Chapters Dollhood: A Woman's Choice Appendix to Book 1
Author’s Note: While Dave and I brainstormed the early plot of Dollhood and I brought it to fruition, this section was written almost exclusively by him in a sudden burst of inspiration, and it was too tonally distinct to dilute in pieces into the main story.
Please consider this appendix as bonus content, all semi-canonical.
Written by Dave Potter and edited by Cafter Homme.
Of course, the stories of all the pupils at St. Werburgh’s did not mirror those of Chastity and I completely. Whilst most were broadly similar, the Society Standard education and dollification, there were also some notable exceptions and, if you’ll indulge me here, I’d like to talk about a few of them. Some of these stories were spread by my classmates, others I saw myself. Maybe, with these notes you’ll begin to understand the virtues of our Society, especially those of diversity and acceptance.
The first concerns a young lady named Emilia Delany who came from a wealthy family somewhere in the west of England. A new student in the three-year program when I started my one-year, she was a pretty thing with cornflower blue eyes and strawberry blonde hair, and one might say she was halfway along the road to the Doll ideal already. But whilst God may have blessed her physically, mentally, it was a different story completely. Right from the first day she rebelled against the Doll ideal and her parents’ wish to make her follow that road, a road they’d chosen for her so they could join the Society. She deliberately walked in an unfeminine way, her gag was not removed at mealtimes unless one wanted unholy obscenities shouted in the dining hall, and she somehow managed to think of clever ruses which kept her dresses perpetually stained, damaged, or at least unkempt. Things really came to a head however on the day when, during her dressing, she somehow managed to disable the automaid that was dealing with her. No one knows precisely how this happened, but the rumour going around at mealtime held that, prior to arrival at the school, Emilia had acquired a male admirer back in her hometown who worked for AutoServe, and he had secretly provided her with some voice commands that overrode the Teachers’ control.
Regardless of how, it all happened in the evening of the day when Dame Henderson had informed her that her marriage to a Dr. Aspley of Nuneaton had been arranged and that, following her graduation and final modifications, she would henceforth be legally known as “Bubbles”. Well that night, Emilia decided she had had quite enough, somehow disabled her automaid and escaped, running away from the school reportedly clad only in her undergarments. We were all shocked of course, but deep down I was pleased for her. Whilst the Doll ideal is the highest that a girl can aspire to and she should have embraced it, at the same time it was clear that she had not done so in the slightest, and I did not want to see a sister unhappy (and by this time I was aware that Dolls could be unhappy with their lot, like Vanessa and a few of the others). So she gained her freedom and that was that… or so we thought.
Completely unexpectedly, during the gathering after our graduation ceremony, the Headmaster announced that we would be joined by a special guest, and into the reception hall was brought none other than Bubbles Aspley, wife of one Dr. Aspley of Nuneaton. We all knew in an instant that it was old Emilia; she was recognisable, but at the same time the changes made to her were extreme. Most Dolls are altered greatly of course, but Bubbles was on a whole other level; she was no longer an example of beauty but instead an utter parody of it. Her lips resembled a full-size plastic doughnut extending at least to her chin and well over her nose, whilst her completely spherical breasts were so enormous, each the size of a healthy autumn pumpkin, that she needed an automated cart rolling in front of her to cradle them and support the extreme weight. She tottered about on ballet boots behind the apparatus, and it was crystal clear that she had no ability to speak or even shift her eyes from their crossed and fixed gaze downward, forced to watch her own wobbling mammaries with a frozen expression of sexual intensity.
It was also clear from the tears that were still allowed to fall from those eyes that she was both unhappy with her lot and humiliated at being shown off to all her former classmates like so. I shuddered inside, especially when the Societymen all whooped and cheered, their approval more than evident.
The story of Heather Ferguson was completely different to that of Bubbles Aspley. As I’ve mentioned, not all the pupils at St. Werburgh’s came from families of significant means like Chastity and I, a sizable minority were what we called “scholarship” pupils, girls taken from orphanages or impoverished families and given an elite education that they could otherwise never aspire to. Althea was a recipient of such a scholarship.
Well, Heather Ferguson — or Jamila Murphy as she was then known — was also one of these. Her background was so low that she was in fact of mixed race, a concept that quite alarmed us, brought up as we were in the ideal of marble-white beauty. Rumour had it that her father was some sort of seaman from the West Indies and her mother a low-class prostitute like Althea’s.
Jamila was sponsored to attend St. Werburgh’s by one Lord Ferguson, an ageing peer whose previous Doll wife had passed away the year before. He sponsored her because he wished to create a perfect Doll replacement for his former spouse and Jamila came extremely cheaply. With no family to pay off and an evaluation by the Society quite appropriate to a woman of mixed race, she was nigh more expensive than her tuition and hospital bill. Regardless, over the course of her schooling we saw her visibly transformed, her dusky skin slowly bleached china-white, freckles tattooed on her face and her final wig being of flame red so that, at her graduation she was completely unrecognisable from the brown, black-haired girl that had started her schooling with us, and instead appeared as the very stereotype of a Highland dolly wearing only tartan dresses and shawls. We all felt so pleased for her of course, being able to become so beautiful in a way impossible without such serious modifications. What she thought of it however, naturally we never knew. All the “special order” girls were not treated with the same leniency as us; they received no mingling time and did not partake in free-speech dinners, and their transformation was gradual, with many visits to Great Ormond Street throughout their education.
But if we were pleased for Heather Ferguson, then we felt only horror and pity for Sandra Rowe. She was another scholarship pupil, arriving as a wild-haired and uncouth urchin from the backstreets of Manchester with a broad accent and huge command of obscenities. But her sponsor, a Japanese business tycoon named Takayama-san, had a quite different fate in store for her, and she was taken out of our classes most of the time and both trained and modified in a completely different fashion to the rest of us. We watched in horror as progressive operations to her eyes made them more oriental-looking whilst her hair was first dyed then at some point replaced with a jet black wig. Her ability to speak was removed very early on, and she was taught entirely in Japanese whilst from her second year onwards she was dressed only in lavish silk kimonos, albeit still in the muted colours of the St. Werburgh uniform.
Upon graduation and certification, her legal documents renamed her Takayama Yukiko and married her to her sponsor whom she was shipped off to the very next day, her physical dollification complete just as ours was beginning. Like Heather, her previous identity was erased completely, yet unlike that lucky girl she was transformed into a lesser race, not a higher one. None of us could understand why Takayama had not simply used a Japanese girl for his desires.
Years later I received an answer which would have shocked me then: Dolling is illegal in many countries, although bringing over a foreign-made Doll to Japan is not. Apparently, quite a few Asian and African devotees of the Leisurely and Doll ideals do the same as was done to Yukiko, even some Russian comrades in the Kremlin if rumours are to be believed, though they more often consult with expedited modification clinics than with a full boarding school like St. Werburgh’s, where the utmost refinement and a tailored curriculum mark it as world-class — with a tuition to match.
Aficionados from the continent are relatively common, while the Americans have their own strange methods, so they rarely purchase brides from England, but that’s another story.