The Spicy Situation of the Courtesan

Where to begin?

Choosing a starting point is often difficult. To recount the history of anyone's life in the most minute detail is not only technically challenging but also dangerously borders on prying into other people's affairs.

Let's limit ourselves to mentioning that from a very early age, Anatoly was fascinated by electrical engineering. He even attended a school club for young amateur technicians—at that time, such clubs still existed in that hopelessly provincial town. Moreover, on his nightstand stood a radio receiver he had assembled himself—though, as he later learned, it was non-functional and, in principle, could never work.

What else was there for him to

be interested in back then?

Being an unsociable guy, what would now be called a nerd or a geek, Tolik wasn't particularly drawn to active forms of entertainment, and the quiet, backward provincial town didn't offer a lush array of other kinds of amusements.

The situation changed slightly in his late teenage years.

All of them.

From bloody action movies to obscene comedies.

Since hormones were bubbling more than actively in Tolik's blood during that wonderful time, he was interested in and attracted to films of a somewhat different theme—the kind you had to request at the video rental store almost in a whisper and sneak home. Among these films was "Captain Orgazmo," whose title pleasantly appealed to the impressionable teenager's mind.

This film, alas, turned out to be not erotic at all.

Comedic.

According to the "film-within-a-film" plot, the superhero Captain Orgazmo restores order and justice using a handheld orgasmator or orgasmizer—translated differently in various versions—a metal device of suspicious phallomorphic outlines that shoots scarlet discharges of unknown energy.

Try to guess what a person feels when hit by such a discharge?

Hint: not pain.

In short, Tolya didn't regret watching the film one bit, even though it wasn't erotic in the full sense of the word.

However, there were a couple of scenes that pleasantly stimulated his teenage imagination—when the main character, a Mormon priest, armed with the support of a filming colleague and a young technical genius rolled into one, gets his hands on a "real working" specimen of the orgasmizer—and even shoots it at passersby a few times.

He rewatched these scenes many times afterward.

The idea of the orgasmizer so captivated Anatoly that several years later, when a new wave of the scientific and technological revolution in the form of computers and the Internet swept over that town—everything came to their Zamoskvorechye with significant delay, but fortunately, in recent years, this trend had greatly diminished—he even tried to independently gather some information about the possibility of creating one. Alas, even a basic familiarity with nervous physiology and a slightly deeper one with electrical engineering were enough for him to understand—if an orgasmizer is possible, it's not within our lifetimes.

An article once read about a miraculous device by some Dutch professor, which had filled Tolik with hope, upon careful analysis, alas, turned out to be a newspaper hoax. Another article, on the contrary, wasn't a hoax—but to use the remote "orgasmizer" described in it, one needed to pre-implant a special device under the victim's skin in the right place, which was hardly feasible.

So he abandoned this preoccupied fantasy, especially since soon he had things to do besides hormonal fantasies.

After finishing school, it suddenly became clear—well, how else do such things become clear?—that even diligence in physics classes and attending some children's club still don't automatically guarantee acquiring the necessary practical knowledge and a well-paid profession. He had to survive, like many of his peers in those years, and therefore—he had to hustle. Initially getting by with unstable earnings, Anatoly later attached himself to the company of Stas Loshatsky, one of the most successful former classmates from his year, who just lacked manpower for the most primitive company orders—related to the vulgar task of setting up electricity at sites. Actually, Stas's company dealt in real estate and some asphalt phishing—what that had to do with wiring, Tolya didn't quite understand at first, but he tried not to delve into it.

That's when he realized how little theoretical knowledge matters if not backed by real experience.

A couple of times, despite all the book-learned notions about the habits of the predatory spirit of Electricity, Tolik got such a "jolt" that he was ready to come to work wearing gloves.

Jolted and burned.

But parallel to the received shock—whether the discharge knocked the last remnants of sense out of him, or short-circuited some neural circuits connected to teenage fantasies—a new thought formed in Anatoly's mind.

A new plan.

A cunning plan in all its details matured in his head gradually, acquiring additions and nuances.

Tolik wasn't in a hurry to implement it, even deliberately dragging out some of its phases.

He needed reliability.

He still roughly remembered one post he published on a women's internet forum. Published from a female persona, from the face of a non-existent virtual lady he had invented, who had flashed around different corners of that forum for a couple of months beforehand and had already managed to gain the trust of many.

"Girls, at our company—I've already told many of you about the amusing place of my planktonic growth—a new type of product is being prepared for launch.

A female electrostimulator-massager for you-know-what, comprehensive, attachable to erogenous zones. The issue is creating a proper program for it, as it's an extremely delicate and individual matter; ideally, we couldn't do without mass testing on hundreds of subjects, like in the West, but we don't have the resources for that. There will be testing, but on a smaller scale, once draft programs in general terms are ready.

By the way:

— if anyone wants to be among the tester-participants—step forward, this is your chance, but first, take part in creating the program for the electrostimulator.

You can, if you're shy, write in private or from a freshly registered nickname, it doesn't matter."

The end of the post was adorned with a dreamily smiling emoticon with lecherously darting eyes.

No, well, what else was there to do?

Anatoly desperately needed data that was hard to obtain without working somewhere as a gynecologist or sexologist for several months. Torture and interrogate his own girlfriend? There were two problems here: first, her answers and reactions would be purely individual, while he needed something universal and flexible; second, at that time, his intimate life wasn't particularly blessed with girlfriends. Perhaps that's why his inflamed brain kept tossing him one perverted fantasy of a specific kind after another.

In September of another year, Vadim, a cousin from Vinnitsa, whose sphere of activity had not intersected with his until then, unexpectedly came to visit Anatoly.

Vadka had always been, as it's commonly called, an aesthete. A bearer of artistic imagination.

Well, the current turbulent era provided him, as a spiritual bearer of unbridled creative fantasy, an excellent opportunity to express himself in the delicate sphere of designing women's wraps, dresses, lingerie, and other charming frills and furbelows.

Dissatisfied?

Not what you dreamed of in your youth?

Move along and don't linger: there are always many willing to take the place of a frill-and-furbelow designer.

Vadka wasn't a burden at first.

Despite practically immediately deciding to save on hotels by settling himself and his suitcases in one of the rooms of Tolya's dwelling, he made no more noise than a cockroach behind a dresser. Seizing the opportunity, Anatoly even tried to extract some benefit for his long-standing plan from Vadim's temporary stay in their Zamoskvorechye, questioning him about the intricacies of his current profession. He seemed to suspect that Tolya was having difficulties at work and was planning to change jobs, but nevertheless patiently endured the interrogations, and in the end gave his interlocutor links to a couple of internet resources that Tolya would never have dug up on his own in the Web. Who would have thought there were so many nuances in these frills and furbelows?

Thus Anatoly became one step closer to his goal.

The information he obtained gave him a shaky chance to realize not only that ancient fantasy, dating back almost to "Captain Orgazmo," but also a much more primitive one. Weren't you ever aroused in early age by those fragments in films where a gangster with a clever shot hits a dancer's lingerie strap and it slips off her? Well, what about a remotely controlled dress that slips off a girl on command?

This, however, was a step away from his main idea.

A prank.

The realization of his main obscene teenage idea required diligent drawing of diagrams and meticulous work with delicate materials unfamiliar to his rough hands.

And even then, nothing might come of it.

Why?

For many different reasons.

For instance, the Z-shaped wiring scheme Anatoly mentally composed in his mind after that post on the women's forum, as he later unexpectedly realized, would be inoperable simply due to the excessive thickness of the required insulation. And how to thread the conductor wires so that at the right moment the voltage isn't excessively dissipated by the surrounding fabric? Not to mention that activating the necessary sequence of contacts and, moreover, remote control of them requires a sewn-in and disguised chip-microcontroller—in addition to an equally disguised battery.

However, no need to go into details.

Besides, even if he managed to flawlessly execute the purely technical part of the plan, there remained the social part.

He needed a victim.

A victim he knew well enough from a distance to have a chance of planting a booby-trapped surprise on her one way or another. A victim he could also observe.

Here, Anatoly was also indirectly helped by his neighbor.

Having settled in one of his rooms, Vadka seemed to have dragged behind him from Vinnitsa almost the majority of his business and personal contacts; the phones rang almost constantly—both Tolya's landline and Vadim's mobile. It turned out, in addition to everything, that a significant portion of Vadim's contacts didn't even live in Vinnitsa but in the same city as Tolya, so it was nothing for Vadim to jump up from the dinner table, not finishing his soup, throw out: "I have business," and then, tying his tie with a melancholic-lyrical look, disappear in an unknown direction.

The opposite also happened.

Having become completely brazen, he invited his local friends and even friends of their friends to Tolya's place—"It's okay if Antokha and Galinka stay with us for a couple of hours, right?"—and Anatoly had to somehow endure all this.

What else was there to do?

Observe.

Study. Collect information and compile lists. Gather data and personal contacts.

By all permissible and not entirely permissible means.

And if someone, due to forgetfulness, tends to leave their half-open laptop unattended on the table or sofa—or, say, a mobile phone—so much the better.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Svetlana Iriilenko, a blonde twenty-three years of age, possessor of amazingly clear and amazingly light blue eyes, stood in front of the mirror with a slightly embarrassed look.

Embarrassment, actually, was an organic part of her nature.

Sveta, even in school, preferred to sit at the back desk and answer the teacher's question only if asked. She couldn't be called a bad student—she read a lot and always tried to memorize the assigned material. However, the social part of her personality always remained somewhere at a primitive communal level of development, if not earlier. Communication and Sveta—bringing these two concepts together was fundamentally impossible.

She raised her hand to her bangs, slightly adjusting a stray light hair from her parting.

Organic part or not, this time the embarrassment had a more than logical and natural reason.

Girls don't get married every day.

Moreover, with Sveta, due to the special makeup of her nature, this might never have happened at all. Being outwardly angelically innocent and enchanting to the eye of an outside observer, Sveta, due to that same shyness, didn't give herself any slack—and often admitted to herself that her appearance was more likely to attract pick-up artists looking for easy prey than anyone serious. As for Sveta's inner content, it's enough to say that her strict upbringing—or, as some would say, complexes—completely excluded both the thought of a fleeting affair with anyone and generally overly deep contemplation of the nuances of her personal life.

Thus she would have faded away the short span of her womanly age, losing all her white petals over a few decades, if not for the meeting with Kirill.

Being outwardly not tall, thin like her, a dark-haired, tanned guy, he alone managed to discern in the fragile golden-haired girl with a sad face at the desk of the district library…

…something requiring revelation.

He addressed her—what did he say then? Some insignificant question about one of the books he had checked out. Sveta, who was working part-time as a librarian then, had already reached for a ballpoint pen to put the necessary signatures, but was distracted by his question.

That first conversation between them lasted no less than half an hour. At the end of it, Kirill, embarrassed for some unknown reason, asked Sveta for her phone number.

Sveta, surprising herself, gave the number…

A vibration at her right hip, felt even through the dress fabric, distracted Sveta from her memories.

What is that?

A phone call? No, in that case, the opening melody of the song "This World" would have played.

An SMS message.

From Kirill.

"In the box tied with a blue silk scarf, standing by the open window of the balcony, a surprise awaits you. A bit ambiguous, but I hope you won't kill me, my sunny. I'm a bit embarrassed myself, so let's not talk about this at all today, not a single word. You know what I'm like" .

Next was an emoticon meant to symbolize either guilty embarrassment or a sly hint, but Sveta didn't even think about its prudent ambiguity.

"Consider me… a bit perverted, or something, but I'd like you to be in this today at the wedding. Specifically in this. For me" .

Going out onto the balcony with the phone pressed to her chest and tormented by somewhat ambiguous—like the supposed surprise—premonitions, Sveta glanced toward the open window. Sure enough, a box tied with a blue silk scarf. Somewhat crookedly placed, as if Kirill, wanting to make a surprise, had shoved it right through the window—fortunately, Sveta lived on the first floor.

A few movements of Sveta's thin musical fingers were enough for the scarf to release the box from its embrace.

She blinked in bewilderment.

Blinked again.

Lingerie.

In the box lay white semi-transparent lace lingerie, panties and a bra of a strange, never-before-seen by Sveta, intricate-abstract shape, reminiscent either of New Year's snowflakes or maple leaves.

A rare brand?__P_END