Bad Girls SSU

[Servus Venandi]

Troubled young ladies caught in the soul grinder of Klorman Syndicate's Sacred Servant University....

Bad Girls SSU is a lightly illustrated series chronicling the mischievous adventures of Blaire, Roxie, Ginger and Renee. It shares the universe of, and sometimes references events within, my Syndicate Wars comic.



Characters

 

[Servus Venandi]

It Wasn't Me



From the Mind of:
Blaire Zu’loris

Date:
3 March EY2421 / Orbit K187::191

Location:
Her Dirty Dorm Room, Which Must Be Cleaned Before She’s Written Up

Weather:
Rain tonight, turning into ice tomorrow

Mood:
Sad, Mad, Mostly Sad

---------------------------------------

Dear Diary,


ROTC got cut short today for another punishment session. Yes, Ginger and Roxie are in trouble again. I don’t even know what they did this time, cuz they were already hogtied on the altar when I finished running like a lunatic across campus. Assistant Dean Orlander commented on my tardiness and nasty flop sweat, but luckily it ended there. You never know what that guy is gonna do or make you do….

Anyway, the event was more of the same. Mostly. Just humiliation this time, no [serious] spanking, so maybe they didn’t do anything major. Every time Ginger and Roxie get cuffed, I think everybody expects them to go away permanently, but they’ve both had multiple “last chances.” Guess I’d know a thing or two about behind-the-scenes family pull, for all that’s worth. Lucky us, right?

The pews were packed as usual, and they called us up in small groups to do whatever we wanted to the poor girls, long as we stayed within the safety rules. As always, participation ranged from timid to psychotic. In my group, Ulana Harx took off Roxie’s gag and tickled her feet until I thought she’d piss herself. Roxie has a wild mouth (gagging her is maybe necessary sometimes, I’m sad to say), but I don’t think I’ve ever seen her smile or laugh. So it was pretty weird to be standing right there while she howled hilariously and tried in vain to pull her soles away from Ulana’s eager fingers.

While this went on, Kathleen Pendleton stepped in and tried to fucking choke Roxie, and I think she’d have done it if Mr. Orlander didn’t make her stop. Who the hell does something like that? Kathleen’s been on the altar herself a couple of times, so you’d think she’d show some empathy. Maybe she has none!

Also as usual, I wasn’t comfortable. You know I don’t like these disciplinary things, not really, and I try to do just enough to fit into the “timid” end of the spectrum and not draw attention to myself. Today, though, I just….

Damn it. Should I even tell you this?

Look.… I’ve written before how I have a huge crush on Ginger. Part of me hates seeing her punished like she was today, but part of me kinda gets off on it. So I walked in late today, and the first thing I saw was Ginger naked on the altar. Yes, completely fucking nude, except her uniform stockings. That doesn’t happen often. I’ve seen Mr. Orlander strip Roxie before, and she usually doesn’t even seem to care that much. Ginger though, she normally just gets her skirt hiked up for her spankings and stuff, and one time she had to stand topless on the temple steps with her nipples clamped to Roxie’s after they got caught passing out satirical abolitionist-leaning fliers to new students. But I’ve never seen her naked. Even in her arrest footage on the Metanet, she’s topless at most. Daaaaaaamn. That flop sweat I mentioned? Well, if I hadn’t already been drenched from ROTC and my sprint across the grounds, I think I would have broken into one immediately when I saw Ginger O’Brien tied up in her birthday suit.

Excuse me while I step outside for a few breaths of cold Aurora air….

Now here’s where the day takes a weird turn. My group took the stage, and for a while I just hung back with Sally Amsel and let the aggressive bitches do their thing. Then I saw something else about Ginger that I’ve never seen before. She was crying. Not a lot…. Just some shiny water in her eyes, maybe a little desperation in her muffled gag-talk. And she was still angry. God, she gets so angry when she’s being punished. It always makes things worse, and she does it anyway. Sometimes I wish I could be that defiant. Then again, that hasn’t worked out so well for me in the past, and I don’t want to be naked in front of the whole university.

When I saw Ginger on the verge of tears, or at least what I thought were tears, I moved up to the altar. This is so embarrassing, and I don’t know what came over me. I was just thinking that I could gently touch her face, a quick connection to let her know I was with her and that I wouldn’t let anybody hurt her. It was so romantic in my head before I did it…. A touch, my palm on her cheek, her eyes looking at me over that big gag as she understood that I cared.

Fucking stupid. I don’t think I’ve said ten words to Ginger in the whole time she’s been here. Why would she interpret my touch as anything but another asshole trying to fondle her at the Assistant Dean’s command?

Of course, by the time I reached this brilliant conclusion, I had already put my hand on her.

At the exact same fucking moment, Carinda Blume bulled her way up beside me, slipped her hand across the altar, and pinched Ginger’s nipple hard enough to make her squeal. Carinda, laughing her little ass off, then drifted back where Ginger couldn’t see, and so naturally Ginger found only me standing there when she turned to stare down whoever had just assaulted her boob. The eyes that locked on mine were not teary or desperate or understanding. They were pure rage, accompanied by a gagged growl that made me flinch and back off.

Reality was a painful hammer. Ginger thinks I pinched her.

At this very second, whether she’s on a cot in a cell or back in her dorm room, she’s lying there with the “knowledge” that I joined those wild animals and hurt her when she was completely vulnerable.

Do I even dare try to make this right? I’ve got a good record here, way better than I had out in the “real world,” and I don’t want want to mess it up by playing school politics and getting burned. Word has it that Carinda is blowing one of the local campus cops, so saying anything about her to anybody could sideswipe everything I’ve worked for. On the other hand, if I don’t do something to bring out the truth, I might have to worry about Roxie jumping me. She hasn’t been through the ROTC grind that I’m in right now, but she’s lived hard and protects Ginger from bitches and sons-of-bitches like a big sister and mother rolled into one. I wouldn’t want to fight her.

Shit. Talk about plans backfiring….

So yeah, that’s been my day. The fantasy soulmate I’ve hardly spoken to hates me, Kathleen Pendleton might be clinically crazy, and Carinda Blume is a cunt who deserves to have her own naked ass bruised in front of the whole student body.

An ironic wish from me, I know. If anybody ever finds this journal, it’ll be my ass under the crop. Fuck, I don’t even wanna think about it, but I need to say this stuff. With all the indoctrination, obedience training and military stuff, this is like my own little corner of privacy and relative sanity. I don’t want to give it up. Worth the risk, I guess. Or at least I’ll keep telling myself that till I’m dragged out of here in smartcuffs.

Till next time, Diary.


Yours truly,

Blaire

--

 

[Migoz2]

Very nice start. I want to know more, particularly about Blaire. I'm looking forward to the next instalment.

 

[Servus Venandi]

Getting the Hand



From the Mind of:
Blaire Zu’loris

Date:
4 March EY2421 / Orbit K187::192

Location:
A deserted alley between the temple and the admin building

Weather:
Cold, Windy, sleeting hard, can barely walk on this shit

Mood:
Exhausted but restless

---------------------------------------

Dear Diary,


Ginger was back in class today. I didn’t see Roxie, but I heard a rumor that Ulana Harx might have injured one of her toes during that tickling frenzy yesterday. If that actually happened, Ulana could get her ass whipped, and Roxie by rule would be given the option to do it. Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Talk about eating your own shit, Ulana! Stupid bitch.

Over a mostly sleepless night, I decided to give a half-truth about the nipple incident by telling Ginger I hadn’t done it, but I didn’t see who did. And believe you me, I tried like ten times. Every time I psyched myself into going up to her, I aborted at the last second, twice when she was looking right at me. She probably thought I was some kind of weirdo, or maybe a Pale Ambrosia addict fogged out of my mind. God, just thinking about it makes my palms sweaty all over again. I haven’t gone crazy like this for somebody since the day Jin first kissed me….

Nooooooo, I’m not going back there right now. Don’t worry.

The good news for Ginger and Roxie is that everybody’s already forgotten about yesterday. That’s how it is at the SSU Re-ed campus. You’re a laughingstock one day and then back to being background noise the next.

Today’s distraction was a free guy from the other side of campus and a Re-ed girl from the trustee program (I forgot their names already—see how it works?). They were caught fucking in a coed restroom! Supposedly, the girl’s ankle monitor detected a hard spike in her pulse (possibly due to her actually getting spiked by something!), which triggered a medical alert since she was in the public damn lavatory. This spelled doom for their passionate tryst on the toilet o’ love.

First campus offense for both, and so I was slightly surprised when Mr. Orlander stripped them, but the spanking itself was an over-the-knee job where he didn’t use anything but his open hand. Don’t get me wrong—it’s a mean hand, and dudes and gals alike are brought to tears by it almost daily, but it’s not like getting hit with an instrument. I don’t have any direct experience, but you can just hear the difference. The hand makes this gaudy smacking noise, like a glorified clap, but the crop hitting flesh at full-tilt sounds like a gunshot. People react differently, too. They’ll cringe under the hand and tighten their glutes (some people make this more interesting to see than others), but it seems like the crop makes every muscle in their body go into spasms, like each stroke is a bolt of lightning.

Consensus around campus is that, if you get sent to the altar, you want to be hit by a hand, not by a crop or a paddle or a whip. I trust the consensus for once.

Anyway, that nonsense got over and done with pretty quick. After their gentle beating, the unlucky couple had to kneel bound-n-gagged outside the temple while everybody filed out, but by tomorrow all the whispers, giggles and humiliation will be directed at some other poor fuck or fucks. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

So, you see, Ginger and Roxie just had to tough it out for a day. I’m guessing they’re both pros at getting punished by now anyway—high endurance and low recovery time. How else would they maintain such a tireless schedule of getting in trouble?

I’ll be in half-day PT exams tomorrow and the next day, so I don’t know when I’ll get to try again with Ginger or even write about anything. I’m beginning to think that maybe I should tell Roxie the truth (or half-truth) instead. Sure, I think Roxie’s hot and a little intimidating, and I’ve never actually spoken to her, but she’s not my crush, and I don’t get all stupid about her like I do with Ginger. It’s something to think about. Maybe I just need to grow a spine.

Gotta run before I freeze to this bench. Later!


Sincerely,

Blaire

 

[Servus Venandi]

Outside Rumors



From the Mind of:
Blaire Zu’loris

Date:
11 March EY2421 / Orbit K187::200

Location:
The Cafeteria

Weather:
Frozen Over

Mood:
Worried

---------------------------------------

Dear Diary,

Stuff is getting crazy in Aurora, at least from what little news we can get here on the Re-ed campus. See, there was a terrorist attack around the turn of the e-month. AUR-4 got hit hard by Broken Chain ….. a residential block leveled and a bunch of dead ….. and Klorman Syndicate supposedly linked Paula Broadway from the Emancipation Network to the whole thing. They boarded her ship, brought her out gagged and naked, said she would be put on the dock for a public confession in a few days.

But that hasn’t happened.

In fact, various trickles of information from outside seem to be pointing toward some scummy stuff. First of all, Broadway’s Emancipation Network is reporting from a Free Zone that the “terrorist attack” was actually a cover-up for illegal slave trading by Klorman Syndicate. Secondly, rumors have it that Klorman’s golden boy, Cpt. Noah Watanabe, might have brain-wiped Broadway in the field, and that’s why there’s been no confession.

Thirdly, if any of that is true, then there could be some serious problems with other syndicates. Paula Broadway has only been like the biggest person of interest in the history of human law enforcement. To actually pin a crime on her is a political holy grail. For a decorated officer to take it upon himself to just erase her brain in order to hide his own skeletons (or those of somebody above him—like his chancellor candidate daddy!)….

I wish I wasn’t stuck here in Re-ed, because I’d really like to dig and find out what’s really going on here.

The reaction planetside has been building steadily these last couple of weeks. Demonstrations are getting bigger and more tense by the day. Honestly, this has been slowly boiling in the background since Earth executed Sage Gallows a few months back. Now syndicate troopers everywhere are supposedly going into mass-arrest mode, and KSS is no exception. A few days ago, nearly five hundred people got stripped, cuffed and loaded onto police buses at Orboren Plaza, and just this morning about fifty nude SSU students got full-body whippings in front of the main student center.

Amazingly, Ginger and Roxie were not among the punished, which gives me a nice transition from big matters to smaller ones.

So…. I know what you’re wondering, and the answer is no, I haven’t talked to Roxie or Ginger about the nipple-pinching incident. Circumstances haven’t been great, but I’ll just be honest. I’m a total coward, and there just isn’t much else to it.

I’m not getting drop-dead looks from either of them, so I guess that’s something.

Jin was so easy to talk to. I miss her.

Gotta scarf down this veggie sandwich and be on the drill grounds in thirty. Till next time.


Sincerely,

Blaire

 

[Servus Venandi]

Celebrity



From the Mind of:
Blaire Zu’loris

Date:
19 March EY2421 / Orbit K187::207

Location:
The Ol’ Dorm

Weather:
Cold As Assistant Dean Orlander’s Heart

Mood:
Confused, Slightly Smitten

---------------------------------------

Dear Diary,

Well, I didn’t see this one coming. Apparently my “good behavior” and “exemplary test scores” put me on somebody’s radar, and I’ve seen selected to join the KSS Student Police. My ROTC sergeant (Sgt. Cryft) even recommended me for “special service.”

I don’t know whether to be scared or proud. Whatever the case, this might be a step in the right direction. Ever since that thing with Jin, my goal in life has been getting out of Aurora and, hopefully, getting off Obseq altogether. The sooner graduated, the sooner my mandatory enlistment can start, and the sooner I can play soldier a couple of years and then be done with this shithole planet.

This morning I went to the Student Police orientation, and about fifty of us listened to some KSS enforcer drone on about duty and patriotism and career options. When he finished, ten of us were called out to stay behind, and I was one of the ten. The enforcer gave up the floor to an older guy who called himself Sergeant Nash. I was sitting still as a rock in my uniform, but my heart was pounding like I’d just sprinted around an obstacle course in full gear when he called us to attention.

Nash told the ten of us that we would be entering a new counterterrorism training program. While the other forty student cops would learn how to write tickets for jaywalking and littering, the rest of us would be taught to infiltrate abolitionist groups on campus and spy on them.

I know what you’re thinking. That kind of puts me at odds with Ginger and Roxie in a whole new way. And yeah, it does. My future aside, I don’t feel good about this at all.

So we all had to sign a massive secrecy agreement and swear an oath to KSS. As is usually the case when Klorman Syndicate wants something from you, saying no wasn’t an option. So I guess I’m officially a jackboot-wearing pig now, though they didn’t actually issue jackboots or any other equipment.

I can’t help but think my father had something to do with this. What an asshole.

But it’s not all bad. I got back from my first briefing about an hour ago. Get this….. They paired me with Renee Firewing. Yes, that Renee Firewing, front-woman of Wyrm Whore! I didn’t know whether to ask for her autograph or pretend I didn’t recognize her. She got arrested about a year ago, just a little before my life unraveled. The KSS said she started a slaves’ rights protest after a show, and it turned into a riot. Renee said it was a peaceful demonstration, and undercover KSS goons incited the violence. You can probably guess which argument won in court.

I heard she plea-bargained herself into Re-ed, but I’ve never seen her on campus until today. Wyrm Whore has been one of my favorite bands for a while (Jin turned me on to them), so this whole day has been totally surreal.

(For what it’s worth, Renee looks almost as bad-ass in handcuffs and a gag as she does with a guitar. She’ll never achieve Sage Gallows or Thalma Krexton levels of fame for her bondage chops, but Metanet vids of her arrest still trend in the Obseq top 100. She’s way shorter than I expected, though.)

Anyway, Renee and I (how strange to type that!) didn’t get any specific orders today, but we’re supposed to be training three days per week during regular ROTC hours. What we will eventually be doing, I really don’t know. This program is new, so I’m not even sure the people in charge know what to expect. I think they’re just feeling us out.

Sometimes I wish you could write back, Diary, because some advice would be great right about now. Funny thing is that I’m already breaking my oath (and violating multiple laws) by keeping this journal. I’d bet my own ass the Powers That Be will be watching me closer now, so I should probably encrypt this thing a bit better and be very careful about when and where I record my thoughts.

I got Renee’s autograph, by the way.

Catch ya later.


Yours truly,

Blaire

 

[Servus Venandi]

Hands-On Education



From the Mind of:
Blaire Zu’loris

Date:
20 March EY2421 / Orbit K187::207

Location:
The Dorm

Weather:
Ice Hell

Mood:
Too Tired To Care

---------------------------------------

Dear Diary,

So…..

One day after being recruited into the KSS to spy on my fellow students, I started my training with Renee Firewing and the other lucky fucks. I’ll give Sgt. Nash this—the guy doesn’t waste time. The second I arrived, I got ordered to dress out for PT. The second I stepped out of the dressing room, he set me on the indoor obstacle course and yelled till I was moving at a full clip. This went on for an hour, lap after lap, and I think my lungs melted. Renee and a couple of guys puked, and another girl fainted around the 40-minute mark.

You’d think this was enough, but no. It was just the warm-up. Once everybody was jelly-limbed and could barely stand up, Nash took us out on the gym floor and grouped each of us with the partner we’d been assigned yesterday. So there we were, me and Renee about do our first “mission” together. What was it?

We got tied up.

Don’t look at me like that. I’m serious. A couple of Nash’s aides brought up boxes of white rope and dumped them on the floor. Each of the five teams got to pick one person from another team to tie up personally. Renee picked a guy on the far end, but I didn’t get to help since the team beside us decided that I needed to be bound.

You’d think somebody would jump at the chance to tie up a rock ’n’ roll legend. But nooooooooo, the lanky blond is clearly the biggest threat in the room. Cocks.

So Renee went down to deal with her guy, and I sat still and let the most chiseled bitch I’ve ever met see how tight she could cinch my poor wrists behind my back.

As you well know, Jin was always kinky, but we never progressed beyond spread-eagle bed-ties with belts and fetish-y gags, and she never did anything to hurt me (except get herself arrested and executed, the cunt). So I wasn’t exactly experienced with real rope bondage, and the sensation was a little uncomfortable, but also …. pleasant.

ANYWAY, after half of us were tied, Nash and his boys tied the remainder. So there we were, five teams of two, bound hand and foot on the gym floor. When the ropes went onto Renee beside me, I kinda forgot my own plight and drooled over her for a moment. Seriously, she took to getting bound like some kind of pro, leaning forward as she offered her wrists, rolling her shoulders back and making her small tits press through that sweaty green shirt. I knew she publicly identified as submissive, which is why she started wearing a collar on stage way back when, but damn….. Seeing her like that…...

I know I go on and on about my fascination with Ginger O’Brien. But Ginger is like this distant star that I want to reach, but no matter what I do, I can’t seem to get any closer, let alone achieve orbit. Renee Firewing, on the other hand—she was right there with me, tied up with me and on my team, and I was on fucking fire.

Of course, I’m too socially messed up to do anything subtle. Renee noticed my gawking and asked if I saw anything I liked. If my face wasn’t already red from the obstacle course, it turned red then and probably broadcast my embarrassment five-by-five to the whole room. I take some comfort in the fact that she was grinning ear to ear.

ANYWAY AGAIN, Nash told us that our objective was to work together to free ourselves. The last team still tied up had to run another hour on the obstacle course while everybody else went in for classroom work. Needless to say, pretty much everybody wanted to do anything except run again, and the competition went from zero to light speed.

I might have been the only person in the room who sorta wanted to stay in the ropes, just because I prefer working out over sitting at a desk. But Renee, submissive leanings aside, didn’t seem too fond of sticking around.

So we struggled together. This was plain rope, not smartcuffs or that nasty binding wire carried by mercenaries and slave hunters. Unfortunately, the strongest looking girl in the room had tied me, and Renee had gotten her tidy bondage straight from Sgt. Nash. These bonds were not loose, I assure you. But like true damsels in distress, we took turns leaning over and gradually working on one another’s wrist ropes with our teeth.

I would be lying if I said it wasn’t fun. We even had a “moment” when I tried to change my angle of attack and accidentally wound up with one of Renee’s fingers in my mouth. She started laughing and nearly fell over on me. If I get nothing else out of this KSS program, I guess I can claim that I literally tasted the hand of one of the best guitarists on Obseq.

Hands aside, my teeth must be better, because Renee’s ropes came off first. She pulled herself free, helped me get my wrists loose, and then we each untied our own legs. Well, I say “untied,” but those knots might as well have been weld joints. We had to shimmy our legs back and forth. Getting the ankle ropes to give at all was a nightmare, but my student-applied bindings proved less effective than Nash’s job on Renee. I got out first, and then it was my turn to help her. When she pulled the last coil off her boots, she held the rope up and cried, “Done!”

Nash walked over, inspected our handiwork, and gave a surprisingly satisfied nod.

“Marginally tolerable effort, cadets,” he said. “Hit the showers.”

We stood up to salute, and I realized that Renee and I were the only team free. Every last one of those other fuckers, including Muscle Girl and the dude Renee had bound, were still flopping around like beached fish. Not only had we not finished last, we had finished FIRST.

I don’t know why this made me so happy. Maybe I was glad to have not let Renee down. Maybe I’m halfway enslaved already from my time at SSU, and I can’t help but get off on struggling in bondage for my superiors. I don’t know. I guess it doesn’t really matter.

We followed orders and hit the showers. I really wanted to see Renee naked. But after she caught me drinking her up with my eyes earlier, I figured it was best to not push my luck.

I stood in the hard spray, let in massage my shoulders, and waited for her to finish in the next stall over. Antisocial as fuck, yeah, but I didn’t think I could handle a locker room chat without saying or doing something stupid.

The water shut off, and I fully expected her to dress and run out. I’m a nobody, just some random person she got stuck with, a stepping stone on her way back to touring and recording. But she actually knocked on the wall outside my curtain and said, “Good one today, B. Keep those teeth sharp for me.”

Then she was gone. I smiled like I haven’t smiled since that afternoon at the old greenhouse, when I tripped and spilled half a bag of fertilizer on Jin’s lunch tray, and she told me it was the sexiest bit of clumsy she’d ever seen.

I DON’T KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON HERE.

Gotta run. And by “run” I mean sleep.


Sincerely,

Blaire

 

[Servus Venandi]

Stress Relief



From the Mind of:
Blaire Zu’loris

Date:
30 March EY2421 / Orbit K187::212

Location:
A clear patch on the football bleachers

Weather:
Cloudy and frozen

Mood:
scared

---------------------------------------

Dear Diary,

I don’t remember the date of my previous entry, but it seems like a week or two since I had time to write. A lot has gone down, and I’m not sure where to begin.

So I told you about my selection for Student Police counterterrorism training, and Renee and I have been training our asses off. Most of it has been physical, but there’s been a lot of classwork and psych stuff too. I’m not sure if this is how they plan to build us up, or if the point is tearing us down to see who quits and who toughs it out. In any case, Nash is a regular slave-driver, and I don’t think that’s a metaphor.

Regarding the classroom stuff, yesterday we got a visit from a KSS colonel. I shit you not. Col. Vincent Ryx, second in command of the Janus Division, just below Gen. Hideki Watanabe. Yeah, that’s right. I spent an hour and a half sitting just a few meters away from one of the most powerful people in Klorman Syndicate.

This wasn’t a lecture. Not really. I guess it was a… briefing? Ryx told us that abolitionist sedition is out of control, and he wants a major crackdown to prevent another Bay Bridge Hanging like Aurora had twenty e-years ago. Rooting out student abolitionists at SSU and other schools is part of a bigger worldwide effort at stamping out civil unrest.

That’s not the worst part. The worst part is that Ginger and Roxie are on the list of priority suspects. In fact, Roxie was the priority suspect—first to get her mug put up on the big screen. Ginger showed up a few spots later. All told about two dozen students got marked for a take-down, as if being enrolled in Re-ed isn’t already enough of one.

You know my plan was to ride this incarceration period out until I got my freedom back, and then get my ass off Obseq, away from my father, away from everything. Now I’m gonna have to get involved. And getting involved with Klorman Syndicate and abolitionists is how you wind up with medals pinned to your chest for doing impressive amounts of evil, or a slave collar locked around your neck for opposing that evil. I’m not a big fan of either option.

Of course, I can’t sit by and let Ginger and Roxie get the hammer. I have to warn them somehow. Why? I don’t even fucking know, except that I’m pathetically attracted to Ginger. Am I out of my mind?

Renee and Wyrm Whore are infamous for their slaves’ rights work—that’s why Renee is here—so maybe I can bring this up with her. Maybe she’ll help. But she’s got a lot to lose, and I don’t know how she’ll feel about tipping off the people we’re expected to trap.

If nothing else, I have to get over myself and go talk to Ginger. I don’t know what I’ll say. I can’t just blurt out, “Hey, KSS is about to bust your ass.” One, that would compromise me in my new job—and as much as I hate it, I wouldn’t even know about this crackdown otherwise. Two, Ginger and Roxie both are probably immune to worrying about getting arrested. They flirt with it every day, and me bringing them a doom-and-gloom story about counterterrorism efforts is unlikely to impress them.

I’m really at a loss.

So guess what I’m doing to cope? The only thing I’m enjoying about this whole ordeal—bondage. I’m coming home every day and doing “homework” by tying, handcuffing and strapping myself in every way I can devise while still having a way to free myself.

Something about struggling is …… therapeutic, I guess. It’s not really pain. It’s tension and release, like strenuous stretching. Steel bites my wrists, and a hogtie is just delicious for my shoulders and thighs. I’ve still got that old bit-gag Jin gave me—totally ineffective at keeping a girl quiet, but damn, it makes me drool all over the place while I’m flopping around in fake distress, and I love it.

I want to tie myself better. I’m absolutely obsessed with the idea of being tied up and not being able to get free. But I don’t have that luxury here in my room. So it’s obviously not as secure as the bondage exercises we do in class. But…. so far we haven’t been naked in class, and I don’t think Sgt. Nash would react well if I had an orgasm in front of everyone.

Anyway, I’ll have to make-do with these little dorm room forays for stress release. All my problems are still here when I’m done, but at least I feel better while I’m pretending to be somebody’s captive, weird as that sounds.

This really isn’t anything new, at least not since I met Jin, but I’ve never been this elaborate in my solo-play. And I’ve previously always thought about Jin to get myself off. Now I find my brain flickering between Ginger and Renee as well, sometimes thinking about them both at once, wondering what it’d be like to have them watching me from the edge of the bed while I struggle and sweat and drool.

Shit. I need to go home and tie myself up now before my roommate’s classes are over. Lara’s a Klorman tool—pretty sure she’s ridden every cock on the SSU force by now. I avoid her like the plague, and the last thing I want is to explain myself to her while I’m naked and scrambling to undo my handcuffs.

I’ll write more when I come up with a plan for Ginger and Roxie. Something tells me there’s no sane solution to this problem.

Thanks for listening as always.



Sincerely,

Blaire

 

[Servus Venandi]

Good Little Citizens



FROM THE MIND OF:
Blaire Zu’loris

Date:
19 April EY2421 / Orbit K187::222

Location:
The Dorm

Weather:
Clear and slightly warmer, but not for long

Mood:
Disgusted, horrified, strangely excited

---------------------------------------

Dear Diary,

We made our first bust.

Well, it wasn’t our bust. Renee and I just did the setup, then stood around faking surprise when everything went to hell.

I can’t deny the thrill. I also can’t deny that I feel like total shit as I sit here writing about it. Turns out that setting people up to get collared is work that tears at your soul. Surprise, right? I hate myself right now.

It went like this. Campus security got a tip about the source of some abolitionist flyers going up on and around university grounds. These people were working out of dorms on the regular SSU campus, not Re-ed. Some loudmouth named Courtney Magloine is the main one who got the attention of the local security force, but she’s got a handful of known affiliates who were working out of the guys’ dorm down the street.

They weren’t very well organized. At all. In fact, they were fucking stupid. If abolitionists are this dumb on average, no wonder 10,000 or so got to swing by their necks from the Bay Bridge back in the day.

Man, I hope we aren’t headed for that again. I almost sympathize with Colonel Ryx wanting to bust dozens or hundreds now, if it keeps tens of thousands from getting enslaved or executed later.

Anyway, a separate team got assigned to infiltrate the male side of the sedition operation. Renee and I got stuck with the girls. Given her reputation as an anti-establishment rock star, my partner was a perfect candidate for charming her way into the gullible Courtney’s good graces. It only took a single 10-minute conversation to get herself and a “friend” (yours truly) invited to the next super-secret meeting. We’d have to “pull some favors” to get a pass out of Re-ed, but by Chancellor Quinn’s left nut, she would find a way to make it. “For the revolution.”

She actually fucking said that, or so she claimed.

I barely slept the night before, and Renee confessed similar anxiety when we met at sunset the next evening.

We crossed campus together, arrived at Garbury Hall fashionably late, and rode to the seventh floor. Renee found the target door and drummed on it with her fist. Heavy music played on the other side, a skin-melting guitar breakdown from Castles In The Air, track seven on Wyrm Whore’s second album.

Courtney herself answered, purple-haired and full-bodied, with a big ass and tits straining against the green fabric of her SSU uniform.

“Hey!” she said, making me cringe. “Thanks for coming!”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Renee replied. “Nice tune. Sounds familiar.”

Courtney grinned. “Only the all-time greats for the revolution.”

“Right. Don’t make me feel old, now.”

“Come on in.”

We entered the dreaded abolitionist lair, a creatively-lit, book-strewn space that looked suspiciously like a girls’ dorm room. Besides the host, only a couple of conspirators were present: a blond waif named Leshi, and an auburn-haired athlete named Avril, whom I recognized as a member of the volleyball squad.

“You’re Blaire?” Courtney said as she shut the door. “Things must be worse than I thought in Re-ed if ROTC types are rising up.”

Suddenly self-conscious about my t-shirt, running shorts and dog tags, not to mention the tiny microphone embedded in my sports bra, I cleared my throat and tried to keep my voice from shaking.

“Didn’t really join ROTC by choice.”

That is a factual statement, and I stopped there, because I’m an awful liar.

Courtney cocked her head. “I’ve heard of mandatory ROTC and military service being handed out by some magistrates. It’s just another form of slavery. You don’t carry yourself much like a soldier, at least, and I mean that as a compliment.”

I tried to smile. “Thanks.”

“So what’s on the agenda?” Renee wondered. “What do you guys do? What are we doing tonight?”

Too strong, I thought. You’re gonna tip them off.

Nope. Courtney ate it up.

“We are Alumni Libertatis,” she said, and somehow the name made me think of a disease. “Klorman has its pretentious Latin slogan, so we made up our own. We’re not really in any one place, and this is just one of several independent chapters. Our long-term goal is to become the biggest thorn in Klorman Syndicate’s side on the SSU campus, and to lend our voices to the wider reform and abolition movements springing up all across Obseq.”

“Decentralization is bound to come in handy sooner or later,” Renee said.

I winced inside, but Courtney continued, “Yeah, it’s the only way to go. With speech codes, student police, and unrest spreading all across the galaxy since Earth executed Sage Gallows, we really can’t be too careful.”

Avril shoved a canned fruit drink in my direction, but I shook my head, not trusting my stomach. Renee snatched one, popped the top, and took three big guzzles before wiping her mouth on her forearm.

“You’ve got me hooked,” she said. “I just need to know how I can help.”

Courtney offered a thumbs-up. “Right now, our main method of attack is sneaking old-fashioned flyers up onto prominent locations. If you’re really ambitious, there’s always room for a little graffiti.”

“Ah, so you were behind that so-called vandalism outside the student rec center a couple weeks ago?”

“That was us!”

“Nice.”

Nice way to hang yourself, maybe.

Courtney waved us over to a desk holding a couple of cardboard file boxes. She took the lid off the top one and pulled out a rubber-banded stack of folded pink papers. Unfolding one and holding it up for our inspection, she gestured up and down the length of the page as if showing off a game show prize.

It was a catchy pro-quality design, very similar to others I’d seen plastered across the Re-ed side of campus—grungy, ink-style lettering and graphics with a minimalist sketch of a male and female figure, bound and leashed and trudging toward some unknown destination. The headline declared, “SAY NO TO SLAVERY,” and a series of bullet points underneath attempted to justify it. I agreed with most of them, but my gut reaction was that the propaganda might just as well read, “SAY NO TO OXYGEN,” for all the good it would do.

Pretending to be impressed—or maybe actually impressed—Renee accepted the stack and dropped it into her backpack.

“Any particular place you want these?” she asked.

“Anywhere with lots of traffic is a good place,” Courtney explained. “Of course, those are also the riskiest places. You’ve got cams all over the place, and foot patrols and flying drones make things even worse. Usually, you can put stuff up in restrooms and locker rooms without outing yourself too much, but hitting these prime targets requires ... creativity.”

“Ninja moves!”

“Sorta. We’ve got a guy in the local KSS department—a real cop, not a student. Let’s just say there’s an arrangement, and he keeps us supplied with updated shift schedules. When there’s a shift change, we hit the pavement. It’s best to get out after curfew. Wear a street runner’s mask, or those facial recognition systems will have pigs on you before you can say fascism. We can hook you up with some gear. Be quick and quiet, don’t stop for anybody or anything. Long as they aren’t right on you all the way to your room, and you ditch your mask and shit before going in, the best they can do is say somebody from your building did something. That’s like melting into a mob of ten thousand people, so it works out in our favor, even in the middle of the night.”

Renee nodded. “Only problem for me and Blaire is we’re stuck in Re-ed. We can’t come and go quite so easily, especially after curfew, and every dorm floor is monitored and patrolled. We’d never get back without being identified. Any advice for the newbies?”

Courtney shrugged. “Work with what you’ve got. If you can’t get out at night, figure out a way to tag places during the day. Don’t carry the flyers on your person until you’re ready to hang them, and do not take them through checkpoints. Avril does most of the running for this chapter, so you might want talk to her if you intend on getting serious about it.”

“What happens when we’re out of flyers? Come back for more? Is there more to this than hanging paper in forbidden places?”

“Yeah, we do both above-ground and underground publishing from an abolitionist and reformist perspective. We have to be careful what we say in university publications, but outside of that—especially stuff we can post anonymously on darkwebs—we can afford to be a little less PC. If you’re interested in that, Leshi can show you the ropes. There’s this girl named Ginger O’Brien over in Re-ed, and she’s really put up some great stuff over the last couple of years. We’ve been trying to get her into Alumni Libertatis, but no luck so far. If you want to help out, maybe you could talk to her.”

“Sure thing,” Renee agreed. “The more the merrier, right?”

My first thought on this was: Fuck, now I have to protect Ginger not only from KSS, but from the local abolitionists too.

My partner took another swig of juice. Half a second after she turned the bottle up, the door behind me beeped. Before I could move, somebody kicked it open, and I got nailed between the shoulders.

Boots stormed into the room, and people started screaming. I caught flashes of white—KSS street cop armor. I knew exactly what was happening, and I knew in my brain that I was in on the setup and not in any actual physical or legal danger. Still, the chaos sunk its talons into me, and I was fucking terrified.

You know how people get shot or stunned or beaten up for disobedience during police encounters, and then later on everybody brings up those lame lines like, “He shouldn’t have resisted,” or “He didn’t keep his hands up?” Well, when all that is going on, your brain is mush—fogged, mushy mush. I’m not sure how to describe it. It’s a shot of adrenaline and probably a bunch of other biochemicals. Fine motor control vanishes. Everything is bright and and loud and fuzzy. I couldn’t even hear myself think, let alone calmly choose to follow the explosion of incoherent commands being shouted at me. Not even my father’s goons, who chased me down for trying to leave Obseq after Jin’s execution and then dragged me through South End with my tits hanging out, were as crazy as these screaming pigs who broke into Courtney’s dorm room.

My legs gave out, and I collapsed in a blubbering puddle of fear. I covered my head. In the corner of my vision, one KSS trooper seized Courtney while others took control of Leshi, Avril and Renee. Two more armored cops stayed in the doorway, covering everybody with submachine guns, and yet another one moved toward me.

He didn’t say a word. There was no reason to, I guess. We were both just doing our jobs—our shitty, immoral jobs. He yanked my arms behind me and slapped on the handcuffs. I braced for the inevitable stripping, but it didn’t happen right away—not to me, anyway.

By the time he got me on my feet, Leshi and Avril were cuffed and topless, and Courtney was completely naked except for her shoes and thigh-high stockings. Also, her mouth was running so fast that I could hardly understand her. Something about human rights and free speech and privacy, which are things that don’t exist under Klorman Syndicate. I don’t know what she was thinking. Maybe, like me, she was having trouble thinking at all.

My KSS escort positioned me facing the door and told me to stand with my legs apart. As I obeyed, I caught a glimpse of Renee in similar condition across the room, handcuffed with her back toward me.

“Open up,” said the cop.

I looked down at the shiny rubber bit hovering in front of me. I wanted to spit on it, headbutt him in the schnoz, and tell him to go fuck himself. Maybe a far more heroic version of me in an alternate dimension had the guts to actually do this. But me, the mundane Blaire in this reality, I just opened my mouth and let him gag me while I cried like a bitch.

The other girls got the same, as I deduced from the ensuing mmmmph chorus. Even Courtney’s tirade gave way to muffled grunts.

They took her out first, shackled at the elbows and ankles in addition to her handcuffs—I guess because she resisted. (At least they didn’t beat or shoot her.) The chain between her feet was so short that she had to hop instead of taking proper steps, and her big butt and breasts bounced every time she moved. If there’s a silver lining to any of this, I guess that was it, even if I simultaneously felt really bad for her.

Felt bad for myself, too.

We all got marched outside, stuffed into a transport van, and strapped onto benches with spreader bars between our knees. It was embarrassing enough in my gym shorts, but I suddenly found myself glad I hadn’t worn a uniform skirt.

Out of public view, Renee and I finally lost our tops. Maintaining appearances and all. This delay was surely a courtesy from our Klorman “allies,” but I noticed how deliberate the woman was in cutting off my bra—didn’t wanna damage that expensive mic, ya know.

They drove us to the KSS lockup on campus, went through the motions of checking me and Renee in with the other girls, but graciously stopped short of giving us cavity searches. Courtney, Leshi and Avril—not so lucky. I heard all three of them screaming into their gags as they were “processed” behind closed doors.

Pretty sure I participated in ruining their lives. Jin used to say, “The process is the punishment. You survive, or you don’t, and you’re scarred forever either way.”

Sometimes I wonder if she pondered on this in amusement right before they hoisted her up in that noose. It seems like the sort of irony she’d have found funny.

Anyway, Renee and I eventually got hustled into separate interrogation rooms. I waited awhile, handcuffed, gagged and topless on a cold chair, shivering and drooling on myself. It seemed like forever, but was probably more like fifteen minutes, and then Sgt. Nash walked in.

He took off my bondage and gave my shirt back. After setting some water and a snack bar in front of me, he took the opposite chair. I wasn’t hungry, but I ate slowly since I didn’t want to appear ungrateful.

“You did good,” he said. “I know you didn’t say much, but you didn’t have to. Renee’s the people person, and the two of you make a fine team. We got enough dirt on this Alumni Libertatis shitshow to collar every one of those girls. But I suspect they won’t want to be collared. To avoid that, they’re going to have to give up bigger fish in their network. They’re cornered, and KSS will not soon forget the role you and Renee played in making this happen. You’ve got a bright future ahead of you, young lady.”

I took a drink and then found enough of my voice to ask, “What happens now?”

“The charade needs to go on a bit longer. You and Renee will spend the night in jail and go to the hearing tomorrow. If the conspirators sing like we expect, the magistrate should hand down a slap on the wrist. Colonel Ryx requests that the two of you accept the punishment. This will not only keep you free of suspicion among campus abolitionist groups, but they might even admire you for it. This is a request, not an order. If you want out, I can pull you right now, but this could be a major blow to future operations if anyone suspects you were a plant.”

“I don’t want them to hate me,” I said. “I’ll stay with it for now.”

WHY DID I SAY THIS??? I have no idea. Nash gave me a clear and clean path out of this shit, and I VOLUNTEERED TO STAY NECK-DEEP. What the fuck is WRONG with me??????

Maybe, somewhere deep in my damaged brain, I was still thinking that KSS lap doggery puts me in a position to help Ginger. I’m such an idiot.

“Good,” Nash said, pleased by my idiocy. “Rest assured that no criminal records attached to your name in the course of your service will be permanent. Barring a career path that takes you into even deeper cover, everything—including your actual criminal history—will be expunged when you graduate from SSU.”

How the hell was I supposed to say no to that? I mean, morally, maybe I should have, but how?

“Thanks,” I said.

Nash chortled. “You don’t say much to anybody, do you?”

I just shook my head.

“Well,” he said, “I wish more people said less, to be honest.”

He got up and walked to the door, but turned around before leaving.

“Not everybody on staff here is in on our little operation, but you and Renee have special VIP flags in the system. They’ll let you lounge in here a bit before putting you in a cell. Just keep your head down, don’t let Firewing talk you into starting a prison riot, and you’ll be fine.”

Then he was gone. As promised, I got an hour to myself before a couple of KSS pigs showed up to strip me, chain me, and take me to my accommodations, which I shared with Renee and a couple of girls I didn’t recognize.

We sat side by side on a cot, naked and bound.

“You okay, B?”

“No,” I replied.

“Me neither,” she admitted.

Morning came with neither of us having slept more than thirty minutes. We got forced into a van bright and early, and the cops drove us to the campus courthouse. Me, Renee, Courtney, Leshi and Avril got leashed together by our belly chains, along with a half dozen other girls from the lockup. Shackled, ball-gagged and nude, we marched up the usual gauntlet of photographers and reporters, into the halls of justice, and had only a short wait before shuffling in front of the magistrate, the Honorable Lycinda Dunwall.

She excoriated us as a group for “flirting with sedition” and “ignoring the fabric of law upon which civilization is built.” It was pompous horseshit of the worst sort. I knew it was technically fake for me, but she scared me all the same. It felt real, and all those actual eyes were glued to my actual trembling, naked, flesh-n-blood body. The future purging of my criminal record seemed distant and not so helpful.

After Dunwall made all of us aware that we were horrible people allowed to continue existing only by her mercy, she had us fitted with ankle monitors and released, with an order to report back in a week for sentencing.

Renee and I, unchained and back in our clothes, trudged to Re-ed in a daze before trading tired fist-bumps and heading our separate ways. My roommate Lara—thank whatever god is responsible—was already out to class when I got home. While I scrambled to shower and get myself ready for the school day, I got a note from Admin saying I’d been granted an excused absence. Nash’s doing, I suspect. The guy takes care of his own, or his perceived own. I gotta give him that.

So now I’m sitting here on my bed, wrapped in a blanket, writing all this out while it’s still fresh. My body wants to lose consciousness, but my brain isn’t quite ready to let go.

It’s awful. What I did is awful. I can’t do it anymore, but I have to.



Sincerely,

Blaire

 

[Migoz2]

I really like this story. Blaire has a lot of depth as a character.

 

[Servus Venandi]

I really like this story. Blaire has a lot of depth as a character.

Kinky themes aside, that's the main goal of this series. Thank you.

 

[Migoz2]

Kinky themes aside, that's the main goal of this series. Thank you.

Depth of character and kinky themes does it for me!

 

[Servus Venandi]

Painful Memory



From the Mind of:
Blaire Zu’loris

Date:
29 April EY2421 / Orbit K187::229

Location:
The Dorm

Weather:
It’s Aurora (-6° C)

Mood:
SAF (Sore As Fuck — not really a mood, but close enough)

---------------------------------------

Dear Diary,

When you’re innocent, the Klorman justice machine is slow to prove it and even slower to let go of you. When you’re guilty, either in some actual moral sense or simply for having the wrong opinions, the system will gobble you up like a ravenous monster.

A week after helping Klorman Security Service bust an abolitionist “terror cell” on the SSU campus, Renee and I returned to the presiding magistrate in our role as co-conspirators. Despite knowing I wasn’t actually in trouble, I didn’t sleep well for days on end leading up to the shit, and I was a nervous wreck as I stood in front of that self-important robed asshole.

The Honorable Lycinda Dunwall sentenced all of us—me and Renee, plus (the actual criminals) Courtney, Leshi and Avril—to crucifixion in the small campus crux park near the student center.

Before you freak out, just know I refer to the “gentle” form of crucifixion. No nails. You hear it called NLC (nonlethal crucifixion) in the media. Basically, you get tied to a cross and have to hang there naked, in full view of the public, for a set amount of time. In our case, we got ten local hours.

This is Sgt. Nash’s idea of a “slap on the wrist,” apparently.

Some crux parks, even a few on Obseq, allow the public to do things to crucified prisoners—water balloons, flogging, tickling, verbal taunting, and even sexual contact at some of the worst facilities. At the Aurora Municipal Crux Park in district AUR-1, it’s common for people to pose for photos beside hung prisoners, especially celebrities. Tourists love that shit.

Fortunately, none of that flies here at SSU. Only guards are allowed to touch us crucified schmucks—most often in the form of a whip for struggling too much, struggling too little, or failing to submit in any variety of ways. Idiots who break the rules, guards and visitors alike, can wind up on crosses themselves.

On the bright side, at least I didn’t have to bend over Assistant Dean Orlander’s lap and count while he turned my ass purple.

So.... Dunwall handed down our sentence, and all of us got stripped, shackled and ball-gagged right there in the courtroom. They marched us out into the cold, linked by our belly chains with our hands behind our backs. As is common practice at SSU, students sentenced to the cross get to walk from the courthouse to the crux park, weather be damned. They’ll keep you [mostly] warm and [mostly] hydrated while you’re hanging (lawsuit prevention!), but that walk is torture in the most medieval of senses.

Flurries were falling on us that morning, and a stiff north wind made it even worse. It was so bad that I almost didn’t notice all the students staring, whistling and hooting as we shuffled past. By the time we reached the park, my fingers and toes were numb. Drool had frozen on my lips and chin, and I was shaking so hard I could barely stand. I took some solace in seeing that the other girls, Renee included, were equally fucked. Loyalties, legal statuses and other concerns notwithstanding, the five of us were sharing a traumatic experience, and I felt connected to everyone, even loud-mouthed Courtney and her snow-speckled purple hair.

The relatively low-tech SSU crux park has a dozen T-shaped steel crosses set in concrete, all arranged across a fenced-in plot lined with footpaths and cold-weather Obseqian plantlife. All crosses were empty when we arrived, but a crowd had assembled in anticipation of several getting filled.

We stopped near the torture array and got ordered onto our knees. The frozen sidewalk might as well have been made of razors. No subtle shifting about did anything to lessen the misery, and I caught myself biting down hard on my ballgag.

Renee, our resident rockstar, got dibs on the first crucifixion. I could just see the Metanet headlines—DELINQUENT WYRM WHORE FRONT-WOMAN DANCES ON ALL NEW STAGE. Probably fair, since Renee’s actual on-stage “dancing” is seldom anything more complicated than flailing around like a bitch possessed. While four guards kept the rest of us at gunpoint, two others unhooked her from the group and forced her to the left. She went without fighting, but her eyes were wide, unmoving and locked on that cross like it was every bit an execution device rather than a “slap on the wrist.”

She pleaded incoherently into her gag, a squeaky, terror-drenched sound that bore no resemblance to the strong alto pipes of Wyrm Whore.

Pigs removed her handcuffs, shackles and belly chain, but left her ballgag on. Then, with her naked back pressed against the frozen-as-fuck base of the cross, they replaced the bondage with layers of smart binding wire on her wrists and ankles. A pair of chain-linked alligator clips went on her swollen nipples, and the pain that washed over her face tore me between wanting to run over and save her, and wanting to turn and run the other direction.

The guards put Renee on a ladder and made her climb high enough to step over onto a horizontal plate. Visibly shaking, she again leaned against the apparatus and, upon command, spread her arms. With puffs of air billowing around her nose and mouth while her breasts heaved, she waited as one guard climbed the ladder behind her and secured her wire-wrapped wrists to the crossbeam with chains and padlocks. Below, the second trooper locked her ankles together and connected another small chain.

Upon climbing down, the first pig ripped away the supporting plate. Renee fell several centimeters, and her entire weight jerked to a stop against her wrists. This time she straight-up screamed into her gag, and I nearly pissed myself. While she twisted and rocked her hips in a circular motion, desperately seeking relief, the second guard pulled her feet up by the chain and locked it to a connector just below her butt. She yanked against it a few times and wrapped her bare feet around the sides of the cross, but the only way to straighten her legs and take pressure off her arms was to push against her ankle cuffs. It was very much a pick-your-poison situation, and I’m sure that was the whole point.

So there she danced in cruciform, and she was beautiful even as I hated seeing her hurt. The entire procedure had taken about two minutes.

I won’t belabor the scene. Suffice it say the rest of us went to our crosses in similar fashion. Leshi cried a lot; Avril impressively held her volleyball-toned body up for several minutes before gravity forced her down; and Courtney got a flogger on her chubby ass when she resisted the nipple clamps. By galactic standards, I figure it was a pretty unremarkable NLC.

I was last in line. While kneeling on that sidewalk, it was the most pain I’d ever felt, but it held the record for only a few minutes. When that little platform flew out from under my feet, I managed to avoid screaming, but I knew I could never hold it against Renee, not even as a joke. It was excruciating, and it was just binding wire and nipple clamps. I don’t even wanna think about what it’s like to get executed on one of those fucking things.

Once the shock of the drop wore off, I found a rhythm where I hung by my wrists for a 25-count, then pushed up and held myself with my legs for another 25-count, then sunk back into a hanging position.... Repeat, repeat, repeat. Yay, ROTC phys-ed training.

For a while I convinced myself that it wasn’t so bad, but ten hours is a long time. And, of course, it’s the time that ultimately breaks people. As far as I know, slave training works the same way. You can’t rewire my brain by beating the hell out of me once. You might intimidate me into short-term compliance, but I’m going to hate you, and I’m going to take my first chance at escape or revenge. But beat the hell out of me every week, keep me in a cage between sessions, drag it out for a year.... That’s different. That’s long-term reprogramming.

Nonlethal crucifixion is a condensed, lite version of that. There’s an initial “ouch,” followed by a brief adjustment period, but the real pain doesn’t start until your muscles are exhausted. After just a short while, I think I’d have done almost anything if somebody offered to take me down early.

By the time the first hour was up, my legs were gelatin. I’ve had some nasty training sessions in ROTC, but I have never worked my body to the point of just shutting down. The terror of my brain sending signals that my limbs simply refused to acknowledge—in a lot of ways, that was the worst thing about it all.

As bad as it was though, Renee and I got some privileges that weren’t granted to the real prisoners. For starters, the guards didn’t whip us—not once, not even when we probably deserved it for going too still, while everybody else had bright red tits and thighs in short order. Also, I’m quite sure the lady going around with the handheld heater deliberately lingered on me and Renee long enough to warm us up completely a couple times per hour. The other girls got enough attention to prevent frostbite and hypothermia, but I don’t think she ever let them get warm.

The audience was terrible, but I think being a tied up zoo animal bothers me more in reflection than it did during the event itself. There was just too much pain to worry about who was watching. Since I’m a Re-ed student, I didn’t even suffer the indignity of having classmates present—though I’m sure there’s no shortage of them who watched me on the live Metanet stream. My parents are sure to be nice and proud, too. Maybe Nash will at least tell my bootlicking father that I’m working undercover for KSS. Of course, that probably defeats the purpose of being undercover in the first place.

Fuck, I’ll never live this down. Graduation can’t come soon enough.

At dusk, an ambulance rolled into the park and went from cross to cross. The guards took us down one at a time, shackled us despite the fact that nobody could walk, and then used a wheelchair to load us into the medical van. On the way to the infirmary, an EMT took off our nipple clamps, and fuck me if it didn’t hurt even worse than when they went on ten hours earlier. As I type this, I’m wearing no bra and still have gauze taped over my areolas. It might even be amusing if I had done this to myself. As it is, I am not amused.

We all got admitted overnight for observation, distributed throughout a communal room with only curtains for privacy. We were technically still prisoners, so they kept us chained to our beds and gagged unless we needed to eat, drink or answer questions. There was a lot of awkward silence in there, let me tell you, and more than once I was actually glad for my gag (and everybody else’s). In the morning a KSS trooper brought around a tablet bearing our legal release orders, signed by the Honorable Lycinda Dunwall, and we all had to scrawl our names in agreement with her bullshit, or else get carted back to the lockup.

When all that was done, we lost our chains and intravenous drips, and got our clothes back. I’d worn my ROTC uniform to court yesterday, so that’s what I left the hospital wearing. For some reason I hobbled out expecting cameras and sneering students, but nobody looked at us twice. I thought back to the diary entry I wrote a few weeks ago, the one about the attention span of your average SSU mob. Sure enough, the public had already forgotten us. Somebody new was getting crucified today.

A female SSU trooper escorted Renee and I down to a tram that would take us to Re-ed. Good thing, because neither of us could have made the walk. As we strapped in, she quietly asked if we were okay. I nodded, but the woman’s sad smile said she saw right through me.

See, I can’t even lie with a simple nod. This spy crap is out of my league.

Courtney and friends got loaded into a separate tram. It struck me that I hadn’t even made eye contact with her since right before the raid on her dorm room. To be honest, I hope I never see her again.

We rode without a word, but Renee held my arm and rested her head on my shoulder. I’m still not sure what to think about that. She’s like nine or ten EYs older than me (not that older women are new territory, of course), and she’s an interstellar rockstar. But she’s human. Probably, like me, she was just broken down inside and out, and she needed to hold somebody. I guess I’m glad I was there.

Back in the dorm, I had dreams of a long shower, but the bathroom was crowded, and my presence sparked a round of hushed giggles and one too many questions about the number of KSS troopers I blew to get released without a slave collar. Since the hot water turned me into gelatin again, I decided I didn’t wanna be there anyway.

The way I just wrote that, it sounds like I made some badass stand of defiance against insufferable assholery. But I actually fled sobbing, soaking wet and half-naked, with most of my clothes wadded in my arms. I’m not fragile, but the bullying caught me at the end of a long week. That cross took everything I had, and I finally broke. Any one of those cunts would have broken in my place. So fuck them.

Where to go from here? No idea. Klorman has me in its filthy web, though at least I’m trapped as an ally instead of an enemy. My grand plan of turning all this into a way to help Ginger looks more and more like the ravings of a crazy person. Shit, Ginger hardly knows I exist. Far as she’s concerned, I’m just a spiteful little ROTC snot who helped torment her during her last brush with the law, and I never even found the courage to explain otherwise.

Let that sink in. I let myself get crucified by Klorman Syndicate, because I think a girl who doesn’t even know me, and might actually hate me, is cute.

That is insane, and I seriously wonder whether something is medically wrong in my head.

At least I had another excused absence in my messages when I got back to my room. I also had about a thousand other messages. After sampling a couple dozen, I suppose about thirty percent were sympathetic, and the other seventy percent were a mixture of hateful, lewd and creepy. I even found a few marriage proposals.

Ultimately, I just had my tablet AI do its best job of keeping nice stuff and scrubbing the rest. In the middle of all this, I got a message from Renee.

“How you doing? I can’t stop crying, and I’d be drowning myself in any available alcohol if I wasn’t afraid it’d get me put back on a cross. You were quiet through it all, which is normal, but I’m sitting here worrying about you all the same. Just let me know you’re okay. Talk later, B.”

I smiled and replied:

“Verbally assaulted in shower. Fine now that I’m alone. Can barely move. Might as well still be tied down. Thanks for asking, and I hope you’re okay too.”

She hit me back a few minutes later:

“At least all the cuffs and chains gave you something else to focus on, right? I’ll tie you up if you’ll tie me up. Deal? NO NIPPLE CLAMPS. At least not for a while. Sorry about your shower encounter. I’ll come over and kick asses if you want me to. Get some sleep, B. Lunch tomorrow, no excuses.”

After making sure the AI properly cleaned up my inbox, I started writing this, and I guess I’m feeling slightly better for it. I think I’m gonna take Renee’s advice and crawl into bed now.

Thanks for listening, Diary. Not sure what I’d do without you.


Sincerely,

Blaire

 

[Migoz2]

Painful Memory

View attachment 804418

From the Mind of:
Blaire Zu’loris

Date:
29 April EY2421 / Orbit K187::229

Location:
The Dorm

Weather:
It’s Aurora (-6° C)

Mood:
SAF (Sore As Fuck — not really a mood, but close enough)

---------------------------------------

Dear Diary,

When you’re innocent, the Klorman justice machine is slow to prove it and even slower to let go of you. When you’re guilty, either in some actual moral sense or simply for having the wrong opinions, the system will gobble you up like a ravenous monster.

A week after helping Klorman Security Service bust an abolitionist “terror cell” on the SSU campus, Renee and I returned to the presiding magistrate in our role as co-conspirators. Despite knowing I wasn’t actually in trouble, I didn’t sleep well for days on end leading up to the shit, and I was a nervous wreck as I stood in front of that self-important robed asshole.

The Honorable Lycinda Dunwall sentenced all of us—me and Renee, plus (the actual criminals) Courtney, Leshi and Avril—to crucifixion in the small campus crux park near the student center.

Before you freak out, just know I refer to the “gentle” form of crucifixion. No nails. You hear it called NLC (nonlethal crucifixion) in the media. Basically, you get tied to a cross and have to hang there naked, in full view of the public, for a set amount of time. In our case, we got ten local hours.

This is Sgt. Nash’s idea of a “slap on the wrist,” apparently.

Some crux parks, even a few on Obseq, allow the public to do things to crucified prisoners—water balloons, flogging, tickling, verbal taunting, and even sexual contact at some of the worst facilities. At the Aurora Municipal Crux Park in district AUR-1, it’s common for people to pose for photos beside hung prisoners, especially celebrities. Tourists love that shit.

Fortunately, none of that flies here at SSU. Only guards are allowed to touch us crucified schmucks—most often in the form of a whip for struggling too much, struggling too little, or failing to submit in any variety of ways. Idiots who break the rules, guards and visitors alike, can wind up on crosses themselves.

On the bright side, at least I didn’t have to bend over Assistant Dean Orlander’s lap and count while he turned my ass purple.

So.... Dunwall handed down our sentence, and all of us got stripped, shackled and ball-gagged right there in the courtroom. They marched us out into the cold, linked by our belly chains with our hands behind our backs. As is common practice at SSU, students sentenced to the cross get to walk from the courthouse to the crux park, weather be damned. They’ll keep you [mostly] warm and [mostly] hydrated while you’re hanging (lawsuit prevention!), but that walk is torture in the most medieval of senses.

Flurries were falling on us that morning, and a stiff north wind made it even worse. It was so bad that I almost didn’t notice all the students staring, whistling and hooting as we shuffled past. By the time we reached the park, my fingers and toes were numb. Drool had frozen on my lips and chin, and I was shaking so hard I could barely stand. I took some solace in seeing that the other girls, Renee included, were equally fucked. Loyalties, legal statuses and other concerns notwithstanding, the five of us were sharing a traumatic experience, and I felt connected to everyone, even loud-mouthed Courtney and her snow-speckled purple hair.

The relatively low-tech SSU crux park has a dozen T-shaped steel crosses set in concrete, all arranged across a fenced-in plot lined with footpaths and cold-weather Obseqian plantlife. All crosses were empty when we arrived, but a crowd had assembled in anticipation of several getting filled.

We stopped near the torture array and got ordered onto our knees. The frozen sidewalk might as well have been made of razors. No subtle shifting about did anything to lessen the misery, and I caught myself biting down hard on my ballgag.

Renee, our resident rockstar, got dibs on the first crucifixion. I could just see the Metanet headlines—DELINQUENT WYRM WHORE FRONT-WOMAN DANCES ON ALL NEW STAGE. Probably fair, since Renee’s actual on-stage “dancing” is seldom anything more complicated than flailing around like a bitch possessed. While four guards kept the rest of us at gunpoint, two others unhooked her from the group and forced her to the left. She went without fighting, but her eyes were wide, unmoving and locked on that cross like it was every bit an execution device rather than a “slap on the wrist.”

She pleaded incoherently into her gag, a squeaky, terror-drenched sound that bore no resemblance to the strong alto pipes of Wyrm Whore.

Pigs removed her handcuffs, shackles and belly chain, but left her ballgag on. Then, with her naked back pressed against the frozen-as-fuck base of the cross, they replaced the bondage with layers of smart binding wire on her wrists and ankles. A pair of chain-linked alligator clips went on her swollen nipples, and the pain that washed over her face tore me between wanting to run over and save her, and wanting to turn and run the other direction.

The guards put Renee on a ladder and made her climb high enough to step over onto a horizontal plate. Visibly shaking, she again leaned against the apparatus and, upon command, spread her arms. With puffs of air billowing around her nose and mouth while her breasts heaved, she waited as one guard climbed the ladder behind her and secured her wire-wrapped wrists to the crossbeam with chains and padlocks. Below, the second trooper locked her ankles together and connected another small chain.

Upon climbing down, the first pig ripped away the supporting plate. Renee fell several centimeters, and her entire weight jerked to a stop against her wrists. This time she straight-up screamed into her gag, and I nearly pissed myself. While she twisted and rocked her hips in a circular motion, desperately seeking relief, the second guard pulled her feet up by the chain and locked it to a connector just below her butt. She yanked against it a few times and wrapped her bare feet around the sides of the cross, but the only way to straighten her legs and take pressure off her arms was to push against her ankle cuffs. It was very much a pick-your-poison situation, and I’m sure that was the whole point.

So there she danced in cruciform, and she was beautiful even as I hated seeing her hurt. The entire procedure had taken about two minutes.

I won’t belabor the scene. Suffice it say the rest of us went to our crosses in similar fashion. Leshi cried a lot; Avril impressively held her volleyball-toned body up for several minutes before gravity forced her down; and Courtney got a flogger on her chubby ass when she resisted the nipple clamps. By galactic standards, I figure it was a pretty unremarkable NLC.

I was last in line. While kneeling on that sidewalk, it was the most pain I’d ever felt, but it held the record for only a few minutes. When that little platform flew out from under my feet, I managed to avoid screaming, but I knew I could never hold it against Renee, not even as a joke. It was excruciating, and it was just binding wire and nipple clamps. I don’t even wanna think about what it’s like to get executed on one of those fucking things.

Once the shock of the drop wore off, I found a rhythm where I hung by my wrists for a 25-count, then pushed up and held myself with my legs for another 25-count, then sunk back into a hanging position.... Repeat, repeat, repeat. Yay, ROTC phys-ed training.

For a while I convinced myself that it wasn’t so bad, but ten hours is a long time. And, of course, it’s the time that ultimately breaks people. As far as I know, slave training works the same way. You can’t rewire my brain by beating the hell out of me once. You might intimidate me into short-term compliance, but I’m going to hate you, and I’m going to take my first chance at escape or revenge. But beat the hell out of me every week, keep me in a cage between sessions, drag it out for a year.... That’s different. That’s long-term reprogramming.

Nonlethal crucifixion is a condensed, lite version of that. There’s an initial “ouch,” followed by a brief adjustment period, but the real pain doesn’t start until your muscles are exhausted. After just a short while, I think I’d have done almost anything if somebody offered to take me down early.

By the time the first hour was up, my legs were gelatin. I’ve had some nasty training sessions in ROTC, but I have never worked my body to the point of just shutting down. The terror of my brain sending signals that my limbs simply refused to acknowledge—in a lot of ways, that was the worst thing about it all.

As bad as it was though, Renee and I got some privileges that weren’t granted to the real prisoners. For starters, the guards didn’t whip us—not once, not even when we probably deserved it for going too still, while everybody else had bright red tits and thighs in short order. Also, I’m quite sure the lady going around with the handheld heater deliberately lingered on me and Renee long enough to warm us up completely a couple times per hour. The other girls got enough attention to prevent frostbite and hypothermia, but I don’t think she ever let them get warm.

The audience was terrible, but I think being a tied up zoo animal bothers me more in reflection than it did during the event itself. There was just too much pain to worry about who was watching. Since I’m a Re-ed student, I didn’t even suffer the indignity of having classmates present—though I’m sure there’s no shortage of them who watched me on the live Metanet stream. My parents are sure to be nice and proud, too. Maybe Nash will at least tell my bootlicking father that I’m working undercover for KSS. Of course, that probably defeats the purpose of being undercover in the first place.

Fuck, I’ll never live this down. Graduation can’t come soon enough.

At dusk, an ambulance rolled into the park and went from cross to cross. The guards took us down one at a time, shackled us despite the fact that nobody could walk, and then used a wheelchair to load us into the medical van. On the way to the infirmary, an EMT took off our nipple clamps, and fuck me if it didn’t hurt even worse than when they went on ten hours earlier. As I type this, I’m wearing no bra and still have gauze taped over my areolas. It might even be amusing if I had done this to myself. As it is, I am not amused.

We all got admitted overnight for observation, distributed throughout a communal room with only curtains for privacy. We were technically still prisoners, so they kept us chained to our beds and gagged unless we needed to eat, drink or answer questions. There was a lot of awkward silence in there, let me tell you, and more than once I was actually glad for my gag (and everybody else’s). In the morning a KSS trooper brought around a tablet bearing our legal release orders, signed by the Honorable Lycinda Dunwall, and we all had to scrawl our names in agreement with her bullshit, or else get carted back to the lockup.

When all that was done, we lost our chains and intravenous drips, and got our clothes back. I’d worn my ROTC uniform to court yesterday, so that’s what I left the hospital wearing. For some reason I hobbled out expecting cameras and sneering students, but nobody looked at us twice. I thought back to the diary entry I wrote a few weeks ago, the one about the attention span of your average SSU mob. Sure enough, the public had already forgotten us. Somebody new was getting crucified today.

A female SSU trooper escorted Renee and I down to a tram that would take us to Re-ed. Good thing, because neither of us could have made the walk. As we strapped in, she quietly asked if we were okay. I nodded, but the woman’s sad smile said she saw right through me.

See, I can’t even lie with a simple nod. This spy crap is out of my league.

Courtney and friends got loaded into a separate tram. It struck me that I hadn’t even made eye contact with her since right before the raid on her dorm room. To be honest, I hope I never see her again.

We rode without a word, but Renee held my arm and rested her head on my shoulder. I’m still not sure what to think about that. She’s like nine or ten EYs older than me (not that older women are new territory, of course), and she’s an interstellar rockstar. But she’s human. Probably, like me, she was just broken down inside and out, and she needed to hold somebody. I guess I’m glad I was there.

Back in the dorm, I had dreams of a long shower, but the bathroom was crowded, and my presence sparked a round of hushed giggles and one too many questions about the number of KSS troopers I blew to get released without a slave collar. Since the hot water turned me into gelatin again, I decided I didn’t wanna be there anyway.

The way I just wrote that, it sounds like I made some badass stand of defiance against insufferable assholery. But I actually fled sobbing, soaking wet and half-naked, with most of my clothes wadded in my arms. I’m not fragile, but the bullying caught me at the end of a long week. That cross took everything I had, and I finally broke. Any one of those cunts would have broken in my place. So fuck them.

Where to go from here? No idea. Klorman has me in its filthy web, though at least I’m trapped as an ally instead of an enemy. My grand plan of turning all this into a way to help Ginger looks more and more like the ravings of a crazy person. Shit, Ginger hardly knows I exist. Far as she’s concerned, I’m just a spiteful little ROTC snot who helped torment her during her last brush with the law, and I never even found the courage to explain otherwise.

Let that sink in. I let myself get crucified by Klorman Syndicate, because I think a girl who doesn’t even know me, and might actually hate me, is cute.

That is insane, and I seriously wonder whether something is medically wrong in my head.

At least I had another excused absence in my messages when I got back to my room. I also had about a thousand other messages. After sampling a couple dozen, I suppose about thirty percent were sympathetic, and the other seventy percent were a mixture of hateful, lewd and creepy. I even found a few marriage proposals.

Ultimately, I just had my tablet AI do its best job of keeping nice stuff and scrubbing the rest. In the middle of all this, I got a message from Renee.

“How you doing? I can’t stop crying, and I’d be drowning myself in any available alcohol if I wasn’t afraid it’d get me put back on a cross. You were quiet through it all, which is normal, but I’m sitting here worrying about you all the same. Just let me know you’re okay. Talk later, B.”

I smiled and replied:

“Verbally assaulted in shower. Fine now that I’m alone. Can barely move. Might as well still be tied down. Thanks for asking, and I hope you’re okay too.”

She hit me back a few minutes later:

“At least all the cuffs and chains gave you something else to focus on, right? I’ll tie you up if you’ll tie me up. Deal? NO NIPPLE CLAMPS. At least not for a while. Sorry about your shower encounter. I’ll come over and kick asses if you want me to. Get some sleep, B. Lunch tomorrow, no excuses.”

After making sure the AI properly cleaned up my inbox, I started writing this, and I guess I’m feeling slightly better for it. I think I’m gonna take Renee’s advice and crawl into bed now.

Thanks for listening, Diary. Not sure what I’d do without you.


Sincerely,

Blaire

That's really powerful stuff!

 

[Barbaria1]

Sorry to have come to this late. It’s really quite good.

 

[Servus Venandi]

New Crackdown




QUIKlog (build 7.0.11)


LOGIN: shortz03

PASSWORD: ***********************

Welcome, Ginger (shortz03).

ΔXTT encryption is ACTIVE.


---------------------------------------


SUBJECT: New Crackdown

DATE: K187::229


Five women are dancing in the campus crux park. I recognize two of them from Re-Ed. One is Renee Firewing, galaxy-famous rockstar and submissive reformist. Her activism is too reserved, but it’s no surprise that Klorman Syndicate finally put her on a cross for spite.

The other one, Blaire Zu’loris—a quiet weirdo I share some classes with—surprises me a lot. Socially awkward, ROTC standout, military father, slave industry mother, rumored to be in screening to join the student police.... Maybe Blaire isn’t thrilled to lick Klorman boots, and she’s got cause to rise up after what they did to that lover of hers last year, but she’s never struck me as revolutionary material. Maybe her crucifixion means she tried to rise up, and just picked the stupidest possible way of doing it. But something feels ... off.

Speaking of stupid, the other three victims are Courtney Magloine and her abolitionist friends. I don’t know Courtney personally, but we frequent the same circles, and she’s been trying to “recruit” me for months. Everyone I respect believes she’s far too aggressive—so aggressive that some think she’s a Klorman plant—and now she’s gotten both herself and people who trusted her in some very painful trouble. My butt is no stranger to Klorman floggers, obviously, but at least I haven’t been crucified yet.

If things are going where I think, though, that might change. Since Courtney’s conspiracy was blown open for all to see, I’ve spent the last week turning over rocks. Many nasty bugs scurried out.

• Courtney’s so-called source inside the campus KSS division—a Corporal Tal Laskin—is a bonafide double agent. According to my sources, Laskin has had KSS one step ahead of Courtney and crew from day one.
  
  
• A few weeks ago, ROTC students got a highly unusual visit from Colonel Vincent Ryx. Ryx is a major figure in the Klorman government. None of my contacts actually got to hear what he said or to whom he said it, but nobody thinks his presence had anything to do with academics.
  
  
• Right after Ryx’s visit, Blaire Zu’loris and Renee Firewing had schedule changes approved by the dean’s office. Then, weeks later, they showed up with Courtney Magloine just in time to get busted and crucified with her. My tinfoil hat leads me astray sometimes, and I understand that any informant activity by these ladies probably unfolded against their will. However, the timing of all this is suspicious.
  
  
• There’s been an uptick in public warnings, drone patrols and campus arrest rates since the start of the current term. Drone patrols in particular have doubled in the last 11 local days.
  
  
• Also, something big is brewing outside our heavily monitored SSU bubble. That explosion in AUR-4 and the very strange happenings with Paula Broadway were just the start. Some of my dark web sources suggest that unrest is growing in the Earth Authority, and there have been reports of some serious diplomatic breakdowns between the Andorians and other syndicates.

Might be a string of coincidences. But taken together....

I won’t get my hopes up on how things seem until I get more information, but I think there’s a shift in the wind. The establishment senses it too, and they need to whip the masses back in line before we seditious upstarts get any more attention.

Meanwhile, I’ll just keep my ear to the ground and try to keep my naked bottom (and Roxie’s) out of public view for a while.


------------------------


Adding encrypted file to database.... Done.

Logging off user shortz03.... Done.

Goodbye.

 

[Servus Venandi]

Unwelcome Visitor



From the Mind of:
Blaire Zu’loris

Date:
8 May EY2421 / Orbit K187::235

Location:
A wobbly bench outside the cafe

Weather:
Rain, no ice for a change

Mood:
Rage

---------------------------------------

Dear Diary,

My father blessed me with a visit this morning. In typical form, he showed up way too early. It was outside visiting hours, and most people would have been turned away, but all kinds of concessions get made when your name is Colonel Qarl Zu’loris.

Two campus security lackeys dragged me out of bed, waited for me to dress, and then drove me to the Visitation Center. Since I’m a Re-Ed student and technically an inmate, and since there are security procedures for inmates interacting with the public, I got searched and trussed up. Metallic binding wire on my wrists and ankles, no gag or collar—it could have been much worse, I guess. Would be easy to say it beat hanging out in the local crux park, but I think I’d have preferred another round on the cross to being taken in front of my father like that, or being taken in front of him at all.

He sat at a round table in the small visitation room, his officer-grade KSS armor spotless and adorned with symbols of rank and achievement. A cup of Zarns coffee sat before him, barely touched, so I assumed he hadn’t been here long. He focused intently on the beverage, vapors wafting around his chiseled features and brown hair, and made no effort to look up as the rent-a-cops brought me in, urged me onto a chair opposite him, and then cinched my ankles together so I wouldn’t be walking around of my own accord.

It was perhaps the most humiliating moment of my life, worse than my arrest and even worse than the naked cross dance.

The guards left us alone. As the door latched behind them, the room fell into a heavy approximation of silence, with little perceptible beyond the electric hum of overhead lights, central heating that didn’t work well enough, and my own respiration.

Father took a sip, returned the cup to the exact position from which he’d taken it, and finally met my eyes.

“I’ve been briefed on your status with the local KSS.”

I didn’t know if he meant my real status as an undercover snitch, or my fake status as a recently-crucified abolitionist conspirator.

“I’m very proud of you.”

Okay, that answers that.

“It surely wasn’t easy for you to accept this lot in life after all that’s happened, but you’ve shown a great deal of maturity, beyond even my highest expectations.”

Everything that HAPPENED was CAUSED by YOU! Don’t act like it was all a random throw of God’s dice.

“This is why you’re here, of course. I’ve known since you were little that there’s a spark of greatness in you—one that needed guidance.” He smiled, looked like a snake. “You’re maybe a bit too much like me in that regard. I was a wild one at your age, not quite in the same way, but KSS similarly honed my talents and inclinations toward productive ends.”

I needed out of that room. I wanted to thrash in my restraints until they broke, and then crash the door and run till I couldn’t. Instead, somehow, I stayed still and silent.

“You’re moving past your childish idealism and into a better state, and I wanted to tell you in person how pleased I am with your progress.”

‘Progress’ as defined by my father is compliance with his every demand and desire. While he’s never admitted as much, my mother has implied several times over the years that he really wanted a son he could mold into a good little military machine like himself. My lack of a penis was a disappointment, but he got over it until I took decisive steps toward not being his heir. My so-called rebellion was an assault on his deepest assumptions about reality, and Jin and I both paid for it—the former with her life, and I’ll never forgive myself.

“I’m under no illusions that we’ll return to friendly father-daughter terms anytime soon.”

We were never on father-daughter terms, asshole. You were always the drill sergeant, and I was always the conscript.

“But it is my hope that, maybe, we’re moving toward that. Your mother and I only want you to succeed.”

Sure, for your own sakes. Points for honesty, though—my happiness has never counted for shit.

As time passed, I humored him with vague responses to questions, asked a few of my own questions about mother (with whom I have a slightly better, if not ideal, relationship), and told him (truthfully) that I was just trying to get by until graduation. He seemed more or less satisfied with all this, even though he complained about my ‘sullen attitude.’

He only stayed about half an hour, and then he was gone, leaving nothing in his wake except an empty coffee cup and a lingering scent of the cologne I remembered from my earliest childhood years, back before I hated him.

I sat alone for a few minutes before different rent-a-cops showed up to loosen my ankles and hustle me out of the Visitation Center. The restraints came off entirely before they let me outside, and I rubbed my sore wrists en route to the security cart that would carry me back to the dorm.

I’ve spent most of the day trying to figure out what the hell my father thought he was accomplishing. For fuck’s sake, even if I had actually become a Klorman patriot, he was still responsible for my friend and lover’s arrest, torture and execution, all under some bullshit ‘This is for your own good, and you’ll understand someday’ excuse. Then he had me arrested on false charges when I tried to run away from it all, and his pals in the criminal justice system sentenced me to this Re-Ed purgatory. The only thing I understand is that I despise him, and I want as far as possible from Obseq and Klorman Syndicate and my bootlicking family the instant I’m released.

Just had to vent. Sorry.


Sincerely,

Blaire

--

 

[Servus Venandi]

Author's note:
The original formatting of this story didn't translate well to this forum software. I hacked together a solution using ">" marks and color. Sorry about that, and hopefully it's readable.

Conspiring



QUIKchat (build 4.3.81)


LOGIN: toasty165


PASSWORD: ********


Welcome, D.T. (toasty165).


ΔXTT encryption is ACTIVE.


------------------------


Session initialized K187:235 24:02:49.


User liberatas has joined the session.


User toasty165 has joined the session.


>>>>>liberatas: You there?


toasty165: yeah


>>>>>liberatas: What have you got?


toasty165: a mess


toasty165: she’s tall and strong as a bear with a survival instinct to match


toasty165: you failed to mention as much


toasty165: I had to beat the fuck out of her


>>>>>liberatas: Meaning what???


toasty165: i got her, but the cap wasn’t quiet


toasty165: a do-gooder showed up to investigate


>>>>>liberatas: SHIT


toasty165: you said “no witnesses,” so now there aren’t any


>>>>>liberatas: SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT


>>>>>liberatas: What the hell were you thinking!!!!!!!


toasty165: hey, i was doing YOUR dirty work according to YOUR instructions


toasty165: don’t act like you didn’t know this was possible


>>>>>liberatas: Just tell me you got her off campus.....


toasty165: of course she’s off campus


toasty165: and so’s the body in case you


>>>>>liberatas: stop


>>>>>liberatas: I don’t want to know.


toasty165: suit yourself, but my fee just doubled for clean up work


>>>>>liberatas: And why should I pay for a problem you created?


toasty165: ok, put it this way


toasty165: my fee just doubled, or that off campus body might magically reappear with your name on it


>>>>>liberatas: You’re a real piece of shit.


toasty165: which is exactly why you hired me


>>>>>liberatas: Not one shred of suspicion had better fall on me for this.


>>>>>liberatas: And don’t forget that the syns I’m paying came from somewhere.


>>>>>liberatas: So you are NOT invincible.


toasty165: don’t threaten me, and don’t worry.


toasty165: i got a reputation to uphold


>>>>>liberatas: All right, just tell me what you’ve learned.


toasty165: the cunt confessed to being a klorman agent


>>>>>liberatas: I knew it.


toasty165: she was as tough to break as she was to catch, but i’ve got her begging now


toasty165: turns out getting staked in muddy snow while i cane her from tits to feet isn’t her idea of a good time


toasty165: anything else she knows, you’ll know soon enough


>>>>>liberatas: Good. Keep me in the loop.


toasty165: yeah yeah, just remember our contract only covers detention for one day


toasty165: so you got another 10 hours to tell me what i’m doing with this pig bitch


toasty165: or i’ll have to take care of her myself


>>>>>liberatas: I need to sleep on it. Will have a decision by morning, unless something she says changes my mind.


toasty165: whatever you say


toasty165: we done?


>>>>>liberatas: Yeah.


toasty165: great, back to work


User liberatas has left the session.


User toasty165 has left the session.


Session closed K187:235 24:08:19.


Deleting local cache.... Done.


------------------------


Logging off user toasty165.... Done.


Goodbye.

 

[Migoz2]

Intriguing.......

 

[Eva Inanna]

Intriguing.......

Well said! Intriguing indeed.