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.
She also had a pretty good idea what the mustard substitute was. Another tattoo risk, or a mitigation? Chrissy would evaluate that later, she could count on that too.
Khalidah's cable reeled in unrelentingly, marching her in drug- and degradation-induced obedience to the next available position. Joanie gave the untattooed pair of butt-cheeks an enthusiastic whack on the way.
"Owww..."
Evidently the helmet concealed no gag. It would no more than lightly muffle their screams.
Khalidah stepped between the pads; her cable became precisely vertical. Joanie removed the chain between her elbow strap and ankle chain.
"Open your legs, honey," Joanie ordered, "and put your feet on the pads." Her chatty demeanor jarred in unsettling dissonance with the electric prod dangling from her belt. Khalidah seethed inside—'honey' was yet another term she didn't care to be addressed by but there was nothing she could do about it. As she spread her legs the cable tightened, nestling deep into her cleavage as it pulled her wrist spreader higher, drawing it even more uncomfortably up under her breasts. When her feet reached the pads the chain between her ankles pulled tight; it was exactly the length needed for her to comply with the order. The moment it stretched taut Joanie snapped a split-hinged plastic tube over it, rendering Khalidah's legs rigidly separated.
Quick and simple and totally unanticipated, Khalidah thought. No, not thought, just experienced, the increased helplessness instantly permeating her psyche. Joanie clamped the newly-created spreader to the floor.
Khalidah could no longer move her feet.
The cuffs and bars, even the cable's clip, were perfectly smooth, Khalidah sensed more than observed as she looked over at her neighbor's bindings and down at her own; no buckles, clips or other metal parts that might puncture the elastic sheet projected. Clearly they were about to be lying face down in the oily goo, but how would they get there? An uncontrolled face-plant was terrifying to say the least, but right now most of her attention was directed to the taut cable pressing on her face. By thrusting her chest forward in an awkward back-bend she could just get it clear of her nose, allowing her to turn her head from side to side without having to tilt her head back painfully.
"I know, dear—that cable's such a bother. I'll fix it in a jiffy."
Sure, thought Khalidah, finally managing a glance at her unable-to-glance-back neighbor. When you haul my arms up and hood me. Just get on with it, it's not like I can stop you.
And so Joanie did, not as Khalidah was expecting, but should have. The moment Joanie unbuckled the strap drawing Khalidah's elbows together she gave her a hefty shove, sending her pitching headlong into the pit. Khalidah's instinctive reaction to thrust her arms forward was met by the cable's sudden retraction, pulling the bar up past her projecting bust, stretching her arms upward and arresting her fall. But the moment she reached vertical the cable immediately slackened, causing Khalidah to tip helplessly backward. At that instant the ivory-colored helmet descended like a grotesque airplane oxygen mask from the ceiling; Joanie caught it with two hands and spread it over Khalidah's face, folded it around her head, and closed the Velcro seam at the back.
"Nighty night, sweetie," she cooed, snugging the helmet's collar around Khalidah's neck as the cable retracted, once more stretching Khalidah's arms upward and returning her to vertical. The helmet's tube reeled in, all its slack taken up neatly.
