Cornerstool

Drawing of a CornerStool™ by Spankart (2002).

A CornerStool is a punishment stool designed to make sitting on it uncomfortable in Lurking Dragon's Rejuve Universe.

This is how the stool is described in the first appeance in the Melody stories, Melody's Xmas 2:

The stool with the bright pink bow tied to it.

Melody shuddered. She'd been hoping these were still too new and expensive. They'd just come out again this past year, as part of the recent 'craze' over twenty-fourth century furniture and fashion.

Everybody wondered why they'd gone 'out of style', since they were clearly ideal for dealing with a naughty Penitatas.

Melody looked at her new CornerStool™ with a mixture of fear and admiration. It certainly was a clever design.

Just not one Melody wanted to sit on.

The CornerStool™ was designed for naughty children to sit on in the corner, of course. Since it was assumed the child would be well-spanked, the stool's crossbars were all right down next to the floor, where the naughty child couldn't get her feet on them to lift her weight off her sore bum. (It came in varying heights, too). And it featured two little additions to help naughty little Penitatas contemplate their crimes.

One was the ankle rest. This was adjustable (Mel noted that it had already been adjusted for her height). It was a small board that angled out and down from two of the legs at about a 45 degree angle, sticking out 30-40 cm. It was made of smoothly polished wood, and had two deep cutouts where the child's ankles could fit. And an optional locking crossbar to keep her ankles IN the cutouts, if necessary.

This would hold the naughty child's feet and legs out from under the stool, just a little. Just enough to keep a child from shifting her weight off of her spanked (or about to be spanked) bottom and onto her upper thighs. This was a trick all spanked children learned in the corner -- to get as much weight off of their sore bottoms as they possibly could. But not on a CornerStool. On it Melody's whole weight would be on her naughty little bottom in the center of the stool's top.

Its very special top.

The stool's sitting surface could be ordered in any one of several variations. The one the Johnson's had ordered for Melody wasn't all that severe. The top of the stool had been divided into hundreds of little 1cm by 1cm squares. And in each square the wood had been ground into a little pyramid, 1cm on each side, slanting up to a little point just 3mm above the surrounding wood.

Just enough to make sitting on the stool for any length of time very uncomfortable.

Enough to make sitting on the stool on a well-spanked bare bottom an awful, painful ordeal.

It could've been worse. 1cm were the largest squares, and 3mm close to the lowest pyramids. Worst of all were supposed to be the ones cut into triangular pyramids. Some were said to be almost like sitting on needles. After she'd seen the stools in the Mall, Melody had been interested enough to look up their history. The design of the sitting surface had originally been taken from a hammer-like kitchen gadget apparantly used to 'tenderize' tough cuts of meat before in vitro cloning came along. Those gadgets might even still be used out in the colonies.

If it was effective in tenderizing meat, the theory went, it should be effective in tenderizing naughty little bottoms, too.

Of course, they also made the stools with the seats cut into a hexagon pattern. The broader base and six-sided pyramids made these stools far less uncomfortable. But those stools were only recommended for non-hard-time Penitatas. Melody had even heard a rumor that a few very naughty Kindern had found themselves perched on the less-uncomfortable seats. They were becoming very popular.

But they were still quite expensive, since they were real wood, and production hadn't quite caught up with demand quite yet. So Melody had hoped this was one present she wouldn't get.

Frontier colonies or other places which are heavily into arts and crafts , such as summer camps might instead have homemade knockoffs of CornerStool.

See also

• Corner time
• Time-out
• Naughty step

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