Lisa had experienced profound growth ever since she met her “Cutie” Aether. He encouraged her opening up to those she held dearest. She had finally gathered the courage to adopt Razor as a parent, a mother and not merely a tutor. Lisa had stopped sending others for Razor, choosing to regularly visit him in Wolvendom herself. After successfully filing for adoption, Lisa set out to help Razor move into his new home with her, only to fall into a trap set for Razor by Signora and Dottore and the pumpkin headed monster, Jack of the Lanterns. Lisa awoke in a dark room to Signora tightening her bonds while taunting her; mocking Lisa being bound helpless by cord made from Hephaestian Gossamer with its ability to absorb magic like a sponge, rendering even gods weak, tauntingly telling Lisa the tales of the Olympian Forgemaster’s fibers’ use in trapping his mother Hera, Queen of Mt. Olympus, to her throne as vengeance for abandoning him for dead as a child, and then binding the mad god king Zeus during an Olympian coup before being freed by the Hundred Handed, as nothing short of their Titan strength could break the enchanted bonds.
With a fiery wave of her hand, La Signora reveals the macabre crop of jack o’Lanterns enveloping both the room and Lisa like a murder of lurching crows. Shocked, Lisa scoots into the crate behind her, knocking over a jack o’lantern, its creaking from rocking back and forth heard as hoarse, wicked laughter in Lisa’s ears, along with the hiss of jack-o’-lantern inner candles flickering. The frightened tears welling in Lisa’s eyes could not obscure the giant carved gourd holding her witch’s hat in its sharp toothed maw like a chew toy, its ghoulish grin seemingly twisting ever wider with it’s every imagined bite. The sight leaves Lisa too panic stricken to vocalize a spell before Signora cruelly stuffs a thick wad of cloth into her mouth, then further winding another cloth repeatedly through and over it, gagging Lisa, while sneering a promise to bring dire harm upon Aether and her band of “little strays”.
Lisa’s desperate struggles only serve to amuse Signora. “What part of neigh-unbreakable is the Akademiya’s greatest student in 200 years having trouble comprehending?”, Signora mockingly bemused before hissing “or is it like everything else about you and that damned library of yours! All cursed fiction!” Lisa’s pleas for Razor, for Fischl, for Klee, all of her “little strays” to be spared whatever harm Signora has planned for them are smothered by her tightly wound gag. Lisa pauses struggling, as her eyes slide over to fixate on the large orange nightmare in front of her, its imagined chewing on her hat becoming unbearably louder and all the more excruciating, as Lisa is unable to pull up her bound arms to cover her ears with her hands. Signora, catching Lisa’s tortured writhing, smiles a toothy vampiric grin, her tongue rubbing on her pronouncedly elongated canines as the ecstasy of viewing an enemy so reduced to helpless captivity has the former Fatui Harbinger delightfully savoring the sight. Signora further leans in to thirstily drink in the fear building in her pretty, long legged captive. “Why so frightened, my Cutie” teases Signora while leering gleefully over Lisa. “Oh, Im sorry, I can’t make out a word you’re saying. Feemph omph fermfem?! Ugh. All that cloth wound around your mouth has left you incomprehensible. Tsk. Tsk. It must be so frustrating”, she sighed condescendingly. “Poor dear, you’re shaking like a leaf. Come now, these children’s decorations don’t bite. Well, at least as far as I’m aware. But, who knows what that Stingy Jack can have them do…or who he’ll feed them with. I’m sure your witch’s hat will satisfy that great, big, gourd...” Signora’s sinister smile cuts gleaming and widely open across her across her oft cold expression, “then again, what if it doesn’t? And here you are, all by your helpless lonesome.” Signora rises to leave the darkened room, looking over her shoulder to pleasingly glance at the increasing terror washing over Lisa. “Ta ta. Sleep tight my little witch. Don’t let those pumpkins…hehe…Bite!” Then, leaving Lisa alone to drown in suffocating fear, Signora saunters down a carved stone hall bearing a smile she feared she would never have again after fate wantonly took her love, Rostam from her. Lisa, in wide-eyed bound vulnerability, darts her head to and fro, looking across the room at every perceived sudden sound from the surrounding jack-o’lanterns, rising terror consuming her from within. Lisa pulls herself into a panic filled ball desperate to bury her head and sight in her knees and thighs, only to be denied by the tightly twisted bindings restraining her. Lisa’s phobia envelopes her like a thick smothering blanket, forcing her breaths into stifled, sobbing gasps, slow bleeding into pained wailing.
Suddenly, Lisa’s muffled screams manage to pierce past her confinement to echo throughout a dimly lit keep’s stone walled hallways, prompting Signora into a graceful waltz-like pirouette to Lisa’s lengthy agony, as if to music. “Oh, Rostam, my darling…my love,” Signora, longingly dreamt to herself, “if only you could hear this sweet melody with which to dance alongside me.” Signora’s smile is swiftly torn away by cold determination. “But as always, fate is coldly without mercy, and so must I be.” Signora, her cruelty now satisfyingly quenched, gracefully proceeded down the hall, her deadly plot now unfolding.
Will Aether and Lisa’s “little strays”, Razor, Fischl, Bennett, and Klee, rescue her in time?
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