Intelligence on TM's
This preface is an attempt to explain what I've learned about the TMs as I wrote these episodes.
My earliest tickling "daydreams" starred inanimate objects, sometimes tickling unintentionally (at first). Motorized equipment, the wind, or some electronic devices were easily employed... if the "target" was held in position. Immobilized.
Their apparent motives varied - curiosity, revenge, recharging/consuming energy ("fueling up"), even more clinical experimentation and testing.
If these animated objects gained anything from tickling, if the benefits outweighed the consequences... there's no logical reason why they wouldn't do it again.
Spontaneous tickling would be of fairly short duration - a delirious night, a weekend. Experience would lead to planning, and if the gain warranted it, the tickling sessions would logically run longer.
If the place where the target was tickled could be discovered or overheard by other people, that might cut the session short. They would prefer long-vacant buildings... dusty storefronts, forgotten basements, storage sheds, boiler rooms.
And when the ticklers learned how to transport their target, the room or cell could be extremely remote (private, and "safe").
If the gain made all this effort worthwhile, it would lead to still longer sessions. Food and maintenance stretching things out over ten days... fourteen...
As expertise grows, numbness and loss of responsiveness are more easily avoided.
The more the ticklers learn about restraints, over-the-counter drugs, tools, toys... what would limit their sessions? Only the target's health, stamina and reactivity. If the target makes it to day number ten and is still "paying off", perhaps he'll make it to day thirty...
In such expert hands, those days would completely blur together. Three major components of each: sleep, prep and delirium.
The planning involved for such a session would imply a more "thoughtful" tickler... more of a coherent sentience than "mere" inanimate objects. (This is almost mincing words, though. What the target determines - one tickler, or many? - is what the tickler(s) leads him to believe. An invisible or noncorporeal TM could tie rope, "pull on" gloves or pick up a feather duster.)
A veteran TM is invisible (except by the objects it manipulates or uses to taunt), tireless, flexible, meticulous, dexterous... driven to have a target firmly in hand (sorry) and imperiously rule the agenda for a session.
They would be able to recapture a particularly enjoyable target. The head-games which can increase their effect might be revealed by taunts before and after a session. They're determined to make each session memorable... more of a buttkicker than the one before.
Guys are more often their targets 'cause of more ferocious reaction, the irony of debilitating them with feathers or satin, and certain external body parts loaded with nerve endings.
This is the hidden world I'm writing about - TMs with almost unlimited resources... deliberation, cunning, skill. Stoked with delight. Free to choose their targets, snag 'em and stash 'em away, find their threshold and keep raising the bar.
Extreme tickling - especially the exploits of a TM - now there's something you can't turn up every time you turn around.
I'm not into tickling others, TM-level or otherwise. Just trying to understand the allure, and especially possible TM "mindsets" - and, well, the TM's thought processes come out damn easily in my writings.
The attraction is, I think, that the tickling is a means to an end. While some of the targets I write about have endured other things that would, frankly, be labeled "torture" (though I can't see anything that would pay off more, over the long haul, than tickling and its mindfuck opportunities), I think the underlying goal of most TMs is power. Unalloyed control. This is sad, in one way, but a relief in another.
(I know I could definitely be overthinking all of this, by the way.)
The sequence seems inarguable to me: try a thing... if it pays off, do it again... attempt to increase the payoff. When new TMs learn the vocation (and I assume they're not "omni-"anything), that's the progression. It's the development of a liking for the physical or neurological reactions of their target, simultaneous with increasing authority over him. Inside and out. There are payoffs from the target's body, and... well, behavioral payoffs that don't end when the target is hoarse or numb or exhausted.
Reduce the risk factors (escape, rescue, desensitization, physical infirmity/trauma)... and control is increased - far more for TMs than for human ticklers, because their most copious resource is time. They can more easily relocate their target to reduce risk of discovery, or take a day just to remoisturize chafed skin, or see that he spends a weekend resting and gobbling vitamins to fend off a flu bug ... and then go full-bore on him again.
Time allows for planning. Contingencies, backups, alternate methods, fallbacks... (as well as mindfucks and all kinds of taunts.) The next best thing to magic.
This amount of effort would be insane - unless the payoff was thought to be worthwhile. The ultimate aphrodiasiac?
I've always been a big science fiction buff (whether it furthered the TMs' "credibility", or vice-versa) and heavily spiritual, so the existence of undetectable "entities" has never posed a problem here.
While a young Cor slotted things as black-and-white in the real world, I just don't sense malevolence in most TMs. Since they're parasites (or users), bonafide "ill will" would be short-sighted, now wouldn't it? Besides, how much more teasing it is to leave the target without any verifying evidence of his sessions...
There are a couple of legends that allow such beings to exist. Tibetan buddhism gives us the tulpa, which has been hard to research but is supposedly a morally neutral spirit being that's not in transition - never was human, will never be "more" that a tulpa - and does whatever it wants, involving humans and earthy stuff in its activities when it chooses to. The original concept of a "poltergeist" (pre-Hollywood) was not unswervingly evil and murderous. And then there's plain ol' garden-variety "magic". Poof - here they are. (With or without a "poofer"... a wizard on the other end of the magic wand.)
But I wonder if we have to reach that far for a source. One of my early theories about the creation of the first TMs blames an intricately technical military experiment gone awry... and either being unstoppable, so more TMs are awakening even now, or maybe they're able to "reproduce" !?!
There would seem to be room for different temperaments in TMs - some wanting fight and fury in a target, others on the prowl for those whose mindset is much more, uh, cooperative ("He likes it! Hey Mikey!"). The tickling, especially the anticipation of it, is wholly dreaded by some targets and horribly exciting to others - but in the end, does it matter?
(I'm wondering if there's a path-of-least-resistance response for the target. If - hah! - he could shut off his responsiveness, it would seem to thwart the ticklers, or at least shift their focus toward getting him reactive again. Control freaks such as my TMs have gotta hate any attempt at undermining their agenda. In the clutches of some, passivity would make a session much worse, while aggression would be just the wrong attitude in other dungeons...)
It stands to reason that victim's genuine satisfaction is not the primary goal - otherwise, who's really in charge?
Part of my awe is that they have the option of using familiar gestures and slang, of being gregarious or conspiratorial... yet if they don't want to be seen as a big ol' warped buddy they're alien enough to be quite unreadable/unpredictable.
Victorious micro-managers with a schizoid stripe.
And, lest I forget, another result of the unknowably vast experience the TMs have acquired: by accident, some have discovered how to edit what's happening inside a guy's head. For a veteran target, every session can be his "first"; objects can materialize before him in the blink of an eye; one second he's sitting in a crowded bar, and the next instant, laid out on a rack. Moods can be adjusted, personal history can be rewritten, reactions... increased.
It'll be clear enough from my writings that the events right before the tickling starts have a huge impact on me. In laying the framework for some of the accounts, it was important to know how the target ended up in the cell, or how he was selected for the TM's attentive barrage... or what motivated the TM to define the session just so. Sometimes I investigate what drew that TM to that target.
There's even more variety in what precedes the tickling than there is in the tickling itself. So much material for messing with the target's head, even before they lay a finger on him...
It's fascinating to see someone else describing VRML-esque places (well, surely out of our space/time) to which some hapless targets are transported. Anything goes - time can stand still.
Guilt or desert is a goldmine, as you are no doubt aware. A target who shoplifts a pack of rubbers, pisses in the doorway of an abandoned store one drunken evening, fires up a smoke in an elevator or even snatches up a roll of bills that was laid on the sidewalk as bait... well, he's in for some corrective incarceration. "Aversion therapy." Damn straight.
For every time I detail how the target got tapped for tickle duty, there's another written episode beginning with some poor slob coming to in a padded room or a dusty ranchhouse, taking in the cuffs spreading him out or the boxes of victuals or the emoillent caked onto his bare chest and feet. (Or all of the above!)
The target usually gets an opportunity to test his bonds. When he's convinced himself he's stuck, yelled enough to discover no one can hear him, burned through any furious panic...
The unworldly fingers or feathers or brushes come into view. Denial evaporates. What was patently impossible is now certain and all too clear. "This can't be happening. This is happening!" - A paradox that can keep him busy for days... if he can manage to hold onto a thought at all.
Enormously important is the moment just before the tickling begins... when the gloves pose menacingly over the vulnerable target's loco zones, or the feathers have cruised over from across the room, closed the gap and now hang in position, able and ready. The contrast between that moment and, say, ninety seconds later is drastic.
By now, the TM is unswervingly confident and intent. Successful in the pursuit, secure in the helplessness of their prey... and ready to dig in.
An instant before the sinister, prolonged threats become reality - when the sober target's stomach flops apprehensively and the drunk guy's perplexed smirk starts to falter - "Oh, no way, they're just kidding around, they wouldn't... they... oh. Wow. No... shit..."