The brush was set down on the towel, sitting between other brushes and knocking against them with a gentle clacking sound. Serena's fingers glided towards another brush, picking it out and holding it up in front of her vision—this one was built more like a fine painting brush, with a narrow, stiff tip on the end of it.
"I… like the sensation of brushes..." Serena whispered gently into the microphone, speaking softly, this time lingering near the left ear. She had switched hands with the brush, now holding it in her right hand near the right ear—a purposeful decision, being right-handed, now possessing the more agile and precise hand to brush the ear with. "It… it kinda tickles a bit… but that's what I'm doing right now… tickling you to sleep…"
There was no point in rubbing around the ears and teasing them—it was time to get to business. She took the brush between her fingers, pinching it like a pencil, the brush tip just inches out from the tips of her fingernails, steeled as they came close to the inner crevice of the ear. Beneath the large, arching edge of the ear itself, there was a sizable silicone ridge inside, sticking out like a swollen artery from the smooth cup-shaped ear, shelved and hidden surfaces all around it, leading down to the dark tunnel of a flap of thin skin and thick cartilage towards the outer ear flap—the piece of cartilage exactly like the one keeping the earbud firmly fixed in Serena's ear.
Though Serena was used to brushing in that upper 'shelf' of the ear, a place where a lot of oily dandruff caked in and became itchy, Serena aimed to drag the brush along the outermost edge—sort of a corner at the top of it. As she did, dragging the stiff, tickly bristles across it, the near-silent rustling of the brushes over the resisting silicone skin fed into the microphone in the tiny, cavernous depths of the 3Dio earholes, in turn being fed directly into the earbuds wedged in Serena's ears. Serena could feel every sensation like it was real—and then electrified. The tickling of the brush she had done to the artificial ears in front of her had been done just the same to her own ears. It forced Serena's eyes shut, stopping all of her breathing in that one moment.
Still, despite the intensity of the sensations, Serena kept dragging the brush along. It reached up to the corner of the large upper arch of the ear and where that ridge tucked into it, playing with where the two edges of cartilage would have met. A few loose ends of the bristles slipped into the pockets of the ear, brushing near the all but untouched—and unusually sensitive—undersides of the ear.
The sensations wracked Serena's skull. It felt as though all of the follicles on her head, every single planted hair on her skull, suddenly bloomed with an electric tingling sensation. It burned, spreading out from the whorl of hair on her head, taking hold of Serena's skull with spider-like legs. Serena forced her eyes shut, unable to breathe and having gone far beyond what she had felt earlier. A shuddering, powerful gasp escaped her, her head pulling away from the side of the ear just in time as a louder than ASMR-appropriate breath left her, keeping it from ruining the recording. Her fingers, steeled around the brush, seized up and let go of the brush, dropping it down onto the table with a muffled clatter, her fingers slightly seizing up.
Serena's eyelids twitched and became unsettled as her eyes rolled back beneath them. Softly, she let out a moan.
