Consciousness Brings Paranoia

The sheets crumpled and wrapped about Wendy as she rotated in place, fighting consciousness... but the small, sharp-edged device screamed its klaxon alarm (as she had programmed it) and so she was **** to leave her bed (as she had designed it) to go and enter the secret passcode that would silence the blasted thing (as she had memorized it). In her deft march across the debris of her room, Wendy didn't pay much mind to the dresser covered in scanners, tracking devices, spy cameras, directional microphones (yes, plural), and other odd bits and ends with which her father humored her. She certainly paid no mind to the barely visible disheveled girl in the mirror, nor how her brow furrowed as she quietly tapped into the keypad of her combination alarm clock/perimeter alarm/intercom. She had tinkered it together two years ago and it served her loyally... even if she hated the thing for its efficacy. Blinking and bleary eyed, Wendy stripped her over-sized shirt, threw it amid the rest of her laundry, and pulled her phone off the charger by lazily grabbing it and continuing her walk towards a morning pee. Left on the bathroom counter, her phone quietly watched its owner plop down onto the toilet and sigh along with her gentle tinkle.

Wendy yawned and grabbed her phone with her right hand while idly stroking her belly and pubic mound with the left… but something bothered her about what she wasn't feeling when she did this. Her brows lifted in surprise, and soon her left hand groped around her hips—where surely she expected at least some stubble from lazy shaving—and again her fingertips dared to tap her pubic mound.

Her once-unkempt, now Brazilian-waxed, pubic mound.

“What da... whatdijd-?!” She stared down in a panic at her body: gone were the tiny, near-invisible hairs on her chest, the more visible stems on her legs, and the absolutely not-bikini-ready bush of pubes she seldom trimmed. She nearly dropped her newest phone in the toilet—again—as she tried to calm down and assess the situation. How the Hell...? Did I sleepwalk into... no, that makes no sense, how would I have...?

But it slowly dawned on her... of course. She kept poking at the veil of lies that made life seem so predictable, so average... so terrestrial. Of course they’d eventually poke back... though their method of doing so left her perplexed. Radiation...? No, the hair on my head is fine, and so are my eyebrows... just to show they could cut me down while I sleep then. Or maybe... some kind of localized radiation? But if the target is localized to… Well, why hair of all things? This doesn’t match the behavioral patterns of any of the entities documented in the Roswell Archives, and I’ve read ALL their entries! Unless StarGazer420 was right about the server admin...?

Her phone remained unlocked and largely ignored... at least until the pop-up caught her eye with its animated icon. Wait... when did the App Store add animated icons...?

She brought the phone close until it was almost on her nose so she could see without her glasses. A large-breasted, red-skinned succubus cheered in cartoonish, chibi styling on the tiny golden icon of... Gem Ladies? Beneath the app title was a blurb more akin to a threat than an announcement:

Amazing! You've earned six punishments in less than six hours! But there's no credit for being eager here: you've got to play another round in the next 15 minutes or end up with another punishment!

A memory flashes in her mind like a passing dream: she had used her phone to play something at night... or she dreamed of doing so, it was hard to tell. ... Well this wasn’t on my phone last night, so it wasn’t a dream… well, I can't be asked to play games while I'm being manipulated by some mysterious Powers That Be!

After wiping herself clean--it felt so strange now that she had no hairs at all down there--Wendy fetched her glasses and assessed herself in the mirror once more.

She was nothing exciting: non-existent breasts, almost down to 4'11" in height, narrow and bony everywhere except in the loudness of the hair still on her head. Before she ever stepped outside the home, she would always put on the old medical filter--a cloth eyepatch with a strainer in it to dapple and limit light exposure--to hide the malformed part of her face. The tiny black glint of her visible eye in the sunken, narrowed socket looked back through her glasses and scanned her naked body. It disturbed her to see her crotch hairless like this: she looked like a little kid... or a very niche porn star, neither of which held any appeal for her.

Wendy checked her phone again, now with the gift of vision. She dismissed the message and held down on the app to delete it... only it merely jiggled in refusal. What? She tried it again without success; it refused as if it were an integral application for her phone. Annoyed, she opened it... and was greeted with the bizarre interface she had only sleepily seen before. Before she could click PLAY or MANAGE PUNISHMENTS, however, a new pop-up greeted her:

You have just 13 minutes to earn bonus time! In that time, earn one second for every inappropriate word you can shout for any carnal part of the human anatomy! Go for it, and press PLAY when you're done!

What a bizarre... no, Wendy, focus! There are more important things to worry about! But it still infuriated her that her phone had been subjected to such an invasive app install, especially after she had taken so much time and care to jailbreak and subsequently boost the security on this device. Wait... yeah, how would they have even...? No, this app couldn’t be… part of THEIR plans, could it? Annoyed, she tapped away the message and hit PLAY as she anticipated a video conference with her shadowy adversary, or a brief of their terms for her cooperation, or worse still, some visual hypnosis signal now empowered with the 5G towers installed in her locality.

The suspiciously resilient application revealed its ultimate ploy by greeting Wendy Peppernickel with... Bejeweled.

Well, a weird Bejeweled where all the gems looked oddly similar beyond their color scheme... and that they shifted on their own, albeit seemingly never in a useful way... and they were so tiny! Who even designed this? I don't really have time, but...

Still half-suspecting this was a government ploy to control her mind, Wendy cautiously, quietly played, suddenly enthralled by the spinning diamonds while her mind put the world conspiracy against her on the back burner. The gems occasionally evaded her touch--suspiciously so at times--and she quickly burned out of the moves she was permitted. She hadn't even noticed the meter ticking her moves down on the right while the time limit--just 20 seconds?!--nearly reached zero first at the bottom-left corner. Still, she didn't do too bad... or so she thought.

Uh-oh! Time's up, let's see how you did:
18 out of 20 matches made
0 out of 90 bonus seconds earned
You failed! Punishment grade increased by 0.3.
Punishment Grade LEVEL ONE has been reached!

Wendy tapped away the jeering message only to be hit with another:

You have achieved Punishment Grade 1.0 or higher! All future Punishments will be Grade 1.

Choose your punishment within 30 seconds (or all three will apply!):
[Headmaster’s Attention]
[Spoon-Fed]
[Bizarre Allure]

How any of these factored into Bejeweled could not be foreseen by Wendy, but she was fed up with the thing already and quickly tapped "Headmaster Special" just to be done with it.

[Headmaster’s Attention] added! You now have seven punishments.

So it’s actually a game… with admin privileges. Why am I still playing this stupid thing?! I have to figure out how and when I can expect to ultimately be disposed of by whatever forces just deleted my body hair, and- wait, wouldn't there be traces on the bed...? As she contemplated this, however, she did find herself compelled to explore the app. She had no stats beyond a "PG" of 1.2 (Premium... Grub? Goins? Gadgets? It's got to be the premium currency- no, wait, that must be the “Punishment Grade.”), and still had the other half of the app to consider.

With a tap, MANAGE PUNISHMENTS expanded into a curious list of "CURRENT PUNISHMENTS." Her constant urging to herself to put the app down and figure out a counterattack plan stopped dead as she read the first one on the list.

[Smooth and Shorn]: Grade 0. User loses all body hair except on her scalp and eyebrows.

Something dipped in her throat or chest, and a chill ran up her body. She read on with one wide eye.

[A Button for Punishment]: Grade 0. Every time the User lies or deflects a question, a random button on her outfit will lose all threading and fall off. If she has no buttons remaining, she must instead strip a piece of clothing off for one hour.

[Sweats Under Scrutiny]: Grade 0. Being looked at will cause the User to perspire, increasing in intensity based on how hard a person stares and how many people are staring.

[Underwhere]: Grade 0; Evolver. Once every four hours, a random piece of underwear being worn by the User will permanently vanish. At Punishment Grade 2, this evolves into [Neverwear].

[Her Period Peace]: Grade 0; Evolver. The User no longer experiences mensuration and suffers no negative health effects as a result. At Punishment Grade 3, this evolves into [Healthy Womb].

[An Immodest Proposal]: Grade 0. [Punishment Grade + 1, rounded down] times per day, a random person will ask the User for a piece of clothing she's wearing and the User must comply by immediately stripping it off and handing it over.

[Headmaster’s Attention]: Grade 1. User receives extra scrutiny from all school personnel and can be punished physically based on the severity of her offense. At Punishment Grade 3, this evolves into [Detention Desire].

You have two free punishment removals pending! Remember: winning a game will let you remove a punishment!