Tea Party In Hell (story text)

The threads of fate are undoubtedly mysterious. Or perhaps, coincidences do not exist when events are viewed from a broader perspective. Curious is the case of Karenina, a 18-year-old girl with wavy black hair and intense red eyes. Although still young, she has led a cursed life and already suffered considerably, but will the suffering ever end, or is Karenina condemned to her tragic fate like all the ones that she sees in her dreams? Karenina is able to contrast her existence with the nightmares she has every night, in which women suffer a multiplicity of horrors and even fatalities. Has Karenina gone crazy? Or is she really able to see through other people's eyes and be the only witness to their tragic outcomes? Whichever the case, it's not something anyone will ever believe her about. This power that Karenina has recently received from some fickle god, each day it becomes more and more of a burden that will surely condemn her to her own tragic end. Karenina is a shy, withdrawn girl, not very social, and given to nervous fits. She lives with her Aunt Regina, a distant foreign cousin of her parents. Karenina’s parents were special in their own right. Her father was a secret government agent, while her mother was a renowned scientist and college professor who has been in a coma for nearly a year and a half after a hadron collider accident in New York. No one believes will ever wake up, but her husband continues to pay his wife's medical expenses to keep her on life support in the hope that she might wake up one day. That leaves Karenina alone with her sadness most of the time, since her father works constantly, and there are rumors that he has found a new lover, who is taking up the rest of his time. She also hasn’t seen her mother since she went into a coma. She lives alone with her aunt Regina, whom her father helped get a visa for so she could fly in from another nearby country to take care of their house and their daughter. However, the relationship with her aunt is complicated by the fact that Regina believes Karenina is crazy, or that she suffers from some kind of schizophrenia. It didn’t help when Karenina received a gift from another young man who was in love with her and who was attending the same high school together. Another distant relative of Karenina, he had heard that Karenina liked dolls like her mother, so he bought her a doll for Christmas, a very cute one with striking features and metallic blue hair. That coincided with the onset of Karenina’s strange behavior, for the doll spoke to her. Or no, it did not speak by moving its mouth, it was more like it spoke directly into Karenina’s mind. Or maybe Karenina could read the doll’s mind? Why would a doll have a mind in the first place? These were the thoughts that occupied Karenina after she discovered her new ability. In addition, she started having some rather strange nightmares, which depicted women and occasionally men getting gagged, shrunken, and turned into dolls and dresses and such through various arcane means. Also, sometimes, Karenina heard the distant voice of her mother telling her bedtime stories, the same mother that had been in a coma for several months now... When Karenina told her aunt Regina about her dreams, she reacted by mocking Karenina and completely ignoring what she said. Karenina's mood began to slip until she plunged into a deep depression. At that point, Regina sent her niece to a psychologist, who could not understand what was happening with Karenina either. Even though she looked completely healthy, she continued to insist that her strange delusions and nightmares were in fact real. Other psychologists could do nothing for Karenina too, which made Regina deeply angry and her hatred of her niece began to curdle into aggressive hostility. Ever since she arrived at Karenina's family home, Regina always saw Karenina as a possible mental patient due to her withdrawn attitude and low maturity. Despite being 17 years old Karenina still exhibited certain childish behaviors. It didn’t help that Regina had always seen Karenina's parents, who were both her cousins, as deviants. They were twins who had been close ever since childhood, eventually falling in love and deciding to marry despite everyone in their life advising them not to. Karenina was the product of their incestuous relationship, and that did nothing to endear her to Regina, who thinks that surely some mental retardation or other mental illness had been the result of her inbreeding. Thus when Karenina started to share the dreams and other delirium she was having with her aunt, Regina was already predisposed to dismiss them out of hand. To further complicate matters, Karenina began to buy all kinds of dolls on a constant basis. Some were cheap, while others were quite expensive. She swore that the dolls she bought had thoughts and feelings and thus they were special and needed to be saved by her. All the money came out of the trust fund her father had set aside for her, and which her aunt managed. When Regina found out, she exploded in anger and started treating Karenina to a constant stream of physical and psychological abuse. Even so, Karenina continued to take care of her dolls, talking to them every day. She had observed that the more she spoke to them their thoughts would become calmer and more rational, while if she neglected them for a while their minds would begin to deteriorate into some kind of ecstasy loop and they would gradually lose themselves to endless sexual desire. As the months went by, Karenina increased her collection of "smart dolls". Her latest acquisitions included yet another doll with blue hair, the shade of which contrasted with the previous such doll, and a wind-up doll with long black hair. She had seriously damaged the mental sanity of the latter when she had tried winding her up. Karenina put the doll under intensive care after that, and it was slowly recovering. In addition to the mental support she provided to her dolls, Karenina also took care of them physically, changing their clothes, combing their hair, and caressing them in other ways. All too often her touch would cause their faces to blush, but that was the only way they seemed to be able to communicate, apart from Karenina’s strange telepathic connection with them. Karenina spent every spare second she could taking care of the dolls, and it seemed they had finally achieved a measure of peace with their kind, new owner. Alas, their happy existence was about to be disturbed. [Image 1] [Image 2] [Image 3] One day Karenina's father was rushed to the hospital with serious gunshot wounds. So Regina went to the hospital to see her cousin, and there he gave her a large, odd-looking pistol, stained with what was clearly human blood. He asked her to keep it safe and pass it on to Karenina. Perhaps it was evidence in some crime he was investigating. Regina didn’t really know or care, so she irresponsibly left it on the table in Karenina’s doll-infested room. What concerned her more was the critical condition her cousin was in. The doctor’s didn’t give him more than a week to live. With Markus likely to pass, she would become responsible for Karenina’s mother who was still in a coma, and could probably get her disconnected in the name of “mercy”. With her parents out of the way, Karenina would be left alone and defenseless. With all her crazy stories about dolls, Regina had a good chance of arguing Karenina was mentally unfit and that she should be granted a full conservatorship, and then she would get to manage Karenina’s inheritance. On the other hand, she hated Karenina so much that the possibility of her having an unfortunate accident was even more appealing. And so Regina started to make plans on how best to dispose of the last obstacle between her and the inheritance. Searching the Internet for creative solutions to her niece problem, Regina found some green pills purported to be capable of shrinking people, and a fushia liquid to be used alongside that would serve to toyify a person, for lack of a better word. Regina was familiar with crazy talk and this sounded like more of the same, but still, if they didn’t work the way they were supposed to, they might poison Karenina and that would serve just as well as far as Regina was concerned. The thought that these might explain Karenina’s dolls nagged at the edge of Regina’s mind, but she was too firmly set in her course of action to pay it much heed. Ultimately Regina decided to take a more direct approach though. Scandal be damned, she couldn’t wait any longer to rid herself of Karenina and her innumerable dolls. So one day she came home and descended into the basement where Karenina’s father had a small arsenal stashed, presumably for use with his government job as a secret agent. Emerging with a flamethrower, Regina headed for Karenina’s doll sanctum. Bursting in, she pointed the already lit tip of her weapon at the ceiling and cried, “Are you and your ridiculous dolls ready to go to hell?” [Image 4] Karenina, who had been sitting in the middle of the room with her back to the door, doesn’t move a muscle at Regina’s feral yell. Incensed at the lack of reaction, a look of contempt fills Regina’s face as she lowers the flamethrower to point it squarely at Karenina’s back. Confronted with the stoic figure of her niece, Regina pauses. Did Karenina know she was coming? Can she hear her thoughts just like she says she can hear the dolls talking? As Regina ponders the possibilities, Karenina turns slightly to stare back at her with one piercing red eye. The scornful defiance in Karenina’s stare angers Regina such that she starts yelling, asking what a weak little girl like her who is so clearly touched in the head can do to prevent her impending doom. She mocks Karenina’s obsession with dolls, a number of which are spread around her chair where she had apparently been playing with them prior to Regina’s entrance. Before she can finish or do anything else though, a loud shot reverberates through the room. Karenina turns the rest of the way around, revealing her father’s bloody gun that had been hidden under her long, black hair. Regina’s face is a mask of shock as she falls to her knees and topples back onto the floor. As darkness starts to creep in from the edges of her vision, Regina fancies that she can see the angry, judgemental glares of Karenina’s dolls closing in from all sides all around her. [Image 5] The darkness takes her at last and Regina sinks into a deep, black abyss. As she settles onto some sort of ethereal plain, a winged shadow appears back of her, which to her horror Regina instantly recognizes. It troubles her deeply to see that familiar face again in a place like this, and Regina scrambles backward to get away from the accursed vision. The shadow slowly approaches with its intense red eyes, closing the distance with no sound but the clicking of her heels. Reaching Regina, the shadow plants her heel in the center of Regina’s chest as she writhes in fear and terror. Scared beyond belief, Regina asks the shadow, “Why are you here? Why are you narrating all of my actions? What do you want from me? Just let me die already...” The shadow grabs Regina by the neck and lifts her bodily off the ground as the darkness closes in even more. The shadows laughs and smiles a maniacal grin as she squeezes Regina’s face even tighter. Regina, for her part, can do nothing but stare back in confused horror and puzzlement at what is happening. “Huhhh, Want to try dying this once?" answers the winged shadow. Surely this is the end she thinks, but she does not understand the shadow’s twisted sense of humor. Even now, back in the land of the living, Karenina is taking pity on her wretched aunt and does not intend to let her die. [Image 6] The next day, Regina finds herself sitting at a small table set with several miniature teacups. Some of Karenina’s other dolls she recognizes are also seated around the table. Although she couldn’t really get her mind around it, Regina was in fact happier than she had ever been, a placid smile on her face. No longer troubled with ambition or avarice, she instinctively wants to be loved and treasured. Karenina is there, brushing Regina’s soft hair and gently caressing her nude body. Her figure is no longer perfect, marred by a scar from the tragic events of yesterday, but Regina finds she doesn’t mind at all since Karenina seems to have covered it with a small rose. “At least she's not dead,” thinks Karenina, who couldn't do much to stop the bleeding and had to use that green pill and that fuchsia liquid to change her aunt's physical composition, because the fuchsia liquid dilates the blood and prevent her from dying, even though it meant she was no longer really human. Karenina stops brushing and moves to dress her new doll. As she does so, she thinks that although all’s well that ends well, deep down her blood is cursed and she should really do something to redeem herself and her family. The ever-insistent voice in her head seems to agree. For Karenina, the gates of hell have opened, and no happy endings lie beyond. She feels the responsibility of finding solutions to all the damage caused by her family, and she thinks about how to start correcting it as she watches the sunrise through the window. Hours later, Karenina's determination to find solutions has not waned and she has decided to start by looking for her parents. Despite their happy new arrangement, she still resents her aunt for all the abuse and cannot help playing with her a bit. She mounts Regina Doll on a stand adapted with a dildo on the end before proceeding to stimulate Regina’s vagina with a cotton swab. In the end, Karenina cannot deny her own nature. [Image 7] [Image 8] [Image 9]