In Dreams

Story by Amethystine on SoFurry

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A praying mantis geisha receives a mysterious package, which leads her to an introspective journey of self-discovery. Also, sex, snakes and sexy snakes..


Basically a little fan-fiction for WhiteMantis, a sort of cross-over of ideas: 'What if Nae was exposed to an Amethystinian-type snakey situation?'

Also, this is a tangential off-shoot of a potential outcome from this older story of mine (that was the inspiration, at least), found here: http://www.sofurry.com/view/151690

Anyway, enjoy!


In Dreams - by Amethystine


Part 1 - 'Morning in the Asazaki Teahouse' ~Or~ 'A Puzzling Package'

~

The package could have only been stranger to the stunned recipient if the glossy, patterned paper that tightly coated it had _actually_ matched the kimono she was wearing. It was a style she would have wanted to adorn herself with, the exact sort of beautiful, flowing, floral pattern she enjoyed. In short, if she had the chance, she'd have already been wearing the pattern that appeared on the peculiar package.

It had been just outside the door to her room within the teahouse, meticulously arranged to be precisely centered in her doorway so that it was crystal clear in its intention for her, and not some other resident or guest of the establishment. This was another fact that made it odd, since no one ever sent her things, much less such a lovely looking one. She had spotted it there on the floor when she opened her door to look for her brother, Tetsuo, who was over-due to arrive with her morning meal. She almost always got it herself, which was much easier than waiting for the meandering moth.

She held the package in her pale pink palms, keeping it aloft as she studied it and idly traced the sinuous and serpentine lines of the stalks of the flowers within the artful design, following them with the tips of her scythe-like upper limbs, which hung over the box. Said limbs had their origins just above the shoulders that bore her more human arms. She was an orchid mantis, as fair as the flower after which her species was named.

She traced about like that, antennae twitching as she thought to herself about the provenance of the parcel, until she gasped, startled by the sudden discovery of a strange creature amongst the roots within the wrapping. Its body blended perfectly into the long, thin strips of colour that were the beginnings of the flowers.

The long creature within the paper's pattern was purple, and she attempted to follow the meandering path it took. It was smooth, smoother than a millipede, and legless. A creature of myth she wasn't familiar with, she assumed. The more she looked and followed it, though, the more that she got the sense that she must have once been told a story that had such a creature within it, as it seemed very familiar. She began to remember that such a creature was known to be cunning or devious, and maybe deceitful, and that the way it was hidden among the flowers of the flourishing pattern seemed appropriate, based on her newfound memories.

By now, Nae had shuffled her way back into her room and had absentmindedly closed the sliding door once more, returning to rest with her legs tucked under her and her rounded abdomen held curled up behind her. She sat alongside her bed, which was laid out flat on the floor of her small living quarters. The mysterious box was almost an exact six-inch cube, and she carefully turned it over and around, rotating it to keep the strip of purple creature on the relative top of the package, for her to follow with the tips of her long scythe-claws. The pattern was a maze, and she had begun to see the other lines of purple as she went, other parts of the same long labyrinth of loops that finally found its finale as she reached the tapering tail at the exact centre of the current top.

She grinned, tapping the tail-tip with her claw, only to feel something under the paper that she hadn't noticed before, even with all of her fondling of the box. It was a small, stiff, curved line.. no, a circle! It linked back on itself quickly, a circle less than an inch across. The mantis sucked in a soft breath of regret as she felt the scythe-tip catch, hearing the rip before really seeing it.

With the tear, though, the circle was revealed to be a tiny handle in the middle of a very light wooden box. Carefully ripping the rest of the beautiful wrapping, Nae uncovered the lid of the compact container and pulled it open with the small, circular handle.

Inside, there were pink and white orchids. That would have been enough for the humble geisha, but the parcel was too heavy to just be filled with flowers, so she dug deeper into the garden of the box, and soon found a buried treasure. Her nimble hands pulled some blooms free and quickly found the real point to the pretty package.

There, nestled in the centre of the flora-lined case, was an egg.

It wasn't quite like the eggs she had seen before, though, but it was similar enough for her to identify it as such. The surface of the ovoid was soft and leathery, being more of a tight bundle of warmth, rather than a cold, hard shell. The heat of it stood out to the mantid maiden, more than anything. Warmth of the kind she felt through her fingers during the light, hesitant touches she ventured, was the kind of warmth that was not temporary, fading after being near a source of thermal energy.. she could tell that it was its own potent, petite powerhouse of heat.. and that meant life!

The sudden revelation that the egg and by extension, the package she had been sent, contained a life.. any life, was shocking, and she withdrew her hand hurriedly. Was she now responsible for this.. thing? What was it? Would it hatch, and did it need heat to be able to do so?

Most of the arthropod's avenues of enquiry were both answered and halted completely by what began happening at that moment. The egg twitched. The slightly wrinkled surface of the soft sac squirmed as something stirred within, causing the taught, hardened membrane that was the egg to stretch, little lumps poking upwards from the ovoid's surface here and there.

After a moment, it stopped. Thoughts of the fragile little flame of life being snuffed out right in front of her ran through the mantid's mind, images of the slow squirming having actually been the poor creature's death throes caused her to panic and pluck the egg free from the package, holding it in her palms, the box and its flowers forgotten.

Of course, occurring as if on cue, a tiny head popped free of the egg's leathery skin, a small slit splitting open to allow the smooth, slime-coated snout and the long neck that supported it to stand a few inches above the ovoid itself. It stared unblinkingly up at Nae, who was peering just as steadfastly back, dumbstruck, her antennae twitching, attempting to discern the nature of the 'beast' cupped in her pale palms.

As more of the being's body, that the geisha had thought was a neck, began to slither out of the seam in the sac, almost uniform in width, she realized that the flowing form was familiar.. the mythical monster on the marvelous wrapping paper! It made sense, when she thought about it.. the wisp of a whimsical creature had been half hidden in the flowers on the paper, so the real creature's egg had been covered in real flowers, inside the package.

Besides being strangely adorable to the awestruck arthropod, the newly hatched animal was, more specifically, coloured white, with regular geometric blotches of a pale pink over its back. There was also a large black spot over the back of its head, and very faint spots of reddish brown attached to its eyes, swept back from the intelligent, little round windows through with it observed the world. The skin of the thing was smooth and seemed almost like the hide that all the people of her land possessed, but was not as firm as the chitinous covering of her peers. It was almost like a vine or a long-stemmed flower, its head like a bud that had yet to bloom.. the egg like a giant seed, the head and body before her just a sproutling. The arthropod's affection and affinity for flowering flora seemed to quell any misgivings she had about the 'monster' in her hands.

(It could also have been that some other force was compelling her to care for the creature, some sort of sorcery, the seeds sown some time prior to the arrival of the package.. whether the mantis would have reacted the same way or not without a touch of post hypnotic suggestion is a mystery lost to the ages.)

While the geisha girl grappled with the implications of her holding what she thought was a baby mythological creature, as well as the possibilities of pet possession, as well as why in the world she would receive such a thing, the miniature 'monster' flicked its tiny forked tongue towards its towering companion, its head on level with the insect's chest. The wildly wondering woman's kimono was folded over said region, leaving a small triangle patch of her pale pink porcelain chitin exposed below her neck. This was precisely where the so-called 'sproutling' sprang towards while the woman worried about this and that.

Naturally, Nae's concerns about the package and its contents immediately shift to concerns about her kimono and ITS contents, specifically the addition of the animatedly squirming, slimy, slippery 'sproutling', which was worming its way down between her breasts! As it continued its course into her kimono, the bug leapt to her feet, her arms flailing slightly, not knowing what to do. Perhaps she was afraid to touch it, or thought it might provoke its anger if she grabbed what little was left of the dangling, whipping tail outside the crux of the folds of her silken dress.. or maybe, in her panic, the thought to snatch it and yank it out simply did not occur to her.

Quickly, the tail of her accidental pet vanished into her clothes and she was left with the feeling of the flowing form exploring her body, bit by bit. She had dropped the egg as soon as she had jumped to her feet, and it lay forgotten right in front of her, the split slit sitting face down, allowing the excess goo that resided within to leak out, lubricating the floorboards underfoot. That same slippery substance was what coated the creature as it careened around under cover of cloth. Whatever kept Nae from grabbing at her intimate little interloper had evaporated as she began to try to pin down the devilish creature as it crawled all over her core.

It was not an easy task, as it always managed to slip through her attempts to arrest its exploration, no doubt aided by the goop it was lathered in. She began to twist about more and more rapidly, trying in vain to capture the creature under folds of silken clothing, the smoothness of her own hide, the being's patchwork skin, the slime, and her kimono itself, made it nearly impossible to stop. So fast were her floundering flailings and flappings, that she needed to re-align her footing after particularly forceful flops.. she only lasted a few of these spastic steps before her slender leg landed in the puddle of yolk.

It was at this inopportune moment that the rascal that was running amok under her robe reappeared, rearing up over her exposed neck from behind her back. After a split second to allow a pair of dripping, glistening fangs to unfurl themselves from the roof of its mouth, it plunged downwards to pierce the soft armour of the insect's collar, injecting her with some unknowable venom.

The shock of feeling both the bite and the flow of foreign fluids into her form brought about her most forceful flailing up to that point, her hand clamping down on her shoulder. Nae simultaneously felt that the bothersome being had slunk back into her kimono, as well as her foot slipping in the slime, thanks to her violent twisting. She was sent sprawling to the floor as that half of her footing was entirely lost to her.

The mantis initially landed upon her abdomen and side, and with her arms still holding her stinging shoulder, her head was unslowed in its descent to the hard floor, knocking roughly into the dark, polished wooden plank. Darkness invaded her vision as if from inside her mind, the world quickly clouded from view as she passed out. While some may state that it was clearly the snapping smack of her skull on the ground that brought about her unconscious state, others may contest that the insidious poison implanted within her system by the little beast was to blame. Perhaps a confluence of both is the safest bet.

No matter the cause, the unlucky lady was snatched from her warm little room in the teahouse and thrust into a world of darkness.

~

Part 2 - 'The Enmired Monsters' ~Or~ 'A Peculiar Place'

~

Nae awoke, and it was dark. She was not in her room. She was not in the teahouse at all, in fact. She blinked a few times, feeling the bare dirt under her fingers and scythes. She sat up and fretted for a moment about her hair and her kimono getting soiled before looking around to realize that although she could clearly see that she was in a forest of some kind, it was unlike any place she had ever been.

All at once, she could sense a number of things that were unnervingly incorrect about the world around her. The dirt was too fresh, first of all.. it wasn't packed down by the footfalls of the world, as it should have been. It was as if the whole area had just been turned, for planting, like a flower garden. Also, the trees around the clearing she had found herself in were too slender and smooth to be like any trees she had seen. They didn't have any sort of widening at the base to denote regular roots, they just emerged at a constant and consistent thickness and extended upwards.. forever? She could not see any branches or treetops, just the dense fog that surrounded her meek little spot in the freakish forest.

It was night time. Or.. it was dark, but it was too warm to be a real night. Paradoxically, this thought made her shiver, but not out of lack of heat. How could it be dark in the warmth of day? There was a suffuse sort of illumination to the world, that made it easy to see within the confines of the oppressive mist, as if there were two or even three enormously full moons somewhere over her, though she could not see them. With this strange, ethereal lightness of the land, she could see, as she stood up, that the dirt had an alien tint of purple and blue to its normal dark hue.

Beginning to walk in what she desperately hoped was a good direction, despite having no way of knowing if it was, the lost little mantis began to pass by the strange, twisty trees. The streamlined trunks all seemed to be contorted into weird winding paths as they had grown upwards. At least, she assumed they had grown. On more than one occasion, she spun around, thinking she had detected movement in the corner of her large eyes.. beginning to become convinced that the movement was actually the 'trees', further shifting or spiralling themselves.. always outside of her view.

During her walk, upon which the land never changed and the fog never lifted, the insectine individual also began to notice the lack of sound. The world she was in was not mute, but there wasn't the normal rustle of the wind or the creak of trees.. although there was a rustling sound, forever at the periphery of her perception. It was an odd raspy sort of sliding sound.. which seemed familiar, despite it being utterly out of place in a forest. She must have heard it somewhere before, and she puzzled over it intensely as she plodded along through the soft soil, starting to seriously suspect the security of her sanity.

After some time of wondering in the weird world of winding trees and turquoise tinted and tilled dirt, she figured out what had been occupying her, aside from how she had gotten there. The constant rustling sound all around her was nearly the same as the tiny and twisted 'sproutling' had made as it terrorized her, gliding about under her garments.. the same sound as that slippery sliding.. just amplified and expanded, increased and larger, all around her, in the distance, in every direction.

As her mind struck upon that solution, her foot also struck upon something sticking up from the ground slightly. It was something smooth and rounded, not unlike a partially buried root, which worked perfectly to capture the tip of her long, chitinous leg in mid-stride, and cause her to topple forward. Topple she did, but not back onto the dirt from which she had risen earlier.

The mantis fell into a massive mire of meaty, thick 'roots', like the one she had tripped over. While the fog might have played a part in keeping her from being aware of the large patch of curving, twisting shapes she found herself in, she could have sworn that the path before her had been clear, as it always had been, for as long as she'd been trekking forward.

Soft, under a thick sort of tough skin, were the large roots upon which Nae had fallen. All at once, she knew that they were exactly like the trees.. and that both of them were giant versions of her 'pet', although in different colours. She wasn't sure how she could not have made that connection before, but there it was. The fog of this bizarre place permeated her mind, it did not allow her to see things until it wanted her to.

Able to see that she was at the centre of a sizable patch of the tightly twisted and knotted giant monster-body, despite how comfortable it was to lay on, Nae was frozen in terror. What did it mean that the reddish brown and smoky beige coloured loops where half-buried in the dirt? Was this creature dead? Had it not yet lived, a failed 'tree', unlike the others around her? Had it been buried, then partially uncovered over a long period of time?

A sudden shifting beneath her as the coils came to life all at once broke the mantis of her mental meandering, as well as her frozen state. She let out a soft cry of alarm and surprise and bolted up onto her hands and knees upon the gradually awakening shapes under her. She had been laying flat upon them before, and it was only as she scanned around for the nearest spot of clear ground to scurry toward that she realized how relaxed she had felt while resting on the rounded sections of brown body. She could have dozed off while pondering the origins of the bizarre impromptu bedding she had quite literally stumbled onto. The truth of that seemed impossible as she scrambled away from the centre of the increasingly lively patch, but she could not deny it.

The rustling noise she had obsessed over during her journey to that place had concentrated itself to just the jumble of loops under her, and it was once again all around her.. until she flopped off to one side of the swamp of smooth-skinned 'sproutlings'. And sprout, they did! New portions were pulling themselves free from the faintly fuchsia floor of the forest all the time, the patch swelling larger as the loops slid up and down, in and out of the ground as if it was water.. water that never seemed to stay on their hide. Somehow, the soil never stained the pristine forms as they wound and twisted, undulating and tunneling up and down, threading through the earth, in and out in the winding paths that seemed to have no beginning and no end.

Something of a beginning appeared before long, though. A head, like a much magnified model of her miniature monster, made its way up from the ground as seamlessly as a needle through silk. An oddly two-tined tongue almost immediately began to appear from the tip of the snout, in much the same effortless manner, moving out of the blunt, wedge-shaped tip of the lengthy body.. unlike the emerging front end of the creature, it began to recede and disappeared back inside the snout that was still slowly surfacing. The rapidly flicking and flapping, glistening black thing had slipped out and back into the lips of the large beast several times by the time that its eyes slipped free of the dirt.

The eyes, Nae will never forget those blank, glowing blue eyes, burning with an unblinking intensity, seeming to stare at her eternally.

The head was pointed almost straight up, and she was looking at it from the side as it ascended upon its long neck of a body, so only one of the two orbs was visible to her, but she still felt more penetrated by that single cerulean sphere than she had ever been by any number of eyes upon her arthropod peers. She wanted to scream, and her hands clasped over her mouth, her scythes folding defensively across her front.. but no sound came from her throat.

Taking no notice of the mantid's fear, the slender creature continued to grow from the ground, and revealed that it was, in one manner of speaking, a sproutling with branches. What could only be described as a pair of shoulders began to show with the upward crawling of the creature, followed by appropriately attached arms, pressed tightly to the sides of the smooth shape as it slid clear from the soil.

Nae tucked her legs a bit more tightly up towards herself as she sat on the ground, watching the somewhat less beastly-seeming being bloom in its bizarre way. She was frightened. Wasn't she? She asked herself if she shouldn't be running away. She didn't know where she would go, of course, but did that matter? She was convinced that she should have been running for some time, that she should already have been a great distance away. If that was true, though, why wasn't she?

She tried to come up with excuses for her lack of long-distance dashing.. maybe she wanted to stay with this creature to demand that it return her to her home, or.. maybe she thought the beast was rooted to the ground, like the trees, that it wouldn't be able to reach her past a certain distance.. maybe she was paralysed with fear.. or she was cursed. She knew she could move, though and she knew she was too close to be out of reach, if it really was rooted in one spot.. she was merely mentally dancing around the simple truth: She was utterly fascinated by the fearsome, flowing form that flexed before her. If anything, she was most frightened by her fascination itself.. she felt she should have been horrified, but instead a wholly different "H" word rolled around in her head as she peered at the smooth snout that, by then, stood high above the other gliding sections of sproutling body.

Handsome.

Her hands clamped tighter over her mouth, as if she had just spoken that word aloud, as though it was the most offensive and forbidden word in the world. But.. as she realized with a lightening of her tension.. she wasn't in her world, clearly.

A new section of the streamlined body caught Nae's eye as she attempted to reseal that revelation within her mind, distracting herself with the steady progress of the creature's self-unearthing. There was a thick part of its body that was arching up out of the dirt, and after a dip under the surface, she could see a more slender section, clearly continuing from the other, which was nearer to her, also arching up, having just appeared from underground. The geisha was certain that the tip of the monster's tail would be a short distance along this last, thinner piece, tapering off to a point, like the smaller one that had hatched in front of her.

Instead of any sort of taper, though, the thin section of unnervingly attractive body continued at that same width until it actually began to thicken again, long after Nae had imagined a tailtip. But it wasn't really thickening, it was simply a slight bulging to form another head. Nae calmed slightly at seeing this new head emerging, as it meant she was right, the slender section she had been peering at WAS coming to an end. Just not the kind she thought.

After a short few moments of relief, the bug girl did a double take, looking from one head to the other numerous times. Such a development shouldn't have calmed her at all! There was a second scary creature there in front of her! And both of them appeared to have no visible end. At the least, though, another beast explained the presence of the copious coils. Nevertheless, the mantid found herself most scared of her self for not freaking out about the addition of another strange organism directly in front of her.

While Nae fretted, the new beast.. which, Nae realized, wasn't new at all.. was revealed to have a pair of slim arms, much like his counterpart. Also like the other, this revealed head had glowing, featureless eyes. A deep piercing purple, in contrast to the lighter blue of the other. She could also discern another difference in the dim light, through the fog: The blue-eyed beast had long slanting streaks of lighter brown upon its sides, which faded as they got higher, towards the back of the body, which had a strip of dark skin along its spine. The violet-eyed one had thick, sharp-edged gold blotches within the dark brown of its back. The 'new' one was also a deeper, reddish brown, as opposed to the lighter wet-sand shade of the 'original' one.

The thick, arched portion and the thin one she had observed on the second individual, which she then knew to be its neck and torso, had pulled up what lay between them in the dipped down part, and it was there that the shoulders and arms had been hidden. Said limbs now flexed and rose slowly to uproot themselves from their resting places, easily pulling up from deep in the dirt.

Were they just that powerful? To move so freely in the forest floor, like it was a fluid.. or was their might more magical, and they shifted in these impossible ways through sheer undeniable will? And.. had Nae just called the new creature a 'he'? She could deny it no longer. Both of them were obviously, potently male, despite their sleek shapes, if her knowledge of anatomy was to be trusted. On the other hand, she didn't think she could trust any of her prior worldly knowledge at that point.

Both of them rose up, their hands coming free from the dirt at the same time. Again, the mantis marveled at how they were utterly pristine and unsoiled by the earth they had just been entrenched within. Their whole forms slid and slipped around on the ground, the last of them coming loose as they stood their torsoes up at a height that seemed appropriate, given their size. The sound of their bodies rustling about, that same rustling that had followed her ever since she awoke in this strange place, increased in volume as their forms were completely free, having been rising with them all along.

The timid observer could not stop watching the winding shifting of their bodies.. she'd have explained that she was trying to determine if, perhaps they were rooted, their tails still stuck deep in the ground.. but in the end, she'd have to admit that she just wanted to watch the graceful slithering movements of their sinuous, perfect forms.

Regardless of the reasons for her grounded gaze, the geisha made an important discovery while her eyes remained locked on the languid loops. She spied a section of smooth body that had both blotches on the back and streaks on the sides, an odd combination of the two patterns on the two different creatures. Furthermore, that area possessed a shade of brown that was somehow directly in the middle of the blue-eyed one's lighter, polished wood tones and the darker, reddish hue of the purple-eyed one. She couldn't tell which of the two, 'Lighter' or 'Darker', as she had unconsciously named them, owned that portion, as it lay right in the middle of the twisting, writhing pile.

In the middle..?

~

Part 3 - 'Otherworldly Introductions' ~Or~ 'A Pythonic Pair, Presented'

~

All of a sudden, the rustling stopped, and the world was completely, inescapably, crushingly silent, save for Nae's own breathing and subsequent soft gasp at what she could suddenly see, without the noise clouding her brain.

They.. it! They were _one_, it was one. A single two-headed male monster, massive and long, with two similar, yet distinct ends. Ends, or beginnings. The portion with both patterns was in the _middle_ of their lengthy body. As Nae slowly traced the winding path of the body that went from one of them to the other, she found that they were both hissing.. and grinning.. and peering directly at her!

"What are you?!" cried the confused little mantis, scrambling to her feet once more after her outburst, soon demanding "What do you want?!" as well.

One streamlined head turned to the other and smiled slowly, the other returning the grin. It appeared as though the matching, multi-part monster had malicious intent.. or at least, mischief on the mind.

The pair began to move toward her, spreading their arms open simultaneously, near their sides, their hands open in a non-combatant gesture of peace, their bodies rippling with that alien form of locomotion they used, looking like liquid pouring forth, advancing toward her smoothly. The marvelous manner of movement mesmerized the mantid maiden for a moment, giving the pair the time they needed to launch into a renewed slew of hissing.

The grins on their sleek snouts only stretched wider as the low sibilance that slipped from their throats coalesced into what could only be described as a single voice coming from two sources at once. Their unified voice uttered something somewhat close to almost being called a kind of language of low hissed 'S'es, punctuated with percussive 'T's, smooth 'H's and hard 'C's or 'K's, mixed with a smattering of long, yawning 'A's. The un-words of the not-language washed over her, totally indecipherable and also utterly clear in its intent. It was as though her sense of hearing could not comprehend the sounds they made, but something deep inside her brain could, and assembled it all into an abstract meaning.

As that translation filtered through Nae's mind and her conscious self caught up with it all, her antennae raised to their fullest extension, shooting out into ramrod rigidity with her shock. She blushed with a heat more intense than the fires in the teahouse's hearth in the dead of winter, her face becoming red enough to cause the make-up near her eyes suddenly seem like a natural hue her hide could actually achieve. The creatures had introduced themselves in a way that was informative, polite and irretrievably perverse.. while somehow remaining compelling, making the mantis want to stay, to hear more of the seductive, succulent sibilance.

The glow of their eyes seemed to leave trails in the fog as they swayed and subtly danced their way nearer to her, their tongues flicking in time with one another, as if a single glistening black, forked length disappeared into one snout and reappeared, emerging from the other instantly. They continued to both creep forward, caressing her with the sublimely sinful sounds that slipped from their lips.. regal regaling that rooted her to that spot with her rapt attention.. teases and turns of phrase that tantalized and tied her heart in knots.. adorable and affectionate announcements that allowed them to arrive all the closer to her.. whimsical words that wound her 'round their little fingers.. proclamations and promises of pleasure that pulled her into the middle of their massive mass of coils.

Then, there she was, surrounded by the streamlined siblings, their serpentine self squirming around her, on all sides. She had learned a few things from their two-toned monologue as they approached her. She knew that the creature she had been sent in that petite package was a 'snake'.. and she knew the pair piled around her at that moment were serpents of a special sort. She also knew that they were covered in scales, which she wanted to reach out and touch, to feel them upon her chitinous hide. While this last point was something she only just learned as well, it wasn't something that they taught her. She figured that out for herself.

Something about them appealed to her, on some deep, instinctual level, despite the fear she felt. She was drawn to them, against all reason.

As she peered at the pair, Nae pondered her past. The mantid's memories had not materialized unbidden as she gazed at the grand, imposing, intriguing mirror-ended 'monster', though. Thoughts of that which had come before had welled up in her as she struggled with dueling, dual impulses, the panic that jabbed at her to run away from anything new, and the desire to explore the unknown.

One half of her, which was the half that won out, invariably, had always hidden in the safety of the same and the scheduled, while the other half had harboured a hatred of such fearful floundering. Blinking her big beautiful eyes, she looked back into the recesses of her recollections and back up at the snakes. So many times, she could have reached out and touched that which was wild or weird, and she had not. So, confronted with fabulously far-out fellows, face-to-face with her fears and fantasizes of the unfamiliar, she had frozen, to reflect.

Her momentary inward self-examination bore out something she wouldn't have expected, had she been observing the situation from her room, back in the teahouse. That impartial version of herself wouldn't have been inches away from the intoxicating allure of the alien creatures, she wouldn't have been presented with what seemed like her only chance to defy the utterly numbing normality of her life as a geisha, she wouldn't have had the two-pronged attack of tender and tantalizing teasing and tribute lavished upon her by the silver-tongued devils.

Sitting in the midst of all that, Nae didn't think running away would actually solve anything. On the other hand, if she decided to delve into the depravity of the deviants that dwelled in the dark realm where she had been transported, she might receive their assistance. Somewhere, deep in the mantid's subconscious, a stray thread of thought lingered: She might get help, but she might have to do something for the strange pair.

That thought clearly did not weigh heavily on her more base, primal instincts, or it might have risen to the surface, perhaps stopping the decision she had settled on.

She would feel the scales of the snakes, come what may.

~

Part 4 - 'Clothes Were Made to be Put On/Taken Off' ~Or~ 'Perfect Privacy'

~

Facing the blue-eyed one, Lighter, Nae hesitantly extended a scythe at first.. her hard, tough claw seeming a safer option to touch the mysterious male. He watched her, and hissed invitingly, shifting subtly to offer himself to exploration, clawed, scaly hands held behind his back, remaining non-threatening. She smiled nervously and touched both the tip of her claw to his front, as well as the more sensitive feeler that grew from the back of the scythe. His belly, and the scutes that lined it, where warm and firm, reminding her a little of her own hide, just a bit softer, and easier to press into. Without thinking about it, she began feeling over his front with her other upper arm as well, amid soft, pleased hisses from the onlooking snake.

Nae lifted her hands and pressed her palms into the beige belly, feeling a pair of hands touching her abdomen at the same split second that she came into contact with Lighter's long, smooth body. Darker had decided to return the gesture that the mantis had made to his other half, evidently choosing to touch the closest portion of her form. She paused and blinked, suddenly picturing herself from an outside view, seeing herself standing in between the two towering, naked nagas. As this image ran through her head, a soft ripple of muscular contraction ran down Lighter's front, a few of the scutes shifting under her claws and hands. At this sudden stimulus in the midst of her hesitation, she gasped and pulled away from him.

Darker's hands were gone from her abdomen and in her retreat from the streaked snake's supple scutes, she backed into the splotched serpent by accident, unaware of his proximity. Automatically apologizing to them, to him, to it, she began to try to excuse herself, trying to get back to a conversation that might somehow resemble the one she imagined having before.. one wherein she should definitely ask for directions back toward her home. How she had strayed so far from such an exchange was an enigma. She shook her bowed head, trying not to look at either end of the mysterious, multi-faceted male 'monster'.

As she began to look around for a way to step free from the swamp of scales she found herself in, the insect's upward curled abdomen happened to brush against a soft material of some kind.. which seemed like yet another impossible event in the long list of such things that had happened to her that day. She twisted around to glance at the smiling other half of the lengthy creature, curious about the sensation. She found that it was indeed cloth, as she had imagined, but it was a kind unlike she had ever seen.

The material was course, and felt more tough than the silken sort she was used to. The garment that Darker was somehow wearing all of a sudden was also much more thin and flat than she was accustomed to. She imagined clothes as being thick, billowing robes, with long, extensive sleeves and enveloping interiors. The strange robe upon the splotched serpent was tight and almost seemed restrictive, to the mantis. The cuffs at the end of the sleeves barely had any space around his wrists, and the collar was held tightly shut around his thick neck by some sort of round, disc-like fastener. A series of the circular fasteners ran down the front middle of the tight tube of tough cloth, spaced evenly along the length. The length was another thing that appeared incorrect to the insect, as the serpent was so long, his kimono should have been quite, quite extensive, and yet the white thing he wore didn't even go all the way to the ground on his legless body.

Nae turned back toward Lighter, as if she might ask him about his partner's peculiar taste in fashion, only to find that he too was suddenly sporting the same thing! Once again, the mantid's mind focused on the oddity of the garment itself, and not the impossibility of it appearing upon the serpent's form in the tiny window of time he would have had to don it. She reached out and felt Lighter's clothing to check if it was of the same consistency as Darker's.. then stopped herself. Had she been rubbing Darker's chest to feel the fabric he wore? She thought back to realize that, yes, she had indeed leaned up to him to discern the quality of his 'kimono'. She hadn't even thought about it at the time.

This shock at her previous, unthinking actions brought back the image of her situation, imagining herself betwixt the two bewitching beasts once more, but now seeing them in their pristine white clothes. The scene seemed more appealing to her, then.. or less shocking than it had when they were in their bare scales, and she was still in her red robe. Had some part of her discomfort at their nudity spawned their instantaneous outfits? Could they sense the problem, and corrected it, in their sly manner? The question was, how would they go forward to use their new state of dress to make good on the orgasmic oaths they had made minutes earlier? Nae wouldn't have admitted it then, but she needed to know.

While Nae considered the clothing that had suddenly appeared on the serpents, she examined it a bit closer. She noticed that a flap of fabric on the right side of each of their chests, which formed small pouches, sported small symbols. The symbol upon Lighter's robe was three overlapping ovals, each with a single dot piercing the otherwise perfect trio of elliptical shapes. A single larger dot sat in the middle of the criss-crossing lines, in the empty space that would have existed within the core of their intersections. The lightness of the faint ovals went with the bright blue of the threads that formed the logo, also matching the snake's eyes.

The corresponding mark on Darker's covering also surrounded a theme of threes, as it was comprised of three circles. Or crescent moons, as the triple-circular symbol's outside edges did not join all the way up. As opposed to the more peaceful-seeming symbol upon Lighter's clothes, the pointed parts that were created by the three circles' unfinished outside edges seemed hook-like and hazardous, as though showing the world that Darker was dangerous in some way. His was the colour of his eyes as well, a vibrant violet for the vaguely violent vision of circles.

A soft apology wafted down from behind Nae, Darker making amends for his wandering hands. Even so, once again, Darker's hands glided gently onto her body, this time sliding onto her shoulders to hold her steady as his snout hovered down near to her head. He hissed to her, one long slow, soothing statement in sibilance. A single syllable of snake-speak, stretched into a serpentine length itself. Despite being beyond translation in any simple terms, the girl's first impression of the almost lazy utterance was the word 'alone'. 'Solitude' stemmed from that, and 'privacy' from that.. which lead to the idea of freedom, all included in the serpent's single, lengthy sound. The three of them were alone, in the middle of no-where, in a world of no one.. free to do as they wished for as long as they wanted was the entire message, but it was said in no words, and all the words needed, at the same time.

Nae sighed softly, considering what Darker had 'said' and looked up at Lighter, who smiled in a kind way as he fiddled with the topmost disc-like fastener on his 'kimono'. As it popped open, he sighed in a soft show of relief, visibly more comfortable with his clothing loosened. The mantis was taken aback at the show of vulnerability from the previously aloof creature, seeing him differently in that moment. He hissed a quiet compliment to Nae as he dipped his head to flick his tongue at her cheek, smiling again in that almost shy way as he straightened back up. His movement made the top of his robe fold open, exposing a teasingly small amount of his sleek front. The breath caught in Nae's throat as she realized how much she liked how it looked.. the partially open nature of his clothing, at that moment. She would have wanted it to be a little bit more open, though. She eyed the next circle in line, imagining it being unfastened.. imagining _herself_ unfastening it, now that she saw how they worked, thanks to the undone one above.

Slowly, the insect's large amber eyes closed as she pictured such an action on her part, more and more.. she wanted to see the snake's scales becoming gradually uncovered by the garment's removal.. to see his body but know that it had been obscured moments beforehand made it more special, like knowing a secret, or doing something that was against the rules. Her eyes fluttered open, and she found herself sitting up higher than she had been, leaning forward against the tender curve of Lighter's upright body. She was poised to unfasten the next of the round clothes-holders. She didn't care if she had put herself there, or if she had been manipulated into that position, though. She felt a spark of thought about how she might have had the idea to scurry back off of him and out of their coils altogether, or at least stop herself. Said spark did not catch, did not ignite an actual flame of a notion, all the fuel for her fires had been steadily moved to more.. social centres in her cerebrum.

She glanced up at Lighter, who simply smiled and hissed his permission. He specifically did not tell her to do one thing or another. She could sense Darker looming over them both, but he was also silent. With all the encouragement and the knowledge and the growing acceptance of her curiosity toward the creature(s), the mantis still hesitated, one of her thumbs on the smooth circle, a fingertip on the other hand already tucked timidly below the flap of fabric under said circle.

Then, in the stillness of that second of indecision, Lighter happened to flick his tongue at Nae's neck.

The feathery fondle of the flitting forks filled her form with a fantastic feeling, flowing forth from her sensitive neck. Her eyes closed and a moan rolled up from her throat, unbidden, and when she opened her eyes, she had undone not just the disc she had her hands on, but another one below, as well. She laughed and used her scythe-claws to spread the slackened flaps, exposing the handsome, trim front that was hidden underneath as she consciously dove her hands down to attack the next fastened pair.

After prying apart more of the glossy circles and their matching holes in the thin material, Nae paused in her pleased peeling of Lighter's attire from his body. She had felt her own clothing shifting subtly, and she twisted around to see Darker, with his hands on the large bow that tied her kimono together in the back, just above her protruding abdomen. He smiled sheepishly, having stopped before she had even turned to look. As he hissed something to her, she could see that his coat had been pulled open to the precise same point that Lighter's had.

Darker's sibilance seemed to say that it was only fair that they be allowed to untie her clothing while she did as much to them, as well as being a general statement about their lack of need for clothing at all. Nae looked to Lighter once more, thinking about asking him to retie her partially undone obi, and was surprised to find that his own thin white kimono was totally re-sealed, cutting her off from the prized peeks she had been getting at his smooth scutes. Her gaze whipped back around to find Darker still hovering near, his garment once again closed up and fastened in full, as well as her obi, the kimono's securing bow, tightly tied.

~

Part 5 - 'Hands-On Assistance' ~Or~ 'A Pretty Prison'

~

Darker's sibilance seemed to say that it was only fair that they be allowed to untie her clothing while she did as much to them, as well as being a general statement about their lack of need for clothing at all. Nae looked to Lighter once more, thinking about asking him to retie her partially undone obi, and was surprised to find that his own thin white kimono was totally re-sealed, cutting her off from the prized peeks she had been getting at his smooth scutes. Her gaze whipped back around to find Darker still hovering near, his garment once again closed up and fastened in full, as well as her obi, the kimono's securing bow, tightly tied.

She sighed, accepting the simple truth with a smile. She had to give what she took and reciprocate with her suitors. With her resigned sigh, she felt herself loosen up once more, the obi coming undone all on its own, in time with her exhalation, as she let go that particular inhibition. She looked up from their coils to find both snakes sporting fully opened clothes, the long garments hanging loosely alongside their streamlined selves, framing their fronts in a manner Nae found quite fabulous.

Her hands could not help but reach out to rest upon both slender, svelte stomachs at once. She slid her palms over the pale scales upon their bellies, idly reflecting upon how they seemed all the more slim and sexy while sitting in their draped open outfits, the contrast between their clothes and their bare scales only accentuating the appeal of their svelte forms.

At the same time, her kimono was gradually gliding off of her form with every one of her movements, the formerly tight folds that formed the collar had loosened to the point of her bare shoulders nearly coming free from underneath the thick material. The heavy, full body covering hung precariously upon her slender body, seeming to grip around the very edges of her frame.. her neck and collar bared, left naked, save for the occasional covering by her thick, jet black ponytail, that draped down from her coal-coloured crown of lightless locks.

The snakes seemed much more at ease in their unclasped 'kimonos', and hissed hearty compliments about the beginning of Nae's nakedness, nurturing such a state for their guest good-naturedly. Their smooth, sibilant sentiments spoke of comfort and freedom, flexibility, and of course, sexiness.

Although the mantis shied away inside of the slowly opening shell that was her kimono, she found that she honestly did enjoy hearing the pair's kind words about her body under the silken material. Simply hearing what they really thought with no fuzzy filter, no flurry of formality to muddle the meanings of what they said, it was just as refreshing as the cool air was upon her body. What could be seen of her front was a winding canyon of white hide between the red cliffs formed by her kimono's undone opening. Withdrawing her arms from their sleeves, Nae spread said rippling ravine into a ocean of her own creamy carapace, hints of her sweet sea swells snuck into view on either side of her bared belly. Her pink-tinted feminine entrance below was saved from exposure by a twist of her robe's tie, a portion of the formerly tied obi.

Nae laid upon and within her kimono over the contiguous coils of the conjoined constrictors, as if lounging languidly in her bed, her nude, nubile form only barely concealed under the haphazard curves of a silken sheet. Her hosts hovered high above her, their hugeness in comparison to her compact chitin covered body had seemed scary before, but now she appreciated their size and strength. Such powerful partners.. protectors, perhaps. The bigger they were, the more massive their... devotion must be. Such vast vessels, packed with potent passion for her. For little old her.. surely she would overflow with their... affection.

The mantis knew these things were true in the way they had spoken to her before, how they spoke to her then, their constant comments caressing her form as they laid themselves along either side of her, their eyes exploring the parts of herself she had deigned to reveal to them. Their large forms formed wide walls that she found herself nestled nicely between, not trapped or held, but shielded and sheltered amidst the creamy scutes and their soft care. They all rested and relaxed their bodies while their minds raced forward, becoming all the more excited. Nae grew entirely at ease with her exposure, happily hidden, hunkered down between the huge hunks.

As they lay there, both ends of the impossible serpent whispered the sweetest of things to her, washing over her attentive antennae and along her white, slender shape, making her body buzz with bliss. The idea of being free to talk about and to feel such things was a sinful delight to her, although she quickly thought of it as less and less of a morally corrupt or abhorrent act and more of a natural, beautiful bonding between beings.

Elevated and elated to the extreme, Nae turned to look at her two sleek suitors. She felt a pang of regret, coming to understand how little she had shown of her affinity for them. She was too shy to say much more than her thanks, so she reached out to touch Darker's chest with one of her lower limbs, her fingertips touching tenderly over his soft scutes. She complimented the cream coloured plates, considering how they reminded her of her own hide, the stripes formed by their divisions reminiscent of her lower legs.. to which he remarked that they were both for locomotion, which made her giggle. Despite their differences, common ground could always be found.

The mantis had extended her arm from the middle of her kimono, not through a sleeve, and as she laughed, she realized that her breast had been bared for some time. She glanced down at the modest mound, with its pinkened peak, thinking about how it was not physically uncomfortable, how the air was warm enough to make nudity as natural as wearing clothes (or more so). She was not upset at her exposure, or that she hadn't known about it. She kept her hand upon Darker's broad chest, rubbing it softly, considering how she couldn't help but want herself to be covered, but didn't want to pull her arm back, so that her robe could be re-wrapped around her.

Lighter's sandy brown hand slithered across from the other side of the mantid's middle to gently cup and cover her mammary, fulfilling her fleeting thought of furtiveness. She grinned at him and he smiled in return, softly stroking her with his palm, keeping her 'concealed' with his large, clawed hand. She lifted her other arm, the one next to Lighter, to caress his chest along with Darker's, knowing full well that the other half of her bust would be bared, just like the first, but she also knew that what her companions would do. Just as she hoped, Darker's deep, reddish brown limb glided over her front and Lighter's forearm to fondle and form the other half of her scaly 'bra' of sorts. She laughed, as did the snakes, arching her back to fill out her new 'garment' as it gently rubbed her bosom.

The combined stirring of the steadily steamier scene caused the mantid's modesty to be all the more compromised as the strip of silk that was draped over her nethers was pulled out of place. A flush flashed over Nae's face, but not due to embarrassment.. excitement instead was the culprit as the serpents' other hands surfaced from the sea of scales below to brush up between her legs and curl around her inner thighs before floating up to the fulcrum of her feminine folds, their fingers forming a new bit of scaly clothing as their palms pressed against her pink passage.

Under the criss-crossed caresses of her coily companions, the chitinous creature cooed and contorted, causing her to slide from one set of soft, scaly strokes to the other. Writhing in retreat from the reptilians' tender touches upon one of her private places only made her move into the other all the more, multiplying her moaning. It wasn't long before she found herself grinding up and down into the pythons' protecting palms, pressing against their, sleek strong arms, her little body swiftly heating their cool scales.

After her arms ached and her legs lost their luster, the mantis came to rest, her hands slipping down to cup over the ophidians' upon her thighs and pelvis.. her scythes snugging against the arms over her front. She sighed, then remembered why the snakes had slithered their various limbs into those spots to begin with. They had been 'protecting her modesty'. She blushed brightly, then laughed lightly. Her own arms remained in place, pulling the males' closer to her, instead of springing up to cover her mouth politely while she tittered. She giggled because of how ridiculous it seemed, to have been so worried about her clothes, how she had clung to the constant coverings, keeping herself concealed from.. everything.

No more constrictive kimono, no more restrictive robe, not in that place, with her powerful partners. She reached up to each of their snouts with her scythes and pulled each into her hands, on either side, to kiss their cheeks, one after the other. The precise pecks to the pythons' cheeks led to longer locking of lips, which expanded along the lines of lingering fingers upon flesh.. which blossomed into full-blown frenching, fondling and foreplay. The twinsnake twined and twisted with the tiny geisha, lifting her up and out of her kimono, into the open, Nae no longer noticing or caring about her exposure as she emerged, engaged in erotic entanglement. As they too stripped themselves, the serpents sighed their abundant approval of the group's good-bye to their garments, grinding their graceful forms around and around their insectine guest.

They went on and on for what seemed like hours, Nae losing herself in the heated maze of lusty loops.. time flowing both faster and slower and swirling all around her. She was inside it all and outside at the same time, and through the sexual haze, she saw herself and the snakes doing many things.. beginning with mere sexual congress in more positions than she had imagined were possible (and some she KNEW were impossible) and progressing to more otherworldly scenes.. seeing the serpents twist together into an even larger version of themselves, a single giant, four-armed green snake, with flowing hair, which loomed over her, blocking out all light with his immensity.

At one point, they snakes divided themselves further, their long, two-ended body turning into a cross, four serpentine lengths extending from a single point, four males surrounding her, which, at times, felt like the most thrilling adventure of adultery, a pack of potent pythons pulling and pushing to pleasure her petite form.. and at other times, fluxed into the most delightfully decadent experience of having a group of sexy slave snakes attending to her every whim, the four slowly sub-dividing again into six, then eight, soon having enough expert scaled hands to massage every part of her pale pink form at once. The former pair having become a cadre of constrictors, in every single shade of brown between the two extreme ends that had been their forebears.

With an errant thought to the possibility of boredom at the banality of a bevy of boidae boys at her beck and call, Nae saw something all the more exciting happening to her.. and to her body, as the scads of snakes slithered back into one another to become the original two, Lighter and Darker, who had kept some of the extra arms their clones had possessed.. and were already in the midst of using said cornucopia of limbs to drag their many hands across Nae's body, spreading scales upon her chitin, quickly turning her into a sleek, snake-like sort of mantis, their palms providing the pale scales to match her fair form's faintness.

Delighting in the development of devilish and demure additions to her anatomy, the insect saw herself investigating the intense integration of mantis and snake, delving ever deeper into the duo's depraved demonstration. She luxuriated in their languid loops and leered at herself in a (mysteriously materialized) mirror, actually allowing herself a perverse pride in her newfound appearance. All the while, the serpents simmered with sibilant celebrations of any and all appearances or alterations.

And more alterations did occur. Gazing at herself in the mirror, Nae's wandering eyes roamed her rapidly more reptilian form.. in searching for spots suffering from a scarcity of snakiness, her vigilant vision and her growing thirst for new changes actually caused her body to blend further towards that of her hosts. She had gone from innocent insect, to an exotic explorer of the desire of those around her.. to the craven corrupter of her own core. As Nae finished crafting her ideal body of elegant, beautiful mantis and sleek, sexy snake, the looking glass that lay flat in the midst of the coils of the quietly hissing males shifted shimmering and rippling like a be-pebbled pond. The reflection rearranged to show Nae her original appearance against a bright clear sky, unlike the dim un-night around her. As Lighter and Darker leaned over to look, their distorted reflections were revealed to have grimacing faces, suffused with wicked, curving horns and antennae.. which looked vaguely familiar to the mantis, striking her as a memory of a nightmare, long since dead, buried and fortunately forgotten.. now reborn.

They appeared as something abhorrent and horrible, menacing and malevolent, but nevertheless charismatic and compelling, though she could see past the last, even if others were fooled. Without thinking, Nae struck at the surface of the mirror, a hatred and fear spilling forth from deep in her soul, unbidden. The peaceful picture of her past was pierced by her punches, the powerful penetration lodging her limbs in the liquid of the mirror. With a sudden violent wrenching, she was pulled asunder, plunged headlong into the pond of her former fate.

~

As soon as Nae realized she was falling upwards into that strange mirror world she had seen, gravity flipped back to normal and the 'snakes' grabbed at her, but they were different, no longer kind, they were more like the stern, unforgiving sort of men she knew in her everyday life. Their long, coily bodies were bristling with insectine legs and they held her firmly in place. She tried to escape back to the side of the magical mirror from which she had come, back to the relaxed reptilians and their rousing recreation. The ground was not a mirror on this side, yet it had trapped her lower legs as she had fallen through. She realized she was back to being a mantis, an orchid mantis, plain and placid, no longer brimming with the sexy danger she had thought the scales had given her, moments before.

As she was held there, she realized she was rooted to the ground, long tendrils of attachment anchoring her there, without hope of removal. The dirt was its normal, boring brown, it was infecting her buried legs with a disgusting shade of green and she was trapped, utterly ensnared by her suddenly floral form. Her body and her lifeline with the flat, dull ground were both bonding into a beautiful, pristine prison of routine and safety and polite people who seethed and writhed with dagger-like roots under the blank surface of the world. Her body was a blooming bud (a bud upon which bitter bids could possibly be placed, to her horror), stuck there as an endless procession of patrons passed her by en route toward terrific adventures, of which she would only ever hear snippets from the rare return visitors.

Her guards, a pair of centipedes, she realized, sneered and snickered and simpered at her snidely, condescension and contempt clear on their warped faces. She shied from them, wanting to fold up her pretty petals and sink back into the ground from whence she had come. In that moment, she both wished to return to the serpent's soft, scaly embrace as well as disappear into the dirt, returning to the womb of the world that had spawned her from a simple, single seed.. for her reality as a deeply rooted plant had begun to force its way into her mind.

Before long, the pair of painfully pompous 'escorts' sloughed off, their train-like bodies clacking discordantly away with their unending series of legs. Nae hugged herself and held her breath, twisting on her stalk, attempting to will herself away, as far away as possible.. to somewhere as different from that spot as she could.

While staring at the dirt and the pale green column of her own body that tethered her to one spot for the rest of her existence, she noticed some sprouts of weeds appearing around her. She thought it was odd, as the memories that had arrived with her floral form told her that the powers that maintained the garden around her would have never allowed even the faintest hint of such pest plants into the prized patch of soil.

The weeds wiggled their way out, worming upwards and unfurling to reveal themselves to be her reptilian retinue from the rousing realm she had nearly forgotten. Her rescuers' roots writhed about in the soil, sleek, sexy serpentine vines corrupting the calm, cold collection of faceless, feminine flowers. The peace of the garden was disrupted by the charming invaders many slithering, tender tendrils. The males' main bodies twisted around Nae's form while a wide matrix of creeping coils roused the rest of the repressed realm.

Just as Nae knew she was to be tugged back down to the place she had come to think of as paradise, a considerable claw craned into view above her, reaching down from the sky to grasp her and hold her against the pervasive pulling of the pythonic serpenvines. The giant's grip tightened as the entwined embrace of the erotic, exotic encroachers intensified. The crushing claws did nothing but harm her while the twist of the tantalizing tangle did nought but nudge her need for naughtiness.

The battle over her body was brought to a boil as the boyish brothers began to bite at the formidable fingers that fought with them for the fearful flower. Adjusting its grip as the nips to its knuckles deterred the hand, its massive digits closed upon Nae's delicate petals and pulled.

Pain shot through the pitiable mantis as she was ripped in more ways than one. She was flung floorward, feet-first, her form flapping as she was dragged deep into the dirt by the dashing duo, while a pair of her petals were peeled free from her back.

~

Crying in anguish, the restored insect collapsed into the arms and coils of her pair of protectors. It took her a moment to realize she was free of the agony of where she had just been, she was back in the dull, dark heat of the liberating lack of light, the nice, nebulous night. Her body was unharmed, and her spirit swiftly came to know that the traumatic trial had not been true.

But, it WAS true enough to remind her of her own former garden of indolent incarceration. She leapt up and kissed the hissing, handsome snakes upon their snouts, thanking them in a rushing gush of gratitude for.. whatever they had done, whether it was to wake her up from her wicked nightmare, or if they actually arrived to alleviate and aide her. They both hugged her gently, side by side in front of her small frame, lifting her up to their twin torsoes.

The mantid's many kisses led the lithe, lengthy ones into a renewal of their rapacious race toward ribald raptures.. and Nae was all too eager to assist them!

~

Part 6 - 'A Taste to Leave One Breathless' ~Or~ 'Potent, Palatable Plunges'

~

A palpable, potent hunger hung in the air as the powerful pythonic pair's palms pulled upon Nae's pinkish parts. Their tongues flickered fast, flitting over the female's flesh, their once more rising lust lapping at the mantid's form like waves on a beach, going from gentle, sliding sheets of soft seawater, to crashing, crushing surf splashing over her as their scales slid over her body every which way.. the tide of their tender love for her encroaching around her more and more, threatening to wash her out into a swirling, scaly sea of serpentine sensuality.

For the formerly fearful female, a single snake would have been just about enough to sweep her into such a state, but she was but an island, overwhelmed by the ophidian ocean, all around her. Said small speck of soil in the swelling sea stood no chance, nor did she want to hold herself apart from them (or anyone else she cared for) any longer. That she might have once been unable to swim was unthinkable to her, but she had been incapable, before. She was attracted to the idea of love, and had wanted to dive in, but could not find the courage within her until she had been so suffused by the sweet snakes, and thrown into the pool of passion. Nae had not known how to respond to the reptile's clear intent, but now she reveled in the thought that someone, that _anyone_ desired her with such dire desperation. And the fact that she desired them just as deeply was all the better.

Lighter's lips locked with her own, a subtle splash of snakey sweetness to pull her from her mental meanderings. The sandy brown snout smiled at her in the kiss, his arms cradling her upper body, stroking over her wing-covers with his long fingers. A second set of scaly digits danced over her as well, running along her legs, around the petal-like protrusions of her lower limbs. Darker's snout slid its way between Nae's thighs, confirming that it was his reddish brown hands upon her feet. His grinning purple eyes loomed up in the dimness below Lighter's flexing form, the violet orbs appearing before their owner's sly smile could.

The lengthy lurker below made a show of sliding his glistening black tongue out of his mouth, silently demonstrating its length and dexterity to the captured gaze of the geisha. As she watched from the corner of one big, amber eye, Nae kissed Lighter all the more firmly, her sudden sucking upon his tongue seeming a clear sign of her eagerness for all things forked. Darker grinned, somehow knowing of the deepening of the kisses, perhaps through a mental link with his 'brother'. No matter the reason, Darker took it as a sign to nestle all the more into Nae's nethers and begin to lick.

Wedge-shaped and blunt on the end, the snake's snout fit impossibly well between the bug's legs. His hands roamed over her rear and attended affectionately to her abdomen as his tongue twisted to leave long trails of warm wetness all around the mantid's slit, teasing her with close calls around her quivering core. She shivered and rolled her hips almost automatically, trying to press against him, to feel the almost fluid-like flesh against her feminine folds. Finally, as Lighter locked lips with her one more time, so did Darker, kissing her core and pressing inwards with his agile, twin-tined tongue.

While both kisses continued, more of the snakes' tongues were slipped into both ends of her body. Nae wrapped all six of her limbs around the duo's thick torsoes, her scythes and arms around Lighter, embracing him, her legs hooking around Darker, straddling and squeezing, subconsciously wanting to force more of his forks into her. She sucked hard on the thin tips of Lighter's large linguistic length as he and his counterpart down below rationed the rousing muscles inch by tantalizing inch.

Sensitivity is the speciality of the oral orifice, and as Lighter's tongue crept forth through Nae's lips, it felt fabulously full-formed, flooding her mouth with the succulent string of snake. This only served to make her imagination exaggerate the dimensions of the devilish muscle making its way into her matronly mound. It just kept coming, on both ends, and she thought she might do the same, sucking firmly on the forks in her face, frenching forcibly with the fairer fellow. Her hips pressed down on Darker's snout and his arms clasped around her bottom and lower back, crossing over the base of her abdomen to lock himself in place as his wandering worm reached the end of its extension.

Lighter had already pulled back to leave some room in the mantid's mouth, and now leaned back with a grin, drawing his long tongue out through Nae's lips, wagging the length at her impishly, showing off both what had been mashed into her maw from his, as well as re-iterating what was interacting with the more intense set of her lips. She gazed at the exposed extremity, eyes agog. She gasped, then, as Darker snatched up his small, slimy, slippery serpent all at once, the forks flashing free of her heated tunnel, the friction upon her entrance made her moan, wanting it back, and more.

Darker delivered, although with deliberate delay, delving back into Nae's depths delicately. His forks fondled her folds firmly, licking her flowery petals passionately before pushing his agile tongue through them, the swift, squishing entrance almost as pleasurable as the prior grinding. Nae twitched and tightened around the invader and his two-pronged probe, arching her back and grabbing for Lighter, wanting to anchor herself in her sensual squirming. The unoccupied ophidian caught the mantid's wrists and held her hands in his, leaning down to kiss her fingers fondly. To have one end of the exotic creature treating her so delicately and demurely while the other drove into her, downstairs.. it was a delightful dichotomy to say the least.

The exploring ends of the more adventurous serpent surged into the insect's body, back to the total length.. and then it snuck in a little more.. and a little more! Darker's tongue, aside from the teasing twists that rubbed Nae the rather right way upon entrance into her pulsing passage, also appeared to be stretching, more of the marvelous material moving from the male's maw, into the middle of the mantis. She gasped, as much as from shock as from glee. The snake really was giving her his tongue, and more. It crept ever forward, flowing freely from within the cavernous recesses of the reptile, reaching euphoric inner areas that Nae knew not, nor had never even dreamed of.

Writhing more and more upon the multiplying muscle, the mantis moaned and moved to massage Darker's head, wishing to will him forever forth.. but she could not. Her eyes tore from her own belly, which she swore was swelling with the sizable suffusion of tongue, to find Lighter restraining her wrists.. with his own impossibly long tongue, the strong, slippery strip wound around her arms, binding her in baffling bondage. The girl gaped at the sight, squirming all the more at the sudden knowledge of her restriction.

In addition to the tongue trussing up her hands, a compliment of coils had curled around her feet and her scythes, where they had lain slack over the ever-present sea of scales, the only thing untouched was her abdomen and her wings, which were left to flick and flutter in faint futility. The ability to move portions of her form with such ferocity with so little effect only amplified the exotic effect it all had on her.

The more she pulled upon the python's tongue and coils, and the more she wanted to be able to touch Darker's snout, or her own enraptured sex, but could not budge-- the hotter she became. The heat of a new kind of paradoxically fulfilling frustration bloomed in her body, billowing outwards in the midst of her bondage, blossoming into a full blown blissful feeling of sweet sexual submission.

The revelation of relinquishing control was an odd thought to the recently awakened mantis, but by that point, her mind was open.. she knew, immediately that it was not a hypocrisy. She may have been a geisha, serving others with little personal power before, but with the snakes, she knew it was different. She had allowed them to gain the upper hand, she _wanted_ them to take over, she realized. Nae grinned to herself and tugged harder on her various trapped limbs, trying all the harder to break free.. they would hold her tight, never letting her go, as if proving their powerful need for her. Her release would arrive at the appropriate time, she was confident.

During Nae's struggles, the nearly twin nagas snickered sibilantly, speaking softly, their language not limited by their tongues being quite busy, it seemed. They teased her with comments about her inability to escape and how they would go on forever like this.. Lighter had started stroking all over the small female's form, fondling her, caressing her curves, cupping her breasts, his thumbs massaging over the malleable mounds, which bounced with her wriggling. As she shook under the brighter boy, the more murky male's tongue had never stopped streaming into her slit, flooding her form with fantastically flexing and vexingly sexy sensations. It was all bringing her just inches away from total meltdown, making her feel as though she was about to explode from the erotic escapade, not to mention the extensive tongue inside her.

Darker's black, forked flicker was being mashed unendingly into her, the non-stop slithering tongue having folded up inside her to stuff itself in thicker, expanding to jam every spare space with squishing, smothering, licking lust. Lighter's own forks were slithering around Nae's wrists to be able to keep them constricted as well as extend past the knot, joining his sandy hands in worshiping her body.. licking at her beautiful bust amid her heated, huffing, puffing.. the mantis panted in passion, pulling weakly at her limbs, shivering and quivering at how she was basically bound by no more than the incapacitating intensity of their interaction. She would have been just as helpless without them holding her, with how utterly, uncontrollably near she was to a climax.

Through the heavenly haze, two points of contact became clear.. tiny points of pressure upon the plates of her chitinous flesh. The forks of Lighter's tongue were traveling upwards. They started on her breasts, in the valley of her cleavage (created by his helping hands, holding her flesh together), and were then slithering upward, ever-so-gently wisping over her hide.. the tenderness of the touch making it stand out among all the others, within the chaotic cacophony of coupling with the coily creature. The faint, feathery feeling guided her senses, ascending with them over her body, the barest of brushes bringing everything to a head as the tongue travelled to her actual head. It licked up her chest, up her throat and off of her chin.. before darting in to dance over her neck.

At the flash of fleeting flicks to her oh-so-sensitive neck, Nae sucked in a huge gulp of air, tensing up tremendously, her entire body was like a compressed spring, a loaded gun, an armed bomb.. every molecule of her mass was prepared and primed to go off. She teetered on the tiniest tip of an edge, above an immense experience in her erotic evolution, an expansive abyss, awash with an abundance of ambrosia, into which she would fall, if either male would just.. do.. something, anything!

They did nothing for a long moment, leaving their staggered student to struggle in vain to gain the needed nudge toward nirvana. Slowly, Nae slumped silently in their various embraces while her libido raged at her, and at them, crying out for more, demanding it upon threat of death even as the heat within her faded away, seeping out of her with her panting and twitching. Her loins longed for further filling, her muscles meekly mashing the massive tongue, as if whimpering for more. At that, Darker began to withdraw his tongue, turning it so it was flat, flush with her flesh, providing next to no naughty stimulation. The only thing the evacuation of all that extended licker length did was provide a pale memory of the marvelous massage that she had been blessed with, during its insertion.

Groaning and attempting to grind at her 'cruel' captors, the mantis felt both melted and mushed, strained and pained. The pain was of a pleasurable type, though, an agonizing ache to return to the realm of the risque` and finish what had been begun.

As soon as the pair of pythons released her to lay upon their loops once more, Nae's hands hurriedly snapped to her snatch, hoping to plunge inside, to quell her craving for the carnal.. but she couldn't! Her hands found nothing but smooth exoskeleton, her belly was blank from her breasts to her behind. A slight shivering sliver of the sensation of being tied up run through her body. She was unable to reach that which she desired, while not being held in any fashion.. it was bondage without bindings.

A quiet hiss came forth from behind and to either side of her. Her antennae twitched and she twisted around to see the snakes smirking. The mischievous males made it known to the mantis that only they could continue what they had started. While not directly stated, an undercurrent of their sibilant speech was that they weren't there just so she could be alone in her achieving of ascension.. despite the fact that they both thought it would be something they would want to witness, rather relishing the notion.

Her hand hadn't left her middle, massaging her modified mound in the hopes that she might get through, or somehow recapture the heated heights she had been soaring through, moments before. Lighter smiled in his kind way and leaned down to sidle up against Nae's side, his big upper body almost encompassing the mantid's as his arm wrapped around to slip down alongside her own. His hand joined her own in her massage, and she gasped as the firm flesh she'd been furtively fondling flowed like a fluid to re-form her female folds, their fingers falling into her together.. twisting into a tangle in the tight, small space.

The sweet snake hissed a short explanation as he demonstrated manually. The visual, tactile aid was very much needed, as Nae could not have focused on Lighter's tender talking to save her life, thanks to what his hand was doing to her. After an all-too-short time, the serpent pulled his hand away, leaving her own entrenched, exploring eagerly. Before she could continue, though, her digits were deposited outside of her skin once more, pressed back out of the plush, pulsing passage as it sealed itself against her self-inflicting any sort of satisfaction. Darker chuckled at her dismay, and she realized that Lighter had probably said that was exactly what would occur when he slipped away from her.

~

Part 7 - 'Gaining the Upper Hand' ~Or~ 'A Power Play'

~

As the fog finally lifted from the mantid's mind, though, she realized that she was hardly cursed. She simply needed to let the looming lamias do lewd things to her, which was quite acceptable, as far as curses went. She smiled and stood up, pressing close to Darker to give him a hearty smooch and to suck on his most sinful of tongues. She whispered her thanks to him, and timidly implied that he was allowed to use as much as he pleased of the unending organ, on her, any time. She turned to Lighter to kiss him as well, and inform him of the same, but he stopped her with a knowing grin and a flick of his forks at her neck, once more. The double-headed devil surely shared information from one side to the other.

Sharp spikes slid up both boys' bodies as Nae raised her upper arms along the spine of both serpentines astride her, gently clasping around their long necks. She pulled them to her, to kiss both their snouts at once before beginning to brush their chests with her hands, reciprocating to the reptiles for their sublime treatment of her so far, wanting to be all the more deserving of their desire, she returned to coy actions of a geisha, with a decidedly deviant drive behind them.

Delicate digits danced over the broad scuted chests on both sides of the bug, her hands running over the smooth expanses expertly. Her scythes slithered over their necks to curve under their chins and rub the recesses between the powerful jaws with the smooth backsides of her clawed extremities, which enticed them lower all the better than her hold had.

The idea that faint touches drew someone all the better than firmness was something Nae knew from her geisha training.. they were always told to be placid and calm, to make men marvel over the mystery of what could be hidden under the surface of their serenity. To touch in a way that grew ever more faint and drew forth the fellow being stroked was an easy evolution of the aforementioned technique. She drew them forward to her, slowly making them turn and come up side by side at the edge of their coils, where she left them wanting, aching for more of her superb yet unfulfilling caress. She stepped back onto the oddly coloured dirt from whence they had emerged, smiling slyly at the stupefied snakes, enjoying her tiny taste of payback before continuing with her plan.

Her plan was still coming to her as she went along with it, and the idea to dance for her captive audience came from no-where, but seemed so perfect and so right, it was as if she had planned it ages beforehand.

And so, Nae danced for her snakes, for her utterly unique companions, her sweet 'sproutlings'. She spontaneously snatched up her kimono in a spinning whirl and began to tell her tale through the only real medium she had been able to engage in, throughout her life. Her steps started out slow, and she clasped the kimono around her tightly, cut off from everything and everyone, but as she progressed, she moved more and more, faster and faster, the flowing silken robe coming undone. The clothing flapped open to give the snakes sudden, unpredictable peeks at parts of the white and pink female form that flew around before them.

It wasn't long before the heavy material was merely draped over Nae's shoulders, fully open as she danced in an increasingly sexual manner. Her humanoid arms had slid out of the sleeves to press themselves around her own body, the scythe-limbs staying up to keep her balance and retain the robe as a frame for the steamy show going on between the concealing covers of the kimono. Held open in a way that only revealed her body to those right in front of her, Nae swayed in place, her hands running sensually over her own form, showing herself off.. but remaining shy to the rest of the world, in a way.

Soon, the silk was thrown almost totally off of her body as something happened in the tale of the dance, an event which changed everything. Each end of the snake smiled to itself and each other, knowingly. They exactly knew what occurrence was being emulated before them (for they had a hand in it).

With her clothing hanging around her waist, Nae's dance picked up all the more, no longer a subdued, traditional geisha movement, she was wild and reckless, and with a final coy cover-up with her kimono held loosely to her chest and privates, she let it slip out of her fingers in a particularly forceful fling of her form, leaving the nubile Nae nude.

Her body stood out in the dark as she twisted and spun fluidly, her lithe frame suddenly seeming sublimely free from all constraints, be they clothing or otherwise. Moving with feverish fervor, the female flaunted her form with effortless grace, proud to be gazed upon by the snakes. The serpents had begun to lean forward in rapt attention long enough before that moment that they were then almost encroaching upon the area through which Nae twirled, their long forms easily able to flex down, extended outward almost horizontally. Even they were surprised at the mantid's show, impressed and all the more hungry with lust for the little lady. As her dance ran toward its climax, Nae's jet black hair was tousled about with her energetic and erotic writhing, her long ponytail weakening with each whip. Throughout her journey, her hair had remained tied up, constrained, somewhat forgotten, but in the finale of her free-form performance, it expressed itself along with her, suddenly coming undone as she threw her head back, so that it billowed out behind her, in full flowing freedom, framing Nae's body with the cascading gleam, a perfect black background on which to present the transformed insect.

~

Part 8 - 'Erotic Suffusion' ~Or~ 'A Perpetual Passion'

~

The final pose of Nae's dance lasted about three seconds before the snake(s) swooped in to sweep her off her feet and into their tight, wanton embrace, their lascivious loops licking at her body even before their tongues did. They needed her, and she needed them.. even if she had momentarily forgotten her burden. She had risen above the craven call for coupling and climax, been able to ignore it, defeating it. She was free to go back and indulge herself, as well, of course.

The twin snakes had grabbed Nae on either side, sandwiching her between their needily insistent and flowing fronts. Their scales rustled all around her, rubbing up against her, their scutes rippling against her bare body as they held her up between their twin, towering torsos. The small insect was suspended by the snakes, their hands supporting both the underside of her abdomen and her thighs, both the bulbous bug-behind and her legs were flexed upwards, due to her weight in the middle. The mantid's nexus of sexual spaces came to rest upon the reptile's curving, streamlined scutes, the sides of her rear wedged against each of the serpent's bellies where the space between the two nagas narrowed.

Being held aloft in that manner made the mantis moan, reminded of the rapturous relinquishing of control to her sinuous suitors, being unable to move of her own volition again, tightly held in place between the writhing, unified bodies. Their grip on her legs and the closeness of their forms meant she could not lift herself up, wedged between the busy-bodied boys.. all she could do was wriggle her abdomen and flail her feet, her arms having nothing but rippling, ravishing reptile flesh to rub. And she did just that, naturally, goading them both on with massages to their sleekly muscled forms.. she did not crave escape, just more extreme ecstasy. Their hands roamed over her lower portions, coming teasingly close to touching some of the more tender areas of her anatomy, but actually avoided said avenues, aggravatingly.

With Nae's legs and abdomen so tightly flexed and her rump held against the snakes' scales, her underside was unavoidably stretched, all of her most secret of spaces on display and ripe for the picking. She could feel how anyone could see so much of her, and being unable to move back to a more modest position was making her all the more aroused. Of course, the constant caress of her coily companions certainly sent her soaring toward the hazy, heady heaven of hedonism, too.

Said sublime stroking came not just from their fingers upon her form, but their forks, which flowed out to flick and flit and feel and fondle, fonts of fluid and fantastic feelings. They began slowly, at natural sizes, but soon stretched to more and more impossible lengths that slithered over her body, caressing carefully.. cradling her chin or brushing breasts between retreats to the dank cavernous mouths from which they poured.

Nae gripped at their shoulders now and then, her scythes gently pressing at them, being careful with the claw-like limbs, as she always was. She panted and squirmed between them, whimpering for them to do more, to give her their.. say couldn't say it, but she thought about it. The lamias laughed a little at her slow silence after crying out for more. They didn't need their apparent telepathic powers to know what she was pining for. They kissed her cheeks at the same time, hisses welling in both of their throats, which turned into their smooth speech as the smooches stopped.

They asked what it was that she wanted, and grinned at the blush that arose before them both, on the cheeks they had just been kissing. Aside from the sub-question of what she wanted in her life and what she looked for in a mate and all the other ways to consider their expansive language, the core query was compact and concerned something very specific. It was something a proper lady would never bring up, in her mind, but she had to. She could tell that they would never go beyond what they were doing to her at that moment if she didn't.

The monstrous males went on, mouthing over her flesh, licking and keeping the mantis quivering and craving more.. their tongues even going as far as to worm down under her waist, impishly tantalizing her poor neglected nethers until she could take no more.

"Cock!" she cried, and tried to immediately cover her mouth, mortified, blushing brighter than the sun. Her hands were unable to reach her face, as the serpentine snouts slid in to kiss her cute embarrassment away, their lips leeching away the heat of her flushed face, showing her just what a good thing it was to shout. Her hands came to rest on their smiling snouts, and held them as they kissed her, kissing back to one and the other in turn, back and forth many times.

To further teach the timid mantis, Darker soon slid one of his hands under Nae's body and asked what she wanted again while he rested the tip of a finger against her leaking lower lips. He gathered some of her feminine fluids as he waited for her answer.. collecting quite a lot of the copious lubricant. At the same time, Lighter kissed her cheek, whispering encouragement for her to repeat what she had said. When she admitted in a more verbose variation that she wanted their shaft(s), Darker delved a drenched digit into the darker and tighter of her two tunnels while Lighter praised her growing courage with the subject matter.

Gasping, the bug girl groaned out another confession, which was that she hoped that they both had one of their own. As she grew used to the insertion within her slightly stretched backside and gradually calmed, she explained how she had guessed about their adult anatomy being a single spire in the middle of their mass.. but had been hoping, a desire somewhat hidden even to herself, that they each had a cock.

Cryptic smirks curled over both the snakes' long snouts as Darker pulled his finger free from the female's flesh. They exchanged knowing glances before lowering the mantid a minute, measly amount along their fronts. Almost immediately, she felt two hot, throbbing tips touching her tender places. She gasped, squirming, blushing and yearning to feel more of the potently pulsing poles. She couldn't believe that they'd been there all along, probably bobbing with their heartbeats, directly under her, all throughout her struggle to ask for them.

They brushed both of their shafts around against her bottom and thighs, teasing her with them as they resumed kissing and their lengthy licking, rapidly returning to the sweet, succulent level of communal carnality they had been drifting down from while urging Nae past another mental barrier. In no time, the mantis felt one of the thick, pointed tips of the two males' manhoods moving up, prodding firmly at the flesh of her sex. It was slightly askew and failed to skewer her slit, but succeeded in sending sensual signals into the mantid's mind, making her moan once more. She guessed that the devilish Darker was teasing her again, and she peered at him, pouting.. thinking of telling him how heartless he could be.

Before she could quip at the constrictor, Lighter moved slightly on her other side and the poorly targeted penis plunged into Nae's pink, plated pussy. Nae cooed, her core clenching at the considerable cock, though craving more. Lighter's body flexed and stretched to raise his rod into her without letting her go, his body sliding against her side slightly before the immobilizing pressure returned. He was the culprit, she realized, turning to him to see his sheepish look.

The girl kissed him deeply, delighting in the filling feeling of his phallus within her. As they kissed, Lighter began to softly slide against the mantis, moving his maleness further into her, tiny, tender thrusts using the middle of his massive-feeling meat to massage her moist maidenhood. His tongue invaded her mouth in a big way as they began their true coupling, their kiss deepening as his shaft sunk ever further into her.

Suddenly, a second tongue whipped around Nae's chin and tugged her away from the sandy snout she had been smooching. Darker slid his snout closer, smirking with an impish look in his eye as he pulled his tongue back, having already secured the insect's attention from his more gentlemanly brother. Darker's finger returned on the bug's backside and tapped her still lubricated ring once before he unceremoniously slid his own sex into her there, mashing his lips to hers, hard. His tongue forced into the lady's lips, and added itself to the already full space, Lighter's forks still cradled within.

It was much the same below as Nae's small body was filled to the brim, her bottom half bulging with throbbing organs. Their slowly leaking tips only added to the already abundant amount of the mantid's juices running out of her snugly stuffed slit. She shuddered in utter and perfect contentment, filled with happiness and heat, Nae felt fabulously fortunate to be there, forgetting her past life entirely for a moment.

The snakes writhed around her, their single long form twisting with their thrusts, their bodies moving in turn, one pulling out slightly while the other slid in, never stretching her skin both at once.. until she thought about it. Perhaps it was coincidence, but when she began to ponder the possibility, and how she might feel as they did it.. and as the notion infected her mind, the idea of both of the sizable, slick, solid spires spearing into her slackened spaces, stretching her from nothing to everything all at once.. they began to do just that, making Nae's brain boggle, blurring as her thoughts manifested in the male's movements. She was lost in a lustful maze, the only thing left in her mind was a simple craving for 'More!'.

Bringing the beautiful, black haired bug girl geisha to the cusp of another climax, the coiled creatures came crashing to a halt once again, leaving the poor insect in another intense limbo. Her entire body pounded with paralysing pleasure, peaking just short of her forever-out-of-reach rapture as the echoes of the erotic entanglement ebbed out of her. Enraged and elated at the same time.. she groaned in the fabulous frustration of it, knowing they'd finish her off eventually.. excited at the prospect of a prolonged period of play with the pythonic pair.

Looming back down close to her face with his snout, Darker's -by then familiar- scheming smile slid into view on Nae's left. While she might have been a bit bashful at his bemused look, before, Nae now knew what it could mean, and her body buzzed with expectant anticipation at what he might do. She didn't have to wait long as something new nudged the underside of her leg.. it was familiar and warm and slightly damp at the tip, and it seemed, in all aspects to be another.. but it couldn't be another! As Darker drew back and dove upward once more and another sunk snugly into her sopping sex, she came to realize that, yes, of course it could be another cock.

Darker seemed to have two twin tapering towers of taught, tawdry, turgid flesh, and both were wedged firmly within her form. Nae groaned in groin-grabbing pleasure and her hands did indeed rush southward to feel over her mightily tightly packed midsection, swearing she could sense slight swells that signified the snakes' intense intrusions. They leaked all the more liquid and so did she, at the thought of it. Dual shafts for the dualsnake. Her body was illuminated with pleasure, but her mind held onto the illumination of this knowledge: If Darker packed a pair, what about..

Lighter's second sex squeezed itself suddenly into her beyond full backside, making the mantis lose all control, overcome with body-tensing bliss. Her scythes raked over their thick skin in her passion, but left not a scratch on the flawless scales, no matter how hard she may have pressed in her fog of lust. Her body stretched painlessly, miraculously, marvelously, making the whole group groan as they ground together.. the serpents were wild wanton waves crashing together over the petite pink pebble that was Nae, submerging her in a suffocating suffusion of scintillating, sibilant sex.

Each of the snakes had one of their thick girths embedded in each of Nae's holes, tucked tightly in with another, that of the other ophidian. They pleased one another with forceful frotting as much as they took pleasure in the vice-like nature of Nae's nethers. For the first time, their normal veneer of charismatic calm cracked and they were just as jubilant in the jumble of joy, hissing loudly in unconstrained lechery, thirsting for the quenching refreshment of coitus just as desperately as the damsel into whim dove and drove so deeply.

As the pair of panting pythons, pulsing with perpetual need, pumped into her, Nae's body flexed and stretched, her upper limbs reaching out to grasp at the immense bodies that pleasurably pummeled and enveloped her own. Their bodies were arched toward one another over her, leaving her in a tight, hot, narrow naga-formed nook, spare coils of their body having slid up to encircle her legs and abdomen, rubbing against her randomly, keeping her all the more contained. She pressed her palms against their chests once again, but not to rub, just to gain some semblance of stability as she was bounced between them, her chest heaved gently as her hips were humped up, over and over, rolling rockily on the rapturous reptilian writhing below. Her hands slid and bumped over their scutes with the power of their pumping, the mantis mashed by the males, wrapped and rapt in ceaseless bliss.

With the insect so well supported by the multitude of malenesses below, the snake's hands slid from her abdomen to clasp around her back, their long, agile fingers curling around her slim sides, claws clicking inaudibly on her torso as they stroked her sweetly, teasing tirelessly even while their shafts shoot in and out of her. The serpentine tongues slithered rampantly around her increasingly sensitive body, running everywhere at once, squishing and squeezing more aggressively into every spare space as their owners moaned around their extended exploring extremities, licking at length, even occasionally stealing a lick of the girl's groin while one of the twins was withdrawing his widths.

And just as before, the boys had been balancing themselves with a back and forth rhythm of thrusts.. but as things climbed ever higher upon the mountain of sensation and sex, they returned to the same simultaneous slamming of Nae's supremely stretched skin that had nearly ended their escapade earlier. Nae's body continued to contort around the giant snakes' invasions of her delicate form and, somehow, she felt only utopian euphoria whenever she was pushed farther by the phallic forms forcing into her flesh. She wondered how she could be stretching so sweetly each time they sank into her, her body never seeming to become warped or uncomfortable.. but she realized with a flash that she didn't care in the slightest.. she was only concerned with her rush for release. She trusted the towering snakes enough to know they would never harm her. They were her protectors, her lovers, they couldn't cause her even the tiniest bit of pain.

With the very first over-filling of the four formidable phalli all at once, Nae thought she might die of delight. She screamed in wordless aphrodisia, succumbing to the succubus that was sexual succor. She could feel herself begin to tumble into the abyss of erotic excess, she was going to explode, it was inevitable. Even if the snakes stopped, in seconds, she would have sweet release.

At her final surrender, the serpents grinned amid their grinding and groaning and endeavoured to extend their student's experience for as long as they could, not to mention their own!

Nae's body was suddenly set upon by a myriad of manual massaging, many fingers flowing over her form, fondling her fabulously as she flew through the last of her lustful ascension.. in her daze, she saw that each male had a new pair of arms, which they used to coat her in caresses, their former limbs joining in, since their coils now held her legs and abdomen aloft. Eight dexterous and devilish hands roamed her skin, the cornucopia of caressing fingers fondling her form setting her nerves on fire. She could have almost believed that the snakes had always had two sets of arms each, so addled with pleasure was her mind.

After another long moment of shutting her eyes, Nae felt something else shift against her, and opened her eyes through the hedonistic haze, she saw that the extra arms had been replaced by lengthy tendrils, which were like miniature snake coils that wound around her and slithered all over her skin. They rubbed her more completely than the limited and rigidly fingered form of normal arms could, although the brushing of the bony digits was still present and still sensual as well. She groaned and lapsed into another moment of lust-filled fog, closing her eyes to just ride the erotic experience forever forward. In that second, the same shift happened again, and she came back into the moment long enough to see a veritable viper's nest of small serpentine lengths gliding over herself, skyrocketing her sensations once more.

The thought of the snakes altering themselves so easily was amazing, as was the notion that the nagas did it all for her, without hesitation. She arched herself against the all-over scaly, squeezy snuggle of the sexy snakey limbs, loving everything in that moment.

She burned with utter bliss, bouncing with the four huge cocks inside of her.. the many arms embracing her, she gasped with each earth-shattering thrust, then.. her detonation imminent. She shook her head around, her exquisite, ebony hair tossing about behind her, draped over her back and the snakes' arms and coils.. her head being the last unbound element to her form, her last outlet for the overwhelming ophidian-fueled and fantastic fornication.

Then, it too was stopped in place by the pythons. Their heads swooped in, appearing to be aimed for a last, climatic kiss.. if Nae had the time to think as her loins overflowed with lust and began her orgasm, she'd realize their intent was to kiss her cheeks, which she would have liked, but it wouldn't have been what she wanted.. she would have about how she would have wanted to lock lips with a single someone in a final, single symbol of love.. but she also didn't want to exclude either of the handsome hunks from that moment. The twin males mashed their mouths to the sides of her flushed face in the last moment before she crashed into her climax.

As the mantis came, she threw her head back, the longest, loudest moan sounding from deep within her, which carried into the dim atmosphere for any and all to hear. Simultaneously, the snake's eight limbs wrapped around her, the tightest embrace they had ever given her, their abundant arms back to normal, reformed fingers clasping around her flesh.

While they embraced her, the males slammed upwards one last time, into her firmly secured core, to erupt into their perfect, petite, pale partner. Nae's moan only grew in volume and intensity as what seemed like a sea of serpentine seed swam up into her, swelling her already stretched skin and sluicing from her slit, around their sizzling hot spears, which seemed to empty themselves endlessly into her.

And then, her prior kissing conundrum was quashed as both snakes' snouts slid forward from her cheeks, toward one another, smoothly gliding around her face to kiss her lips, both at once.. and the tips of their snouts seamlessly, effortlessly merged into a single mouth before her, the unified lover's lips locking with her own, silencing the tail end of her skyward cry. After all the other impossible events she had seen, Nae just shut her eyes and enjoyed it, knowing that her wish had been granted somehow, able to kiss both of her perfect lovers at once as their synchronized climaxes continued, their bodies thrumming in their shared Shangri-la, rapture running rampant throughout them all, all around the two-ended serpent brothers and the object of their want and worship, who pulsed powerfully with pleasure between them. They kissed for what seemed like ages as their conflux of coitus carried on and on and ever so slowly trailed to tender afterglow.

~

Nae didn't exactly black out, she wouldn't possibly allow herself to miss any of the perfection of her time with the serpents. But, nevertheless, she drifted in a soft, delightful daze through time. All she knew was that it had been indescribable paradise, her body drinking in the dual-shafted joy of her dual mates as they had slowly sank down to lay languidly over the lengthy loops. Their forms had been thrilled with enchanting illumination, and were practically ravaged by the ravishing release, aching with over-sensitive flesh that tingled with teasing memories.. echoes of embarrassing amounts of Elysian ecstasy.

Any slight twitch was felt by all three, making them groan, their tender skin giving them a soft shock of surprising sensation and making them laugh quietly as they cuddled together upon the coils.

After some time of serene silence, Nae spoke up. She thanked the males, whose mass she was using as a mattress in that moment. Soft sibilance slid from their snouts, in seamless sync with one another one more. They thanked her in return, for her courage and her willingness to explore the exotic.. the potentially monstrous. They expressed gratitude for her allowing them to teach her, to let some of her rigid, self-imposed rules go, to let herself go, to fall into freedom and let them catch her. She blushed and covered her face in her hands and scythes.. the snakes grinned. 'The more things change, the more they stay the same,' they quipped, along with a few other idioms, combined into a densely packed bit of witty hissing.

They fell back into another comfortable quiet lull while they rested together, the peace only pierced by the low rustle of scales against scales, or the sound of scales upon chitin. That noise was now all too familiar to Nae, and she loved that it was. The mantis heard faint wisps of that new noise as she watched as her chest rising and falling with her breath, her bare breasts bobbing before her. She blinked, considering her nudity and how it no longer even really registered to her. Although, she was hardly exposed, as several of her lovers' limbs were laying over-top of her.. arms, coils, randomly reformed serpentine tendrils, a tongue, a neck, even a few cocks limply flopped over her legs. Clad in clothes or not, she was content, safe and secure in the arms of her pythonic protectors, her sexy serpents.

Eventually, Nae yawned and stretched her scythes up and back behind her head, her arms extending out to either side, her legs straining further downward, mingling with the thick coils that blanketed her lower body.. even her antennae standing at strict attention for a moment. It was a slight blip of activity during the barren expanse of indolence they were laying within, all of them perfectly happy to just be with one another. Bringing her upper limbs back down, she used them to affectionately pet over her boys. Nae smirked at how she had thought of them as 'hers'.

Again, the insect elected to talk, saying how she was a little hungry, and for breakfast, for some reason. The snakes just nodded, lightly acknowledging her before seeming to sigh out once more in their sibilant speech. They said that she would need to eat soon. It was odd, though.. they said it reluctantly, as if it was a bad thing.. or at least unfortunate, somehow an unpleasant inevitability they lamented. Layered within their labyrinthian and lilting linguistics was a light looping logic about the battling needs for sustenance and the search for spiritual elevation. Something about how a meditative monk can only go so long before he needs to give up on the realm of the head or heart and heed the husk and the stomach inside. Somewhere deeper was a wish that one might be nourished by the growth of character.. or at least energized by eroticism, rather than run ragged by rapturous romps.. how people need food to function, even if asleep. How healthy people would wake, if their forms fought for fuel.

The ideas swirled around Nae's head, and she found it hard to discern what the snakes were saying, or what they meant. She was flummoxed by a fog of fighting thoughts, running from one notion to the next as she lay in the cushy, coily confines of her companions. She was tired from her tawdry trials with the towering twins, and their scales seemed softer than before, and blessedly bed-like.. soon she began to slip towards slumber.. the spiralling concepts swimming through her head. She couldn't remember which were borne of her own brain, and which had been placed there by the placid pythons, nor could she trace them back to their roots.

As her eyes closed, she thought about roots. She thought about the snakes growing out of the ground like sproutlings, their bodies like a tangle of roots.

As her breathing slowed and steadied, she thought about plants, bending and blending and blooming and beautiful.

As she slept there with the snakes, she thought about flowers, floral, flowing flourishing, flashing---

~

---flowery fabric flashed in front of Nae's face.

"Nae! Nae! Wake up!" Tetsuo cried, shaking his sister awake with his lower arms, his upper set holding a meal tray. Nae awoke to the smell of the breakfast the luna moth had brought for her. "You'd better get up right now, before 'mother' finds out you've been sleeping in so long!"

"Leave me alone, I'm awake already!" Nae cried, which surprised herself. When she rolled over to see Tetsuo's shocked expression, she confirmed how out of character it had been. She completed her roll over in a smooth maneuver, coming to rest on her knees, so she could immediately bow to her brother, apologizing twice, for good measure. In her haste, though, her kimono was not properly fastened or folded, so as she bobbed in her bows, her chest was almost completely exposed, leaving her cleavage revealed, but her breasts covered. Barely.

Nae didn't even notice until the moth's steel blue eyes darted down to her front and he gave her one of those looks he usually reserved for rowdy customers he didn't quite care for. She saw what he had glanced at and sheepishly drew up her robe in her humanoid hands, her scythes bending behind her in a sign of slight shame.

Tetsuo rolled his eyes and shrugged, merely exasperated at his clumsy sister once again. "Just.. come on, we have work to do," he said, gruffly before leaving the room, his large green wings sending a breeze through the mantid's untied hair as he spun around on one red foot.

Taking a breath as her blush faded, Nae suddenly stuck out her tongue at the doorway, where her sibling had just been. She clasped her hands around her mouth, once again shocked at her defiance. She wondered what had gotten into her that morning.

She thought back, remembering that she had been dreaming about something. It had been a doozy of a dream, and she smiled to herself, suddenly overwhelmed by happiness, for some reason. She sighed in contentment and looked around her room. She spotted her flower box near her bed and picked it up. She opened it and took enjoyed the sweet scent of the orchids inside. She must have been smelling them just before she went to sleep the night before, she concludes, as she placed the prized possession back on her table. It fit neatly in the spot where it always sat and she smiled at her little collection of things.

The bug bent over and picked up the meal tray Tetsuo had left behind, and had breakfast. As she ate, the subtle melancholy that was a permanent feature upon her face slowly crept back into her visage.

Looking a little morose as she finished her breakfast, Nae stood to stride dutifully out of the room with the tray, trudging back into her daily life. Before she got through the doorway, she spied the wooden box once more. She thought back to the wrapping paper she hazily remembered it being wrapped in, whenever it was that she got it. She tried to remember where she had found it or who had given it to her, but it was so long ago, she couldn't quite recall. The wrapping paper had been beautiful, and she had a dim memory of a fantastical creature curling around the corners, as if the person who packaged it all up had somehow managed to line the design up with the dimensions of the container within.

Nae smiled at the pleasant recollections before heading out into the teahouse, a bit more bounce in her step, a spark somewhere deep in her large amber eye.

The End

Epilogue -

The tiny snake peered out from under Nae's bed, checking to see if the room was empty. He slithered out, flicking his tongue as he went.

Gliding in a zig-zagging manner, he climbed the mantid's table to return to the flower box. It was the same way he had climbed up the unconscious girl's body, after he had bitten her and pumped her full of his venom. He slid gracefully along the wooden tabletop, slaloming around the various knick-knacks that Nae had accumulated there before reaching the finely crafted contained her had arrived in.

Deftly, the diminutive serpent nudged the lid up, just enough for him to wriggle inside and wind himself up, hidden under the fragrant flower petals. The coiled creature looked forward to that day's eventual evening with eager anticipation, when he would emerge.

~

He would then make his way to the mantid's bed.. and more specifically, to the mantid's head.

He would hiss to her, then insert himself into what she dreamed, From what he had seen, there were many fun things to try it seemed.

The lovely lady deserved ever more, all of her fantasies, he would soon explore.