Christmas staggered awake at four AM, three alarm clocks and the television thawing her drug-induced sleep. Her first thoughts were 'gotta get to Jarrod; I'm late!' but, as she cracked her eyes open and huddled on the toilet as her shower warmed up, she slowly reviewed the previous day, and her conscious anger overrode the incessant messages being fed by her subconscious. "How dare he mess with my mind!" she railed in the shower, banging hard enough on the shower wall to knock down a line of precariously perched shampoo bottles. Then she bent down under the spray and picked them up... then found herself absently rubbing her soap-slick breasts with one hand while arranging the bottles with the other. She pulled that hand down, but a few seconds later pulled the other back from the bottles, which she had started stroking up and down as she arranged them on the towel rod. Angrily she turned off the hot water, then hurriedly rinsed off and stepped out to towel off. "I've got to get out of this trap," she muttered to herself, tittered slightly hysterically at the 'Rocky Horror Picture Show' reference, and then grimaced at the similarity of their situations.

'I'm obviously fighting those suggestions on Merither's computer,' she mulled. Then stopped stroking her lingerie in her drawer and focused on getting dressed. 'Bulky, comfortable, unsexy clothing,' she decided, 'with as plain and sensible undergarments as she could find.' Except, as she rummaged through her drawer, she couldn't seem to find anything other than the few slinkier pairs of panties and bras. Finally clad in a sheer French-cut pair of panties and a half-bra that seemed to be the least outrageous of the clothing in her drawer (she couldn't see any of her plain underwear, as per instructions from Jarrod), she went through the same process in finding outerwear. She couldn't find any of her sweatshirts, pullovers, jogging pants, or jeans. Her entire field inspection wardrobe seemed to have vaporized! She stood back and looked at her closet, which seemed oddly bare. Then sat down, hands beside her, on the bed, put her head down for a moment, and ran through the previous day and this morning in her head. 'No,' she thought, 'no missing time. Unless he had come through her place yesterday!' She jumped up in a panic, ignoring the flash of heat in her vagina as she checked the windows and, peering out from behind the door to her townhouse, the door, to check for scratch marks on the lock. Back to her bedroom, puzzled again. Then over to the telephone to examine the caller ID log. No, she decided, no one had called that she couldn't identify on the display.

Stumped, Christmas Jones finished dressing. She left her house in a sheer, black shirt with vertical ribbing rounding around her upthrust breasts. It curled around the low-cut, square front, spooling up into spaghetti straps that turned into a cord that draped down her back, creating a spiderweb closely pulling the shirt front back towards her exposed spine. Christmas remembered buying it for a Halloween costume a few years back but, for some reason, it was the only top that seemed to fit her; the others seemed uncomfortable, itchy, or somehow... unwearable. 'Another post-hypnotic effect,' she seethed, and vowed to exact every measure of revenge she could. A tight pair of capri pants and slip-on docksiders completed her outfit. Fishing her entry badges out of her jeans, she hopped into her fifteen-year-old Honda Civic and headed to the office. Once past the oggling guard, she spent the next few hours first understanding, then rearranging, the 'screen capture' utilities on their machines.

As she left, she reviewed her plans, then finally stopped at a liquor store and picked up a bottle of top-shelf vodka. She squared her shoulders, then tried to relax and let the clamor at the back of her mind take over as she pulled over to the side of the road, unscrewed the bottle top, and took a long, protracted swig. After coughing a bit from the unaccustomed alcohol, she took another, longer swig, then capped it and lay back in the seat for a few minutes, until the buzz set it.

She closed her eyes, and let the images of Jarrod wash through her, inundating her with flashes, and urges. After a few short minutes her face relaxed, and she started squirming in her seat. She saw the spaghetti strands she had seen on her computer the previous day, and started focusing in on them, knowing that they would bring her back to where Jarrod had wanted her. Back to that safe place he had made for her...

After a few minutes, slack-faced, Christmas Jones started her car up and set off for an address she had never consciously seen, one hand on the wheel, the other determinedly between her thighs, her index finger alternately pressing and rubbing at her increasingly hard clitoris throbbing through her then pants.