Russia’s police was called militsia until 2011 when they changed to politsia. It didn’t improve quality of policing.
ZIL Mission 005 part 1: Dom, Dishwasher and Discussing Disappeared Dissidents
*I couldn’t find whether Dom-2 was really available in Uzbekistan government offices around 2004. And no, because my questions would be too specific, I don’t want to ask these questions on Quora or Reddit. There’s enough propaganda on Quora. If my account was ever identified, people might feed me lies for fun. So just treat this with suspension of disbelief. Besides, no fiction can be 100% factually correct.
**It is a longstanding policy of Belarus and President Alexander Lukashenko to deny that Belarus has political prisoners. Lukashenko put it himself quite succinctly: since Belarus has no laws that support prosecuting people for political crimes, therefore there are no political prisoners. Only lawbreakers.
I have set my secret prison in this legal environment. That’s why the wardens of this secret prison have to work to convince their prisoners to admit to crimes.
ZIL Vote 005 Soliciting Soligorsk Salt Speleotherapy Sanatorium Survey
*Nope, I didn’t choose this name because of the alliteration. Soligorsk sanatorium or spa is a real place. It really is a communist era salt mine, and it really engages in speleotherapy.
Much of Belarus is really a flat, marshy land. After my ZIL members have happily stereotyped it and said all kinds of mischievous things, I didn’t really want any boring stuck-in-the-mud missions. You can read your Napoleonic War history, your WW1 history and your WW2 history if you want to read about mud adventures in Belarus.
I wanted an exotic environment for ZIL members to operate, and this was the place!
But…
There’s also realism. So I need to come clean, in case any of you ever decide to take a holiday trip to Soligorsk. (Not very likely given the current war in Ukraine, but who knows?)
The salt mines are pretty simple tunnels. Lights and visible wiring is mounted along the walls. There are no visible rectangular industrial ventilation shafts mounted overhead for Marilyn to crawl through. I’m just taking advantage of a commonplace expectation in readers – that such ventilation shafts exist in most buildings.
To be realistic, such ventilation shafts should not exist. Because you don’t really want to introduce outside air. Aboveground halotherapy has been shown to be ineffective because it is too easy for the air to be contaminated.
So I’m just going to pretend that the ventilation shafts in my fiction, were placed here during the process of mining. Before they decided to turn this into a halotherapy center.
Also, there has been no accusation that political prisoners are kept locked up in this area. It’s just fiction. Belarus has lots of political prisoners, and lots of cells for them, probably inherited from Soviet times. I read quite a bit about political prisoners being held in solitary, and nothing about overcrowded cells, so I’m reflecting what I read. Every prisoner in this story has a cell to himself.
Officially, the real mine has 5 shafts of which 1 is still in use for mining. So outsiders are not allowed to visit this shaft. I have changed this to 5 shafts of which 1 is closed off for special ‘patients’. That’s my invention.
**by now you may have noticed panties are quite a theme.
It’s partly because I got influenced by Japanese anime, after all. And also I want to create an ecchi version, without hentai/ actual porn. So panties have a fanservice element.
But there is another level of interaction going on.
Stacy is heterosexual female, so she isn’t doing any male gaze thing here. But when women are relaxed, they do things they wouldn’t do in male company.
So panties are constantly being used as a way to discern or reinforce body language. At least for Naz, Riley and Angel, who wear dresses. If Stacy can see their panties, it usually means they are relaxed, open to new ideas, etc.
This body language doesn’t work for Stacy, whose outfit is something like super short shorts. Or Marilyn, whose outfit is lace lingerie. So I will usually use different cues. Like when Marilyn’s smile vanishes, it means Marilyn is tense or in disagreement. If Marilyn remains smiling, it means she’s open to new ideas. For Stacy, I usually use the narrator’s voice. Stacy is the leader and the one with the Tranquility Aura, so she constantly tries to put aside her own fears to calm others down.
After a while, Stacy’s teammates will notice her own ‘nervous’ cues. But Stacy’s are not so obvious, and I have made it that way. When Stacy is nervous, blood flow to her core increases at the expense of her skin. But because Stacy is an indoors person entirely of high-latitude ancestry, she is already extremely fair. It’s not obvious when she turns pale from fear. You will only know if you touch her, since her skin will feel cold.
(It is anecdotally reported that people of Chechen ancestry tend not to tan well. Stacy is also like this.)