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.Flaminius, of course, was practiced and skillful in what he was doing, and Phyllis was not difficult to catch and tangle in his well-woven nets of logic and supposed fact.During this time Virginia would usually remain silent, but she would occasionally volunteer a fact, a precedent or event which would support Flaminius’ position, much to the anger of Phyllis.Elizabeth chose, wisely, not to debate with Flaminius.She had her own ideas, her own insights.She had learned on Gor that women are marvelous, but that they are not men, nor should they be; that they are themselves; that they are independent, magnificient creatures; that it takes two sexes for the human race to be whole; and that each is splendid.Following some two weeks of these discussions, which seemed to me at the time, at any rate, to be a waste of training time, Virginia Kent, who had feared men, had come to weigh seriously, if not to accept, certain of the theories of Flaminius, Phyllis to fight them and reject them as hateful slanders, and Elizabeth to regard them as an entertaining and stimulating hodgepodge of sophistry, reality, nonsense and propaganda.All three girls, in the last week, were taught certain standard answers to certain standard questions put to them by Flaminius, whether they agreed with them or not.These questions, to which simple, standard, memorized answers were to be promptly volunteered, were put to them over and over, until they, even Phyllis, responded without thinking.Certain of these questions and answers, suggesting their nature, would be:Q: What are you?A: I am a slave girl.Q: What is a slave girl?A: A girl who is owned.Q: Why do you were a brand?A: To show that I am owned.Q: Why do you wear a collar?A: That men may know who owns me.Q: What does a slave girl want more than anything?A: To please men.Q: What are you?A: I am a slave girl.Q: What do you want more than anything?A: To please men.There is, beyond these, an entire set of questions and answers, some of them considerably more detailed, and involving standard responses to simple questions pertaining to such matters as history and psychology.The truly sinister aspect of even this portion of the girls’ training did not become evident to me, or to Elizabeth, until the entrire week was spent again before the mirror, seeing themselves as slave girls, and repeating, aloud, these questions and answers, as though putting them to themselves; as though, with Flaminius gone, it was they themselves, the girls, who were putting these questions to themselves, and responding with almost hypnotic automatism; it was probably easiest on Elizabeth, who knew that she was playing a part, that she would be, sooner or later, carried to safety, but even Elizabeth, more than once, awakened with a cry in the night, clutching me, whimpering, “No, no, no.” The sixth week of the training was spent, as several of the former, before the mirror, but this time repeating over and over, aloud, “I love being a slave girl.I love being a slave girl.” At last, after this cruel and almost interminbale repetition, utilizing simple psychological princeples, intended to brand into the girls’ psyche the identity of a Pleasure Slave, the girls began the period of exercises, many of which would, for certain periods of the day, be carried through the next months.During the next weeks and months the lessons of Flaminius were never again touched upon, except occasionally, for her amusement, by Sura, who would suddenly cry to one of the girls, at the same time brandishing the slave goad, such a query as “What do you want more than anything?” to which the girl, to her shame and astonishment, would find herself crying out in fear, “To please men!” Then Sura would say, “Then learn what I am teaching you,” and they would respond, fearing the goad, “Yes, Mistress!”In the hours that Virginia and Phyllis were not in training, and the training hours are only five Ahn a day, they were, particularly in the beginning, intensively drilled in Gorean.Elizabeth, on the other hand, usually assisted Caprus in his office.Later, when the girls became reasonably proficient at Gorean, they were permitted the freedom of the House baths, which they enjoyed, and the liberty to move about the House rather as they pleased, saving that they must be locked in their cells by the eighteenth bar.The foods given them also changed with the advance in their training, and the desire to have varied, tasty fare, and sometimes a small bowl of Ka-la-na with their supper, drove them to perform well.Further, each must eat the same, so pressure was brought on each to come to a given level, for the food of all remained the same until each had attained the desired next level of training.By the end of the twelfth week of their training they were eating well, generally low-calorie foods, nourishing, a good amount of protein, diets supervised as carefully as those of racing tarns or hunting sleen; Elizabeth was the only girl who had, so to speak, a compartment of her own, with a door that might be shut, rather than simple bars, and so the three girls often, when possible, would come to the compartment, for some moments of privacy.At these times they would, as well as possible, converse in Gorean; Elizabeth taught them much; she did not permit them to know she spoke English; I would often leave the compartment at these times but sometimes I would remain.Elizabeth led them, to some extent, not to fear me, leading them to believe that she had so well served me that she had, to some degree, engaged my affections.I think she did not realize how true her words were.In the beginning, when moving about the house, the girls had been permitted only the garb customarily worn in the sweat and motion of the training, a rectangle of silk, about a foot long, thrust into a silken string knotted about the waist; Virginia and Phyllis would not even leave their cells so clad until Elizabeth called upon them, so clad herself, ordering them forth; Phyllis had been tearfully furious that she should be so seen, Virginia terrified; but, on the orders of Elizabeth, who spoke with authority, they followed her forth, frightened, but heads high and shoulders back, and soon they were delighting in the sights of the house, for they had seen little but the kennels, the training room and their cells; it had been a good day for them; each was female and Elizabeth had taught them that this was a permissible thing to be.“These men are slavers,” Elizabeth confided to them.“They have seen women before.”Later, in the eighteenth week of their training, they were given brief silken slave livery, sleeveless, fastened by the loop on the left shoulder.Virginia and Phyllis were give white livery, Elizabeth red.It was at this time also that Virginia and Phyllis had been given their lock collars, white-enameled, and that the slave anklets, the identification bands, had been removed from their left ankles.Elizabeth, at the beginning of her training, had simply exchanged her yellow collar for a red one.She had already been a lock-collar girl.By the twentieth week of their training the girls could converse rather adequately in Gorean, and Virginia and Phyllis continued to improve.Elizabeth, of course, was totally fluent in the language.Elizabeth’s accent was interesting, for it was, in effect, Tuchuk; the accent of the girls was that of Ar
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