Capt. Spalding
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*The following tale, which depicts a number of intelligent, responsible women tickled silly, is copyright 2002 by the author.
*This tale is not meant for the eyes and minds of those under 18. It does have some
sexual content. (Hmmmm. ‘Might have been wiser to claim it contained a moral, or something
else equally wholesome. That would drive the kids away, fer shure, But I digress…) Nor are any of the characters—no matter how childishly they behave—under 18.
*The institution of higher learning presented in this tale only coincidentally bears any
resemblance to any actual college or university. I mean, really, would anyone going to a school so infested with ticklephiles ever come away with a useful degree?
*Finally, the author wishes to thank Strelnikov, discerning habitue of this forum, for providing the initial premise for Hannah's third bow, for contributing the spirited character of Lauren Weaver, and for nudging me periodically to get the tale done. As it was, it took practically 11 months (!) to finish. (What's that? Tolstoy must have finished WAR AND PEACE faster? Yeah, but try to find any tickling in that! Nyaaaah!) Thanks, Strel! I couldn't have done it without you!
Now, let’s begin…
To students of the Ottoman Empire, it was an interesting, finely crafted example of
Iznat pottery. To the Vellication Irregulars, however, it proved, unmistakably, to be…
A JAR FULL OF LAUGHTER
a tickle tale featuring Hannah Davis
and the Vellication Irregulars
by Tee Hee Lawrence
Istanbul, Turkey
Dr. Junchiro Yamaguchi stepped out onto the rooftop and walked to the parapet. There he wearily removed his dusty Seibu Lions baseball cap from his unruly mop of black hair and rested his elbows on the flaking stone. He gazed upon the panorama of Istanbul, basking in the mid-morning sunlight, the ornate minarets dueling with the satellite dishes atop the office towers and apartment buildings for dominance of the great crossroads city’s skyline. Here the present (and the impatient future) existed only at the sufferance of the past. He loved places like this: Rome, Prague, Cairo, Bombay—cities where the legacies of lives past constantly interacted with the work of modern lives…where one couldn’t dig a hole without careful consideration of what historical treasures one might be disturbing.
This dig had been unusual for him, for it hadn’t been established in some remote area requiring an extravagantly mounted and staffed expedition. In these past several months, he hadn’t left Istanbul, and had enjoyed the relative comfort of a room at the American University dormitory. The project had very generous underwriting from a consortium of institutions, predominantly his employer, Commonwealth College, and the nascent Gates Museum in Seattle. However, it had been a surprisingly difficult effort, certainly the most stressful the 37-year-old scientist had ever supervised.
He and his colleagues (One, his liaison with the Gates Museum, was Yumi Menabe, a slightly older woman with whom he’d struck sparks, initially in turf conflicts and then, naturally, almost inevitably, in a passionate affair.) had been working below this very building, a warehouse here in the market district, painstakingly unearthing the remains of a 16th Century cellar. Daily he’d had to deal directly with Turkish authorities—brusque military attaches, fastidious clerks from the Ministry of Antiquities, suspicious Customs agents, as well as academics and curators concerned for their national patrimony (not to mention the warehouse’s irascible landlord). To his chagrin, Chiro had been less the hands-on archaeologist he preferred than a constant bureaucratic battler. Just thinking about it caused him to nervously stroke his
mustache and narrow beard, both flecked with incipient gray.
Thank goodness, his staff had been so dedicated. They had laid bare a marvelous find: a merchant’s storehouse, apparently forgotten since the reign of Suleyman, and full of a tremendous quantity of artifacts, many in extraordinarily pristine condition. True, there was no one spectacular object (This wasn’t a royal tomb, after all.). However, Chiro and his colleagues could anticipate many months—even years—of identifying, cataloguing, and studying the objects, most of which would remain here in Turkish museums and universities. He and his crew had worked through the night, cataloguing and packing the few select items to be shipped later that day to the States. In a few days, he and the other American members of the dig would follow.
Chiro was admiring the sunlight glinting off of the Blue Mosque across the Bosporous when he heard a theatrical cough behind him. It was Tansu, a student from Ankara employed on the dig. She was dressed in khaki coveralls—snugly fitted over her rich figure, and work boots. A black headscarf covered her wavy black hair and framed her striking black eyes, which flashed with provocation above her ever-present sardonic smile. She positively radiated self aware sensuality, which, coupled with the fact that she had a few inches over his own chunky, 5’ 6” frame, always caused Chiro’s palms to sweat when he encountered her alone. He could never decide if she was oblivious to his awkwardness in her presence, or whether she silently reveled in it. As it was, he was quite involved with Yumi, who was petite, barely 5’3” and waif thin, but who (happily) left him with no strength to act unwisely or unprofessionally with the staff.
She was shaking her head and smiling, and said in her proficient English, “You should hurry downstairs, Doctor. They are teasing Lauren. It’s so funny, but I don’t think they will stop until you come. She’s asking for you.”
Chiro smiled back, aware of how the approaching end of the dig was bringing out the prankishness in his mostly young crew. He said to her as he strode to the stairway, “It never fails. They feel homecoming is near and become children in anticipation. ‘Better give her a hand.” He was relieved to have an excuse to flee her unnervingly sensual presence.
He jogged down the narrow stairway to the warehouse basement, where he descended in a creaky open elevator to a sub-basement, from which he lowered himself on a ladder several meters to a low-ceilinged, stone-lined passageway. As he approached the repository, he heard playful laughter and a young woman’s sharp shouts of “Hey, don’t! Heh-heh! Cut it—haha--out! You’ll be sorr--eek! —sorry when I get outta here-heh-heh-heh!”
He entered a room filled with packing crates, bins of excelsior, and, on most every unoccupied surface, innumerable examples of pottery, ceramics, and mosaics from the height of the Ottoman Period. Whenever Chiro entered the room, he immediately thought of the end of the movie CITIZEN KANE, when the camera swooped over the vast possessions of the dead, once powerful rich man. The camera hovered over acres of priceless art crammed next to seemingly useless junk, a life’s legacy to be auctioned off or fed to a hungry furnace, their meaning to the dead man lost irretrievably. “Which object in this room,” mused
Chiro, “is like ‘Rosebud’ in CITIZEN KANE? Which is the piece of the puzzle that will illuminate life here over 400 years ago?”
“EEEEEE! Don’t-hehheh-don’t do that!” The voice of a giggling damsel in distress came from behind a pile of crates, where several of the project’s younger members--graduate students from Turkey, Western Europe, and the States--were gathered. They were laughing, and teasing someone in their midst.
“This little piggy…”crooned a sweet British soprano voice.
“…And thees leetle piggee…” sang a gleeful French baritone.
“Aargh! Ah-ha-ha! C-cut it out! Heh-heh!” giggled the unseen object of their teasing.
As the rowdy group parted slightly, Chiro, from the back, could see one of the larger Iznat jars, strikingly adorned with colorful faience and tile work. It was about 1.5 meters high and about 4/5 of a meter wide, though it narrowed a bit at the base and at the top, capped by a heavy lid. Most of its adornment consisted of detailed faience blue and red plumes, their feathery tendrils curling around the glazed white jar. The curled tips of the ornate plumes seemed to gesture to curious features built into the body of the jar.
On one side, two horizontal openings—8 cm high and 20 cm wide—were set--one directly above the other--into the jar; the upper slot began .4 of a meter below the lip and the lower slot began an equal measure below the first. On the reverse side, more inlaid feathers led to two parallel vertical openings, each 8cm wide and 20 cm high; both began 1/3 meter from the lip and were 1/3 meter apart. These side openings were rimmed by meticulous bands of blue and red mosaics.
Still more of the decorative plumes directed one’s eye to five semicircular openings in the lip of the jar. Two, each about ten centimeters wide and deep, about 1/3 meter apart, were in the lip above and on either side of the front slots. Two more semicircles, of slightly lesser width and depth, were in the lip directly across from each other halfway to the reverse side. A single wider, shallower semicircle, about sixteen cm wide and eight cm deep, was in the lip on the reverse side. The lip openings had been glazed substantially and their surfaces were quite smooth to the touch.
The lid of the jar was lavishly ornamented with faience of swirling plumes. It rested quite heavily on the lip. It, too, had openings built into it: three circles, each about eight cm in diameter, equidistant from each other and close to the small raised knob at its center; and a semicircle, about sixteen cm wide and an equal measure deep at the reverse, which matched the equally wide opening in the lip to form a neat circle.
Chiro, Yumi, and the rest of the crew had been debating for weeks just what the purpose of the jar was. The openings in the sides, which certainly appeared to be part of the original design, seemed to rule out the jar having been used to store oil or nuts. The ornate faience plumes and meticulous decorative tile work led one to assume the jar had been commissioned as an objet d’art. Yet, the peculiar variety of the openings, however, hinted at some specific but undetermined function for the jar.
Complicating the debate was their observation that, within the jar, was a semicircular shelf, thirty cm long, twenty cm wide, and eight cm thick extending from the earthenware wall, about .7 of a meter from the bottom. To their amazement, they found the shelf could be removed from the thick wall of the jar. The shelf fitted with careful balance and precision into a deep groove in the wall. As there were corresponding grooves on the wall above and below where the shelf had been, it was clear the shelf’s position was adjustable. The shelf was directly across from the lower opening in the face of the jar. The dig members asked, why the unusual openings in the sides and at the top? Why the movable shelf inside? And what was the significance of the copious plume decorations, seemingly meant to direct an observer’s eye invariably to the openings in its surface?
Chiro’s curiosity had definitely been piqued. The plume décor alone was sufficient. As a member of the Vellication Irregulars, back home at Commonwealth College, his imagination was always stirred by images of feathers, which worked on his cultivated interest in erotic tickling. Could the jar somehow have been involved in tickle play? He had discussed it one evening in his cozy dormitory room with Yumi, who, knowing of his yen for tickling, rolled her eyes before she began a spirited ten-fingered tickling aggression. (Yumi had made it clear that her interest was as a tickler only. Chiro fueled his sexual passion for Yumi with his frustration at not being able to tickle her. At least not when she was awake…) Thoughtful speculation was abandoned that evening…
Now, in the chamber, peering through the gaggle of giggling, teasing students, Chiro saw that the jar was not empty. Rather, it held someone in such a way that seemed to vindicate Chiro’s musings about its uses. For there, with only her head, hands, and feet rising from the openings in the lip of the jar, and kept there by the massive glazed lid, was the project’s other member from Commonwealth College, graduate student Lauren Weaver.
When not trapped in a jar, Lauren was usually a very clever (if a little willful) aspiring archaeologist, whose skill and enthusiasm for the careful detail work of their field made her Chiro’s most valued assistant. That she was a striking beauty--5’8” tall, perhaps 135 lbs. (He had helped her out of enough holes to be able to safely estimate.), with silky long ash blond hair, lively blue eyes, and flawless, pale skin—naturally had not influenced in the slightest his decision to have her join his project in Turkey. (Besides, his introduction to and subsequent intense involvement with the sagacious and smolderingly sensual Yumi Menabe made it simple to keep his relationship with Lauren strictly business.) Chiro valued not only Lauren’s youthful erudition and energy, but her good humor, embodied in her playful, ready laugh, and her devious imagination, which frequently led to her finding solutions to vexing questions before anyone else did.
Her colleagues around the jar was giggling as they playfully offered tickles to her helpless ears and neck, the palms of her hands, and, most effectively, to the soft, pink soles of her bare feet, from which they had removed her boots and socks, which were lying at the foot of the jar. Lauren was unsuccessfully trying to restrain her bubbling laughter as she hurled salty threats and creative curses at her eager tormentors.
Chiro swallowed hard and cleared his throat loudly. The group around the jar fell silent and, with red faces all round, stopped the tickling of Lauren, who emitted a few residual giggles before sighing with relief. The group parted wide and Chiro approached Lauren. She, blushing deeply and perspiring generously, cried, “Chiro! Thank God! I thought these guys would tickle me to death!”
Chiro cleared his throat again and addressed the group. “Well, this is a fine way to treat a precious object.”
“You said it!” insisted Lauren, waggling her hands and feet for emphasis.
“I meant the jar,” said Chiro, struggling to keep a straight face. “OK. Who’s behind this?”
“Well, uh, actually, sir,” offered Rene Lavocque, a French student who had been happily stroking Lauren’s right sole, “she was the one who inseested that we put her in zere.”
“He’s right.” Chiro was startled slightly by Yumi’s voice. She stepped out of the group and began to wipe Lauren’s moist face with a clean red bandanna. She continued, “Lauren was the one who figured out that the jar is meant to hold a person, who sits on the shelf within while her head, hands, and feet are restrained by the heavy lid. She was most eager to have us help her test her theory.”
“And I was right!” Lauren cried. “See how comfortably I fit in here! Well, I’m as comfortable as one can be in this position. Anyway, this proves the jar was designed for, ah, personal occupancy. I was right! And it felt great, until these guys started clowning.”
Anne Palmer, from Manchester University, failed to stifle her giggles as she said, “Professor, she—ha-ha-ha--looked so funny in there, waving her hands and feet, boasting about her ‘discovery’ and all, that we couldn’t resist knocking her down a peg. At first, we just thought we’d let her stew in there. Then, Yumi whispered ‘Tickle her!’ in my ear. And almost before you knew it, off came her boots and, well—we just couldn’t help ourselves!”
Yumi winked at Chiro, who cleared his throat yet again and intoned, “OK, why don’t all of you take a meal break of, say, thirty minutes? It’s your last rest until we’ve finished packing the last of the export artifacts. So, get going. And, ah, we’ll take care of Lauren.” He didn’t have to tell them twice, as they’d been working through the night. Soon, only he, Yumi, and the jarred Lauren remained.
He leaned rather casually upon the jar, by Lauren’s bare right foot and said, “Lauren, don’t you think you might have cleared it with me before ‘experimenting’ with this rare artifact?” He began to lightly stroke with his fingertips along her bare sole. This was simply too good an opportunity to satisfy a curiosity he’d long idly entertained about Lauren.
Lauren’s head whipped back as she screeched, “Oh, noooo! Stopstopstop! Ah-ha-ha-ha-naha-not you-hoo-too, C-Chiro!”
His fingertips sought out the tender undersides of her toes as he added, “I mean, it’s only 450 years old, perhaps the only one of its kind, so it might have been nice if you had at least mentioned that you intended to inhabit it.”
“Sorreeheeheehee, Chiro! I…I…Ahhahaha! Ah-ha-ha-ha-haaa!” Lauren howled. “Sta-ha-ha-ha-haaap! Oh, no-ho-ho-ho-ho! I remem-hehhehheh-remember! Ahhahahaha! At home—hehhehheh--you’re one of thohohohose—Ve-Velli-Vellication Irrationals! Ehhehhehhehheheeeeeek!”
“I believe the group is called the Vellication Irregulars,” Yumi corrected her, with another wink at Chiro. She knew—and he knew she knew—how thrilling this situation was to Chiro’s erotic imagination. “And Chiro—ah, Professor Yamaguchi is right to, ah, take you to task on this point.” She held Lauren’s big left toe firmly with three fingers, and began to flutter her fingertips ever so lightly just below the ball of the younger woman’s helpless sole. Her fingers moved along the soft surface of Lauren’s wriggling sole with infinite patience, eventually leaving no square centimeter of sensitive skin untickled.
Lauren’s blue eyes squeezed shut as she shrieked, “Aiee-hee-hee-heeee! N-not you, too-hoo-hoo! Plee-hee-heese s-stop it! You’re—hahaha—killing me-heeheeheeeee!”
Chiro shivered with empathy for Lauren as Yumi’s fingertips lightly grazed the tender flesh along the blonde’s pale arch. He knew from experience how skillful a tickler Yumi was, expert not only in violent, aggressive stroking but maddeningly gentle, subtle touches. This empathy, however, did not keep him from dragging his own fingertips along the wrinkles of Lauren’s other soft sole as if he were carefully tracing routes on a map. He followed the wrinkles until they led his questing fingertips to the very pale and tender flesh under her shapely wildly wiggling, and concertedly clenching toes. There he aggressively mined her laughter. Together, he and Yumi teased her thus for many long (for her) torturous minutes.
“Wha-ha-ha-ahahahahahaaaaa! Sta-ha-ha-haap! I’m gonna p-p-peeheeheehee in this ja-hahaha-ar!”
This desperate stab at the professional consciences of two of the project’s mentors (who, after all, were trained to mitigate damage to artifacts) definitely affected their tickling. With noticeable reluctance, they pulled their playful fingers back from her lovely, helpless soles, now noticeably pinker. She bubbled with giggles for quite a while before sighing loudly and pronouncing, “Some saviors you guys turned out to be!”
With a cartoon sneer, Yumi threatened to renew her tickling of Lauren’s toes as she said, “Who says we’re your saviors, hmmm?”
Lauren screeched and blurted, “Aieee! Enough please! Now I know, Chiro, why those people at home used to call you ‘Chiro Kootchy.’ You and Yumi make the perfect couple.”
This time, Yumi, her eyes crossed with mock menace, leaned back against the jar between Lauren’s waggling bare feet. Without comment, she spidered her fingertips spiritedly upon the jarred woman’s helpless soles.
“Wait! No! Wah-ha-ha-haaa!” Lauren howled. “Quit it! You guys are almost as bad as that bitch Hannah Davis. She tickled me until I peed my jeans. I was so embarrassed!”
“Oh, c’mon, Lauren!” Chiro snapped, rushing to the defense of the associate professor in American Studies (and fellow Irregular) at Commonwealth College. “Hannah was a little drunk, and, frankly, so were you. You seemed to laugh a lot—and enjoy it—at the time.”
Chiro thought back to an Irregulars party, held more than a year before in the spacious renovated farmhouse that faculty members Luci and Osvaldo Montanez called home. A curious Lauren had come with a date who was an irregular Irregular. There had been many pitchers of Sangria and margaritas passed around. When someone inevitably unveiled a set of padded stocks for the keenly anticipated tickle play, Lauren was herself too drunk—and too curious, to resist entreaties that she allow her wrists and ankles to be locked in the stocks. Her hosts pointedly reminded her that, throughout the day, she had been strenuous in her insistence during conversations that she just wasn’t very ticklish.
Now, Hannah Davis, with a sly smile, sat cross-legged before Lauren’s feet. Lauren had earlier that afternoon been introduced to the instructor, whom the grad student had known, by reputation alone, as a respected scholar and a popular instructor. Hannah, sporting owlish, dark-rimmed glasses, assiduously maintained a sober, poker-faced demeanor in public on campus.
The historian was in her mid ‘30s, her taut, trim frame--just shy of six feet tall--flattered by a silk blouse, tight jeans, and thick-soled blue suede clogs. Her rich, straight auburn hair was mostly tucked under an Alabama baseball cap. Her striking face had a clear, olive-tinged complexion, high forehead, strong cheekbones, expressive smoky eyes, and a broad sensual mouth with a slight overbite. Lauren could plainly see one reason for Hannah’s popularity: even straight-faced with glasses, she was quite attractive. And when Hannah Davis smiled, she
was incandescently radiant.
And Hannah was smiling now—very fetchingly, with her glasses perched on the end of her nose, clearly in a lightheaded and playful state of major intoxication. Lauren then realized another reason why Hannah so beguiled her students. Getting the historian to finally smile—so they could bask in its lovely, hard-won radiance, surely was her rapt young charges’ fondest wish. Lauren thought further that winning laughter from the serious Hannah must have fueled obsessive plotting, too. (And it did, many months later, as we—but not Lauren—witnessed in “Sabbatickle” and “A Ticklish Matriculation.”)
Lauren, considerably tipsy herself, was trying to reconcile all she had heard and read about Prof. Davis, with the smashed and beaming redhead sitting cross-legged before her. Professor Hannah Davis was, after all, an important, serious feminist scholar. And yet this pixilated Hannah Davis was a key, enthusiastic reveler at this gathering of The Vellication Irregulars, Commonwealth College’s circumspect circle of tickling celebrants. Clearly, in this select company, the serious professor figuratively let her hair down in eager tickle play.
Sure enough, Hannah removed her baseball cap and, shaking her head, let her auburn bangs fall to her shoulders. She winked up at Lauren, who, however drunk and open-minded she was, began to reconsider her helpless position in the stocks. As she removed the grad student’s sandals, Hannah, in a drink-husky Dixie contralto, announced, “Our young guest has assured us that she’s not ticklish. Ah say it’s … a likely story!” The gathering crowd chortled and urged Hannah on as she cracked her knuckles. She hovered her fingers just above Lauren’s long toes, flashing with blue glitter nail polish, and asked, “Tell me, dear. Do you know the words to ‘The Star Spangled Banner’?”
Lauren, her blue eyes misty in her own intoxication, snorted and rolled her eyes, saying, “Oh, puh-leeze, everybody does!”
Hannah nodded her head and said, “Good. Ah would like you to sing the first stanza (‘cause no one knows the second stanza). And when you finish, Ah’ll unlock these stocks.”
Lauren smiled to the assembled as if to humor this madwoman. Then, she made a goofy face and began to sing, “O-oh, say can you see….”
Hannah began to run a finger along each of Lauren’s bare soles.
Violently waggling her feet, Lauren abruptly stopped singing to protest, “Hey! Heh-heh! D-don’t! Heh-heh! D-don’t tickle my…” before it dawned on her pickled mind that, after all, tickling was why she’d been goaded into the stocks. She was helpless to prevent her tender feet from revealing how hopelessly ticklish she really was. The game had clearly been named—and it was afoot, so to speak. And unless she got her act together—quickly! —the smiling Professor would tickle her into hysterics, to the cheers of the gathered Irregulars. Fighting her building mirth, she recommenced singing, “Uh, by--Aiee! --the dawn’s early--eek!--light. Oh, so proudly—Hey! Hee-hee! --we hail…”
Hannah suddenly brought all ten of her fingers to bear on Lauren’s feet, spiritedly stroking up-and-down her soft, wrinkly soles despite all her evasive efforts. Almost immediately, Lauren abandoned the anthem, and tumbled into hysterical laughter. Periodically, she’d try to pick up the tune, but this effort would collapse in shrieks of laughter and pleas for Hannah to stop. This went on for what seemed like hours, and well past the moment her bladder had surrendered…
Over a year later, in the jar beneath Istanbul, Lauren remembered acidly, “She just wouldn’t stop! Teasing me in that syrupy mint julep voice of hers while she tickled my feet and teased my toes until I-I just lost control. I hate to lose control. She wouldn’t stop!”
“Well,” reasoned Chiro, “you didn’t finish the song.”
“What the hell does that have to do with it?” shrieked Lauren. “My God, Chiro, you’re as sick as she is. Well, someday, I’ll catch the great Professor Hannah Davis in a helpless position—and she’ll learn what it means to be mercilessly tickled until one can’t—until one can’t control oneself!”
“You mean,” offered Yumi, “helpless--like you, now, in this jar?”
“Yeah,” agreed Lauren, “in this jar… Hmmm! Now, that’s a thought!”
She was still musing on this when Yumi began to tickle her feet anew. Lauren shrieked and insisted on being released. Chiro, thinking he heard some of their colleagues returning from lunch, stopped Yumi. The two then carefully removed the lid, and helped Lauren out of the jar. They crouched beside her as she, donning her socks and boots, sat in front of the jar.
Anne Palmer, walking into the room, teased, “Aw! They let you out! I was hoping we could have worked while you…laughed!”
“You wish, dolly bird!” Lauren barked, over her shoulder. Lacing up her boots, she considered the jar’s glistening, plumed surface. To Chiro and Yumi, she murmured, “You know, I’ll admit I’m pretty ticklish, but, I swear, trapped in there, I felt sensitive like you wouldn’t believe!” She mused, “I know it sounds crazy, but it’s as if, well, as if the jar made me more ticklish. Even more than that day Hannah Davis had me in the stocks…”
She paused in her lace tying, her face suddenly alight with a cunning smile. Yumi and Chiro exchanged curious glances. They leaned in as she thought aloud, “Yeah…Hannah Davis…. Trapping her in this jar at my mercy. Sure…. After all, it’s one of the few artifacts that will come back to Commonwealth College with us. What a great idea! Of course, I’ll need both of you to help….”
Yumi rested a hand on Lauren’s shoulder and smiled, as if she were sharing the plan beginning to form in Lauren’s imagination. Both stared in fascination at the jar. It may have been a trick of the harsh work lights glinting off its surface, but it seemed to them as if the faience plumes were swaying ever so gently, as if from some unbidden breeze….
Chiro, disturbed by their seeming complicity (against which, he knew, he would have little resistance) coughed nervously and stood. To their returning colleagues, he barked, “OK, people! Enough fun and games.” He directly a stern look down at Lauren and Yumi, who stuck her tongue out at him. He cleared his throat and announced, “OK, let’s get these artifacts packaged quickly but carefully. Unless you want to miss your flights home….”
(Continued below...)
*This tale is not meant for the eyes and minds of those under 18. It does have some
sexual content. (Hmmmm. ‘Might have been wiser to claim it contained a moral, or something
else equally wholesome. That would drive the kids away, fer shure, But I digress…) Nor are any of the characters—no matter how childishly they behave—under 18.
*The institution of higher learning presented in this tale only coincidentally bears any
resemblance to any actual college or university. I mean, really, would anyone going to a school so infested with ticklephiles ever come away with a useful degree?
*Finally, the author wishes to thank Strelnikov, discerning habitue of this forum, for providing the initial premise for Hannah's third bow, for contributing the spirited character of Lauren Weaver, and for nudging me periodically to get the tale done. As it was, it took practically 11 months (!) to finish. (What's that? Tolstoy must have finished WAR AND PEACE faster? Yeah, but try to find any tickling in that! Nyaaaah!) Thanks, Strel! I couldn't have done it without you!
Now, let’s begin…
To students of the Ottoman Empire, it was an interesting, finely crafted example of
Iznat pottery. To the Vellication Irregulars, however, it proved, unmistakably, to be…
A JAR FULL OF LAUGHTER
a tickle tale featuring Hannah Davis
and the Vellication Irregulars
by Tee Hee Lawrence
Istanbul, Turkey
Dr. Junchiro Yamaguchi stepped out onto the rooftop and walked to the parapet. There he wearily removed his dusty Seibu Lions baseball cap from his unruly mop of black hair and rested his elbows on the flaking stone. He gazed upon the panorama of Istanbul, basking in the mid-morning sunlight, the ornate minarets dueling with the satellite dishes atop the office towers and apartment buildings for dominance of the great crossroads city’s skyline. Here the present (and the impatient future) existed only at the sufferance of the past. He loved places like this: Rome, Prague, Cairo, Bombay—cities where the legacies of lives past constantly interacted with the work of modern lives…where one couldn’t dig a hole without careful consideration of what historical treasures one might be disturbing.
This dig had been unusual for him, for it hadn’t been established in some remote area requiring an extravagantly mounted and staffed expedition. In these past several months, he hadn’t left Istanbul, and had enjoyed the relative comfort of a room at the American University dormitory. The project had very generous underwriting from a consortium of institutions, predominantly his employer, Commonwealth College, and the nascent Gates Museum in Seattle. However, it had been a surprisingly difficult effort, certainly the most stressful the 37-year-old scientist had ever supervised.
He and his colleagues (One, his liaison with the Gates Museum, was Yumi Menabe, a slightly older woman with whom he’d struck sparks, initially in turf conflicts and then, naturally, almost inevitably, in a passionate affair.) had been working below this very building, a warehouse here in the market district, painstakingly unearthing the remains of a 16th Century cellar. Daily he’d had to deal directly with Turkish authorities—brusque military attaches, fastidious clerks from the Ministry of Antiquities, suspicious Customs agents, as well as academics and curators concerned for their national patrimony (not to mention the warehouse’s irascible landlord). To his chagrin, Chiro had been less the hands-on archaeologist he preferred than a constant bureaucratic battler. Just thinking about it caused him to nervously stroke his
mustache and narrow beard, both flecked with incipient gray.
Thank goodness, his staff had been so dedicated. They had laid bare a marvelous find: a merchant’s storehouse, apparently forgotten since the reign of Suleyman, and full of a tremendous quantity of artifacts, many in extraordinarily pristine condition. True, there was no one spectacular object (This wasn’t a royal tomb, after all.). However, Chiro and his colleagues could anticipate many months—even years—of identifying, cataloguing, and studying the objects, most of which would remain here in Turkish museums and universities. He and his crew had worked through the night, cataloguing and packing the few select items to be shipped later that day to the States. In a few days, he and the other American members of the dig would follow.
Chiro was admiring the sunlight glinting off of the Blue Mosque across the Bosporous when he heard a theatrical cough behind him. It was Tansu, a student from Ankara employed on the dig. She was dressed in khaki coveralls—snugly fitted over her rich figure, and work boots. A black headscarf covered her wavy black hair and framed her striking black eyes, which flashed with provocation above her ever-present sardonic smile. She positively radiated self aware sensuality, which, coupled with the fact that she had a few inches over his own chunky, 5’ 6” frame, always caused Chiro’s palms to sweat when he encountered her alone. He could never decide if she was oblivious to his awkwardness in her presence, or whether she silently reveled in it. As it was, he was quite involved with Yumi, who was petite, barely 5’3” and waif thin, but who (happily) left him with no strength to act unwisely or unprofessionally with the staff.
She was shaking her head and smiling, and said in her proficient English, “You should hurry downstairs, Doctor. They are teasing Lauren. It’s so funny, but I don’t think they will stop until you come. She’s asking for you.”
Chiro smiled back, aware of how the approaching end of the dig was bringing out the prankishness in his mostly young crew. He said to her as he strode to the stairway, “It never fails. They feel homecoming is near and become children in anticipation. ‘Better give her a hand.” He was relieved to have an excuse to flee her unnervingly sensual presence.
He jogged down the narrow stairway to the warehouse basement, where he descended in a creaky open elevator to a sub-basement, from which he lowered himself on a ladder several meters to a low-ceilinged, stone-lined passageway. As he approached the repository, he heard playful laughter and a young woman’s sharp shouts of “Hey, don’t! Heh-heh! Cut it—haha--out! You’ll be sorr--eek! —sorry when I get outta here-heh-heh-heh!”
He entered a room filled with packing crates, bins of excelsior, and, on most every unoccupied surface, innumerable examples of pottery, ceramics, and mosaics from the height of the Ottoman Period. Whenever Chiro entered the room, he immediately thought of the end of the movie CITIZEN KANE, when the camera swooped over the vast possessions of the dead, once powerful rich man. The camera hovered over acres of priceless art crammed next to seemingly useless junk, a life’s legacy to be auctioned off or fed to a hungry furnace, their meaning to the dead man lost irretrievably. “Which object in this room,” mused
Chiro, “is like ‘Rosebud’ in CITIZEN KANE? Which is the piece of the puzzle that will illuminate life here over 400 years ago?”
“EEEEEE! Don’t-hehheh-don’t do that!” The voice of a giggling damsel in distress came from behind a pile of crates, where several of the project’s younger members--graduate students from Turkey, Western Europe, and the States--were gathered. They were laughing, and teasing someone in their midst.
“This little piggy…”crooned a sweet British soprano voice.
“…And thees leetle piggee…” sang a gleeful French baritone.
“Aargh! Ah-ha-ha! C-cut it out! Heh-heh!” giggled the unseen object of their teasing.
As the rowdy group parted slightly, Chiro, from the back, could see one of the larger Iznat jars, strikingly adorned with colorful faience and tile work. It was about 1.5 meters high and about 4/5 of a meter wide, though it narrowed a bit at the base and at the top, capped by a heavy lid. Most of its adornment consisted of detailed faience blue and red plumes, their feathery tendrils curling around the glazed white jar. The curled tips of the ornate plumes seemed to gesture to curious features built into the body of the jar.
On one side, two horizontal openings—8 cm high and 20 cm wide—were set--one directly above the other--into the jar; the upper slot began .4 of a meter below the lip and the lower slot began an equal measure below the first. On the reverse side, more inlaid feathers led to two parallel vertical openings, each 8cm wide and 20 cm high; both began 1/3 meter from the lip and were 1/3 meter apart. These side openings were rimmed by meticulous bands of blue and red mosaics.
Still more of the decorative plumes directed one’s eye to five semicircular openings in the lip of the jar. Two, each about ten centimeters wide and deep, about 1/3 meter apart, were in the lip above and on either side of the front slots. Two more semicircles, of slightly lesser width and depth, were in the lip directly across from each other halfway to the reverse side. A single wider, shallower semicircle, about sixteen cm wide and eight cm deep, was in the lip on the reverse side. The lip openings had been glazed substantially and their surfaces were quite smooth to the touch.
The lid of the jar was lavishly ornamented with faience of swirling plumes. It rested quite heavily on the lip. It, too, had openings built into it: three circles, each about eight cm in diameter, equidistant from each other and close to the small raised knob at its center; and a semicircle, about sixteen cm wide and an equal measure deep at the reverse, which matched the equally wide opening in the lip to form a neat circle.
Chiro, Yumi, and the rest of the crew had been debating for weeks just what the purpose of the jar was. The openings in the sides, which certainly appeared to be part of the original design, seemed to rule out the jar having been used to store oil or nuts. The ornate faience plumes and meticulous decorative tile work led one to assume the jar had been commissioned as an objet d’art. Yet, the peculiar variety of the openings, however, hinted at some specific but undetermined function for the jar.
Complicating the debate was their observation that, within the jar, was a semicircular shelf, thirty cm long, twenty cm wide, and eight cm thick extending from the earthenware wall, about .7 of a meter from the bottom. To their amazement, they found the shelf could be removed from the thick wall of the jar. The shelf fitted with careful balance and precision into a deep groove in the wall. As there were corresponding grooves on the wall above and below where the shelf had been, it was clear the shelf’s position was adjustable. The shelf was directly across from the lower opening in the face of the jar. The dig members asked, why the unusual openings in the sides and at the top? Why the movable shelf inside? And what was the significance of the copious plume decorations, seemingly meant to direct an observer’s eye invariably to the openings in its surface?
Chiro’s curiosity had definitely been piqued. The plume décor alone was sufficient. As a member of the Vellication Irregulars, back home at Commonwealth College, his imagination was always stirred by images of feathers, which worked on his cultivated interest in erotic tickling. Could the jar somehow have been involved in tickle play? He had discussed it one evening in his cozy dormitory room with Yumi, who, knowing of his yen for tickling, rolled her eyes before she began a spirited ten-fingered tickling aggression. (Yumi had made it clear that her interest was as a tickler only. Chiro fueled his sexual passion for Yumi with his frustration at not being able to tickle her. At least not when she was awake…) Thoughtful speculation was abandoned that evening…
Now, in the chamber, peering through the gaggle of giggling, teasing students, Chiro saw that the jar was not empty. Rather, it held someone in such a way that seemed to vindicate Chiro’s musings about its uses. For there, with only her head, hands, and feet rising from the openings in the lip of the jar, and kept there by the massive glazed lid, was the project’s other member from Commonwealth College, graduate student Lauren Weaver.
When not trapped in a jar, Lauren was usually a very clever (if a little willful) aspiring archaeologist, whose skill and enthusiasm for the careful detail work of their field made her Chiro’s most valued assistant. That she was a striking beauty--5’8” tall, perhaps 135 lbs. (He had helped her out of enough holes to be able to safely estimate.), with silky long ash blond hair, lively blue eyes, and flawless, pale skin—naturally had not influenced in the slightest his decision to have her join his project in Turkey. (Besides, his introduction to and subsequent intense involvement with the sagacious and smolderingly sensual Yumi Menabe made it simple to keep his relationship with Lauren strictly business.) Chiro valued not only Lauren’s youthful erudition and energy, but her good humor, embodied in her playful, ready laugh, and her devious imagination, which frequently led to her finding solutions to vexing questions before anyone else did.
Her colleagues around the jar was giggling as they playfully offered tickles to her helpless ears and neck, the palms of her hands, and, most effectively, to the soft, pink soles of her bare feet, from which they had removed her boots and socks, which were lying at the foot of the jar. Lauren was unsuccessfully trying to restrain her bubbling laughter as she hurled salty threats and creative curses at her eager tormentors.
Chiro swallowed hard and cleared his throat loudly. The group around the jar fell silent and, with red faces all round, stopped the tickling of Lauren, who emitted a few residual giggles before sighing with relief. The group parted wide and Chiro approached Lauren. She, blushing deeply and perspiring generously, cried, “Chiro! Thank God! I thought these guys would tickle me to death!”
Chiro cleared his throat again and addressed the group. “Well, this is a fine way to treat a precious object.”
“You said it!” insisted Lauren, waggling her hands and feet for emphasis.
“I meant the jar,” said Chiro, struggling to keep a straight face. “OK. Who’s behind this?”
“Well, uh, actually, sir,” offered Rene Lavocque, a French student who had been happily stroking Lauren’s right sole, “she was the one who inseested that we put her in zere.”
“He’s right.” Chiro was startled slightly by Yumi’s voice. She stepped out of the group and began to wipe Lauren’s moist face with a clean red bandanna. She continued, “Lauren was the one who figured out that the jar is meant to hold a person, who sits on the shelf within while her head, hands, and feet are restrained by the heavy lid. She was most eager to have us help her test her theory.”
“And I was right!” Lauren cried. “See how comfortably I fit in here! Well, I’m as comfortable as one can be in this position. Anyway, this proves the jar was designed for, ah, personal occupancy. I was right! And it felt great, until these guys started clowning.”
Anne Palmer, from Manchester University, failed to stifle her giggles as she said, “Professor, she—ha-ha-ha--looked so funny in there, waving her hands and feet, boasting about her ‘discovery’ and all, that we couldn’t resist knocking her down a peg. At first, we just thought we’d let her stew in there. Then, Yumi whispered ‘Tickle her!’ in my ear. And almost before you knew it, off came her boots and, well—we just couldn’t help ourselves!”
Yumi winked at Chiro, who cleared his throat yet again and intoned, “OK, why don’t all of you take a meal break of, say, thirty minutes? It’s your last rest until we’ve finished packing the last of the export artifacts. So, get going. And, ah, we’ll take care of Lauren.” He didn’t have to tell them twice, as they’d been working through the night. Soon, only he, Yumi, and the jarred Lauren remained.
He leaned rather casually upon the jar, by Lauren’s bare right foot and said, “Lauren, don’t you think you might have cleared it with me before ‘experimenting’ with this rare artifact?” He began to lightly stroke with his fingertips along her bare sole. This was simply too good an opportunity to satisfy a curiosity he’d long idly entertained about Lauren.
Lauren’s head whipped back as she screeched, “Oh, noooo! Stopstopstop! Ah-ha-ha-ha-naha-not you-hoo-too, C-Chiro!”
His fingertips sought out the tender undersides of her toes as he added, “I mean, it’s only 450 years old, perhaps the only one of its kind, so it might have been nice if you had at least mentioned that you intended to inhabit it.”
“Sorreeheeheehee, Chiro! I…I…Ahhahaha! Ah-ha-ha-ha-haaa!” Lauren howled. “Sta-ha-ha-ha-haaap! Oh, no-ho-ho-ho-ho! I remem-hehhehheh-remember! Ahhahahaha! At home—hehhehheh--you’re one of thohohohose—Ve-Velli-Vellication Irrationals! Ehhehhehhehheheeeeeek!”
“I believe the group is called the Vellication Irregulars,” Yumi corrected her, with another wink at Chiro. She knew—and he knew she knew—how thrilling this situation was to Chiro’s erotic imagination. “And Chiro—ah, Professor Yamaguchi is right to, ah, take you to task on this point.” She held Lauren’s big left toe firmly with three fingers, and began to flutter her fingertips ever so lightly just below the ball of the younger woman’s helpless sole. Her fingers moved along the soft surface of Lauren’s wriggling sole with infinite patience, eventually leaving no square centimeter of sensitive skin untickled.
Lauren’s blue eyes squeezed shut as she shrieked, “Aiee-hee-hee-heeee! N-not you, too-hoo-hoo! Plee-hee-heese s-stop it! You’re—hahaha—killing me-heeheeheeeee!”
Chiro shivered with empathy for Lauren as Yumi’s fingertips lightly grazed the tender flesh along the blonde’s pale arch. He knew from experience how skillful a tickler Yumi was, expert not only in violent, aggressive stroking but maddeningly gentle, subtle touches. This empathy, however, did not keep him from dragging his own fingertips along the wrinkles of Lauren’s other soft sole as if he were carefully tracing routes on a map. He followed the wrinkles until they led his questing fingertips to the very pale and tender flesh under her shapely wildly wiggling, and concertedly clenching toes. There he aggressively mined her laughter. Together, he and Yumi teased her thus for many long (for her) torturous minutes.
“Wha-ha-ha-ahahahahahaaaaa! Sta-ha-ha-haap! I’m gonna p-p-peeheeheehee in this ja-hahaha-ar!”
This desperate stab at the professional consciences of two of the project’s mentors (who, after all, were trained to mitigate damage to artifacts) definitely affected their tickling. With noticeable reluctance, they pulled their playful fingers back from her lovely, helpless soles, now noticeably pinker. She bubbled with giggles for quite a while before sighing loudly and pronouncing, “Some saviors you guys turned out to be!”
With a cartoon sneer, Yumi threatened to renew her tickling of Lauren’s toes as she said, “Who says we’re your saviors, hmmm?”
Lauren screeched and blurted, “Aieee! Enough please! Now I know, Chiro, why those people at home used to call you ‘Chiro Kootchy.’ You and Yumi make the perfect couple.”
This time, Yumi, her eyes crossed with mock menace, leaned back against the jar between Lauren’s waggling bare feet. Without comment, she spidered her fingertips spiritedly upon the jarred woman’s helpless soles.
“Wait! No! Wah-ha-ha-haaa!” Lauren howled. “Quit it! You guys are almost as bad as that bitch Hannah Davis. She tickled me until I peed my jeans. I was so embarrassed!”
“Oh, c’mon, Lauren!” Chiro snapped, rushing to the defense of the associate professor in American Studies (and fellow Irregular) at Commonwealth College. “Hannah was a little drunk, and, frankly, so were you. You seemed to laugh a lot—and enjoy it—at the time.”
Chiro thought back to an Irregulars party, held more than a year before in the spacious renovated farmhouse that faculty members Luci and Osvaldo Montanez called home. A curious Lauren had come with a date who was an irregular Irregular. There had been many pitchers of Sangria and margaritas passed around. When someone inevitably unveiled a set of padded stocks for the keenly anticipated tickle play, Lauren was herself too drunk—and too curious, to resist entreaties that she allow her wrists and ankles to be locked in the stocks. Her hosts pointedly reminded her that, throughout the day, she had been strenuous in her insistence during conversations that she just wasn’t very ticklish.
Now, Hannah Davis, with a sly smile, sat cross-legged before Lauren’s feet. Lauren had earlier that afternoon been introduced to the instructor, whom the grad student had known, by reputation alone, as a respected scholar and a popular instructor. Hannah, sporting owlish, dark-rimmed glasses, assiduously maintained a sober, poker-faced demeanor in public on campus.
The historian was in her mid ‘30s, her taut, trim frame--just shy of six feet tall--flattered by a silk blouse, tight jeans, and thick-soled blue suede clogs. Her rich, straight auburn hair was mostly tucked under an Alabama baseball cap. Her striking face had a clear, olive-tinged complexion, high forehead, strong cheekbones, expressive smoky eyes, and a broad sensual mouth with a slight overbite. Lauren could plainly see one reason for Hannah’s popularity: even straight-faced with glasses, she was quite attractive. And when Hannah Davis smiled, she
was incandescently radiant.
And Hannah was smiling now—very fetchingly, with her glasses perched on the end of her nose, clearly in a lightheaded and playful state of major intoxication. Lauren then realized another reason why Hannah so beguiled her students. Getting the historian to finally smile—so they could bask in its lovely, hard-won radiance, surely was her rapt young charges’ fondest wish. Lauren thought further that winning laughter from the serious Hannah must have fueled obsessive plotting, too. (And it did, many months later, as we—but not Lauren—witnessed in “Sabbatickle” and “A Ticklish Matriculation.”)
Lauren, considerably tipsy herself, was trying to reconcile all she had heard and read about Prof. Davis, with the smashed and beaming redhead sitting cross-legged before her. Professor Hannah Davis was, after all, an important, serious feminist scholar. And yet this pixilated Hannah Davis was a key, enthusiastic reveler at this gathering of The Vellication Irregulars, Commonwealth College’s circumspect circle of tickling celebrants. Clearly, in this select company, the serious professor figuratively let her hair down in eager tickle play.
Sure enough, Hannah removed her baseball cap and, shaking her head, let her auburn bangs fall to her shoulders. She winked up at Lauren, who, however drunk and open-minded she was, began to reconsider her helpless position in the stocks. As she removed the grad student’s sandals, Hannah, in a drink-husky Dixie contralto, announced, “Our young guest has assured us that she’s not ticklish. Ah say it’s … a likely story!” The gathering crowd chortled and urged Hannah on as she cracked her knuckles. She hovered her fingers just above Lauren’s long toes, flashing with blue glitter nail polish, and asked, “Tell me, dear. Do you know the words to ‘The Star Spangled Banner’?”
Lauren, her blue eyes misty in her own intoxication, snorted and rolled her eyes, saying, “Oh, puh-leeze, everybody does!”
Hannah nodded her head and said, “Good. Ah would like you to sing the first stanza (‘cause no one knows the second stanza). And when you finish, Ah’ll unlock these stocks.”
Lauren smiled to the assembled as if to humor this madwoman. Then, she made a goofy face and began to sing, “O-oh, say can you see….”
Hannah began to run a finger along each of Lauren’s bare soles.
Violently waggling her feet, Lauren abruptly stopped singing to protest, “Hey! Heh-heh! D-don’t! Heh-heh! D-don’t tickle my…” before it dawned on her pickled mind that, after all, tickling was why she’d been goaded into the stocks. She was helpless to prevent her tender feet from revealing how hopelessly ticklish she really was. The game had clearly been named—and it was afoot, so to speak. And unless she got her act together—quickly! —the smiling Professor would tickle her into hysterics, to the cheers of the gathered Irregulars. Fighting her building mirth, she recommenced singing, “Uh, by--Aiee! --the dawn’s early--eek!--light. Oh, so proudly—Hey! Hee-hee! --we hail…”
Hannah suddenly brought all ten of her fingers to bear on Lauren’s feet, spiritedly stroking up-and-down her soft, wrinkly soles despite all her evasive efforts. Almost immediately, Lauren abandoned the anthem, and tumbled into hysterical laughter. Periodically, she’d try to pick up the tune, but this effort would collapse in shrieks of laughter and pleas for Hannah to stop. This went on for what seemed like hours, and well past the moment her bladder had surrendered…
Over a year later, in the jar beneath Istanbul, Lauren remembered acidly, “She just wouldn’t stop! Teasing me in that syrupy mint julep voice of hers while she tickled my feet and teased my toes until I-I just lost control. I hate to lose control. She wouldn’t stop!”
“Well,” reasoned Chiro, “you didn’t finish the song.”
“What the hell does that have to do with it?” shrieked Lauren. “My God, Chiro, you’re as sick as she is. Well, someday, I’ll catch the great Professor Hannah Davis in a helpless position—and she’ll learn what it means to be mercilessly tickled until one can’t—until one can’t control oneself!”
“You mean,” offered Yumi, “helpless--like you, now, in this jar?”
“Yeah,” agreed Lauren, “in this jar… Hmmm! Now, that’s a thought!”
She was still musing on this when Yumi began to tickle her feet anew. Lauren shrieked and insisted on being released. Chiro, thinking he heard some of their colleagues returning from lunch, stopped Yumi. The two then carefully removed the lid, and helped Lauren out of the jar. They crouched beside her as she, donning her socks and boots, sat in front of the jar.
Anne Palmer, walking into the room, teased, “Aw! They let you out! I was hoping we could have worked while you…laughed!”
“You wish, dolly bird!” Lauren barked, over her shoulder. Lacing up her boots, she considered the jar’s glistening, plumed surface. To Chiro and Yumi, she murmured, “You know, I’ll admit I’m pretty ticklish, but, I swear, trapped in there, I felt sensitive like you wouldn’t believe!” She mused, “I know it sounds crazy, but it’s as if, well, as if the jar made me more ticklish. Even more than that day Hannah Davis had me in the stocks…”
She paused in her lace tying, her face suddenly alight with a cunning smile. Yumi and Chiro exchanged curious glances. They leaned in as she thought aloud, “Yeah…Hannah Davis…. Trapping her in this jar at my mercy. Sure…. After all, it’s one of the few artifacts that will come back to Commonwealth College with us. What a great idea! Of course, I’ll need both of you to help….”
Yumi rested a hand on Lauren’s shoulder and smiled, as if she were sharing the plan beginning to form in Lauren’s imagination. Both stared in fascination at the jar. It may have been a trick of the harsh work lights glinting off its surface, but it seemed to them as if the faience plumes were swaying ever so gently, as if from some unbidden breeze….
Chiro, disturbed by their seeming complicity (against which, he knew, he would have little resistance) coughed nervously and stood. To their returning colleagues, he barked, “OK, people! Enough fun and games.” He directly a stern look down at Lauren and Yumi, who stuck her tongue out at him. He cleared his throat and announced, “OK, let’s get these artifacts packaged quickly but carefully. Unless you want to miss your flights home….”
(Continued below...)
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