Rebecca Waite Character Study

Character Study of Professor Rebecca Waite, another one of those crazy Gnosis College psychologists. She’s playing around with some very peculiar mind-altering substances…

(Click on the image for larger size. Creative Commons License
Rebecca Waite Character Study 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.)

_Gnosis Dreamscapes_ now available

The fifth Gnosis College script, Gnosis Dreamscapes, is now available.  Professor Rebecca Waite is busy with new and highly-questionable experimental undertakings, proving that you can’t keep a good mad scientist down, while meanwhile our various heroes and heroines are up against it, facing a more motivated enemy than they ever did before.  Am I making a spoiler if I say that whether they all make it, or several do not make it, depends rather centrally on what theory you hold in the metaphysics of personal identity?  Also, there be pirates in this script.  Really!  So surf over…and enjoy.

In trouble at Magdalene

It can be a serious mistake to piss off a bunch of nuns, especially if said nuns maintain enough bondage dungeons in their cloistered spaces that they have to be given numbers.  Willie has already found out that you trifle with the Magdalene College nuns at your peril, and Professor Rebecca Waite is about to learn the same, the hard way.  As Rope Guy over at Bondage Blog once observed

Enraged nuns. With ropes. It’s never pretty:

…they seized the luckless wight,
And began to exercise their spite;
They tied him to a tree, that grew
Within the yard, of mournful yew,
Then went to search with indignation
For instruments of flagellation.

Ouch.  He’s quoting a much longer poem, the whole of which can be found here.

And as for the fact that Professor Waite is eventually delivered back to campus with her clothes freshly laundered and folded?  Well, I guess I couldn’t quite avoid alluding to this little scandal

Fair trade?

And of course, young Willie manages to step in it again when a (possibly ill-advised) experiment with his work-study supervisor, Professor Rebecca Waite,  runs off the rails.

I know that there are people who write stories about the possibility of erotic body swapping (examples here), and as a fetish this definitely shows up on Franklin Veaux’s sex map as part of the “Islands of the Imaginary,” just east of tentacle sex.

I wish I could point to some of this erotica as a precedent for the Willie/Waite experience, but I actually suspect that I was more influenced here by two other body-swap stories, both non-erotic in their content.  One is Mary Rodgers‘s story Freaky Friday, age-appropriate children’s novel about a one-day body-swap between a mother and her teenage daughter.  I read this and was fascinated by it when I was about eleven.  The other is the explicitly anti-erotic story by H.P. Lovecraft, “The Thing on the Doorstep,” which I first read and was equally fascinated by at age fifteen and which I attempt to honor in the name, “Rebecca Waite.”

A good part of the fun of writing scenes like the one herein discussed is not only do you get to play with an intrinsically titillating idea like swapping bodies with someone else, but you can indulge also the fantasy of crossing into a different gender, as both Waite and Willie do.  If you could “try on” being a different gender I would try it in a heartbeat, and I suspect most of you readers would as well.  Swapping bodies is a fine mad science theme as well because the imagined means by which it might be accomplished — brain transplants, for example — are something that a mad scientist would be eager to try.

Plus I got to indulge one other little trope that makes me squee, which is the nerd who is really a hottie but who covers it up because she (it’s usually a she, in these cases) realizes that as a hottie she wont be taken seriously for the right things.

Victoria Vetri in _Invasion of the Bee Girls_ (1973), looking about as nerdy as it is possible for her look.

“You try being taken seriously as a scientist when all your male students and colleagues are staring at your chest.”