A literary mystery solved

An astute reader of my BDSMLR page sent me a link to the story I was asking about in July 2021: Hangman, by Storm Christopher "A city-beat newspaperman investigating a string of strange disappearances discovers a trail that leads him to the highest levels of power and deep into a cult of murder and corruption. There may be no escape! Another shocking and suspenseful tale from the dark imagination of Storm Christopher!" If you haven't read this, go get it. Only available in Kindle format, unless you grabbed it when it was posted to the old Noose Network. You will enjoy it.

A literary mystery

A few years ago I read a story that I enjoyed very much, yet did not save it to my story archives, to my long-lasting regret. I don't remember the title or the author. I read it in the Noose Network or the Breath Control Network, or possibly someone's personal blog of stories. Maybe readers can help me find it.

A reporter is tracking down what's causing a number of bodies being found dumped in a city, all bruised but most notably with rope ligature marks around their necks. He's gotten far enough with his investigation to be lurking outside a warehouse one evening, where he sees people walking up and entering. They look like people who shouldn't be in an area like this. Before he gets too close, he is accosted by some men and hustled inside the building. There he sees an amphitheatre with a large cage on the stage, and he learns that there will be fights to the death inside the cage for the assembling crowd. He begins to see notable local figures, including senior law enforcement and elected officials, and now he knows why there hasn't been much said about the bodies. So he's getting excited because now he has the story – then he gets told that he will be in one of the fights tonight.

I think the fighters are all male, one-on-one; they fight naked, using any style or means they can, clean or dirty; the loser is the one who gets dragged to a noose dangling at one end of the cage and hanged. I forget why most of them are there – maybe they're criminals, or political enemies, or I don't know. The journalist is in the cage to shut him up one way or the other. His fight is highly entertaining, and though the story has no sex, the fights have nudity and bashing and bruising and someone hangs from a rope at the end. What could be better?

That's all I will say about the plot and characters. The story itself is so well-written that I expect it has been published in a mainstream source, though I could be wrong about that. If I could remember who wrote it, I might have found it already.

So... do any of you know it? Or can even send me the story or a link to it? Please let me know in the comments.

A dead game in virtual reality

I didn't get a story done in June. But I do have a photo from SecondLife of what my avatar is doing there now:

Gus got hanged late on June 29th. He is nude, restrained with metal cuffs, gagged and blindfolded, and wearing a chastity cage. He is unable to adjust any of these because each piece has embedded coding that restricts the avatar's activity. He is hanging from a "display hook" that contains a timer and the same restricting scripts. He's in a public sim and vulnerable (in theory) to the whims of others. There's also a little sign that invites people to adjust the timer if they wish. (This is not usually encouraged, but my sign gives permission in my case.)

The rules of the "game" as I've devised them are, the timer may be adjusted - up or down, technically, but I'm only asking for up. As of this writing, he has two days and 22 hours to go. If the timer ever runs out, he goes home. If the timer gets increased, he stays. Now, I can't stay logged in 24/7 due to a system limitation I can't solve. So when I log out, and then log back in, if someone is in my spot, then I go home and the game is over. Otherwise, Gus is hanged naked and apparently dead.

I just updated Gus's profile to say this, and I even changed his name to a serial number. His profile designates his cousin, Rocky (actually an alternate avatar, or "alt," of mine) as the person to contact if anything comes up. Rocky has full power over everything.

This might sound potentially boring. I mean, dead people don't do much. Even if in SL they don't decay, they're pretty uninteractive. Here's the thing: This is day 5 of my "trip," and I'm still into it. I haven't been into the other things I've been doing lately, not to this extent. I've had some fun, but not as much fun as pretending to be dead has been. Between my knowledge of the system and Rocky, I can get out of this anytime I want to. I just don't want to.

Maybe with Gus quietly hanging dead, I can get some writing done.

Word from the long-lost

Entirely a fantasy. No, I'm fine, really. I have lots of story ideas, too.

He entered the dilapidated barn quietly. Standing still for a moment just inside the open sliding door, he looked around to get a sense of what he was looking for. Off to the left was an opening to a large empty area with exposed beams, and he went there. This part of the barn was darker but for skylight visible through a few gaps in the wooden boards high in the walls. As his eyes adjusted, he saw a naked male body dangling from one of the beams, its feet eighteen inches above the dirt floor of the barn. The body's hands were cuffed behind him, but his legs were untied. The hanged man was not moving. It looked like he hadn't moved for a while. The visitor moved a little closer.

“Hangdog... wake up,” the visitor said. He got very close and turned on a flashlight. Shining it in the hanged man's face, he said, louder, “Hangdog!”

“Unnnh,” came from the apparently not-quite-dead man. The visitor saw eyes open slightly then close in irritation.

“Wake up, dumbfuck.”

Hangdog opened his mouth. Though no words came out, the shape of his mouth seemed to indicate “Why?”

“You have stories to write, that's why. You have to get back to work.”

Hangdog's toes wiggled. The visitor wasn't sure what that meant. He could smell dried sweat from the hanged man's crotch, tinged with a little urine that might have dripped from his half-hard cock shortly after the hanging started. But he wasn't going to let himself be distracted from his quest by all that.

“I'm gonna let you down. We can't have this,” the visitor said as he went to where the far end of the noose-rope was tied to a cleat in the wall. He didn't see Hangdog mouth the words “Fuck, don't” and he wouldn't have cared if he did. The visitor untied the knot and let Hangdog down somewhat carefully, considering he was dealing with dead weight here. Hangdog lay on his side for a couple of moments before the visitor realized he might have to loosen the noose. When he did, Hangdog managed a couple of weak coughs.

“Don't say I never did anything for you,” the visitor said. “I want to see a new story online by the end of the month.” He started to walk away.

Hangdog struggled to sit up, finally managing a word flung weakly at the visitor's back: “Cuffs?”

The visitor stopped. “Oh.” He reached in his pocket and fished out a handcuff key.

“Here,” he said as he tossed it gently at Hangdog's chest.

Hangdog stared as the key slid down his chest into his crotch. “Thanks,” he said, the sarcasm lost in his throat's soreness.

The visitor turned and left. Hangdog took 25 minutes fumbling to pick up the key and work it into the lock in the cuffs behind him. By then his head was clear enough, and he could find his jeans and boots and head home.

More dangling

I'm putting in a chat transcript from my latest adventures in virtual noosing, but I need a little background first. In Second Life, the avatars have a little bit of floating text above them to show their name and a group title, if the group title is turned on. My avatar is a member of a group called Cocksucking Males, which shouldn't be surprising. It's not an active group, and the founder disappeared long ago. It is useful because the members get the title "cocksucker," which will appear above their name and avatar, like so: 

With that established, I can tell the story. As of about 2 a.m., Gus had been hanging for two days and ten hours. A guy came up and sent a private message to him/me. Chat wouldn't have worked, because dead men don't chat. Neither do gagged men, really, and dead gagged men are very quiet. But private messages are kind of a gray area. He apparently noticed my group title. I decided to see how far I could push the envelope. 

The chat is behind this "Read more" link, because I need to say it makes liberal use of the "F-slur" and, if you don't like that word, you should know in advance. But it was key to making the exchange hot for me, because in addition to being dead I like being humiliated a little too. 

Another SecondLife dangle

 

My SecondLife avatar, Gus, got hanged again. He's into latex, so this time he was strung up in head-to-toe latex, and wearing a ball gag and a blindfold. He was inspired by someone else who was hanged nearby in a latex outfit that was a bit more science-fictiony. 

The thing with death in SL is that it's not easy to kill an avatar permanently. Gus looks pretty dead, now, but when he comes down from the gallows he'll be pretty much fine. It depends on the roleplaying involved, really. If I'm playing with someone else and we agree that dead is dead, then the victim is dead, unless the player backs out of it. If I'm playing with someone else who has a ritual to revivify me, or maybe a stasis tube for healing, then death doesn't have to be permanent but it needs fixing first. Or, y'know, not. How seriously will it be taken?

It's all on the honor system anyway. You could agree to let me kill you. You even decide you're willing to never use the avatar again after this. So we interact in such a way that your avi dies, and maybe gets cremated and interred afterward, nice big funeral, etc. That seems final, yes? But it's not like real death. You CAN take it back and play your avatar again. It might piss me off, but so? According to the terms of service, I can't make you not play. (Some "killers" take your login credentials and change your password at the moment of "death." This is not allowed under the ToS, but if the admins never find out it's not stoppable.)

Anyway, snuffing it is just one of the many activities possible in the online world of SL. Obviously it's not one of the more popular activities. It's interesting to play with for some of us. Like a few other activities people do in SL, it can be, y'know, kind of horny in real life, too. It's a bit safer than wrapping a rope around your neck in RL, which is a plus.

Breath Control Network disappeared again

The Breath Control Network is gone again. Specifically, the URL for the site has expired. This happened in June 2019 too. I know of no other way to get to the contents, which are hosted on a social network site. It might be possible using its URL if one knew the specific account to add to the end to get there.

BCN has been a very poor site since before the last URL expiration. Features have dropped off (such as web chat and user icons for new users), the database for images and videos is borked beyond repair, and the timelines regularly include "thumbnails" that are more than one screen long. Server downtime is frequent. There was talk of the whole site being redeveloped and moved to a different server, but there has been no news on that in many months. Not surprisingly, longtime users have drifted away, since very little is happening in the BCN.

I don't intend to be mean. The gay breath control "community" is not big enough to attract a patron with deep pockets and computing resources to make a full-featured site with constant uptime. It's also hard to envision getting money from many users, since guys are understandably skittish about putting not just money but their personal details on the line to support a site. It seems that the best we can do is fly under the radar on some existing kinky site, hoping that nothing goes wrong.

Still, when we have so few options (at least two other sources gone in the last year), to have the main one disappear too doesn't leave us breathless kinkazoids much.

P.S.: If anyone knows what the URL would/might be, if it's possible to access it directly from the server, please share.