All the usual suspects are in on this one; bleak visions of an oppressive future, a paramilitary force of ass-kicking hotties, and more cyber-punk mind controlling nasties than you can shake a steel tentacle at. Yet far from being a repetition of past ideas, XXX4 is a refined celebration of all the things that make a sara castle story great. There’s mass-quantities of mind control (three times fast), there’s love and betrayal and revenge, there’s girl-sex so hot it’ll melt your eyes right out of your friggin’ head.

I’m speaking ambiguously because I really don’t want to ruin any of the fine work she’s done crafting her narrative, but in the broad stokes, four women are in competition for a single position. They each have mind control tech, fancy weapons, and three women standing in their way. From there, sara does just delicious things with her characters; love, betrayal, see above for more.

The point is that’s its a ridiculously good story, its one of the hottest things you’ll ever read, and I am so glad I put off what I was supposed to be doing to read it. I recommend you do the same.

Congrats sara, you’ve really outdone yourself with this one (waves).

I’m working on some new manip material and desperately trying to return emails this evening; hopefully if I owe you correspondence, you’ll have something in your inbox soonish. I’m also doing some housekeeping on the site and trying to fix some broken things. Incidentally, the rss feed should be functional again.

Lastly, I had time earlier tonight to read a couple items from the new update at mcstories. Betrayal, by zorkmeister was quite good as was the always delicioius Jukebox with Play the Game. There’s still several I haven’t gotten to yet (including sara castle’s newest chapter to XXX4 which I’m dying to check out), but hopefully I’ll make up for lost time tomorrow night.

The announcement this week of the The Beatles Rock Band video game has me thinking about the greatest band that ever was and reminded me of a story I’ve been meaning to tell you all about the Beatles break-up and how some nefarious mind control may have played a part. But I’ll leave that as a tease for next time.