Posed for Success Ch. 01

"What the hell?" Penelope went back to the computer and pulled up the network connection options window. One of the protocols which was enabled was new to her: Skimmerz. She opened the file window and searched for files by that name, and hit the jackpot. Skimmerz was some kind of executable; she avoided it, but pulled up the accompanying documentation file.

"Cheap-ass bitch is scamming my bandwidth." Penelope was pretty pissed off. This kind of violation was just like Linda. She'd racked up twenty bucks in charges on Cheryl's cell phone once and when caught had said she'd mistaken it for her own. Cheryl had given her the benefit of the doubt, but Penelope'd never been so sure... Now she sure as hell was!

The dumb thing was, Penelope would have been happy to share the high-speed connection with her absolutely free of charge if she'd have just asked politely. It wasn't like Penelope was hurting for cash or anything. For that matter, Linda wasn't hurting for cash, either.

Penelope sighed. This was giving her a headache. And she was still no closer to figuring out what the hell had happened last night. Could Linda have been sneaking into her room and using her connection? Unlikely; Penelope was a little more intelligent about security than Linda. Besides, she'd not been out of the apartment anytime in the last two days, and the scene Linda had been imitating had been rendered within that span of time. Puzzled, she dug deeper into the documentation. Just what does Skimmerz do, anyway?

Half an hour later she had her answer, and collapsed in peals of laughter.

Skimmerz was indeed allowing Linda to snag bandwidth from Penelope's supply, but that was only one of its uses. The damn thing was a cracking tool with a huge number of functions besides stealing illicit bandwidth. First of all, the thing had an elaborate trojan horse wrapped around it, and it had certainly been sending information about Linda's system to who knows where. Penelope disabled this immediately; if Linda was moron enough to do this to her own computer, that was fine, but it was evident there was some kind of access to her own system as well, so Linda got a free ride, there.

Skimmerz was also a packet sniffer, and although most of the functionalities there were disabled, there was one bit which intrigued her-- a check box called Frame Capture. Checking the docs, it turned out that Skimmerz would periodically sample the bitstream and if a file being passed was in a recognized format it would grab it and allow the user to display part or all of it. There was apparently a logfile which listed the captures, and when Penelope checked it, she finally found what she'd been looking for. All of the images she'd sent in the last couple months or so were listed under their filenames. So Linda'd been scanning her outgoing file transfers.

At first, Penelope had thought Linda must have been doing this on purpose, but when she checked the settings for the captures, it turned out that they were all set to the default values. All except the "Frame-Display Duration", which had been locked at... well that was interesting. The minimum setting was one frame, and that was what Linda had set it to. But the refresh rate of the monitor was 60Hz, so that was only one frame out of sixty every second; at that rate, you didn't even have time to look at an image. Technically, your eyes could see it, but your brain just wouldn't register it consciously...

Wouldn't register it consciously... Was that it? Linda'd had no clue why portions of Penelope's work had kept popping up, and instead of turning off the display she'd instead ended up dosing herself with subliminal messages? Leave it to Linda... but really, was that even possible? Then she remembered what Linda had mumbled before she'd gone back to bed: Thirteen oh six. Was that one of Penelope's filenames? She checked the cache for Skimmerz's frame capturing, and sure enough, 1306.jpg was one of the most recent images. Penelope had a pretty good guess what position the brunette would be in if she checked the files' contents. Knees to the floor, head raised to her mistress's breast...

Uncertain anymore what was possible or impossible, but pissed enough at Linda's idiocies to risk trying some mischief of her own, Penelope made one more alteration before she left. The default for "Frame-Display Frequency" was set to once per hour; Penelope cranked it up to once per minute, just to see what might happen... It was getting late, so Penelope closed everything she was doing, made sure the chair was back where it had started, and returned to her own bedroom. Mystery solved, and perhaps she'd have an opportunity to get back in some way at her annoying freeloader of an apartment-mate.

***

Linda didn't make the soccer team. She knew she was better than most of those bitches who had made it, but she hadn't been at her best because of the previous night's activities. That put her in a foul mood all weekend, and she sat around in a funk just downloading and playing music on her computer.

It didn't help that she was immeasurably horny for some reason, and that her boyfriend was at an Ultimate Frisbee tournament this week. She concentrated on the music and hoped it would go away, but nothing would stifle her libido and she embarrassingly resorted to something she hated to do: masturbation. She laid back on her bed and thought of Todd, and how it felt when he kissed her deeply and

from behind, licking around her shoulder blade, a smooth hand covering her mound as the full breasts pressed into her back

Full breasts at her back? Desire's Embrace. What the hell was that? 1204. Gross! She stopped fingering herself immediately, creeped out. She immediately washed her hands and used the toilet, trying to blot the offensive imagery from her mind. She wasn't entirely successful; it's not easy to not think about something, but she at least concentrated on an email she'd just gotten from a high-school chum:

Dear Linds,

How's college life treating you? I'm way glad summer's here, although I am working the whole
time. My parents are being jerks, and it's like I have no choice--

1067 Have No Choice
long painted fingernails clutching her brown hair, guiding her face into the tufted fur of the other woman's cunt

Grrrr!!! Dammit, what the hell is wrong with me?!? She turned off the computer, put on her running clothes and shoes, and decided to use up her energy in some kind of useful way: she'd do two miles or so.

She studiously ignored the dampness between her thighs, and walked out the door.

***

Penelope watched Linda from afar in the next couple of weeks, and smirked to herself when she saw the girl driven to distraction by whatever images haunted her from time to time. Even Cheryl commented on Linda's extra "attitude" these days, though unlike Penelope she was entirely unaware that the cause was her unconscious bombardment once per minute with a sexual picture. Once or twice when Linda thought she wasn't looking she caught a glimpse of Linda absently stroking a breast while mouthing a number, her eyes glossing momentarily, or hiking a skirt up a bit too high when passing a mirror, hissing "Seducer" while looking over her shoulder at herself. To "help out", Penelope had re-uploaded all of the female images she'd done in the past year.

Linda would retreat into her room to sulk, or... do whatever... but Penelope knew she must be trying to distract herself with her computer-- which would obviously only make things worse! She was obviously at a spiritual low point, and Penelope almost felt sorry for her... but Penelope hadn't really had enough. To tell the truth, like most artists she was a bit of a voyeur at heart, and this was turning her on something awful! She masturbated much more often when composing her images these days, and realized while she was doing it that she wasn't getting off so much on the sensuality of the poses, but on the fact that she knew the poses would be in Linda's unwilling mind, and that once in a while (it had only happened twice since that first night), Linda would sleepwalk into the living room again to live out one or more of the scenes. Just the thought of watching her do that was enough to provide a week's fingerplay for Penelope. She'd even started changing the brunette model slightly, making her look a little more like Linda, and the backgrounds for the images started looking suspiciously like the layout of her living room. No, she couldn't give this up, yet.

In fact, she had made a point to go into Linda's room again yesterday, and bumped the Skimmerz "Frame-Display Frequency" up to once per second.