It is unsurprising that Bridget would command a high price from a connoisseur of women.
(Click on the image for larger size. 
Study Abroad: Chapter Two, Page Sixteen written and commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com and drawn by Lon Ryden is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.)
Script for today:
Page 22
|
View of Taylor, now standing by the side of the bed. He is in the process of putting a bathrobe on. TAYLOR: Committed to what? |
View of Taylor standing next to Waite. She is pointing out a large machine, sort of like an X-Ray machine, that points down at a table, large enough for a human subject to lie on. The background of the room in which this takes place should be full of cables, wires, computer monitors, and so on. CAPTION: In a few minutes, in another lab room, Professor Waite explains just what it is that I would be committing to. |
|
Close up of Taylor’s face, wearing an astonished expression. The background of the panel should be the same collection of techno-stuff we saw in the previous panel. CAPTION: She says she has the technology for making a woman out of me. Not just a hormones and surgery sex-change. A fully biological woman, down to the cellular level. |
Micrographic view of of a human cell. CAPTION: She claims you change the very cells with very precisely managed radiation, making the change complete and undetectable. |
|
View of an oriental slave market, similar to the sorts painted by orientalist painters like Gerome. CAPTION: You have to admit, there’s nothing like a would-be slave for seeing what slavers are up to. |
View of EDITH STERLING, from Teuthology, suspended on her cruciform gurney, mid-way in her transformation from woman to octopus. It sounds insane, but Professor Waite insists that the technology has been successful in much more radical applications. |
Page 23
|
View “from the rear” of Jill and Taylor sitting in the back seat of Jill’s car. It is dark, except for illumination coming from the screen of a netbook computer which is sitting between the two front seats of the car. Taylor and Jill’s faces are looking at the screen (we should be able to see some of their features becasue they’re 3/4 tunred away). On the screen we see the words ENCRYPTED CONNECTION ESTABLISHED. TAYLOR: You don’t think this looks suspicious? JILL: Why? High school kids are totally into video chat these days. |
Close up view of the screen. We see IRIS BROCKMAN, conservatively attired in a business suit. She’s in some sort of high-rise office, and it’s clearly daytime where she is. IRIS (radio balloon): Greetings Comrade Keeney. I see you brought the new recruit. |
|
View of Jill’s face, illuminated by the screen of the netbook. She is wearing a serious expression. JILL: Can you explain to Taylor here how it’s supposed to work? IRIS (out-of-panel radio balloon): Sure. |
Close up on Taylor’s face, illuminated like Jill’s by the netbook screen. He is wearing a concerned expression. IRIS (out-of-panel radio balloon): We’re taking a shot based on our belief that many of Kupler’s clients are orgiasts. They like group scenes, swapping their slave girls around, and so on. |
|
View of Iris on the netbook screen. She is leaning forward, looking severe. IRIS (radio balloon): The organization I work for has a…commercial rivalry with Kupler’s, so we’ve been studying their methods for some time. |
View of Iris, in the same position in the panel as the previous panel, except that here we see her swimming underwater, in the cool blue of one of the tanks at the Club Cuisine (from the Study Abroad quasi-screenplay). She looks happy and serene. CAPTION: Your organization? CAPTION: There are some obscenely rich people in the world, kid. And you would be amazed at the weird kinks vast wealth liberates. |
Page 24
The visual idea behind the hacker group in whatever shadowy organization Iris is now a part of really was inspired by Ghost in the Shell, from scenes rather like this one from the first movie.
While the inspirations for “very dangerous harem” are perhaps too numerous to mention. One recent example (one of nicer ones, believe it or not, comes from this Dofantasy cover.
Looks like Taylor had better hope he’s as tough as he dreams, if he intends to go through with this.
Well, poor Marie, her usefulness in Colonel Madder’s plots now at an end, ends up getting haremized for her troubles. And her new life — curiously paralleling Iris Brockman’s — begins with a bath.
There are worse ways to get started, I suppose, even if Marie’s experience isn’t exactly smiley.
/p>
(Proximate image source GoodShit.)
Now harems and baths are obviously a subject that appeals to me, since they’ve turned up in posts here before, illustrated either with classical art or photographs. For a bit of visual inspiration here I’ll turn in another direction, which is CG art. I found a relevant example in a set of CG harem pictures at site called verywierd.com (yes, that is the correct spelling).
Now this is not ideal in any number of ways, but there’s still some appeal here. CG is getting better all the time, and for the thaumatophile or anyone else who is into things that are so weird that they would be prohibitively expensive (or just plain impossible) to actually photograph or film and costly to create as hand-drawn art, it remains the great visual creation hope. So let’s not be too critical of CG just yet — let’s lend it a hand instead.
And hope that perhaps it will soon get as good as hand-drawn art.
(Found at The Abyss.)
What does it say about morality that so much human energy is put into imagining someplace where we are rid of it? All four of the stories in Study Abroad involve a certain leap into some realm beyond good and evil. and Bridget’s involves one into an imagined world that has had a pretty deep grip on the erotic consciousness — at least of Christian Europe and its cultural offshoots — for hundreds of years. In the age of Google, it takes a matter of seconds to peer back into the artistic record and see the story. I make a tiny, tiny nod to political correctness in imagining that Bridget goes there of her own “free will,” (or does she? — there are layers of complicating detail), but otherwise, I simply indulge the story whose record is so abundantly available. The visual image of nubile slaves, up for sale, voyeristically inspected:
Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824 - 1904), "The Slave Market"
That of the odalisque, a subject so popular in European painting that there must be hundreds of examples, of which this is perhaps the most famous:
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780 -1867), "La Grande Odalisque"
The image of life in a place of sensual indulgence:
Gérôme again, "The Harem Baths"
And I must of course note, that this visual tradition continues in cinema, and interestingly not just as male voyeurism. Perhaps the first important male sex symbol in film, Rudolph Valentino, really broke into the public consciousness in The Sheik, a story of the abduction and seduction of an aristocratic white woman in the mysterious orient.
And the whole theme continues onward. See related Erosblog posts here, here, here and here. Who am I, humble scrivener that I am, to decline to expropriate such a tradition?
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children” (1927)
And with respect to Bridget, where did you think the dance came from, or where might it be going?
Hans Zatzka (1859 - 1945), "The Harem Dancer"
Gaston Guédy (1874 - 1955), "Dançarina de harém"
A theme continued in a more modern visual idiom here, here, and here. Enjoy!
EroticMadScience.com RSS Feed| Commissioned art and original blogpost content are published here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. |
Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha |
