The DSS Tickle Bench is a RLV based bondage toy for my fellow Second Life kinksters. In addition to being able to truss someone to it, you can also torture them in a fun and cheerful manner using the little feather at the base.
The Tickle Bench started kind of as a fluke. I’m a fanatical user of Mesh Studio and had been building props for taking photographs to post on my Deviant Art page. In the course of building the Electro Cross (it’s mature so you need to have a basic but free DA account to look at it) I – naturally – over complicated things and came up with a way to generate a particle effect which would move across the victim’s body following the mouse pointer.
“COOL!” I shrieked gleefully.
Heady with that success I decided to build something that would take things a step further – or a step too far depending upon one’s perspective 🙂 – and add an animated toy. There are a couple of things I had to overcome, mainly horrific mind-bending three dimensional rotational math but my friend Ria – who’s way smarter at that sort of thing than I can ever hope to be – helped out a lot and eventually I had the Tickle Bench.
If you’re just looking for a quick “how to” scroll on down to the Using The Tickle Bench section. Otherwise let’s start out with…
Setting Up the Tickle Bench
I tried to keep this pretty simple so there are only a few basic settings, and in many cases you’ll be able to use the Tickle Bench as is straight from the box, but just in case you want to fine tune things just click on the Tickle Bench for the main menu:
As long as you’re the owner you’ll see the Settings button. Click that and you’ll get – big surprise – the Settings Menu, which should look something like this:
Most of the buttons are pretty self explanatory – the two Access buttons raise or lower the access level. There are three settings:
Public – Anyone can use the Tickle Bench.
Group – Only active members of the same group can use the Tickle Bench.
Private – Only you can use the Tickle Bench.
The two Range buttons control the distance the Tickle Bench will scan when hunting for potential victims. Each click will increase or decrease the range by five meters up to a maximum of 90 meters.
Likewise the two Volume buttons raise or lower the volume of the sound effects.
The Reset button simply performs a script reset. The Tickle Bench saves the settings in the device description field so resetting the scripts won’t reset the settings.
The Feather button (added in version 1.0.6 and higher) allows you to turn off the animated feather. A sharp eyed Knismolagniac pointed out that if one stands close enough to the bench the native SL animation when you click on something will cause your hand to move over the victim’s body as if you were tickling them without the feather.
The Self Tickle button (added in version 1.0.6 and higher) allows or prevents people using the Self Bondage function to tickle themselves.
The only thing that’s not self explanatory is the Self Bondage button. When the Tickle Bench scans for potential victims it intentionally ignores the person operating the menu. Instead there’s a button which will attempt to grab that person and set a random release timer – and no, they don’t get to see the menus so they have no idea how long they’re stuck. And we call that the Self Bondage button.
The Self Bondage button in the settings menu allows you to set the maximum upper limit for that random timer. Keep that in mind, just because you set it to 99 days, 23 hours and 59 minutes that doesn’t mean that it won’t randomly pick two minutes when the time comes. The Self Bondage timer menu should resemble this:
The two 10 Min buttons increase or decrease the maximum time by – you guessed it, ten minutes. 1 Hr increases or decreases it by an hour, and 8 Hr increases or decreases it by eight hours.
The Settings button returns you to the Settings Menu, the Main button returns you to the Main Menu.
And now you’re all set with the settings. On to…
Using The Tickle Bench
Click on the Tickle Bench to open the main menu. You should have three options (unless you’re the owner, then you get four):
First off don’t click the Self Bondage button. Well, not yet, unless you’re really eager to play. It does exactly what it says it will do, try to grab the person clicking it and lock them on the Tickle Bench for a random amount of time.
Since the Tickle Bench prevents the tickle-ee from accessing the menu once they’re locked on, clicking the Self Bondage button means that you’re stuck until the timer expires, a helpful by passer passes by, or you safeword out.
The Scan button is also pretty much what you’d expect. It looks for the nine closest avatars with active RLV and Relays and lets you select your victim from the list.
Once someone is locked on the Tickle Bench it prevents them from standing, teleporting, or initiating new IM sessions. You may notice that there’s no Strip or Strip All buttons. That’s because the Tickle Bench doesn’t do those things.
“Why” you may ask. Go ahead, I said you may 🙂
Two reasons. First off is a simple logical reason. Someone explain to me how an inanimate piece of furniture is able to take off my clothes. Even if it IS as wonderful as the Tickle Bench. Keep in mind that the person on the bench is probably wearing a collar which can do all the stripping you want. There’s also a good chance that the person doing the capturing has a RLV HUD tool that lets them carry out their evil wishes via the victim’s relay.
This leads to reason number two – duplication of effort. If the collar has the scripts and the relay has the scripts and a RLV HUD has the scripts isn’t it a little extravagant for me to use up sim reqources duplicating all that for potentially a fourth time?
Now what’s the HTML tag for ending a rant 🙂
Once your victim is properly secured clicking the Tickle Bench will bring up a menu something like this:
Pretty straight forward. The two Volume buttons will raise and lower the volume of the giggles, laughs, and snort sound effects.
Release does just that.
And the Timer button lets you set a delayed release.
Enough of the pedestrian stuff, let’s get to the fun part. I know it’s fun because someone is always laughing when I do it 🙂
While you’ve got someone on the Tickle Bench click on them and don’t release the mouse button. The feather will spring to life and follow your mouse all around your victim’s body, causing them to laugh uproariously and writhe in their bonds to avoid the feather.
Unsuccessfully of course 🙂
That photo is un-edited other than cropping and adding an after the fact mouse pointer so you could see where my mouse was pointing. I did cheat a little bit and wear my fancy wind blown hair, though the facial expression is “real”.
And that’s pretty much it for the Tickle Bench. Oh there is one other bit, and that’s…
Being Stuck On the Tickle Bench
This is pretty simple. Like most RLV bondage gear once you’re on board the ride is pretty much out of your control. The only thing you can do is keep your hands inside the car, and frankly the chains pretty much ensure that 
.
When you first get on – or are put on – the Tickle Bench you’ll get a menu like this:
The sound effects in the Tickle Bench are – as you can probably guess – gender specific. Just click the button that comes closest to the sounds you want to make and you’re all set.
Thanks again for looking at / playing with / buying (please please please let it be buying) my fancy RLV gizmo. If you have any questions suggestions or just want to shower me with extravagant praise please feel free to IM me in SL at Wilhelmina Hinchcliffe. If you’d like to try the Tickle Bench out you can visit my shop in Orbitalis.
And for those extra geeky out there, here’s the version history starting with the first update:
v1.0.5
Code clean up, no update necessary
v1.0.6
Added setup menu option Feather to enable / disable the animated feather
Added setup menu option Self Tickle to enable / disable the tickling system for the victim’s use
Added Xcite compatibility. Victims wearing Xcite genitals will experience increasing arousal while being tickled (assuming their kinks include tickling)
Fixed RLV error – replaced @clear with !release (thanks to Toy Wylie for spotting this)
Added @fartouch restrictions to RLV restrictions
Automatically trigger the Self Bondage timer if someone simply sits on the bench. This corrects a problem where people using self bondage would log off while trapped, then be re-seated by their relay but no timer would be set leaving them trapped.