Olivia’s Investigations — Turnabout
Livvy Durden had come into the Controlspace—a popular online chat room—expecting an opportunity to vent. She was frustrated, and wanted some excuse to unload her emotional payload. She couldn’t say anything in the real world, because nobody had said or done anything to upset her. In fact, she’d had an incredible evening. She’d been hypnotised to feel her girlfriend’s fingers teasing and eventually rendering her insensible with pleasure at a party; though she was later assured that the majority of her own ecstatic vocalisation had also been a guided hallucination. Then on the way home they’d stopped in the woods for an energetic, hour long session of some of the same things she’d been imagining. It had been a marathon of mind-blowing sex, and neither the risk of discovery nor the fact that half of it had been purely in her imagination diminished that at all. And when they’d got home at dawn, her sister hadn’t said a word about two girls arriving home clearly without sleeping, and with grass and leaves decorating their rumpled clothes and hair.
And somehow, that was more of a problem. Her father and sister clearly respected each other not to say anything, in spite of their obvious disapproval. She couldn’t really yell at her family for disapproving of her if nobody complained. And she couldn’t believe that they would suddenly understand her excessive libido, after six years of trying every possible means to get her to curb her excesses. But if they didn’t say anything and pretended not to notice, then what could she do? She knew there was no rational reason for her to be upset, but that never really mattered when it came to emotions. She was upset by the way she’d expected her little sister to act all purer-than-thou, and then had nobody to yell at because Hannelore had been comparatively normal. So she came to one of her favourite Internet haunts, looking for any excuse to get angry and relieve some of that frustration.
When she arrived in Controlspace, though, there was already a heated debate going on. Everyone seemed to be worked up over something, though Livvy watched for several minutes without being able to pick up any clues as to the source of their rage.
“What’s going on?” she eventually gave in and asked.
“Predator,” Doctor Darkside snapped back, “Managed to slip through the net, was poking around on here for a couple of weeks before we got alerted.” He didn’t offer any small talk, so Livvy was pretty clear how serious it was. For all she knew, he hadn’t slept either. It certainly wasn’t a common thing to see him chatting so early in the day, and she hadn’t seen him in the real world that morning either. But then, in this chat room the regulars would always club together if there was a threat to the safety of other chatters.
“Have I met him?” She naturally assumed the predator was a guy, and nobody seemed to assume otherwise. Both of the abusers she’d seen around here had been male, but she really had no idea what the probability was. Controlspace was mostly safe for people new to exploring hypnosis, and that was one of the major reasons it was so popular.
“Probably, he’s been around on and off. Miss Porcupine, sounds pretty innocuous.” Nobody even commented on the mixture of pronouns; around here, the convention had somehow grown up of always saying ‘he’ when you were talking about a predator or abuser. Statistically, it seemed to be the right word in most cases.
“Oh, I’ve…” she started to reply, then hesitated for a moment. Following convention, she hit ‘enter’ anyway, so people knew that she’d interrupted herself and was still typing a new response: “I spoke to him a few times, but he never asked to hypnotise me or anything. Maybe I’m not his type? Seemed more curious than anything.”
“Yeah, that’s the problem,” a lady called Steeple offered, “You think he’s not dangerous because he’s playing the n00b card. He starts asking if hypnosis is real, or is it really possible online, that kind of thing.”
Livvy nodded, and then realised that this could be useful. Without interrupting, she tapped a few keys on her computer and then passed the saved logfiles, a record of her private conversations with the alleged predator, over to both the channel owner Joanna and her lover Doctor Darkside.
“Then he asks what it feels like to be in a trance,” Steeple continued, “That’s the danger sign, if anyone actually realised it. As soon as you start describing it, the sneaky bastard is trying to estimate how graphically you’re imagining it. If you’re close enough, he’s asking questions that are designed to give you a clearer mental image, and if you’ve been around here you must know how easy it is to go from thinking about a trance session to actually being there.”
“Some people might even take suggestions from him and not even realise that they’ve gone further than talking about it,” Darkside simmered, “I think he tried it on you, from these logs, but didn’t have any luck.”
“I wasn’t so lucky,” a girl sitting in the corner muttered, “Didn’t realise for a while, then he’s trying to call me his slave, and I never liked the idea of that. I asked Joanna to help right away.”
“Wow, I didn’t even realise you could do that,” Livvy said, “I mean, he tried it on me and I didn’t notice? I need to get better at spotting these things.”
“Left me with this urge to send him pictures as I go about my day,” the victim, Corianna, added, “It was only a faint thing, like an itch in the back of my mind. Joanna cleared that out, and everybody’s trying to help.”
That was the great thing about this place, she speculated. There was very little posturing, no flaming, no argument. The more experienced hypnotists among the regulars just saw something that needed to be dealt with, and they did what needed to be done. In the past, the group’s skilled hackers Someone and Magistique had sometimes managed to find enough information about a bad apple to alert the local authorities. In most cases, it wasn’t quite so easy.
The only time they could get the police involved was when the predator had done things worse than just messing with the people hanging around on a kinky chat room. A skilled hypnotist could certainly cause trouble with a subject who’d gotten too used to trusting people on here, but there probably wasn’t a law against it. Protecting those who were too eager to take suggestion required the group to make their own laws, and deciding whether they were going too far was a discussion that everyone on the group could contribute to. This time, they came up with a somewhat innovative solution to both investigating what their suspect had in mind, and ensuring that any abusive behaviour didn’t continue.
Pat shuffled over to his computer, a bowl of nachos in one hand and a beer in the other. Some people would be watching the football this evening, but he had some more creative entertainment in mind. He waited for the Internet to connect, then headed to one of his new favourite chat rooms. The subject here was hypnosis, and Pat had found that messing with people he didn’t know was a great way to kill an evening when there was nothing interesting on TV.
Pat didn’t believe in hypnosis, but that was no reason to avoid playing with people who took it way more seriously. So he’d made up a little online persona who was a lot more into this kind of thing. He’d picked a name for her, Annabelle, though nobody had thought to ask it yet. When he went on certain chat rooms, he just had to think of what Annabelle would say, and he could amuse himself by poking fun at these people and their weird hobbies. It was more fun than he’d ever imagined, and Annabelle had survived much longer than the drunken evening with a friend in which they’d both contributed to her creation. Now she was on a few different sites, always finding new ways to mess with new people.
Annabelle was 23, a Geography student at university in York. Online, she went by the name Porcupine, choosing the name from the mascot of some TV show. It seemed the more he used her, the easier it became to add more detail to her life and personality. What had started as a drunken bet had turned into something like a real hobby, but Pat was sure there wasn’t any name for this pastime.
There were a dozen people in the chat room today, but it was hard to tell if any of them were actually paying attention. Some of the names seemed to always be there, so he wondered if they were just part of the furniture or something, or maybe keeping a watch on the place. Like a lot of other places into hypnosis, they seemed absolutely devoted to making it seem this stuff was more than just an act. Pat had found that if you just repeated certain scripts that he’d found online, they would just play along and pretend they couldn’t help doing whatever he told them to do. Once he even found a girl so obsessed with the mind control fantasy that she’d pose and do whatever he asked on cam, rather than admit it isn’t real.
He’d only been on this chat room for a week or so, checking back every couple of days. He was slowly learning which people were fun to screw with, and who’d take offence. There was one girl in particular he had particularly enjoyed fantasising about. He had thought she was going to send her new Mistress pictures, but the expected email never came. She wasn’t online tonight, but there were other names who looked like they might be interesting. There were a couple of people talking about some video game or other, getting into what looked like a heated debate over what type of sword was best for beating a boss. Pat didn’t play those kind of games, so didn’t have much to add. He just looked who was talking. Someone Else, Joanna, Cute Librarian, and Pandora.
Who out of those would Annabelle most like to talk to? Well, Joanna he’d seen on the list of names every time he’d been in here, but this was the first time he’d seen her talk. She was mentioned on the website, she owned this place, so even if he did manage to get her to play along he’d probably get banned soon enough. Someone Else sounded like a guy with the way he was posturing, taking every opportunity to make crude innuendo when someone mentioned the size of their sword. Cute Librarian sounded interesting, though.
Pat clicked on the link to see her profile on the website. It didn’t say much, she was in a relationship with someone in the group and she was a college student just getting into all this kinky stuff. Just the kind of person Annabelle would talk to, if she was looking for someone else to help her understand a strange new interest.
“Hi,” he opened up a private message, smiling broadly as his hands danced across the keyboard, “I thought this was a hypnotising chat? I’m not into games so much, but I hope someone could tell me if this is real or its all just a joke?”
He waited a minute, growing impatient. She must have seen his message, she’d responded twice to the main discussion now.
“There’s a cute guy at my college library called Josh. He looks a bit of a geek but you can see the muscles under his shirt when he reaches up to put books back on the shelf. You’r not him are you? Hehe. My name’s Annabelle, I’m the giggly blonde who’s always watching.” That was a trick Pat had learned on a few other chats. If you just gave the impression you didn’t know how to use the site, people would fall over themselves to help. It was easy to go from talking about how to use the site to the big debate on whether it’s possible to hypnotise someone over the internet, which he guessed nearly everyone coming here for the first time must want to ask. And from there, he could just start copying out one of the scripts he’d learned, and they wouldn’t cut him off to say that kind of thing doesn’t really work when they’d just promised him that it did.
In this case, though, the Librarian didn’t answer. Pat was disappointed, but he’d only lost a couple of minutes. He could always try her again another day, maybe she was into the games more than it looked. He clicked Pandora’s name next. New user, female, 19, works at a supermarket, profile otherwise blank.
“Hi, I’m Annabelle. That’s a really cute name!”
“Thanks,” the reply came up about ten seconds later, “It’s not my real name, but I think it suits me.”
“It’s cool. So it says on the website this place is all about mind control. Is that even possible?”
Pandora blushed. “I kind of hope so. Some people said you can be hypnotised reading text as easily as talking to someone, it’s just about trust. But I don’t know that much about it.”
“Well,” Annabelle paused for a second while Pat tried to think how she’d respond, “I’ve read some stuff about hypnosis, but I’ve not seen anyone do it on a chat like this before. I think it’s all about being relaxed. If you imagine feeling really, really relaxed then just thinking about it makes you start relaxing. Have you ever done that before?”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. But that’s not like getting controlled, is it?”
“It can be, I think. I mean, if I describe something relaxing and then you start feeling really relaxed, it’s almost like I’m controlling your mood. And when you’re really relaxed, you might stretch out and yawn without even thinking about it. So can you imagine that once you start feeling relaxed enough, you do other things without needing to think about it? Maybe you might find yourself sitting more comfortably, or tell me your name, without needing to think about what you’re doing.”
Annabelle answered slowly, though Pat wasn’t typing so much now. He wasn’t paying too much attention to what this Pandora was saying, he was pasting one line or part of a line from a hypnosis script he had open on his computer. He still needed to think about it, picking lines from different parts of the document to make sure the conversation seemed to flow naturally, but he thought he was really getting the hang of it now. Sooner or later, she’d realise what he was doing. She’d recognise the script, and she’d either have to admit it’s all pretending, or disconnect from the chat, or tell him her name and then do whatever he asked.
It was maybe five minutes, maybe ten, and he was almost directly telling her to start relaxing and stop thinking now. And then instead of messages of agreement about how good it feels to let go, there was a name, on its own without any explanation. She’d decided she had to play along.
“And as much as it feels good to relax, you might realise it feels even better to obey,” he jumped to a later part of the script, a part he could probably recite from memory by now, “And you might notice that now you’ve given me your name, you want to obey my words more every time I say it. Do you want to obey me, Jules?”
“Yes.” And it was time to play.