyes.
He took her hand, gave her a soft tug, leading her out of the cushioned cubicle she had been stored in. He was tall, handsome and broad-shouldered, with tan skin and a long nose.
How long had she been unconscious?
"Who are you?" she said sharply. She had to maintain command of the situation.
The purple-haired boy introduced himself as Ziff. The taller one as Lym.
Behind them stood Nahia, a young, pale, mousy woman wearing a puff-blouse and what Rhune dimly recognized as a bio-specialist's feed interface clipped to her ear.
They told her they were off-world university students on break. Well, that checked out. At any given time, there were probably at least a million intoxicated college kids visiting Salorea.
She was in a hotel suite. On one of the beds sat a fourth student, a slim, well-cut dark-skinned boy with gold paint around his eyes, digging through a travel bag.
"I'm Pael," he said. He seemed embarrassed. "Look, I'm sorry about this. There must have been some sort of mix-up."
"You don't think your parents
meant
to order us sexual services?" grinned Ziff.
"I...wouldn't put it past my dad, honestly," Pael mused glumly. "But, no. I think he just ordered us the most expensive package they had, because he likes to intimidate my friends."
Lym had led Rhune to the other bed, even bigger than her own back home at the palace. She sat down. Her legs felt like jelly.
Sexual services.
The hotel bed seemed to sort of purr beneath her. A prompt to buy massage credits?
More memories begane to filter back into her mind. Her personal servitor, leading her to the private room at the rear of the palace where the stasis cubicle had been wheeled in.
Her stomach sank.
Wasn't she supposed to have received some kind of orientation? But her handlers had probably wanted to keep this as quiet as possible. She wished she'd thought to do some research.
"What's your name?" Ziff asked her. He might have been blushing, although it was hard to tell behind all the cholorphyll.
"You don't need to know that," Rhune hissed.
"Her name is Rhune," smirked Nahia. "It was on the cubicle display."
"
That's
why you seemed so familiar," Lym burst out. The tall, athletic young man, who had introduced himself as a Galactic History student, looked her up and down with a lingering grin that made her shudder.
He flicked on the wall-screen and pulled up an image of her from the newsfeed. Princess Rhune, at the opening ceremony for a new ski dome.
She groaned internally.
On the screen, she was wearing a long gown trimmed with spectacular living flowers whose roots grew from a matrix of fine fabrics and nutrient gel.
Here, in the hotel room, she was dressed for public brothel duty -- a flimsy, diaphanous sarong and slender matching breast-band.
The outfit came with some tacky, showy jewelry, a crystal diadem and a turquoise collar that encircled her throat and spilled out over her shoulders and upper chest. Some marketing hotshot's half-remembered parody of an ancient Earth concubine.
It probably really was better for business than a more tasteful look. Best not to unpack that any further.
She was acutely aware of how much of her body was on display to these strangers.
She was even more acutely aware of the creeping sensation of arousal, slithering through her, aided by who-knew-what chemical brew.
"
Princess
Rhune," Ziff breathed, looking between her and the image. "It
is
her. Unless...it's some kind of clone?"
"I am
not
a clone," she said, standing up sharply. "I am a Princess, and you will treat me with respect."
Cloning. She should have thought of that. Why hadn't she cloned herself for just this purpose? Okay, it wouldn't be very nice to the clone, but...
They were all staring at her now.
"I mean, I know this is a fucked up pleasure planet," said Nahia, "But why would the actual reigning Princess of Salorea be in a stasis cubicle in
our
hotel room?"
"We have a lottery here," Rhune said. "Everyone must do their part, even me."
Foolish girl,
rattled old Veritim's rasping voice in her memory.
The withered chamberlain had tried to persuade her to only
announce
that she would be eligible for the lottery like everyone else -- not actually allow her name to be in the running.
She had refused to cheat. On a planet of 2 billion, she hadn't thought she would actually be picked.
Aargh.
She was beginning to feel strangely cold, despite the throbbing heat between her legs and the comfortable temperature displayed on the nearby thermostat.
She straightened, trying to maintain a proud bearing.
"Salorea is a pleasure planet. We all have a duty to keep our visitors happy and our tourism industry strong."
To bring pleasure is our pleasure,
cheered the diverse array of Salorean workers in the ads they beamed across the cosmos. She managed not to echo the idiotic slogan, but she cringed internally at the way she sounded. Fake. Gross.