By the time Sue reached the door, she was already soaked to the skin. The rain fell in sheets turning the unpaved parts of the driveway into a river.

A huddled figure sat in a domed porter's chair by the door. Only his battered frock coat and crumpled hat were visible in the gloom, both were as decrepit as the chair itself. "Your first visit," he said as she entered the lobby.

"Yes," Sue replied.

"It was not a question," the doorman snapped, "Room 13." A withered hand emerged from the sleeve of the coat to point the way.

Sue began to ask if there was somewhere she could freshen up first but the doorman cut her off, "Welcome to the Combat Zone." His tone was anything but welcoming.

The room was empty of furniture, the only lighting coming from an emergency strip light hanging off the wall at a precarious angle. It had been a grand room once but all was crumbling and decayed. The remnants of a chain that had once held a chandelier hung from a hook in the center of the ornately plastered ceiling. Sheets of rusted corrugated iron had been nailed across what had once been a window.

Just as Sue was getting used to the gloom, a device Sue had taken to be the remains of a floor lamp unfolded and wheeled itself across the floor. Like everything else in the combat zone, the droid was battered and old but it was functional.

"Consent to continue," the machine barked in electronic tones. A display showing a consent form unfolded from the top of its stalk.

The form was detailed, clinical and explicit. Some categories, mostly those involving criminal activities and bodily fluids, were pre-marked PROHIBITED in red. Tapping an unlocked category once caused it to show REFUSE in red. Tapping it again caused CAUTION to appear in yellow. Tapping it a third time and GOOD appeared in green. A fourth tap cleared the entry.

Marking categories yellow caused the indicator on an analog temperature dial underneath the display to move right. The left hand side of the dial was marked green, just past the center was a patch of orange, beyond that red. Different activities caused different amounts of movement but marking a yellow category green didn't move the gauge at all. To the right of the dial, a light inside button pulsed slowly green.

Sue began by marking her green categories and was disappointed to see the dial barely passing the halfway point. Marking restraints and public display yellow nudged the dial further towards the orange zone. After two more CAUTION choices, the indicator was almost there.

Sue was wet and cold. Pressing the button to accept her choices had no effect. The message was clear enough: move the dial further or leave. 

Fortunately, one more selection was sufficient. The button changed color from green to orange and the machine sputtered back to life. An eye stalk contraption extended itself from the Lampbot. "Read consent for the record" the mechanism crackled.

The wording of the summary was as clinical and explicit as the form but no distinction was made between degrees of consent. As she read the words aloud, Sue felt her stomach muscles tighten.

"Public Display will not be possible."

Sue turned to see Max dressed in black tie, carrying a battered black Gladstone bag in his left hand. Max's dinner jacket was the only thing she had seen which was not broken, tattered or rusted since she had arrived, including her own clothes, the ones Max had told her to buy. Cheaply made but not cheap, they had not fit well to start with and the rain had only made them worse.

His choice of dress had surprised her. The first time they met at the book launch, Max had been one of the few men present not wearing a Tux, wearing an immaculate white Jacquard cocktail jacket instead. What had he said then? An Englishman never wears black tie before six o'clock and never when a lady will be present.

Max ignored her, turning instead to dismiss the contraption. "That will be all Cora." The device folded itself back down and trundled out of the room. 

Max locked the door behind him and pocketed the key.

"Hello, Max," Sue began then stopped as she felt the stinging blow to her cheek.

"Have to be given permission." Max said, "You were not asked a question, you were not given permission to speak."

Sue opened her mouth to apologize, then thought better of it and nodded.

"Public Display requires an audience." Max continued, enunciating the words crisply in the manner of an English schoolmaster. "These walls are thin but you can cry or shout as much as you like. We are very much alone."

Max grabbed Sue's lower jaw, forcing her head upwards, "don't worry about the porter interrupting us either, he doesn't have ears and he's bolted to the chair."

Max lifted the bag to Sue's face and opened his hand. The bag hit the floor with a thud, "open it."

Sue was directed to arrange the contents of the bag on the floor in neat rows. Items she was familiar with such as the paddle and cane went on the left, the ropes, cat of nine tails, shock collar and all the other items new to her on the right. When the bag was empty, Max picked up one of the ropes and used it to bind Sue's wrists together, passed the other end through the chandelier chain and gave it a sharp tug. 

Getting into the right headspace for a scene had always taken effort. The transition from Sue the business executive to Sue the submissive usually required the assistance of Sue the brat. Max switched Sue into submissive mode as easily as turning on a light.

"We are going to push your boundaries," Max said, sweeping the familiar items aside with his foot and picking up another length of rope.

Sue flinched with the sudden realization that their scene would be all about the yellow choices. The coded message in the dinner jacket now as clear as day: Max would not be treating her like a lady.

Max worked slowly and methodically, winding ropes around each ankle and fastening them to eyebolts screwed into the floor. With all four limbs immobilized, her legs splayed, Sue expected the assault on her body to begin. Instead, Max wound more rope over her dress, pressing the cold, wet fabric into her skin.

The ropes began with a double loop cinched under her breasts, with one end passing over each shoulder, then crossing at the front to pass under her armpits, crossing again around the back of her neck and so on to make an inverted pentagram front and back.

The upper harness complete, Max rolled the hem of the dress up underneath it to reveal her panties, which were pushed down as far as the ankle restraints would allow. Sue let out a stifled yelp as the cloth bit into her flesh and whimpered slightly as she felt the tails of the flogger caressing her buttocks.

Sue yelped as a cold, hard object was suddenly pressed up against her spine. The shock caused her to momentarily lose her balance but Max threw his other arm around her waist to stop her dislocating a joint. Sue tried to crane her neck to identify the object, but she already knew what it must be: the object to push the last boundary she had selected. 

Max held the butt plug up for Sue to examine. Sue's guess was correct. Anal play had always been a red line for her, a line she would need to cross tonight if she ever wanted to return. The business end of the device was tear-drop-shaped with a number of radial gouges cut into the widest part with a t-shaped handle connected by a curving stem. Sue could see her face and Max standing behind her in the polished steel.

Sue had seen similar plugs on the Web but the handle of this one was different. Instead of being a flattened oval with a hole through the flattened part. The stem of this handle ended in a short tube with three curving U shaped channels emerging from it in a Y pattern. Before Sue could worry about their purpose, the device was hooked into the center of the pentacle harness and the flogger began inflicting a fiery pain on her buttocks.

"There is nobody to hear you," Max said between strokes. Sue tried to resist giving him the satisfaction, but soon the silence had turned to yelps, the yelps had turned to protests and the protests to full throated, inarticulate screams.

"That is better," Max said, "now we can begin."

Max took off his jacket and snapped on a pair of purple nitrile gloves. Before continuing, he examined all of Sue's bindings and cut parts of the dress away with scissors. The panties simply fell apart with a tug. Sue had never felt so naked. Her vulva and her anus were open, vulnerable, her arms and legs bound. 

Max smeared the business end of the plug with grease and teased it against her asshole. It felt ridiculously large. Max grabbed her crotch, pushing his thumb and forefinger into her cunt and ass, lifting her body off the floor. Max repeated the process several times, each time working the plug a little deeper inside.

The plug fully inserted, Max wove a second harness around Sue's lower body, the ropes passing through the channels in the plug behind and digging painfully into her slit in front. A second, harsher flogging followed, the new arrangement amplifying the effect of each blow, focusing the force at the center of her being as the plug and ropes kneaded her clit front and rear. 

Whether the balance was pleasure or pain, Sue could not tell. But after a while, instead of twisting away in a vain attempt to avoid the blows, she found her body turning to accept their full force as if under control of another person. It was as if the body receiving the blows, the mind controlling it and the mind observing the process were three separate people. She could not say how long the torture continued, but it must have ended as Max was there, holding her, soothing her wrists and ankles where the ropes had bound her, rubbing her body dry with a towel. "Aftercare," Max said simply, placing his jacket over her shoulders to keep her warm.

When she woke the next morning, Sue was in Max's bed. Max sat next to her in a chair, still wearing the shirt and trousers from the night before but the tie was now unfastened, the ends hanging asymmetrically. The jacket was thrown over a chair, the maker's mark embroidered on the lining: Henry Poole & Co. Savile Row.

Max had also told her an Englishman would never call a dinner jacket a Tuxedo unless it was made by Henry Poole, the tailors who had made the very first dinner jacket for the Prince of Wales which quickly found admirers amongst the members of the Tuxedo Club in New York.

"What happened last night?" asked Sue, "it was different."

"You were in subspace," Max explained.

"I think I might have liked it," Sue replied, "can we do it again?"

"You are a good girl," Max replied, the only praise Sue wanted or needed.

*****

It was over a year before Max decided Sue was ready to return to the Combat Zone. A year of pushing boundaries, of learning the true limits of her mind and body, of checking off the remaining items on the consent form until only one remained.

Rather to Sue’s surprise, being shared came easier than sharing Max. Perhaps that was because Max clearly took pleasure from allowing other men to use her body for pleasure. Watching another submit to Max’s cock did not make Sue jealous: Orgasms are not a rival good. But she could never watch a woman receive lashes from Max’s flogger without thinking, that could be me.

Max took control of all decisions regarding Sue’s body. The hairdresser round the corner she had used for years was replaced with a much more expensive salon. The pedicures and manicures which she had treated herself to occasionally became part of her regular routine, as did the full Brazilian every three weeks. A schedule which Max maintained with scrupulous regularity until suddenly stopping the appointments without explanation.

Sue was puzzled. Max had once required her to attend an appointment during a business trip rather than delay the appointment by two days. She knew better than to ask why but something was clearly afoot. Max loved the feel of a smooth pubic area, the more hairless the better. 

Six weeks after the appointment would have been due, Max stopped her birth control as well.

The explanation for these changes came three days later when Max took Sue to meet Jeff, an elderly eccentric who turned out to have been the principal creator of Lampbot and The Porter. Jeff lived in a spacious Victorian house, the cavernous basement of which had been turned into a series of workshops. The walls were covered with chests of drawers from a former apothecary, animatronics in various states of completion littered the work surfaces.

An elderly but clearly active woman who turned out to be Jeff's wife, Helen, accosted Sue as Jeff demonstrated a project he was working on to Max, "Here for a fitting dear? Just take off your clothes and I'll take some measurements."

Moments later, Sue was standing naked on a circular plinth, her legs parted as Helen drew lines around her waist and on her buttocks and thighs with permanent marker. Measurements were made with a dressmaker's tape. After finishing talking with Max, Jeff took a second set of the same measurements, compared his numbers to Helen's and after they were both satisfied the numbers were the same, they were entered into a computer and a plasma cutter standing in the corner suddenly leapt into action.

Parts made on the plasma cutter were then passed to a machine that looked a bit like a capital letter G holding two rollers close together at the gap between the two ends.

"Ranalah, the Rolls Royce of English wheels," Jeff announced with obvious pride as he placed the metal between the wheels, "the machine that built the plane that won the Battle of Britain. Thanks, Max."

The crafting was a joint enterprise, with Helen making the belt using a roller and Jeff working the domed front guard that would cover Sue's vulva on the wheel. When the parts were finished, Helen welded them together and Jeff polished the pieces to a high shine and carefully fitted a neoprene rubber liner.

Sue did not get the chance to admire the handicraft before the chastity belt was clamped around her waist with a strap and the ends joined together with more welding. This required the placement of an insulating block under the join site behind Sue's back, causing the front of the belt to bite deep into Sue's chest. After the belt was fixed permanently, two flattened chains fastened to tabs on the front guard were welded to the belt so that the guard was held firmly in place without obstructing her anus. The belt and front guard were fitted with D-rings which could be used to fasten an additional back guard but this would obviously need to be removable to allow for waste elimination.

The result was surprisingly bearable, if not exactly comfortable. In her student years, Sue had worked a summer as a 'character mascot' at a theme park and the belt was a lot more comfortable than the panda costume she had worn. But the panda costume wasn't welded shut around her body.

After they left the fitting, Max announced work required him to leave for Istanbul. Sue stared at him in disbelief. "You bastard! That's what gave you the idea! You locked me in a bloody chastity belt like a bloody knight going on crusade!"

A week after Max had left, Sue was less than surprised when a warning appeared on the dash of Max's Mercedes electric, telling her to stop immediately and wait for roadside assistance. For anything Max owned to fail would be very surprising indeed. Therefore, the warning did not indicate a failure; it was not a warning at all; it was an instruction and she'll comply happily.

Sure enough, a few minutes later, three men in olive gray fatigues arrived in a gray 1983 GMC Vandura with blocked out windows and a red stripe on the side and introduced themselves as the 'roadside assistance'. After the briefest pretense of attempting to find the cause of her breakdown, the crew bundled Sue into the back of the van and ripped off her dress.

"Belted bitch!" her assailant spat in disgust.

"All that for nothin'?" the youngest, not more than a boy, whined.

"Use her stink hole. That's open," the third suggested.

"Don't want her stink hole, that's all my girl gives me," the boy replied, "I want pussy."

"A virgin in front and a martyr behind!" came the rejoinder.

"Get her to the workshop. Nelly knows how to set a belted bitch straight."

"Nelly got a can opener!"

"And a razor! Look at that moss growing!"

"Nelly will give her a proper shave!"

The taunting and bickering continued all the way to the workshop, a derelict auto shop in sight of the Combat Zone hotel. A small crowd had gathered under a battered sail erected to make an awning. Most were dressed in wasteland garb, torn leather jackets, faded military fatigues strung with bandoliers and canvas map bags. A few were not dressed at all.

In the center of the group, three women were handcuffed to the remains of a utility pole. Two were naked, the third wore the remains of a dress that had been torn down the front so the tattered rags framed her crotch and cleavage. Around the pole were littered three very substantial sawhorses made from railroad ties and an H shaped device made from girders.

Instead of being added to the group at the stake, Sue was thrust face down on one of the sawhorses. All the surfaces touching her flesh were worn smooth by decades of wind and water, the interior parts were still rough from the teeth of the chainsaw used to cut them. The wood still had the smell of creosote. The straps were made from old belts nailed to the body and legs of the horse. Sue was secured at the ankles, wrists and waist. Sue had been bound like this before but never without Max directing every detail.

A pair of welding goggles were strapped to Sue's face, blindfolding her. There were sounds of an arthritic electric motor and wheels spinning on muddy ground. When the shade of the goggles was flipped up, Nelly stood in front of her in all her animatronic, a steampunk glory. Nelly had been fashioned from an old mobility scooter with a plethora of mechanical arms waving a frightening array of power tools. All the tools spun to life as Nelly approached. The crowd jeered, even the women chained to the post were jeering as the robot passed behind Sue's head and out of her sight. The cutting began as soon as Nelly was in position.

They say the anticipation is worse than the thing itself. Not so with Nelly. For the first time since stopping the car, Sue was seriously scared. Sparks flew as the blade of the angle grinder touched metal, singeing Sue's back and arms to roars of approval from the crowd. A trickle of urine soiled Sue's thighs. 

Two cuts made, Sue was released from the sawhorse. What had been the back of the belt hung uselessly between her legs from the chains. The boy from the van stepped forward and pulled the remains of the belt off her, threw them on the ground and raised his foot to stomp them.

"No!" Sue cried out, much as she had hated wearing it, the belt had been beautifully made and, more importantly, made for her. The boy ignored her and turned the belt into a twisted, ruined mess then kicked it aside.

"Shave her!" a middle-aged woman in a battered boiler suit shouted.

"What you waitin' fer?" a fat, bearded man in a biker jacket shouted, "shave her!"

Sue was dragged to the H device. The surface of the girders was perfectly smooth, with no holes or visible attachment points, only a few recesses a few millimeters deep gouged into the steel. Five U-shaped hoops were placed over her wrists, ankles and around her waist and made fast with the turn of a key.

By this time, the other 'victims' were no longer laughing as they were each in turn dragged to a sawhorse and strapped in for their own torments. The spectators began using them immediately, drawing screams and curses as they were manhandled.

A familiar figure approached in a tattered white lab coat, her face half covered by an elaborate pair of green tinted goggles.

"Permanent body modification is hard," Helen said, "you probably expected to receive a piercing or a tattoo like so many other women wear."

Helen held up two metal rods.

"Piercings close over time, tattoos can be removed," Helen continued, "the effect of the electrolyzer is permanent."

As she finished speaking, a spark leapt across the gap, making a loud buzzing sound. The H frame pivoted about its center so that Sue lay flat, her legs splayed, her sex open.

Sue had had electrolysis before to remove a few stray facial hairs but this process was quicker and a lot more painful. Helen worked with a pair of assistants so that one was finding the next hair to attack while the other was ripping out the hair that had just been zapped. As soon as the front was finished, Sue was spun upside down to finish any stray hairs behind.

Sue had expected her body to be used but not that her first partners would be a couple in their seventies. Helen shrugged off the lab coat and grabbed the frame, pushing Sue horizontal again with her on top. Helen offered her pussy to Sue's obedient mouth while guiding Jeff's cock into her pussy. It was only at this point that Sue suddenly remembered she had stopped her birth control. What had seemed a fair recompense for their efforts suddenly gave cause for panic. Fortunately, Jeff was gentleman enough to finish in her ass.

One cock followed another and Sue was spun every which way. Some men preferred to enter her face up, others face down. Only two men used her standing up but they used her at the same time, front and back. Couples used her as well. The woman lying against Sue for support as her man entered her. Some of the couples used Sue upside down so she could see the cock enter the pussy close up. Afternoon turned to evening, turned to night and the queue of spectators waiting to use her dwindled. The other 'victims' had been released from the sawhorses long ago and these were being used as tables for drinks instead. Propane patio heaters were fired up to keep away the night chills.

Finally, the last John was served, a repeat customer at that. Sue hung limp from her shackles, every muscle in her body sore from the use. An unseen hand released the shackles binding her ankles and wrists and helped her to her feet. Sue could barely see his face in the dark but she didn't need to see to know the name of her rescuer, the only man dressed in clothing that was not tattered and dusty, the only man wearing a tuxedo made by Henry Poole.

"Time for your aftercare," Max said simply. "I watched it all. You are such a good girl."