Sophia smiled as she packed her bag. It was the day of her trip to the colonial historical grounds. At 26, she was in her second year of her graduate program where she was studying for a Masters in history. The program was going great. She got along well with her classmates and professors and enjoyed the classwork and lectures.
The only problem was, unbeknownst to Sophia, how she was a terrible partner when it came to class projects. She barely did any work and when she did it was sloppy and needed serious edits, edits she never herself made. Sophia justified her behavior by assuming that her take charge classmates wanted to do the bulk of the work and that she would only get in their way with her input and engagement. Her classmates had other feelings and would grumble emphatically to each other when being assigned to a group with her.
The trip to the colonial historical grounds served the purpose of studying various aspects of colonial life. Sophia and her team's project was on colonial punishment for crimes. She liked her group, which comprised of Holly, a slightly nerdy but attractive student who was slightly younger than Sophia, Forest, a reserved individual who was also a baker, and John, who was mildly intelligent and also a musician. He was the lead singer and guitar player in an obscure band that played at dive-y bars in the area.
From the moment the program began, Sophia formed a massive crush on John. She shyly, but religiously, attended his shows. She was way too nervous to ask him out but she constantly talked of how and when she would do it with her friends.
Sophia selected the lingerie she would wear, picturing John seeing her in it. She secretly got off on wearing the sluttiest lingerie possible, lingerie that she would never wear around any of the guys she dated or slept with. In the end she chose a strapless underwire bra that only went up a inch on breasts, revealing the bulk of her tits, and a micro-thong that barely covered her mound and only went three quarters of the way up in the back, revealing her ass crack.
She admired herself in the mirror, cupping her breasts, which were between small and medium, a size she liked, and then fluffed her dark shoulder-length dyed red hair. She stroked her ass, which still hand tan lines from the summer previous. She tanned topless when her roommates were out and few people were aware of this, probably only the guy she had been sleeping with casually since then, who she only saw once a week.
Sophia pulled on a strapless romper that had long pants. She figured the long pants would excuse her bare shoulders, and even though she was private about her choice in undergarments, she did like to dress slightly provocatively, and felt it to be a statement against the formality of academia. She was unaware that some of her classmates felt, disdainfully, she was trying to get a different sort of attention from her professors.
It was a sunny day and Sophia figured she would kill time before her trip with a walk to the library. She meandered over and wandered into the rare books section. The books were beautiful to her and she ran her fingers along their spines, suddenly stopping at a particularly ancient looking one made of leather. She squinted at the spine and read "Enferer: the Demon of Shame."
"Huh," she remarked to herself, and slipped it out. The book was clearly very old and when she opened it the illustration before her made her frown. It was an image of a women emerging from a pond naked, hands clasped on either sides of her face, clearly panicked. A man was crouched to the side holding what Sophia assumed were the woman's clothes. She flipped the page and saw another image, this time of a woman riding what seemed to be a rollercoaster, only naked. "Why the fuck is there a rollercoaster in here?" she wondered, but the illustration looked dated back to medieval times, just with a rollercoaster. "Did they even have rollercoasters back then?"
As Sophia flipped through the book she saw more and more images of distressed nude women. She was curious but felt a tinge of nausea looking at them. She was about to shut the book but came to a page with a naked woman in a pillory (that wooden structure used for punishment that had holes for holding the wrong-doer's head and hands,) being spanked. "Very appropriate for today," she laughed, feeling nervous for some reason. She suddenly had the urge to read the text below the picture out loud. For some reason she wanted to resist but suddenly found herself quietly reading it aloud.
As soon as she did she felt a chill down her spine and her vision momentarily blacked out. "Ah!" she cried out in fear then dropped the book to the ground and looked around. She felt someone was watching her, but no one was there. Her breath quickened, she quickly placed the book on top of the other books, too panicked to re-shelve it.
Sophia felt her breathing slow down the further she got away from the book. "So weird," she remarked and shook her head. She ruminated on the experience for the walk home but as soon as entered her house she forgot about it, anticipation for the trip taking over.
--
The sun shined brightly as the graduate students moved through the colonial grounds. Sophia's teammates all had notebooks and pens to take notes.
"Shit, I forgot mine!" Sophia cursed to them.
"You can borrow paper and a pen from me," Forest offered, pushing up his dark glasses. "I have another notebook."
"No, it's okay," she shrugged. "I can remember things pretty well."
Her teammates glanced at each other in annoyance. In their experience, Sophia would only verbally mimic what they had written, musing, "Oh yeah, that's so weird, that's exactly what I would have written about!"
They wandered about by the animals, strolled through the stately house, observed a woman churning butter, and finally came to a clearing in the center of the grounds. Sophia eyed the structure in the middle warily. It was a pillory, early similar to the one she'd seen in the illustration. "Just a weird coincidence," she assured herself.
"Cool!" exclaimed John. "I've heard of these. What did people have to do again to end up here?"
"Well," Holly began, shaking out her brown curls, "Theft. Adultery. Public intoxication. I wrote a paper on these at one point." She wandered up to the structure and ran her fingers along the top.
"Is it also used for being a lazy worker who doesn't pull their weight?" Forest asked, grinning at his teammates. They laughed. Sophia tilted her head and looked at them, the joke going over her head.
In the evening, the graduate students went to a bar near the colonial grounds. Sophia was having fun chatting more casually with her teammates. She was so sick of talking about school! Getting a bit swept up in the good time, she had a drink more than she typically would have, and felt it go to her head. She excused herself to the restroom, smoothing down her romper as she went.
"We should confront her, honestly," Holly said as soon as Sophia was out of earshot.
"And what?" Forest asked. "She'll just give us more half-assed work. I think she actually thinks she's doing her part just by spitting something out on paper. How are we supposed to tell her its of poor quality?"
"Like that would even make up for all the times she's screwed us over," John grumbled, pushing his sandy blonde hair behind his ear. His long legs stretched out before him.
"Let's prank her," Holly suddenly said conspiratorially.
"How, even?" John asked, grinning. He could think of a few options.
"We could like... I don't know, tell her everyone is going to streak but only let her run off," Holly laughed.
John and Forest both felt themselves get slightly turned on by this. There was a pause.
"No, I have an idea," Forest said, a mischievous look spreading across his face. "Let's get her in the pillory. We could leave her there and she'd look so dumb when all our classmates saw her in the morning."
"Couldn't she yell out for someone to let her go?" John asked skeptically.
"There's like, no security on the grounds," Forest said. "They only watch the entrance and have cameras of the perimeter to make sure no one sneaks in."
"Shit, how did you figure that out?" Holly asked.
"I have my ways," he replied. In truth, he had planned to have a contemplative night stroll and had asked an employee if this was feasible. He now had lost all interest in said stroll.
