Anna's Story - A Slave's Journal: Entry 7

[Danicali299]

You know the drill..Slavery and dark topics. Please poke some holes in this chapter too. I probably need a rewrite and need someone to point out what I missed.
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The next morning I awoke to a familiar sounding industrial alarm buzzing through the speaker in our “dormitory”, as the overseers liked to call the slave pens here. Then before I could even lift my head up from the bed, the lights turned on right above me and blinded me with their LED's. I wasn’t normally a back sleeper, but without a pillow this was apparently the only comfortable position I could find last night and this blindness every morning would just have to be another annoyance I had to get used to.

After a minute or two sitting on my bunk I was finally able to get my bearings and see what was going on and what I had to do. The others told me about the morning routine last night, but I knew it was still going to take some getting used to in practice. Luckily for me, we had double the time I had in the warehouse to get ready for whatever our day was supposed to be.

There were still others sitting on their bunks waking up as I made my way over to the “bathroom”, with the concrete floor freezing my feet as I walked over to the short line for the toilets with my toothbrush and paste. I had thought by this point that I would’ve gotten used to the cold floors of these places, but apparently that was never going to happen. Luckily for me the line went quick, as I definitely couldn’t hold it anymore by the time it was my turn. After I was done, I brushed my teeth in the sink on top and put my stuff back in my bag before making my way to the line for the showers.

There were four women ahead of me, and by the looks of it we were allowed slightly longer showers now. The others in line were chatting about the sitcom we watched last night on TV, while I stayed quiet unless they asked me something. I hated to admit it but the the reality of it all was to put it simply, depressing that morning. There was too much bad shit going on in my head and I simply didn’t have the emotional energy left to socialize with anyone. I hoped that this bad mood was just temporary, and would end as soon as I found a way to keep my mind busy here.

By the time it was my turn at one of the shower heads the others had finally left me alone and if the clock on the wall was correct, we actually did get longer showers now. Even though the water was still cold and the soap still sucked, it was nice being able to take a little more time to actually feel clean instead of just rinsed off. The towel, though damp, was also a nice touch. Instead of drip drying and shivering in the cold for what seemed like forever, I could actually end my shower like a person for once. I knew that Mercer just did these things to make us more presentable to potential buyers, but I still appreciated these little comforts that kept some of the despair away in the end.

After I was nice and dry, I noticed that our breakfast and our clothes were dropped off through the door slot while I was in the shower. Each paper sleeve of clothes had our slave number written on it, so we knew which ones were ours, and like last night they gave us our loaf and milk in a brown bag that you’d send your kid’s lunch to school in. I followed the other slaves’ lead and ate my breakfast nude, as one of them explained to me that the overseers wanted us to do this in the morning so we didn’t get any little crumbs on our clothes that the customers could see. I didn’t really understand it, but since being a slave is more an exercise in obedience than thought, I just did it to avoid any potential trouble.

After I was done eating, I got dressed and sat down on my bunk to fold my blanket up like the others before I lined up with the them to wait for the overseers to let us out. Before I could get up however, a middle aged slave came over and set me back down on the bed and sat down next to me. She then told me while she put her arm around my shoulder,“my name is Melissa, even if you don’t want to talk to me right now you need to listen carefully. You can be depressed and antisocial all you want around us, but out there on the sales floor you need to fake it for these people so they’ll want to buy you. Trust me when I say this, cooking and cleaning all day and night is 100 times better than waiting around here wondering where you’re going. Do you understand?”.

I nodded and was about to say something to her, but then an automated voice came over the speaker above us and said, “Attention all slaves, you must be ready for staging in 10 minutes”. The message repeated again and five minutes later an overseer arrived at our door with a scanner in hand. The door was unlocked and we were scanned one by one into the morning counts before we were led off through the hallways. Like yesterday, we weren’t chained into coffles but we still had to keep our eyes to the floor and stay silent as we made our way out of the back hallways to the sales floor.

Even with our heads down, I could still tell when we got onto the sales floor. The freezing concrete was replaced with cool tile, and a small rush of warmer air hit us as we went through the swinging doors. Even the lights felt brighter as we were taken from the bare minimum slaves were given, to an area designed for the customer’s comfort while they shopped.

It wasn’t long before we reached our aisle, and we were secured to our display one by one. When the overseer got to me I was led over to an empty display and ordered to stand on the slightly raised wooden platform. He scanned me into the display, and locked a steel cable bolted into the floor around my left ankle. Before he left me however, he was “nice” enough to repeat the rules to me just in case I forgot them. It was the same no talking, no sitting or squatting and no crying/misery rules I heard before, so I mostly just tuned him out until he left. After the overseer left, I was allowed to look around to satiate my curiosity, and the slave section by itself was huge. The cable only let me go a few feet an any direction, but from my vantage point in what I assumed was an aisle full of domestic slaves I could still see signs for three or four more aisles full of slaves hanging from the ceiling. There were even male domestics being sold here too, even if they were segregated from us in the next aisle.

After a while of looking around my area, that eventually got boring and I ended up zoning out until I could hear what I assumed was a pregnant woman and her husband approaching with a salesman. I immediately pretended to put my eyes to the floor and watched as they decided that they wanted to examine this one Latina slave across the aisle from me. I knew I shouldn’t have been looking, but I had to see how this worked so I knew what to expect when it happened to me. The woman didn’t seem too interested in touching the slave beyond lifting up her dress and inspecting her breasts and nipples, then asking her if she had ever taken care of a baby before. The man went to town examining her from head to toe in front of everyone. He wasn’t dumb enough to feel up another woman’s bits and pieces in front of his pregnant wife, but he did seem more interested in her general condition, and her ability to do gardening for some reason. While this was happening, I could clearly see this poor slave just standing there staring off into space while a pair of strangers took turns examining her. I was used to the spot inspections, but I could never figure out how someone could handle what these customers were doing to her multiple times a day.

Then the wife caught me watching them and came over to my display. I thought I was going to be in trouble, but instead she just looked at the tablet in front of my display and lifted up my dress to check me out while she muttered something to herself. I quickly attempted to adopt the same staring off into space look as the woman across from me and was afraid to breathe as she felt my breasts and my ribs before putting my dress back down. I was shaking like a leaf by this point from the nerves, but the woman didn’t seem to take offense as she walked away saying to the salesman who noticed her checking me out, “the slave over there would’ve been the perfect nanny if she wasn’t so skinny”. It hurt to hear, but she was right. Even with the hormone shots that allow a slave to breastfeed and better food, it would be months before I could properly feed a baby.

After what felt like an hour of this couple checking out other slaves in the aisle passed before they decided to buy the the woman across from me. When I heard her price, I was stunned. This woman apparently cost 30,000 dollars and someone could buy her with a loan just like a car. The price shocked me, but then again, you don’t exactly want to cheap out on the slave taking care of your infant either so I could understand the price being so high. I wondered what was going through her head as she was taken down from her display and led off though. Was she was as anxious as I was just thinking about how her owner would be? We all wanted to get out of here, but how did we know what our new homes were going to be like? Honestly what scared me the most about getting bought was the chance of getting some weirdo with a sex dungeon or something else out of a Criminal Minds episode.

After my first customer inspection, this routine repeated itself a few more times over the course of the day. It was still humiliating to get felt up and grabbed at by all these people in the middle of a store, but thanks to our previous spot inspections we were mostly used to it by this point. A lot of the customers even seemed to want me once they asked me a few questions and realized how smart I was. Unfortunately I was too scrawny for the price every time, but I hoped that the increased amount of food I was getting would fix that soon enough. Eventually, and thankfully, the store closed at 8 and we were led back to our pens for the night.

Once I was back in my pen and eating my dinner, I decided to thank Melissa for her pep talk. To which she responded while laughing, “girl, if you thought that was a pep talk you’re more fucked in the head than I thought you were. Now seriously, I know being a slave is depressing at first but there has to be more to this”. I told her about my mother and losing everything and all she had to say was, “At least you got to grow up free, a lot of us were born into this shit. Still sucks that you’re never going to see your mom again though. That being said, life isn’t fair and you need to move on so you don’t fall into too deep of a pit honey”. It honestly felt good to get that off of my chest, even if the response from other slaves was to put it bluntly, “suck it up bitch, life ain’t fair”.

Over the next week I started to feel a little better, and the sales floor remained largely unchanged from my first day out there. Customers occasionally checked me out, I was still too scrawny for the price, and the days were still boring. Things were even ok in the slave pens, with me being able to trade a massage to another slave, Carol, in exchange for help fixing my half-assed buzz cut. We couldn’t do much with a dollar store razor and a comb, but she somehow pulled it off once she borrowed a pair of scissors from a sympathetic overseer. When I looked in the mirror I still looked like a butch lesbian, but that humiliating warehouse buzz cut was transformed into something that you’d see on a free person at least.

The only event that really stood out to me was the teacher who presented my scholarship last year, Mr. Edwards, seeing me on display. He looked at my tablet and looked at me for a second. Then he said in a surprised tone, “Anna?”. I nodded while trying not to cry from embarrassment. He then said to me, “Sorry you ended up like this, you’re too smart for this shit. I’ll tell your mom you didn’t end up someplace bad at least”. He then quickly walked away like this situation was just as embarrassing for him too. After he left, I risked getting an overseer’s attention and asked if I could have my bathroom break.

To say I cried in that bathroom, was an understatement. I ugly cried and ended up getting bitched out by an overseer for it. Luckily for me, the overseer understood once I told her who it was and was nice enough to let me get myself back in order for a minute before I was taken back to my display. I felt like a piece of shit for this later, but in that moment I hated Mr. Edwards for even seeing me and reminding me of what I lost. It would’ve been better if he had just kept walking.

That night, to the other slaves’ annoyance, I cried myself to sleep. Luckily for me, they understood and that was the last time I would see these women before I left the dealership for good.

[ZeeChromosome]

Excellent segment. I really liked it.

[Danicali299]

Thank you zee, I appreciate it

[Danicali299]

I've discussed the pricing of slaves with four other authors, as I feel most stories price them unrealistically cheaply. For a lifetime service from a healthy young woman, I price my slaves at 5-10X that. I'm curious how you came up with the price.

I was mostly putting her around the price point of a good used car for some reason that I can’t remember. I was trying to draw a parallel between people going up and down the aisles of the lot at a dealership and people doing the same with slaves. That was for the nanny at least.

As for Anna’s price in the next part she was scrawny and unhealthy before she was a slave because of how poor she was. Running around the warehouse on the same rations as the other slaves sitting around doing nothing didn’t help her much either . I don’t remember which part it was in but it took Miss O’Connor a while to get her back on track to a healthy weight.

Keeping this in mind I mostly imagined Anna as a discounted slave since so many customers didn’t want her because of her condition. That was how Miss O’Connor was able to get her so cheap. She simply looked under the hood and negotiated Mercer down to the price she was actually worth after all the work that would be needed to make her healthy again was taken into consideration.

Expanding stuff like that is on the rewrite list of this chapter already tbh.

[ZeeChromosome]

As an accountant, I spent a lot of time thinking about this. Remember, the value of a utility slave is the value of their labor minus the cost of upkeep, including medical. Also, the retirement tax if it's a lifetime enslavement.

So that's one way of doing it. Another is to consider how much money people actually save in the bank. So, if a 20 yr old sold themselves for a 5 year indenture, would they have far more money in their savings account at age 25 than their never-enslaved peers? Of course, because slaves are cheaper to support and don't spend money on frivolities like pizza or movies.

So there's a lot of variables besides physical attractiveness.

For my stories, I decided that 10K per year is a reasonable price for a voluntary indenture of a high school graduate. Also, for Harriette's HH Ranch, the fact that she provides her pleasure ponies an opportunity to take remote learning college classes is also an incentive to sign up.

You can take a 2 or 3 year "gap year" as a pleasure pony, end up not far behind your peers academically, and have money in the bank. That's the incentive.

Zee