Zoë 24/7
by YFNR

This is an immediate sequel to "Zoë finds a Reluctant Master" by Yashi. It is so immediate that the action begins just one second after that story ends.

Zoë found that the water was warm. I knew it would be; that end of the lake by my hunting and fishing place is shallow, and it is quickly warmed by a few days of May sunshine. There was little risk that Zoë would get a cramp when she plunged in, but a leg cramp could have been a serious problem with her arms out of action behind her back. So I carefully escorted her out to the island where I had put the combination for her wrist-link lock, doing the side stroke and watching her while she flutter-kicked.

The little sticker with the combination for that lock was taped to a willow tree with broad transparent tape. That was the safest way I could think of to keep rain or an animal from carrying it away. I undid Zoë's wrists, and she easily beat me back to the dock, moving through the water like a veteran lifeguard (which after all she was). Then we went back to the house, and I cooked a generous batch of steak-and-eggs for both of us.

After breakfast she ran off into the woods, and we started a game of naked-girl-hide-and-strong-man-seek. The first time I caught her, I lashed her wrists together crossed behind the small of her back, and it became a game of bound-naked-girl-hide-and-strong-man-seek. We had fun until lunch, which I fed her without undoing her wrists. Afterwards we went walking through the woods together, my arm around her waist, just enjoying each other's company. We spent that night in the house, with Zoë tied spreadeagled by my side. We even managed to get some sleep.

That was the first of many sunny summer weekend days for us at that camp. We took Penny once or twice, but it was usually just the two of us. We had to invite Penny after Zoë told her about the dunking tank. Penny had to see for herself, and we found that she was close enough in size to Zoë that she could ride the dunking cage too.

It's a long long time from May to December, but the days grow short when you reach September. The weekend days seemed even shorter that September because every weekend was rained out. I knew that soon we would have to find our fun together closer to home.

I had fulfilled one of Zoë's fantasies with the cage in the dunking tank, but that cage wasn't practical for her other fantasy: 24/7 confinement, long-term. I began thinking about how that could be accomplished. Fortunately, I had a nice head start.

I had a one-and-a-half story, three-car garage to work with. My house, and that garage, had been the second project of my brand-new contracting company, right after the first project had made me some money. I thought that the company would be based in that garage, at least temporarily, but the business took off so fast that it outgrew the garage within a few months. The only space still used for business was my desk and office area upstairs, where Zoë now worked.

These days I have only one vehicle, a full-size four-wheel-drive pickup that is strong enough and comfortable enough to replace both my old rough construction-site pickup and the sedan I used to drive. That left two unused parking spots in the garage, spots that had been filled up over the years with junk, miscellany, and miscellaneous junk. I needed to clean out one of those spots anyway, so that Zoë could park her car there. Why not clean out the whole place, the garage downstairs and the attic space upstairs, and install a proper 24/7 holding facility?

I could bring in a construction crew to do the much of the work, and as a matter of fact I had a crew available in November between the deadline for finishing one project and the start date for another. However, I didn’t want anyone I didn’t trust perfectly to see the final result. It would take just one person, saying too much over a few drinks in a bar, and then our local gossips would have a field day.

Finishing the job would be much easier with two people to work on it. I needed an assistant I could trust, and there weren't many candidates. I asked Penny, and she answered "I will probably have a nightmare about that idea tonight."

That reply surprised me. I asked "A nightmare? Why?"

"I have this mental image of us driving in one of the vehicles from our county emergency service. Suddenly a call comes in alerting us to a fire in your garage. We drop whatever we were doing and rush to your place, with our siren wailing. The fire department is there before us, and the flames are mostly out now. We dash up the stairs, and we find Zoë's body on the floor just inside the locked door. She is dead of smoke inhalation. There are bruises on her hands which show that she was fighting the locks and chains with panic intensity before she died, but she couldn't get anything to release."

That certainly would be a nasty basis for a nightmare. I saw right away that I would have to modify some of my plans.

= = = = =

I had to do a general clean-out before the remodeling work began. I couldn't get much help with that, because nobody else could make the decisions.

For example, there were some rusty worn-out tools that should have been sent to the landfill long ago. That is where most of them went. But one of the tools was a hammer with a cracked wooden handle which I sent instead to the local artists' supply shop, for framing and engraving of a brass ID plaque. That hammer was the first tool that I bought with my contractor's discount, so it was the first tool owned by my construction company. It hangs now on the wall of the customers' lounge at the company garage. Nobody else would have recognized it.

Decisions, decisions: books worth re-reading, books only worth burning as fuel, my son Jimmy's old toys (He lives in Thailand now), my wife's clothing, photo albums and photos, half-empty cans of paint, etc. etc. and so on and so forth. I was still cleaning surplus stuff out when the rest of the job was completed.

Once the space was clear enough, the construction crew came in. Fire safety first. I checked my copy of NFPA 13, Standard for the Installation of Sprinkler Systems, and I had the crew follow its recommendations carefully both upstairs and downstairs. I figured that the experts at the National Fire Protection Association who are responsible for that document would know how to do the job right. The installation included an alarm flowmeter. If any water ever goes through the sprinkler plumbing, other than during tests to make sure it all works, then that flowmeter will trigger calls to my cell phone and to 911. It will also trip relays that will switch locking magnets off and allow Zoë to escape.

The crew put in a bathroom against the outside wall on the far end of the garage from the house. The room was narrow, with a toilet at one end, a prefab fiber glass shower stall at the other, and a sink against the outside wall in the middle. There was only about three feet of open space between the edge of the sink and the inside wall of the bathroom.

The next item was a newer, stronger door at the head of the garage stairs, a steel door in a steel frame. I mentioned in passing that Zoë would often be working there alone, and she needed to be kept safe. I carefully did not say that the “kept” part would be at least as important as the “safe” part.

I had taken lunch up to Zoë several times so that she and I could eat together at her desk. I found that taking a hot meal through several doors and up those stairs was an awkward job. So I had the crew install a dumbwaiter between my dining room and the back corner of the garage.

Finally one of my electricians put a new breaker box into the wall of the garage stairwell and ran conduit to new lights, new outlets, and new circuit boxes that Penny and I would be using for the final installation.

We turned the water on in the new bathroom in early December, and it became the first of Zoë's Christmas presents that year. Besides the bathroom, I found an old cast-iron bunk bed in a second-hand store, the kind of bed you might have expected to find in a boy scout camp or college dormitory. I bought a brand-new very comfortable mattress for the bottom bunk, and we put that bed up in the former attic area. I also set up a folding table there, the kind that is the size of two card tables; that table folds in half in the middle for easy carrying. These changes reduced the need for Zoë to ever leave the second floor of the garage. Zoë and I ate at that table on Christmas day, and Penny joined us the following day after spending Christmas with her own family.

Zoë found a special present from me under the tree. She tried to pick it up, and she found that she needed both hands to lift it comfortably. The package wasn't very big, but it was heavy. When she opened it, she found a set of aluminum leg shackles, custom-made by Martin Handcuffs, very thick and bulky, with nine stainless-steel chains connecting the two cuffs. The standard model of these shackles has eight-inch-long chains and weighs 3.9 kilograms, according to Martin's website. Zoë's pair is custom-made with 14-inch chains, to match the ankle spacing that she is used to. With the extra weight of the longer chains, this pair must weigh more than ten pounds. That much weight on the ankles tends to discourage long walks, especially long walks that involve going up and down stairs. She would probably want to stay in her space while she wore those shackles.

I started her gently, putting the heavyweight shackles on her for only an hour at a time. But they were perfectly shaped and sized to fit her ankles without bruising. We soon found that she could wear the shackles for at least a week continuously.

I thought at first that the most erotic possible sound was the chinging and ringing of nine shackle-link chains against each other when Zoë walked across the floor. I soon found something even better. Zoë's cuffs had another custom modification: provision of several points for attaching additional chains to the front, back, and sides. I had her lie on her back on that newly-acquired bunk bed, and I attached the fronts of her cuffs to the side rails of the upper bunk. A careful adjustment of length suspended the cuffs less than an inch above the lower-bunk mattress. This arrangement took the weight of the cuffs off of Zoë's ankles, while it left most of the weight of her legs on the mattress. It minimized the risk of bruising. Zoë soon learned to sleep that way.

The cuff supporting chains could slide freely along those upper-bunk side rails, since there was no upper mattress. If Zoë folded her knees, I could move those chains almost to the middle of the rails. Then when Zoë pivoted her hips and allowed her knees to separate, there was more than enough room for me in the middle. This arrangement put three of the cuff linking chains under tension, so that they made no noise. But owing to the angle of the cuffs when Zoë's knees were so widely separated, there was some slack in the other six chains. I eventually decided that the sounds of those chains when Zoë reached orgasm was even more erotic than the sound of the chains while she was walking.

One of Zoë’s cousins had always wanted to take a winter vacation in Florida, so I told Zoë that she wanted to go too. I reminded her that Florida weather in February is often warm enough that people wear nothing but swim suits, and I offered to pay for that trip for her and for her cousin. After she left, Penny and I were very busy every afternoon and evening for the next three weeks. Zoë's 24/7 place was ready for her when she came back.

= = = = =

Finally the big day came. Zoë parked her car in the garage, and went up the stairs, and saw for the first time how Penny and I had transformed the space. She found herself in an anteroom that was separated from the rest of the space by a new wall made mostly of stiff woven/welded steel wire mesh panels. The wires in the panels were heavy gauge and about two inches apart, and they ran diagonally, forming a diamond pattern. One end of the anteroom had a small closet and a bureau, with more than enough space for all of Zoë's clothes. The house-side wall had a row of hooks that Penny and I could use for coats and anything else we chose to take off.

Access to the rest of the space was through a sliding door in the new wall, made from the same wire paneling. Off to the right, a counter was supported on two metal columns, about a yard apart, that were parts of the wall. The counter was thirty inches wide and 48 inches long, half inside the wall and half out in the anteroom. Above the counter the wall was different, made of horizontal quarter-inch steel rods on five-inch spacing, firmly welded into the columns on either end.

At each end of the counter were not-quite-chairs made from steel wire paneling mesh, bulging out from the wall. These objects were shaped like overstuffed chairs, hollow inside. It might be possible to put an automobile bucket seat into either of them. But they couldn't be sat on, because they were too close to the counter, and there was no way to adjust them. A creature that could sit on one of these not-quite-chairs would have to measure no more than two inches from bellybutton to spine.

Zoë peeled her dress off, said "At last!", and hung it in her small closet. She had nothing on underneath, as per usual. She walked through the wire-paneling door, which was latched open. She found that she was in a corridor that ran the length of the garage, all the way back to the bathroom. Most of the right-hand wall was made from more of the steel wire panels. The space behind the right-hand wall was subdivided into a series of rooms/cages that were entered through doorways from the corridor.

The first of these rooms/cages was a bookkeeper's office, with a desk, and a computer, and file cabinets, and shelves, and all other necessities for that job. The inside half of the counter in the anteroom wall poked into this space on the right.

The next room/cage was an exercise area with a treadmill, a stationary bicycle, and a Bowflex bench. Zoë would have no trouble staying in condition without leaving her space.

The next stretch of the corridor had a solid wooden wall, with a solid-looking wooden door. The door had no knob, just a simple pull handle and the cylinder for a pin-tumbler lock.

I had accommodated another of Zoë's fantasies alongside the next stretch of the corridor. I sawed off the bottoms of the legs on her bunk bed, to lower it so that the bottom of her mattress was only three inches off of the floor. (Like most bunk beds, Zoë's did not have a mattress pad.) The lowered bed sat alongside the corridor in a pocket of wire paneling that almost surrounded it. Curtains behind the wire paneling blocked off the view of the rest of this part of the space. To allow entry from the corridor, a hatchway about 24 inches tall and 30 inches wide opened near the foot of the bed. Zoë had spoken about crawling into the cage that would contain her. She would have to crawl to get through that hatchway.

The pocket of wire paneling also contained a headboard that Penny and I had made of wood, designed to stand on the floor at the head of the bunk bed. It included two shelves; one of those had two lock boxes with quarter-inch-thick Lexan windows. One of the lock boxes could accept a padlock.

The last stretch before the bathroom had no easily understandable purpose. The wall was wooden, with one relatively shallow large recess and one much deeper recess with a smaller opening. The large recess had a thin layer of padding on all sides. Both recesses had steel-wire-panel doors.

A long row of low cabinets occupied the other side of the corridor, opposite the wall of steel-wire panels. The front roof of the garage sloped much more than the roof of the shed-type dormer in the back, and those low cabinets were tucked under the corresponding sloping ceiling on the inside. Some of the cabinets had locked doors with lock cylinders clearly visible. The cabinets near Zoë's bed held a large-screen TV, and a TIVO recording system.

Zoë turned to me, obviously wondering about the purpose of some of these details.

I said "This is how it is, and this is how it will be for as long as you want to keep it that way. The master keys for the whole place are hanging from a hook in the wire paneling by your bed. If you wish, you can put those keys in the lock box in the headboard of your bed. You could keep watch over them through the Lexan window of that box, and you could lock them up safely with a combination lock on the door of that box. Of course, if you would rather see the full capabilities of this place, you can give me the keys. I will then be able to get into the circuit breaker box on the stairs, which is locked, and switch some breakers on. But fair warning: if you give me the keys, I will keep them until I feel like returning them. Your only way out then would be to chicken out and use your safeword. I know that you don't want to do that. So make up your mind. Keep the keys, or give them up."

Zoë paused and thought, but only for a moment. Then she went to her bunk, and pulled the keys off of their hook, and handed them over to me, looking down with an embarrassed smile as she did so. That was exactly the reaction that I had anticipated, even including the embarrassed smile. I was really getting to know my Zoë.

= = = = =

Penny and I walked back out into the anteroom. I went halfway down the stairs, opened the breaker box, and threw the necessary switches.

I returned to the anteroom and pulled out my cell phone. It was one of the fancy models, equipped for connection to the Internet, and it had a wireless link to the master computer for Zoë’s space. Even if Zoë got her hands on it, she wouldn’t be able to use it to lock or unlock anything, because she didn’t know the security codes.

At that moment, Zoë was standing in the corridor outside the office area. The steel-wire doors to that stretch of corridor were latched open by electromagnets. I punched in a code, which switched off the power to those electromagnets. With a combined crash, Zoë’s access to the office, the exercise area, the anteroom, and the other end of the corridor were all cut off. Another set of electromagnets then held the doors closed, and those magnets are rated at 1300 pounds pulling force. Zoë was quite securely caged into a barren stretch of corridor. She checked the doors, and realized that she couldn’t escape. She gave me a wicked grin.

And then I asked, “Is anybody hungry? Penny, why don’t you show Zoë how the eating accommodations work?”

Penny was agreeable. She took her EMT coverall and her underwear off, so that she was as naked as Zoë. She stepped on a floor pedal under the not-quite-chair at the far end of the anteroom wall. The entire anteroom side of this object was an access door, and it opened. Penny climbed in, settled herself with her head sticking out the top, and pulled the door shut using a small handle conveniently placed on the inside. The door magnet clicked into place, locking Penny in.

The purpose of the not-quite-chairs suddenly became evident. They were girl cages, each just large enough inside to hold one kneeling woman. There was space enough around Penny’s body for her hands and arms in front, alongside, or behind her. Since her hands were not bound into any of those positions, she had some room to move them. But the top opening clamped her neck firmly into place, and there was no excess clearance around her knees. She would remain kneeling in that girl cage until somebody released her.

I stepped on the pedal under the other girl cage, and the inside face of that cage opened to allow access from the corridor where Zoë was trapped. Zoë climbed in and pulled the door shut again without being told to do so. At that point I had two closely-confined beauties waiting for me to feed them. I said “See you later” in the most casual tone I could muster, walked out the exit door and down the stairs, and disappeared from their view.

Of course I was cooking food and loading it into the dumbwaiter. Less than half an hour later I returned and brought a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs over to the counter. I used just the one bowl. For politeness’ sake, I fed myself and each of the girls with a separate fork.

The girls were clearly not upset by being left in girl cages. When I got back they just continued the conversation that they had started half an hour before, catching up on each other’s lives over the previous three weeks.

We had just finished the last of the spaghetti noodles when we heard a stereo “Dah …Deeee…Dahhh” as Penny’s pager and mine went off simultaneously. Somebody had called 911 to report a heart attack, and the duty crew at the ambulance service was already out on another call. I stepped on the floor pedal to release Penny and grabbed my boots and heavy jacket as I dashed out the door and down to my truck. Penny followed as soon as she had her clothes back on, and we drove to the ambulance bay together, listening to the dispatch radio adding more details about the medical problem we were about to deal with.

The heart attack was real. Whoever had phoned 911 had diagnosed it correctly. We were very busy keeping the victim alive until we got him to the hospital.

I had planned to free Zoë from her girl cage after I left, as soon as I had a strong wireless Internet connection to send the unlocking codes. I had not done so, because there was always something urgent happening every time we drove through an Internet hot spot. I figured that Zoë would probably be annoyed with me for treating her that way. I was wrong. The moment I re-entered the anteroom of her space, she said “That was fun. But next time your pager goes off, you should think about passing me an open pair of handcuffs through the wire mesh so I can lock my hands behind my back.”

I said “Zoë, this place has lots of ways to restrict your movement. Arms free in a girl-feeding cage is one of them. Handcuffed in a girl-feeding cage is another. Don’t be impatient to see them all on your first night.

“Here, for example, is an auto-sequence routine.” I spent about a minute entering codes on my cell phone, and then I told her “When I push the Send key, you are to leave the feeding cage and walk back to the bathroom. You will obviously pass through the mid-corridor door when you do. Get ready for bed, and then crawl in through the access hatch in the side of your bed cage.

“The door locks will be sequenced. The feeding cage will lock when you leave it, and the mid-corridor door will unlock. When that door closes and locks, the bathroom door will unlock. The bathroom door will lock the second time you go through it, when you go back out into the far end of the corridor, and the bed cage hatch will unlock. The bed cage will lock when you are inside. And finally the left-hand lock box in the headboard of your bed will unlock, and you will be able to reach the remote for the TV and TIVO that is kept in there. Go through the doors when they are unlocked; don’t hesitate and let them close again. You could be stuck spending the night on the hard floor of the corridor or the bathroom if you do.”

Zoë followed instructions. I left her 24/7 space and took my own shower in the house. When I returned she was resting in her bed cage.

I used an ordinary pin-tumbler key to open the solid wooden door along the corridor, and I went “backstage” behind the curtains that screened the area around her bed cage from view. After a few moments of preparation, I pushed the curtains aside and looked down at her.

I was lying in my bed, a king-size platform bed, which sat on small blocks that raised it about three inches. That extra height, plus the shortened legs of Zoë’s bunk, meant that I was about one foot above her when we were both lying down. I thought that the difference in mattress heights was a good psychological trick. I knew for certain that a bed cage with a beautiful woman inside is an excellent headboard for a king-size bed. The near side of the bed cage was solid metal up to about six inches above my mattress, so that it could function as a headboard and keep pillows from oozing off the top of my bed. Above that it was made from three-eighth-inch vertical steel bars, spaced five inches apart. I could reach through the bars to tickle, or chain, or otherwise interact with Zoë.

I punched in a few more codes. The entire near side of Zoë’s bed cage unlocked, and I slid it up out of the way, pounced on her, and locked a cuff on one ankle. By the time I got the cuff locked on, the power winch at the foot of my bed was already reducing the slack in the attached chain. Over the next minute or so, the winch pulled Zoë up from her cage and alongside me. There was no way she could resist that winch even if she wanted to.

I locked Zoë’s old familiar leather cuffs around her wrists, connected by a twelve-inch chain behind her back. I pushed her onto her back with her hands pinned to the mattress on either side of her waist. I reached for her with lips, and hands, and body, and I began to give her a properly passionate welcome home.

= = = = =

The next morning we began a game I called Permission. I pushed Zoë back into her own bed cage and undid her cuffs and chains. (I might add that she always had to go through her bed cage to get on or off my bed. I never allowed her to climb off the bottom or side of my mattress, the route I normally used.) I set the door locks for a sequence that allowed Zoë to crawl out of her bunk; use the toilet and take a shower; and install herself in her feeding cage in the anteroom. By the time she was done, I had scrambled eggs and sausage ready to feed her and coffee ready to drink.

She was a bit disappointed when I left for work after sequencing the locks to take her from feeding cage to bookkeeping office. I did not apply any chains or straps at all. But I knew that Zoë had had two cups of coffee with breakfast, and I knew that the caffeine in coffee is a diuretic. I waited for a phone call. It came about 10:30. She had to go.

I told her “Permission rules are in force. The expression you are looking for is ‘Permission to go, Sir.’”

“Uh, Okay. Permission to go, Sir. Am I going to have to say this every time?”

“As long as Permission is in force, yes. Permission granted. If I know you, you waited as long as you could before making this phone call, so the door locks are sequenced for immediate response. Next time there will be a twenty-second delay on each door. You may wish to allow for this the next time you phone and ask for permission.”

“OK Bye.” She must have needed to go badly.

For the rest of the day she had to ask for permission to go through any of the doors in her 24/7 place. I never said no, but she always had to ask. The requests included “Permission to eat lunch, Sir”, which Penny provided, and “Permission to exercise, Sir”, and finally “Permission to shower, Sir” when Zoë was done exercising. But the most common one remained “Permission to go, Sir”. Zoë liked coffee with her meals.

I thought that this game would make Zoë realize how firmly she could be controlled in her 24/7 space even when there were no restraints on her body. I thought that that would make her hot. I was right. That evening when I opened the panel between her bed cage and my bed, she attacked me before I could put a single chain or cuff on her. I allowed her to pin me on my back in my bed, and she lowered herself onto me and began to bounce. And then when I was about to explode, she stopped dead, with superb control, not moving a muscle, and asked “Permission to come, Sir!”

So I said “Permission granted”, and we both did.

That incident showed that I was not in complete control of what happened in Zoë’s space. I learned that again a few days later. Permission rules were still in force, and I noticed that Zoë had never asked for permission to eat lunch. I dropped in to find out what was happening, and I found Zoë happily finishing her lunch at the counter which extended into her office. In between bites, she reached out through the bars over that counter to feed Penny, who was in her girl cage. So I asked “Why is Penny in the cage?”

“It was her turn.”

“Oh. How is she going to get loose?”

“Like this. We just finished lunch, anyway.” And Zoë took a yardstick, poked it through the steel mesh wires below Penny’s cage, and lifted the end she was holding. The other end pressed down on the release pedal, and Penny climbed out.

= = = = =

The week after that I changed the rules from Permission to Tradition. I put Zoë’s old well-worn leather cuffs on her wrists and ankles, with the old four-inch chain linking her wrists and the 14-inch chain on her ankles. The latch-open magnets were switched on for all of the doors that Zoë was allowed to go through.

Then I changed to Tradition-X. The cuffs were the same, but the linkages were different. A locking leather waist belt was added. Zoë’s left ankle was chained to her right wrist, and her right ankle to her left wrist, with both linking chains passing through a D-ring in the back of the waist belt. The chains were long enough for Zoë to stand and walk normally if she kept her wrists in the small of her back, or she could stretch and use her arms freely if she was kneeling. But she couldn’t do both at the same time. I replaced her office chair with a hassock that allowed her to work at her desk while kneeling. Both of us really liked that one, so I let it run for two weeks.

Zoë then spent one week in her space under Heavyweight rules. Her hands were free, and her ankles were secured in her ten-pound Martin ankle shackles. I put a steel rod four feet over my bed so that Zoë’s ankles could be supported just above the mattress at night, the way we had done it before in her bunk bed. Her knees could be folded, just like before, and the jingling of the chains was just as erotic as before when she reached orgasm.

Those were the daytime rules. Sometimes the rules changed at night, when I was there to supervise and deal with any emergencies. For everything except Permission, I took the cuffs off for a while in the evenings, so Zoë could exercise and shower. At night, in my king-sized bed, I usually used nylon straps, unless of course I wanted to hear her Martin shackle chains jingling. Some nights I left her in her bed cage, and we watched TV on the set across the corridor.

= = = = =

There was still one last stretch of corridor between Zoë’s bed and the bathroom with equipment that she hadn’t experienced yet.   So one Saturday afternoon, after Zoë had exercised and showered, I put her in Traditional cuffs and chains and had her sit on the floor just outside the bathroom.  I told her to fold her legs up to her chest and wrap her arms around her ankles, which of course squeezed her ankles together. I took up the resulting slack in her ankle chain with a padlock, and I trapped her wrist chain with the locking loop of that padlock when I closed it.  Then I picked her up and stuffed her into the larger, shallower recess in the wall in that last stretch of corridor.  She found that this recess was just large enough to hold her with her body in this position.

 There was a slot in the recess that was conveniently placed directly in front of her ankles.  The loop in her ankle chain, created when I padlocked it shorter, went through that slot.  I slid a sturdy metal pin through several links in that chain on the side of the slot away from her, so that she couldn’t pull her ankles back.  Sturdy straps were available to hold her shoulders down, and I buckled and tightened those straps.  Then I closed a wire-panel door over the recess, and I warned Zoë “You are going to be in there for awhile.”  Then I put a blackout curtain over the wire-panel door, and I punched in a start code on my cell phone.

 Somebody who is trapped rigidly in one position will probably begin to feel pain after an hour or two, and the pain gets worse as time goes by.  Body weight always presses on the same spots, which get sore, and blood can pool in immobilized veins and cause cramps.  Zoë had been able to last for three hours and more in the dunking tank because she floated in the water when she was immersed.  The water supported her.  I needed another way to give the same effect in her 24/7 space.

 Zoë soon felt her weight shifting from her buttocks to her spine.  Three minutes after I sent the start code, she was lying on her back with her arms reaching straight upwards to wrap around her ankles.  Six minutes after the start code, she was hanging head-down with much of her weight on her shoulder straps, and she understood why I had tightened those straps so carefully.  There was no weight on her relatively fragile neck.  Nine minutes after start, she was kneeling with her head and torso squashed to her knees.  Twelve minutes after start, she was back in her original knees-folded sitting position.

I pushed the blackout curtain aside and told her “Five rotations an hour.  I wasn’t sure about blindfolding you or putting a blackout curtain over the door.  Are you having trouble?”

“No, I’m fine.  I think that riding this thing will be fun, especially since I understand what is happening now.”  So I put the blackout curtain back, and she rode my slow tumbler for another three minutes.

Then I stopped the rotation.  Gravity pulled her body down.  The pinned-in-place chains pulled her ankles up.  I had convenient access for slipping a remote-controlled vibrating egg into her vagina.  I said “Computer controlled random vibration timing,” and I input the start codes for that function and for the rotator motor.  Zoë spent the next three hours in total darkness behind the blackout curtain, never knowing when or for how long that egg would be activated.  I didn’t know either, of course, but I could have a pretty good idea of when it was on by listening for Zoë’s moans.

= = = = =

The other recess in that part of the corridor wall, the deep one, really belonged to Penny. So when Penny dropped by the same Saturday afternoon, I offered her the first chance to try it. Penny knew most of the design, because she had helped to build it. She immediately agreed.

She undressed in the anteroom while I worked in my curtained-off backstage space behind Zoë’s bed cage. I threaded the winch chain through a set of pulleys into the back of the deep recess and guided it out the front. I checked the restraints that were available on the backstage shelves and selected a set of Darby cuffs. And I sequenced the door locks so that Penny could get into the back stretch of the corridor.

The recess was a tube, eighteen inches wide and about fifteen inches tall, with solid wood walls. The bottom was covered with a belt of satin fabric so that a naked captive could slide in without abrasions. This belt could be hand-cranked, which was the easiest way to guide a chain through. But once a captive was installed, the friction of that captive on the belt would make the belt move without any direct mechanical input.

Penny held out her wrists in front, and I locked the Darby cuffs in place. I wrapped the end of the winch chain around the cuff linkage and padlocked it. And then I punched in the code to start the winch.

As Penny’s arms were pulled into the tube, I lifted her body and fed that in also, on her stomach. Soon the tube had swallowed almost all of her. She had been a bit turned on when she rescued six-year-old Mickey from the well, but this was much better. There was no dirt or slime, and nobody was in danger.

The tube had one refinement that Penny didn’t know about. I stopped the winch when her feet were still sticking out of the wall, and I clamped her ankles in place with a set of stocks. There was a curtain over the far end of the tube, so Penny was trapped in absolute darkness. I left her there.

Half an hour later, Zoë finished her last rotation in the slow tumbler, and I let her out and unlocked her wrists from her ankles. She saw Penny’s feet sticking out of the wall, and a wicked grin grew on her face. She began to play with those naked feet. Penny couldn’t do anything except twitch, and that wasn’t enough to stop Zoë. The length of the tube greatly muffled Penny’s screams of laughter.

I let this go on for about half an hour. Then I reversed the winch, unlocked the stocks, and pulled Penny back out. The girls were soon exchanging excited explanations and accusations, both talking at once. I undid the winch chain from Penny’s arms and locked it around one of Zoë’s. She didn’t realize the implications until she felt the tug as the chain retracted again. Zoë was still wearing her Traditional cuffs and chain, so she could not slip the winch chain off. I picked her up, said “Raise your hands over your head”, and fed her into the tube on her back. And then I closed the ankle stocks on Zoë’s ankles.

Zoë stayed undisturbed while I installed Penny in the slow tumbler. I had chosen Darby cuffs for Penny because they have a long enough linking chain to allow a girl to sit comfortably with her arms around her ankles.

I admit I was a bit of a rat fink to deny Penny her revenge on Zoë’s naked feet. However, I wanted to reserve the privilege of tickling those feet for myself. Zoë was on her back, so she could lift her head and scream down the length of the tube louder than Penny. I quickly confirmed that Zoë was at least as ticklish as Penny.

= = = = =

By early spring Zoë had been in her 24/7 space for over a month without interruption. She wrote herself the checks for her pay as a bookkeeper, and I signed them and deposited them in a joint account. I used the money to pay Zoë’s mortgage and other home-ownership costs, but not for anything else. She had no control over her own money. She didn’t even know which bank I was using.

I did not want to keep her in her 24/7 space for the entire summer, but I also didn’t want her close confinement to end. So I proclaimed a set of Voyager rules for when she was not in her space. These rules required that Zoë be secured essentially helpless at all times, even when the trips were short ones.

Zoë’s first trips went no further than the living room of my house. My general clean-up had uncovered several boxes of movie videotapes, and the entertainment center in the living room still had a VCR which could play them. For a while that spring, Zoë knelt by the side of my recliner chair most evenings while we watched movies and I fed her supper, or popcorn, one bite at a time. Zoë wore the outfit that I had first seen her in, a strait jacket and chain-linked ankle straps. I could add one more padlock to that combination to connect the ankle chain to the jacket and confine her kneeling or in a hogtie. We called this combination Voyager Tradition. From time to time Penny would drop by and cook, wearing just an apron and the leg irons that were also a part of Zoë’s outfit on that first night we spent together.

I liked the pose that Zoë was held in by the strait jacket, with her forearms parallel across her back. However, I thought that the jacket covered far too much of her body. So I bought two pairs of Irish-8 handcuffs, one for her wrists and one for her ankles, to give us another way to closely confine her to Voyager standard. The cuffs were modern reproductions with high-security locks. I put her wrists into those cuffs behind her back with the hands pointing in opposite directions, and she was held as if she were still in the strait jacket, but naked and – unlike the leather jacket – in waterproof confinement. Then I could give her a nice long soaking bath as an alternative to her quick showers out in the 24/7 place.

The ankle cuffs essentially immobilized her. I had to carry her everywhere. That was fun too.

The End