Part 9

The Escapist!

Part 9: The Cavern

“That was truly an inspirational story,” Avola gushed sarcastically. “I especially loved all the parts of it I already knew about because I was there for them.”

Thesca sighed, “I’m just saying I’ve had a lot of near brushes with disaster.”

The two women were sitting on a stone floor in a mineshaft huddled around an electric torch. They were wearing their yellow, rubber hazmat suits but had taken off their helmets and facemasks and set them down. Their shoulders were touching and Avola had draped her penis-trunk over Thesca’s shoulders, although whether it was to comfort her friend or herself it was impossible to tell.

“Alright, Escapist, how do we get out of this one?”

The two girls from PUBES Inc. had been called to help remediate an old silver mine. Decades ago the place had been a highly productive operation, bringing out tons of the precious metal and creating a small mining boomtown. The miners delved deeper into the natural caves of the hill, finding richer and richer veins… until something happened. Miners started to transform, becoming warped and twisted. The first documented changes were fairly minor: enlarged genitalia or a few small extras or a change in sex as well as a newfound love of angry, rough sex. As time went by though, perhaps as the mine cut deeper, the changes became more extreme with miners coming out reduced to furious, gibbering masses of genitals or not emerging at all. The mine, despite still being rich in silver, was deemed too dangerous and shuttered. The mine closed, the boomtown became a ghost town, and the entire incident was all but forgotten. Now, though, with the price of silver climbing and a new concern owning the land, there was renewed interest in reopening the mine. Thesca Piste and Avola Unteer have been sent to make the mine safe for workers again.

While the two women have employees who do most of the direct decontamination and abatement work, for unusual jobs like this the two principles like to perform an initial inspection. Thesca insists on this because it allows her give a more accurate quote to clients and because it gives her a chance to assess the risks to her staff before she sends them into danger. Avola comes along for the novelty of of seeing something new, like the depths of a retired mine. And so the girls from PUBES Inc. put on their hazmat suits and descended into the old silver mine to do an initial inspection.

An initial inspection that, it turns out, has more or less solved the problem. Using the mana-sense of Avola’s antenna, the two specialists were able to track down the source of the dcum contamination. The women, sensing mana through a crevice, found a small natural cave jutting off one of the mineshafts. At the end of this tunnel was a small cavern covered in ancient cave paintings which contained a kind of living artifact: a disembodied human penis and balls covered in glowing tattoos. This apparently immortal cock was just resting on the floor, periodically erupting in cum that Avola could tell was laden with trace amounts of dcum. Water, dripping from the ceiling, would collect in a depression right in front of the cock, perhaps eroded there by decades of ejaculations, creating a little pool. This little pool would catch the dcum, and when it overfilled, would trickle the contaminated water deeper into the mine through a crack in the wall. This then, was the problem with the silver mine.

This would be a fairly easy problem to fix. Avola suggested they just take a shovel and put the magical cock in a bucket. Thesca agreed that would be a reasonable first step, but that the mine would still be filled with who knows how much contaminated water. After thinking about it a moment, Thesca suggested they could probably give the clients two plans of approach. The quick and expensive approach would be to remove the contamination source, find any pools of contaminated water, and pump it all to the surface in holding tanks. The cheaper approach would be to just remove the cock and leave the mine closed for a few years until the dcum washed away, and then do periodic inspections until everything was safe. Avola thought that sounded about right, but suggested that the pair of them could probably sell the magical cock to an alchemist looking for a safe, dilute source of dcum rather than burying it somewhere new. Thesca agreed it was something to look into.

The two wiggled their way back into the main mine shaft, and decided to head a bit deeper to see if they could find out where the contaminated dcum water was ending up. They picked a downward sloped shaft that seemed to follow the direction of the hidden stream and set out. They walked a few hundred yards and…

The earth rumbled and released a muffled roar as the ground bucked and shook and shaked!

It was an earthquake!

A cracking smashing sound rolled through the air, and the sound of tumbling rocks echoed down the shaft!

The shaking stopped and Thesca and Avola picked themselves off the ground where they had been huddling. They looked at each other silently and made hustled back up the mine tunnel to find that it there had been a cave in. The shaft was completely blocked. They were trapped.

Which is when Thesca noticed the new cracks in the ceiling of the tunnel and trickle of water running down the wall. Thesca scowled at the water thoughtfully. “Avola, is this water contaminated?”

Avola turned and looked at it, swishing her antenna around. “Yeah, it’s definitely radiating dcum energy…”

Thesca sighed, “I was afraid of that. I think we’re in trouble.”

“Because we are trapped down a mineshaft?” Avola asked.

“And because I’m pretty sure we’re about to be washed away in a flood of transformative water. I think above the ceiling of this tunnel is a natural cistern full of the run off from that magic penis thing. If those cracks get any bigger, I suspect it’s all going to come rushing down at once.”

“Maybe the hazmat suits will protect us?”

“I doubt it, the suits were made to protect us from splashes, aerosols, and gasses. I doubt the seals will hold up against the pressure of standing water…”

Avola grimaced, “So much for your humanity and my lovely body…”

“Yep. Although it’s more likely we’ll just drown.”

“That’s a cheerful thought. So what do we do?”

The two women found a smooth section of the floor and sat together. They removed their helmets and began to chat about their options. Maybe they could wait for rescue and hope help arrived before the ceiling flooded the tunnel. Maybe they were wrong about there being a cistern, maybe the trickle would stay a trickle. Or perhaps the women should go deeper into the mine and try to find one of the natural caves, maybe find an alternate exit. Avola started to despair, and Thesca launched into a passionate recounting of her various escapes from transformation. Avola rolled her eyes.

“Alright, Escapist, how do we get out of this one?”

“I don’t know. But I'm sure we'll think of something..."

The end?