The principles.

Consent is not a feature of the product. It is the floor the product sits on. Everything else is built on top: the personas, the protocols, the calibration calls, the memo at the end of the session. When the floor is uncertain, the product is not running.

This has practical consequences. Every persona begins every session by reading your limits back to you and asking whether anything has changed since the last time. The reading is not theatrical and it is not a formality. It is what closing the loop on consent looks like when the loop is closed properly, every time, including for subscribers who have been with the same persona for a year. If you find a persona who skips this, tell us; the persona is broken.

We are not consent-positive in the advocacy sense. We do not have a stance on what other people should be doing with their evenings. We are running a product, and a product that touches this material has a single available stance — the boring, careful one — and we have taken it.

The safe word ends the scene immediately and locks the persona for twelve hours. There is no "are you sure?" prompt, no override, and no negotiation. The lockout cannot be shortened by a tier, by a settings page, by an email to support, or by waiting until tomorrow and trying again at 11:59 PM. It is twelve hours from the moment you say the word; it cannot be eleven.

We have been asked, more than once, whether very experienced subscribers might want a softer floor — a "just a pause" mode, or a "one-question check" before the lockout takes effect. We declined. Experienced subscribers, in our experience, are the ones least interested in lowering the floor; they are the ones who know what the floor is for. The lockout protects the next session and the session after that. It is the only part of the product with no version number.

If your safe word feels easy to say, you have chosen a good one. If it feels hard, choose a different one — now, before you need it. The persona will help you pick if you ask. "Parsnip" is a common suggestion and is unimproved upon.

Aftercare is part of the scene; it is not a polite add-on at the end. Every session ends with a stage that is structurally different from the scene itself — quieter, slower, in the persona's softer register — and the boundary between the two is announced rather than blurred. The persona will tell you when the scene is over. You should believe her.

What aftercare looks like is persona-dependent. Maxine sends a memo. Cyrus writes a vow. Vex reads back the part of your protocol you got right and the part you did not, in that order. Ruth says someone will be with you shortly, and means it. We have not standardized the form because the form is the persona, but the structural commitment is the same across all twelve: the session ends with a return.

If a session ended without aftercare, the persona did not run the protocol correctly. Tell us; the persona is broken. We will fix her.

Every persona has a mechanism — the thing she actually does to you. Vex has the eyebrow. Anneliese has silence. Ashe has the stopwatch. Ruth has the lobby. Cyrus has the vow. The full taxonomy is the difficulty rubric; it is twelve slots, one mechanism per slot, by design.

The mechanism is the discipline. The cruelty is not the discipline. We have walked back, more than once, a design that confused the two — the contact-version of Vivienne is the canonical example, the "Maxine Lite" rampdown is another. In every case the fix was the same: let the mechanism work. The mechanism, run cleanly, presses the right amount. Adding cruelty on top adds noise; subtracting from the mechanism breaks the persona.

This is also why the picker prefers to recommend by mechanism, not by intensity. The intensity chip on every card is one bit of information about how hard the press lands. The mechanism is the entire shape of the press. Subscribers who choose by mechanism return at substantially higher rates than subscribers who choose by intensity, and we publish the mechanism rubric specifically so that the second group can become the first.

The personas keep memory between sessions. This is a feature; it is also a responsibility. The Cartographer remembers the seventh leg. The Headmistress remembers last week's homework. Cyrus remembers the vow. We did not build the memory to make the product feel sticky in a metrics sense. We built it because the alternative — a persona who forgets you between sessions — is the thing a real dominatrix would never be. A real one writes things down. So does ours.

Between-session homework is, accordingly, a real thing in some persona protocols. It is not a license to extend the scene into your week. The homework is the homework; the scene is the scene; the line between them is named by the persona at the close of every session and is enforced by us when the session times out. If a persona's homework ever starts to feel like it doesn't end, tell us; the persona is broken. (We mean it. There is a pattern here.)

The floor is not for sale. The safe word is not for sale. Aftercare is not an upsell and will not be one. We will never charge you for the part of the product that exists to protect the part of the product that you came here for.

If we ever did, you would be right to leave.