💡🐇 Naughty Thoughts

⚤🕴️꩜🚼 Subliminal Spaces

This bonus idea is dedicated to Maja. Thank you for supporting me!

(placeholder cover art created by Dall-E 2)

Kesha has never been much of a gamer, but a lot of her friends are so she tries to at least keep up with what's popular; sometimes watching streamers play a popular game just so she can understand the memes. And the latest new thing is a craze that she might actually have stumbled on before the majority of her gamer friends; she noticed that all the streamers she watches most often seem to have started on the same new game, and she wonders if maybe she can get into it before her friends. After watching the game, she gets quite an urge to try playing it.

The game is a weird thing; it was pitched as a fan-remake of a 'classic' game for which the rights have been lost; but a few people seem to have realised that it isn't quite what it seems. At first, the discrepancies are things that only someone completely obsessed with the original would notice. Like a hallway in the game is longer than it should be. And Kesha wouldn't have noticed that, because she doesn't have the original game to compare it to, but she does notice when the dimensions of a map don't add up at all. Like when a room is larger than the space between the doors on either side of it in the corridor. Some serious gamers are starting to notice things that aren't quite the same as what they remember, but Kesha spots the incongruities through the same kind of instinct that means she can't ignore a picture hanging crooked.

After a while she gets past watching videos, and starts playing by herself. She enjoys it, and finds herself getting deeper and deeper into the strange lore of the game. The more attention you pay to the incongruities, the worse they become. The game world starts to break up... there are doors connecting completely different parts of the map, or vast canyons inserted between the back gardens of neighbouring houses on a suburban map. And eventually, the aesthetics of the original game disappear completely, replaced by a confusing maze of twisty, turny passages whose layout completely ignores the laws of geometry. By this point, the game is becoming fashionable among her gamer friends at last; people who dismissed the game as just a remake until somebody told them it was more have started trying to explore. And as people discover more, they tell all their friends. Slowly, the community moves closer to working out what lies at the heart of this mysterious adventure. And Kesha finds that she can't stop playing the game, as well as following where other people are up to so that she doesn't miss anything.

At some point, the game finally becomes widely known, and every major streamer has at least tried it; often needing instructions for how to get into the weird stuff. And the game's creators have released "decor packs", which let you put stickers on the walls to help with navigating around an ever-changing liminal space filled with endlessly repeated identical rooms and passages. And some people have started making their own packs. One of Kesha's friends from college, the guy whose casual mention had first gotten her to check out this game, gives her a pack as a gift. This isn't just another collection of posters based on iconic album art, or meme images, but a collection of art that seems oddly reminiscent of a nursery. But she accepts it, glad that not all of her friends have lost interest after a week or two of exploring the game.

Then she is watching one of the streamers, and her connection breaks down. Normally that would be frustrating; but this time the game has frozen with one of the subliminal messages in view. "NEED TO EXPLORE". Now that she knows they're there, she's determined to find more of them. Maybe this is why, despite the levels making no sense, some people seem to have an almost instinctive sense for which way they need to go. The repetitiveness of the game lulls players into an intense flow state, where they are a lot more suggestible than they would normally be.

It doesn't take long before Kesha realises that Wyatt's decor pack isn't just images; it also modifies the subliminal messages, adding text about babies, and desire, and obedience. She knows that should be a reason to stop using it, but she's getting more and more curious, just like when she was first watching other people play and knew that she needed to explore the maps herself.

But this time, she has to work out why her friend decided to give her these messages. Clearly he knows about the subliminals; is he trying to turn her into an adult baby? She decides that she wouldn't mind that; he's kind of cute anyway, and if he's too shy to actually ask her to do stuff together, she decides she's willing to go along with whatever indirect courtship ritual he wants. So she modifies the pack herself, changes the messages further, and asks him to watch her videos. Messages fine-tuned to have a different effect for someone watching over her shoulder, who isn't actually the one playing the game.

They meet up and it turns out those suggestions turned out well. She can turn him into her adult baby, and he can't possibly resist. He's surprised; never expected this. He was intending to give her a desire to have his kids, because he'd read that subliminal messaging isn't good for directly sexual suggestions. He'd never spotted the ABDL connections at all. But the more she read about it, the more Kesha realised that those mental images spoke to her. She doesn't know if she would have been so fascinated by it without all the nursery imagery being poured into her mind by the decor pack, but she knows what she wants now. And Wyatt doesn't really have any choice but to go along with the events he's set in motion.