Lexi stumbled into the living room with her dirty blonde hair looking like the 'before' part of an ad for styling mousse, dressed in a pair of pink-and-white striped pajamas that she'd only intended to put on but had wound up using. Her hazel eyes drooped about a quarter of the way shut, and it was tempting to just turn right around, flop back into her bed, and let them close the rest of the way so that she could get a decent night's sleep.
But she had promised Madison. And not just out of obligation, either--somehow Madison always had a nose for exactly the kind of crazy shit that appealed to Lexi's fucked up sense of humor. She was always the one who found the really messed up YouTube videos of 'man in the street' interviews on local news shows that went hilariously wrong, or movies that were made with a camcorder and featured bizarre performances and godawful special effects and deranged scripts, or mp3s of songs that were so terrible they made Coke squirt out of Lexi's nose. If she said it was worth getting up at 3 AM to watch the public access channel, Lexi actually kind of believed her.
And she knew that she wouldn't get any peace until she did. She flopped onto the couch, fighting the temptation to lie down, and turned on the television.
There wasn't much on. The TV listings at 3 AM on a Sunday morning looked like they catered exclusively to an audience of gullible insomniacs; Lexi scrolled through programs with titles like 'Firmer Breasts Now!' and 'Never Cook Too Much Again!' for what seemed like ages before she finally found something just labeled 'Local Public Access Television 1' for a twenty-four hour block. (Which of course meant she couldn't just DVR the damned thing and watch it later. How did Madison even find this thing, anyway?) She hit enter, and the screen flipped over to a static image of a slogan that looked like it had been dashed off in five minutes in Microsoft Paint. 'Local Access--Television 4U, ByU!'
Lexi had just gotten to the point where she had convinced herself that she was 'resting her eyes' waiting for the show to start when the sound of blaring organ music startled her into wakefulness. She blinked rapidly to refocus her gaze on the television, and saw a logo of stark white letters on a background that was a swirling spiral of dark gray on darker gray. 'THE KIDNAP SHOW', it read. The organ music ratcheted up in its intensity until Lexi half-expected the logo to cut away to an undead Vincent Price frantically hammering away at the keyboard.
Instead, it cut away (well, almost cut away--hilariously, the logo didn't quite fade out properly, instead faintly showing like a watermark on the screen) to a young man in his mid-twenties, wearing a white shirt with ruffled sleeves that hadn't been popular since Beau Brummel and dark pants. He was glaring at the camera with what was presumably supposed to be smoldering intensity, but a couple of things kept him from pulling it off. First, he had a skinny neck with a prominent adam's apple, a nose that could charitably be called Roman but which would more accurately be termed as parrot-like, ears that stuck out almost ninety degrees from his head, and a frizzy mop of hair, all of which distracted from his eyes pretty thoroughly.
Secondly, the camera clearly wasn't where he thought it was, so his smoldering gaze was directed just a little bit to the left and it made him look more like he was really really irritated with his floor manager for not getting the spiral to go away like it was supposed to. Lexi was already choking down great snorts of laughter.
"Welcome," he said, straining for a lower register than his voice was naturally able to reach and sounding as a result like he was perpetually gasping for breath. "To the Kidnap Show. Tonight, we have two new victims for you. Beautiful, sensual, young women who will fall into our clutches, live, on the air. They will try to resist--of course they'll try. But you who watch...the Kidnap Show...know that there is no escaping the power of sexual slavery." He turned, exposing his profile for a few seconds before they cut to Camera Two. "Let's watch!"
The screen cut away to a view of an anonymous-looking staircase, with three men wearing dark clothes and ski masks. They looked like they were trying to be intimidating, but they looked sweaty and uncomfortable in the July heat. The camera zoomed past them to show a nondescript wooden door. (Still overlaid by the show's logo, of course. There was nothing quite so funny as people desperately failing to be taken seriously.)
"We're now ready to pick up our first victim," the host said in voiceover. "She called us last week, deep in the influence of our hypnotic spell, and told us that she would be a perfect candidate for the Kidnap Show. She has no close family, and only a few friends who would notice her disappearance. We commanded her to take a week's vacation, and to make sure to watch the show tonight at the appointed time. Now that she's been primed for obedience, it's time to pick her up and bring her back to the studio. Let's see if she managed to resist, shall we?"
As if the words were a signal, the men lumbered into action. They opened the door and trotted down a bland off-white hallway, followed by the cameraman...who alternated between falling so far behind he lost them around corners and racing to catch up until he almost bumped into their backs. All four of them, including the cameraman, were huffing with exhaustion by the time they got down to one door in particular. They stopped, nodded to each other, and went inside.
At first, it was impossible to really see anything--the cameraman was following three sizable guys into a small room, so the camera just showed silly spiral overlaid on black T-shirt for a moment. But when they moved out into the wider area, Lexi's jaw dropped. She recognized that room. She recognized that apartment. In retrospect, she even recognized the bland hallway that looked like every other bland hallway in every other apartment complex. She was looking at Madison's place.
And sure enough, there was Madison, sitting on her ratty old couch that she'd found sitting next to the dumpster in her parking garage, staring at the television with rapt attention. She had her blue-and-black striped pajamas pulled down to her knees, and this was not actually the way that Lexi expected to find out she wasn't a natural redhead. "It appears she didn't," the host said. He sounded impossibly smug, like it was his doing that they caught Madison masturbating in the middle of the night.
The camera swung around, taking in the room, and Lexi caught a glimpse of the television. It was tuned to the Kidnap Show, the screen within the screen warping with distortion as the camera caught an image of itself. Lexi suddenly realized why Madison had been so insistent that she watch tonight. She was actually going to punk the actors playing the kidnappers and pretend to be their mindless victim of the week. They probably normally hired actresses to play their would-be wanna-be sex slaves, but Lexi knew first-hand that Madison was pretty relentless when it came to talking someone into doing what she wanted.
"Now, it's time to initiate...the kidnap!" the host said melodramatically, but all the men on-screen did was pull out a pair of goggles that looked like an off-brand knockoff of an Oculus Rift. One of them strapped it onto Madison's face, while another pulled her pajama bottoms all the way off and bundled them away into a sack. Then they took her hand and lifted her into a standing position. She swayed slightly in place, her arms sticking straight out in front of her like a cartoon sleepwalker, and allowed them to lead her out of the room.
Lexi rolled her eyes. Trust Madison to overact the 'hypnotized victim' part. She looked like she took her acting lessons from Ed Wood. Still, it was kind of freaky of her to go along with the nudity--Lexi had no idea that Madison was okay with that kind of stuff. For that matter, she couldn't imagine how the guys behind the show were getting away with it, apart from choosing a time slot and a channel that literally nobody but her and Madison were even watching.
"Now, we lead our victim...our beautiful, helpless victim...down, down, down to the darkness of the Kidnap Show's...private transportation," the host said, huffing out every word with sleazy fervor like a pick-up artist desperately trying to make his efficiency apartment sound like a 'party pad'. The action on the screen looked less like a perfectly executed abduction, and more like five people trying to squeeze into an elevator. From the angle they got, the cameraman was clearly holding his camera over his head to avoid bumping it into anyone.
The 'private transportation', when they finally reached it after an excruciatingly awkward elevator ride that left Lexi giggling like a loon, turned out to be a windowless white van with no markings. Lexi was a little disappointed to see that it didn't have 'The Kidnap Show' airbrushed onto the side, but the spiral overlaid on the screen at least gave her a pretty good idea of what it would look like. They hustled Madison into the back before clambering in themselves, and the van lurched into motion with a camera-shaking jerk.
"Now," the host said, his voice dripping with oily fascination, "the victim is truly helpless. The authorities will find no traces of our actions, and our pretty young thing is too deep in the hypnotic trance to even think of escaping." In the van, two of the men were helping Madison out of her top, making sure not to knock her goggles off in the process. Lexi couldn't help but notice that Madison was enjoying the whole scene a little more than Lexi wanted to know about. Her pussy was obviously wet, her jaw hung slack like she was so absorbed in whatever she was seeing that she forgot to close it, and when her nipples were exposed to the camera, they were stiff little buds at the tip of her pebbly aureolae.
The men placed Madison's hand up against her cunt. With every sign of evident enjoyment, she began to play with herself again.
"Of course," the host said as the ride went on, the camera zooming in to show Madison's fingers rubbing her stiff clit in gynecological detail, "my men could have their way with her right now. She has already succumbed to our programming. We could make her suck their cocks, open her legs for them, betray everyone and everything she holds dear. But we have...other plans for this one." Plans that apparently included dramatic pauses every three words or so, Lexi thought in annoyance.
She almost changed the channel for a little bit--as much as Madison was right that this was just the kind of campy, absurd cheese that they normally lapped up, Lexi wasn't really in the mood to get to know exactly how her best friend masturbated. But at the same time, there was something perversely hot about it, in a weird ironic kind of way. It was so insane to think that someone would actually want to see amateur kidnap fetish porn on public access television, complete with a stupid spiral overlaid on the woman's pussy like they were trying to hypnotize you with her cunt. But at the same time...
