Competition Breeds Excellence in Captivity

Zarina’s heart was going to stop forever if kept up my opening level of cruelty, and this was a realistic limitation I had taken into account. In the course of designing my torture chamber, I was particularly interested in discovering methods that caused maximum pain, with the minimum visible or long-term damage. Electricity seemed to be a promising ‘genre,’ so I dusted off old textbooks and consulted both technical guidelines and historical documentation from despotic regimes. I read literature showing that the long-term effects of electrical shocks can include depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, mood swings, and personality changes. But all of these mental health problems could just as easily be caused by my other forms of torment.

I just said that I had been fretting about Zarina going into cardiac arrest, so this same concern drove me to study how painful electrical shocks can be without being fatal. Voltage may be the more common measurement of electricity, but as the saying goes, “current is what kills.” For example, tasers are advertised with absurdly high voltage ratings, but the actual volume of the electricity as measured by the current is quite low. Voltage also does not measure what the target actually feels. The fact is the effective charge in microcoulombs, or amount of electricity delivered, is what actually hurts and matters.  

All this sounds like it should always work in theory, but I never have fallen in love with academia. In practice, Zarina would be the first subject of my experiments. Portable stun guns designed for close-range were portable and convenient when I needed to quickly correct her behavior. I had ordered a plethora of models from all over the world to try and measure whether the advertised numbers converted into perceived pain. This proved elusive as relative pain cannot be accurately measured, especially while Zarina was still gagged. But I could approximate by observing Karina’s response, spending many happy hours trying one shock weapon after another. I recorded the charge, voltage and current and pushed the upper limits during each subsequent session. 

Fundamentally, all handheld shock devices have their limitations. Stun gun batteries only last for 10-15 minutes of continuous fun, and tasers can only fire a couple of shots per cartridge. Devices powered through a connection to a wall outlet avoided this problem. I had started my collection of torture instruments with ordinary commercial-off-the-shelf versions. As I had become quite the collector before capturing Zarina, I sought out curios on the black market from the most discriminating connoisseurs in police states. 

The modern versions of Latin American picanas seemed to cause Zarina some of the most exquisite pain of all. Normally picanas are cheap to produce, but I made contacts who independently verified that an upgraded version was favored by a despot’s infamous secret police for being able to extract confessions—true or false—faster than any other method. I was well-aware that each link in my anonymous daisy chain of procurement was adding exorbitant surcharges, but I had no bargaining power because I was enamored this model. 

I discerned that the picanas I bought were not stolen. The hard truth that did disquiet what little conscience I can claim was that I had bought them officially from the police department, through front men. This regime was obscenely rich and ruled over a relatively well-developed society, so I negotiated a surcharge several times the cost of the base model to customize activation only via a fingerprint reader. If I lived for several more decades and acquired a harem of slaves as I aspired to, one of my captives was bound to get her hands on one of my torture implements and try to use it against me. I could only keep the traditional implements like whips, pliers and needles under lock and key, and I was ready to take my chances in a fight if a girl nabbed one of such non-electric tools. But, where technologically possible, I had such additional safeguards installed on my more advanced gadgets, because they could incapacitate in an instant. 

A side effect not ordering ‘off the shelf,’ was my paranoid need to buy faraday bags on my own upon receiving the shipment of the picanas. As plutocratic as the government was, it was unlikely an official would want to absorb the extra cost of surveillance bugs or any kind of geolocation or radio transmission signals. But I assumed I would not have time to inspect or sweep the picanas upon delivery, and was in hurry to get away from the secret police who were sure to be watching the dead drop. Hence, I had a drone immediately enclose the package of picanas in faraday bags that blocked all electromagnetic signals coming from inside.

According to the octaves that Zarina's voice reached and the way her muscles convulsed, the picana jolts were indeed more grievous than the industrial strength cattle prods they had evolved from. Not surprising, considering these picanas delivered 2-3 times the voltage at a lower, and thus safer, current.  The modern versions had rheostats built into the handle, so I did not have to walk back to the wall to adjust to adjust the current or require a second operator to be present, like the 1930s versions.

The muscular contractions caused by severe electric shocks can be enough for a victim to inadvertently fracture their own bones. But more commonly these involuntary constrictions caused Zarina’s jaw to lock down and tested the durability of her ring gags, lest she bite off her own tongue. 

I had chosen specific bondage restraints with a little give in them, so that my slave girls did not dislocate their own joints when they spasmed. Even after I ceased zapping Zarina, her muscles remained clenched and sometimes I had to physically pull on them like I was helping her working out a cramp. The constant firing of her muscle groups taxed Zarina to exhaustion more than other forms of torture, and often left her too stiff to follow her own brain’s signals, even after vocal and electric prodding. 

All the picanas I procured ran on directed current (DC). The ceaseless nature of DC meant that Zarina’s muscles were forced to keep firing, whereas AC shocks would give muscles micro-breaks between engaging them again. As much as I loved watching Zarina’s body tauten, the main reason why I chose DC electrical torture was that it was less likely to be fatal. AC powers most outlets around the world, but I had directed my architects and engineers to also include DC outlets in every wall. The electrical shock from DC can stop a human heart, which even I normally wanted to avoid, but the heart has the ability to start beating again on its own (that is why defibrillators, which I kept handy, provide a DC jolt). In contrast, AC electricity can cause the heart to beat irregularly or too quickly, which leads to blood clots or strokes. 

People who work around electricity and have inevitably been shocked may tell you that AC hurts more than DC at the same voltage. This is because skin act as a capacitor and blocks some level of DC, but AC can bypass the skin. I couldn’t have Zarina being hurt any less than possible, so the obviously solution was to crank up the DC voltage. Luckily for villains like me, science provides even more answers. Before electrocution sessions, I soaked Zarina with salt water kept below zero by liquid nitrogen to lower the electrical resistance of her skin by at least two orders of magnitude and increase its conductivity. The other workaround was to avoid Zarin’s skin entirely and inject the electricity directly into open wounds or wire needles that punctured her nerve endings. 

Muscle contraction is caused by electrical signals sent from the brain. So with artificial shocks I could instantly make Zarina’s muscles work as hard as humanly possible. That much ‘bodybuilding’ quickly evaporates even water so cold it would freeze were it not for the salt content. My research had also taught me the happy discovery that sweat is similarly an excellent conductor of electricity. When I having too much fun to douse Zarina again with salt water, I took comfort in the fact that the sweat on Zarina’s skin was working as a comparable substitute to keep her electrical resistance low and her pain at the maximum.

Sweating that hard during a long electrocution session causes dehydration, which in turn leads to more lovely muscle cramping. Overhydration is more dangerous than dehydration from exertion, but to be ‘safe’ I always hung a water bladder nearby. I replaced the mouthpiece with a custom dildo molded after my cock and balls, so that my slaves could practice their blowjob skills even when I couldn’t savor it. Zarina was sucking down 3-4 liters or almost a gallon of water per hour, which is more than double the average sweat rate for normal exercise and close to the 5 liter record. That’s well above the maximum hydration limit of 1 liter of pure water per hour that can be processed by the human kidneys. So to avoid causing hyponatremia or water intoxication, I reached back to my military training manuals and titrated Zarina’s drinking water with the prescribed levels of oral rehydration salts.