Week on my knees

After spending a good few hours locked up in the hogsack the other day it was good to be free to move around again. There's little doubt that those heavily-restricted moments make me really appreciate the times I can come and go as I please.

Yesterday and today saw quite a few TPs being used to deal with Z&A and Raven Park business. Today though I got caught out. We needed to make a few changes at one of our mall locations and, just as Zardia and I were about to head out, I noticed I only had 2 TPs left on my allowance. Not to worry, pop over to the mall, do the thing we needed to do and come back. By then I'd have none left but when Miss Vila logged in I'd be able to get a top-up (at the usual cost, of course).

And then, after dealing with the mall location, Z realised that it was a good idea to check another one for the same issue. She headed over, checked, and sure enough I'd need to follow to help come fix it. That meant my last TP would be used to get there and then the only way of getting home would be to hit the Sub-Allowance "emergency TP home" button. Which would land me in my cell.

So, after Z relogged....

You can imagine how much sympathy I didn't get. Of course, Mistress was most put out that I was stuck in my cell with around 50 minutes to go...

...so she waited, and waited, and waited...

...all the while reminding me how inconvenient it was to have found me in this state.

I did suggest that all she had to do was reach up for the keys, but she was having none of that...

What didn't help matters is that I was in need of a top-up for both TPs and walk allowance. And that meant being able to touch the book on her desk. But the cell was denying far-touch so I couldn't even cam down and touch it. Eventually, after deciding she'd waited far too long, she pulled out the Z&A Misfortune Cookies and loaded them up with the new list and offered them to me through the bars.

The result of which is this:

I'm gagged (with no outgoing-IMs) for 2 hours and locked on my knees for.... 6 days! While I do, thankfully, have the ability to touch objects and can TP about, etc, I can't sit-tp and can't fly. Shuffling around slowly on my knees is the only way (unless I TP, which uses my TP allowance).

This is going to be a very interesting 6 days...

In the hogsack

After a bit of window shopping late yesterday, with a view to changing part of Raven Park, I was getting very low on my teleport allowance. After needing to pop somewhere this morning I finally ran out. It's rare that I ever get down to 0 on any allowance. So, when Miss Vila turned up, I needed to get a top-up.

The payment from the picker was.... 10 hours in the hogsack. Mistress gleefully arranged that.

This is the first time it's had an outing in quite some time (in fact, it's just over a year ago since I was last in it) and it's had an update since then. It now comes with a wider range of textures and there's a pretty nice leather one in there, which Miss Vila went for.

There was some confusion though, that wasn't cleared up by the notecard that comes with it either. The last time I was locked into this I was locked until Mistress released me -- no timer. This time it was with a timer. What isn't made clear (and we still don't know) is if the timer is RL (counts down no matter if I'm logged in or not) or SL (only counts down when I'm logged in). What was even odder, and a source of much annoyance for Mistress, was that she couldn't set the time to what she wanted. Seems you can only select from a pre-set number of times, you can't "dial in" a time of your choice as most restraints would allow.

I was supposed to be locked in for 10 hours, the nearest options were for 6 or 12. As you might well imagine Mistress decided that 12 was closer to 10 than 6 and went with that.

Now that it's locked on I'm denied fly and far touch. I'm also forced to shuffle around on the floor very slowly. Any sort of step is difficult if not impossible to get up so I have to be very careful where I go or I might get stuck. Getting up the step in the house so I could get to the transport pad that takes me to the workshop was amazing effort and needed Miss Vila's help.

I finally made it to the workshop but now I'm wondering if it's possible that I'll end up getting stuck there!

Not knowing if I'm out 12 hours after it was locked, or after 12 hours in-world, makes it all the more.... interesting.

Gagged and a little extra

Today, after tidying up from last night's party, I met up with Miss Vila for a short while. One of the things she wanted to do was collect on the remaining payment I had from the allowance top-up on Friday. This involved being gagged for 5 (or 6, there was some confusion about this number) hours. So, after meeting her when she rezzed in bed, and helping her get changed out of her party outfit...

we had a little chat while she had a cuppa...

...and she decided on which gag to go with. In the end she decided that the feather duster gag was a brilliant idea.

After locking it in place we dealt with a couple of jobs around the region before returning home so she could log off and head for bed. On the way back she mentioned that the house could likely do with a good dust and I made a joke about how, if I was sensible, I'd pull the feathers out of the end of the duster and do the job by hand.

Not a smart move.

A couple of clicks of locks later and there was no chance of that:

This means, not only am I denied any form of outgoing IMs for 6 hours, I can only shuffle around slowly on my knees (and sitting on anything that's more than 1.5m away is denied).

Next time I think I'll just get on with the job at hand...

...and leave the joking to when I'm not already in trouble. ;)

Building in the fiddle

Yesterday evening, while flitting around the region, getting a couple of things ready for today's party, I ran out of fly allowance. I generally don't fly too much but if I'm dashing about getting stuff in place I will. The timing of this was rather hilarious and perfect. I was heading back to the shop, the allowance ran out, which instantly denies flying, which causes you to fall from the sky. And fall I did, with enough forward momentum to faceplant one of the clocks on the Z&A clock tower.

Ouch.

So, when I saw Mistress today I decided it was sensible to get a fly top-up. The punishment handed out was six hours locked in a fiddle.

The restrictions in this are very few. In fact, all it restricts is removal. But there's a little more to it than that. It has an anti-cam system which works like this: if you cam too far away you have to go into mouselook for a period of time to make up for it. I also believe that there's a timer penalty too. Miss Vila set the max camera distance to 12m (which she claimed was very generous) and the timer to 6 hours before wishing me goodnight.

As it was, I had an impromptu build to do (well, more of a re-script of an older product of ours -- a request from a good regular customer) so I was thankful that the restrictions we few.

But, even with this, I noticed that I was constantly aware of what Miss Vila had left me with. Normally I'm cam-happy. I use a SpaceNavigator to control my camera while working (and generally) so I cam around a lot. Today though, while working away, I was very careful to not cam too far at all.

Even something as simple as this had me constantly thinking about my Mistress and my submission.

Now all I've got to do is hope that the timer runs out before the party begins!

Oh, yes, did I mention that this fiddle gives me no clue as to how much time is left on it?

Apparently I have it too easy...

After flitting around the grid yesterday to sort things for a new product release I was getting low on my TP allowance. After Miss Vila and I had finished up some stuff to do with tomorrow's party I had to ask her for a top-up. The payment from the punishment picker today was 3 hours in a cell and 6 hours gagged. This was going to prove awkward seeing as how I had a few things I needed to do after she'd gone to bed, both involving building and communicating. The 3 hours in the cell was doable, but 6 hours without IMs or any other form of chat would have been very inconvenient.

Of course, inconvenient is exactly the point. However, I pleaded my case and Mistress she she was happy for me to postpone the gagging part, but she wasn't letting me off the cell time. So she ordered me to follow her.... up to the build platform.... where she rezzed out a cell:

...locked me in it...

...and left me to get on with the building I needed to do...

Of course, this meant that she had to leave me with edit and rez rights, all forms of touch and access to my inventory. Much to her annoyance.

She left claiming I have it far too easy...

Some gardening

After my little adventure on Zindra the other day I was very low on walk allowance so, when I saw Mitsress yesterday afternoon, I had to ask for that to be topped up. Given that the items in the list were now much harsher than before I was, obviously, a little hesitant to find out what I'd get this time.

I touched the book and got.... Miss Vila's wildcard item. The idea being that she gets to pick any payment she desires (okay, sure, she can do anything she wishes with and too me at any time anyway, but this makes the allowance payment system just a little more interesting). She had a good think...

and, more or less to my relief (because it could have been so much worse), she decided that I should be locked doing some gardening, naked, on Raven Park, for an hour. So she ordered me to strip and change into a leather pouch and then she attached my leash and walked me out to The Abbey. There she rezzed a Z&A Gardening and locked me on it, setting the timer to an hour. She then also denied my ability to wear any clothing via my SubHUD and set the timer on that for an hour too.

After a brief chat she said her goodnight and headed off home, leaving me to enjoy the view.

I logged off for a short while, so we could chat some more before she had to head to RL bed. I then went back in to finish off the time.

During this period, with about 5 minutes left on the gardening and clothing timers, I totally missed the region restart warnings. While it was RC restart day, and while I was expecting it, our restart came a lot earlier than usual. So, without realising what was happening, I got logged out. By the time the region was back and I logged back in the gardening had decided I wasn't locked any more. On the other hand by SubHUD had decided to roll back to when I'd last logged out. The 5 minutes or so left of forced nudity was back to 57 minutes.

Not the worst rollback I've ever had to suffer. ;)

Wandering the streets of Kama

As suggested at the end of the post I made yesterday, photos of my time in the bane suit were taken. The whole album can be seen over on imgur, and what follows is a few highlights with some explanations of what happened on the way.

After Miss Vila left me I decided the obvious thing to do was to head in the direction I was more or less facing. So, quite simply, I followed the road to see where it would take me, stopping to pay attention to any sights I found on the way.

While I wasn't sure at the time, not knowing where I was other than "somewhere on Zindra", it turned out I was somewhere on the edge of Kama, the city in the north west part of the continent. Other than to drop in on a shop when out shopping, or on a hunt, I've never actually visited it. Especially not to walk around and see what's there. Even when I've dropped into a shop there (on my walk I saw two I recognise and have been to before) I've never really known where I am, I've never paid attention to where on the grid I am.

With no real sense of direction, but a vague feeling that I was heading north, I kept going. Soon I found a bridge over a river which gave me some clue as to where I was if I decided to go looking for a map (keep in mind I was denied my world map and mini-map so I actually made a point of not running to the Wiki or somewhere to work it out).

After a while I stumbled on a second bridge over a river (I'm still not sure if it was over another river or if I'd doubled back on myself and it was a different bridge over the same river) and saw this next to it:

That made it pretty obvious whereabouts I was on Zindra.

My walkabout had a couple of rough moments. The first came within the first hour when I fell through a bit of phantom road.

Try as I might I couldn't get out of the hole I'd fallen into and there were walls on three sides (and the bit of road that formed the "roof" of the hole, that I could walk up to by walking up the land surface, wasn't phantom). I spent a good 5 minutes trying to find some way out (keep in mind that fly was denied) before resigning myself to the fate of spending the next 3+ hours stuck in this hole.

Until I realised that Mistress had left me with the ability to sit. I could only sit on objects within 1.5m of me, but it was something. So I made a dash up the bit of land there was and tried to sit on the prim above me and.... it worked! I stood up again and was back on the road!

This is one thing I did notice about a lot of the roads in Kama City: they're very unfriendly to pedestrians. Lots of phantom sections that I kept falling into (thankfully without the holes below them).

I kept going, snapping pictures of fun or interesting things, until I hit the edge of the continent. I think it was the northern edge.

At this point I decided to head back to RL for a while and continue my journey later. By this point I was about 1/2 way through my time and had managed to not get any time added. However, I did notice one possible problem. I'd started out with just over 12,000m of walk allowance on my Sub-Allowance and, at this point, I had 7433m left. While that suggested that, at my current pace, I wouldn't run out, it did suggest that I'd be cutting it fine and I'd finish with very little remaining.

I was going to have to be careful!

When I logged back in, a couple of hours later, I decided to take a look at this monorail I kept seeing around. Given that I had some ability to sit I wondered if it might be a way to see the sights without using up a lot of my walk allowance. I managed to track down a station and.... it was closed!

I carried on walking and did find other transport. It was a little static though:

Eventually I did find a working monorail station. By this point I had about 40 minutes left on the timelock on the helmet. Walk allowance was getting fairly low so I decided that I'd have a blast around the city in this, seeing as much as I could, with no walk cost to me!

Sadly, the plan backfired. Most region crossings worked okay but, eventually, I hit a region that either wasn't there or my viewer thought wasn't there and I got stuck on a region boundary. Nothing would work, I couldn't stand or move or anything. This was going to take a relog. Which was bad news. A relog very likely meant that the timer in the helmet would roll back to the time of last login. Worried, I relogged...

...back to where I'd logged in earlier. Sure enough the timer on the helmet was showing 2 hours left rather than 40 minutes. On the other hand at least my walk allowance had also rolled back to the same value. So, annoyed, and a little dejected, I headed off again, knowing that I'd get no sympathy from Mistress as it was my own stupid fault that this happened (take a vehicle without relogging first so as to save the script state of any attachments?... that's the height of stupid)

Eventually, after much more exploring, I found a map on the floor, which also showed exactly where I was!

For the first time in this little adventure I knew exactly where I was and had some idea about where I'd been. By the looks of things I was at the very north western edge of the continent.

From there I turned round and started making my way south and east. I was planning on heading mostly south, trying to retrace by steps, to get back to the bridge I'd crossed earlier on. By the next time I found a map with a marker it became clear I'd taken a wrong turn somewhere (something about the helmet is very disorienting, which is cool):

By this point I was almost done, I'd almost made up the rolled back time. All I had to do was take it easy and not do anything silly, while answering the helmet's recurring question that checks I'm here and not goofing off afk (if you fail to answer you get time added).

Walking slowly, I kept answering the question, and before I knew it...

...the helmet unlocked and popped open. I took it off, took a few moments to get used to the world being so colourful again, and then headed home for a shower.

At which point I was ready for bed, both in SL and RL.

Aside from the couple of issues along the way I really enjoyed the whole experience. It's a long time since I'd been locked into anything like that, made to concentrate on the world around me in-world, denied any chance of fiddling with builds and scripts. It was a good reminder of what what the RLV-enforced side of D/s in SL can be all about. And, really, it was a great change of pace.

All that was left was to get ready to ask for more walk allowance from Miss Vila, and hope that this punishment didn't come up again when I paid for the extra walk! :D

PS: Don't forget that the whole album of all the images I took can be found over on imgur.

Banished

The second part of last Friday's allowance payment got delayed yesterday (RL being what RL is). So, a little earlier, I met up with Miss Vila and she put me in my bane suit:

We had a little chat about how it would work, and what restrictions there would be (a lot), and then the helmet was locked in place:

Miss Vila then decided that she didn't want me just hanging around the house, workshop or even the region for four hours. So, after giving the problem some thought...

...she decided that she'd drop me on the mainland somewhere and deny teleporting too.

After one final check of timers and restrictions she headed home and left me to have an adventure. I know I'm somewhere on Zindra, that's it. I can't talk. I can't IM. I have no access to inventory or any offered notecards, etc. I have no map, mini-map and I can't see the name of any region I'm in. I'm locked into the bane helmet's windlight settings so I'm not even sure if it's day or night.

There's also a bunch of things I have to be careful not to do or the timer will go up. One of the key ones is that, every so often, I have to demonstrate that I'm not away from the keyboard (the helmet asks a question and I have to reply pretty quickly or the timer increases). Meanwhile Mistress has left incoming IMs turned on (normally it'd be off). This means that I have to concentrate on being in-world if I'm in-world (so no letting the timer run down a little while I write this blog entry) and I better not get lost in reading group chat or I'll miss the question/answer.

For the next four hours all I can do is wander around the mainland, exploring, seeing what's there and having no idea where I am. I've not done this sort of thing for a long time. The last time I did anything like this was way before I even started this blog.

I'm both apprehensive and excited.

Expect more photos. ;)

Edit to add: There are more photos.