Hypothetical #6 (Patreon)

Your back hurts and you can’t move your head, that’s the first you realize. It takes a few moments for you to realize most of you can move around fine, it’s just your neck that is held in place. There is some sort of structure around your neck. It feels like metal with rings sticking out, and some sort of flap sticking out the front. You can see it, barely, looking down. You tap it. It sounds solid. You shift around, get both your legs out of bed and unsteadily manage to sit up. You feel the weight on your shoulders, and are happy for any core workout you’ve done recently. Just balancing sitting up is a chore. You carefully stand straight up and slowly walks over to the bathroom to have a look in the mirror.

It’s pretty much what you’ve already figured out, a metal shackle with some locking mechanism around your neck. Sturdier than anything you’ve ever seen. Absurdly so. The locking mechanism in front doesn’t look like anything you’ve ever seen before. For a start, there is no key hole. Slowly you rotate the entire neck shackle and have a look at the hinge at the back. Sturdy, as everything else, and precision made. No visible screws and not a lot of gap to get anything in.

You start getting a bit fatigued standing up, so you carefully sit down on the toilet. You have so many more questions than answers. Who put this on you? Why? How did they do that without waking you up? How did they get in? You should look around the apartment and see if anything else has changed. Sitting down doesn’t really give you as much rest as you’d hoped. You still need to balance you upper body. You lean your back against the back of the toilet, something you rarely do. It’s better, but you still need to balance sideways.

Stating the obvious, the ring needs to come off ASAP. There’s not a padlock as such, so you can’t use a bolt cutter, even if you had one. You need to saw your way either through 2/3 inch thick, 2 inches long metal tongue on the front or through the locking mechanism, 1/3 inch going though the holes and ½ inch on all other sides. But the lock is probably something much harder, like hardened steel. But then all of it could be milled out of hardened steel for all you know. Or magic. In any case you don’t have a metal saw, or angle grinder, or dremel, and you are not really happy about using any power tool inches from your face. Certainly not by yourself. At the very least you need someone else to do it for you.

You hesitate at the thought of contacting someone. It’s not like you would be revealing a embarrassing secret. Your are innocent here, right? It still feels intimate for some reason. You know a few people you could call, but they would have to come here. This thing is impossible to hide. Beside, you are exhausting yourself just by sitting on the toilet.

Luckily you wear the T-shirt you fell asleep in, because there is no way you could get another one on now. Fuck. What do you do now?

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