A sceptic's waste paper basket

[skeptomaniac]

The ideas good enough to fish back out and unfurl.

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[skeptomaniac]

Taken by Scuttlebuttin

Sherlock (of the Johnny Lee Miller persuasion, or even a female Sherlock) is very newly out of rehab and has a burning desire to get back into crime solving. He has to be able to prove he's on the wagon and his father wants him closely supervised. The fact his father hasn't met the assistant he's hired gives Sherlock a golden opportunity. He arranges for the woman his father has hired to disappear and instead goes about selecting his own minder, in his own unique fashion that crucially does not involve telling her she's being considered for the job. He abducts her and sets about breaking her down psychologically and emotionally into the perfect PA.

This starts out completely non-consensual but to his surprise and delight he has selected wisely and she responds to the violence, rape and humiliation exactly as he hoped. He continues to chip away at her psyche, emotional wellbeing and self esteem until she's a twisted enough slave to him. Once that's accomplished, she'll do anything he asks or face the consequences. She'll lie through her teeth about his occasional relapses, about his drinking habit and about his mental state and temperament to whoever needs to know. Sherlock will get everything he wants out of it; the thrill of sexual, physical, psychological and emotional sadism, his job back with the police, the freedom to drink or use as he wishes, his generous allowance and his father off his back. He'll make sure she gets just enough out of it not to jeopardise Sherlock's new life.

This one I would want to be VERY verbally abusive, delving into the psyche of my character and wreaking havoc. Mocking her and being absolutely on point about her characteristics and mannerisms or whatever. Lacerating her self esteem just for shits and giggles. Making it his business to know everything about her and then weaponising (is that a word) that knowledge.

 

[skeptomaniac]

For reference... and posterity. Not currently seeking for this one.

The thought that I had was that my character could be a novice wiccan. A girl with slowly rising power but no guidance, since she is orphan and has no idea from where she inherited this 'gift' or how to master it. She has fallen in with the bohemian crowd of Paris because they're always to drunk or high and self absorbed to notice that she occasionally accomplishes to do the impossible, or somehow manages to put a huge dent in her tiny rented room.

She runs into your character and the inevitable ensues. When he comes to feed from her however, he discovers that her blood is the most incredible thing he has ever tasted and better than that, it imbues him with some of her power, giving him superhuman strength, speed and agility as a short term side effect. It gives him a high like nothing else.

It takes pretty much everything he has to keep himself from draining her dry at the first feed. He is in fact, addicted to her blood, physically and mentally. Naturally he abducts her and she becomes his pet project. He has to walk a fine line between helping and allowing her to develop her burgeoning power and learn how to wield it. If however he takes his eye of the ball and doesn't keep siphoning off her power by feeding on her, she will not hesitate to attempt to destroy him and escape. At the same time, he has to limit the amount he feeds from her if she is not to die from it and lose her vitality completely. Tossed into that balancing act is the fact he becomes more physically addicted to her blood as her power increases. The highs and lows gradually become more terrible and begin to cloud his judgement.

A side effect of my character's developing powers is that she heals incredibly fast, something your character spots and exploits mercilessly. She becomes the ultimate outlet but he has to be careful not to accidentally maim or kill her, something that he finds hard to focus on when he's high and horny.

He has to keep her on a very tight leash and that involves grinding any attempt at rebellion of any description under his boot at the first opportunity. He delights in mocking, humiliating and demoralising his new toy, as well as dishing out cruelty and violence. It's been a long time since he treated a woman like this and she lived long enough for him to revel in her degradation. As her powers naturally replenish themselves along with her blood cells, he goes from being able to drag her around like a twisted side-kick to having to seal her away and shackle her in the strongest restraints he can conceive of. There's a lot of trial and error before he gets the balance right.

So there will be an awful lot of powerplay and your character will not always retain the upper hand. It won't take him too long to bring her back to heel however.