A few months after having seen a magic show hosted by Carlos the magician and his assistant Carmina, Quinn had the chance to go again; she jumped at the chance. It was not because the show had been particularly surprising until the end, when her friend Ann had been an audience volunteer for the finale and ended up strapped into a fibreglass sarcophagus and fed through a wood chipper. Quinn was determined that she would get the chance to feature in such a finale.
The show up to the finale was pretty much as she remembered it, although it also appeared that it had been abbreviated in places to avoid the overrun of the show that had lead to Ann being used in a deadly escape that it was intended Carmina perform.
During the first act, Quinn sized up her potential competition for audience volunteer to the finale escape and used a few of the pictures she had taken of Ann being tied, shredded and returned to the world of the living naked, to sew doubt in the minds of the greatest threats to her position of lead contender for finale audience volunteer.
When Carlos announced that he needed an audience volunteer to check things for the finale which would be an escape by Carmina from a deadly situation, the only hand waving with enthusiasm was Quinn's. There seemed to be a spark of recognition in Carlos' eye, but not being able to place where he had seen Quinn before (she had been a 'check the equipment' audience volunteer several months before), he hoped that she was a TV personality (or similar celebrity) that he could not quite remember.
Quinn was invited to come up to the stage to check the apparatus that they would be using for the escape attempt and Carlos' commentary gave Quinn some hope that she might be more closely involved than a mere checker of equipment.
The introduction the audience was given to Quinn the same as the introductions they had received for all the previous audience volunteers. Name? Quinn. Where was she from? She lived and worked locally. Was she here with friends? No, her friends couldn't make it this time. Had they ever met before? Yes, she had been a volunteer holding a strap that held Carmina down while she was cut in half. Quinn was quick to add that she was in no way associated with Carlos, but remembered what had happened to her friend the last time and thought it looked like fun.
Carlos did his best to cover his confusion that someone might be enthusiastic to meet a similar fate to the only Ann he remembered; Tied up, shredded by an industrial wood chipper and left naked on the front of stage once the curtains were closed. For a brief moment he wondered if there was any way to take additional advantage of the volunteer's death wish, but dropped the idea, because it would take too long to work it out and then communicate the changes to his assistant. He decided to get on with the illusion/escape as planned, but be prepared to make adjustments to the patter to fully take advantage of the volunteer's prior knowledge and 'I want to be involved' demeanour.
“Let me give you a close-up tour of what will be happening while Carmina is doing her best to escape. We can describe it for the benefit of the audience, while Carmina fetches the equipment that will restrain her.”
Carlos assessed Quinn's attire; it was almost perfect for what he had in mind. She wore a dark blue sweater that was tight enough to enhance her curves and hinted that she was excited to be up close with the magic and was not wearing a bra; her legs sported leather trousers that looked painted on; and her mid-height heels lengthened and slimmed her already long slender legs.
“The first stage is this conveyor to take her up to the more deadly section. You will see two frames over the conveyor; these have fabric in the top and will trigger the cloth to cascade in front of the box for about three seconds, giving Carmina two opportunities to get out of the box without being seen. If she has not escaped on either of these two chances things get a lot dicier, because the conveyor deposits the box that she will be in onto a trapped slide. The final and most obvious of these is a set of spikes that will impale the box lengthwise and, of course, anything or anyone still inside it. The less obvious trap is this set of parallel buzzsaw blades that will slice through the box as it passes over them.” Carlos tugged a thick cloth that covered the obstacle halfway down the slide to show the three circular steel blades side by side. “These blades are set up to cut through anything inside that box that is not within two inches of the lid, because we don't want the box to fall apart before it has been stopped by the spikes.”
They returned to the front of the stage where Carmina waited with two trolleys. The one parked a little upstage was piled high with equipment of many sorts. The second supported a frame with panels hinged down from the ends and a base panel. Quinn was close enough to see that the base was four slats a few millimetres narrower than the gaps between the buzzsaw blades halfway down the slide from the top of the escape track.
Carlos lifted Carmina to sit on the base which gave the audience a better view of what was happening. “Ok, Quinn, you have three minutes to tie Carmina up as best you can with any of the equipment from the trolley over there. If you need a bit of help, you can ask me, and Carmina will cooperate and sit or lie down in whatever pose you want. The thing is you will have to explain what you're doing so that the audience have some idea how tightly Carmina is tied and so they don't get bored.
“Ok. Please, bring a gag, a pair of cuffs, and two leather straps to start with; while I get Carmina into position.” A three minute countdown was projected on the back wall of the stage. “While he gets that stuff, please sit facing that way with your knees close to your chest and your hands behind you. Carlos returned with the requested items as his assistant got into the pose Quinn asked her to adopt.
Quinn paused for a few seconds to gather her thoughts. “I see the buckles on these straps are lockable, so we'd better have the padlocks to go with those and a blindfold... No! That leather hood and another padlock if it can be locked.”
Quinn laid one of the straps in Carmina's lap and picked up the other strap. The second strap she lifted up to the back of the assistant's knees, before immediately clamping it in place between the bottoms of Carmina's thighs and the tops her calves by using the first strap to hold her legs bent with her heels against her buttocks. The audience saw Carmina wince as the strap around the tops of her thighs and her shins was tensioned to get the buckle to locate in one of the holes and the padlock was applied.
The volunteer's next move was to feed one of Carmina's arms through the gap between her body and her tightly trussed legs, then using the strap trapped in the assistant's knees to pull her body close to the legs, effectively trapping her arm in place. The wrists were then handcuffed together to reduce the usefulness of the remaining arm.
The gag and hood were quickly put in place and the preparations were stopped, when a buzzer announced the end of the three minutes.
“Well that was remarkably more efficient than we usually get from a volunteer,” Carlos noted; a sentiment echoed by Carmina by a nod of her head and a raised thumb, because there was very little else she could do.
“If I had had a bit more time I'd have looped a strap between her elbows and made so that the loose arm wasn't going to able to do anything; not that it'll be able to do much.”
“Alright; now it's time to put the box together. Please bring over the back panel.”
Quinn fetch the panel Carlos indicated and held it in place while he put a pin through the loops of the hinge at the bottom where it attached and held it in place with a small padlock. While she held the back upright, the magician raised the end behind Carmina's back and slid in and padlocked a pin to hold the two panels together. This was repeated with the panel the assistant was facing, leaving the top and front open. The top was soon closed with a second panel held in place by hinge pins.
“Now, so that everyone can be sure that Carmina isn't cheating by starting her escape early, we will transfer the box to the conveyor and install you to keep an eye on everything, before we close up the front and start the conveyor.”
Some cables were lowered and the box was lifted from the trolley and moved to the flat section at the beginning of the mechanism.
“Now to get you ready to observe this from a unique point of view,” announce Carlos. A stagehand handed a step ladder to Carlos, who positioned it at the end of the box containing the trussed assistant. “Please stand on top of the box where you'll get to see if, and how, Carmina makes it out of the box behind the falls of cloth.”
Quinn was half way up the ladder, before she paused. “Won't it be dangerous? I could fall off the box if it jerks suddenly. And I don't want to fall off onto the saws or the spikes either.”
“We've got you covered.” He picked up a metal post with a leather belt on top and slotted it into a holder on the back of the box. “All you have to do is belt yourself in and you can't fall off the box.”
“Ok”, said Quinn. She stood against the waist-high post and strapped it round her waist. While she was doing this Carlos fitted some shackles round her ankles and pinned the chain between then to the top of the box. “Isn't that a bit of overkill,” queried the brunette volunteer.
The justification that Carlos offered was, “We don't want your feet slipping and you to be suspended by your waist; that would be most uncomfortable.”
Carlos climbed the ladder and joined Quinn on top of the box. He took out a pair of handcuffs. He snapped one end around Quinn's wrist and then fed the other end through the belt, before snapping the other end around the same wrist. She protested. “We can't have the rest of the audience thinking that you are a plant and are going to help Carmina with her predicament, can we?” Quinn's other wrist was treated the same while this explanation was being given. With his volunteer firmly attached to the box top, Carlos jumped down and closed the front of the box, concealing Carmina for the first time. The front was held in place by a padlocked hinge pin to the lid.
Carlos hit a big red button and the box lurched into action. It seemed that if it were not for the precautions taken, Quinn might not have remained on the box.
Besides Quinn re-establishing her balance, the next twenty seconds, as the box travelled to the first frame, were mostly smooth movement, although some in the front rows and Quinn could hear movement from inside; this sounded like Carmina's free elbow bumping against the inside of the box.
At the first frame the box triggered a mechanism that tipped a cascade of golden fabric obscuring the box from the audience for a few seconds. As the last of the cloth passed from in front of the frame over the conveyor, the audience saw that something had change, but it took them a few moments to work out exactly what and respond with the applause the change merited.
From Quinn's point of view there was a click and then her view of the darkened auditorium was hidden by the falling cloth. After about two seconds it seemed to change direction and fall upwards. Then she realised that she was is a totally different position from the one she had been in when the cloth-fall had begun. The belt was still around her waist, but her wrists were not shackled to it; they were shackled to the lid of the box and her ankles were secured by the doubled over handcuffs to the belt. She had been inverted and had barely enough time to take the part of her weight not supported by the belt on her hands and avoid bumping her head on the top of the box.
For Quinn the twenty seconds in a semi-supported handstand before reaching the next frame, seemed to be several hours. She could more clearly hear the noises from inside the box, despite the audience applauds at her sudden inversion. In addition to more elbow bumps, there was what she could only assume was fluent and vehement cursing in a foreign language.
Quinn hoped that the next frame with its stack of red cloth ready to cascade, would bring her to a more comfortable position and see Carmina on top of the box with her, ready to ride it down the trapped slide that was the second half of the apparatus.
Quinn felt, rather than heard, the bump that trigger the flow of red cloth in front of her upside down form. Her already limited view of the auditorium was covered by the cascade of red, until she blinked.
What the audience saw was the flow of cloth being trigger as the box touched the apex of its journey. As the red flow disappeared to the floor, the person standing on the box was upright and dressed differently. This person was not Quinn, but Carmina; she was dressed in a skirt made of two panels held up by a rope belt tied at her hip, and narrow bandeau top, both in a dazzling white that contrasted with her dusky skin. She was posed as Quinn had been at the start of the ride.
A lot of people were wondering what had happened to Quinn; even Quinn. At the end of the blink she was in the dark and could not move. Using what little light filtered through the slots in whatever contained her, and the restriction on her movement, Quinn quickly concluded that she was inside the box that she had been standing on and trussed up in the exact manner that she had tied Carmina in the previous minutes. The only differences she could detect were the lack of a hood or gag and that instead of sitting up she was jammed sideways in the box.
The hapless volunteer felt the box tip off of the up-tilted conveyor onto the trapped slide section.
Once the box reached the crest of its path, Carmina made quick work of unfastening the belt and shedding the pairs of shackles from her wrists. She was soon squatting to access the shackles that held her ankles to the top of the box. These were soon not an encumbrance and she vaulted lightly from that sliding box to the floor. Where she and Carlos looked worried; the audience assumed that they might be worried about where Quinn had disappeared to, but they was surprised not to hear volunteer screams from the box as it accelerated towards the triple buzz-saw blades.
Quinn was quickly realising that she was about to get the kind of experience that she had attended the show to get. She was slightly disappointed that there was less time to anticipate what came next; she heard a rubbing noise as the edges of the saw blades that she had been shown bumped against the outside of the box and nudged it until it was properly aligned. She could not see the blades enter the box, but she felt the vibration. She tried to compose herself to enjoy what came next; this would be her first time with triple buzz-saw blades lengthwise. She had moments to wonder what would become of her clothes, before noticing that she was not in her clothes, but in what was presumably was the leotard that Carmina had been wearing; she had a moment to wonder if the assistant was, even now, wearing her clothes, before she felt the saws' teeth begin to gnaw at her soles and buttocks.
Soon the world dissolved into flicking back and forth across the pain-pleasure boundary with a frequency high enough to blur the distinction; particular highlight of her time travelling through the vicious spinning blades were when the saw that was to part the back of her torso from the front ripped through her G-spot giving the first of several orgasms, the moment when the central blade tore her nipples from her breasts and, to her surprise, the moment when the same blade ripped off her nose, opening her olfactory senses to the combined smells of her sexual excitement and the light machine oil that lubricated the saw bearings, triggering a flood memories of her many encounters with similar, although usually singular, buzzsaw blades and echoes of the feelings she had at the time.
As the final tickle of the saw teeth left the top of her head, moments after the spinning teeth of its neighbouring blade had passed out of her sight, Quinn found that she still could not move. In the dark she was unable to determine whether she was a scatter of Quinn sections in the bottom of the box, or she and her bonds were, somehow, intact.
The rubbing noise of the saw-blades in the slots of the box containing her ceased and she felt the box tip a little more and continue to accelerate down the slide towards the next peril. It took all her focus to remember that the plan was that the box would be impaled by spikes before coming to a halt, and probably her with it.
The dozen spikes that impaled the box ran through Quinn too, the only one to miss pushed its way between her feet; the rest traversed the length of her body, retriggering the feelings that she had experienced about twenty seconds before. This time she made an audible moan. As the after glow of the sensations she had endured and enjoyed over the last minute began to fade, something changed.
She was equally unable to move, but she was now also unable to make a sound, due to a gag in her mouth, and unable to see or breath freely due to her head being under a tightly fitting hood. Quinn also know that she was in an upright position, not the sideways she had been before things altered.
What the audience saw was the box arrive at the saws where it passed more slowly than most might have expected, as if there was something, or someone inside the box resisting the saws passing through the box. Then the box slid with increasing speed towards the set of spears that were its final destination. When it got there, there was a loud moaning from the box, which seemed to take the magician and his assistant by surprise. Then all was still, except the saw blades spinning to a halt. The tips of the spears were visible sticking an inch or two from the box's end.
When the saw blades finally halted, Carlos quickly unlocked the padlocks on the pins that held the box together and Carmina pulled them so that the sides fell away. Between the ends of the box, still held apart by the spikes, were a few scraps of dark fabric. The audience applauded rapturously, mostly relieved not to see the brave one of their number impaled in chunks there.
Carlos drew attention to a large box that had been hanging in full view; the box that he had told the audience several times would become important later in the show. At a signal from the magician this box was lowered until the performers could manoeuvre it onto the trolley that had stood vacant at the side, having been used for the preparation of Carmina for her escape. They soon unhooked it from the cables that had suspended it and began pulling the rods that held the sides of the box together, stacking the removed panels under the other trolley.
This left them with the floor panel of the box on which sat a naked and hooded woman tied exactly as Quinn had tied Carmina before the escape. The audience applauded.
“I sense some scepticism from some people. Is this really the Quinn who volunteered?” The applause faltered at the realisation that this could be some previously unseen assistant, pretending to be the volunteer, which would not be as impressive as if the naked woman was the volunteer; although it would be impressive enough to get a hidden assistant trussed up in the same manner as Carmina had been and then sneak her into a box suspended in full view.
The magician pulled a bag from the equipment trolley. Briefly he put the bag over the figure's head. When he pulled it back off the hood was gone, but there was a bright red ball gag in place and a leather blindfold. The audience recognised Quinn by her brown hair, which while slightly flattened, but still in the same style.
Quinn looked round feeling the disappearance of the hood, but still unable to see due to the newly introduced blindfold. She was already aware that she was still on stage, from the clapping and cheers she had heard; and that she was naked apart from a few scraps of the assistant's leotard that hung down her back. She heard the renewal of the applauds that greeted her becoming recognisable again.
“Well, that's the end of our show. Have a safe journey home.” In an undertone that the audience did not hear, he asked Quinn, “Are you OK being left here for a while for the audience to check out and maybe answer a few questions?”
The magician was surprised that the naked volunteer nodded that she would be ok; he wondered if he detected enthusiasm in the nodding.
“Those who are sceptical that Quinn is a genuine volunteer or that the bondage is real and tight are welcome to come and check. And if you wish to ask Quinn a question, I feel sure that she'll do her best to answer, although questions that can be answered with a nod or shake of the head would probably be easiest.”
The curtains closed after a final bow from Carlos and Carmina. Quinn was alone in front of them as the house lights brightened. She heard the hubbub as the audience prepared to leave to their various homes. After a few minutes she heard the first person approach; this person gave a couple of tugs on the belts holding her in the foetal position with an arm trapped between her torso and thighs; a little rattle indicate that this person checked out the miniature padlocks the secured the straps in place.
Over the next quarter hour people checked Quinn out and asked questions and commented that they would not have been so brave.
The noise of the auditorium being emptied faded to silence. Quinn felt herself being moved and soon the gag and the blindfold were off, quickly followed by the straps and the handcuffs.
“Did you enjoy that?” asked Carmina.
“Yes. Any chance I can do something like that again?”
“Are you asking for a job as an assistant?” asked Carlos.
“Well, if there's one going I would be happy to apply.”
“Sorry, I only need one assistant, but would you like to be invited to be an audience participant for the finale another time?”
For a moment Quinn's excitement at the prospect overcame her ability to speak. “That's the kind of thing I hoped you would say. I'll give you my contact details and if you're back in the area, you have a very willing audience participant.”
“Maybe, I'll have to come up with something extra special for you to take part in.”