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Volume Five: Jakob’s Ladder (Issues 293-400)
At Princess Pink, Kanti and Q reclothe themselves and are informed by Yves that township PD has called. Q wonders if it has something to do with his probation, but Yves surprises them by saying that they were asking for Kanti and that they need to get to Vik’s townhouse. We don’t see Kanti and Q again this Volume, but we do see Katie and Alex several issues later in the hospital being treated for exhaustion and hypothermia, so it is likely that Vik split after his confrontation with Julian and Adrian and left them behind.
At the Infirmary, the revelation of Jakob’s survival sends shockwaves through the main cast. Dani protests it is impossible while Marliese helps Mallory recover from the trying ordeal of calling upon the Baron. Erin and Adrian discuss her abilities, during which Erin is playful but evasive. She does however mention that Cherry apparently has a very particular, very dangerous power of her own. After examining flight paths along Jakob’s last known trajectory, the group comes to the conclusion that Jakob could have secretly landed his plane, which had been reported to have crashed. For safety, everyone at the Infirmary stays there for the evening, leading to passionate nights had by all. As Amy lies sleeping during the night, Dani notices that the crystal fitted into the ring Vik had given her bears a striking resemblance to the scallops.
Across town, on the same evening, Miriam spends several hours masturbating with a hitachi wand, seemingly very worked up and unable to sleep. The next morning, she gets coffee at Over Roasted and overhears Raven discussing Erin with Reka and Weston. She discusses the unusual relationship Jacqui has found herself in with the two, and they invite her back to their place. She accepts and nearly has sex with Weston, but cries out in protest as he is preparing to enter her. She explains to them she has some psychological block to having intercourse with a man, but she does have join in as Reka and Weston have sex, offering oral and accepting it from Reka in turn.
Hitomi, who has been exploring with Imani and Coates, finally meets Coates’ wife Astrid, still a nebulous figure even in the comic’s present run. However, given what we know about Astrid, it is likely this is the first time Astrid sinks her hooks into the cheerleader, which will lead to further shenanigans down the road.
Miriam drops in on fencing lessons with Reka and Erin, accepting a challenge from Erin and dueling her. She protests to Erin throughout the match that someone must have done something to her and the other members of Adrian’s harem. She suggests that Pink Clouds might be involved, thinking someone has used it on Jacqui, but when Erin informs her of Jacqui’s immunity to the formula, she breaks down suddenly. As they wash afterward, she explains she has memories of Q using PC on Jacqui, which is the only reason she informed on her mother. Erin asks Miriam if she trusts her, claiming that she can help Miriam remember what actually happened, and begins heading to the Infirmary with Miriam and Reka in tow.
At work, Dani calls Adrian and informs him that the ring crystal Vik had contains the same circuits as the scallops. She is interrupted from her call when she suddenly sees Kuppler company deliveries being unloaded in the hanger. She goes outside and begins to call her father, but eventually changes her mind and tearfully hangs up before she can be connected to him. She then calls someone and asks to speak with Johannes Kuppler, Jakob’s brother, to inform him of her survival.
As mentioned previously, Marliese looks over Alex and Katie at the hospital after their abandonment by Vik. She prepares to call Laura so the girls can be given the antidote, but Rain appears and stops her, saying they can use Alex and Katie to find Vik.
Johannes, taken utterly off guard by Dani’s call, decides to fly into Wilmot to meet her in person. He informs his secretary Angela to search for a plane for him. As he leaves, she pulls out a phone and calls someone, eventually revealed to be Jakob, that Johannes has been told of his survival by Dani.
As she heads to the Infirmary, Erin is called by a panicking Danielle, who doesn’t know how to react to the news of Johannes’ imminent arrival. Miriam overhears the name Kuppler and reveals she knows Jakob as a client of her lawyer father’s. Erin abruptly changes course and drags Miriam to the record store. Despite the awkward atmosphere, she drags Adrian and Jacqui into the back room and begins having sex with them to charge herself up for a ritual to recover Miriam’s missing memories. Dani arrives, and the group persuades a skeptical Miriam to join them in the back and strip for the ritual. As they do, Jacqui calls her ex-husband, Ezra, and informs him he needs to come to Kearsarge due to Jakob’s reappearance.
Cherry and Julian stop for gas at a gas station. At the station, Julian uses a crystal pendant to hypnotize the attendant into not having to pay for gas and supplies. He leaves her on her knees with a card for a “free blowjob with purchase” beside her, because he’s terrible.
At her safe house, Claudia is shocked to hear that Johannes Kuppler has called for her, having thought the family did not even know of their existence. She wonders, if Johannes knows about them, if there might be a way out of their situation, and summons Derek, ordering him to intercept Johannes when he lands at the airport and to check on Zenon, who has stopped answering her calls.
In the mindscape brought on by the ritual, Erin helps Miriam recover her memories. While she believed that she and Q had had sex, in reality, she had caught Q with a PC-dosed Katie and had been dosed herself. At some point, she had met both Jakob and Dani, and Jakob had used one of the crystals on her. Contrary to her original story, Jacqui didn’t see anyone distributing PC, but was rather told by Yves about the distribution. She was then programmed by Jakob to keep her from revealing the truth. He sent Miriam to find one of the scallops for him, while Yves removed her memories that he and Sawyer were the ones dealing in PC, replacing those memories with Jacqui. Dani says that Jakob sent her to find another scallop as well, claiming he only had one whole one. Miriam claims Jakob had programmed her to save her cunt for him, hence her earlier freakout when attempting to have sex with Weston, and that he used a scallop fragment to make the pendant. Dani reveals (though without much explanation), that she sabotaged the Watch, and the ritual ends.
Dani now remembers that she found the scallop in the Wilmot steam tunnels, and she, Erin, and Adrian head there to recover the others; Adrian calls Caitlyn to meet with Johannes at the airport in Dani’s place. Miriam explains her false memories to Jacqui, and the two tearfully reconcile. When the reach the tunnels, Erin comments that Dani’s accent had changed; for her part in the ritual, Dani has recovered her own suppressed memories of her time as Jakob’s possession as well. They prepare to disassemble the mechanism containing the scallops, but stop to have sex first. Afterward, they discover that of a possible twelve scallops, four are still present in the device, much to their alarm.
While Miriam and Reka take a spin in the back room to work off the excess arousal lingering from Erin’s ritual, Ezra arrives and exchanges greetings with Jacqui. Afterward, they and Miriam go to Over Roasted, where Ezra eventually agrees to violate attorney-client privilege and tell them what he knew about Jakob, giving in when Miriam reveals that she was one of his victims.
Caitlyn awaits the arrival of Johannes at the airport but sees Cherry and Julian also there. She arms herself with a pistol and approaches, and when they claim they work for Johannes, she asks if they are certain they don’t actually work for Jakob. Julian cuts her off by brandishing the pendant. When Derek arrives and accosts them, they offer him a pliant Caitlyn to distract him as they prepare to intercept Johannes; Julian reveals that his pendant was Zenon’s, meaning he and Cherry were the ones responsible for the break-in a few Volumes ago rather than Marliese and Rain. They greet Johannes and his pilot, Einfríður, and prepare to escort them away. Caitlyn, due to the priority of the Watch programming, is able to shake off the crystal’s influence and holds Derek at gunpoint before tying him up. When she reappears and Julian tries to subdue her, she kicks him in the face. He attempts to draw his gun but is held at gunpoint by Einfríður. They confiscate Zenon’s pendant and are preparing to restrain the two before Cherry lashes out with some sort of power and summons a red being of energy, which wounds Einfríður. Caitlyn and Johannes find that guns seem ineffective against it, so Caitlyn refocuses and fires for Cherry herself, striking her in the torso. They manage to flee before the creature can recover, though it is seen active in spite of Cherry’s incapacitated condition, meaning it is now out in the wild. For their part, Julian attempts to get Cherry to a hospital as she loses consciousness. Sidenote: This marks the last time that Derek has been seen in the story other than a flashback. While Claudia does call him when he finally escapes his bindings, he has not been seen in the flesh since.
Adrian, Erin, and Danielle discuss the scallops. According to Dani, they act as both power source and filter, able to lock into and change a person’s thoughts when properly focused in such forms as the crystal or the Watch. In spite of Cherry’s previous claims that he knew nothing, Dani says that he understood the scientific theory behind the scallops very well, but needed someone like her to realize the ideas.
Between Ezra, Johannes, Dani, and some narrative magic, we get a short glimpse behind the curtain as Jakob himself breaks the fourth wall to reveal some of his history. He apparently taught at Wilmot, which is where he discovered the scallops and began using them to take advantage of female students and faculty. We see that, for some reason, Rain at one point gave him the shattered fragments of one of the scallops, implying she is the one who made him first aware of their existence. Following his teaching career ending in a coverup of some scandal (hushed up by his father’s money), Jakob went into the family business of jewelry with a focus on timepieces. Simultaneously, he was researching the scallops and used one of the fragments to create the crystal, which we see him using to build his original harem. Among their number is Claudia, her maid Meghan, and Dani herself, whom he uses to create the Watch. Apparently, however, eventually his behavior became bad enough that his father’s money could not continue to cover up his dalliances, so he moved on. His narrative ends here, but it seems this is the point where he faked his death and went into hiding, his current precise whereabouts unknown.
At the Infirmary, Dani and Einfríður try to pinpoint Jakob’s possible location while Johannes speaks of Jakob with Erin, Mallory, and Adrian. He claims he needs proof of his brother’s faked death beyond Danielle, which they do not currently have. He does say that Julian has a history with the Kuppler family and expresses slight bemusement at the harem situation. Ezra, Miriam, and Jacqui arrive, and Ez and Johannes begin to discuss the potential fallout of Jakob’s survival. Johannes and the group identify a potential shell company in Claudia’s name which Jakob may be using to launder his funds while “dead.”
Dani eventually uses the crystal on Einfríður in secret, wishing to coax her into having sex with Adrian. Adrian offers to walk Miriam home, and she heads upstairs to get her coat, walking in on Dani and Erin using the crystal. They turn its power upon her without hesitation, priming her to make a move on Adrian as well. Sidenote: From the beginning, girls affected by the Watch’s programming seem to have an affinity for not only serving Adrian, but expanding the harem to as many other women as possible. Perhaps a lingering recruitment strategy for Jakob to swell his ranks? Who is to say?
Adrian walks Miriam home as Johannes and Einfríður settle in to stay in the Infirmary for the evening. Despite her protests to Jacqui’s relationship, Miriam seems willing to accept that Adrian may not be bad for her mother. She also, in spite of not wanting to invite Adrian in, aggressively kisses him on her front porch in accordance with the suggestions Dani and Erin laid in her mind. She begins to proposition him, but Adrian gently turns her down. Embarrassed, she apologizes, while he assures her it is fine, blaming her actions on the memory ritual (which linked the physical sensations of its users for a time afterward). He asks if someone can stay with her, and she prepares to text Reka.
Claudia is called by Derek and, upon being informed that the crystal did not work on Caitlyn, realizes with horror that the Watch is in the wild. She frantically orders him to recover it from Adrian, but as previously mentioned, we do not see Derek again, so he may have simply skipped town.
At the Infirmary, the girls prepare an orgy as they wait for Adrian to return, inviting Laura, Hayley, and Marliese to come and join the fun. When Jacqui double penetrates Dani, Erin, Adrian, and Miriam all react, their arousal linked to hers via the ritual. This results in Adrian and Miriam, in spite of their previous reluctance, throwing themselves at each other and frantically disrobing within Miriam’s apartment. Inside, Miriam enthusiastically consents to sex with Adrian, and right on cue, Reka appears with condoms handy. She calls Weston and gets his permission to participate in the festivities, and then Miriam and Adrian prepare for intercourse. Despite her warning that it has never worked for her before, Adrian successfully penetrates Miriam, claiming her virginity; whatever happened during the ritual seems to have broken Jakob’s restriction on her having sex, and she throws herself into it with gusto. The Infirmary crew is informed by Erin and Dani, who sense the moment through the link, of Miriam’s cherry being popped. Jacqui reveals (surprise surprise) that technically, this is an act of incest, as she had sex with Adrian’s father in college, making him and Miriam half-siblings. She swears them to secrecy, and the orgy continues, Einfríður descending the stairs and joining the fun.
Eventually, Adrian must leave. On his way home, Rain approaches him and sardonically comments that “Zeus would have approved.” He informs her of Jakob’s survival, of which she seems aware (in retrospect, it is likely the Atlas clock was some sort of message from Jakob to Rain that he was alive, though how that might have been communicated is unclear). She walks Adrian home and talks with him about “Odysseus, and how to win impossible battles.” She tells him of the sin of hubris, punished by the gods themselves for the arrogance displayed therein, and informs him it is his duty to keep Jakob’s hubris from being repeated. Adrian vulnerably asks her if he and Erin would have been together in spite of the Watch, and Rain confirms she had feelings for him before the fateful night. Adrian bids her good night and returns home, to find his harem of eight (plus Hayley, who is noncommittal, and Einfríður, who is eager thanks to Dani) awaiting his selection.
STOP
Cherry’s wound at the hospital will result in her being stuck in an extended coma, which leads to much of her remaining screentime being in the hospital before the events of issues 770ish-920ish. Julian, in desperation to save her, will eventually approach Adrian and his women with a possible deal, to be covered in subsequent Volumes.
Johannes and Einfríður’s entry signifies the heightening of the stakes. Jakob is alive, and now people to whom that information would greatly matter are privy to it. The investigation into his whereabouts will persist into the modern day in the real world, as he has yet to be located, and will involve all the players, from Adrian, to the Kuppler family, to Julian, to Claudia.
The recovery of Zenon’s pendant by Caitlyn from Julian at the airport will also lead to more shenanigans, especially when Hitomi’s exposure to Astrid’s currently mysterious powers eventually leads her to rope in Caitlyn, and possibly Danielle and the twins, into reconditioning all of Zenon’s former patients. The SJI women do so under the pretense of gifting Adrian more sexually obsessed women, though Astrid’s own goals are currently far less clear.
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