Lara Swift is Colonized Ch. 01

The final tattoo was the most egregious, though, and Lara gasped as she beheld it.

It seemed to mimic the appearance of the top part of a stocking -- the part that would wrap around a woman's upper thigh. It was awesome in its complexity: something like a geometric cardioid blended with lace patterns, it looked like the sort of design that she would find in a highly advanced calculus textbook. It also had many little threads hung down from its main band, and from those threads dangled everyday objects such as keys, diamonds, and fleurs de lis.

"I don't understand," Lara said, although she had a terrible suspicion that she knew exactly what the nurse was asking.

"You need to decide which of these tattoos you want," Nurse Cerys said, as though she were talking to a foolish child.

"I don't want any of them!" Lara snapped.

She wasn't about to get inked up like some common strumpet -- tattoos were quite unpopular among her group of friends. Not that she particularly cared what they would think, but it was sending the wrong message to the world! She couldn't hope to hide any of them, either: each one would be visible if she wore a bikini, most workout clothes, or even a low-cut dress!

"You have to decide," Nurse Cerys urged, "otherwise, you will get all three."

"I refuse," was Lara's only answer. "How dare you make this request? Don't you see how twisted this place is, nurse? Please --"

"Stop!" the nurse commanded.

"Listen, I've been here a while. Your best bet is to just pick a tattoo and go along with what they say. Please. Why don't you get the violin one? It would look good on you, you're tall!"

Lara fixed her gaze on the blonde girl, amazed at her own naivete for thinking this woman was her ally. She had been brought up to listen to her medical professionals, but this was no ordinary place. In fact, this pretty blonde girl was probably just trying to lull her into a sense of security by acting like a 'good cop' right out of some movie! No, she would refuse, and see what happened then.

"I will not," Lara said, asserting her rightful heritage as the Lady of Abington.

"I wish you hadn't said that," the blonde nurse replied. There was genuine sadness in her voice, but it didn't stop her from pulling out another damn syringe.

What could Lara do? There wasn't much of a fight -- Nurse Cerys's small size belied her strength and agility. There was the pinprick in her neck again, and a numbing sensation that spread out along her body.

"You bitch!" Lara shouted, "You cannot! You will not get away with this! My solicitor knew my whereabouts, and he will certainly find the path that brought me here. And when he does, I will remember this. You... American whore!"

Nurse Cerys never changed her expression, looking down at Lara with her big blue eyes full of pity. She paged someone using the tablet, and soon two other nurses came in wearing similar uniforms. They had a cart with them, containing two portable tattoo machines. At this point, Lara's tongue was too heavy to form words, but she still squealed as they lifted her onto the bed.

"So, which one did she pick?" one nurse asked -- a Taiwanese girl.

"All three."

"Wow! A triple winner! So she will get her outside time pretty soon, huh?" the other one jumped in. From their attitude towards the woman, it seemed clear that Nurse Cerys was the ranking employee here.

"No. A triple loser."

The other two nurses winced involuntarily, which worsened Lara's already strained mental condition. Although she was paralyzed by whatever curare the bitch had stuck her with, she could still feel every part of her body.

"Please give her a defiant marking in the usual place. And use the... Amative ink."

"Yes ma'am!" the Taiwanese nurse responded, and Lara almost thought she looked happy to follow the order! Who were these awful people?!

The pain was excruciating.

Out of necessity they removed her straitjacket, but she wasn't even able to enjoy her freedom because of her unresponsive body. Lara had never received a tattoo before, but it was worse than she had imagined. Again and again she felt her tender flesh punctured by the vibrating needles, leaving their foul ink in a place she could never hope to remove it. The searing pain gave way to a certain numbness, but only for so long. Then it was back again in full force, and she could do nothing to stop it.

The nurses spoke as they worked.

"Are you going to put your initials in your work again?" the Taiwanese girl asked the other nurse, whom Lara assumed to be Indian. She had very dark skin, and black hair.

"Of course!" was the Indian nurse's answer. "Come on, that's the best part of getting a triple loser. I hate it when I do such an amazing job and I am not permitted to give myself the proper credit."

They fell into a silence as they continued defacing Lara's beautiful body. She cursed them with every word she knew, and mentally began searching for the best tattoo removal clinic in all of the UK.

Soon, the Indian girl's eyes lit up as something dawned on her.

"They say she attacked Dr. Yeung --"

"Oh my gosh! Seriously? Who's that stupid?"

The Indian nurse continued, clearly annoyed to be interrupted.

"Anyway, I was thinking that maybe we could be a little more... luxuriant with her body art."

"What do you mean?" The Taiwanese girl asked, a deviant smile showing up on her face.

"Why just put our initials on? Why not do our full names?"

The Taiwanese girl made a tepid argument against it, but Lara could see the gears turning in her mind. This was obviously something they had both wanted to do for quite some time, and now they had their chance! Why did it have to be on HER though?

They agreed to a compromise: they would only put their family names on her, to avoid detracting from the artwork overmuch.

Here's where Lara's thinking got a little ugly. She was a member of the British nobility. Her ancestors were the captains who made first contact with these nurses' home countries and brought them aboard the empire. She was completely aware of the horrors committed beneath the Union Jack, but she was still proud of her heritage. Now, she was about to have two foreign names forever engraved into her English body just to temporarily satisfy the egos of two strange women. She was furious right now, and understandably so. But there was a new emotion bubbling to the surface, something foreign to the aristocratic young woman.

Lara Abington was beginning to feel defeated.

The nurses had placed her on a special chair they had brought in, and manipulated her body several times to do their job better. After quite some time, they finished that day's progress on the three tattoos Lara had originally refused: the outline of a feather was on her right breast, the elaborate stocking pattern had crawled to life on her left thigh, and although she couldn't see it, she knew the F hole was spread from her scapula down to her lower lower back. They finished one tattoo that day, though: the 'defiant marking.'

It was a spindly length of interconnected lines on her left ring finger, eerily reminiscent of a wedding band but more like a dark parody of one. It was sizable enough to be seen in casual conversation -- and how in the world would Lara explain such a strange thing?

It was necessary for them to put Lara in a new position, so she would not interrupt her tattoo's healing. This, they accomplished by putting her on yet another chair. It had a sort of bicycle seat with an unusually tall and narrow back and a very heavy base. They placed her body in such a way that none of her fresh ink was touching anything, and then cuffed her ankles to its base. Then they put a leather collar around her neck, and secured it to the back of the chair by a short length of chain. Finally, her hands were cuffed behind her back and then attached to the same back.

The dull ache of her tattoos grew, and soon she could twitch her muscles ever so slightly. She wondered what the hell Nurse Cerys meant by 'amative ink' -- didn't amative have something to do with sexuality? There was nothing sexy about this, at least not for poor Lara...

After a few hours, Nurse Cerys returned to Lara's cell, carrying a tray of food and what looked like a bedpan.

"Food" was a generous term for what the blonde woman had for Lara. It was little more than a pink gruel, which Nurse Cerys insisted on feeding to Lara as though she were an infant! Lara was so hungry that she accepted this indignity, and her only protest was that she gave the hated nurse the snake eyes the entire time.

"How long am I going to be here?" Lara asked. Although she was still seething from the fact that they had practically branded her, she was more focused on her eventual release. She could tolerate whatever petty torments they came up with. She was a strong girl.

"That's not for me to decide. Open," Nurse Cerys answered, spooning the first dollop into the Tomb Liberator's pretty mouth.

Lara could tell the gruel was nutritious, but it was also one of the worst things she had ever eaten. It had almost no flavor and a repulsive thick, gloppy texture that required her to use her tongue and her jaw to properly eat it. It was like they were throwing it in her face that this stuff was terrible, by making her do so much work to even eat it. And the temperature! Tepid, like it had been sitting out too long, or else she were eating someone's leftovers.

She had trained herself to eat rattlesnake meat, and live on dried seaweed in a survival situation, but this stuff was something else. Lara was grimacing by the end of the first spoonful, and there was quite a bit of the stuff left to go. There were no seasonings on the tray, no spices, and the only thing to look at was the bedpan which was disconcertingly close to her food bowl.

"After each spoonful, you will need to open your mouth wide and show me that you swallowed it. And say, 'thank you, nurse.'"

A biting remark came to the tip of Lara's tongue, then died there somewhere among the flavorless mush. She had seen what happened when she fought back already.

Beside herself with indignation, Lara swallowed, then opened her mouth wide as though she were some kind of hussy. After the blonde nurse had confirmed that she had indeed gulped down all the awful pink porridge, Lara spoke.

"Thank you, nurse."

Nurse Cerys smiled, and rewarded Lara with another helping of the stuff. Somehow, its taste only bothered Lara more, the more she had of it. Nonetheless, they repeated this process until the entire bowl was empty, even if the so-called meal did very little to sate Lara's appetite.

Next was the plastic bedpan, which Nurse Cerys placed between Lara's privates and the seat of her chair. The girl was absolutely mortified, but had no choice but to urinate beneath a nurse's watchful eye. She kept telling herself that this was a medical procedure, but couldn't convince herself of that when everything else had been so strange. She was a smart girl, and she rightfully suspected that this was a needless practice, only designed to further violate her sense of privacy and demonstrate that even her essential bodily functions were under another person's control right now.

Nurse Cerys cut off Lara's sheer white micro panties -- she had no other way of removing them through all the girl's restraints, and waited. Soon Lara relaxed her bladder enough to begin peeing into the plastic basin -- the sound of her water dominating that little cell and twisting the knife of humiliation a little bit more.

Her urine was dark brown and had a considerable aroma -- something that made her blush even deeper. The lurid scene took a devastating toll on her: the Lady of Abington all tatted up, restrained and urinating on command like some deviant! She was one of those sorts who generally used private bathrooms with gold fixtures marble floors. She might have become comfortable roughing it on archaeological expeditions, but nothing prepared her for this.

If someone had heard her unmentionable noises before today, it would only be a well-trained bathroom attendant who would smile, pretend that she heard nothing, and perhaps offer to rub some scented lotion onto her dainty hands before she left. Nurse Cerys was the antipodal opposite: watching her with far too much interest, as though she could learn Lara's medical history by how many drops of urine fell from her perfectly-shaped labia!

She thanked the heavens that she didn't need to do anything else right now -- but wouldn't that come eventually? There was no toilet in the room.

But there were cameras.

Lara was consumed with this notion: if the tabloids got a photo of her right now, she would NEVER live it down! Was that their plan all along? Simple blackmail? All these unconfirmed suspicions harried her young mind. That, combined with the fact that she didn't even know her location really toyed with her sense of reality. She didn't even anyone to speak with -- Nurse Cerys had made that abundantly clear. When Lara had finished, the blonde woman dabbed her dry using some tissues, and left her alone.

Hours passed.

Lara was getting extremely uncomfortable in her seated position -- her vertebrae were aching because there was no way for her to relax. It also felt very odd to be have her exposed flesh against a seat. The boredom was a worse torment, though. There was literally nothing to look at -- even that mirror was currently out of view -- and nothing to do except remain exactly as they wanted her to be.

To pass the time, she daydreamed.

She went over the highlights of her life: playing soccer at her boarding school, the research that lead to her paper being published in several academic journals in spite of her young age. Then, to counteract the effects of solitary confinement, she pictured her previous social interactions.

To her disappointment, not many of them were good. Lara was extremely wealthy; and so she grew up in a community that was cloistered and rarefied. Most everyone she associated with was an heiress, a plutocrat's daughter, or else they were part of the waitstaff. She had seen first-hand the way excessive money distorted peoples' thinking, especially towards those with less.

She thought back to the bathroom attendant, a poor Creole woman who was supposedly doing work-study to go to University. It was the only path to higher education for most of the world in today's economy, and extreme competition for limited slots had a predictable affect on the labor expected of those 'beneficiaries.' Lara didn't accept the hand massage, but her friend Robin Woodward did.

Lara recalled the striking imagery of the poor Creole woman's dark, callused hands caressing Robin's perfectly manicured porcelain digits. Robin insisted that they both wait in the bathroom while she got her hand massage; she was always trying to boss Lara around and dictate her actions. She probably had some jealousy about how Lara's nobility was the old sort, the type couldn't be purchased at any cost, while Robin's family had bought their title more recently than the girl would ever admit.

Robin spoke with the bathroom attendant.

"This hand massage is delightful. What is your name, sweetie?"

"Cassandra, ma'am."

"And what made you want to be a bathroom attendant? Do you massage feet as well?"

Cassandra was obviously uncomfortable at the familiarity, but she didn't want to offend a girl whose comportment made it clear that she was a member of the ruling class.

"I'm doing this as part of a work-study program at the University of London. No, I've never done a foot massage before -- I haven't really been asked for that here."

"You are working as a bathroom attendant for work-study?" Lara cut in, "How could that possibly help you in your career? Why would the school allow this?"

Cassandra nodded, and seemed like she was about to tell the real story about the college's ugly side, and maybe she would have if Lara were in here alone. But with Robin present, Cassandra erred on the side of caution.

"It's part of the 'whole economy' approach," the Creole girl replied by rote memorization, "it helps us understand all the different facets of a business so we can find places to cut down on labor costs."

"It doesn't make any sense," Lara persisted, "people go to college to avoid this sort of job. No offense."

Cassandra recognized a kindred spirit; Lara could tell the girl had spent a lot of time thinking about these exact things. But Robin cut them both off.

"Calm down, Lariska," the girl said in her cut-glass tone; Lara noticed it was the same tone she used when addressing a poorly-behaved servant.

'Lariska' was a mean nickname that the other girls used for Lara whenever she started talking about issues of social justice; it was the Russian nickname for Lara. They were implying that she was some kind of Marxist, and even though Marx was German this was an effective way of shutting her down in a clique where his ideas were social suicide.

Robin continued.

"Cassandra is good at her job, this is the best hand massage I've gotten in months! A little more pressure though, please."

Cassandra smiled at the backhanded compliment, and rubbed Robin's hand with renewed vigor.

"There's a hidden benefit to this, too. Like she said, it shows her the 'whole economy'; maybe Cassandra will decide that she is better suited for this sort work rather than working at some corporate facts-and-figures rat wheel. What are you studying?"

"Art history," was Cassandra's terse response.

Okay, even Lara had to admit that probably wasn't the most lucrative degree. But it was still important! Art historians provided a narrative context to her archeological work -- it was tragic that there was so little economic incentive to pursue this field.

"Perfect! You could be an erudite attendant, making smart comments about Vermeer and Caravaggio and turning the women's bathroom into an intellectual haven. And giving massages all the while? I might like to hire you myself... if you do my feet too."

Cassandra involuntarily glanced down at Robin's feet, encased in £3000 platform sandals with a peep toe.

"And the student debt is an asset for your employer! You will be educated, able to follow complex directions, and the need to repay it will guarantee a high standard of service!"

Now Cassandra was getting angry, although she did a good job of hiding it. Lara noticed, but Robin didn't observe it or perhaps didn't care. Robin's way of talking really was offensive, and deliberately so. The wealthy girl was always having this 'debate' with Lara, although it never amounted to much more than making derisive comments about the working poor, often in their presence.

She said worse things in private.

"If it is such a great program, why don't you volunteer to participate?" Lara asked Robin.

"Why don't you?" Robin fired back, smiling as she entertained the idea, "what better way for Lariska Swift to get a taste of the working class than by being a bathroom attendant? Maybe we could make a wager of it. We would need a way of making sure you can't wiggle out of it, though. I do quite like the idea of having a noble lady standing at attention for me..."

"You're mad," Lara said.

She didn't want Robin to explore this odd fantasy very much further -- she was already getting too into it for comfort. Cassandra looked like she wanted to be anywhere else right now, and sighed audibly when Robin signaled the end of the massage.

Before they left, Robin flagged down the manager, a balding man in his late 50's wearing an inexpensive navy blue suit.

"I had a few ideas to improve the experience at the lady's bathroom," Robin began.

"Of course, miss! We love to hear how to make things better!"

Robin began talking, and the ideas just kept coming.