A Brief Moment of Vertigo

Your vision fades for a moment, and you get very dizzy and disoriented for what seems like a long time, but it’s probably only a few minutes.

When your eyesight returns, you find yourself in Sophie’s body with Sophie next to you in your old body. You and Sophie are standing in front of a long, high ivy-covered brick wall, capped with iron spikes. It's almost twice your height - well, now that means about ten feet, but still, it towers over you.

“This is the Rutherford School,” Sophie tells you. “Discipline is swift and painful here, so don’t try anything stupid like you did in the Beauty IVR. You can’t die here, but you can suffer the consequences of stupid actions. And then, when your body is healed, your ass will suffer the consequences of your stupidity.”

“Why are you doing this?” you ask.

“Because, Gerald, I don’t trust you anymore. Beauty’s stupid **** will have attracted the attention of Trainer, and he’s going to be looking for you. The best place to hide you is where he was going to send you if he found you. He’ll not think to look here. But, I’ll be honest: this is going to be painful and humiliating. Just remember that you brought this on yourself.

“Now, I’ve arranged it so that the AIs and real people here think that Trainer is sending a new girl named Janet Coyne to be trained here. All the fees and whatnot have been paid. I’ll come get you when I’ve figured out how to get you out of IVR without a DMC.

“Don’t mention the name Sophie Caruthers here. I was a student here a long time ago, and you don’t want anyone to notice that you look a lot like I did back then.”

“What were you doing here?” you ask.

“Being trained, just like you are going to be trained.”

“But trained for what?”

“Trained to be submissive. This is the naughty schoolgirl IVR. Expect to be topped a lot, and to be punished if you are not the perfect little subbie. It was actually a lot of fun, but is even more intense in a way than Roissey was. Roissey was just physical. This is physical and psychological. My advice is to just go along with it. Forget that you are a guy, and play the perfect little schoolgirl - one who gets paddled a lot. Now go to the gate and ring the buzzer.”

You could read the subtext, now. Sophie was sending you here not because it was such a great hiding place, but because she was still mad at you for the fight earlier, and for the stupid way you’d acted in the Beauty VR. This was about punishment, not just safety. It kind of pissed you off, but Sophie was holding all the cards here. You could only do as she said, and take your medicine.

You turn to a set of iron grille gates set into the wall, just barely wide enough for a car. The gates are closed. There's an intercom cemented into one of the gate pillar supports.