The newly stripped diploids were held fast by a number of hands reaching out from behind and beneath them. Their thighs were wrenched open at obscene angles, bodies vibrating, waiting. Lina shuddered as she watched one of the winemakers pluck a fist-sized fruit from the basket, full and ripe, that had been recently harvested from the Great Tree.
The winemaker held the fruit high above her head for a moment, she herself chanting and writhing to the heavy beat of the music, before rubbing the fruit along the trapped diploid’s scent glands. The diploid woman began vibrating and expelled a heavy cloud of pheromones that quickly dissipated into the surrounding air, already rife with the cloying stench.
All around, the same scene was playing out with other winemakers and similarly ensnared diploids. Lina watched as a scented fruit was dragged slowly down over another trapped woman’s bare, heaving chest while her heavy-lidded gaze automatically lowered to follow. Even from this distance, Lina could see the diploid’s open-mouthed gasp as the fruit was pressed hard against her sex until it disappeared. The winemaker with the basket then moved on to the next helpless diploid.
While the woman filled with fruit vibrated and spasmed, she was approached by a second winemaker. In her hands, this winemaker held a vessel that Lina knew contained fresh water from the colony’s well. A quantity of this water was sucked up into the winemaker’s proboscis, who then forced it into the mouth of the helpless diploid, and expelled all the water at once into her throat. Lina watched as the diploid woman choked and sputtered, the winemaker’s hand now clamped over her mouth.
Lina had only taken part in the wine making ceremony at one other gala, and had since then lost her nerve until now. She couldn’t get past the feeling of drowning as the water was forced down her throat, the feeling of aching fullness and cramping down below as her muscles involuntarily clamped down and crushed the fruit inside her. And by doing so, turning the fruit to pulp just as her sex began to swell, mixing in her own juices as the final step to completing the process.
With this dark memory at the forefront of her mind, the air around Lina seemed suffocating as she watched the thrashing diploid. The third and fourth winemaker approached, the third holding her vessel low between the spasming woman’s thighs, and the forth reaching out to fondle the shuddering diploid’s sex with two outstretched fingers. As the fingers disappeared, the diploid woman’s mouth gaped a few times before being locked opened in a sensual scream that was lost among the noise of the celebration.
Lina recalled the sweet feeling of much-needed release, even from so long ago. The rush of the newly made wine gushing forth from inside her, leaving her empty, but satisfied, ready to take her turn as one of the faceless grabbing hands holding the next one in line. But try as she might, Lina could never get past the choking feeling.
Arabel, on the other hand, had either never experienced it, or didn’t care, because she began making her way to the Tree’s trunk, ready to ascend to the sturdy lower boughs.
“Arabel,” Lina said.
“Come with me.” Arabel reached for Lina’s hand.
“Arabel…I…I can’t,” Lina said, stretching her arm out as far as she could before losing Arabel’s fingers to the compulsion that sent her marching toward the Tree.
“Arabel,” Lina cried out. Her voice was swallowed by the beat of the music and the constant hum of the crowd—a beat that became frenetic and a hum that was increasingly dissonant, as numerous unseeing hands reached out, pulling at Arabel’s tiny body.
“Arabel,” Lina shouted again. No use. Lina was one against the tide and could do nothing but curse the tree flower flowing though her system as she stood, frozen, watching the ritual play out before her.
Arabel’s mouth gaped as the fruit was pressed inside her. She spasmed as the water filled her throat. And all that time, Lina choked down her own bile, as she watched the bio-luminescent glowing mass of bodies writhing around Arabel, keeping her pinned to the bough of the Great Tree. Watching helplessly as Arabel’s little body jerked and shook.
Lina fell upon her hands and knees and vomited before she even saw the newly converted royal wine being taken from Arabel’s body. As Lina tried in vain to stop the spinning of the room, she felt a gentle tap on her right shoulder. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and looked up, through teary eyes, into the smiling face of a large diploid woman, covered in glowing bio-luminescent artwork, with a bota bag slung over her shoulder and holding a cup of water. Her face seemed to glow.
“Your Highness,” she said as she stretched her hand out to Lina, who took a small sip at first and then guzzled the rest. And Lina, upon seeing the beaded skirt, made the fuzzy connection that it was the twirling woman she had collided with at the rave. She hoisted herself up onto her own two feet, intending to think the woman for the water, but she was already gone, lost to the crowd.
Lina snapped back to the here and now as she felt the first hands on her body. Even in her moment of distress, Lina had been compelled to move ever closer to the Great Tree, until finally she was ensnared. Lina closed her eyes and thrashed her head side to side, insisting to herself that this was not happening. But it was. Lina grunted as the first winemaker deposited the fruit, forcing it deep inside Lina’s sex.
Lina had just started to
