Kuro Kagame had been driving taxis in and around Tokyo for most of his adult life, and whilst he had seen all kinds of crazy things, picked up all kinds of people, from the downright weird to the famous, he felt sure he was never going to see everything, not if he lived for ten lifetimes. That didn't bother him, because he wasn't watching out for everything - he was watching out for the perfect fare: a pretty girl, all on her own.

Kuro Kagame was also a serial rapist, of the worst possible kind. Outwardly, he was just a simple fellow, nothing special, but underneath, he was a scheming monster, any unfulfilled potential festering into a vile lust-hate relationship with the opposite sex. Any scrap of knowledge, any new technology, he investigated it, incorporated it into his methods...

Patience was an essential part of his technique. There were areas he preferred to frequent, patrolling them for the perfect prey, but until he chose to strike, he was still a taxi-driver, picking up fares and taking them wherever they wanted to go. That was frustrating, and Kuro often felt his anger rising as he was dragged away, possibly missing out on the ideal target, but each time he reminded himself that, until he took her, each girl would still be out there, always ripe to be picked, and their paths would certainly cross again.

Of course, tourists were the best prey, foreigners who thought a guide book and a bunch of hilariously-pronounced phrases were all they needed to survive in Japan. That was what Kuro relied on - their foolishness, their Western arrogance was his greatest ally; they would much rather flee the country and try to forget than get caught up in the Japanese legal system, the partial memories his thoroughly researched concoction of drugs left them with all but worthless to the police.

Kuro was just returning after delivering an Australian couple back to their hotel when, passing through one of his favourite stalking grounds, he caught sight of a particularly striking woman, who he briefly mistook for Japanese. As she paused in the light of an all-night internet cafe's neon sign, she revealed she was nothing of the kind; she was definitely foreign, perhaps Indian, with long straight black hair, and wearing a knee-length fur-collared coat of red leather, under which disappeared a pair of long, glossy black stiletto-heeled boots - she was fabulous, and Kuro looked forward to ruining her. It would be a conquest worthy of legend, perhaps the crowning achievement of his "career"...

The woman looked up and down the street, trying not to seem too much like a tourist, but failing miserably. Kuro, previously concealed in the darkness, switched on his "for-hire" light, and the next time the woman looked in his direction, she saw him, and signalled to him that she required his services. He didn't hear what she said - it didn't matter where she wanted to go, because he had no intention of taking her there - but his scheming mind took in everything. She didn't sound Indian, her accent rather hard to place, but her mastery of English, of which Kuro had acquired a decent grasp, suggested she was well educated, and probably thought she was better than the hard-working "little people" - she was just the sort of woman Kuro despised, and particularly enjoyed assaulting. This evening was getting better and better.

Rain started to spot the windscreen of Kuro's taxi as he set off, with his prey curled up, oblivious, in the back. He found that strangely poetic, and erotic - it was strangely arousing to image this exquisite creature's tears of anguish and degradation dripping into the gutter, to be washed away with the autumn showers...

"You're very lucky, Miss", he said over his shoulder. "Tonight's my last night..."

There it was - the bait on his hook. He'd just won the lottery, and he was retiring from taxi-driving, so he would offer his passenger a drink. He "just happened" to have sake and European champagne in the boot, as part of his extensive rapist's toolkit, and the woman's drink would be dosed with a mix of drugs that would render her semi-conscious, and unable to do more than struggle weakly as he took advantage of her. That was the best part...

"...and I wonder if you'd care to share a drink with me...?"

Usually, the passenger would have been drinking already, and would be just intoxicated enough to accept the offer without thinking. This woman seemed quite clear headed, and Kuro anticipated that some gentle coercion would be necessary...

"Oh, why not?", said the woman. "It's my last night in Tokyo, after all - back home tomorrow..."

Kuro smiled, and nodded vigorously. Christmas, as they said in America, had come early.

The taxi-driver had several places in the city where he would stop to carry out the next, and most crucial part of his monstrous routine, places where there were no closed circuit cameras, and as few passers-by as possible, but which seemed quite innocent and safe to his victims. He tried not to use the same place twice in a row, and the particular site on this occasion, at one corner of a small public park, was one he hadn't used for some time, as some boy had murdered a friend there a few months back, but the publicity had long since died down, and the location was just close enough to the route to the woman's destination that it might seem to her to be chosen purely for convenience...

Kuro parked his taxi under a tree, sheltering them from the increasingly heavy rain. He opened the passenger door opposite his victim, and looked inside with a smile. Good - she appeared quite relaxed, legs crossed, her coat falling open from the hip down to show him that her boots went easily half the way up her thighs, with skirt-like cuffs at the tops, and appeared to be made from some kind of black shiny snakeskin. Those, and the coat, which looked to be lined throughout with the same rusty-coloured fur as the collar, rather suggested to Kuro that the woman might be some kind of high-class prostitute - that would be a shame, for there was no victory to be gained in forcing himself on a woman others had paid to use before him.

Kagame came back with the champagne - not too cheap, not too exclusive - and a couple of cheap disposable plastic glasses, to maintain the illusion that this was something of a "spur of the moment" celebration. Her glass had been coated inside with the cocktail of debilitating drugs, his drinking vessel distinguishable by the notch in the rim, and he chuckled inside as she accepted her glass, and held it out for him to pour her a drink. The trap was set, and in maybe no more than a minute, she would be his, to do with however he chose.

"To a happy retirement", toasted the woman, and she took a sip of champagne.

Kuro didn't like champagne, but he took a drink anyway. This, after all, was very much a night to commemorate...

The woman wrinkled her nose, looked as though she had tasted something that didn't agree with her palate - that shouldn't be the case, thought Kuro, for his mixture had been devised to ensure it was completely tasteless. "Sorry, I don't drink champagne very often", she said when she noticed his look of surprise. "Usually half a glass of wine... if anything..."

The woman started to sound drowsy - the drugs were having their desired effect, and Kuro edged closer as his victim leaned back, her eyelids drooping. This was quicker than usual, but by the sound of things, she didn't drink much, and that perhaps made her more susceptible to the drugs. The rapist was somewhat disappointed, for he took great pleasure in seeing that tiny spark of understanding in his victims' eyes as the chemicals took effect - but he wasn't going to let that spoil the "main event". The woman's eyes almost closed completely, and a soft moan escaped from her lips as her head slumped against the headrest... now was the time.

Kuro leaned over the beautiful woman, and reached for the buckle of the broad, black patent leather belt that kept her coat shut. Trembling hands went for the polished oval buckle, and quickly unfastened it, then they took hold of the front of her coat, and threw it open...

The rapist simultaneously felt a surge inside his trousers, and a dryness in his throat, as he almost choked on his own breath. Underneath the leather coat, which was indeed fully lined with the reddish fur, and apart from those wonderful boots, the woman was quite, quite naked.

She's been begging for this, he told himself as he unzipped his trousers, and pushed them and his underpants down past his knees. She better not be a whore - but to be sure, I'll just have to screw her a good bit harder than normal, to teach her a lesson...

Kuro took hold of the woman's snakeskin-booted legs, his sweaty hand sliding on the glossy surface, and he swung them up onto the seat next to him. The female murmured something, a meaningless slur of words, and shifted slightly in response, causing her would-be assailant to pause briefly before he took hold of her ankles, and prepared to push her legs back and apart in readiness to receive him...

"I can feel them", the woman said, suddenly, and clearly. "All those you've violated. Their fear, their horror, their self-disgust - all that you made them feel, all you made them suffer. Now, at last, it's your turn..."

The woman squirmed effortlessly out of Kuro's grasp, and suddenly, the rear compartment of the car was full of writhing night-dark serpentine flesh. Before he could even try to scramble free, the rapist was trapped in powerful, muscular coils - the woman had transformed into a giant snake, its sinuous body wound about him, crushing him...

A serpent's head, almost the same size as that of a pony, imposed itself in the centre of his vision, yellow eyes boring into the twisted depths of his mind. "Are you afraid?", hissed the fearsome creature, with the woman's voice, but in lipless reptilian tones. "Are you?"

Kuro nodded frantically. "Not afraid enough", snapped the great serpent, forked tongue flickering close to the rapist's face. "Let's see what we can do about that..."

The giant snake tightened her coils enough for Kuro to feel a couple of ribs crack - then suddenly, he couldn't feel anything above his neck. He flopped back against the car seat as the serpent withdrew, returning to her previous, human-like form, naked except for those fantastic long boots, sitting next to him on her fur-lined coat.

"Your spine has not been broken", she told him - at almost the exact same moment that terrifying thought came to him. "I have simply disabled the nerves connecting your brain to the rest of your body. You can see, you can hear - if I allow it, you can speak, but you may only move when I permit it. Now, Mister Kagame, I want you to go to the boot, and your 'rape kit', and bring me the razor blades you have there. Don't try to tell me you don't have any, because I can see inside your mind, and I know all you know..."

Kuro found himself a passenger inside his own body as he slid out of the vehicle, hobbled round to the back of the car, trousers and underwear around his ankles, and opened the boot. helpless, he could only watch as his own hands, no longer under his conscious control, opened the sports bag and took out the tin of adhesive dressings for small injuries, at the bottom of which lay several paper-wrapped razor blades. He shuffled back to the passenger door, dropped himself back in his seat, and his hijacked hands opened the first-aid tin, and tipped its contents onto the seat next to him...

"You know what to do", said the woman - she'd put her coat back on, and was fastening her belt back around her slender body, "or more correctly, your conscience - that one piece of you that is still remotely human - knows what to do. I have set it free. Can you feel it...?"

Kuro nodded, tears welling up in his eyes. The memories of a dozen, two dozen faces, wet with tears of terror, filled his mind, filled it to bursting. What had been a game to him had its veneer of amusement brutally torn away, leaving only the awful truth behind, and the rapist could only blubber "I'm sorry... I'm sorry... I'm sorry..." as one hand took up an unwrapped razor blade, and the other went to take hold of his genitals...

As Ravani walked away, with the strangled shrieks of pain from Kuro Kagame spilling out into the night behind her, she felt a definite sense of satisfaction that she had put an end to the foul deeds of a true monster, in a manner befitting his actions. It didn't, however, feel entirely proper that she should have enjoyed the whole process - choosing her outfit, her visits to several night clubs, the fishing around in the surface thoughts of others for any evidence of the kind of sexual predator she absolutely abhorred, pursuing her chosen target, setting her trap on the street corner...

In the last few months, Ravani had done much to put right all the wrongs she had committed before The Transformation. Before the birth of Mystalorn, she had been a collector - no, a thief - of mystical artefacts, stealing antiquities from her native universe and several others, using her magical skills for profit, or her own entertainment, but since her "rebirth" as a Mystalornan, the fullest manifestation of her magically-gifted race, she had come to look upon her past with disgust, and those powers had been employed to retrieve the items she had stolen and sold, returning them to their worlds of origin. Almost all the damage she'd done had now been put right, but the spell-caster felt there was more she could do, more she should do.

Tonight, there was only so much she could achieve. She couldn't undo all Kuro Kagame had done, although she could contact the minds of the man's victims, and give them some modicum of comfort. I couldn't have found them all without finding the exact place where they were assaulted, where their emotions had become imprinted, the Mystalornan told herself, and that set her mind at ease - and made all the dancing and close contact with the party-goers of Tokyo a good deal more palatable...

Suddenly, the tiny communications module tucked inside her right boot, no longer than her thumb when unfolded, began to vibrate against her leg. Not stopping, she slipped her fingers inside the top of her boot, fished out the device, flipped it open with her thumb, and pressed the receiver to her ear. "Yes?", she growled, trying to magically blot out Kagame's screams. "What is it?"

"Hello, Ravani - it's Pippi Korax", said the voice on the other end of the comm-link. "I'm just calling to let you know that the Captain Dominion business appears to have been resolved for the moment. Tony has vacated the crystal form, and we're making it ready for you to transport back to Dominion. Do you want us to pick you up from... wherever you are...?"

"No, I'll be right there", said Ravani...

...and she stepped out of the streets of Tokyo, and into her quarters onboard Dominion Five. Not breaking her stride, she shed her luxurious fur-lined coat and belt as she crossed the room, and picked up her usual scarlet leather dress, its front laced up and armoured with golden dragon-scale, which she had left draped over the back of a chair. By the time she reached the other side of the room, and had prepared a second translocation spell, she was once again fully dressed, and armed, an enchanted whip coiled and hanging from the belt of golden chain-links she'd slung about her hips...

Ravani expected her sudden arrival back at SCORPION's Beacon Ridge to startle Deputy Commander Korax, but the odd, rather ragged young woman simply smiled sweetly as the Mystalornan materialised in the reception hall of the private hospital and health resort. She must be sensitive to magic, thought Ravani, nodding respectfully in response. That's worth remembering - I heard she was some kind of genius, but I wasn't sure whether that genius extended to magic...

"Do you have anything to report that I should know?", asked Ravani, resting her hands on her hips as she stopped in front of the Deputy Commander.

"Just that you don't appear to have lost your super-hero", Pippi replied. "Although... well, he may be on hiatus for a while. If you want the whole story, you better talk to the Fulchers..."

...to be continued...