Fae must have fallen asleep in her cage, because she heard voices and when she opened her eyes, Dorian and his client had returned to the parlour. They must have completed their business, she thought, but something was going on. The man was standing, talking intently to the Madame, while holding Dorian’s cage in his hands, with Dorian inside it watching the conversation happening above him. The voices were a little muffled due to the glass, but Fae could hear what they were saying.
“I really must insist on this, Madame Ferelli, as I said, just name your price.” The lord’s voice was insistent, with an edge to it, but the Madame simply smiled at him in her slightly condescending way and shook her head slightly.
“My lord, as much as I would love to grant your request, I am a business woman, and not only that, I run a highly specialized business. I can’t simply sell one of my products to you. Especially since this little man is one of our most popular products – the value he will provide to me over his lifetime is immeasurable, I couldn’t simply take a one-time amount from you. Not to mention the fact that in no way can I allow any of my products to leave this building. That was included in your contract, as you’ll recall.” The Madame’s tone was reasonable, level, and immovable.
A look of frustration and anger crossed the lord’s handsome young face, “how can you stand there calmly, mistress of an establishment that obviously specializes in sexual slavery, and talk about these people like they’re ‘products’? In any normal brothel, unless the prostitute owed debts to the Madame, he or she could go free any time they wanted. But you keep these people as prisoners. Do you honestly expect me to not go straight to the police after seeing all this? If you want to keep me quiet about all of this, I must insist that you accept my offer.”
The Madame shocked the lord by laughing lightly in the face of his serious threat, “my dear sir, you’re young so I’ll overlook your mistake this time, but those kind of words are not conducive to keeping you welcome here. In your contract you signed that you would not reveal anything about this establishment to anyone, including the police. You break that contract and you are automatically banned from the premises. You would never see this tiny young man again. And let me be blunt about you going to the police – many of our dedicated patrons are very powerful men, including many officers and the chief of police himself. First of all, those who are not our patrons would not take your claims seriously, think about how ridiculous they sound, and secondly, if you were to reveal it to one of our patrons, it would be reported to me very quickly.” Suddenly, the Madame reached out and grabbed Dorian’s cage out of the lord’s hands, he was so surprised that he let it go without a strugge. The jerking caused Dorian to fall and cry out a little. “Thirdly, and I want to make this as clear as possible, this young man is mine, and obviously in a very vulnerable position. If you were to displease me in any way, not only would you be banned from the premises, I would have no choice but to punish him for causing a client to behave in such an unpleasant manner. And believe you me, there are many, many ways for me to punish a person this small and helpless. Are we clear?”
The lord stared, stunned at the Madame. He was shocked that anyone could be so cruel, but realized where he was and remembered that this entire enterprise of sexual slavery and imprisonment was her doing. Obviously she was a woman with very few morals, as well as the mysterious ability to shrink people. Not, in other words, a woman he wanted to anger. As the Madame started to turn away, the lord quickly moved to block her. “Wait, please,” he said, slight pleading in his voice, “forgive me for my indiscretions, I was being extremely rude. I would not want to do anything to put your establishment in jeopardy, I have simply found myself extremely enamored with one of your… products… you see.” The lord tried not to wince as he used that vile word to describe the young man whom he’d come to adore. “Isn’t there some sort of arrangement we could come to, where he would be, let’s say ‘set aside’ for me, and me alone? That way he doesn’t leave the premises, yet he belongs to only me – we can both be satisfied.”
The Madame appeared to consider this for a moment, and then smiled widely, “well, I am a reasonable woman, I think that an arrangement like that could come to pass. For a price. You would have to pay a regular amount to, let’s say ‘rent’ him. He will be kept reserved only for you, but you have to pay not only every time you avail yourself of him, but also enough to make up for the profit I would be losing having him off the market. Does that sound agreeable to you?”
The lord nodded his assent, and the Madame placed Dorian’s cage back on its pedestal, covering it with a white cloth to show its unavailability. She and the lord then walked into the front foyer to discuss the price. Fae couldn’t believe it. She stared at their retreating backs, and then looked over to Dorian’s covered cage. That lucky bastard, she thought bitterly, he manages to woo some rich, handsome young lord, and gets to stay completely off the shelf. She glanced over at some of the other cages, and saw that nearly everyone had watched the entire conversation and many were also glaring at Dorian’s cage. Fae flopped back down and leaned against the wall of her cage. Her mind was filled with envy and bitterness at the unfairness of life.
…
The parlour was finally closing, as dawn had approached and the patrons were finally finished with their pleasure. This meant that it was common time for the ‘products.’ The three normal-sized prostitutes who were employed by the Madame: Carmen, the beautiful tall black woman, Tina, a young blonde who was as mean as she was stupid, and Victor, a handsome Hispanic man with fiery dark eyes and long black hair, came in and began to carry the cages into a room off the main parlour. In this common room, the shrunken people were allowed to mingle with each other, and were fed. This was also where they slept. The Madame at least offered them the kindness of companionship with their own kind –she correctly figured that if they were kept alone in their cages all the time that they would go completely insane. It was a room with an interesting dynamic to say the least. Everyone there was a different size, some were absolutely tiny, as small as insects, and some were as large as 2 or 3 feet. Most, however, were somewhere between 2 and 8 inches, as those were the most popular sizes. They were men and women of varying ages, the youngest being 14 and the oldest in his 30s. What they had in common was that they were all incredibly beautiful, and they were joined by their common experience of shrinking, imprisonment, and forced prostitution. In this room, at the very least, they could forget the experiences of the day and be around others like them, some even of the same size. Today, however, the events of the day were not being tactfully avoided as usual, but were the topic of intense and heated conversation. Dorian and his savior, as he was being called, were occupying everyone’s minds. Some of them were happy for the boy, and had hopes that something so lucky would happen to them as well, but most of them were furious and jealous.
Dorian was forced to be at the centre of it all, still stunned by Jameson’s act of mercy, and unsure of how to feel about the entire situation. He was staring into space, thinking about Jameson’s words to him before they had concluded their business. Dorian had experienced too much suffering to fully trust Jameson, his cynicism telling him that the lord was just another lustful giant who wanted to abuse him, but that he just so happened to be rich and selfish enough to pay for Dorian to be his alone. Even if that were the case, having to be with only one client, and especially one as seemingly gentle as Jameson, was truly a blessing to someone who often had to exhaust his tiny body pleasuring multiple people a night, most of whom were violent and repulsive. But Jameson’s words were fighting with Dorian’s cynicism and suspicion.
“How did this happen to you?” Jameson had asked, while Dorian was lying next to his giant form on the bed. Dorian told Jameson the whole story – something which still surprised him. Why did he trust this young lord so easily? His story was sadly a common one, at least until he came to the Parlour. His parents had died when he was very young, and his abusive, sadistic uncle took him in. Eventually, when he was around 8 years old, Dorian managed to get up the courage to run away. He was found by the police, living on the streets, filthy and half-starved. He had no identification with him, and he refused to tell them who he was for fear of being sent back to his monstrous uncle. As a result he was sent to a state orphanage where he lived in relative peace but with little hope for a decent future. When he was 15 the orphanage was getting ready to find him a job so that he would stop being a drain on the government’s overtaxed welfare system. That’s when the Madame showed up. She claimed to be a business woman looking for an able-bodied young man to make deliveries for her business. Her offer was a sweet one – steady work plus room and board. The orphanage told Dorian this was the best he could hope for and sent him on his way.
Dorian had hardly been surprised when the door had slammed shut behind him, and the Madame ordered him to remove his clothing. He figured that a single middle-aged woman, whether she wanted him to work for her or not, would want something a little more than deliveries for such a sweet offer. Dorian’s experiences had already made him very cynical and emotionless at a young age. He learned that the world was a cruel and unforgiving place, where the strong abused the weak, and the smart used the strong. What innocence and naiveté he had as a child had been destroyed at his parents’ death. Although he was an intelligent boy, he kept to himself and did not make friends in the orphanage. He was told that he was handsome, but that looks alone would not get him far in this harsh world, that all he could do was to work as hard as possible and hope that he’d catch a break some day. Little did he know that his pretty face would not only not get him far, but would lead him to be turned into a 4-inch tall plaything. He had been in the Parlour ever since, about a year and a half now. Every day was torment, as he was rarely left alone due to his desirable size and appearance. Since being shrunk, he had receded further and further into himself until he hardly felt alive – it was a good way to defend himself from the world he was in. It wasn’t until he met someone as unusual as Jameson that he had felt curious or interested in anything. He had repaid that by telling Jameson the story he asked to hear.
Again Jameson had surprised him. When Dorian looked up into his face after telling his story, he saw tears in Jameson’s giant eyes. He actually cares, Dorian had thought, before his cynicism reminded him that regardless of how much he was moved by the story, Jameson had still paid to have sex with a shrunken sex slave. This started the internal debate within Dorian, for although it is true that Jameson paid to be with Dorian, he had done everything. He had not made Dorian do anything for him in return, and when Dorian offered to pleasure him, Jameson had blushed in that adorable way of his, and said that he didn’t yet feel comfortable making Dorian do something like that. And so instead they had laid together on the bed as Jameson asked about Dorian’s life. It was so strange, like nothing Dorian had ever experienced. No one had cared about him at all since his parents died when he was a child. And it didn’t stop there. After he had told his story, the tear-eyed Jameson had leaned down close to Dorian, and whispered to him with an intensity in his eyes and words that made the tiny boy’s spine tingle:
“I promise you, Dorian, on my honour and my life, that I will get you out of here.”