"Scylla and Charibdes" takes it's origins from a great number of stories, most of them unwritten, co-told between myself and a paramour of my youth. Sulis is the character she told the story about, and Sageth was the viewpoint I told the story from. To be honest, the stories were simply an elaborate form of pillow-talk, yet the characters took on a life of thier own, and I continue to use them. "Scylla", however, was written for a completely different reason, which is almost a story unto itself. Two of my associates, while I was living in California, engaged each other in a rather strange wager; they would both abstain from self-gratification for as long as they could, and the one who gave into thier urges first, would become the property of the other for one night (I was peripherally involved in the S&M scene at the time). One of them made the error of telling me about this odd wager, and in a fit of friendly sadism, I wrote "Scylla and Charibdes" overnight, adding in as many images and details as I could which I knew would push his buttons. Then I e-mailed it to him at work, the next morning. I was rather pleased to recieve a friendly, spluttering e-mail full of epithets, in return.
He'd lost the wager.