Ai blinks, but the panic doesn’t set in until several seconds pass.

(Where am I?)

Sometimes, in the past, she’d woken up in an unfamiliar place. It always disoriented her, struggling in a foreign environment to take it all in at once. Having to piece together her arrival: how she’d gotten there, where she was, all while her body was still sleep-lagged and not fully awake. This isn’t like waking up.

She had blinked once and found herself in a new place, fully aware, and the assault on her senses came from all directions. She takes it in, but it’s as though her senses are coming on one at a time, discovering pieces of her surroundings before she can understand the whole.

Her arms are crossed over her chest–no, they’re bound over her chest, held down in a tight self-hug, like she’d put on a baggy jacket and had the sleeves tied together like a pretzel around her body. Though Ai had never worn a straightjacket before, she deduces what’s pinning her arms down before she can even see it.

Warmth spreads over her crotch, and again it takes her a couple tries to guess why.

(Did I spill something? No. Blood? Also no. It’s like–ah, I’m peeing.)

That too feels wrong–the warmth doesn’t spread down her thighs, nothing past her crotch, but she can feel more moisture spreading out. Something is between her legs–an acute bulk that rustles when she shifts her weight.

This time, she needs to look, but her attention is quickly taken up by distracting revelations.

Mostly, the hands pressed against her body. One hand with fingers laced through a strap over her chest, holding it tightly like a leash, one pressed into the front of her…

(I’m not wearing pants, and those aren’t panties, that’s a…)

“Diaper?” she says aloud, and the person attached to the hands laughs, a gentle teasing tone, her form still coming into focus.

“Good girl, you’re using your diaper, that’s correct,” she replies. “Just like you were told.”

An audience watches her, paying particular attention to her diaper, to the way she reacts to her humiliations, but she’s blissfully unaware of their presence. For now, it’s just her and the strange woman.

She pulls away, slack-jawed, eyes darting between her diaper and the woman standing in front of her.

“What–no, I didn’t–”

“Shh,” the woman says, a smirk spreading across her face. “If you want me to believe you don’t need your diapers, you’ll have to prove it. There’s a toilet just through that door–even though you couldn’t hold it completely, but if you can keep from making a big, stinky, mess in your diaper, I might let you come out and play with the big kids.”

Ai doesn’t understand, but her mind is still coming into her body, still taking things in. The room looks…not clinical. A clinic would have a degree of comfort, it would be designed to help patients feel a little better about their situation.

The room she’s in looks scientific, but only in a way that makes her feel like a specimen pressed into a glass slide. It’s hastily assembled, as though it were an afterthought, not worth giving any real focus. Why care about the set dressing? Her audience won’t remember what the room looks like; it’ll only remember the way she looks when she’s forced to fill her diaper.

Before she can ask another question, before she can make her brain obey, the woman pushes a rubber ball between her teeth. She moves so swiftly and smoothly that by the time Ai recognizes the gag, it’s already locked into place.

It doesn’t silence her, but it garbles her words into mere noise, so that when she tries to object, it comes out as, “Buhh-mughga!”

The woman smiles again, warmly, like she’s watching a child present a crayon drawing and not facing a fully grown woman babbling into a gag. With straps around and above Ai’s head, she can’t spit it out, and her hands are trapped in the straightjacket, so she can’t reach up and pull it free.

Ai’s senses finally come to be in her body fully, finally give her a full picture, and the result is claustrophobic. She jerks and twists, but her arms are held fast, with only a hint of wiggle room.

“The suppositories won’t leave you much time,” the woman says. “If you want to use the potty, you’d best get started.”

With her role in the performance done, the woman leaves–the audience doesn’t care about her any more, not unless she stays to taunt and belittle. That isn’t her role, it’s not why she’s here, so she won’t play that part.

The room is empty, save for the two doors: one leading to the promised toilet, the other to the exit the woman had taken. With her gone, Ai is left alone.

Ai fights off the urge to keep struggling in the jacket. It wouldn’t get her anywhere; she needs to make progress. Taking deep breaths through her gag, she centers herself.

It’s difficult to walk around with her arms bound. She wobbles unsteadily, and the diaper makes the waddle more acute than it’d otherwise be. Reaching the bathroom door, she leans her back against the perpendicular wall for support.

The bathroom door has a metal latch and a combination lock holding it shut. Next to the lock, a sticky note holds a simple message.

Combination is 1508 - A big girl should have no trouble opening it - Be sure to hurry. If you don’t make it to the potty, you’ve got another spanking in your future! - <3 Aya

Ai’s eyes widen and her brow furrows as she reads the note.

It carries an implicit message. If she enters the combination, she can use the toilet, avoid…a spanking, and…

(She can’t be serious, can she?)

But, because she’s already in a straightjacket, already in a soggy diaper, she intuits another truth.

(She’s serious.)

Ai makes up her mind. She needs to enter the combination.

She takes a moment to inspect the combination lock. It has a spring-loaded cover over the combination, so that it’s difficult to reach. She tries pushing at the cover with her nose, but it won’t move, and the attempt forces her to squat awkwardly. She does half a chicken dance, her padded butt wobbling in the air as she tries to keep upright. Besides, even if she could get the cover to the side, there would be no way to turn the numbers without hands. Maybe her teeth, but they're gagged, and to remove the gag, well…

Ai needs her hands.

She steps back, breathing deeply, and feels a tentative, anxiety-inducing gurgle in her belly. The woman–

(Aya. Her name is Aya.)

Shaking her head, Ai tries to focus. She knows precious little, and can't afford to discard what few details she’s gleaned.

Aya had mentioned suppositories. Ai doesn't know how long it will take the medicine to work, but judging by the early cramps, she can’t imagine it will be long.

Shutting her eyes, Ai takes a few deep breaths.

There aren’t any tools in the room she can use. Nothing sharp or hard or useful for leverage. It’s all up to her.

She tries wriggling again, but this time, it’s not desperate flailing. There’s a little room for her arms to shimmy from side to side, and when she does, she can feel the back strap move.

Squirming with new hope, Ai moves within the jacket. With the little amount of play she has, it seems like it should be possible to wriggle free, to–

“Mmmph!” She squeaks as she feels a sudden, intrusive buzz start up in the front of her sodden diaper.

Bending over, she looks down and sees what she’d missed before. Attached by two straps on the straightjacket, held snugly in place over her diaper is a flat, plastic vibrator. Something had triggered it to start–her audience doesn’t want her to have too easy a time of it, and the distraction serves to entertain.

Ai bites down on her gag and her cheeks flush. There’s only so much she can focus on at once. The claustrophobia, the restriction, and now the vibrator buzzing away, flooding her body with hormones and unwanted pleasure, it forces her down to the ground, sinking onto her butt.

(Deep breaths. Just persist, I can do this.)

The way the vibrator works, pulsing into a layer of sodden padding, just makes it worse: the pleasure is coming through her diaper, forcing her to acknowledge it, to think about the piss-soaked diaper in the context of intense, mind-numbing desire.

After a minute or so, the vibration stops, and the concern that it might kick back into high gear is just more motivation for Ai to keep trying. The gurgle in her belly–an insistent reminder of the suppositories doing their work–only pushes her further.

(Think. The strap. It has play.)

Sitting against the wall, she tries lifting her legs and moving her arms, shimmying side to side to get it out from beneath her, but there isn’t that much play. The strap holding her sleeves together won’t go past her waist.

She tries the other way. Pushing against the wall for support, she stands, wobbles, and then pulls up.

Bingo. It takes a lot of wriggling and effort, but the sleeves move over her head.

Ai’s arms aren’t free, but they have mobility. The sleeves might still cover her hands, and the damned strap holds her arms together, bound so that she’s always making an O shape, but it’s progress; an enormous step in the right direction and a sign that she can succeed.

Before she can celebrate this victory, though…

Bzzz.

Her face flushes again, and she is once again distracted from escaping her situation.

Ai can’t tell if the vibrator is turned higher, or if she’s become more susceptible to it by her first session of edging. Her Ego might shout and complain, but her Id’s reaction to the sensation is undeniable. The vibrator sends pulses through her sodden diaper and into her sex. Intense pleasure signals carry up her back and into her thoughts, killing her ability to focus on anything, even breathing, air escaping her mouth as little desperate moans.

(You’re better than how you feel.)

She bites down on the gag until it hurts her jaw, forcing deep breaths through her nose.

(Don’t let this beat you.)

Another minute passes before the vibrator dies, and in its wake Ai needs a few moments to recover, panting into her gag. The pressure in her bowels is more intense than ever, but she’s still able to hold it. She still has time.

Getting back to her feet, Ai already notices an improvement. With her arms able to move freely, she can balance, all the wobbliness gone. She doesn’t need to use the wall for support any longer.

Waddling back to the padlock, she tries again, pressing the sleeves of the straightjacket into the combination cover.

No dice. She can sort of get the cover to slide to the side, but when she does, there’s not enough play to get the small dial beneath to spin how she wants it.

Her attention returns to the jacket.

She can open and close her hands beneath the heavy canvas. It doesn’t give her much control, but it gives just enough to grab things. Fumbling at her back, moving her arms together so she can reach as far as possible, she feels at the straps holding the jacket over her body.

Ai isn’t certain, but by wriggling and moving her back, she puts together a rough estimation of how it had been assembled. There are three buckled straps that comprise the linchpin of the vest. If she can get those loose, there’ll be enough play that she’d be able to get the crotch strap free. And, once that’s free, the jacket will just slide right off.

Simple. Not easy, but simple.

Ai refuses to contemplate the alternative to success: the pressure in her bowels releasing, and the subsequent threats that’d been made. She tells herself that the pressure she feels is just a ticking clock, and she lacks the time to think about why this self-delusion isn’t true.

Determined, she gets to work, pawing at her back. Going by sense of feel isn’t easy, especially when she has to work through layers of dense canvas, and her only way to manipulate things is to fumble through the jacket and try to squeeze whatever she can reach.

Grumbling into her gag, she works at it all the same, spinning in place to try and get a better angle like a dog chasing her own tail, until…

Cli-clack-clack-clack.

The rattle of the metal buckle pulling free is pure relief, pure triumph. Just two to–

“MMpHH!” Her unbidden squeak seems deafening in the utterly silent room, legs buckling beneath her as she the vibrator kicks into high gear.

This time, Ai knows it’s turned up higher just from the pitch of the vibration, and she also can’t deny that her body is more susceptible than ever. The mixed sensation, frustration, and simple burning feelings that the buzzing brings up from deep inside Ai makes her forget herself, and she rides the pleasure with purpose. It isn’t just that there’s a vibrator pressed into her diaper, there’s something… more, but she can’t identify what.

She wants it.

Just before she can ride into a reluctantly anticipated climax, the vibration stops. Ai cries out–no longer grateful to have the vibration end, but furious that she was denied her pleasure. She could have at least had a little bliss before returning to her task, but they–

She sits up sharply, the truth finally dawning. The timing is too perfect for the vibrator’s control to be automatic, on a timer, anything. An intelligent observer is turning it off and on at particular times.

But… though she walks a circle of the room to look for one, she can’t see a camera, a viewport, or anywhere to hide and watch. The door doesn’t even have a gap beneath it or a keyhole to peer through. Her audience is watching another way, and she has no means to understand how. It can’t just be visual, either–they know precisely how Ai feels, they know her intimately, able to turn off the vibrator to deny her the climax that she’s been conditioned to want.

Ai tries not to think about what else they could condition her to want. For now, she just wants three things–the toilet behind the door, the climax she’d been denied, and an explanation for her circumstances.

She can’t have the third and isn’t in control of the second, so she forces herself to focus on the first. Accepting that she’ll have to deal with a malicious audience, Ai turns her attention to the second buckle. It’s harder in some ways, having to reach further down her back, but with the first buckle free she has a lot more range of motion. With only a minute of squirming, it comes free, and this time, knowing she’s got watchers, she braces herself.

It comes, right on queue, and she leans back against the wall, biting down on the gag and riding it out. She doesn’t hide that she’s enjoying it, and she admits to herself that the soggy diaper carrying the vibration into her might actually make things better.

This time, Ai speeds things along. One orgasm could clear the distraction from her mind, it could let her think more clearly, it could end the uncomfortable correlation that’s building in her unconscious between diapers and an almost incomparable sexual craving. She tries to indulge in the pleasure, to rush to the peak.

And again, it stops before she can climax. No pleasure to be had, just denial.

(I was…just trying to get Aya to stop, because I knew she wouldn’t let me finish.)

Ai doesn’t believe herself.

Only one buckle to go.

She knows she’s going to make it. Her desperation is intense, but even if the vibrator sessions take minutes of her time away, she can last. It’s so close.

Ai just has to get the last buckle, which, now that she has a high range of motion with most of the jacket loose, isn’t difficult at all.

Bracing herself, anticipating the vibrator’s surging power, she waits a couple seconds. She’s left disappointed when it refuses to activate.

Frowning, she continues her escape. With all the other buckles free, she slides the straightjacket off her body. Though she feels a need to use the toilet, it’s not unstoppable.

For reasons she can’t quite explain, she goes for the combination first, before stripping out of the diaper. 1508.

(Is that 15-0-8? Or 1-50-8?... ‘1-5-08? Eh… oh, okay. There’s no ‘0’ on the combination, and no ‘08’. So it’s gotta be 1-50-8.)

Free fingers working deftly, she enters the combination.

And, as triumph is within her grasp, she feels the vibrator pulse to life.

The door swings open, but at that moment, her knees buckle. She falls to the ground, staring into the bathroom she’d unlocked, but she’s left stupefied by pleasure and cannot enter it.

The vibrations are like nothing she’s ever felt before. Greater, more dominating than any sex in her memory, any pleasure she’s ever felt. The vibrator paralyzes her completely, rising in waves that give her just enough time to try and break free before it surges once more, throttling her mind, never quite reaching an intensity to let her climax, nor dropping enough to allow her escape. Her body craves the sensations, the feeling of a saturated diaper throbbing against her sex, and Ai cannot pretend that she only wants the edging to end faster.

She can only sit on the ground, staring forward at the toilet only a few feet away, hopelessly frozen in agonizing bliss as the pressure in her builds, builds, builds, and with her thoughts and body so far from her own control, there’s no holding back.

The edging may have lasted a minute, or ten, but it keeps her down until the suppositories do their work, and her diaper suddenly swells. The seat balloons out as a sudden warmth sludges into the padding. It’s faster than she expected, more intense: One moment, her diaper was only wet, but now it bulges and sags, muck packing in every corner available.

Even then, as the smell hits her and she knows she’s lost this game, she still wants it.

(No…)

She still needs it. Her promised climax, the one bright spot of hope amidst the landscape of her shattered dignity.

Biting down on the gag, moaning in wordless prayer to whatever cruel god controls her vibrator, Ai is given only disappointment. The vibrator dies, and she is left utterly defeated as the door behind her unlocks.

Frustration pours over her. She’d lost. She’d lost, she’d humiliated herself for her audience’s pleasure, she’d bottomed out her diaper while only moments away from victory, she’d lost. And, even then, helpless to change the situation, the lingering desire still burns, craving the orgasm she’d earned.

In the mental drop that follows, panting heavily and catching her breath, her thoughts clear slightly. A question in her thoughts that she hadn’t been able to consider, not until her thoughts were in her control again.

(…the vibrator had been attached to the straightjacket, hadn’t it? So how–)

The door behind her swings open.

Aya steps in, making a show of sniffing the air, of ‘realizing’ that Ai has loaded her diaper like a helpless infant.

“That’s what I thought,” Aya declares. “Well then–I think it’s time for your spanking.”

It’s exactly what her audience had wanted, and the fate Ai had fought desperately to avoid.

But then, her wants don’t matter. She exists to be observed, not to be happy, and right now, her observers see Aya pull her down, push her body so that her ruined diaper points into the air, and begin her assault.

Aya’s slaps are merciless and devastating, and Ai is at a loss for which contacts are the worst.

The swats to her thighs sting like a swarm of bees; each leaving angry red marks on her tender, bare skin, and each eliciting a helpless, pained squeak into her gag. Pain builds with each impact, growing, multiplying on itself, burning overlaid on a deep ache, accented by acute spikes of acid pain.

The blows to her diaper did little to hurt her body, but sent disquieting shockwaves through her soul. Though the pain is muffled by a layer of saturated, abused padding, the way that each spank presses the results of her accident into her reminds Ai that she failed and humiliated herself, and that she’d do it all again if it would get her ten seconds with the vibrator to reach the bliss she still craved. It makes her squirm in embarrassment and shame, worrying if she had always been this depraved, or if she’d just been broken that easily.

But, while pain and humiliation eat at her in their own ways, neither are the worst. What drives her insane are the occasional pauses, the rests where Aya retreats her hand and gently caresses the skin of Ai’s back and her delicate hair, soothing her, whispering sweet sounds without meaning, reassuring Ai in whispers that she’s doing so well to take her spanking like a good girl. Ai wants to scream.

(How dare you try and comfort me when you’re the one inflicting the pain?)

But another thought plays in her mind.

(If you’re not going to stop, can you hold me closer?)

In the haze, the mindfuck soup that’s slowly blending her consciousness into putty, Ai starts to slip, but she refuses to lose herself. She catches onto a thread–the one facet of her identity that remains.

Her id slips away, disassociating from her quickly sublimating ego. She puts together her coherent thoughts, slim as they are, and chief among them is confusion.

(It’s not much, but it’s all I’ve got. How did I get here?)

At first, she thinks about the room–how did she get put in the straightjacket? Or in this facility, for that matter? But then, a more specific form of the question presents itself.

(How did I get here? Over Aya’s lap?)

Ai remembers her defeat: Subdued by the vibrator, dropped to her knees, forced to pack her diaper full mere feet from the toilet.

She remembers Aya coming in, taunting her, the subtle ways that the woman made Ai feel as small and helpless as possible.

Then…Ai was over Aya’s lap, and the spanking began, as though the world had shifted around them. Aya has a chair now.

(There definitely hadn’t been a chair in here before!)

The thoughts have no clear answer, and worrying over them, trying to parse the impossible situation, forces her mind back into her body. The full physical sensations assert themselves again: every smell, every feel, every ache.

Flailing, struggling, none of it seems to help. She’s going to be on Aya’s lap until the spanking is over, and there’s nothing she can do to resist that fate, but she no longer has the capacity to realize this. The mental break draws her deeper into her role: she fights, she kicks and yelps and whimpers, not because she thinks it will get her away, but because if she shows her defeat and wears her humiliation like armor, maybe Aya will give a little sympathy.

Finally, the last few blows on her thighs rain down–hard enough that she cries out with more volume than ever–and it ends. The pain is over. All that’s left is a smug, taunting little bit of pressure; Aya rests her hand on the seat of Ai’s full diaper and presses down. It’s a degrading reminder that, for everything she’s been through, Ai still needed her pleasure.

“Shh, shh,” Aya says, though Ai is perfectly quiet save for shallow breaths. “You took your spanking like a good girl–I think that deserves a reward.”

(A reward?)

Ai’s eyes snap open, heart suddenly pounding.

(Will…will she give me the wand?)

Of course not. Even her gifts can only ever push her deeper into humiliation. Aya pulls Ai up, first seating the young woman on her lap, then turning her so that they face one another. Ai wriggles, but Aya’s firm grip pulls Ai down, so that her legs straddle one of Aya’s thighs.

“You did good, just enjoy yourself,” Aya coos, and before Ai can even try to ask a question through her gag, the taller, stronger woman begins to bounce her knee up and down, a rhythmic motion against the ground.

Each bounce raises Ai up just for a heartbeat, momentum carrying her into the air, and then down again to smash her weight into the mucky, full contents of her diaper. She’d packed it full–the suppository had left her unable to do anything else–and the heavy, squelching contents slosh against her skin with every landing, wafting the stink upward into a haze she can’t help but inhale.

It’s as bad as the spanking–worse, because at least then the humiliation was broken up with pain. Now it’s one note playing over and over ad nauseam until Ai can’t think about anything except the state of her diaper, how she had failed, how she had been helpless from the start, how she never could have done anything except lose control, fall to her knees, and prove her infantile helplessness for all to see.

It had been inevitable, and now Aya makes sure that Ai knows it.

But Aya isn’t all cruel. Once the lesson has sunk in, once Ai’s headspace is fully sunk into the seat of her diaper as firmly as her last accident, Ai realizes–this is the prize she wanted all along. She doesn’t need the vibrator, she just needs her diaper, and the slick ecstasy rhythm of Aya’s constant bouncing.

It doesn’t take her long. The bouncing lacks the white-hot power of the vibrator, the ability to all but rip an orgasm out of her body, but all of Ai’s intense edging has broken down her mind, left her horny and desperate in a way that only one pleasure could solve: the pleasure she gets from her diapers. She wants this–all of it.

Shuddering, Ai’s thoughts laser-focused on her helpless lack of control, relying on Aya’s firm arms to guide her as she bounces up and down. Each new rise and fall now rocks her with pleasure so intense it almost hurts, and only when she’s gasping and whimpering, thoughts numbed by ecstasy, do the bounces slow to a stop. She falls forward into Aya’s waiting arms, sweaty and delirious.

“There’s my good girl,” Aya says, patting her back gently. “Now, let’s get you changed, okay? The experiment is over for the day.”

(The…huh?)

Aya doesn’t explain further, and with her gag in, Ai can’t ask. She wants to, but her head is awash with a soup of endorphins and it’s difficult to convey any requests. ‘Take off my gag so I can speak immediately’ doesn’t occur to her. She’ll ask when she can, if she can, if Aya will allow it and if her audience doesn’t put a stop to anything so reasonable as ‘telling Ai what’s going on.’

Aya guides her to the floor, gently laying Ai on her back, so that her diaper is easily accessible. Reaching for the nearest tape, Aya pulls it free.

…

Ai blinks. She’s in the room–or, maybe a different room, it’s so bland that she can’t quite tell. Sharp emotional whiplash courses through her–all the hormones and post-coital bliss has vanished. She feels almost sick at the change, like instantly switching from drunk to sober, though there’s no expected headache or physical discomfort to accompany the stark mental shift.

Aya is gone.

Ai’s diaper is clean–no, that’s not right. Though it’s reasonably dry, and there’s no longer a heavy load weighing down the seat, she can feel a trickle of dampness dribbling into the crotch. She’s mostly clean, but a little wet.

Otherwise, she’s naked. A gag is locked in her mouth again–nobody wants to hear what she has to say–but her hands are free.

More importantly, her mind is free as well. Something seems to have cleared it–the soup of endorphins that had rendered her thoughts into pulp has lifted. She remembers everything clearly, but with the distance of the morning after, the feeling of a cold dawn light that showed how far she’d fallen just moments before.

In the corner, she sees a steel cage, like a kennel that might hold a large dog, but sturdier. Against the far wall is a TV, an old tube style that probably weighs a billion pounds and has its own built-in VHS player.

The doors are where Ai remembers, but the handles have been replaced. Instead of padlocks or tumblers, they have pin pad locks. A new puzzle. A clock on the wall counts down–it shows five hours and fifty nine minutes, with the seconds slipping lower and lower. Thirty three. Thirty two.

Finally, Ai turns to see a stack of worksheets on the floor, with crayons in a cardboard box next to them.

She has a good sense of what she’s supposed to do, but she isn’t interested in playing. She knows that playing will lead to more demolition of her mind, more brainfuck pain and pleasure that will leave her identity in further fragments.

Reaching down, she rips off the diaper.

…

Ai blinks and looks around.

She is in the same room, but she’s standing somewhere else. Her brow furrows. Did she…teleport? Did the room move around her?

Or did she lose time?

The clock shows that only a minute has passed–Five fifty eight and some seconds, not five fifty nine.

Looking down, she notes the constant–she’s got her diaper on again, still just ever so slightly damp, though the tapes are different–placed a bit higher, pulled a bit more snug.

She wants to say, ‘Screw this’, but the gag stops her, so she just thinks it as intensely as she can and rips the garment free.

…

Ai blinks, steps back, and stomps her foot. She’s moved again, a few steps over. Pressing both her hands into her face, she groans, muffling her exasperation. Only thirty seconds have gone by.

Her diaper…

(Fuck this, I’m not wearing a fucking diaper.)

She rips it free.

…

Ai-

“AAGGGGHHHH!” She screams, frustration coming through without any need for defined words.

Her diaper is still in place–though, looking closely, she sees that duct tape has been added, reinforcing the straining sticky tapes that’d lost their bite after being undone several times. It’s slightly cool, almost clammy, as though it’d been exposed to air for a while. Five full minutes had passed–apparently, some time had been needed to retrieve the tape.

Petulantly, Ai refuses to play the game. Knowing what will happen, she rips the tape free and yanks at the diaper beneath.

…

Ai yelps as she comes to her senses.

Things have changed.

Her diaper is back–of course–but if it’s held in place with tape, she can’t see, because it’s beneath a ruffled pink onesie that zips up behind her back. Her hands are no longer the tool they’d been before, either–canvas mittens are pulled over them, so while she can bat things around and probably pick objects up in awkward fists, she couldn’t squeeze a zipper or get her fingers under her diaper’s tapes.

More acute, more distressing, she feels a solid weight in her bottom–cold, solid metal from a particularly heavy butt plug.

Twenty minutes have passed, and the countdown continues. Five hours thirty-four minutes, something-something seconds, she doesn’t care about the precise count.

Though there’s nothing written in the room, no notes left for her, she gets the message. If she continues to throw a tantrum and refuses to play the game presented to her, it will only get worse. Right now, she has to deal with a distracting, intrusive plug and no more hands. If she disobeys again, she might find herself back in the straightjacket, or some other torture. Who knows what other obscenities her audience would want done to her?

So, though she wants to continue to abstain from her captor’s game, she crouches in front of the TV.

Looking at the black glass, at her reflection, she––

Note: Ai does not lose time here, and fully perceives things for a moment. What she sees, however, is withheld from her audience.

–”What the fuck?” she yelps, stumbling back, landing on her butt–pushing the plug into her, reminding her of its constant presence.

She’s shaken, but she has to keep pressing on. Crawling forward, she presses the power button on the TV, then rewinds the VHS player to the start. The nostalgic whir of reversing tape calms her down a bit, and by the time it resets, her heart has stopped pounding.

When it plays, her pulse skyrockets again.

A woman with vaguely Southeast Asian features stares into the camera, wavy dark hair rippling over her shoulders and a confident smirk plastered on her lips, her eyes seeming to follow Ai.

Ai recognizes the face, but doesn’t understand how she’s seeing it here.

“In case you’re too little to properly understand the rules,” the woman says, “I’ve decided to give you this little explainer. If you can complete the worksheets, each one will give you a letter–you do know your letters, don’t you, sweetie?”

The woman paused for a moment, to let her leering condescension hit with full impact. Ai just watches wide-eyed, confusion and fear clouding her thoughts.

“Well–if you get all the letters, it’ll tell you the combination to the door. Get the door open before your time is up, and you can have a grown up dinner, a diaper change, and you can sleep in a grown up bed tonight. But, if you don’t, you’ll be fed through a bottle and you’ll be sleeping in the kennel behind you. And since I expect the special medicine in the bottle will make your tummy very upset, you’ll be wishing for a diaper change all night, but you won’t get one. You’ll be trapped.”

Sneering, the woman on the video reaches forward towards something, and then the video ends.

Ai just looks at the black screen for a moment, at her reflection, until the black void of video turns to a blue ‘no signal’ screen.

She looks at the worksheets for a moment, but her gaze can’t focus, and she starts to panic. It doesn’t make sense. She saw a detail she wasn’t supposed to see, and the discontinuity has broken her ability to play along.

Ai stands, and though her hands are bound by mitts and her onesie keeps her diaper in place, it’s not enough. She can still refuse to play–getting her hands under the hem of the onesie, she yanks at it, tearing the fabric free. Maybe next time they’ll seal her in kevlar or tie her hands behind her back, she doesn’t care, she exposes her diaper–it’s a new diaper, apparently, there’s no tape and the patterns are different–and rips it away.