War Games

Postby sarobah » Sun Apr 05, 2009 6:46 am

The Tie-up Chronicles

3. War Games

For most of my adolescence, I was a tomboy. I wasn’t “butch” or anything like that, I had my girlie-girl qualities, but I was certainly not all sugar and spice.

As a result, I spent much of my time hanging out with a bunch of boys. I enjoyed their company because they were more fun and more adventurous than most of my own sex at that age. They treated me as their equal, but at the same time not just one of the guys. I kept enough of my girlishness intact to remind them of what I was and what I wasn’t. Sometimes I would play the flirt. In return, when I was around they watched their language, their jokes and their behaviour. I liked that they were comfortable with me as part of the gang. And it surely helped that I drew in a couple of other girls. Having two or three reasonably hot chicks in their ranks gave the guys a coolness factor despite our overall high nerd count.

Sometimes I took advantage of the boys’ good manners to make myself uncrowned queen of the pack. They would defer to me in choosing what we did and what we talked about, the movies we went to see and how we spent our weekends. Nevertheless, they knew that I was perhaps a little weird, and occasionally they would test my limits with a crude joke or a sexist remark or a raunchy video. (Mildly amusing anecdote: I was so naive that once three or four of the guys, including my appalling brother, invited me to join them watching a movie. It was about dancing, they said. It was called Last Tango in Paris. I’ve not looked at a knob of butter the same way since.)

One of our favourite weekend entertainments was to play war games. Paintball was the best but was expensive and the nearest venue was a long bike ride away. However, there was a large area of bushland near my home, and here we spent much of the summer. On occasion we mustered as many as 15-20 players, although the average number was ten to twelve, including three or four girls.

The most popular scenario was aptly named Commando. We split into teams and established separate bases, and the objective was to infiltrate the other’s territory and capture their flag. The game normally lasted from dawn till dusk, and sometimes we even camped overnight and engaged in after-dark raids and counter-strikes that we called “black ops”. Since the location of the enemy headquarters was kept secret, much of the play consisted of exploration and reconnaissance missions.

The rules were somewhat convoluted. The gist is that an enemy was “killed” by tagging, literally. If you were ambushed or cornered by an opponent, you were marked with an adhesive patch. You were then out of the game until you could exchange tags with someone on the other side. This was arranged through periodic ceasefires. At the end of the day, if neither side had captured the other’s flag, the outcome was determined on the tag tally. The set-up depended on everyone being honest. It worked because, for us, the fun was in the strategizing, probing, reconnoitring and manoeuvring, rather than the all-out battle. It was a lot like chess, but with dirt and sweat.

To avoid a kill tag, you could allow yourself to be taken prisoner, but that was at your enemy’s discretion. It was rare because it meant the captor had to take his captive back to his base camp, exposing himself to the foe and maybe giving away the HQ’s location. On the other side, being captured meant you were effectively out of the game until you could manage to escape or the two teams organized a prisoner exchange.

Unlike most of the players, who operated in squads, I preferred solo, relying on my own skills and resources. As well as appealing to my independent spirit, this gave me a chance to enjoy the solitude and beauty of the forest. Therefore I usually acted as a scout, and I became very good at subterfuge, concealment and camouflage. These came in handy on the day I captured Vanessa.

One of the girls who joined us now and then, Vanessa was statuesque and pretty, about a year older than me, the girlfriend of one of the core group members. She was a talented athlete, although she played what I thought were “sissy” sports like netball, so I don’t really understand why she got involved in our Commando games. She would turn up wearing brief shorts and a skimpy tank top – not exactly de rigueur for bush warfare; but she was the sort of girl for whom it was better to look good than to be dressed sensibly.

On this day, the weather was warm and humid. I was hot and clammy in my fatigues, and I revised my opinion of Vanessa and her dress code until I saw the scrapes and scratches on her bare arms and legs. She had become separated from her squad (or they’d abandoned her) and was making her way back to home base. She was following an open trail to avoid the prickly undergrowth, and passed right by the spot where I was lying in ambush. I didn’t normally engage the enemy, even one-on-one, but she was looking so vulnerable that I thought I’d take a chance. I bailed her up and on impulse announced that she was my prisoner. She looked so dejected, but I was a little baffled that she agreed to capture rather than a tagging. It occurred to me that she had maybe gotten herself lost in the labyrinth of narrow, twisting paths.

As she was almost a head taller than me, to keep her under control I insisted on tying her hands behind her back. She was surprisingly compliant; and to avoid revealing our camp’s location, I decided on a blindfold as well. Again she didn’t resist. Her only objection was when I pulled out a large men’s handkerchief. She asked plaintively, “You haven’t used that thing, have you?”

(No, I didn’t carry bondage gear around with me. The cord and handkerchief were part of my first aid kit.)

Vanessa cringed as I bound her hands and she quietly groaned as I blindfolded her, but otherwise she made not a move or sound until I gave her a mild shove and she stumbled forward. Holding one arm, I guided her along the track, feeling a bit sorry for her as she staggered and nearly tripped several times on the corrugated ground. Her head was turning and tilting as she strained to listen for cues and to catch glimpses from under the edges of her blindfold. She was making soft panting and gasping noises, and beads of perspiration glistened on her forehead. My helpless captive, in her flimsy top and shortie shorts, looked so very sexy... not that I was into that sort of thing...

Of course, I became so wrapped up in my impromptu tie-up game that I lost my perspective. Burdened with a bound and blindfolded prisoner, I had put myself in an exposed position. And just as I was starting to reconsider my options, I heard movement nearby. I hauled Vanessa off the path and pulled her to the ground in a patch of long grass. I dumped myself over her body, pinning her legs with mine and forcing both my hands over her mouth. After a few muffled protests, she went quiet and still. Being so much bigger than me, she might easily have pushed me off and broken free; but she remained passive.

When I determined the alarm to be false, I helped her to her feet and back onto the trail. I brushed the leaves and twigs off her legs and chest, and checked that the rope binding her wrists was still secure. I then thought it wise to gag her as well. She was wearing a neckerchief that was well suited to the purpose, and she flinched when I unknotted it, realizing what I was about to do.

“I promise not to make a sound,” she whispered.

“You just did,” I said, being horrible.

We had started moving and I was folding the cloth when suddenly I found myself surrounded. Engrossed in my task, I had blundered into a trap.

I expected to be tagged but offered my surrender by raising my arms and clasping my hands behind my head. My captors were a squad of three guys – including Vanessa’s boyfriend – and another girl. They freed Vanessa, and her expression turned from timid and submissive into a malevolent, vengeful grin. Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but it’s the way it felt to me as our roles were suddenly reversed. She grabbed my arms and spun me around, applying the same rope and blindfold that I had used on her.

When her comrades were assured that I had been operating alone – that this was not an elaborate trap of my own – Vanessa volunteered for the job of getting me back to their base. I thought it strange that her boyfriend was happy to ditch her for a second time, especially after what had happened the first. Their hushed conversation made me suspect that she was being given directions to follow, confirming my suspicion that she’d been lost when I encountered her. Nonetheless, unlike mine, Vanessa’s luck held.

After stumbling blindly – literally – along the rough track, I was thankful when we finally reached the enemy camp. We had to climb a rugged hillside and descend into a steep-sided depression. I recognized the landscape, even from behind my blindfold, as a granite-strewn basin we called the fortress. It was not a site I would have chosen as a headquarters – relatively simple to defend against a frontal assault but also easy to detect and infiltrate. In any case, this was not my immediate concern. Exhausted from the effort of keeping my footing without my eyes to guide me or my arms for balance, I collapsed in a breathless heap when finally ordered to halt.

Vanessa had been much less indulgent that I had been when she was my captive, making me walk on my own, guided only by the occasional push or jostle, and letting me fall every so often. When I did, instead of helping me up, she nudged me with her shoe and I struggled to my feet – very difficult to do when bound. Yet I really couldn’t blame her for this. I think I had caused some damage when I forced her down in the spiky grass, so she was not in a merciful frame of mind.

I was made to sit astride a coffee-table-sized boulder until Vanessa and her comrades decided what to do with me. Then she and another hauled me off my seat and half-escorted, half-dragged me to the edge of the clearing. My hands were untied and I was secured to a tree. It was too large for my hands to connect on the other side, so the rope was attached to my wrists and slung around the trunk, then pulled taut so that I was completely immobilized. I knew what was coming next, so when I felt the material brush against my lips, I opened my mouth and accepted the gag.

They left me tied in a sort of half-crouching position, my back and shoulders pressed firmly against the tree trunk, so that after a while my thigh and calf muscles started to cramp and my arms began to ache pretty badly. Fortunately my feet were left untied so I could move my legs to keep up the blood circulation. I was too proud to complain, though even with my gag I could have made some furious grumbling noises. Anyway, I thought I could more easily work myself free than if I had been bound standing upright. Yet despite my best efforts, I didn’t manage to escape, and spent the rest of the day as a prisoner, some three or four hours.

Over that time people were coming and going in the camp, although I believe that Vanessa stayed around for the entire duration of my captivity. Whenever anyone returned to base, the first thing they would do was to visit me to taunt and torment me. One of them was Jaz, my study buddy who shortly before this had become my magician’s assistant and helped me produce the Escape Artiste act (described in chapter 4). Rather cruelly, he teased: “Try getting out of this one.”

Vanessa and another girl tried out some interrogation with methodical tickle torture, hoping to discover the location of my team’s headquarters. I held out against extreme duress. So I was astounded, after my liberation at the end of the game, to discover that my teammates had found out about my capture in the course of a ceasefire. They had declined the opportunity to recover me, thus prolonging my ordeal. I expressed the appropriate resentment – a total sham, of course. Being blessed with the sin of pride, I had not actually allowed myself to get caught, but it had been fun.

There were two other times when I was tied up during our war games. Each should have turned out more exciting than was the case, and would have if I had just been more creative.

On the first occasion, there were eight boys (as I recall) and two girls, myself and Sheree. To make the game more interesting, I proposed that Sheree and I should be prisoners from the outset. We would be taken off by our respective captors, and the idea was that each team would try to retrieve its girl from their opponents. It seemed a good idea. The problem was that within half an hour I had been rescued, and Sheree was freed not long afterwards, so the rest of the game stuck to the conventional Commando format. Still, it was good times while it lasted, because just before the two teams split up, I suggested to my guards that maybe they should tie my hands to prevent my escaping at the first opportunity. They readily agreed. Sheree gave me a withering look as her guys concurred and her arms were wrenched behind her back.

The other time was when I was the only female playing and my teammates decided I was a liability (the chauvinist cads), so they traded me to the enemy in what was meant to be a prisoner exchange. I got rather a shock when one of my supposed comrades bound my hands behind me (that bit was nice!), put me over his shoulder and tramped up the hill to the meeting place and handed me over. And it would have been amusing to remain their prisoner for the rest of the game; but I now had something to prove, so I quickly escaped. However, there is a delightful epilogue to this adventure. Having been betrayed by my own side, from that point in the game I became a free agent. At the end of the day, when we toted our tag tally, I emerged the winner. As they say in the classics: Girls rule!

Not long after the Vanessa affair, my girlie-girl tendencies began to prevail over my tomboy traits, and I eventually gave up Commando. On the other hand, I still had my tie-games. In particular, I was perfecting my fantastic Escape Artiste routine.

Re: War Games

Postby bound-black-girl lover » Sun Apr 05, 2009 11:17 am

Great story--especially the capturing and impromptu silencing of (taller) Vanessa!

Re: War Games

Postby canuck100 » Sun Apr 05, 2009 12:47 pm

Great story indeed! Your stories are always interesting and well written, and they're fun to read.

Re: War Games

Postby Zaphod » Sun Apr 05, 2009 1:09 pm

I definitely agree with the two comments above. Your stories are very well written, with very few (if any) grammar or spelling mistakes, and they're always fun to read. I can't wait to see what other stories you have in store for us. Thanks for posting, Sarah!

Re: War Games

Postby Kinkychris » Tue Mar 16, 2010 3:24 pm

Nice stories about some good times. I hope you continue writing.