22
January
January
Yesterday, Miss Wednesdai decided to give me a test of endurance.
I think I’ve mentioned StoneHaven before, it’s a great spot filled with an amazing collection of people. StoneHaven Patio is where I met Wednesdai, so there’s lots of good reasons to like it. The Patio is a small open area with seating around two sides, shackle bolts on the wall along the opposite side and a couple of leash posts strategically placed in the middle. Fun spot for conversation, play, watching, what have you. There’s also a Voting cage in the corner.
The Voting cage only opens when enough people have voted to release the prisoner. The number of votes required, and the time interval between votes are configurable. Our last scene before she collared me involved the Voting cage…
Miss Wednesdai thought it would be fun to up the ante a little… After securing my in my shackles, arms tight behind, legs taut but walkable, and after placing a gag firmly in my mouth, she locked the cage requiring 20 votes with 5 minutes between. Before getting to how it went, I’ll admit that I was an active participant in determining the severity of the sentence. 
Oh, should I mention that the gag was my idea? I was splitting attention between SL and RL and wanted an excuse not to be able to easily answer…
One of the things I forgot about the voting cage is that people can only vote once. So what 20 votes meant is that at least 20 people needed to vote. Getting 5 people to vote 4 times each would not be sufficient. By my calculations I should be in for about two hours of confinement which seemed suitable, enjoyable, doable… wrong. Where the scenario went wrong was two assumptions: First, that there would be enough people coming in and out to quickly have 20 different people to do the voting. Second, that someone new would be available and willing to vote the moment that voting re-opened. Wrong on both counts.
It turns out that over any, say 3 hour, interval there is a core of people on the patiow with a few different faces flitting in and out. It also turns out that people come in and out in waves. There will be a period where there are 5-10 people around and a couple of hours later a whole new group has replaced the previous. For about an hour and a half there was nobody around at all.
If was fine for a few hours, there were people about I could gag-speak with, I had IM so was able to chat with a few people privately. Votes were coming in. It was a good time.
Then the RolePlay aspects started to hit me, and I started to feel it. I’m going to start calling it RolePlay-space or RP-space when this happens. Maybe SecondLife-space works better. Yes, I’m going to go with that. SL-space. I’ve read about SubSpace in BDSM, this I imagine is similar. What happens is that it starts becoming real. I’m starting to feel the restraints, the gag really is stopping me from speaking normally. The discomfort of whatever position I’m in really is uncomfortable. I’m not playing anymore, it’s really happening. Just to be clear, I’m also sitting at my computer in RL fixing bugs, getting my wife coffee, there’s still a clear delineation between these two sensoriums (no better word for it), but at the same time, when I’m looking through those bars, I don’t feel like I’m imagining it anymore, I’m really there.
I was unable to sit and I’d been standing in the same place for over four hours (at the time SL-space started to take over). I wanted out of this cage! Even as people were coming in and out, votes ticking, I was ready to sit down and rest my poor feet. There was nothing I could do though. Miss Wednesdai wasn’t anywhere near, she’d locked the cage, only she could override the settings. I start casting wildly about for a way to relieve my poor aching feet. Meanwhile, some people had arrived and one Lady became tired of hearing my mumblings from behind the gag. She ordered me to bee quiet and emphasized her demand with a couple of quick swats from her paddle. I sought to be much more quiet from that point.
In looking around, I notice that I can see the floor clearly and there appears to be enough room to sit down, let’s try. Here we run into one of the quirks of SecondLife. It seems that sometimes (and this is apparently fairly common with cages) if you sit on something that you are inside of, you end up sitting on top of it. I looked around in shock, I was out of the cage? Wait, that’s not right! Not knowing what to do, I sat down, and then laid down in front of the cage. I knew that this wasn’t the right way out of the cage, but it will still locked, nothing I could do about it.
The Lady mentioned earlier saw me and immediately accused me of cheating my way out of the cage. As best as I could through the gag, I protested that I hadn’t intended to, that it was an accident, she was unconvinced. She returned me to my cage and debated starting the vote count over. I was able to prevail upon her to return it to the number remaining when I’d popped out. I should mention, she had earlier convinced me to vote for myself which earned me a five vote penalty. I knew I’d been warned not to, but I was so addled that I could not remember who had warned me, namely: Wednesdai, Walter (a very nice Dom) and Dirk, the owner of StoneHaven). I really wish I’d remembered…
I did finally discover a way to sit down without cheating out, using an animation. At last, off my feet. Now the waiting really started to get to me. There was no one around, except for the occasional straggler wandering through. A Lady came up to my cage at one point and asked me what I would offer for her to get her vote. I was so exhausted and, I want to say dejected but I’m not ure it’s the right word, that all I could say was that I would offer my sincerest thanks. She countered by asking what I’d offer to prevent a No vote and I simply couldn’t respond, I was so deep that I had nothing I could pull out. I felt wrung out, and simply said that I would have to accept her choice whatever it was. I honestly don’t remember how she voted, and I think she left a little disappointed. I just had no energy left for anything. I ended up spending the rest of my sentence sitting, head down, staring at the floor. It took me a moment to realize that the cage was open when the final vote came in. All I wanted to do was collapse on a cushion, curl into a ball and hide for a while.
An aside about SecondLife for a bit. A lot of the actions taken by Avatars are due to animations that people have attached to various equipment. Finding a good source of a variety of animations is proving challenging, as is being able to access the right one at the right time. The next time I have some free time I need to really dig into this because I’m finding that the right animation, accessed at a moment’s notice, makes a huge difference.
I stayed on for a while longer once I was out, but more quiet than usual I think, I really was feeling the exhaustion of my ordeal.
When I saw Miss Wednesdai this morning I pleaded with her never ever to put me in that cage unless it was as a punishment. The thought of doing that again is not a pleasant one. It did feel really good to hear how proud she is that I withstood it, that does make it worthwhile, just please Miss, not again soon.
I did have some time for serious reflection, and a long conversation with Walter but this posting is long enough already. More to come…
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