#cw mind control

Re:The Sisters of DorleyAU/Glow, Worm crossover fic idea: I’m increasingly coming around to the idea that I want to give Stef a character arc that goes through being selected for the graduate school, vampirized, thrall-brainwashed by Elle, and then eventually getting free through a process similar to what seems to be happening to Harriet in Glow, Worm.

That would be the obvious logical easy way to tie together the dubcon arcandthe vampire arc. And at first I was like, nah, I don’t think Elle would want to vampirize Stef, they’re too independent, if anybody from that class is going to the graduate school it’s Adam, he’s a right-wing authoritarian follower personality type who was raised in a cult and was described by Stef as almost like an empty shell and for him Dorley and then the graduate school would just be a series of changing allegiance to new cults, he’s definitely going to be the star pupil of that class as far as Elle is concerned, though I think he might be a little bit too submissive for her, maybe she’d see him as good for muscle but not a position of responsibility.

But then again, I could see Elle being tempted by thought that, vampirized and properly programmed, Stef might make a good assistant for Annaliese. And I could see Elle being a little hubristic about how well she understands Stef and how precisely she’d be able to resculpt them (a little hubristic about how well she understands people in general and how well she can resculpt them, really). I could see Elle warming up to the idea as a challenge.

Besides, the graduate school might actually be the safest place for them. At Dorley they’re disruptive. Washing them out is risky. At the graduate school they can be much more tightly controlled and Elle can resculpt their brain with full-strength thrall.

Besides, Elle might be tempted by the thought that she might not even need to do much brainwashing. Just presenting Stef with a somewhat sanitized and massaged version of the true facts might be enough to get them most of the way to where she wants them:

No, we’re not force-femming cis men, we’re force-femming deeply repressed trans women. Yes, we have ways of reliably finding those. Annaliese can literally smell it. And she sees and speaks to and touches their inner girls during the thrall sessions.

Yes, it’s coercive. That’s necessary because they’re deeply repressed. You wanted our help because you weren’t sure you were strong enough to do it on your own, and you’re a lot less repressed than they are!

Yes, Annaliese carves loyalty to Dorley into their brains too while we do this. Yes, this is a terrible violation. It is a deeply regretted necessity! We’re helping people who are happier after they transition but almost certainly would never transition on their own initiative. Do you not see how that’s valuable and must be protected?

Yes, I have ulterior motives. This is my recruiting ground, and that’s one reason I provide the resources that allows it to exist. I recruit less than one graduate in ten. That leaves hundreds of people who we’ve just helped! And isn’t the vampire kind of transition a cool thing to offer people too?

————–

So, like, one thing that appeals to me about this idea is, like, throwing something like the more typical Dorley transition experience at Stef. Like, yeah, the force-fem thing is totally non-traumatizing and easy and even joyous for them cause they’re trans, but I bet they’d have more complicated feelings about the vampirization thing.

And I want the calling vampirization transition thing to be more than chuckling at similar vocabulary, it is a comparable change. In some ways it’s less radical than gender transition (you get to keep your name and pronouns and being a vampire is less obvious than being a different gender, at least to humans), but the changes in somatic experience are actually a lot bigger.

I think it’d be interesting to see them deal with not fully endorsed physical changes, physical changes that make them at least a little bit uncomfortable. Like:

—

A few weeks into Stef’s second transition she starts to feel not so good. Weak. Tired all the time. Vaguely in pain. There’s mental and emotional aspects too, there’s brain fog and what feels like depression and something that feels a bit like being hangry. She feels a hunger that food doesn’t satisfy. She feels chronic thirst that drinking barely seems to relieve. Foods seem to increasingly taste as if they’re missing something. Even foods she used to enjoy a lot, foods that used to be her favorites, seem to have profoundly lost something. She starts to get scared.

There’s no surgeries and hormone treatments involved in the second transition, but there is a doctor involved. Mostly she just monitors the changes, watches to make sure everything is going right, and adjusts the dosage of Elle’s and Annaliese’s blood as the changes happen (though is that so different from HRT?).

Stef goes to the doctor and tells her what’s wrong, and the doctor examines and pokes and prods a little, and the doctor’s verdict is: she’s had the vampirization equivalent of a growth spurt. The doctor says, “You’re farther along than we expected you to be at this point. You’re thirsty! As in bloodthirst! Those symptoms you’ve been describing are what the thirst feels like - which, look on the upside, now you know how to recognize it! It usually involves an active craving for blood, but probably that just hasn’t come in yet. We need to way up your dosage!” And she hands Stef a bag of refrigerated human blood and encourages her to drink, saying it’ll make her feel better really quick. Stef is a little dubious (this will be the first time she’s drunk blood straight), and tries it and…

Stef tries to think of the best things she’s ever tasted. She isn’t sure this is a reliable memory, it was from when she was a very young child, but she thinks the best thing she ever tasted was some sort of rice crispie-ish thing her mother once gave her at Christmas. She thinks the best-tasting thing she has a firm memory of was a gourmet meal at a fine restaurant she once ate as a teenager. Let’s put the rice crispie thing at a seven and the gourmet meal at a six. The blood she’s drinking now is a ten. It’s the best thing she’s ever tasted.

This is the first time she’s drunk a lot of blood straight, but she has tasted straight blood before, Elle and Annaliese gave her a few small doses of theirs like that. It didn’t taste very good before. And it was just a salty taste, not like this… The blood Stef’s drinking now has an amazingly complex taste. She didn’t think it was possible to experience so many different tastes at once. Actually, she’s pretty sure it wouldn’t be possible, for a human. The taste has changed because she’s changed. Because before she was tasting it as a human, but now she’s tasting it as a vampire. Or something a significant part of the way down the road to being a vampire, anyway.

The doctor says, “It’s better straight from the source. Still warm. Still fresh.” She would know: she’s a vampire.

Straight from the source. Straight from the person. Straight from the victim.

What would hot fresh blood straight from the neck of a person be? An eleven? A fourteen? A twenty?

It’s not the first time she’s heard that it’s better hot, fresh, straight from a person. She’s also heard that part of the reason it’s better that way is that blood straight from a person is still alive, still part of the person in a way.

She thinks she can feel something from the blood going into her. It feels good. It doesn’t feel like the normal sensations of digestion. It feels like there’s some sort of energy going into her. Power. Vitality. Stolen vitality.

She mentions this to the doctor, and the doctor says yes, that’s the normal sensation a vampire feels when they absorb a significant blood meal. That, too, would be better if the blood was hot and fresh and straight from the source. It would feel more intense then, and last longer. More energy going in. Because blood straight from the source is still alive, still part of the person it was taken from in a way.

Elle has assured Stef that the blood in the bags in the graduate school is ethically sourced; no-one died to provide it, no-one was harmed to provide it, the donors were willing, the system is very similar to normal human blood bank donations. But still, it’s… It’s a bit like cannibalism, and it was taken from a person… It’s… being a creature that feeds on people is a little conceptually uncomfortable, even if the feeding doesn’t do them serious harm. It’s a little uncomfortable realizing her body has been rewired, replumbed, changed to work in a very different way that she doesn’t fully endorse.

And she will miss some foods she used to enjoy. She asks the doctor about this and the doctor confirms that yes, the way those foods tasted to her as a human is forever lost to her now. Her sense of taste works differently now. The doctor reassures her that she will find new favorite foods.

Maybe now she can empathize better with how Aaron felt.

—

There’s a bit of an empathy gap between Stef and a lot of the other girls at the graduate school. A lot of the other girls at the graduate school didn’t really like being human in something a little like the way they didn’t really like being boys.

It turns out when you select heavily for socially dysfunctional trans-adjacents, you also end up selecting heavily for people with invisible disabilities. A lot of them had stuff like autism-associated sensory sensitivities and motor control issues and gastrointestinal ick. For them, the second transition meant their bodies stopped hurtingand started working more smoothly. That’s an experience Stef doesn’t share. Stef was never sickly. It’s a bit of reversal from the dynamics in the basement at Dorley.

—

A little after or before the appetite change there was a morning when Stef woke up and was assaulted by a terrible bombardment of sound. Everything was so loud! And because everything was so loud, there were so many new sounds! She could hear people’s heartbeats! She could hear everyone’s footsteps! It was hard to function, hard to think!

She went to the vampire doctor, who gave her a pair of noise cancelling headphones built for situations like this, and explained what was happening. Her hearing had upgraded toward vampire sensitivity during the night, but her brain hadn’t caught up. She was trying to process all that new sensory input with a brain built to process the input from human ears! She’d basically developed a kind of auditory processing disorder!

The noise-cancelling headphones would give her functionality and a refuge for now, but she’d need to take them off at least a few hours a day, to give her brain opportunity and stimulus to learn how to process the new sensory input.

Stef’s brain eventually did catch up, and in a way it was like being back to the normal, and in another way it was the exact opposite of that. It was back to functional, but a very different kind of functional from before. She could hear people’s heartbeats now. And when she walked in the woods outside the graduate school, she could hear the scurryings and motions and noises of little creatures on and in the forest floor.

—

Content warning for a description of intense sexual arousal/desire behind the read-more:

Stef was a joint siring between Elle and Annaliese. Elle wanted her to get Annaliese’s super-thrall ability and sense of smell, or at least a lesser version of those. And if it made her weaker than most of the graduate school girls, well, you can’t have everything, and honestly looking at how Stef effected Dorley Elle … prefers it that way. Stef inherited Annaliese’s sense of smell, or at least something in the ballpark of it.

Stef had a disturbing experience the first time she smelled a cis human woman who was ovulating.

Stef was attracted to women, but it tended to take the form of cooing over how cool and beautiful they were. It wasn’t… Stef was somebody who was not very comfortable articulating their attraction in terms like “I want to rail that person.” It was a gender dysphoria thing. It was getting better now that she looked like a pretty girl, but she was still pretty inhibited about the carnal side of attraction. Even in her own head.

With her new sense of smell, the body odor of an ovulating cis human woman made Stef feel carnal attraction like she never had before in her life.

It wasn’t something transition in the graduate school had prepared her for, because there weren’t any cis human women there. There were a lot of vampire trans women. There were a few vampire cis women (Elle, Annaliese, maybe one or two others). There were occasionally two human trans women (Bea and Maria, when they visited). None of them ever smelled like that.

Being in the presence of an ovulating cis woman with her new sense of smell made Stef really understand for the first time the phrase “I’d hit that like the fist of an angry god.” Her hands ached to touch that person, ached to touch her breasts or bottom or some other soft squishy part of her and squish, press, play, ached to slide over her, she could almost feel her flesh against her palms and fingers, like the sensation in a phantom limb. The whole front of her body ached to have that person’s body pressed into it, to feel that pressure. Her… her… Just say it! She very intensely wanted to have some part of that person pressed hard against her pussy. To scissor her or something. It was a very intense sexual arousal, and it was unmistakably and unapologetically about sex, about bodies.

And this woman was a stranger! Stef didn’t even know her!

It was… it was the sort of sexual arousal Stef had thought of as male and kind of disgusting and kind of scary, found ego-dystonic, been glad she didn’t experience very much even pre-everything, hoped the HRT and the orchi would take away, been glad when the HRT and the orchi diminished it.

She was not happy to find that her second transition had apparently restored it to her, given her a version more intense than she’d ever had as a human!

Oh, and to make it extra-uncomfortable: the woman also smelled like food, because all humans did, and there was definitely some synergy between that and desire to kiss her and lick her and taste her skin. Stef was… really glad she was not thirsty, because she suspected if she’d had been there’d have been a layer of “do I want to throw myself at this person and fuck her, or do I want to throw myself at her and drink her blood? It’s both!” She could feel just the beginnings of that mingling of desires in the mix, thankfully not strong because she was replete.

She really, really, really hoped none of this was showing and making this woman uncomfortable!