Mutants & Masterminds Mutants & Masterminds: The Magisterium - The Weight of Her Chains [WIP]

[Rebekka Van der Vyse]

Geneva, Switzerland - January 2000

Standing in the luxurious, marble bathroom of Jacobus Schonland's suite at the Grand Hotel Kempinski, Rebekka braced herself on the elegant vanity with one hand, the other pressing her fingers against her smooth brow. Her head felt tight and cold, the pain a squeezing vice, like a migraine mated with an ice cream headache.

It was a week into the new millenium and she had been in Geneva with the president of the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, attending a grand symposium at the CERN complex. She had spread her legs for eighteen men and one woman, counted among the greatest physicists and astrophysicists in the world, so Jacobus could cherry-pick their ideas and research for his own.

She had little but contempt for the administrator of CSIR who fancied himself a preeminent scientist. He was mediocre at best, earning his position as the head of CSIR purely on the legacy of his grandfather.

Basil Schonland, now there had been an impressive man, the first president of CSIR. He had started the collaboration between certain sections of CSIR and the DRM, using the skills and gifts of mutants to advance the scientific and economic progress of South Africa, instead of for his own self-aggrandizement.

And even as a man well past his prime, he had been a considerably more inventive and energetic lover than his grandson. He had taken an instant interest in her when she had been inducted into the DRM and had shared his bed several times since she was sixteen, so he could have an equal to confer with.

Rebekka scowled at the mirror, at the woman she saw there. She was the most sexually experienced and enticing woman in the world and Jacobus insisted on her taking his wife's appearance, if a somewhat idealized version. Fok! He even fucked her with the same lazy and pedestrian technique, though she coaxed some more stamina out of him.

But Jacobus wasn't the cause of the pain piercing her brain like an icepick. She believed it was the nineteen people she had sleep with over the last week. It was not because it was an onerous amount - she had had more sexual partners in a single day before - or that all save one was a meek, lackluster, and uninspired lover - the woman in particular had been horribly repressed - but rather, despite all having individual lives, the central focus of those lives were so depressingly similar: Physics, science as religion. It dominated every aspect of their lives.

It was too much of the same thing in too short of a time. Even the finest wine lost its savour if imbibed with every meal. Now, she wanted beer, coke, fruit juice, and hard liquor. Anything else. And she was going to get it, even if it led to being punished. In the mirror, she watched her lips twist into a crooked grin as she shivered. Unwillingly or not, she'd enjoy the punishment more than the throbbing of too many similar Doors swinging open and shut in her head.

She got dressed in an understated, cream skirt suit and strode out of the suite, taking in the shadowed view of Lake Geneva and the Jura mountains through the floor-to-ceiling windows on the way to the door. The plush carpets muffled the sound of her heels, the silence of the room broken only by the snores of Jacobus Schonland - it was past 2am local time, and she had exhausted him.

The concierge looked up in mild surprise as she entered the lobby, but knew better than to question a guest at the five-star establishment. He nodded in acquiescence as she asked him to call her a cab and a few minutes later, the doorman got the door for her and handed her into the yellow sedan.