When we reached the tree house we went straight to our room for a shower and some languorous touching. Rose rubbed ointment into my hand and found a soft leather glove to provide padding that didn't look as goofy as a bandage. I found a change of clothing in the cupboard so that when we were ready to rejoin the world, I wore snug, black silk pants and a fine mesh shirt; and Rose was dressed in black silk and velvet from mid thigh to just above her nipples. I had found a perfectly fitted bodice that flared to a soft velvet skirt at the hips and when she tried it on I nearly stopped breathing. The black silk top hugged her every curve and stopped millimeters above her areola, the cloth was thin enough just over her nipples that I could see them pressed against the material. The skirt flared from her hips and hung just far enough to maintain decency as long as she didn't walk, or breathe. She had shaved in the shower so that whenever she took a step I was treated to a perfectly framed view of her smooth shaven mound.

I found a matching collar for the bodice, but no cuffs or anklets so I decided to leave it at just the collar. And when I led her back into the central room, her leash playing out behind me, there were quite a few low whistles of appreciation. I spotted RG and Rowenna and quickly angled over to ask him if there had been any developments. When I sat down and asked, he gave me a look that I didn't quite understand and then glanced to Rowenna. She shook her head and looked defiant.

My confusion lasted until Rose tugged on my sleeve. "Master, he can't speak unless she gives him permission. Just like I won't speak to anyone unless they ask you first and then you give yours. She is his Mistress." Comprehension dawned. I realized I was being so incredibly rude it was amazing she wasn't throwing insults. A small petty part of me wanted to ask what right she had to demand the protection of the rules when she was still suspect of wanting to take down the club. At the same time however, her defense of the rules and her refusal to be held to a different standard spoke volumes of her intent to stay.

"Pardon my rudeness Rowenna, may I speak with RG for a few moments?" Rowenna looked startled for a moment.

"Yeah, go ahead. You can speak RG my pet." She reached across her body to pet his hair as he raised himself to a seated position.

I glanced once more at Rowenna who nodded and then spoke. "RG, what the hell? First off I thought you were vanilla." Vanilla was a term I had learned from the net, it meant he preferred standard missionary position sex with no bruises or variations. He looked me in the eye and shook his head in bemusement.

"So did I Xeno, so did I. She showed me a side of myself I didn't know existed outside the world of the church." I looked at him quizzically and he explained. "In the church I am a priest, I am therefor ordained to serve G-" I interrupted him, tired of the old argument.

"Which god?"

"Look, do you want to hear this or not?" He sounded both frustrated and amused. It must have been hard for him being a Catholic in this proverbial den of iniquity, but I wasn't going to cut him any slack. I had been abused by too many so-called god-fearing people to let anyone of them presume that their god was the only one. RG saw the look on my face and sighed. "OK, I am there to serve my god. Happy?" I nodded. "Good. Anyway, I have heard all about sub space and the joys of serving, and I have always assumed that my version of the same was what I found with G-my god." He smiled.

"So wait, what you're saying is that you are the sub and your deity up there in the sky is your dom? Your master?" RG nodded and continued.

"Exactly. When I give myself to him in prayer and meditation I find something very similar to sub space. It wasn't until I met Rowenna that I realized there was a difference at all." I felt Rose tugging at my sleeve while he paused to ask Rowenna if he could have something to drink. She handed him a water bottle and I turned to Rose.

"Master, may I speak with him as well? This is fascinating." I nodded.

"Absolutely, I'm interested to hear your point of view as well." She climbed over me and settled herself in my lap where she beamed up at the world in general before launching some very probing questions at RG.

"What is the difference RG, you mentioned that there was one, is it sexual, psychological, spiritual or mineral?" She leaned back into my chest and wrapped my arms around her while she listened.

RG pondered for a moment and answered her. "It is both physical and emotional. There is a sexual aspect with my Lady, obviously, but I expected that to be different so I didn't count it as such. With my god, I can sit down anywhere, at anytime and commune with him. As long as I am in the right headspace I feel wrapped in his presence, I submit my will to him and he gives me a reason to place my trust in him. He rewards my trust with insight and protection and love." He smiled up at Rowenna who returned the smile encouragingly. He continued.

"When I met Rowenna, you remember the night Xeno, wow was it only half a week ago?" I nodded in shared amazement. "When I met Rowenna, I was of the firm opinion that I could have only one master, and that my servitude would result in the same reward regardless of the dom. I thought that my god would be the best at it, but other than that I had assumed the overall sensation was glandular. I was wrong. Where I find an overall sensation of well being and a sense of communion with eternity through my god, I find a sense of true human love and compassion and earthly safety with Rowenna." He looked at her and I could tell her meant it. She was smiling faintly and watching a couple across the room.

I glanced up to see a woman binding her slave with intricate rope knots. He was standing perfectly still with his arms out at his sides, and there was an expression of rapture on his face as his mistress lovingly slid the cord across his body in delicate loops. It dawned on me that she was in fact dressing him. She was dressing him in bondage. The show was fascinating, but Rose's next question brought my attention back to the conversation.

"What about the personal touch, the ability to feel your top and be held by her? I know I need the physical touch to ground myself and to feel safe. Denying us that was one of the ways Ariana tortured us." I wrapped my arms around Rose to hold her and she settled back against my chest. She was rocking herself again and I began to murmur in her ear, soothing declarations of care and love. She sat back up, but did not relinquish my arms. "No, I'm ok. She has no hold over me anymore. You broke that. And even if she came calling I am sworn to you. I can't break that easily. Go ahead and answer RG, I want to know."

RG took a deep breath and took a sip of his water. "The sense of touch is the biggest difference. I get a personal immediacy from feeling my Mistresses fingers on my body. When she ties me I know she is right there, and when we have sex, well, I've never had sex with my god before, at least not the one up there. And I think that's as close to blasphemy as I want to get right now, can we change the subject?" He shifted uncomfortably in his seat and Rowenna pulled him back to her so that he lay nestled between her thighs. She soothed him in much the same way I had soothed Rose a few moments before and I was reminded of the fact that she was my peer in this world of equals. We both held the leash and the similarities were interesting.

"Rowenna." I drew her attention when RG looked quite soothed and halfway to a nap. "What about you? Are you religious?" I was trying to find the common ground between them. I was curious to know if there was something beyond the mastery and servitude; and I think I wanted to know if it was even important.

"No Xeno, I'm not religious. I've always considered myself a pagan. I know, how new-agey of me. But it is the path of faith that has brought me the most joy. I call it faith, but that's a bit of a misnomer. There is no faith involved in seeing the trees or the rocks and feeling their presence as proof that I too exist. That's about all I ask of my faith, proof that I exist." She lit a cigarette and watched our faces with interest. Rose stirred a bit and wrapped my arms around her as she settled back against my chest.

"Now, from RG here, or from any partner I would claim a much greater responsibility. I want to know I am here for a reason. I want to enjoy my existence. I was introduced to the lifestyle as part of my training for the force, but every time I encountered the realities I kept seeing people who were truly happy. They weren't strung out on drugs convincing themselves that they were happy, they weren't selling themselves to make the rent, they were truly having as good a time as was possible. And with some obvious exceptions, no one was being hurt. So when we started to raid the sex clubs I began focussing my attacks on the prostitution and pandering crowd, or looking for those relationships that looked abusive. I wasn't happy about picking and choosing, but at least I was still making choices."

"Shortly after that, I arrested a couple that looked like they were in one of the worst fights I had seen in my life. They had gotten plates from somewhere and were throwing them at each other. They were hurling dishes like mad, and I came down on them like a ton of bricks. It took three men to each to keep the two of them apart, and one of them was a petite girl who couldn't have weighed more than a hundred pounds."

"The amazing part was that when we got them out back, someone decided to let them loose for a few minutes and see what this girl would do. She was off like a shot, the funny part, and the part that should have been obvious to me from the outset, was the fact that these two did not tear into each other. They were in each other's arms immediately and I have no doubt that had they been alone they would have been naked and fucking right there in the alley. I'm not even sure if our presence would have stopped them except the fact that once the other cops realized they weren't going to see a fight, they pulled them apart and tossed them into separate paddy wagons." Rowenna smiled wryly before going on.

"I got the story out of her later. Apparently those two were black belts and got each other worked into a sexual frenzy by sparring. In this case it was a themed display; the theme of course was domestic violence. The were putting on a damned performance art piece in which one partner would throw dishes and the other would try to dodge but let the dish pass as close as possible. It went on until the dodging partner lost his or her concentration and dodged too far, then they would switch. The work-out was so intense that they really got the endorphins flowing and were hot to trot rather soon into the game, but they kept it up as long as possible as a kind of foreplay." She sighed. "And we arrested them and booked them on charges of sexual indecency or something like that." Rowenna paused again, this time to sigh in frustration.

"By that point I was getting pretty fed up with the force, and everything I had learned in college was combining with everything I had learned in training. I was so sure they were wrong when they said that what was going on in these clubs was wrong, but every so often we would run across these broken slaves who thanked us in tears for separating them from an abusive master. I didn't really understand then that this scene is just like any other group of people. You get some good, you get some bad, and you get a lot of people who just want to be there."

"Which is why we are having this problem." Devon knelt down to sit with us. "It's not so much the bad that are the problem, they are easily dealt with in fact. Well, let's try a different word. Those people we are referring to as bad are more accurately described as the people whom we don't want to be. Let's call them the others for lack of a better term. The others share a mindset with which we don't agree, which makes them different. No real judgement call is required, we don't like them, and for the most part, they don't like us. Whether it's because we don't like them, or they started out that way is a moot point. In total this entity we call the club belongs to about seven people. I was mine to start with, but I needed help so I brought on those I felt could do the most to help the club further grow."

"From the beginning of this club's inception, pretty much the moment I stopped thinking about it and invited the first person to come play on what was then a web site, this club has been experiencing a division of opinion. Back then it was great, new input added new material added new life to an idea that would have stagnated through time. Later, as the club began to grow and new members began to join, the club began to evolve. I retained pure ownership, and as such it was my responsibility to maintain the integrity of the idea. I had to decide what ideas to add to the future of this thing and what ideas I didn't want to add. Still later I realized the dream was getting to big for me to handle so I asked those who most closely shared the dream for help. They brought their own perspectives, and together we began to prune and nurture in the ways that we felt would continue to create the future we hoped for."

"That led to some pretty severe differences of opinion at one time or another. We all had different approaches to how to remove the members who were too drastically changing the direction of the club. We began to see our overall mass grow to the point that it took on inertia and once we were pointed in a direction, be it the one we wanted or not, it became harder and harder to change that direction. Even with a massive upheaval it became very difficult to change the direction unless we each took a personal hand in the change. There have been times in the past where we have had to hand pick our members and completely change the dynamic of the group."

"We've had to follow some very muddy paths back through the various members until we found the actual source of the change we didn't want, and in some cases wipe out the entire group that was involved. In some cases, it was easier than in others. When we were still online it became very easy to just shut off their accounts, sure they could come back, but they had to choose another name and often that was enough to make them take the time to think through why they had been blocked. At other times they were so pissed off that they never came back, and on some occasions we found out later that the original name they had chosen was actually having a greater impact on their behavior than they had previously known and the mere fact of changing was enough."

"Now we have the present situation, we are now all here physically. In order to remove a person or a group from the club we have to set the bouncers against them, or we move the club. You've seen us set the bouncers on someone, Reginald was a perfect example. Sometimes it works. In his case I think it will. He has always been a weak willed man who will follow any lead that's given to him. Unfortunately the lead he was given was one that we actively disagree with. And I think he was and is more disposed to believe that there is that much inequality in this lifestyle. He wants to believe in the inequality because in doing so he is able to believe himself greater than someone else, and he needs an external source of approbation to improve his own personal view of himself. And sadly, he is more prone to believe an invisible source that makes him a big man than he is to believe a personal source that makes him a loved man." Devon sighed and lit a cigarette.

"Now the problem; those people who haven't made a decision in their lives, who will float along in the currents of the charismatic, those are our biggest problem. They create the inertia. These members who have no opinion and are just here for the party of it, they all create a sort of vacuum into which we pour a huge amount of information. They are also the greater mass of our dating pool. The fact that they aren't choosing sides is no reflection on their value as people. It just means that they have not been exposed to the politics in a direct fashion. In essence they are impartial observers, or at least, it would be nice if they were. In reality, they soak up the shift and flow of the power dynamic among the members and assume it is the natural way of things. So if the actual flow of power, especially the visual flow is such that our antagonists appear to be in power, then they, in effect, are in power. It then becomes very hard to shift that power away from them, while for them it becomes very easy to control the mass opinion." Devon sighed again, sadly.

"So what happens to all of these neutral people?" I interjected.

"They have to go. It's really not my favorite portion of this whole fiasco, but the fact is, they have to be tossed out on their ear. Some of them will filter back in over time. The hope is that this time they will see the actual club instead of the twisted version that Ariana and her group have been showing our members. The hope is that we will avoid letting in those people who suck. The truth is that many of these twits are also cunningly good actors. So we get taken in by a good line or a pretty face." Devon grinned sideways at RG who stiffened and then grinned back. "We have also allowed in those we felt questionable, some of them have worked out amazingly well. In your case you qualified as a questionable, you have gleaned most of your knowledge of the BDSM scene from books and net porn. We had no way to know what you had been reading specifically, nor did we have any way of knowing whether you would be open to learning when we let you in. You have shown yourself to be willing to listen, and to fit in. While we celebrate our differences here, we are still a cohesive group, and it is the willingness to play by the rules that keeps us that way."

MD showed up behind Devon and began to rub his shoulders. For a moment he leaned his head back and just enjoyed the human contact. I watched the tension flow from his face while I wrapped my arms around Rose and hugged her. I was suddenly very happy I had paid so much attention when I was first learning on that long ago night. And I was grateful for having been given the chance to join.

Devon shifted his weight and opened his eyes again. "Look, I've bitched and moaned about this enough for one night. I originally came out to talk to you about tomorrow Xeno. Normally we would assign you a new slave and a trainer, someone who can show you the ropes." His words set off a few laughs and I guessed it was an old joke. "You have admitted that you are new to this lifestyle, and now you have seen some of the demands it can place on you. Under these rarified circumstances, I think you can stick with Rose for your training." Rose smiled happily at this news. "And for your trainer we are going to assign someone new. Well, only partially new. You have met her once before when you were just getting to know us." He called out casually, and the door behind him opened.