The University had an approach to magical studies that one might optimistically describe as "focusing on student safety," but could just as accurately describe pessimistically as "trying to minimize the amount of time unfocused apprentices had access to the resources to do magic rituals." For years, Beckett had been absorbed in theory work, attempting to understand the structure of a magic spell and the various languages texts on the subject were written in. The goal of such studies was to make it so that, when a student graduated and was given their first official spellbook, they would be able to read and understand it (and engage in experimentation far, far away from the campus grounds, hopefully). Of course, such a curriculum would not stop most apprentices from attempting to put theory into practice. Many was the student who managed to get their hands on something they should not have, who threw their half-learned knowledge together haphazardly to try and make something happen that they could brag about to their peers. Most of these attempts ended in failure. Some were embarrassing. A rare few were tragic.
Beckett had never felt the itch to practice. A consummate fan of the written word, he was almost entirely content to think of magic as a construct of theory, a series of funny ink lines on paper that tickled the imagination in much the same way a historical treatise or a tale of chivalrous romance tickled the imagination. Up until this very moment, he had not felt a strong compunction to do anything more involved than idly leaf through his new book, taking in the symbols and equations and revelling in how they all fit together with his studies to form a cogent whole. Of course, that lack of urgency when it came to practice came back to bite him, now that he was stuck in the middle of obvious sorcery with no clue how to counter anything.
No matter. It was only a matter of a few minutes before he was completely in his element. Poring over formulae and esoterica, the world seemed to fall away. No longer was he aware of the manor, or the smell of dust, or the fact that he was stark naked and bent over a table even though there was a strange rat and a magical bobcat who could have walked in at any second and seen him. None of that mattered, at that moment in time. He traced shapes on the table with one finger, practicing the lines that he would need to do to perform those first rudimentary spells. Only once he felt he had fully committed the motions to memory did he focus his willpower. A heat-less blue flame sprouted on the end of his finger. Now the lines he drew stayed, a glowing trail hovering millimeters from the top of the table's surface. He drew a triangle, nested it inside of a circle, and drew a sigil in the center of both in the ancient language of the Great Wyrms. The triangle began to rotate. Beckett rumbled out a series of will-infused verbal calculations, his words echoing off of the lines and causing them to flash like light catching off of rippling water. Then, the circle collapsed, the lines coalesced into a blue-white ball of light, and then expanded outward into its final shape.
Beckett giggled, boyishly, at the sight of his own creation. In front of him was a glowing blue hand. At a mental command from its master it flexed its fingers and rotated along its semi-invisible wrist. "Good morning," he chirped to it. "Welcome to this plane of reality, friend."
A clatter arose from next door, no doubt Wallace moving furniture in the bedroom to try and find something usable. Regardless, it was enough to cause Beckett to flinch, to stand up straight and resume covering his privates. When it was obvious nobody was coming to stare at him, he sighed in relief.
He looked down at his paws. Then he looked over at his freshly summoned ghostly hand. The gears turned in his head.
It was perhaps an hour later when Wallace sauntered back into the library. "Beck," he said, "I found a couple rooms that are still locked, and I wanted to know if you knew anything ab..." He paused, cocking his head at the dormouse. "What... are you doing?"
Beckett turned around, and about a half-dozen floating hands followed him. Two more hands were clasped together between his legs, covering his sheath and balls, while a second pair were nestled around his soft, small man-boobs. "Wallace." He still hunched in a bit, but his expression was just the tiniest bit more confident. "I've found a spell that can help. At least, for the moment. See? I can keep my modesty intact while keeping my hands free."
Wallace made it a point to keep his eye-wandering to a minimum. With great effort, he maintained eye contact. "I see. Good job, magic mouse. I'd have looked up how to shoot fire out of my hands first, but this is a close second."
Beckett tried, with far worse success, to keep his eyes from wandering. His fellow captive had become far too acclimated to his own nudity, and at that moment was doing nothing to hide himself. "Would you like a few?" he asked. "It turns out these don't require a lot of concentration to maintain. I was going to see how much I could cover, but if you..."
"I'll stop you there, Beck." Wallace held up a paw and laughed. "Even if you could manage to do that (and I don't doubt you can), I'd just as soon not spend my days being groped by invisible strangers."
"That's a shame." Beckett had to force himself to stop facing in Wallace's direction. He turned back to his book. "Well, if you change your mind, I think I can spare a..." He paused. Then, he looked back at Wallace. "I-I'm sorry. Did you say 'groped?'"
Wallace began to wander, idly running a finger along books whose titles he could not read. "I mean, yeah. Do you not see what you look like, right now? Honestly, you'd be better off going around naked. Rather than walking around looking like you're the public property of handsy drunks."
"No..." Beckett looked down at himself, blushing. "No, that's not..."
Wallace perked up. "Actually, yeah. You know who you remind me of?" He looked back, grinning. "There was this lass I knew, barmaid at the local tavern. Sweet little bunny rabbit, she was, and very odd, to boot. See, she never took a man to bed. As I understand it, she preserved her virtue 'til her wedding day, and never even entertained the thought of betraying her husband's trust. However, she had the most potent weakness for wandering hands I'd ever seen on a lass. So long as it never went beyond gropes and fondles, there was not a man alive she would turn down."
"But..." Beckett hunched over his book, mortified. "But I'm not a lass."
"Didn't mean to imply you were, lad. I only mention it because seeing you like that brings me back to that tavern. Many was the day she was bent over, just like you are, with her tits in the paws of some local rowdy who had had a few."
Beckett squeaked, standing up straight to avoid the comparison.
"Yes, sir, those were some fine evenings. We'd make a game out of getting her to make lewd noises and forget about her duties. I myself had taken a pass at her, and let me tell you she was delightful. You ever had a full set of tits rolling around in your paws, Beck?"
"No, I..."
"You ought to, lad. The give and heft of a woman's chest is a pleasure that never gets tiresome."
The rat had the devil's knack for describing things. Beckett could just about picture it in his mind's eye. A set of hands possessively grabbing, rolling, kneading...
Wallace laughed. "At first, we pitied her poor husband. After a while, though, we realized he was in on it, and he got off on his wife's attention-seeking almost as much as she did. Hell, I think half the reason she was willing to do it was just to get the poor bunny flexing his prod behind the bar."
In public? Beckett could hardly imagine it, except for the part where the mental image was burning itself into his head with extreme clarity.
"Sometimes, on festival days and the like, she got bolder. As did the men who visited her. One time I managed to slip my fingers through the waistband of her skirt. Not a stitch of clothing underneath, if you can believe it."
Beckett could believe it, and was already adding it to his picture. He spoke in an inaudible whisper. "I... I don't think we should be talking about this..."
Wallace could not hear him, both because Beckett was too quiet and because the rat was currently miles away in a bawdy little tavern. "Oh, it's a shame I won't be going back there for a while. You have no idea how much it changes the character of a place to know that, at any time, somebody could be reaching into a barmaid's shirt and kneading her chest like dough from a baker's bowl..."
His idle reminiscing was cut short when he heard Beckett make a noise of scandalized alarm. Whipping around, he half-expected to see the dormouse under attack, to see that that Weaver girl had materialized. He froze in his tracks, halfway to raising his fists. He saw Beckett, hands up, staring down at his chest as the disembodied spectral hands began to grope and fondle the little bit of fat around his nipples. The hands between his legs had also shifted position, one sliding lower to cradle his balls while the other gripped and squeezed his rapidly hardening cock.
Despite his best efforts not to, Wallace began to smirk. "That's a neat trick you learned, there."
"I'm not doing this!" Beckett whined, thoroughly misunderstanding the intricacies of magic spells powered by thought. "They're just... they're just doing this!" He reached down, putting one paw on his chest and one down lower, but try as he might he could not shift the groping limbs from the task he had imagined them performing. "S-stop it! Bad hands! B-b-bad magic hands!"
Two more of the magic hands in reserve tagged in, floating down to run themselves along his inner thighs. Then two more showed up, one pulling his long tail upward and the other prodding at his now exposed tailhole. The final two reached for his wrists, pulling his paws away and behind his back. With every new assault, his protests got less coherent and far, far more urgent.
"S-S-Sir Wallace!" he cried, in between helpless moans. "Help!"
He could almost do it. The rat could almost keep himself from completely cracking up. His resolve cracked, a ghost of a snort escaped, but he had been so close to being able to keep his composure. And then Beckett called him "Sir Wallace," and the dam broke. He doubled over, a noise halfway between a laugh and a wheeze spilling out of him so powerfully he had to grab his own knees for support. He groaned, as if angry at the world for showing him something so funny, and then the wheezing hit, again. By the time he managed to recover enough to even attempt speaking, the poor dormouse in front of him was confused, terrified, and leaking onto the floor to a dangerous degree. "Oh, fuck," he groaned. "Terribly sorry, squire, but..." Another short fit of giggles. "...but sorcery is beyond my capabilities to deal with. No Witch-hunter, I, I'm afraid." He took one last moment to commit the image of Beckett being molested by ghosts to memory before turning towards the door. "I'll do you a favor and leave you alone with your new friends. From the looks of things, they won't be working long."
Beckett was of three minds. The first was that he was desperate for Wallace to come back and help. The second was that he was grateful that he at least did not have to suffer this indignity with an audience, once the rat was around the corner. Both of those minds were being drowned out by the sheer, animal instincts driving his body to the brink of orgasm. "S-stop," he pleaded with his captors, unconvincingly. "Please... please, not again. Not again! Please!"
The hand around his cock was now openly pumping him. The one behind had slipped a finger past the ring of his anus and sunk inside, with a disturbing lack of friction. He felt his paws slide up behind his head. Did he do that? Did the hands force him? Normally, he would not even consider the question. However, at that moment in time, all he could truly think of was a crowded tavern room, packed to the walls with people. All he could imagine was himself, in the middle of the crowd, of dozens and dozens of eyes on him, the heat of beer-soaked breath on his neck as hands wormed onto every inch of fur he would let them.
He would have no idea how long he would have stayed like that. Fortunately, and also unfortunately for him, the questing finger probing into his hind end found a strange little area Beckett only knew about from anatomical textbooks, which stole the breath from his lungs and the thoughts from his head. Instantly, he went over, hot seed blasting from him while he cried soundlessly to the ceiling. The ghostly hands continued there work, groping and squeezing out as much as they could, even as their forms began to flicker and warp. By the fourth shot, they began to disappear, one after another in rapid succession. By the sixth, Beckett was finally free, collapsing onto his hands and knees in front of the mess he had just made.
"D-damn," he panted quietly, as if afraid someone might hear him swear. "That was... that was the third one, I..." He looked around his large, beautiful library, where he had left parts of himself on three separate occasions in as many days. "I'm sorry... I'm sorry, books, I..."
"Hey, Beck!" Wallace called, from the hallway. "You still alive, in there?"
"I'm fine!" Beckett lied. "They're gone, now. I think I just had to break concentration for a moment, to dismiss them."
Out in the hallway, Wallace leaned against the wall, by the door, casually stroking his member. He kept the hitch out of his breath and the strain out of his voice with the practiced air of a rat who had definitely done exactly this sort of thing before. "Glad to hear it, squire. I take it that spell's going to be a bust, then."
Beckett's ears flattened, more for being called "squire" than for anything else. "I suppose so," he replied. Then, after a pause, he pulled himself upright and said "I'll find something. I swear it."
"You do that," Wallace said, eyes smiling as his own climax neared. "I have nothing but confidence in you, Beck."
The dormouse smiled. "Th-thank you, Wallace."
Wallace did not reply, instead biting his lip to suppress a moan as his paw began to stroke faster.