Chapter 5: The Claiming of Cathy Delapointe

“You know,” I tell Cathy backstage right before we go back out, “you can still bolt out of here.” These words will be deliciously ironic later, and I know it.

“It’s okay,” she says, glancing between me and Livia. “You both seem like really nice people. Even if things got a little, uh, racy out there, it was all in good fun.”

“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “We’ll all have lots of fun.” I meet her gaze and help her visualize the kind of fun I really want to have with her. She makes an odd, pleasant little squeaking sound and doesn’t say anything. The three of us go back on stage together.

During the intermission, I’ve wheeled a large object covered by a black satin curtain out on to the very center of the stage. It’s ten feet tall, on a base six feet wide and long. Neither I nor Livia say anything about it. The crowd obviously has something else on their minds, as the chant starts up again: “Get Cathy naked! Get Cathy naked! Get Cathy naked!”

Most girls would be threatened by that. Cathy isn’t. She’s blushing, and I think she’s pleased by it. Livia gives her a slight sympathy hug, devoid of salacious intent. “Well,” the magician says, “I think we know what the crowd wants.”

Cathy shrugs. “I suppose I should take it as a compliment, really.”

Thing is, I can tell she does take it as a compliment, and knows how to give different signals about that to different social cliques.

Livia presses on. “They’re not likely to get it, though, are they? I understand you have something of a reputation around here as an unattainable treasure, the Forbidden Fruit of the Big Noodle.”

“Um. A lady has to have some self-respect.”

“Look at me. I’m not a modest lady, and I have a lot of fun with my vanity. Just between us girls, I think we can both agree, at least, that it’s nice to be wanted?”

Cathy demurs.

I think Livia is toying with her prey a little bit too much at this point. We both know what Cathy wants, and that she wants someone else to blame for it. So I step in. “Would you be willing to do one more quick routine with us?”

“Umm ... yeah, okay.”

She doesn’t ask what it involves or show suspicion. She barely even manages the bare minimum of poorly-feigned reluctance. “Should I go sit by the Newton’s —”

Livia snaps her fingers sharply in Cathy’s face and says, “Trance!”

Instantly, her hands drop to her sides and her eyes go dead — and the crowd goes nuts. Livia quickly clamps a pair of headphones back over Cathy’s head before ill-mannered fraternity chants ruin the tone entirely.

“Listen, you barmy tossers!” Livia shouts. “Chill out with the bleedin’ chants! They are not productive to getting what you want!”

The chanting stops — and the implication of what it called for being possible causes several sharp intakes of breath. Yeah, we have their full attention.

Livia starts to swagger around the stage, taking on the body language of a cocky ringleader as she talks to the audience. “Ladies, gentlemen, less-than-gentle-men, I need to tell you I’ve been billed as Lascivious Livia the Naughty Magician for a year and a half now, but I’m a big believer in people earning the titles they claim. So I think it’s long past time that I do something really, deeply, pervasively naughty, don’t you? After all, if I don’t, there’d be a bit of false advertising at work, wouldn’t there? So if you want the third Decan show to be something really obscene and naughty, give me a fuck yeah!”

“Fuck yeah!”

Jesus, I feel that ring throughout my bones. The crowd is officially kind of scary now. Of course, that doesn’t stop Livia from taunting them. “Well, too bad!” she shoots back. “My doctor says I’m not allowed to pull any more Christmas lights out of my hoo-hah until the infection clears up!”

The crowd laughs, but it’s short and vaguely irritable. There’s one thing they want right now, and it’s not a standup line-o-rama show.

I walk over to Cathy. “Wow, Cathy,” I say, “you look kind of rank.”

No response from the entranced coed, her eyes staring blankly ahead. “I guess that’s to be expected after doing fifty jumping jacks. Got a bit of pit sweat worked up there.”

The crowd boos. I’m the villain now; they don’t see where I’m going with this, and don’t like anyone insulting the girl on the pedestal. But I don’t care. I go on with the routine, setting up the scenario.

“Cathy, you feel grimy.”

“I feel grimy.”

“I bet you can’t wait to get home and jump in the shower.”

Cathy nods blankly.

“I’ll call you a cab.”

Now, Livia has a great love of performance flair in her work. When we worked out this routine, she wanted to get a bumper car, of the sort they might have beside the roller coasters and Ferris wheels at an amusement park. She had an idea for a comedic spectacle she fell in love with — Mimi as a fake cab driver escorting a mark “home” in a bumper car. Turns out, though, that those things are both really heavy and only run on specialized electric floors.

So we scoured mail-order toy catalogues for a plastic pedal-scooter big enough for two adults — a hard find in itself — and then we made the metal frame of a bumper car from coat hangers and paper mache, and painted it to give the visual image of being a bumper car while being light enough for a normal woman to lift in one hand or drive by pedal with a passenger of similar weight.

Now, that may seem an insane amount of frivolous work to put into an intentionally tacky prop for a routine that is fundamentally focused on cute coeds being coaxed into giving up the goodies. But, as Livia told me, “glamour is born from elbow grease,” and it really is the glamour and spectacle that makes the cute girls’ tops come off — and moreso, elevates the show into something people will remember. The routine has to be funny in the same way that women always say they want a guy they would date to be funny — a way that puts the raunchy bits into a spirit of good cheer. And our bumper car prop likely helps do that — not for Cathy, who is already firmly hooked, but it will make it easier for all the women watching what will come next to mentally categorize it as “a fun if risqué evening” rather than “gross, sleazy and scary”.

For me, though, the best part of the bumper car gag is Mimi in a sexy, midriff-baring valet girl costume. It makes me wish so hard she wasn’t a lesbian. Like a perfect gentleman, I help Cathy into the “cab” and ask the “valet” to take her home. Mimi has her full bimbo persona in overdrive, mixed up with a caricature New York cabbie — cigar and all. She huffs and puffs as she drives the toy scooter by pedal around the edge of the stage once, then twice; she’s gurning wildly and clearly enjoying the hell out of her role on stage — brief as it may be. And she really is adorable — she’s much more suited to a caricatural but sympathetic role than she was to being a corrupt security guard, even if the memory of the latter still gives me a charge of fetishistic electricity.

Cathy, for her part, stares blankly forward with glassy eyes as she’s carted around the stage, deeply entranced. Our mark finally steps out of the cab and Livia takes her by the arm, pantomiming walking her up the front stairs of her condo and into the elevator, pressing an imaginary floor button in mid-air.

Livia switches her microphone so both the audience and Cathy can hear her. She’s building anticipation. I’m not sure how necessary this is for Cathy — when she’s in trance we could probably just bluntly order her (“You are alone. Strip!”), and I suspect she would do it. I might even be able to charm her clothes off without hypnosis. For the audience, though, this is positively electric. We’re creating the illusion of violating Cathy’s intimacy in grand theatrical style, and it’s deliciously voyeuristic and sleazy. We’re inviting all the frat guys to imagine what it would be like to have a perfectly obedient Cathy-toy waiting for them in their own dorm rooms.

“Cathy, you’re alone in your own condo now. You feel safe. Why don’t you let your hair down?”

Cathy unclasps her triangle-earrings and sets them on a silver waiter’s tray Livia holds out — no doubt, in her mind, on a shelf or dresser in her apartment. Her bracelets follow a moment later. Then she reaches up and undoes her bun, shaking out her long, strawberry blonde hair like she’s auditioning for a shampoo commercial. The crowd cheers, delighted, and Livia continues her calm narration. “Yes, possum, that’s good. No one can see you, and there’s a part of you that faintly regrets that. You feel grimy and can’t wait to take a shower. But you also feel ambivalent. You watched all those other girls lose their tops, you watched that poor innocent TA get stripped by those terrible magicians. And you couldn’t help but feel a bit excited. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” Cathy says, “a lot excited. And horny.”

Trance subjects usually give no detail in replies unless prompted, but that apparently just comes out. Maybe it needed to. Maybe it’s something Cathy had longed to say out loud for a while now. But none the less, we want to get her clothes off, not have her confess her fantasies to the auditorium while in trance. We can strip (and even gleefully humiliate) Cathy, and she can blame us as the instigators and go back to her normal social life relatively undisturbed. But if she starts confessing weird kinks unprompted, things will be a little different.

Livia covers for her adeptly. “Yes, that naughty magician told you to feel horny, and now you feel so incredibly horny. All over. It tingles throughout your body. You’ve been longing to do something lewd for ages, haven’t you? To show everyone what’s under those conservative clothes you wear.”

“Yes,” she says decisively.

The audience cheers — and chokes and coughs. I get the impression some of the most aggressive frat guys have actually strained their vocal chords.

“But you’re shy. You’ve always been too shy to do something like that when people are around for real. You’re sweating. You’re hot. It’s so hot. Why don’t you get in the shower, Cathy? You can take your clothes off inside.”

Livia makes a gesture at the curtained object. The curtain fails to fall — Mimi is probably running back to her control booth in the Scarlet Lady just outside the auditorium after the cab sketch — so I just walk over and tear it down. This reveals a shower stall on wheels. Not a stall, precisely — a six foot square tiled floor with the edges rounded up about half a foot, and then a tall, rectangular metal skeleton rising ten feet up to a shower head in the absent ceiling. (There’s also an industrial water pump, water heater and tanks mounted in an assembly attached to the back.)

There are no walls; the structure gives the suggestion of a cubicle through its aluminum frame while in reality being totally open-air — and totally exposing the occupant to the outside world. There are a total of eight miniature camcorders concealed in the frame to give a variety of views of the occupant, at least two of which are deviously inappropriate.

Cathy steps into the cubicle. “You want to feel the water wash over you,” Livia purrs. “Don’t worry about getting your clothes wet. You’ll need to wash them tomorrow anyway ... except, maybe, the water may not do great things to that bra. Why don’t you take it off?”

Cathy reaches up and unhooks her bra, pulling it out through the neck of her shirt. It’s a really sturdy bra, not a sexy one — Cathy is, as I’ve said, righteously stacked, and she apparently needs some substantial support in her daily life. Without the bra, her tits droop slightly. She’s hot, but she’s not model-template perfect — not fat, but also not the rail-thin look popular with models and starlets. Her breasts, easily a double D, swing pendulously inside the striped shirt without the bra to hold them firm.

“Reach up and turn on the water,” Livia says. “You want to feel it cleanse the grime and sweat from your body.”

Cathy does so. Warm water cascades down on her from above — not perhaps the flow rate a real shower might give, but still enough to soak through her braless top and tight tan slacks. The light in the fake shower booth highlights how the wet clothes cling to, and accent, her body.

“You feel radiant and full of energy again — and very proud of your body. You do have a magnificent body, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Cathy says with no ambivalence. “I do. Everyone wants it, and I love that. It makes me feel so nice. I like the things people say about it, about me. Even, especially, the mean things.”

“Your clothes are all wet now. You should probably take them off. But you can’t help but imagine what it would have been like to do that in public, back at the auditorium, with all those boys watching — a chance to show all the sorority girls and frat hunks that you’re not so reserved and modest after all. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh god,” Cathy says. “Yes!”

“Why don’t you take those wet clothes off, Cathy? Do it slowly, piece by piece. Imagine that you’re doing what you’ve never done in real life. Show them your stripper moves. You’re alone, it’s just a fantasy, it can’t hurt anything, right? And if you get a bit worked up, well, you’ve surely heard about how a girl can use a shower head to release tension, right? You know you want to do it. It’s almost like you can hear phantom music in your head...”

Mimi is apparently back in the Scarlet Lady by this time, because on that cue, the auditorium’s sound system (and Cathy’s headphones) begin to pipe out the opening bars of our special extended remix of You Can Leave Your Hat On ... and the crowd goes wild yet again. The moment that everyone has been waiting for all night has finally arrived.

I scrutinize the crowd. Boys and girls, youth and adult, everyone is focused on the shower. Misdirection achieved. I press a button on my mike to signal Mimi. The auditorium lighting, already dim, fades to near absolute blackness. The shower stall has its own lighting, well set up to show its occupant with maximum clarity free of either glare or murkiness.

No one is watching the south wall with the main exit, where earlier Mimi had brought in the bumper car. There’s a lighted red “Exit” sign above the main doors, of the type schools usually have over their metal fire doors. That sign winks out. One effectively identical to it winks on two seconds later, thirty feet distant along the same wall. Astute readers might guess at the humiliating trick we just set up; the rest of you can wait and watch it play out in all its depraved glory.

Mimi flashes a closeup view of Cathy’s wet, clinging striped shirt and the ample bust it barely conceals on the overhead projector. Blown up to that scale, her protuberant nips and the stretched fabric surrounding them resemble a bird’s eye view of twin, spired circus tents. I grin madly at the oblivious co-ed and make cartoony breast-groping gestures with my hands. Livia mutes Cathy’s headphones and whispers to the audience in her best naughty conspirator voice. “You know, we got our spycams at an amazing discount. I guess Chuck Berry didn’t want to be seen with them any more.”

That gets a few nervous laughs, but the crowd is mostly fixated on the striptease.

Cathy is playing with the buttons on her shirt. She’s moving with the music. She’s not an athlete, and she lacks dance skills, but she is horny and it’s the iconic horny girl song, and she manages to be very sultry none the less. Her hands stroke her body, sometimes roughly squeezing and kneading her own breasts or thighs. Her eyes are closed, and her expression is blissful. She enjoys the water droplets striking her skin. She finally figures out the shirt only has three buttons and won’t come all the way undone. I wonder what striptease she was imagining in her mind? Something from an old movie, perhaps. She reaches down to the hem of the shirt and starts raising it, ever so gradually.

I can’t actually say she’s a natural stripper. A stripper has to be kinetic, hyper-energetic and very athletic; coordinated and sexually aggressive. Her undressing is more sensual; it’s perfectly suited to the song we chose, a more classical kind of Jazz strip than you would ever see in a modern club. It depends a lot on people knowing the girl and really wanting to see what’s under her clothes before they actually come off, rather than the modern stripper being both a tease and eyecatch to men who are seeing her for the first time mid-strip. I will say I doubt this is the first time Cathy has done a private fantasy strip like this, though it’s certainly the first time she was actually in public.

We get underboob. The shirt keeps climbing. Her nipples are so erect it actually catches on one, pulling the ample breast an inch up before it pops free and bounces back down responsively. Her chest is amazing — the kind of huge natural tits that are expected to dangle a bit, and always face the direction their owner was facing exactly one second prior until they swing back to compensate like a pendulum. She holds the shirt aloft in one hand, raising it as high as she can above her head before dropping it at her feet.

It’s the moment the crowd has been waiting for, but they’re not actually going apeshit — it’s more like they’re awed and entranced. I wonder if they believed this was really going to happen, or if those who knew Cathy thought it would just be her teasing them like usual?

Cathy doesn’t stop; neither, fortunately, does our extended remix. She runs her hands over her body in a way that might be called sensual, but could also honestly be called masturbatory — the way a person of either gender grips, clenches and paws themselves when they get near a climax in said personal act. Her hands navigate to her clingy slacks and unbutton them. She loses rhythm wiggling out of them, but the imperfection is in itself adorable. She sloughs off her sneakers and socks, and peels down the wet pants until they lie in a heap at her feet. Her breasts gyrate and bounce as she struggles to get the slacks off, finally tossing the heap of wet clothes out the front of the stall. They land on the auditorium floor with a splorch.

Cathy stands up with a flair and shakes her wet hair around, spraying droplets everywhere thanks to the shower’s lack of walls and even giving me and Livia a light sprinkling. Her panties are plain white cotton rather than anything explicitly sexy ... but plain white cotton looks rather nice wet, and some details can be made out inside them. Those details look puffy and red, pretty worked up. She hooks her fingers into the elastic rim of the panties and pulls at it playfully ... then seems to decide better and slides her hand inside it for a few moments.

She rubs herself a bit, opening her mouth with pleasure. Water pools inside it, and runs in rivulets down every curve of her body. She gasps, slightly, and brings her hands up from her crotch to sweep the wet hair out of her face. She has her eyes closed this whole time. Who showers with their eyes closed? It’s like she’s living out a fantasy, having no idea that tonight it’s actually becoming a reality. She looks so intense, so yearning, with her hair slicked back like that. It takes away the style and social falsity of an elaborate perm and turns it into something raw and passionate.

Cathy’s hands slide back down her body, feeling it up, pawing it, and hooking the panties with her thumbs, pulling them down without any hesitation. Her curly, strawberry blonde pubic hair is matted to her pussy lips. She steps out of them demurely.

Livia is only three feet from Cathy. She has a hand out, not touching her but hovering around her exploratorily. All her stage bravado is gone. I can tell she’s perving on Cathy’s naked body really, really hard — I wonder if, ironically, she’s a bit hypnotized herself. She unhooks the portable shower head — not the same one the water was previously coming out of at the top of the booth — turns it on and hands it to Cathy, almost fumbling it. Livia, fumble a prop? Really? That’s truly a sign of how deep some of her kinks must run. “Use the shower head, lovey,” Livia more gasps than commands. “Use it now!”

Cathy fumbles her hands over the object, wondering what it is, until she finally remembers Livia’s earlier suggestion. She leans back against one of the corner pylons. I grab the opposite pylon to counterbalance it — I don’t want the shower stall to fall over, or less dramatically but crushingly anticlimactically, for it to tilt enough to make Cathy feel unstable, and thus unsafe, and thus end her trance. But it doesn’t shift; we built it sturdy.

Cathy squats down, bending her knees ... and spreading her legs. She tests the water from the portable head with her hand ... and then, after a second, apparently approves of it, adjusting the dial to make the water jets more intense before she places it between her legs, about a foot away from her pussy. She doesn’t put on any grand performance, but her quickened breathing and subtle trembling is more effective than any porn star’s attention grabbing power-moans.

“That shower head makes the most wonderful sound,” Livia whispers. “Tonight, whenever you hear that ‘brrr’, you’re going to feel this overwhelming stimulation of your clit, and sexual pleasure will surge though your body uncontrollably.”

Now, this part I almost feel bad about. The girl has spent at least the last few years of her life harboring intense sexual fantasies of being humiliated. She dates frat guys who spread lewd tales about her, and follows those tales obsessively, for the sole purpose of vicarious self-humiliation. She came on stage to be humiliated. We showed her what to expect, and now we’re just upping the ante a bit. What we do is still both terrible and awesome, though.

You see, that heavy shower head is one of Livia’s trick props. The edges contain a dozen intense water jets. In the center, though, is the well-disguised, waterproof lens for a miniature spycam. It’s after about twenty seconds of Cathy’s water-masturbation that Mimi decides the audience has had enough comparatively subtle shots (or she just finally gets the focus right).

So, yeah. Overhead projector. Fourteen foot wide matte pull-down screen on the east wall. Crystal-clear closeup between the spread legs of the perfect girl next door, the Forbidden Fruit of the Big Noodle. A focused water jet striking an erect valedictorian clit. Engorged crimson pussy lips dribbling water and more intimate fluids. All this framed with firm thighs flushed red and violently trembling on the verge of orgasm. It’s cinematic and over-the-top and horrible and cruel and perfect. But we don’t want to let Cathy orgasm yet, not while she still thinks this is all imaginary. Well, I don’t. I think Livia may be forgetting the script in her estrogen-fueled ogling of the glistening coed. “Snap her out,” I whisper quietly but intensely.

Livia shakes her head and speaks quickly into the microphone. “Cathy, when I snap my fingers, you will come to full awareness. You will have a crystal clear knowledge of where you are, what you have done and why.”

A few points before we get to the climax. First of all, the lighting is very focused on the shower — it, and Cathy, are crystal clear while the rest of the auditorium is murky. Secondly, we’d moved the gym mats used in the jumping jacks segment around a bit while Mimi was driving Cathy around in the “cab”, to ensure the safety of what was to come next. We do think of these things, you know — we can be cruel to our marks in service to the Great God Fetish, when we think they’ll get as much out of it as we will, but we do also try to be attentive to their safety and well-being.

What comes next is, if I may brag on behalf of the whole Trips team, one of the most beautifully choreographed moments of prurient comedy the world has ever seen.

Livia snaps her fingers in front of Cathy’s face. Her eyes go very, very wide as full conscious awareness floods back into her. She struggles to get upright. I hook my hands under her arms and lift her up so she doesn’t slip and fall. Her hands dart to cover her breasts and pussy in the perfect iconic pose of the mortified naked lady.

“Oh my god, I’m naked!” she wails.

Livia smirks like a maniac. “Wave to the blokes, possum! They’re all delighted to be seeing so much of you!”

Cathy’s eyes flash over the crowd, staring transfixed at her as she realizes where she is and what she just did. She screams in panic. And, as any sensible person would do in her situation, she bolts with the energy of an enraged sprinter. Everywhere around the well-lit shower is murky, but there’s an obvious source of succor in the darkness: the bright red “Exit” sign she still thinks is above the main doors.

Her path is lined with gymnastics mats that even her wet feet find good purchase on. We don’t want her to faceplant onto a hard gym floor and crack a vertebra, after all. We do have a 500fps slow-motion lowlight camera trained directly on the path we put her own, however, and it catches all the most aesthetically pleasing and pruriently entertaining aspects of a young lady amply endowed by nature and deprived of any upper-chest support by devious circumstance performing an admirable simulation of the fifty-yard dash.

Mimi’s timing with the lights is absolutely spot-on. The area by the exit sign flares into brilliant illumination, giving a crystal-clear view of the naked sprinting Cathy to cameras and audience alike, when her momentum has already made it impossible to change course. I don’t think she even realizes where she’s running; she just keeps going in furious embarrassment. We have, of course, herded her not toward the main doors but toward the inflatable pool. She’s still blissfully unaware of this and running full-tilt when her legs strike the balloon-like rim and she loses her footing.

Imagine this moment as it’s captured by the slow-mo camcorder concealed in NewBee’s stuffed head. The naked sweetheart, now fully airborne, blushing furiously, arms and legs pinwheeling, breasts sloshing every which way, wet hair spraying out in a corona around her like the most ambitious photographer’s glamour shot of a supermodel, descending gradually into the inevitable embrace of several hundred gallons of liquid chocolate. There is no chance of her sliding into a hard concrete wall — if she somehow overshoots the pool, she would be caught in the padded embrace of NewBee’s plushy rooster body. But she doesn’t; her trip gives her angular rotation and she ends up in a nearly vertical descent ending — doing a perfect bellyflop into the delicious chocolate.

It’s a tradition for NewBee to nail fans with chocolate cakes during Fighting Cock game pre-shows (and he’s picked cute girl-fans more than a few times for this undignified but entertaining treatment), so his placement here makes for a nice school spirit tie-in — serving as foreshadowing and drawing some extra engagement from the athletes and cheerleaders in the crowd.

Now, this is a very special inflatable pool. We cut out the normal plastic bottom and replaced in with the springy material used in a trampoline mat, coated with sealant and treated in other ways to keep the pool’s airtight nature. The momentum of Cathy’s faceplant stretches the trampoline downward, and a second later the trampoline floor springs back up — and in the process casts about fifty gallons of liquid chocolate into the air. This veritable tidal wave strikes dead on target — Karen, Charlene, Macy and R- get plastered from head to toe. (NewBee is also coated, and looks rather amusing coated with dripping chocolate, but I’m not even going to put on a pretense that anyone cares about that.)

The size of the splatter is not coincidental, by the way. Livia wasn’t kidding about being a prop magician, and she can be positively obsessive-compulsive about chasing her perfect cinematic moment. We no shit threw twelve weighted mannequins into various inflatable pools filled with various colloids commonly found in grocery stories. Just so you know — when we’re not being all glamourous and naughty on-stage, separating nubile college girls from their clothing, we’re busy being the evil mirror-universe Mr. Wizard — making messes and blowing things up for Science!

“My clothes!” Macy yelps. R- is quietly angry. Charlene and Karen, however, are staring at each other with mouths wide open in silent, awed laughter. Their faces are filled with delight, and I have no doubt they think this is one of the best nights of their life — though I’m not sure yet if they are gossip girls enjoying Cathy’s humiliation, comedy fans, lovers of schadenfreude, aroused by our erotic stunt or just party girls that love it whenever something “totally outrageous” happens. It could be all of the above.

Cathy has, by pure luck, landed in the best possible position for Livia’s well-engineered “cinematic moment”, with her knees and face plunged into the chocolate but her groin upthrust. As a result, every part of her body is fully covered with liquid chocolate — save for her upthrust ass, which is still perfectly clean, taut and firm, still glistening with water from the shower. She’s perfectly still, frozen.