Merit Coba

She was like that..
Her art was not in the way she snaked her body around the pole. Those movements were animations made by others and then automated through scripts.  It cost  her no effort at all.
Her art was picking – or getting picked by – the right companion, the subsequent conversation and  the possible follow-up. It was the unspoken promise: the possibility of pleasure once you got to know her more intimately. The outcome was never fixed: she was a poledancer, she entertained with easy banter: stirring, sensual and silver-tongued. The price was the tip. The ultimate reward was her avatar. And always and only on her terms: she was a poledancer after all.
Sometimes she was more interested in the other dancers then the customer. Girls like her, twisting their often similar shaped bodies around similar poles in similar ways while they made out or chatted over private channels, mostly between each other. For some that was all the sport they wanted: the other girls and not those male customers. The latter were just a way to earn a living.
She knew one girl who only danced when a new girl had joined the club.  She wanted to get to know the newest dancer and put her on her list of exclusive female contacts. Once that was accomplished, she would withdraw to her skybox again.  Every morning she went through this list of potential diversions and invited one to come over to her place up in the sky. Sometimes she had little to choose from, for in her morning few were online, but she always picked one when one was online, for she craved a quick lay before going to her monotone real life work. When she was able to she tried the newest first, hoping and fearing that that one would be the one true love she was destined to meet. Hoping: for was she not told that there must be a special someone out there? Fearing: and what demands would that true love have?
One girl hated her male customers and she proved to her own satisfaction their depravity each and every time when they paid her for her company in  a shady room filled with pre-animated adult poses and beds that were hugely oversized. They, so she told the other girls, just wanted to use her for sex, while she suffered them, all for money. For half an hour of her time for which she was paid the equivalent of a dollar. She could not devise another way to earn it. If that was possible, she would not have to sell herself. So she told them.
And a few girls were searching for others – other girls mostly – to have them bowing their heads at their feet or to grovel on the floor themselves.  For – to them, – nothing is of such unreel  beauty as an avatar bound with shiny leather, coarse chains and chafing ropes. And it is compassionate creativity that drives them to trigger the twisting and bending animations that mimic discomfort and thus find or cause liberty through restraint. So it says.
She suspected that some of the other girls were no girls at all, but rather men using the countenance of women.  Most girls drew the line there and called such individuals dishonest, even though their real life selves were decades older, many pounds heavier and their skins of any other color but tan. But gender was the deciding moral factor and they howled their anger, as did their clients and the girls who were men.
Some girls have darker passions.. secret forbidden fantasies,  not tolerated by  society. In this virtual world, were anything could be possible, as long as the computer supports it and the graphic card renders it, these could be played out..provided one could find the right companions to play with. And poledancing was a good way as any to find them.
She was a poledancer and it reminded her sometimes of  that old movie she once saw in which one person desired an other, who desired another,  who desired yet another again and so the camera drifted from one spurned lover to the next,  from one broken heart to the next until it returned to the first person. For this world was a world of short passions and desires. It is so much easier to hurt a pretty puppets when it starts to bore you.
She was a make belief poledancer in a make belief world and nothing was real, but she knew one thing for certain: that she would never ever touch a pole in real life… ..again.