Darth Paradox (darthparadox) wrote,
Darth Paradox
darthparadox

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NaDruWriNi went well. Reached tonight's minor goal. Tomorrow should be highly productive - though I'll need nearly 4000 words to reach tomorrow's major goal. One of my NaNo friends has already passed 25,000 - holy crap.

Also, tonight's excerpt was written as part of NaDruWriNi. In accordance with the rules, here is tonight's list of drinks: brandy, sake, bacardi and coke, captain and ginger ale, orangish martini thing, bacardi and coke, double bacardi and coke, white russian.

Also in accordance with the rules, the excerpt is unedited from its original writing.

Zokutou word meterZokutou word meter
8,461 / 50,000
(16.9%)




Born on Boone's Rock, a small, mineral-rich world at the edge of human space, Anastasia Locke had grown up the youngest daughter in a family full of mining engineers. Her genetics had provided her the skills necessary for analyzing a situation accurately and entirely, and her schooling had refined that to an intellect sharp enough to cut to the core of any problem with which she was confronted. Her parents, recognizing the relative rarity of top-notch schooling on Boone's Rock, had sent her off to Hyacinth for boarding school from the time she was ten. Growing up away from her parents, she had quickly developed a strong, independent personality, and the Machiavellian politics of a high-school social environment had shaped her into a masterful manipulator of other people.

Finishing first in her class, her acceptance to Hyacinth's top university, the Unity Military Intelligence Academy, was all but guaranteed. Anastasia had become interested in communication and the flow of information during her high-school days, and had in fact tried to do some informal studies regarding communication and information control in high school. She had quickly distilled the purpose of a military (or any) intelligence agency into a single, simple motivation: keep information out of the hands of those who shouldn't have it, and get information into the hands of those who should. This motivated the dual activities of any intelligence agency: secrecy and espionage. Analysis, of course, was important as a matter of making information actually usable to those who had it.

The Unity Military Intelligence Academy attracted some of the brightest minds from across all of human space. Anastasia was determined to distinguish herself among her fellow students, and started off by devoting herself entirely to her studies. However, she soon found that her full attention wasn't required to attain top marks in all her classes. So, she turned to a pastime that had developed as a favorite for her in the latter years of her high school tenure - manipulating others by the means of sex. Some people, she'd found, were incredibly easy to control. A single night of passion, with the promise of more always dangled just out of reach - or occasionally, within reach and becoming reality - would bring about half of the men in her experience under her control, whether they knew it or not. Some knew it, of course, but didn't particularly care; Anastasia Locke, for her small stature, had developed into a stunningly beautiful woman, and an object of desire for most men (and several women) who knew her. For some, she found, it was not even necessary to give them a taste of her sexual talents - the mere possibility was enough to inspire obedience to her whims.

Another portion of the men she had known required a little more prodding into submission. It was necessary to continually reward their subservience - a promise of sex, held out too long, would cease to motivate them. Anastasia suspected that some of these men knew that she didn't intend to make good on her promises unless she really needed to, and therefore pushed back a little to cause her to sleep with them again to ensure their continued obedience. She knew, however, that the vast majority of men in this group in fact lost interest in her they weren't able to bed her regularly - sometimes, it was just too much work and there were less demanding, if less attractive, women they could pursue.

A third group seemed impervious to her sexual manipulations. She had dismissed them as homosexuals for a long time before realizing that, yes, there were indeed men who did not see sex as the ultimate point of their lives, and therefore would not go out of their way to serve her needs in exchange for a night with her. These men frustrated her to no end. Thankfully, she found that she could manipulate many of them with more subtle emotional tactics - appeals to integrity, honor, kindness and the like. Those that she could not manipulate in any way at all were few, and by the end of her stay in college she had developed a grudging respect for them, as for a competitor capable of besting someone in a fair game of skill.

By her senior year, having exhausted her interest in the myriad and varied ways of manipulating men, she turned her attention back to women. She had engaged in homosexuality before, primarily as a matter of curiosity, but it wasn't until late in her time at the Academy that she started to wonder whether she was capable of manipulating women through sex in the same way she could manipulate men. The answer, she found, was yes and no. Women could be manipulated through sex, without a doubt. But the specific motivating factors were different. Most men, she found, didn't much care about the motivating factors behind sexual intercourse with an attractive woman - the fact that they could get it at all was sufficient for their concerns. Women, on the other hand, tended to see relationships in a holistic manner. They were just as interested in sex as men, but they were concerned in other aspects of a relationship and the way sex fit in to the unified whole. Manipulating them through sex, therefore, was a much more delicate matter. Sex had to be approached in tandem with emotional and personal connections, and that required all aspects of the relationships to be involved in the carrot-and-stick approach of causing women to do her will, as well as in the more comprehensive approach of the cooperative mutual appreciation, care, and exchange that she found was the basis for the majority of her control over other women.

As with men, there was a group of women who simply could not be manipulated sexually. More of these than in the male case, however, could be approached and controlled from a purely emotional standpoint, including a significant portion of the large number of women who were not in any way sexually interested in other women. The care and concern of women for other women was often of a strength that could only be seen by men to be a part of a serious romantic relationship. However, Anastasia found that there was another group of women without parallel in the men she had manipulated. These women were not directly sexually interested in her, but instead saw her as a paragon of womanly independence and control. They admired her ability to control men, and her stength of will. It wasn't exactly a cult of personality, but the effect was the same - another group of people willing to do things for her and be controlled by her, not due to an exchange of sexual favors, but as a result of their perception of her greatness.

Anastasia had discovered several important things about people in this time. Primarily, the fact that almost anybody could be controlled, gived the right motivation. Secondly, the motivation was usually sexual or emotional. Appeals to logic only worked on the most rational of people, at least when it came to goals that were not necessarily their own. Thirdly, women were, ultimately, no different than men in their capacity to be emotionally or sexually manipulated.

In a twist of irony that utterly infuriated Anastasia, she failed to get a perfect score on her last class at the Unity Military Intelligence Academy due to spending too much time attempting to manipulate and control another student. This woman, in fact, had backhandedly manipulated Anastasia into wasting her time, and had taken the opportunity to supersede her and claim the position of valedictorian. Anastasia was beside herself with frustration, but upon reflection - and the recognition that salutatorian in a class of six hundred would not have closed any doors that a valedictorian would have had opened - she realized that there was one more lesson to be learned here.

No matter how clever you may think you are, or how great your skills of manipulation and control may be, there will always be others that seek to manipulate and control you in the same way. You must never let your guard down.



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Tags: nanowrimo, writing
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