Chapter 3: Of course there's a catch. There's always a catch.
Hyori awoke to a metal clang and a sharp tug on her wrists, still locked together. She glanced blearily toward the head of the cage to discover that it opened like the other end did, and Mireu was there. She was looping a chain between her prisoner's wrists, around the chain that linked them. She looped this in turn around a vertical bar to her left and locked it there. Hyori didn't test its strength or her range of movement; she was certain that the first would be great and the second small, blocked as it was into a tiny square between vertical and horizontal bars.
Mireu noticed that she was awake and smiled at her. Hyori didn't smile back, simply watching warily as the strange woman moved down the cage and stopped near her ankles. Two short lengths of chain and two keyless padlocks later, and Hyori's legs were spread, one attached to the top of the cage and the other to the bottom, her feet flat against the short end through which she'd entered. Next, her captor came back to the head of the cage and affixed a huge hook to it. A turn of a wheel on the wall, and the head of the cage was pulled off the floor and lifted until it was standing upright. Hyori faced her captor through the bars from her new position, standing in considerable discomfort on the iron bars of the short end of the cage. She did not have enough slack at her ankles to move her feet even a few inches, but the bars were spaced so close together that she would have been standing on them regardless. The cage was narrow, so she could bend her knees a few inches but no more.
"Now, my toy, it is time for some decisions," Mireu said conversationally. She caressed Hyori's hip through the bars of the cage, and the girl sighed and moved into the motion. "You have two choices."
Mireu stopped, waiting for something. Hyori finally asked, "What are my choices, Mireu?"
"The first is what happened to the other girls who fell into my lair. I drained them and let them go after about a week. I understand the hospital was able to save the life of one of them." She let that sink in a moment.
Hyori shivered, then asked, "Mireu, could you explain how you drain energy? I don't understand." She heard the plaintive note in her voice and inwardly cursed it and her plight, even as her eyes followed the curve of Mireu's luscious breast.
"So much ignorance of your heritage, child! What was your mother thinking? Or maybe she doesn't know, herself? I drain your energy two ways: one is by causing you pain, and the other is by making you choose. When you choose between two types of pain, of course, the greatest energy is released. The other girls had no magic, so choice didn't work on them. Only pain was of any value to me, so they gave me their pain." Her hand slipped between the bars again, this time holding something Hyori couldn't quite see. A moment later she gasped as a tiny vice gripped her right nipple. As Mireu moved to run the chain attached to the clamp around the bar of the cage and towards the other nipple, she continued, "Your second choice is to serve me for a year. You will come to me every night when I call you. Sometimes I will keep you for all the hours of darkness; sometimes only for a couple of hours. But the call will not be one you can refuse, and it will come every night without fail." The chain tightened, tugging her breast toward the bars, and Hyori leaned forward against her arms to lessen the strain. Mireu continued, "I will not drain you completely; you will still be able to maintain a life in the outside world, though you will be tired often. At the end of the year, I will reward you with riches beyond your wildest dreams."
The clamp snapped onto her left nipple and she whimpered. She shifted her weight forward onto the balls of her feet, and succeeded in getting some slack in the nipple chain, but realized that the position was going to put intolerable strain on her feet in short order. She held the position anyway as Mireu stared at her avidly, obviously drinking up her energy released by the painful choice.
