The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

While I sit here trying to remember the events of that day, I find that my thoughts keep slipping, instead, to the feeling of my memories, not the things that happened themselves. Remembering them feels the same as living them—bright. Happy. Bouncy. Bubbly.

I don’t think I’d ever felt truly bubbly until that day. Not just giggly, not just cheery, not just sunshine-and-rainbows. I’d had days like that before, so’s everyone. This day was all of that at once, piled into a horsecart and driven down the bouncy, bouncy road all the way to happy-land.

So you’ll pardon me if I start to sound bubbly while I try to tell it to you. Because I feel more than a little bubbly right now.

So… let me start at the beginning.

I woke up feeling amazing. I slept in! I hadn’t gotten to sleep in at all since I came to Lady Sionamuid’s, and wow did it feel great. I slept in, and then I slept a little more, because my comforter was just so snug and cozy that I didn’t wanna let go of it until the sunbeams started cooking through my covers and my robes and making me start to sweat. That made it the perfect time to get naked. Nobody else was there, after all, so I could take my time in making sure I looked my best before I went down to the dining hall.

Which was empty! Because I slept in. But that just meant I could go to class right away! So I went down hallways and up stairs and got lost a couple times, but that was great, since it let me peek in on what they were doing in some of the other classrooms! There was a spell that looked like fire but wasn’t fire in one class, there were boring pieces of paper in another class (Tests! I didn’t even remember what the word was then, but I know it now!), and the last one I poked my head into was where I was supposed to be!

“Where have you been?” Professor Hernst asked me. And since he was there, that meant it was time for Applied Spellcraft, which was totally my favorite class so far that day.

“I got lost,” I smiled and shrugged at him.

He regarded me with more than a little confusion. “... very well,” he said finally, “go ahead and take your seat now, Miss Arrageste.”

I heard some whispers running around the classroom, but nobody said anything out loud, so I wasn’t too embarrassed. I went over and sat down in my squeaky desk, and there were some more whispers while I took out my books and quill and wand. And everyone was staring at me. That was different.

But of course it’s different, I heard myself saying. It’s the best day of school ever.

And that just made me grin so wide that everybody looked away from me! The rest of the class was awesome. We got to make our own enchantments! But they weren’t really our own enchantments, because we had to pair up so we were working together and also we were just following the instructions off the board. And I’d done enchantments on other days, with Professor Irsine, but I hadn’t done any enchantments yet that day!

I teamed up with the orange-haired girl sitting next to me, since she looked kinda lonely and nobody at all wanted to work with me. She looked up the translations for the words on the board into the magical runes I had to draw around the circle to make the enchantment work. It took a lot of focus. And it felt really familiar at the same time, drawing the circle and the symbols all around it. Like I was sitting there, but I also wasn’t sitting there, but I wasn’t anywhere else, I was just… there.

And somewhere in all of that drawing, and feeling, I could sense the smile on my face going flat and numb. I could feel an itch growing all over my body, a tug at the fore of my mind, a sense that something was wrong but I couldn’t place what, until I made the last few marks on the runic circle…

“... aaaand done!” I beamed at my lesson-partner, who gave me a cute-and-shy smile. “Do they look like the ones in the book?”

She poked a couple of the pinkish-purple symbols on my page with her wand, nudging them a little, then quickly nodded. I’d volunteered my own book for it, obviously, I couldn’t ask her to do something like that when maybe the spell would go wrong! But it didn’t go wrong at all. I ripped the sheet out of the book, held it up to the light by the window where we sat, and whispered a word I’d practiced a hundred times already under my breath.

The sigil flashed to life. Out from the circle’s boundary shot dozens of tiny magical lines, sprouting off like roots from the bottom of a tree to twist across the page almost randomly. Almost. I knew what it was doing, so did my partner. We both grinned and whispered encouragements while the little lines spread, and spread, and once they’d all got in place I said the word once more.

Then I blinked, and the page in my hand that used to be rectangular wasn’t so rectangular any more. A crease had formed across each of the lines of enchantment, binding instantly as soon as I said the word, contorting the paper faster than I could see into the shape of…

“It’s a duck!” I laughed, thrusting it toward my classmate. She took it very gently into her hands, I watched the way that little sparks from it shot off of her fingers.

“Isn’t it supposed to be… um, more three-dimensional?” she asked me sheepishly.

“Is it?” I wondered. Then I looked around, and everyone else was turning their pages into little bears that stood on four legs, or big-winged birds, or one boy even turned his into a dragon. They were all so cool! And they’d stay that way until the enchantments we drew ran out of energy, which wouldn’t be long, since we didn’t bind them to anything powerful like a mystic focus or gemstone. But the best things couldn’t always last forever. “I think ours is great,” I said, brushing the back of the duck with pride.

And of course it’s great, I heard myself saying. It’s the best day of school ever.

Professor Hernst looked pretty disappointed with our duck, but I was riding high. I think I totally aced the quiz on Pushietin in Mystic Histories class. Then lunch came around: my sandwich was so delicious, the best ham I’ve ever eaten in my entire life.

Oh, right, then we had Magical Techniques. I don’t think I aced that one. Magus Vrenwiche, our instructor, asked me how best to hold a wand when doing the rending spell we were practicing that day. I said, with your hand? Everybody laughed, and I did too, because something was definitely funny about the whole class right then. I just wasn’t sure what. But it was hilarious.

And of course it’s hilarious! I giggled in my own head. It’s the best day of school ever.

Mollian came up to me as everybody was leaving class, and she had one of her blond-haired friends with her. I grinned at them, but they didn’t grin back. “You know, I thought they were only supposed to let, like, smart kids into this school?” Mollian thought out loud.

“I think they are only supposed to do that,” her friend said with a snicker.

“Oh yeah,” I agreed, “there were entrance exams and everything. Right?” Neither of them nodded. “Did you two not have to take them?”

Mollian looked caught off-balance. “Um, well, yeah, of course I took the tests—”

“They were hard, right? Mine were hard.” I sighed. “I had to study for weeks to make sure I could do them right. Did you ever get your scores back? I really wanted to know about question number—”

“Hey,” Mollian said, glaring at me. She actually sounded pretty annoyed.

“Yes?” I asked with my head tilting, my lips smiling.

She stared at me for a few seconds, then glanced at her friend with a ‘what-the-fuck-is-up-with-this-girl’ kind of look on her face, then she just walked off without saying anything.

And I was almost, almost super bummed out about not being able to talk more to her. I mean, she’s like, so cool. Her dad is an arcanist. She’s probably been doing spells since she was a baby. And just thinking about how awesome that’d be, to do magic all the time instead of just having to learn about it because your parents couldn’t afford to get you a focus, well that made me super excited. Like, super excited.

The only problem was, I didn’t really have anybody I could talk to about magic and stuff.

It’s the best day of school ever, my voice rang in my skull, putting a smile back on my lips. But the little singy voice in my head was almost drowned out by the sound of tearing fabric from behind me. I whirled around to see what it was, and then it was behind me again! And I kind of spun around in place for a while until I craned my neck around and saw, it was the back of my robe, ripping slowly from my collar down the line of my spine with a freaky green light shearing the threads apart.

It was kind of awesome. But then I started to see my bare skin getting shown to everybody else, so I hugged the robes tight around me and ran out the door past Mollian and her laughing friends and ran all the way to my dormitory before the uniform split itself in half. It fell off me as soon as I reached my bed, sliced perfectly down the middle. I spread it out on my mattress, then folded each end inwards to see how precisely both cut ends matched up with each other. Each little fiber could poke right up against its neighbor, and if I squinted really hard, it looked good as new.

But it wasn’t good as new. It was kind of ruined.

But it’s the best day of school ever, I reminded myself. This just meant I got the chance to fix it up myself!

Since it was before curfew, I wouldn’t get in trouble for casting spells in the dormitories, so long as they weren’t big ones. And it wouldn’t be big—probably. I just needed the right spell to fix it with. And where else would I go for the right spell but the library?

I needed my pajama-robe, first, but then I was off. The library was just a brisk walk away, and almost all the other students were having dinner while I was busy plodding along in my bare feet. I thought the slippers would be a little much, and even it being the best day of school ever couldn’t make me comfortable with the ‘A.A.’ initials stitched onto each of the fuzzy things.

The few students that there were gave me strange looks. I didn’t dwell on that though, just on how lucky I was that they were all from the upper classes. First-years wore blue robes. Seconds wore green, then thirds in yellow, fourths got orange, then red was for the fifths. Any farther around the color wheel and we’d’ve had hypothetical sixth-years wearing purple, and what with the Marcirian empire being a thing that existed, that would’ve been awful.

So I got some weird stares, but I’d been getting those all day, and I felt determined not to let it start bothering me now. The desk clerk looked exhausted, so I was happy to make them smile a little when I asked for any introductory texts on either magical reversals or mending spells. He gave me a little list and I said ‘thank you’ with a small curtsey. That made him chuckle, it made me giggle too.

It shouldn’t have taken me long to find the books, but I got distracted on the way. Which wasn’t a bad thing at all; the stained glass window in there is gorgeous. Like the one in the main hall, and the four others spread around the building, it shows Lady Sionamuid in her prime. There, she’s depicted making a wellspring out of nothing in the desert, which grows into a whole river of ceruleans and indigoes, slaking thirsty mouths along its whole length.

The plaque talked about how generous she was in life, and the part about her generosity in death was left kinda assumed. I thought the image on the window was meant to be a metaphor, but the plaque told a story of how Lady Sionamuid journeyed far and wide for want of knowledge, how the lessons she learned (both in studies and altruism) from all corners of Ephaos have been enshrined in this very library.

At least, that’s what the plaque said. I didn’t have much of a reason to doubt it at the time. And the stained glass was so pretty that it had to have been enchanted somehow, too, or maybe there were illusions over it, or maybe—

Someone’s hand touched my shoulder, and I can remember not even twitching. Just smiling. “Hey there,” a voice said gently, slowly.

“Hi,” I replied, taking a deep breath of the musty library fragrance, the flecks of dust made beautiful by multicolored evening light. And I smelled cherries, too. I turned my head to smile at the woman beside me, and her short black bangs parted to the left, and her shockingly violet irises, and her green robes. She looked amused by me, and that was nice, because her slight quirk of a smirk was very pretty to look at. But my eyes went straight for hers—I had to ask, you see. “Are those real?”

I saw her smirk broaden. “Are what real?” she chuckled. And I think she knew what I was talking about. But I also think she was just surprised to hear someone asking so up frontly.

And I know I didn’t look it, or sound it, or even really feel it, but I was just as surprised to be asking it. “Your eyes,” I finally said, after what I now recognize was a good five seconds of staring. “They’re purple.”

She was immediately on the defensive, but still half-smiling. “You’ve got a problem with that?”

“Not at all,” I breathed. The shoulder where she was touching my felt so tense and stiff, and my stomach had tightened around itself once already. Was this normal?

No, I whispered in my thoughts, it’s the best day of school ever.

And that made me start laughing. Which made her start laughing! And even though she was pretty, it wasn’t such a pretty laugh, it was kind of uneasy-sounding. “What’s so funny?” she asked me, with her smile going straighter into a thin line.

“Oh, nothing,” I answered, letting my giggles die out, “I’m just having a really good day is all.”

She cocked an eyebrow at me. “I can see that. You’re still in your pajamas.”

“These?” I shook my arms in the fluffy sleeves, making more motes join the constellation of dust and fuzz floating around us. “No, I changed.”

“You changed at… dinnertime?”

“Of course I did.”

I was at least aware that she seemed a little weirded out by me. “Normally you change after dinner,” she said slowly, withdrawing her hand away from me.

I shrugged, free of her fingers but still pulled taut inside. “Well I couldn’t go to the library naked, could I?”

She blinked a few times, like she was considering it. “Uh… well…” Then she shook her head and pinched the bridge of her nose, drawing out an exasperated sigh. “Why not wear your uniform robes?”

“Oh!” Then it was obvious why she was so confused. “Because they got ripped in half,” I said with a straight kind of pride.

“Right, that’s—hang on, you got snagged on something?”

“Nope! Magic.”

She was starting to put together a reply, moving her hands around in front of her, but I was already on my way to the desk to check out. The robe wasn’t going to mend itself. She caught up to me a bit before I got there, stepping in front of me and spreading her arms, some, to keep me from going around her. “Do you know who did it?” she asked seriously.

“I have no idea who did it,” I smiled. “But I’m going to fix it!”

“Do you need any—” Before she could finish, I patted the top of the stack I held slung in my arm. She nodded, rubbing the back of her neck. “Ah. Right.”

“It’ll probably take me hours to get through them, but I’m not too worried.”

“Well, supper stops being served an hour from now…”

Oh. For the first time in hours, my smile started to falter.

“... but I could bring you a plate if you’re going to be working all night?”

And then it was right back up. I beamed at her and bobbed my head thankfully. “That’d be so amazing of you. I really don’t want to have to go in there and get embarrassed in front of everyone for the second time today!”

“... right, I’ll just… find you later,” she said, backing up and adjusting the satchel that hung off her right shoulder. “First room in the first-years’ section, right?”

“Right,” I confirmed. “Hang on, how did you—?”

“Left sleeve, elbow, green letters.” She flashed an awkward smile, turned around, and hurried out of the library without giving me another one of her strange purple stares. After I thumped my books onto the counter, I fussed my sleeve around to see the lettering I already knew was there. ‘A.A.’ Convenient for all the other students! Just a little less for me.

But it meant I got my meal, so, that was perfect. The nice second-year left it by my door, so I couldn’t say thank you again, but I knew I’d have to do so the next time I saw her! Beef stew. Mmm. I spooned down the whole thing before I was even halfway through my first text. And I had to read three more to really get the gist of what needed doing, and I also had to work quietly in the dark because one of my bunkmates was trying to sleep early.

But eventually, I got it, just like I knew I would. It wasn’t actually so hard at all—certain spells get made to counteract other spells. The rending magic that somebody used on my robe was actually super clever, because it was partly an enchantment! The two halves of the uniform would never let themselves be stitched back together for as long as the focus that made the enchantment still worked. It was probably another student’s, and you could do a lot of smart things to figure out who cast a spell and when and where and with what mystic focus, but I really just wanted my uniform back. I didn’t want to get in trouble, I didn’t want to make a scene. I couldn’t, not on my best day ever, not on any day ever.

Anyway! I fixed it. I had to figure out what runes my friendly saboteur embedded into their spell to make it last, and then find the approximate opposites of those sigils. It took a lot of experimenting. I made the robes pink a couple times, but once it was done, I just had to do the same thing they did, only in reverse. Magic disrupts things, it carves a path so it can do what you want it to do. And when you’re careful, you can just walk back up that path to where you started from in the first place. And that’s how I got my uniform back! Learning magic is so cool.

I was really tired after all that. Enchanting means you have to focus really hard, so even just holding up my wand felt exhausting once it was done. I kinda just fell onto my bed, giggling, and got my robe nicely folded before snuggling into my covers. Everybody was asleep, the school was quiet, the moonlight was coming through our little window… it was the perfect end for the perfect day of school.

I took a deeeeep breath. I closed my eyes.

And I opened them. I was sitting straight up in bed, looking at the doorway. I knew I was upright, I knew I was biting on my lip, I knew I was shivering, but all the sensations felt dim compared to the pull.

I had to get out of bed. And I barely even felt myself doing it for how strong the pull was. It was like magic. But not like magic. Because magic made me tingly and excited and a little numb and a little lightheaded. This made me cold, clammy, strange and uncomfortable in my own skin. It wasn’t magic, it was…

… memory? I paused in the doorway of the dormitory wing, surprised at the sight of my slipper below me. I didn’t even remember putting them on. And then I was walking. I wasn’t sure where to, but I was going. I picked up speed. It felt familiar, and it felt stronger, and it felt correct.

So correct that I almost walked entirely past the balcony’s precipice. I didn’t try to hide, because I didn’t know that I should’ve been hiding. I just knew to walk onto the balcony, look around, and see…

“Oh gods. You.”

Him. The guy staring at me through spectacles and freaked-out-seen-a-ghost eyes.

I had no idea who he was. “Me?” I said, jabbing a finger at my chest.

“You!” he hissed, apparently forgetting the whole curfew and quiet hours thing entirely. To be fair, I’d forgotten it too. “I can’t believe this. I cannot believe this, how does it keep going wrong?!”

“Umm... how does wh—”

He groaned and buried his forehead in his hands before I could ask. “You just keep coming back! I don’t know what I’m doing wrong! I’ve followed what the books said, I’ve even improvised, but that’s supposed to be safe and oh my gods I have no other options, I am in such a bad situation and I think I’m having a panic attack.”

“Do you… need help?” I offered, coming a few steps closer.

“Yes!” he cried. “I am in so far over my head. All I wanted to do was study! All I wanted to do was study, and work late, because I can’t work late when my roommates smell terrible and when my dorm is too drafty and for weeks it’s been great! I’ve been learning so much. I’ve been studying what they’ll never teach me and my gods is it amazing.

“It’s been great,” he said again, softer, like his voice was crumpling while his shoulders tucked inward. “Until you showed up.”

I’d stepped close enough to put a hand on his shoulder, trying to comfort this strange and messed up kid, and he nearly jumped out of his skin. He scrambled back to the balcony railing, catching his breath, staring at me perplexed. “You don’t know?”

I wasn’t even sure what he thought I didn’t know. I was about to say as much when he started laughing. “Oh,” he said, “oh wow. Oh this makes absolutely no sense. You know what?”

“What?” I asked, finally managing to get a noise out of my throat.

“I think I’ve got it,” he said. “This time. This time I’ve got it. The first day was a mistake, just messed it up royally, left too many threads.”

“... right,” I muttered under my breath. It didn’t feel right to interrupt his breakthrough.

“Today? Today was better? I think? You tell me, Apophenia, how was your day?”

“Today was the best day of school ever.” He was grinning as I realized the words that left my lips, and the word that left his. “Hang on, you know my—”

“Yes, yes, I know your name, and you know my name—”

“—is Carlisle.” And I felt, again, the spell shattering in my mind. All of the memories flooding back into place at once. All of the emotions and feelings and rush of energy washing over me, through my head and down to my toes, and by the time I recovered from the shock, he was already upon me. One arm around the back of my shoulders, his other hand hovering just in front of my eyes. I tried to look to his, but his middle finger and thumb pressed together, and I stared with mouth open wide.

“This time,” he whispered, “I’m going to be more careful.”

“You moldy piece of—”

I woke up. The girl sleeping above me yawned and hopped down from her bunk, stumbling over to where her dresser sat in the corner. A couple of the others were already up. So at least I wasn’t late. I rolled out of my bed with a grunt, stretched as I stood, and grabbed my student-blue robe off the back of my chair. I didn’t notice how nicely I’d folded it the night before, nor how fresh it smelled. All I cared about smelling was breakfast, because I was just starving, so I needed to get going for school.

And my head, for once, had nothing to say about that.