THE 148TH SLAVE
The next week was pretty much all work. Fergusson left Tuesday after giving instructions to Kat, Chiara, Jacobs, Redstone and me. That afternoon the other women began to arrive for the first of the three "Submission to Pain" lotteries. There were to be many medical tests and procedures, promotional broadcasts and other things to build the audience for the lotteries. All participants were expected by Wednesday.
At a reception held that Wednesday evening that Svetlana insisted Kat, Chiara and I attend, I saw the other nine women who would be with us in the first of the three lotteries and in the lotteries thereafter (if not slaves). We were all dolled up at the beauty parlor and dressed in short dresses with plunging necklines as the BLC was going to televise shots from the reception out to its international audience. Yegor, Svetlana and a number of other local celebrities were there.
What do you say at a reception to a bunch of women who you hope will become sex slaves instead of you? Obviously, we did all have one big thing in common. Otherwise our lives were pretty different. Several of the women did not speak English. I knew most of them some already because of my earlier lotteries or the ones I had watched. I learned more about them at the reception.
Alina, I knew from lotteries and her reputation. She had been in more lotteries than any other woman. She was the second wife of the "Great Leader" Pyotr Toltski. I was sympathetic to her situation although she had a bad reputation in Bolry. She said that these three lotteries would finally bring a close to her saga. Either she would be a pain slave or have enough to finish paying her debts and get out of Bolry.
The insufferable woman from Tennessee, Ashley, was back in Bolry along with none other than the preacher man, the Rev. Jeremiah. Ashley's husband, Jeremy, had to work in Tennessee. I overheard the Rev. Jeremiah tell Svetlana that Ashley's husband would be perfect to participate in a lottery for male slaves although, of course, he would not countenance the thought of any form of homosexuality. Ashley proudly said that she was at the lottery in the service of the Almighty and would be contributing her winnings to the church of the holy Rev. Jeremiah.
The Chinese Lady who continued to call herself "the Dragon Lady" was dressed in an incredibly tight silk dress. I thought she looked good but I could not talk to her at the reception except to say hi. I don't speak Chinese and she did not know more than 100 words in English. Two of those were "dragon" and "lady."
Diya the former Bollywood star was there and full of confidence. Although she had run through all the money she'd received at earlier lotteries, she was sure that in five weeks she'd be set for life. She could again make movies and be a star.
I had a sorority relationship with the Polish doctor, Elizabeth, and the German Engineer, Lena, because we three had gone through our first lottery together and all reached the embarrassing semi-finals. I really had thought Elizabeth was going to quit after the first lottery because she had said she was only there because she had lost a bet to her hospital administrator. Problem was that she did not patched things up with the administrator. She quit and moved to a village in the east of Poland that she said was very boring. She said she now had a 75% chance here of getting enough money to establish a clinic in a town where there was nightlife. No one mentioned what would happen in the 25% case.
I had initially wondered whether Lena would be back again. As it happened, she had been in many lotteries since, always playing at the highest possible level of risk and risking becoming a pain slave. Seeing her there yet again, I expected a convoluted story about what she had done after the first of our lotteries. I was not disappointed.
About six days after Lena got back to Germany from the 5-year anniversary lottery, her boss had had the nerve to suggest that she participate in the Lottery again. She had told her boss, Ursula, a woman in her 50s, that if she thought it was so important to offer one's life to serve the cause of women's rights and relief of women suffering as political prisoners, why did she not offer her own body.
Ursula pointed out that there was less demand for women in their late 50s than early 30s. The Lottery would not offer Ursula hundreds of thousands of Euros to risk becoming a sex slave. Lena had called her bluff and said that if Ursula offered herself up to 25 homeless men from the Munich homeless shelter, Lena would go to ten more lotteries and offer her earnings to charity. For dramatic effect, Lena had even said that in the wildly unlikely event that Ursula met the challenge, after Lena came back from the tenth lottery, she would surrender her body to every employee of the specialty steel company her boss owned who agreed to give 300 Euros to a charity working against FGM in Africa and the Mideast.
Things sat like that until Ursula said that she was willing to raise the ante. She would surrender her body for safe sex in a safe supervised place to all the homeless men who passed a VD test in homeless shelters located in Munich, Frankfurt and Hannover if Lena agreed to participate in the ten lotteries as a potential pain slave including special high risk lotteries that Ursula knew were coming up. Lena said she thought she was bluffing and accepted.
Lena was shocked later when a co-worker told her that they had to go to Hannover to watch something important. She was even more shocked to see Ursula pull a train of guys who had not had any luck for years. She even seemed to enjoy it. It was too late to back out of her promise and her boss fulfilled her end in Frankfurt and Munich. Lena started participating in the lottery on a constant basis.