This story continues where part 8 left off, with Khalidah on her way to the Flagellation Chamber to face the atoning band along with four others, one of whom is her former lover and tattoo designer Chrissy.
Don't despair. Khalidah will emerge stronger: more compassionate; more attuned to her lovers past and present; an all around better human being for the experience. She and Ginny might even become friends!
The usual trigger warning - this story contains heavy bondage and discipline. I'm not advocating judicial corporal punishment, which is inherently non-consensual (unless you're a volunteer!). The judicial punishment systems I describe are entirely fictional. I doubt that any political entity on earth today is capable of administering such a system fairly and humanely. Fantasy is fantasy. In real life consent is paramount.
But given all that, if you wish to continue, let's get on with it. I hope you enjoy this story, and I hope you stay safe, in and out of the scene, in these trying SARS-CoV-2 times.
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The walk from Inspection to Flagellation wasn't terribly long, a good thing since Khalidah was pretty stiff from being clamped in the frame for an hour, and pretty disoriented from the libidol in her system, not to mention seriously hobbled by the chains. Joanie had to hold her by the arm to ensure that she wouldn't fall, but in spite of all that, they soon arrived.
No doubt where they were—the windowless double sliding doors proclaimed, in large black letters, 'Flagellation Facility' and in smaller letters below, 'Inmates Entrance.'
Two tiny half-moon recesses located about chest-height in each door met in the center to form a dime-sized opening; a rubber-coated steel cable ending in a thumb-release clip dangled from the hole. Joanie lifted the cable and clipped it to a fitting at the center of the bar between Khalidah's wrists.
"Just a precaution, dear," Joanie chimed cheerily. "Some prisoners panic when they first get a look into the chamber. You won't try to do a runner, will you?"
No, she wouldn't, Khalidah thought, biting her tongue. She also thought she was done putting up with this, but Joanie seemed to be able to imitate Tani's voice to perfection.
And she had to admit that the cable made perfect sense. She already felt far more submissiveness swirling inside than any collar could induce, especially when Joanie circled behind her to cinch the strap between her elbows even tighter, forcing the bar hard up against her chest. When Joanie clipped the cable to her binding bar she felt double the despair and twice the utter inevitability of her punishment, if such a thing were possible. At that point who would even consider trying to resist? Khalidah's gaze skittered helplessly to the control panel to the left of the door where a flashing red button insisted on her attention. Obviously there wasn't anything she needed to do about it, as if she could do something about it.
Joanie did need to do something about it. She lifted the bar-code reader from its hook next to the panel, pointed it at Khalidah's neck and pressed the trigger. The reader's red line flashed on the band momentarily: the blinking light turned solid green.
"Looks like you're legal. Let's get that tag off—you won't be needing it any more. If I had to guess, I'd say that after what you're about to go through, you won't be scurrying back."
Joanie lifted the multi-tool hanging from her belt, snipped the fibrous collar from Khalidah's neck, and slipped it into the slot labelled 'flagellation authorization band shredder.' Khalidah chuckled just the tiniest bit—the tool's logo had been taped over with LEATHERMAAM. Probably the only humor she'd find funny today.
Joanie pressed the green button.
The doors slid open, the cable went taut, and Khalidah experienced herself drawn inexorably through, compelled to reflect on Bev, Ginny and Angie's march to the execution carousel as she went. Was she about to live another of Bev's Barbara-essays, on the receiving end this time? Ginny must be laughing through her debut session at this very moment.
And Khalidah was frightened as the portal opened. Not frightened about the pain she expected to suffer. Frightened for the survival of her tattoos. Anxious about how this process would work. How would it differ from what she'd seen from the viewing gallery back home? Impact punishment, not electrical—Chrissy would murder her if she let it damage her masterwork. Let it? Haha, she thought, struggling for a moment against the bands securing her wrists before relaxing once more into submission.
And how, precisely, would the punishment be delivered? The sentence was quite specific: she would be immobilized in plastic film. But how? How would the band operate? Furthermore, while she was indeed guilty of a crime for which she was about to be punished, she was also being forced to participate in an experiment. How did she feel about that? How would her body, how would her brain react? How much longer would either of those continue to function, given the pharmacological tidal forces distorting her system so savagely?
Even the answer to the first question wasn't obvious. No gleaming steel poles greeted her eyes. No whips or sinister machines came into focus. Just one unfortunate woman stood in the chamber, naked but for the sturdy cuffs at each end of the spreader lifting her arms high above her head, and the ones forcing her legs apart below—and the rubber helmet encasing her head. No elastic film enclosed her body. Nothing but the helmet, which had a tube running from its top to the ceiling, for breathing, Khalidah figured, since the helmet's smooth opaque surface did not appear to have any other holes. Just the tube, and the one where her neck emerged.
Well , Khalidah thought, I'm already wearing the cuffs. How efficient!
She could be forgiven for not noticing the almost invisible clear elastic band circling the woman's waist, nor the gossamer G-string snaking between her cheeks. She wouldn't in any case have been able to see that G-string emerge to rejoin the band just below her navel.
The surface in front of the spread-eagled woman's feet didn't look much like a floor. It looked more like—ahh, a sheet of transparent film a little more than a meter wide, glistening with an oily coating and stretching about three meters from the standing woman's toes to the far side of a gap in the real floor.
The sheet spanned an opening about the size of a small swimming pool, three meters wide and maybe six meters long; long enough to accommodate film-frames for four more inmates. Foot-shaped markings on the floor indicated clearly where those inmates would stand, at least temporarily, with four more shimmering sheets stretched before them. The room's bright lights made it difficult to see what might be taking place underneath, but if one watched carefully one could see someone moving about below, preparing to perform some nefarious function. By this time Khalidah wasn't watching so carefully. Incarcerated in her mental fog she'd become resigned to whatever was going to happen, almost completely.
Racked one above another beyond the last pair of footpads, five more sheets, the same coating glinting visibly from the one on top, did manage to penetrate Khalidah's psychic miasma. She shivered in abject surrender.
Four more underneath the one on top, three after mine, Khalidah counted. Five chastisement sandwiches, coming right up. We're the meat.
