The Control App Chapter 4 (Part 1)

Howdy howdy howdy! Glad to be back, and I can't leave the fans waiting for long! Here's the beginning of chapter 4 of The Control App, I hope you enjoy! As always, let me know what you think or even give ideas for where you might like this story to go!

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The claustrophobic sleeve of Ronnie’s sock.

Linda should’ve become acclimated to its smell by now. It wasn’t terribly powerful to begin with; the child wasn’t incredibly hygienic, but his odor had never struck Linda as unusually ripe or unpleasant, and he did little in the way of sports of physical activity that would exacerbate it. As it was, Linda would describe the scent of this interior of the sock, her current holding cell, as mild. It was diluted with his musk, but nothing about it was overly offensive to Linda’s orifices.

But she just couldn’t get used to it. She was covered in his scent. She breathed it all day, every day. It was the last thing she sniffed before drifting into the semi-waking catatonic state that was her sleeping patterns, and it was the first thing she experienced whenever she came to and realized she remained in this hell. Ronnie’s scent. But she hadn’t gotten used to it yet. She could never forget exactly what she was smelling.

Maybe it was another punishment. Even for the worst of smells, humans will eventually become used to them after only a few minutes. Linda didn’t know if her reaction to this sensation was physical, psychological, magical, or some fucked up combo of the three. But the weird, almost sour-sweet bodily odor of Linda’s new master never seemed to fade into the background radiation of her new life. It remained, a constant reminder of what she’d been torn down to. What she might spend the rest of her life doing, for however short that would be.

God. Linda was convulsing just thinking about it. She wanted to drag her worn-out nubby fingernails across her cheeks for the umpteenth time. But even in these torrid circumstances, she shied away from self-mutilation. The urged however remained, and so Linda turned her desperation on her environment – in this case, the sock. She began her newfound ritual of trying, desperately, vainly, to rip through at the stick, sweat-dried sock fabric. Like a cat at a scratching post, she swiped her claws in a numb, slow drag, pushing against the elastic weave. After some minutes, Linda would achieve something close to a Zen state. Her mind could leave this place, and her body could go on autopilot, doing something “useful”. Doing what hostages are supposed to do in these situations. Even if by now Linda’s hopes of egress diminished, these little routines when she was left alone were all she had to keep her from truly, completely, losing her mind. They were more formality than function.

So, on that day, as Linda squabbled blindly in the dark against the suffocating sleeve of cotton and boy-foot-musk, she hadn’t even realized she’d somehow driven a hole through the fabric until her fingers pushed out through the newly formed aperture and caught the breeze.

It was jarring for Linda. She wasn’t supposed to feel anything close to fresh air when she was alone. But she stuffed her nose through the hole and smelled it. Clear as day, fresh air. Or, as fresh as a teenage boy’s domicile could be. Linda stuck her hands through the hole and used her forearms to stretch it wider, wider, threads and seams ripping until she was staring through a hole wide enough for her to pass through.

Linda’s mind had dulled over this past month. Her curiosity at picking through the frayed hole was more mammalian instinct than the kernels of an escape plan. But now, as she blinked and took dim, blinding light in through her calcified eyes, a twig of defiance was beginning to worm its way into the broken woman’s brain. A seed of hope. Perhaps escape was possible. Perhaps… there was a path toward ending this nightmare.

If she was caught, Ronnie would kill her.

That was something to consider. She wasn’t very big, and though there were plenty of hiding spaces for a creature of her size, there were also as many ways to get stuck and trapped in a minuscule crevice and unable to belt out a scream loud enough to reach her former brothers and sisters of Homo sapienism. There were many machines, cars, lawnmowers, vacuum cleaners, construction equipment, things that did not care about her and would grind her body into pudding the moment she misstepped between their treads. There were many ways for her to be stalked and discovered by nocturnal hunters, birds, rats, foxes, spiders, and ripped apart limb by limb for the juices to be drained out her body. There were many ways that she could die outside the relative comfort of Ronnie’s room.

Linda’s shaking hands gripped the edges of her hole of escape.

Was it really that bad? Being the sex slave of a horny teenager? Linda thought, all things considered, this life wasn’t the worst. At the very least, it was a somewhat certain life. She knew what she could expect night… after night…

After night.

Once Ronnie noticed there was a hole in his sock, he’d surely realize how careless of a holding cell they were. And Linda would no doubt find herself in a far more impregnable prison. Forever.

Whatever decision Linda made here, while Ronnie was gone, it would be the choice that determined whether she would die fast in the outside world, die slow under Ronnie’s totalitarian gaze, or… find freedom. And be rid of all this.

***

Sam’s mind was a frayed coil of synapses and neurons unfurling by the femtosecond. Every cell in her body was sending signals that indicated to her something was extremely, extremely wrong. With her situation, with her perception of the world, with her form and how she was meant to understand it. She was stuffed in the bottom of a frontal sweatshirt pocket, continuously being gripped and squeezed by the sweaty, clammy hands of one of her most frequent customers. She fought and struggled and tried to break away, but all she got was one of those soft… almost invasive… rubs up her increasingly exposed body with his thumb, or his forefinger, or his pinky. It was as humiliating as it was disorienting, as it was just straight up, batshit, god-awful incomprehensible.

What the fuck…?! What the fuck…?!?! What the fuck?!?!

The ever-slackening lasso that was Sam’s stream of consciousness had to focus on a single phrase to keep her from completely shutting down, and that was it. She didn’t understand how she’d shrunken. She didn’t understand why of all people Ronnie somehow had this magical ability. She was scared. She was so damn scared. She was so scared her violent shivers were absorbed into Ronnie's hand.

Ronnie could feel it. He could feel her shake. And it made him warm, and he clutched the young woman ever more tightly within his hand. Cold seared his face, but this new friend was very, very warm. Warmer even than the cardboard Styrofoam latte in his other hand.

Ronnie’s excitement buzzed and bubbled inside him as he approached the front porch. He regrettably had to remove his hand from Sam’s body to find his key in his other pocket, but once he was safely inside Ronnie set the cup down and raced upstairs as fast as humanly possible, gliding over the steps and into his room, sealing the door closed. He turned back to the cluttered space and took a few graceful, ginger steps forth. He was careful where he stepped, and his socked feet sunk into the carpet with each pace as he approached his bed beneath which the sock lay flat.

“Heyyyyyy… Thing… I’ve brought you a new friend…”

Deep in Ronnie’s frontal pocket, Sam’s terror was growing. The otherwordly feeling of being reduced to scarcely the size of an action figure was one thing… but what exactly did Ronnie mean? He didn’t seem to be talking to her. Could it be that this teenager had an accomplice in his kidnapping schemes? Or… even more horrifyingly, was Sam not his first mark?

Dread grew like a warm, gelatinous bubble in Sam’s core, one that rose out in a silent scream hopelessly stifled against her captor’s thumb.

“Hey,” Ronnie crouched, grabbing the floppy tied-up sock and undoing the knot. “Here, wanna meet –”

It was empty.

Ronnie peered down the entrance. He stuck his hand through, and with a growing fear of consternation, he noticed at once the hole of frayed fibers in the end.

“Oh god.” Ronnie’s breathing quickened. “Oh god.”

From the most miraculous high, Ronnie had come crashing down. This couldn’t be happening. She had escaped. She was lost. Ronnie had no idea where she was. This was it. It was over.

Sam couldn’t quite catch the choked mutters from above, but she could feel the change in energy. The warmth from Ronnie’s body seemed to have increased, baking her inside. She felt a sick thankfulness that her uniform had mostly been ripped apart; this madness would’ve been even more unbearable in her stuffy work uniform. But such thankfulness was soon superseded as she was gripped quite suddenly and plucked from within the pocket. It was a flurry of movement and blur, until she was suspended by Ronnie’s hands, looking into the eyes of the colossus that had kidnapped her. They were terrified.

Sam didn’t know what to do. She had no idea what to do. What to say, the most advantageous thing she could do that would further her existence. Sam tried to remember the tips and tricks that hostages are supposed to use when they’re kidnapped, but somehow most of them seemed to fall flat when the kidnapper had access to some sort of shrinking tech that seemed closer in nature to magic. Either way, Ronnie seemed to be thinking hard and long as he looked at her, and Sam wasn’t entirely certain if he expected her to say something or not. At sizes like these, the simplest choices became monumental decisions when the wrong one could get you squashed like a grape.