The Humper Game Pt. 01 Ch. 01

Author's note:

This is, in all its seven parts and their many chapters, one very, very long story. It's several times as long as my earlier story,

Let's Make a Deal. If long stories bother you, I suggest you read something else.

Moreover, a lot of the themes in that story which offended some people—particularly the characters' religious and spiritual views—are present in this one, and stylistically it's pretty similar, too, so if you hated that one, you probably won't like this one, either. Up to you whether you read it or not, of course.

The divisions between parts are, generally, plot-related. Those between chapters within parts are more arbitrary, to keep the chapters from becoming too long. Some are still too long, and a few are arguably too short. I've tried to avoid jarring breaks. And since I mostly don't like cliffhanger chapter endings in what I read, you won't find them here.

As in the earlier story, no part of this story is written so as to stand on its own. I strongly suggest that you start at the beginning and read sequentially—giving up at any point you choose, of course. (Or, if you're intimidated by the prospect of something this long, well,

Let's Make a Deal is shorter, and is set earlier and against a more normal background.)

This entire story is posted only on literotica.com. Any other public posting without my permission in writing is a violation of my copyright.

Part 1. A Game of Chess?

Sacharissa     : (Crying) I meant no harm; they're only men of wood!
Lady Blanche: They're men with whom you give each other mate,
                            And that's enough!

    — W. S. Gilbert,

Princess Ida; Or, Castle Adamant

For the first two weeks of our senior year, gym class consisted of measurement drills. How much could we lift, how fast could we run, how long could we run, how many pushups, situps, whatever could we do. We found ourselves sorted into three groups based on running speed and endurance and general, all-round fitness.

Now, this is not the kind of high school you're probably used to. It's a year-round residential school, for one thing. It's on a fairly small island in the Pacific. I won't say just where, partly because I don't know just where. If that sounds screwy, well, just wait, because that part's not really all that strange.

The school is very hard to get into, and not at all well known. They avoid publicity as far as possible, and that's usually pretty far. The name is a little better known, because graduates do leave, and usually do well enough that those universities and employers who know of it are eager for those who graduate, those with good grades, anyway. The political situation is, well, unique. Students are all US citizens—that's an entrance requirement—and don't exactly leave the US when they come, or re-enter it when they graduate or when they go home for our three one-week vacations each year. But it technically isn't part of the US. It is a privately-owned island in international waters, with some kind of special agreements with the US government, and I know almost nothing about those.

Each class is kept pretty much isolated from the others, so they avoid any tendency to develop traditions like harassing underclassmen, and while we occasionally saw younger students we didn't even know their names. I thought probably siblings close enough in age to be there simultaneously aren't both allowed to enroll, but I didn't really know. Students occasionally saw those from other classes, almost always in groups and at a good distance, probably during their PhysEd classes. About the only time we might be close to someone from another class would be if we were waiting at the infirmary, at the same time, to be examined.

And our parents were required to sign a complicated and detailed contract before we could enroll, and as soon as we were eighteen each of us also had to sign on his own behalf. In fact, we ourselves had signed it earlier, before each year began, but of course that has no legal force. This was basically to show that we at least claimed to have read and understood it. We basically agreed to remain fully under the authority of the school in all matters, at all times, and not to say anything specific about our whereabouts or the education we received when we were away from the school. Our outgoing mail was censored, and we agreed to that. Nothing would be removed from it, but if it contained unsuitable material, it would be returned to us with some explanation, and we had to revise it. This delayed delivery, so for items such as birthday cards it was very wise to think carefully in advance about what we wished to say. I believed that incoming mail was similarly censored, but again I didn't know that.

Oh, yes. Being at least fifteen but not as old as sixteen years old was a requirement for freshman enrollment, so all the students began each successive year the same age, subject to a day or two of variation at the beginning of the year. Our entire class began senior year as eighteen year olds. Some turned nineteen within a week or so, some almost a year later.

More about the school, and ways it is different from other high schools, will come out in what follows. If it's too strange, I'll try to explain a little.

So, two weeks into the year, we began gym class with the sorting into three fitness groups.

The boys' gym uniforms were loose blue tee shirts and shorts—baggy white gym shorts—shoes and socks, and jock straps. The girls wore loose red tee shirts, dark sports bras under those, baggy red shorts, and some kind of underpants, and of course also gym shoes and socks.

By the way, the school provided uniforms, which amounted to almost all our clothes for four years, plus bedding and towels and things like that. Most toiletries, too. Dirty things went into laundry chutes in the halls. Clean clothes appeared in bags by our rooms, and clean linens and supplies were in cupboards in the halls, to be taken and used as needed. Clearly, the clothes were marked in some way I never figured out—we got the same clothes we had worn before, unless they were worn out or outgrown. This meant that we didn't have to buy new clothes as we grew or wore things out, or take time doing laundry. We were also not allowed to wear much in the way of jewelry, beyond wristwatches and stud earrings if we wanted, and even those were forbidden in gym. In gym, the only personal items we had were room keys, in little buttoned pockets in the uniform shorts.

That day, we were given ten minutes to mill around in our groups and make sure we knew who all was in our group, and also to look at the other groups to see who was in them. After four years together, we all knew each other pretty well by sight and name. Those who were in our individual classes—tracked somewhat according to ability and performance and probably other criteria we never heard about—we of course knew quite a bit better than that. Remember, we had been isolated with these same people full time, for three solid years, so I think we knew our immediate classmates, particularly those of the same sex, much better than would be true in most high schools, at least schools of comparable size. In any case, from previous experience and from the tests over the past two weeks, we had a pretty good idea of relative abilities, and there were few surprises in the sorting. I didn't pay close attention to the other groups, and saw only one serious surprise in my own, which was the middle group. The surprising placement will come into view in due time.

Most classes were rather small, though often several classes were taught by the same teacher and followed the same schedule. PE was an exception. All the students for any given year were in one huge class. Our particular class contained between four and five hundred students. We were broken into smaller groups for many activities, of course.

After this reorientation, we were gathered to hear Mr. Miles, the head PE teacher, give us instructions on what was to be coming up. Mr. Miles had already been in the school for two or three years when we entered as freshmen. His main assistant for this class, Ms. Miller, had come at the beginning of our sophomore year. There were other instructors as needed. In most cases, I didn't know what else they did, but I believed all the instructors for the school had multiple roles. There were also many non-instructional staff members.

Mr. Miles and Ms. Miller taught our class PE from year to year, and Mr. Miles was responsible for all the school's other gym teachers as well. I didn't know whether they were regular instructors for any of the other classes during our four years. We mostly thought Ms. Miller was about twenty-five or twenty-six and Mr. Miles about thirty or thirty-one, but we easily could have been wrong by several years. Some of us thought Mr. Miles was well into his forties.

Actually, I could have found out Mr. Miles's exact age, if I'd thought about it while I was at home on break, or probably if I had wanted to look through a year's worth of old newspaper archives at school. He was something of a minor superstar. He had become a chess grand master at a young age, and won significant amounts of money in chess tournaments. Significant in my eyes, at least—chess isn't NFL football or even tennis, of course. And there had been headlines, admittedly buried pretty deep, when he abruptly retired to take a position at this school. I would have bet that the school wasn't happy with the publicity, but their approach was to ignore it. They have a US address, which you will find easily enough if you go looking, but it is merely an office in a building in San Diego. Their office staff must be used to patiently stonewalling.

And why couldn't I just look him up on line, even now, you ask? Again, this is not your normal school. Students may bring computers, of whatever sort, and use them to browse for research related to their homework, but the internet firewall is pretty thoroughly nailed down, and the logs are checked carefully. Attempts to reach any kind of remote email server, or even many specific wikipedia pages, to name just two examples, not only would fail, but were apt to bring you into an uncomfortable discussion with your advisor as to why you thought you needed that page. We were warned of this in the beginning, and of course a few had insisted on trying it for themselves and complaining generally of the results. Most of us learned from their examples. But of course almost everyone accidentally ran afoul of this at least once. In my own case, I hadn't even been asked to justify myself, merely warned to be more careful with my typing—because my errors were so evidently simple typos.

I had actually read a book on chess—when I was in middle school and briefly wanting to be rich and famous myself—which included several of Mr. Miles's games, with commentary. I was never above average, even in my middle school's chess club. Even most of the commentary in the book was way over my head, but I could still see how many moves ahead he set things up, almost always with obvious reasons for each move he chose. But as his opponent moved to cut off Mr. Miles's obvious strategies, he or she was inevitably led into a trap. Mr. Miles seemed to see all the possible moves which might result from his actions and his opponent's, and also almost to read his opponent's mind and know what choices his opponent would make. And when I got to school, I was excited that this man was one of my teachers! But my gym teacher? Had chess been on the curriculum, he surely would have taught that as well. Most—probably all—of the instructors taught multiple subjects or filled multiple roles.

He was somewhat stocky, solidly built, and I thought fully muscular rather than fat. A few times, I saw him lift and carry gym equipment which I would have expected to require three or four men to move, and he showed no signs of strain. He was balding on top, and I knew some of my classmates thought of him as old, chubby and out of shape. In events which will come up later, I was able to see just how wrong that was.

Ms. Miller looked a lot younger. If I was remembering Mr. Miles's age at all correctly, they were closer in age than some of my more obnoxious fellows thought. On the other hand, she had put on a few pounds since she came. Not really a lot, but she had gone from slender to a little chubby in two years. I wondered how much she actually worked out. There was really no way to tell, as the staff exercise room was in a separate wing, normally entirely off limits to students. On the other hand, I knew from the girls that when she had evening monitor duty in the girls' wing, she often had a small bowl of candy at her elbow as she studied whatever she was studying. I liked her, and I thought most of us did. In fact, for the most part I admired her a lot, and I found her very attractive.

At any rate, Mr. Miles was able to raise his voice effortlessly to a level we all could hear, without shouting at all, and he did so then.

"Ms. Miller and I have evaluated the results of all the fitness tests. To be blunt, they are generally dismal. A year ago, most of you were in significantly better condition. Some of you are still in excellent shape, and some of you have been nearly hopeless from the beginning, but it is obvious that most of you are not serious about keeping fit, and especially about your running. Our tentative explanation is that for your other classes you are motivated by desire for good grades, whereas PE is pass/fail and not extremely likely to be highly important to anyone reading your transcripts in any case."

I should say that we were not merely permitted but encouraged to get up an hour or more before breakfast and run, or do calisthenics or otherwise work out, during that period. If the weather was good, most of those who did this used a marked-off course in the grass where many of our outdoor gym classes were held—in fact where we were standing that afternoon. No equipment was available at that time, but if the weather was bad we could use the indoor gym in our building—though that was pretty small. Or we could exercise with weights or other equipment during the study time immediately before supper—in which case we usually started right after gym, during the shower time, and showered at the end of the study time—or in the study time immediately after supper. I knew that I myself was less diligent than I had been in the past, but I did usually make it three days per week. It was obvious to me that no more than a quarter of us exercised even that often in the mornings. And I didn't believe that very many exercised in the evening, except for a very few in the weight room, where I did put in a little time some days.

Mr. Miles continued. "So we have come up with a game which, we believe, will provide strong incentives for you to get yourselves in better shape. It will involve what we for convenience will label penalties if you cannot perform at the same level as others randomly selected from your own fitness groups.

"This will involve activities which you would normally not engage in for at least a couple of months yet, until you have your hands-on instruction in sexual activity." At this there were surprised noises, and everyone stood a bit straighter and started paying better attention.

I had better stop to explain. One section of our contract—a rather large one—involved sexual instruction. To shorten it a lot, we and our parents agreed that we would receive practical instruction in many forms of sexual activity, specifically including intercourse. Our partners would be assigned to us, chosen primarily from others in the senior class, but also from the instructional staff. Some such relationships with other students might also be allowed. The school committed itself, in tedious detail, to go to great lengths to insure that the staff did not abuse this, but limited it to legitimate instruction, with many examples given of acceptable and unacceptable staff behavior in this area. We had been required to agree, from the very beginning, that we would participate as instructed. This would be only during the senior year, when we were all eighteen or nineteen. The code of silence, and the segregation of the different classes, had left us almost completely in the dark as to when and—mostly—how such instruction would proceed. We actually believed that we knew about when this would happen—I will explain this in due course. Speculation had been widespread from the beginning, naturally. This was our first really specific clue, and already it seemed that we were to begin early.

We had already had one bit of eyes-on, if not hands-on, instruction, in our sophomore year. We'd had a unit on reproductive physiology. At the beginning of the year we had each been examined by a doctor, who clearly passed on some information. In fact, we were examined thoroughly three times a year, right after each or our weeks at home. Anyway, at a certain point, a dozen boys and nine girls were selected apparently at random and asked to remove all their clothes. Three of the women instructors were also brought in, and they stripped as well. These were all told off as display exhibits, in shifts so that they could observe too—as far as the students went. Six of the boys were circumcised, and six uncircumcised, and those last were asked to demonstrate how the foreskin pulled back. Six of the girls had intact hymens, and three did not. The three instructors also did not, which was apparently why they were there. At least, we—the boys anyway—all kind of assumed that all the rest of the girls in the class were virgins, but we weren't told whether that was correct. It was pointed out to us that a missing hymen did not necessarily indicate prior sexual activity. The parts of the genitals were identified in each case, as were the parts of the girls' and instructors' breasts. All were past puberty, of course, but none of the girls or teachers was menstruating at that time, and they were at various stages of breast development. Efforts were made to titillate the boys enough for them to display erections, and we were shown how the foreskins or lack of them affected this. Looking at twelve exposed female bodies was enough for some boys, despite their own situation, but even with some erotic pictures added a couple of the boys had still been too self-conscious in front of everyone to become fully erect. Breasts had been stroked—by their owners—so we could see how the nipples became erect. We were told that this was a reflex for nursing, but that for most women it was also somewhat sexually arousing and a reflexive response to sexual arousal as well.

Mr. Miles went on. "Here is how the game will proceed. You will each be paired, at random, with a partner of the opposite sex, from your own fitness group. We have placed the girls' names in buckets—one bucket for each group—and the boys will draw from these buckets You will line up at the starting lines, with the girls at the first line and the boys at the second line, immediately behind their partners. You will be proceeding clockwise."

He indicated two chalked lines, about four feet apart, across the wide lane. The running area was the same as always. It was marked off by ropes running between posts about three or four feet high. The track thus marked out in the short grass ran in an arc perhaps five or six hundred yards, where it disappeared behind a thicket of trees and bushes, which was at least a hundred feet or so across in all directions. The track emerged from concealment on the other side, returning in a similar fashion.