mickie has a proposition for the slave girls of online, off-line Gor.How about sending her stories of "The strangest, hardest, or most loved duty/task that the girl has ever had to do for a Master". Anything you would like (with appropriate permission of course) to tell about your slavery either online or off. Some examples from mickie’s life are included in this month’s article and mickie’s email is mburbella@hotmail.com or her icq# 15027549. Replies can remain anonymous if wished. Next month, let’s see how slaves live on earth.

The girl bit her lip anxiously as she scrolled through the room names in a new chat program called Pow Wow. She had heard of a wonderful world called "Gor" where the people were real and the men were men. The very few Gorean men she had met elsewhere intrigued yet terrified her greatly and for weeks she had been trying to get up enough courage to enter a Gorean Chat room. She was vexed because she normally isn’t a timid type person at all. Fools and mickie usually rush in where angels fear to tread.

"This is silly," she thought. "They are just people and this is just a computer, what could happen?"

And so, bolstering herself up with empty platitudes, she clicked. Only they weren’t "just people" and her whole world changed.

Only it didn’t turn out quite like she thought it would.

This one has always been "real". She doesn’t know why she never made up a "persona" for the Internet-even when she was doing general anonymous chatting in the 30+ rooms. It was either she hadn’t been online long enough to realize that this is "what you do" or she was just gullible enough to think that everyone else was being their real selves, too. Since Master has this joke about saying "What?!" (like he didn’t hear) anytime this one says anything about not being able to hear something-and after two years this one is still falling for it (much to her disgust)-she would bet on the gullible part.

Anyway....

Lantern and firelight flickered over the cool stone walls of the tavern. Beautiful slave girls flitted to and fro, kneeling at the feet of roistering men. Stately freewomen in queenly robes lounged about drinking sweet red wine. The highest slave danced about a pole sensuously. Another told fables and stories. Occasionally a freewomen would stand and toss out a ballad or epic poem. Men swigged a fiery brew called paga, told risqué stories and teased the girls at their feet. The quiet girl in the corner shadows watched with stars in her eyes.

This one was intrigued by what is now called "role-playing" Gor. To her, these were real people, who really looked as they said they did, or as their pictures depicted. (It took her a while to figure out that a lot of the profile pictures were taken from BDSM thumbnails and often had nothing to do with the person other than having the same hair color-hey, she said she was gullible). These people were really strong, manly, stately, demure, lofty, brilliant, interesting, beautiful, sexual in real life. They only took themselves, as this one did, and placed themselves in a group-created fantasy world that they would like to live in were it possible. This one likened it to the "make believe" games one played as a child. But, the people were real, and somewhere in the world they talked of living like this in real time.

Eventually this one was found by what John Norman refers to as "the one Master." Since great distance separated them, almost all of their interaction was in this make believe world, but to each other and to the others around them, they were always "Daniel" and "mickie" (although at the time they were "Flanagan" and "cailin"). The long weekend visits and vacations were heady pockets of best behavior. The rest of the real world tended to stop, or be shoved to a ’way back corner, whenever Master was in town. Life was good. It was going to get even better.

Life revolved so that Master moved back east. He arranged for this one to join him. A date was set and this one spent three months waiting, working out her contracts, packing-and dreaming of life as slave to the one she loved more than life. She was going to be a real Gorean slave girl. She was going to be a redsilk pleasure slave to a real Gorean master. Life was going to be fraught with beauty, a strong man, and great sex. Let her remind you, yes, she is gullible. If she were an Eskimo she’d probably be the one to buy the proverbial ice cubes.

The date came, the move executed and all of a sudden she was in a NYC apartment looking around and thinking, "hurm".

Guess what? Slavery isn’t anything at all like this one thought it would be. For one, it’s a lot harder than the belly can handle at times. For two, well, situations arise that Norman didn’t cover in the books. There are the obvious differences of course. This one doesn’t call Master "master" when with business contacts or general public or family who don’t’ understand the life. This one has a silver chain with a small "D" on it rather than a steel band. The only "silk" thing this one ...er...owns is a gold silk blouse. Master doesn’t ride a tharlarion; he rides a subway (and nasty critters they are too). This one doesn’t ride thrown across his lap; she drives a car. The most "Gorean" men this one deals with are highway police and toll booth attendants (and believe it, they are the most Gorean-attitude men she has ever met).

But even life-at-home isn’t covered in the books. The book slaves cook and clean and sew. They care for offspring. They entertain the master with their wit, presence and body. Occasionally they do farm work, gardening or animal care. Once in a blue moon they have special accounting duties or somesuch. They usually louse it up, but they are sometimes involved in political spying, errands, or maneuvers.

There are so many "services" that a real time slave has to perform for the real time Master that simply didn’t exist in either the book world or the online world. Not once has this one seen a slave sent to the tarn races in order to do a play-by-play for a Master whose duties keep him away from a beloved contest. During the east-coast playoffs, this one’s Master was on a transcontinental flight during a key New York Knicks game. Guess who had to watch the game on TV in order to report as soon as his flight landed in California? You guessed it. And it wasn’t just a matter of which team won. She had to report key plays and players of the last half. Try finding that one in the manual.

Sure, this one serves Master good ol’ Colombian coffee instead of Tahari blackwine. But, she rarely does it on her knees. Why? Because it takes too long. When Master wants coffee, he wants coffee. The point is that the coffee is there when he wants it and not to see her lovely self, slithering a mug up her thigh. You don’t see any silk clad beauties sauntering out of a cylinder to move the Tharlarion to the other side of the street at 7 a.m. in the morning, but you do see mickie in jeans and a T-shirt slugging it up the block looking for a parking spot with bleary eyes on "alternate side of the street" parking days. (For those not familiar with the term, one moves one’s car to specific sides of the street so the street-cleaning machine can, well, clean the street. The practice is the highest parking-ticket/towing-costs revenue generating process in NYC.) No matter how Master tries, he simply cannot train this one to be a morning person. Luckily, Master is not much of a morning person himself so the training is haphazard at best.

Another duty this one finds a bit disconcerting (sorry Master) is called "when Master has the budgies" or "fidgets", as it is also known in some parts of the world. This is when Master can’t settle down to anything and feels the need to be "out and about." This one is sedentary by nature--more of a reader than a wanderer. But when Master has the budgies, slave tags along for company and ends up on a citywide hike at about 10 miles per hour. You see plenty of book-slaves having to march along with warriors from camp to camp. But to this one’s knowledge, there are no infamous passages about a slave walking "just because". Thing is about these hikes is they can happen at any time--even after Master and slave have settled in for the night. And, a good dose of hopefully sidetracking seduction usually ends up only with having to hike after a rousing but slave-exhausting romp. And, since this is the city that never sleeps, there are always things to see, places to go, and people to watch, no matter what time of night.

Something else unique to this one’s service: Master is overly fond of video games. The "other slave" is called Sony Playstation and often Master spends more time paying attention to her than to mickie. Thing is, Master is most fond of those games like Resident Evil or Myst which have puzzles one must figure out, or things one must find in order to win the game. Now, this one never was able to ...um...master Atari way ’back in the dark ages so she never graduated to the virtual games out now. Computer solitaire is her top speed. A control pad simply bewilders her and trying to actually use one frays her nerves beyond all things. But, slave is extraordinarily good at figuring out the puzzles or knowing where to look for the clues. Even better than her brilliant, game-savvy, Master. So, when Master is playing a game of that sort, slave’s duty is to watch him play and help him keep up with, and figure out, all the shinola. This one doesn’t recall any slaves being consulted about what stuff ships needed to carry when they left Port Kar nor which parts of town a merchant caravan needed to stop and pick up maps and supplies before setting off on safari. One time, Master and slave played a particularly hard game in this manner for 16 hours straight.

Then there are the little things. Things like making sure the Master remembered to set his alarm clock before going to bed. Making sure Master remembers to call his kids when there is a set time or reason to do it (the time difference gets a bit tricky sometimes in remembering to call before they go to bed). There is remembering to buy mother’s day cards for his female family instead of just this one’s own. There is making sure Master remembered to mail the bills instead of carrying them around in his briefcase for weeks. Master likes a long soak in the bathtub but he gets bored. So slave curls her long frame on the floor by the tub in the tiny space available. She doesn’t necessarily "bathe" Master, unless that night he wants her too, most times she just keeps him company.

This one doesn’t know how they do it on Gor, but this one has to know home remedies for the occasional toothache that an aspirin won’t help. She has to make sure her meat and potatoes Master gets enough vitamins to function. Aching muscles? Here’s an ace bandage, heat-pad, ice pack, therapeutic massage, and hot bath. Where’s the helpful, house call making, relatively inexpensive, green caste when one needs them?

And then you have being slave not only to Master, but also being slave to Master’s big, furry, watermelon-looking, grumpy, surly godzilla cat. She’s telling you, this cat can...er...bark an order to be fed, pet, left alone, go out, play with me-whatever-more emphatic and preemptory than any Gorean Master this one has ever met either online or off. This one’s two younger, female cats even toady to, and step carefully around Master’s feline. This is truly a Gorean household. There are no standard responses to being smartly dressed down by a Gorean cat. This one has tried the usual "yes Master" and has received only baleful looks in return. Sometimes he just yells (and yes he yells-we aren’t talking "meow" here) at this one because he damn well feels like it. But he snuggles great when he’s in the mood to do so.

This one guesses that if Norman described more of the general one-slave to one-man, kettle-and-mat types there might would be more of this sort of thing. However, not having done so, gave this one delusions of living the Gorean slavelife a bit more like those red-silk pleasure girls who’s primary responsibility was being after-supper entertainment or the yellow-silk waitresses who’d get tossed over a shoulder periodically for a romp in an alcove with various "equipment".

It has been an adjustment not only of going from being a typical earth female who wanted her own way and got it by hook or crook--to being a slave. It has also been a mental adjustment in redefining exactly what being a slave would be like in this world we live in as opposed to the sometimes-glamorous and sensual life of a book pleasure slave. But sometimes rose-colored, gullible glasses are good. Had she known what it was going to be like, most likely she would have bolted before finding out how incredibly wonderful it all is-even if it gets a bit weird at times.

Life may not have turned out exactly like she thought it would but it is still filled with a lot of beauty, a strong man, and lots of great sex. She wouldn’t trade life with master for squat-even for being one of those stereotypical book harem slaves with their silks, jewelry and perfumes. One thing is for sure, it doesn’t matter if she’s a kettle-and-mat by day, by night she’s the most beloved, wanted, lusty red-silk that ever existed in Gor--book, online or off. Even if she’s only wearing the ripped up T-shirt slave rag in which her Master finds her most enticing instead of red slave silk with bells and bangles. Perhaps she ripped just the right threads without knowing it. Perhaps she is actually more slave than she thinks-Gor not withstanding.