Soulful Preprations
The evening after the date proved to be an interesting one. A quick search of Soulful Mannequins turned up a website that told me nothing I didn't already know. Yes, they make high-end realistic mannequins and no two are exactly alike. No, they don't advertise that they're making them out of real women and there's no mention of hypnosis anywhere. There was however, a request a mannequin form where you could enter a picture of what you want your mannequin to look like, and a contact e-mail offering 24 hour support. Noticing that, I decided to see what my knowledge of the company might earn me. After a few minutes spent setting up a new e-mail account, dubbed plasticflesh69 for good measure, I sent off an e-mail containing only a few words: what do you think of my display? Along with a picture off of google I'd found of a display from another store using Soulful Mannequins that had turned up in my search. This one for a fetish boutique that used a tall busty black mannequin as a dominatrix to a submissive little blonde girl.
I sent the e-mail, got up to go get a drink, and had a reply by the time I got back to my computer.
This display shows talent. Though we've seen your work before and think your change-room display is superior. This freaked me out a bit, until I realized that Brooke probably had to let the company know of anyone new who was aware of their secrets. But then how did they know this was me? Was I being watched?
If you would like additional help in learning how to use our products please come by our Toronto headquarters when you have the time. I stared at that sentence for a while, trying to decide if going in to the belly of the beast was a good idea or not. Sure, Dusk Boutique didn't need male mannequins, but maybe other stores did. Before continuing to read the e-mail I ran another search for the company, and discovered that they did not in fact make male mannequins. Somewhat reassured I went back to reading the e-mail.
Should you decide to come please bring your assistant with you, we've been told she is eager to see how our mannequins are made. This line almost made me do a spit-take. I had no assistant, but I knew exactly who they were talking about, and I really didn't think bringing Lin to them was a smart idea. It did make me think that Brooke's mentioning of the name earlier was intentional though. She must have known I'd go snooping and let the company know that I might be in touch with them. As if to confirm this thought another e-mail appeared in my inbox.
Hi Timothy,
It seems you've got some field work tomorrow. Swing by the main store to pick up Lin tomorrow at 8:30, I've already informed her of the schedule change. As we discussed earlier you have two weeks to complete that project, but this fieldwork might help you accelerate it.
Have fun tomorrow!
Brook LaChance
So she did set this up. But at least it seemed like she wasn't going back on her end of the deal and Lin wouldn't be processed immediately tomorrow. With nothing left to do but anticipate or worry about tomorrow, I headed off to sleep.
The next morning I met up with Lin outside the Dusk Boutique at 8:30 sharp. "You sneaky devil. Why didn't you tell me yesterday that you were going to the Soulful Mannequin factory, and that you'd gotten the OK from Brooke to bring me along? I wouldn't have had to get woken up by a phone-call late last night telling me about it." She was doing her best to sound upset but her cheery eyes and jittery body language betrayed her excitement. I wondered what the odds were of her losing control of that beautiful body today.
We chatted about random things on the way to the headquarters, and by five after nine we'd arrived. It was an old warehouse on the east end of Toronto, that seemed to be in pretty good shape despite its age. Lin, who had somehow avoided talking about mannequins during the journey, suddenly sported a grin from ear to ear. "Behind those doors are hundreds of sexy mannequins waiting for us to ogle, and maybe even touch them. I hope you've learned to tame your erections in the last 8 hours or so or you might embarrass us both in there." She winks before grabbing my hand and pulling me towards the building.
Entering the doors we're greeted by what is mostly a fairly standard lobby. There's a few chairs, some magazines, a coffee table and machine, and a reception desk. Behind the reception desk sat a goddess come to life, she wasn't super busty like the mannequins in the store, but rather perfectly proportioned to her frame, and she carried her C cups proudly showing off plenty of cleavage. Her raven-black hair tumbled down her head in loose curls and ended just past her shoulders. She looked up at us as we came in and spoke up, in a voice that sounded like distilled ambrosia and made me feel as high as I must have been to think of that analogy. "You must be Timothy and Lin. Peter is expecting you in his office, head through that door there and go in the second door on your right. He'll give you the grand tour from there."
"Thank you!" Lin exclaims, before continuing to drag me along through the indicated door and into the hallway beyond. She never noticed that my excitement for the trip was tempered with apprehension. I suppose that worked out for the best.
Lin stopped dragging me before we went into the office, a modestly appointed little room with a desk, a couple of chairs, and a bookish young man in it. "Welcome Timothy and Lin, I'm Peter and I'll be your guide to the facility here today."
Lin spoke up before I could "Thank you Peter, I'm really looking forward to this so sorry if I seem a bit on edge." She was fidgeting almost constantly without dragging me to think about.
"Not a problem Lin, we'll get the tour started shortly and I know you'll like what you see, mannequins live for display after all."
Lin's next words nearly knocked me to the floor: "I know we do!"
Peter must have been expecting my reaction because he quickly interjected to explain "Don't worry about your living mannequin here. Brooke told us all about your little wager with her and we're not going to process this one until that's complete. I can't have it just running around the facility as its former self though, so I've brought out the mannequin side. When this is over we'll take a few minutes to implant some memories of a normal tour for its human side to gush over, I'll give you a rundown of what we put in so that you can talk about it with her. This wasn't our idea by the way and we don't normally do stuff like this, but Brooke is a good customer of ours and she requested it so... I'm kinda stuck.
I notice that Lin is holding her pose while Peter speaks, as if doing so was the most natural thing in the world, which I guess it was now, for her. "Don't worry about it Peter. So I'm guessing this won't be a normal tour." I say don't worry, but I do wish he wouldn't refer to Lin as 'it'. At least Brooke has the compassion necessary to call them girls.
Peter shrugged, "This was never really going to be a tour, more of an educational experience. And I got the go-ahead to give a little more than Brooke asked for by the way. It seems your wager has drawn some attention from the higher-ups."
"Should that make me worried?" I nervously ask.
"Worried you might lose? Nah, they won't interfere. The highest of the higher-ups likes to experiment and she still remembers that Cindy girl who came to us willingly. She may want to repeat that type of change."
I blink a couple of times before saying "She?"
Peter laughs "Everyone who learns that is so surprised that the company is run by a woman. Men and women can both appreciate beauty ya know."
"So she turns women into things because she appreciates their beauty?"
"Seems as good a reason as any. And the converted women are beyond caring at that point anyway. Just look at your mannequin here, it's only partially finished and it's happy as can be standing there being pretty."
With my attention called back to Lin I look at her again, posed mid squirm with her weight on her right leg, her hands clasped behind her tightly-clad butt and her teeth just ever-so-slightly biting her lower lip. "Lin," I say, and she looks towards me, "are you happy?"
Lin blinks, pondering the question before replying "If my VM wants me to be I am, though I do wish I was on display in a store right now instead of an office."
I turn back to Peter, "Seems like artificial happiness to me."
Peter just shrugs again, "Yeah, I know it is. Its basically been brainwashed at this point, but to the mannequin it isn't really any different from real happiness. Tell me, did you need to ask it that question? You must have interacted with a few of our products at some point. How did they seem to you?"
I thought about Angelique and answered with the first thing that came to mind "Horny."
Peter laughs, a high-pitched laugh that grates my ears, "Yes they certainly can be that. Beyond that though, what did you feel from them."
"Well I really only interacted with the one beyond Cindy, but as you've mentioned she's a special case, and that one was horny, but... yeah happy. She wanted to help me make her into the best display she could be."
"It's a shame you've only interacted with one mannequin. Once we do the final push we fuse the mannequin personality with the human one, so each dummy is unique. It's about an 80/20 split in the end between mannequin and original, though Cindy is probably closer to 40/60. The bits of the original materials that are left in the mannequin's brain are the parts that are most compatible with being a display figure. We can safely say we've never produced a depressed dummy." Peter says with a hint of pride in his voice. "Besides, why the questioning of this? Brooke tells us you've got a thing for plastic ladies, and before you get embarrassed don't worry, so does everyone here. It's kind of a prerequisite for the job."
I stammer for an answer for a short time, while Lin's frozen form stares at me, making that answer all the more difficult. My resolve from the previous night faltering on seeing her play the part of an object. "You can answer me later," Tim says "and try not to say something like 'it's just wrong'. I think everyone here feels that on some level when dealing with certain conversions, but we do do some good as well. Cindy isn't our only special case. Come on, I'll show you." Peter walks over an opens the office door, then gestures to Lin "Should we leave this here?" His use of the word this irks me, and I do feel somewhat bad that Lin isn't able to have the tour she was so looking forward to so, "No. Lin, follow me" I say.
"Sure VM." she replies
"And please call me Tim"
"Sure Tim." is her response, in the exact same tone.
Peter shrugs once more, "Alright then, follow me. We've got some materials being processed right now that I hope will convince you we're not all bad." We're lead down a few hallways to a set of double doors marked with a sign reading Preparation. Peter is quick to open them up and usher us through and what I see on the other side is a richly appointed spa through a one-way mirror. "Here is where we start our products on their journey to being display figures. The spa is fully functional and operated mostly by living mannequins like Lin here, this allows us to play constant white noise in main areas to make our targets more susceptible to the programming. Each treatment room can be adjusted for any given mind that we're moulding and stage that we're on. Depending on the materials it can take a number of sessions to properly calibrate their minds, but once they've been primed they let us know that they're ready." Peter gestures to a young woman standing on a pedestal in the lobby, stark naked, smiling wide, and not budging an inch. "Our spa offers a special 'treatment' to help women become more comfortable with their bodies, they can put themselves on display in any sort of dress or pose they choose, and stand there for however long they want. Most of our materials shrug it off as being a silly gimmick when they first come in. They all end up doing it at one point or another though. After their session our living mannequins use a code to confirm the material's conversion to a fellow living mannequin, and from that point on they're ready on our inventory list, or taken over to production for final conversion if they've been special ordered."
"And this is supposed to convince me that you're not bad how? I mean you're calling living women materials." I say this while thinking don't look down because his speech, and seeing the girl frozen on the pedestal, had gotten me somewhat aroused. A point that would make it difficult to claim any sort of moral high-ground.
"And you're getting obviously excited by all of this, despite, or maybe because of? My language." Peter accompanies this line with a raised eyebrow and I silently curse his observation skills and my inability to control myself.
"I have a thing for control yes. It doesn't make you, or me, good here though."
"Ah, but you didn't let me finish, see that living mannequin on the pedestal? She's been fully processed for a while now and has, in the last couple of hours, been purchased by your employer."
"So you think me getting a new display makes this good?"
"No, it's where the mannequin comes from that changes things. It was living on the street, half starved all the time and mostly skin and bone, until one of the higher-ups found it and offered it a job and place to stay here at the spa. It's been here a few months, eating well, keeping clean, and building up that body back to display-ready proportions. There's a large gym connected to the spa by the way for cracking our more athletically inclined materials. That's beside the point though: we do try to source some of our materials from dire circumstances, a life on a pedestal and being used as a willing fucktoy is probably better than dying, or addiction before dying or any number of other things. Of course if we're given special orders that does go out the window most of the time."
"So you're saying she had a choice between starving, or becoming a mannequin." I muse on this information for a bit, before saying "Except she didn't really have that choice because she didn't know she was going to become a mannequin."
"Still better than dying on the street. You said yourself that our products are happy, now she will be too. Anyway we're about to get her started on final processing and you get to watch. Come on, we'll meet her there."
My curiosity regarding how the mannequins are made wins out over my need to argue my point and I follow peter out of the darkened room's double doors and through some hallways to another set of double doors marked Production. Before he opens them he gestures towards another door off to the side and tells me to open it. Inside there's a mannequin stand that ends in a bicycle seat sitting on top of a pushcart. "Pull that thing out, we usually use it to transport partially finished mannequins around the facility but we'll need it for our special case here" he gestures to Lin, "if you want it to not to be processed yet that is." He looks at me expectantly. I pull it out and tell Lin to take a balanced pose on the stand. She takes a simple pose, her right leg extended as if taking a step, her back arched to thrust out her chest, and her arms straight and slightly out from her side, her beautiful almond eyes starting off into infinity. "Sticking to your guns eh? Lin, Display ready" I hear peter say, my eyes going wide and searching for any hint of plastic on Lin's body. "Don't worry, she's not going to change," Peter reassures me, "this will just ensure she doesn't start following any order that might be being given in there. The techs sometimes aren't careful about saying a given mannequin's name before they boss it around. Now take your frozen property there and come in, I think Tiffany should be coming along short.. ah, speak of the devil. Hey Phil" Peter waves at a man in a lab-coat coming up behind us, leading the naked Tiffany along behind him. "Hey Peter, and..."
"Timothy."
"Ah! The guy from Brooke's store getting the rundown, welcome! Nice girl you've got there, want to see her started on her way to plastic perfection?"
I appreciate hearing someone call Lin a girl as opposed to a thing, but still find the invitation slightly off putting, even as a part of me wants to scream yes. "Nah, she's good as she is for now. I'll just watch how it's done with Tiffany here." Now that I can get a good look at the girl, I find myself getting aroused again. She has a lithe, dancers body, with breasts that would just barely fill my hands. She must have spent equal time at the gym and the spa because her skin complexion is flawless and her muscles are nicely toned without looking like a body-builder. Her blonde hair is styled in a pixie cut which only adds to her appeal. I can't help but think of having her in an active-wear display with Laura, with the Latino mannequin acting as a personal trainer for the what I assumed to be Russian dancer.
"Yeah, she has that effect on most of us too." Phil laughs while half gesturing at my lower regions. "She'll be even more enticing in a couple of weeks, and you'll get her all to yourself then. Come on in and I'll show you how it's done." He turns to Peter, "I can take them from here Pete, I know where they're going."
Peter shrugs, a gesture that is starting to annoy me "Sure Phil." Peter extends his hand "We'll have to continue our little debate another time Tim." I take the offered handshake but get cut off before I can speak, "Lin is a lovely girl and I think she's lucky that you entered the store when you did. All that it and materials talk just makes it a bit easier for me to work here each day, it's a trick some of us use, maybe you'll need to adopt it for yourself? Though it can be hard at first." He releases my hand and says "Have fun in there! And give this mannequin here a good spanking for me when she gets delivered in a couple of weeks." He taps Tiffany's ass as he walks off.
"Peter's quite a character eh?" Phil says as I stare dumbfounded at the little man that had just defused most the bile I'd been saving up from interacting with him. "He's not wrong though, it can be tough working here, doing," he gestures to Lin and Tiffany "what we do. Though I guess it's not that different on your end knowing what you know." I nod in response. "Well... I don't know if more knowledge is going to make it easier or harder, but you're here to learn so follow me and lets make Tiffany's body match her mind."