Tabenings - Plague Edition

So, the good news is the first of them stories based on my stories that I'd mentioned a while ago has made its appearance: Incubated by the marvelous Half Shim. If you like 'Pierced', you'll like Incubated! Beaches! Hot babes! Alien crawlers suckling on heads and mucking around with brains!

Speaking of mucking... the bad news is I spent all of last weekend about a hair's breadth from death, or so it felt. Some flu-like malady really kicked the spit out of me; I couldn't even manage to rise from bed to make a proper supper for myself and the Subsidiary Unit either Saturday or Sunday, and I had to get someone to cover for me at work both yesterday and today.

No fun!

But I'm not dead, so that's good, and am in fact a bit on the mend. As mentioned I do have a trip coming up in the near future, one which will put me in a hotel with not a lot to do but eat Cheetos and watch porn (old joke reference) so I will do my best to get some writing done and ready for you scurvy dogs.

(The joke is: man goes in to see the doctor. "What seems to be the problem?" the doctor asks. "Well, doc, it's my penis. It's turned orange." "Orange?" the doctor asks. "Okay, let's see it."

Man pulls down his drawers and sure enough his schwanz is bright orange, the color of marine rescue equipment. "Huh," the doctor says, examining it. "How strange. Hmm. Could be an allergy - have you changed your habits recently? Eating new foods, wearing new clothes?"

"Naw, doc, I can't afford none of that. I got laid off a couple months back so now I just sit at home eating Cheetos and watching porn."

Ba-dum-tsss!)

Tabenings - Aragorn Edition

The Tuesday may come when I fail to update the Secret Files - but it is not THIS Tuesday!

Not that I have much.

Did some work on Pierced, but not as much as I would have liked. Was hoping to have it for this coming weekend but that's looking unlikely at this point. It's tough to have the energy to write smut in the evening when you work all day and then spend your evenings helping your subsidiary unit with homework or shuttling it around to sporting events. I just want to sit down and watch some Home and Garden channel followed by falling asleep to whichever of Colbert, Kimmel, or Fallon has the most interesting guest on.

Yes, it's a thrilling life here in Tabico-land!

I'll note that my colleague Dollmistress has produced another fantastic illustrated story, available over at her Deviant Art gallery, which you should investigate if you haven't already.

(How can they call it "Deviant" Art when they specifically disallow anything naughtier than nudity? Talk about misleading nomenclature. It's a good thing Telsis put up that other page.)

Anyway.

I'm a huge fan of these enslavement/transformation scenes - obviously - and this one has again gotten me thinking about how to build a story around something similar.

I'm thinking some sort of base or facility which is dedicated to human to sexy mindless slave transformation. Our protagonists have to raid it, a la 'Rouge' - we'll get to 'why' in a moment.

Of course, the other immediate question is whose facility is it? I rather neatly solved that in 'Rouge', if I do say so myself. Dollmistress has established the Enthasans, an alien race of mind controlling Mistresses, and aliens are a solid choice for this sort of thing; it lets the author use 'technology' not readily understood by the characters.

(I have something similar going on in 'M&A', if I ever decide to finish that one and release it to the public, though it's all modern real-ish world stuff, no aliens at all. In fact it's in the SCUniverse and Diana Snowden makes an appearance. And Neil Arundsen a phone call. But enough about the back burner.)

So, enslavement facility. I'm gonna start with 'aliens', though I think I'll go Far Future and.... ooh. Now there's an idea.

So. Race of aliens that like to enslave and convert humans. Said race is more powerful than the humans, although there are many solar systems' worth of humans and they're not being totally overrun so much as plucked like fruit.

Fortunately for the humans, there are yet other races who don't go in for enslaving humans - because why would you? I mean, you'd just wind up with all these... humans milling around - and said other races also do not like the Enslavers. For whatever reason.

So those folks and the Enslavers have had a war. And the Enslavers lost (to an indeterminate but significant extent) and have been rolled back. And the humans are now returning to territory which the Enslavers had taken from them, because the victors in the war either don't want it or enjoy being vaguely patronizing towards lesser races.

Thus we have an Enslaving facility, on a former human world. A team of soldiers/scientists goes into it with multiple aims - rescuing anyone not converted, if possible, but also securing Enslaver technology, and confirming that the place is "safe" - and, well, this being Tabico talking, you can guess what happens next.

They find, and turn on, the power.

Mmm.

Also I was considering, based on DM's recent ventures, some still-nebulous way of working audience participation into the story. Sadly, I have yet to crack the mysteries of 3D illustration. But I can write purty. So what I was postulating was writing more or less scene by scene, filling in the plot as dictated by my vision but then larding the thing with delicious naughty conversion scenes by taking a vote on the preferred mechanic for each scene as it arises.

Let me elaborate. So I'd write the intro, which would go long enough to insert the protagonists firmly into the facility and turn on their doom the power. Then there would be a vote on the next scene: who should be subjected to Mind Control, and what form should that Mind Control take - which could be a list of options such as:

• Chemical / drug
• Biological / parasitical 
• Mechanical / implant / MC machine
• Subliminal / subtle
• Hypnotic / interpersonal
• Memory / personality erasure

You get the idea. The depth of the control exerted would be up to the author (me), so earlier scenes would not necessarily be "WHAM she's a mindless robot now" but could be more like laying the groundwork for a personality change - but then again, they could also be "WHAM robot now" for effect.

Whaddya think? Interesting idea? Unworkable? The Internet would discover the poll and make every poll result "Hitler Did Nothing Wrong"? The story's no good if they're all going to end up enslaved anyway, because what's the point you know how it's going to end?

Mid September Tabenings

Well, it looks like even over on 4chan they've given up on seeing an end to 'Pierced', so I guess it's about time I got off my ass and wrote one! Ending that is, not an ass. I don't even know how you would write one of those.

Also, given my recent dearth of smut activity - entirely explicable, mind you, given RL commitments that ramp up this time of year - I'm thinking I may go back to some sort of 'Tidbit' paradigm. Since I do a blog post on Tuesday, maybe Thursday would make sense. For the alliteration.

Other than promises and intentions, though, nothing to report on here this last week. Well, nothing from *me*. I can report that I've seen not just one but two stories - very nice, smexy stories - that other writers - very nice, smexy writers - have done based on or related to my stuff, and that you will probably be seeing the delicious fruits of their labors in the very near future.

Also I've been playing Pillars of Eternity, since it was on sale on Steam recently, and... well, I'm underwhelmed. The mechanics are fine but I've just not been pulled in by the setting. If you want to go dark and morally uncertain in your game's fantasy world, that's fine, but then you particularly need some levity and uprightness to create contrast - even if you plan to tear it down for effect later. Eh. They made an actual game, and I did not... but it would have been better if they'd hired me, that's all I'm saying.

Anywhoo, I'll get some prose bubbling or my name's not Tabico, see if I don't.

Tabenings, Ganesh Edition

Oh snap, it's Tuesday again! How did that happen?

Ohh right, there was a holiday yesterday. Ganesh Chaturthi! Also Labor Day, if you're in the States.

Well, as is too common around this time of year, I've got nothing new to unveil. I already directed you to Dollmistress' excellent and fun recent renderventure, as linked in last week's Tabenings.

As usual with erotic mind control stuff like that, it inspired some naughty spin-off ideas; and this seems like a reasonable place and time to elaborate on them! Having nothing else to report anyway. None of them are jelling into a coherent narrative, but it's worth putting some pins into them for examination.

The tale ends with Mel being turned into an incubation drone, her mind deliciously cored out. This elides in my mind towards pregnancy, and I was thinking how yummy it would be to have a story wherein a group of refugees from the Evil Mind Control forces are taken in by those opposed to the malevolent slavers, but the innocent women/children they admit behind their defenses include a goodly number of pregnant women - who are in fact not pregnant, but have inside them the actual advance agents of the EMC forces.

There's obviously some good bio-squick there; the creatures nestling in their hosts' wombs would have control not only of their hosts but could also have some telepathic MC powers which they would use to enthrall, then enslave, the defenders of the redoubt. And they could have all sorts of icky tentacles or eyes on stalks or whatever which could emerge, glistening, from their hosts' vaginas, to brainwash their new hapless victims.

A particular angle that this snippet evokes in my conception is some serious depersonalization. In general with mind control, even heavy mind control, the subject is assumed to retain some sense of self-worth, even if only as a tool for her Mistress. But in this case, the hosts could have been mentally broken down so much that they see themselves as having no intrinsic value at all - they are merely sheathes, sheltering disguises which their masters wear and might discard as they see fit. And in their remodeled minds, that is as it should be.

To reiterate - this is what the hosts truly believe. Without rancor or disapproval. They've been ego-wiped so thoroughly that they look at themselves, dispassionately, as totally disposable. "I am a slave husk; I have neither will nor desire. The Masters command and I obey. My body will serve their purposes for as long as they desire; then I shall die."

Mmm. Definitely something there.

Secondly, and not particularly related, the coterie of protagonistas which DM set up for us also set me to thinking of a similar 'commandos versus mind control' sort of scenario.

Posit powerful Mind Controllers who, let's be honest, really rather out-class our heroines, much as in DM's Space Ditz universe. Said Mind Controllers can use hypnotic / telepathic powers and pretty much enslave anyone they encounter without a lot of difficulty. For some valid reason they don't run the world - perhaps there aren't that many of them - and our heroines have some small defenses against them but nothing that would withstand direct woman-to-Mistress confrontation.

But! It has come to light that once upon a time the Mind Controllers had some enemies, competition as it were, of a more powerful but less cerebral sort. They got the upper hand over these rivals and, unable to destroy them, locked them away some while ago.

Our heroines have recently learned of the existence of these imprisoned but possibly still puissant entities. And now you can see where this is going - the crew of heroines must infiltrate the still-guarded locale where these enemies-of-their-enemies are locked away and, if possible, enlist their aid.

A desperate mission, to be sure, but what alternative is there?

And of course during the infiltration things will go slightly wrong and some of them will be suborned by the Mind Controllers; possibly some started out as traitors, either knowingly or unwittingly, and will betray their comrades to their Mistresses as soon as the time is ripe. But of course through pluck and luck, success is had, and the vault breached - but what is locked away down here that is frightening enough for the pursuit to stop?

And will whatever it is be helpful? (Well... it will certainly help itself to the delicious minds delivering themselves to it...)

Anywhoo. Some random thoughts there, of the sort that spark off of lovely striking material such as DM's set of renders.

Outlook for my near-term smut productivity is low, but I shall as always keep you posted here, in the Secret Files!