_
			DAMSELS UNDER GLASS: THE SERIES
			Jamie's Story — by Van Chapter 3

GONDALOO LAGOON,
THE MAIN RESORT BEACH

---

Jamie waited eagerly on the sand as the tilt-rotor taxied towards her.  As it reached the beach, the seaplane turned 90º, and the wash from the canted propellers blew back her free flowing red curls, and the orchid leis draped over her left arm.  The orchids and green leaves decorating her wrists, ankles and brow; and her own lei fluttered and flapped.  Jamie's string bikini was secure (in its dusky peach and light olive floral motif that perfectly complemented her red locks and freckled complexion), but her matching sarong flapped in the artificial wind, as if offering to lead the threatened floral retreat back to the main resort. 

The seaplane's props stopped turning and the twin turbines whined to silence as the plane's door cracked and opened.  Margo Wells, CEO and founder of TESSERACT International, stepped through the door and onto the the island.   She looked crisp and tropical in a business suit of beige linen, a pair of open toed sandals in one hand. 

Hair and floral adornments successfully shaken and pulled back into order, floral gifts back under control, and sarong once again gracefully draped as intended, Jamie stood on her toes (as best she could in the warm sand) and prepared to drop a lei over the head of her benefactor and employer.  Margo smiled indulgently and lowered her head from its statuesque 5'11" to save her petite, redheaded protégé from having to attempt a toss.

"This is where you ask me 'Aren't leis a Hawaiian thing?'" Jamie started.

"And you answer, 'A good idea, is a good idea!'" Margo finished, surveying the grinning redhead.  "Celtic-Polynesian," she observed with a grin of her own.  "I like it."  Jamie laughed and gave her tall friend a fierce hug, which was returned with equal enthusiasm.  "It's good to see you, Freckle Fox," Margo whispered.

"It's good to be seen," Jamie whispered back.

"Oh please," protested a familiar voice from the seaplane door.  "Not just when all the airsickness bags are behind me and out of reach."

Margo and Jamie turned to watch Kat jump lightly onto the sand.  "Hello, Freckle Fox," Kat said with a grin, stretching and flexing her trim, athletic figure.  The bodyguard's lithe form rippled under its ubiquitous black catsuit.  (This one, Jamie noticed, was lightweight, with black spandex panels sewn among the usual leather of the form-fitting garment and knee length boots.) "Get any interesting e-mail recently?" Kat asked, with a gloating smile.

Jamie paused, as if in reflection.  "Oh, you mean that little trip down memory lane you arranged for me," she answered.  "A real hoot, Kitty-Kat!  Thank you very much!"  Margo hid a smile as Jamie reached up, dropped a lei over Kat's suddenly not-so-smug countenance, and kissed the flustered, glowering, leather-clad figure full on the lips.

Margo stepped forward and put her arm around Jamie's shoulder.  "Please, don't call her Kitty-Kat, Jamie," Margo said.  "She might kill you before I could stop her, and then I'd have to find a new Director for the Institute."  Margo and Jamie laughed as Kat crossed her arms with an air of feline indifference.

"I don't kill people who've saved my life," Kat said quietly, "even if they continue to piss me off at every available opportunity."  She smiled and winked at Jamie.  "I just make their lives... interesting." 

Jamie felt a slight thrill shudder up her spine (and through her loins).  She certainly enjoyed being a member of Margo's Inner Circle, but the sort of games Kat found "interesting" were what Jamie could call "enjoyable" only after they were over...  after they were well over.  Jamie's smile never faltered, but from Kat's grin she knew her eyes had betrayed her feelings.

"'What doesn't kill us makes us stronger'," Kat quoted.

Jamie turned to Margo, gasping in mock alarm (mostly mock alarm.)

"Don't blame me if you keep getting yourself into ticklish situations," Margo chuckled.

A third figure stepped from the seaplane.  "I wish I was on Kat's 'torture-but-don't-kill' list."  It was a tall (just about everybody was tall to Jamie), very attractive woman in her late twenties or early thirties with clear blue eyes and a boyishly short crop of dark brown hair.  Wearing a pale, steel-blue, linen suit, she looked just as tropical as Margo, but not nearly as crisp.  "Whew!  This place is hot," the stranger observed, wiping sweat from her brow.

Margo laughed.  "The wilted flower with the keen grasp of the obvious is Anne Clayton, TESSERACT legal department," she explained.

"Welcome to Gondaloo Island," Jamie said, dropping a lei over Anne's head and giving her a peck on the cheek.

"Thank you," Anne said, returning the welcoming kiss.  "The famous Dr. Seaton, I presume."

"Jamie, please."  Jamie turned to Margo and raised an eyebrow in question.

"Anne is a relatively new member of the Inner Circle," Margo reassured her.

Jamie gave Anne a warm hug.  "We really do need to work out a secret handshake or something," Jamie joked.  Margo and Anne laughed.  (The corner of Kat's mouth flickered slightly, in what might have been a stillborn smile.)  Jamie looked towards the door of the seaplane.  "Wasn't Jodi supposed to..."

The missing fourth visitor in question hopped into view.  Jodi was wearing a lightweight apricot business suit (with a skirt short enough to have made even Ally McBeal think twice), a pair of white high heel pumps, and several yards of white cotton rope.  She was also wearing a narrowly folded white scarf (with a subtle floral pattern, Jamie noted) wound tightly around her head several times and knotted between her teeth.  Jamie stared, admiring the efficient manner with which the ropes had been used to bind the honey-blonde's arms, elbows, wrists, knees, and ankles.  An interesting blend of Oriental and Western techniques had been used, with diamond-hitch and horizontal bindings pinning Jodi's arms to her upper body and framing her breasts.  (Jamie particularly liked one embellishment: the cross-hitch of ankle ropes encircling and joining the insteps of Jodi's pumps, ensuring the aerobic instructor's heels were on her feet to stay.)  Something powder blue and silky peeked around the edges of Jodi's white gag.  (Probably someone's knickers, Jamie mused.  I wonder whose?)  The free ends of the tightly knotted scarf dangled from Jodi's stuffed, involuntarily grimacing mouth, flopping about and giving her a comical, indignant air as she turned her head to survey her surroundings.

"I expressed a desire to practice my rope work," Anne explained, "so Jodi volunteered—"

"M'mrrm'mpfh!" Jodi interrupted in a good-natured, gagged tirade, her sparkling eyes staring at her 'captor' in playful reproach.

Anne smiled.  "So Jodi was volunteered," she corrected herself, "to act as my subject."

"Anne's making remarkable progress," Margo added.  "I'm thinking of promoting her to 'Alice-II' very soon now."

"Don't look so happy," Jamie told the beaming lawyer.  "'Alice-II' means Kat gets to play with you."  Anne's smile faded (...and Kat's grew, in direct proportion.)  Anne knew Kat's reputation.  She wasn't sure she wanted to 'play' with Kat... not just yet anyway.

Jamie stepped to the seaplane door, steadied her bound and gagged guest as she jumped onto the beach, then caught her when Jodi's heels sank into the sand and (with a girlish, gagged shriek that elicited a chuckle from all, including Kat) almost fell backwards.  "Welcome back to Gondaloo," Jamie said, dropping the last of her leis over Jodi's gagged head and giving the perky, precariously balanced prisoner a big hug.

"Well, let's all get settled in and take a dip in the pool," Margo suggested.

"Not necessarily in that order," Kat amended, hoisting Jodi over one shoulder and carrying the squirming and squealing captive towards the main resort.

Margo sighed indulgently and Anne laughed and shook her head.  They then followed in Kat's booted footsteps.  "I sure the laundry-bots will be able to clean her suit without ruining it," Jamie called after them, remaining near the plane. 

Margo looked back.  "Coming?"

"Just a moment," the redhead answered, then turned and watched as the robot container module full of Margo's and the others' baggage emerged from the seaplane's aft fuselage and rolled away, then was quickly and efficiently replaced by a similar module of outgoing cargo.  Jamie squinted in the sun and looked towards the seaplane's cockpit window.

"Lourdes?" she shouted.

A slender female hand waved from the side window.  "I can't stop, Jamie," a melodious voice answered.  "I have another run to make before dark.  Next time!"

Jamie waved as the tilt-rotor taxied into the lagoon and leapt into the air.

Jamie turned and followed Margo and Anne.  "Eve, do you have the information I requested?" she asked.

"Yes, but I wish I could talk you out of this," the voice of the Eve 6900 whispered in Jamie's ears (from what looked to be a perfectly normal pair of post earrings.)  "There is an approximately 31% probability Margo will react unfavorably when she learns you are involving yourself in her plans."

"A chance I'm willing to take," Jamie responded, then chuckled as the sound of a large splash carried from the direction of the largest of the resort's many swimming pools.

"Jamie?  Jamie?  This is your wake-up call."

Jamie slowly became aware of her surroundings.

"Jamie?"  It was Eve's voice disturbing her slumber.

"Bloody hell," Jamie mumbled, rolling onto her back.  "What time is..." Jamie's eyes focused on the large digital display on the longest complete wall in her bedroom.  The dimly glowing numerals "4:13" filled the screen in a low-key, decorative font.  "Are you malfunctioning again?" Jamie groused.

"You asked me to wake you when Kat began carrying out her instructions."

Jamie sat up in bed and stared blankly into space for several seconds.  It had been an early night for the guests (what with their biological clocks still more or less on Seattle time) but Jamie had stayed up late to finish programming Eve to carry on the Marine Institute's most important research projects without human intervention for the remainder of Margo's visit.  "Sorry about the 'malfunctioning' crack," Jamie offered, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

"No worries, Jamie," Eve responded.  "A service-bot will be here shortly with some breakfast.  In the meanwhile..."  The wall screen cleared and began glowing in the eerie orange-red hues characteristic of an ultra-low ambient light display.  Kat could be seen walking down one of the guest corridors, her long dark hair tied back in a ponytail, wearing her usual black catsuit, boots, and gloves.  A pair of TESSERACT's new light-amplifying goggles covered her eyes, looking more like reflective ski goggles than military hardware. 

"Kat has instructed me to lower all sources of ambient lighting in the guest wing below the range of normal human vision," Eve explained, "and I've opaqued all the windows.  To all of the occupants except Kat, it will appear they are in total and complete darkness; but as you can see from the display, in the far-red to infrared part of the spectrum the illumination is quite normal."

Jamie smiled.  "Sort of a reverse blindfold," she mused.  "I like it." 

Kat approached a guest suite door and it slowly and silently slid open.  Kat entered.  A decidedly feral smile graced her lips as she slowly turned her head, her electronically enhanced eyes drinking in the peaceful tableau before her.

In a tangle of satin sheets (crimson, in the red-shifted display, but Jamie knew them to be pale blue under normal conditions),  Anne was fast asleep on the large bed.  Nude, lying on her stomach with one arm extended, her hand gracefully hanging off the edge of the bed, her face was calm and untroubled.

Equally nude, and asleep, Jodi was nestled atop a heaped comforter on the floor at the foot of the bed.  Her hands were bound behind her back and her legs were lashed together at the ankles and knees.  A long, narrowly folded scarf lay on the carpet nearby. 

"Anne persuaded Jodi to let herself be used for some additional rope practice last night," Eve explained.

Jamie chuckled.  "Did she now?" 

"It didn't take much persuasion," Eve continued; "however, there was a bit of a scene when Anne announced that Jodi was going to have to untie herself if she wanted to sleep in a bed."

"Anne was nice enough to let her sleep without a gag," Jamie observed.

"Only after extracting Jodi's promise not to make any noise, on pain of being gagged and hogtied."

"Lucky she doesn't snore," Jamie laughed.

On screen, Kat finished her reverie, took a few steps closer to Anne's bed, performed a slow, graceful, feline, completely silent stretch... and pounced.

"You're not going to leave them up on their toes like that, are you?" Jamie asked, finishing the last of her coffee.

"Application of the bodypaint and costumes will only take several minutes," Eve responded, "and once the paint and fixatives have dried, Anne and Jodi will be released from the frames and allowed to relax on the bed."

"'Relax' is hardly the word," Jamie observed.  "Bound, gagged, in total darkness, deafened by those damn earplugs... Please save a few sets of those things for me, by the way."

"Already added to the Island inventory," Eve intoned.

"Anyway... knowing something is being done to them, but not knowing what; not knowing what will happen next...  No, 'relax' is not the word."  Jamie bit her lower lip.  "They know it's only a game," she continued, "but still..."

"Do you envy them, Jamie?" Eve asked.  "Do you wish you were in their place?"

Jamie felt a tiny, familiar, shuddering thrill, a frisson of sexual delight as she savored the fantasy.  She didn't bother answering her artificially intelligent friend and companion.  Jamie knew the capabilities of Eve's biotelemetric sensors, and that her body had already answered for her.

"I'm going to take a quick shower," Jamie announced, "then a valet-bot can help me with my bodypaint and costume... and in my case restraints will not be necessary."

"Yes, Jamie," Eve answered.

Jamie paused in her bathroom doorway and looked back at the racked, restrained, helplessly bound and gagged figures writhing on the screen.  "At least I was able to enjoy a nice breakfast before the game really begins," she mused.

"I've been instructed to feed them a nutritionally balanced carbohydrate/protein liquid before the main event," Eve announced.

"What flavor?" Jamie asked.

"No flavor," answered Eve, "as per my instructions."  Jamie shuddered in sympathy.  "I will force-feed them if necessary.  They must have their full strength, as they will find today's activities to be most rigorous, and they will probably not be able to feed themselves for the rest of the day... or longer."

"Perhaps," said Jamie with a mischievous smile, and left to take her shower.