Charlotte
Chapter 10
He spent the couple of hours between returning to his apartment and falling asleep trying to figure out how much of Charlotte’s and his hypnosis fetish to reveal to Sophie the next day. He did not want to reveal something so personal to Charlotte as that without her knowing, but he really saw no other way of fully filling Sophie in on his suspicions, and so, with some trepidation, decided to tell her everything. He was in the middle of playing out different speeches in his head when sleep finally overtook him.
He dreamed, naturally, of Charlotte that night. Not the Charlotte that she appeared to be now, but the Charlotte she was before their summer together: innocent and happy and good and a touch naïve. He was not physically present in the dream, but looked down upon her as some perversion of angel, watching her be with her friends, happiness effulgent upon her face as they walked and talked along. From this vantage, guilt struck him, as this is Charlotte as she should be, if he hadn’t caused her ruin. Abashed he stood and felt how awful goodness is and saw virtue in her shape how lovely; saw, and pined his loss.
His dreams continued thus but were nearly fully lost when his alarm blared him into consciousness at 8 o’clock in the morning, but some pain and guilt remained. There were about two and a half hours until Sophie would be over and he decided to put them to best use in his regular, outside-of-hypnosis world. A few strides took him over to the kitchen where he made a small bowl of oatmeal for breakfast, for if he tried to do his morning run on an empty stomach he would only be able to make it a couple miles and that wasn’t near far enough for his liking. He did not entirely feel like exercising this morning, but he was too full of nervous energy and knew that this would relieve that. It would be necessary before Sophie arrived. While still eating, he put on his running clothes, and left the apartment just after finishing breakfast. He didn’t return until five miles and almost forty minutes later: not as long as he would have liked but he was still working himself back into shape and so felt proud nonetheless. A long shower followed, and only ended when the tiny water heater for his apartment became spent. After drying off and putting on a fresh pair of clothes, he noted the time and still had over fifty minutes until Sophie would come. For lack of anything better to fill the time, he went to his kitchen and started to bake a batch of lemon-poppy seed muffins.
The last tray was coming out of the oven when Sophie texted him that her lecture was over and that she would be over in about ten minutes. The dishes were nearly complete when there was a knock on his door.
“Come on in,” he said in greeting as he let Sophie by. “Let me just wash this last bowl and I’ll be with you. Feel free to grab a seat.”
“It smells amazing in here! Charlotte had mentioned you were a great baker, you know. Can I take one, please? I love lemon.”
“Be my guest,” he responded, and she happily grabbed a muffin and sat down on his small couch.
“Holy crap, this is good,” she appeared to mumble, through a muffin-filled mouth. “Sorry,” she added after swallowing.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said while sitting on the little table before the couch. They sat there in silence for a few minutes before he stood up again and began to pace in front of the couch. “So… I, uhh, guess I owe you my thoughts as to what’s going on with Charlotte.”
“Please! It was so difficult to concentrate during lecture today because I was worried about her. She didn’t get back until almost 3 this morning and wouldn’t tell me where she went or anything like that.”
He took a deep breath, for he was still nervous about revealing this aspect of himself, and about Charlotte without her knowing. There was no reason to not continue, so he simply began, still pacing before the couch.
“I’ve been thinking about this since last night. You will learn more about Charlotte, and certainly more about me, than you ever wanted to know. But there’s no way of explaining this without it. So I guess I’ll start here: Do you know what a fetish is?”
Sophie narrowed her eyes at him, evidently already piecing together where this was headed. “It’s something that turns someone on,” she answered.
“Yeah, that’s a layman’s definition, but it’s really deeper than that. For the purposes of Charlotte and I, we’ll go with the psychological definition in that it’s something other than the genitals that’s needed to become aroused and eventually orgasm.”
“So you two were into BDSM stuff? Strongly, apparently?”
“More or less, yes.”
“You and Charlotte are weird,” clearly being a touch facetious.
“Oh, just you wait. We share a particular fetish, and from both sides of it, so we complemented each other perfectly. Everything I had fantasized about doing to a woman ever since I was, like, twelve she had fantasized about being done to her. I never thought I would ever meet a woman like her,” he added, becoming wistful. “She was everything I had ever looked for, as if the universe had crafted her specifically for me.”
“You really loved her, didn’t you?”
He nodded. “‘Grace was in all her steps, heaven in her eye, in every gesture dignity and love.’” Sophie’s eyes narrowed, working through the verse. He noticed this and asked, “Didn’t have to read Milton in high school?” She shook her in a way that clearly said No, of course not, and nobody does. “Well, it’s a pair of lines Adam uses to describe Eve from his Paradise Lost.
“Anyway, yes, I loved her more than you could know. And I still love her, dearly. That never went away, nor do I think it ever will. To be honest, if I didn’t, we wouldn’t be here right now. I’m really under no illusion that I’m going to somehow win her back, but I don’t want anything bad to happen to her.”
Sophie smiled warmly. “Ok, so you were into kinky stuff. What does that have to do with what’s happening with her now?”
“Honestly, it’s all because of our fetish. Before I say anything more, do I have your word that you won’t think any differently about Charlotte?”
“Of course! She’s my best friend. Don’t you want me to promise the same about you?”
He shrugged. “Sure, that’d be nice, but let’s be honest here: we’re likely not going to interact much after this, and at that point, think of me what you will. I won’t know any differently, will I?”
“I guess so, but still, I won’t think any differently of you either.”
“Thank you for that. I appreciate it,” he responded, smiling. He nonetheless continued to pace before the couch and took a moment to shake out his arms in a final effort to pep himself broach this subject with Sophie. “OK, here goes: our shared fetish is for hypnosis. Me, on the side being the hypnotist; Charlotte, on the side being the hypnotized.”
Sophie narrowed her eyes in confusion. He quickly tried to read what that meant. It could be suspicion that he was perhaps lying to cover up the real issue, perhaps because it is more embarrassing than this, and he used the night and morning to craft this story to obfuscate. Maybe it was confusion trying to square this new information about her best friend with the circle of what she already knew. “No, that can’t be. Hypnosis isn’t real, right?”
“It definitely is. Granted, hypnosis is a bit fickle: if you genuinely don’t want it to work or don’t believe that it will, then it really won’t.”
“OK, so for our sakes here, because I think I believe you, and I really must, I don’t understand how that worked with you and Charlotte then. Did you just, like, make her want to have sex with you? Or did you make her fall in love with you?”
“No, no, it doesn’t work like that.”
Her eyes went wide. “Wait, isn’t that really weird then to tell our class you were a hypnotist if you enjoy it in that way? Why would you do that?”
Normally he welcomed questions, but he really was hoping Sophie would have some base level of knowledge about hypnosis so they could get to what he suspected was going on with Charlotte. Taking a breath, he kept his impatience in check and continued on. “I have a spiel about hypnosis that I think will help explain a lot. I’ll give you an extremely abbreviated version. I’m sure you’ve seen hypnosis in some movies and TV shows, right?” Sophie nodded. “And I assume it presented the person being hypnotized as blindly doing whatever she was told, right?” Another nod. “Hypnosis isn’t actually like that. You cannot be made to do something you normally wouldn’t want to do. If one were to try, you’d fight in some way. To be fair, in the small world of people with hypnosis fetishes, the main fantasy is to use hypnosis as total mind control and fully bend someone to you. But it doesn’t work like that; that remains just a fantasy. So I could in theory have hypnotized Charlotte to sleep with me or fall in love with me, to use your examples, but she already wanted to sleep with me and had a pretty large crush on me to begin with. Hypnosis wouldn’t have been of any use: she’d have done those without.
“What we did use hypnosis for was for things more like triggering feelings of pleasure, or controlling when she came, or playing out scenarios with her fully believing everything was real. We did a lot of takes on having her not remember who I was, but me approaching her and hypnotizing her unaware, and making her come home to spend the night with me. That is a huge fantasy both of us have had for as long as we could remember. I had even changed some things about her, which she was wholly OK with as she found that incredibly hot. Nothing major that anyone would really notice or anything core to her being, mind you; just a few small things that would just make our time together even more enjoyable for us. And I honestly don’t think there was ever a time when we had sex when she wasn’t following some suggestion I had given her, and I heavily doubt either of us would have wanted any different there.
“I’ve been into hypnosis ever since I was a kid, and I have watched who-knows-how-many hours of videos of women being hypnotized. I have never seen anyone be such as good of a hypnotic subject as Charlotte. Never. Our summer was perfect; she is perfect.”
“OK, I think I’m getting it,” she said as she assimilated this knowledge about her best friend and her ex-boyfriend. “And why you mentioned being a stage hypnotist to the class was, what, because it’s a fantasy of some kind…?”
“Pretty much,” he answered while tapping his nose. “You saw our class: you are all very attractive. And the idea of having you all hypnotized and willing to do anything I command is incredibly powerful to someone like me. I’ve played that out in my mind several times. So when you asked, my mind first went there and I answered before I could stop myself.”
“That’s kind of gross and creepy, you know,” Sophie answered, but didn’t quite seem to show on her face that she was thinking of him thus.
“Yes, I know. I am sorry about that. But if I hadn’t said that, Charlotte wouldn’t have approached me and brought forth the best four months of my life.”
“And you spent a summer of bliss together, and then something happened that ended your relationship. I know you said yesterday that you didn’t want to talk about that, so I won’t pry. So what do you think happened then?”
Now came the crucial moment of their discussion here today. He had spent the night thinking it through, making sure there couldn’t be anything else that could that reasonably explain the new Charlotte. There was not another explanation, really, that he could come up with. Of course, he was thinking of it all through the prism of his and Charlotte’s shared fetish, and that could be blinding him, and that made Sophie’s presence in front of him all the more important.
“Before me, Charlotte had never really explored hypnosis before, even though she’d thought about it since she was a child. She had done a couple of induction videos on YouTube, and those worked extremely well on her, which isn’t a surprise given she’s basically the Platonic ideal of a hypnotic subject. After she first approached me and we started our relationship, we had henceforth used hypnosis in ways we had only dreamt of up to that point.
“For us, it was almost addictive in how amazing it was. And so here is what I fear happened with Charlotte: I opened the floodgates to this new world and she continued to crave giving up control even if it wasn’t me whom she’d allow to take it. Shortly after we broke up, she went to some hypnosis community online, looking for someone to offer her the trance she came to need, or simply to help her start to feel better. Whether it started wholesomely or no, I obviously cannot say, but I fear that someone there noticed her triple supreme of beauty, submissiveness, and hypnotic susceptibility, and, under the guise of offering innocent trance, began to change her without her knowing.
“Some of the changes are obvious: he’s made her into some party girl, going out almost every night, when she was always much more quiet and stereotypically girl-next-door. He’s making her not care about her studies or her future.”
“But none of that is like her,” Sophie interjected. “You said hypnosis couldn’t make you do anything you wouldn’t want to do. How’s this guy able to do all of this to Charlotte then?”
“I think he’s been subtle about it. While what I said was true, there’s some leeway there. Incremental changes allow you to work your way past someone’s innate self-protections. Couple that with Charlotte’s incredible suggestibility and genuine desire to be hypnotized more or less constantly, and he could make great strides in a short period of time. That’s not to say she hadn’t fought, mind you. She certainly had at the beginning when you’d ask her something and she’d stammer before seeming to fully snap into place and answering. She had programming in her mind from him to provide certain answers, and early on when those didn’t align with how she actually felt or thought, she’d try to not answer in the way he wanted. That produced the stammering. But as time went on, his control over her became firmer, and her ability to fight all but vanished.”
Sophie’s face collapsed and she looked crestfallen. “So there’s nothing we can do to help her?”
“No, I didn’t say that. ‘All but vanished’ is certainly different from ‘vanished’. Think back to last night. When Charlotte saw me and noticed me, her face showed strain and she stammered some answers again. My guess is that—and I certainly intend no offense towards you with this nor am I blaming you in any way but it’s just that you didn’t know any of this—she felt that fighting in your presence was accomplishing nothing because you couldn’t possibly understand what was happening. Me, on the other hand, could certainly guess, and that, along with maybe some residual feelings towards me, allowed her to briefly fight again.”
“So what do we do first?”
“Well,” he answered, no longer feeling as confident in himself as he felt before, because of what he was going to say next, “there’s always a chance that I could be completely wrong here. Our first step needs to be to find proof that I’m right. It would all be on her computer. I’d guess there are both recordings he’s sent her as well as files to read. If we can find those, that would let us know that I’m right and give us insight into what he’s done so we can reverse it.”
“Reverse it by you hypnotizing her again?”
“Mhmm,” he nodded in response. “And I would guess, however, that you’d have to be the one to do it; not me.”
“But why me? I know nothing about this! You’re the expert here. You should do it!”
“Believe me, I would love to, but I don’t think I’ll be able to. I briefly joined the hypnosis fetish scene for a while, and the guys there who were total assholes, the ones about whom word got around to avoid, all had the same tendencies in viewing women as nothing more than cattle to be owned. I am willing to bet that an early thing he put into Charlotte’s mind is that the only man who could hypnotize her was him. His underestimating of women and hubris in his abilities will be his fatal flaws. Pride comes before the fall, and all that.” Sophie now looked as if she was going to be ill. “But don’t worry, I’ll coach you through if it comes to that. We could probably do something with your earbuds and your phone.”
“Ok, one more problem, then,” she said, already looking less blanched. “How will we get onto her computer? She’ll have a password.”
He was starting to feel rather confident now that Sophie had seemingly lent credence to his hypothesis, and answered reflecting that. “Yes, but we were heavily involved for the summer. I remember her passwords, for we shared them for several things.”
“Well, alright, then. So I think it would work best if we were to do this when she next goes out for the night. That would give us like five or six hours. Honestly, at her rate it’ll probably be again tonight. How about I ask her if she is going to when I get back, and I’ll text you what she says. If it’s a yes, then you come over a bit after she leaves and we can look together. Sound good?”
“Definitely,” he said, feeling better now that they had a plan. “I’ll keep my eye out for your text. Also, when you’re back, see if you can do any snooping as-is if Charlotte isn’t there. Doesn’t hurt to try to figure things out quicker.”
“I will,” she said as she stood up, the beginnings of some tears in her eyes. Catching him wholly off guard, she threw her arms around him in a tender hug. “Thank you so much. I’ve been so worried for so long and I finally feel like I’m going to get her back.”
She let him go and smiled up at him. “So, um, before I go,” she nervously began to ask, “can I have a few more muffins? Those were really fricking good.”
A snort-laugh unexpectedly took him, for he didn’t think that was going to be Sophie’s question. “Take as many as you like,” he answered, and she did, taking six and wrapping them in a paper towel before stuffing them into her bag.
“I’ll message you soon,” she said in parting, before opening his apartment door and exiting.
And now he had nothing to do but wait. He followed Sophie’s lead and ate too many of the muffins he had just made and did his best to distract himself by watching television. This surprised him in how well it worked, for finally watching I, Claudius (after meaning to do so for years) allowed him to stop waiting anxiously on something he had no control over. After several hours, it was a little after 4 o’clock in the afternoon when his phone buzzed with the anticipated text from Sophie: “It took a bit of grilling, but Charlotte admitted that she’ll be going out tonight around 9. Meet me in front of the dorm at about 9:30 and we can snoop!”
He felt nothing but relief at this, for he wanted to get moving on this problem and not have to wait superfluously for the opportunity to gather evidence. He had confidence that he was right in his guess, but dread throbbed in his mind for if he wasn’t. Should the latter come to pass, then Charlotte was, in fact, gone, and he and Sophie and the world would be worse for such a loss.
The rest of the afternoon passed in largely the same manner as the previous part of his day, and slowly 9:20 rolled around. Just before he walked out of the apartment, he looked wistfully back towards the left side of his bed, Charlotte’s side, hoping that soon the person who Charlotte was who had graced that side almost nightly would return. He still didn’t believe she would return physically, nor, even if they could get the real Charlotte back, did he think he was worthy of her.
He left his apartment and walked over to meet Sophie, and arrived there shortly after the bottom of the hour. She was waiting, as they had discussed after her confirmation of tonight’s meeting, at a side entrance so he could sneak in after visiting hours.
“Hey!” Sophie called when she saw him. “I’m glad you’re here. Still confident that you remember her password?”
“Yes, I am,” he answered while tapping his temple to emphasize the point.
“Great. Let’s go in then.”
Sophie took out her school ID, and tapped it against the sensor next to the door; a soft click of unlocking resulted. They walked quietly across a short hallway to get to a stairwell, for almost everyone used the elevator, even those who lived on the second floor. To no surprise, they met nobody on their way up to their dorm room on the fourth floor. Sophie took one last look up and down the hallway before unlocking the door manually with a key and ushering him inside.
The dormitory was the newest one on campus, and as a result the room itself was much larger than a stereotypical one seen in movies and television, or even his own from undergrad. It was essentially a kitchenless suite: a central room that acted as a living room where Sophie and Charlotte had a small university-provided couch and their TV, and then one small bedroom off to each side, which were basically large enough for a desk, a twin-sized bed, and small closet. While he knew that this was the nicest dorm here, he hadn’t been aware of the multi-room arrangement.
“Charlotte’s room is here on the right,” Sophie said as she made her way in that direction.
He asked her, “Wouldn’t she have locked her bedroom door?” In his dorm, which was just one room with bunk beds, the two closets had their own key, resulting in the only privacy the room provided.
“Yes, but the university did something rather dumb when designing this place. They used the same lock on the front door and both bedroom doors, so just one key is needed to unlock any of the doors,” she answered, looking proud for the first time of her school’s shortsightedness. She reached towards the doorknob and jiggled it. To both of their surprise, it fully turned to allow them entrance. “Or she just didn’t lock it,” Sophie said with a shrug.
They walked in, turned on the light, and looked towards the desk, where Charlotte’s laptop sat waiting for them.
They both stood there a moment, staring at the machine, neither moving. “Well, I guess you should be the one to sit down, since you know the password, you know?” Sophie intoned. He nodded, sat down, lifted the screen open, and turned it on. The screen blared to life and prompted for a password. He stretched out his hands and typed in the password Charlotte confessed to using for everything: T3achG1rl04. Not the most secure, of course, if you knew (the original) Charlotte’s passion and the year of her birth, but he was happy in this instant for it.
That happiness died immediately when he got the dreaded Incorrect Password message.
“I thought you said you knew her password!” Sophie said, much more in surprise and disappointment than anger.
“I do! Let me try again. It’s always possible I typed it in wrong.”
He did, and learned that he hadn’t, for the same message appeared again.
“Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck!” Anger overtook him while shock overtook Sophie as she dropped onto the bed. He stood up and paced the length of the small room. “OK, OK, we can think of something. He either made her change it, or she changed it herself after we broke up, since, well, it’s never good, really, to have someone else know your password. Oh! I might have something. Part of me hopes I’m wrong because of how dumb this password change would be, but let’s give it a shot.”
He sat down again, and typed in a new password, updated for the new Charlotte’s passion but following the same convention: Hypn0G1rl04. The screen went black for an eye-blink before Charlotte’s desktop materialized.
“You did it!” Sophie yelled as she grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him a couple times in her excitement.
“Yeah, but now we need to search for our evidence. If it was me, I’d have made her hide the files somewhere secure, protected by a different password.” However, it took almost no time to find the wanted subfolder within her Documents folder, wholly unprotected by a password. For its bizarre insecurity, he could offer no explanation. Inside, there were only a couple files: one titled DailyAudio and one titled DailyText.
“Have a preference on which we start with?” Sophie asked.
“I guess the text. It’ll be easier to find specific things instead of listening to some audio all the way through.”
“Ooo, good thinking.”
He double-clicked on the file, launching it open in NotePad, and maximized it to fill the screen. They both began to read its contents:
“Charlotte, take a deep breath in, and Sleep for your Owner.”
“‘Sleep for your Owner’? What’s that?” Sophie asked.
“Almost certainly a trigger phrase to put Charlotte back into trance so he can implant and reinforce suggestions. Really damn tacky, though.”
“He can do that by just having her read that?” She sounded incredulous.
“With Charlotte, absolutely. Like I said, she is by orders of magnitude the best subject I have ever seen. Even being merely a very good subject would allow him to do this, especially if he’d already told her that reading that phrase would drop her back down.”
They continued reading, Sophie seeming to do it word for word, as she wouldn’t necessarily know what she was looking for, he skipping around until something stuck out and caught his eye. Several passages jumped out at him, but he waited for Sophie to finish before talking this through with her. He knew she was finished because her eyes stopped spanning left to right and she clearly mouthed “Whoa” upon finishing. The script wasn’t terribly long, so it only took a handful of minutes.
“So that was… something,” she then said.
“Yeah. Anything stand out to you?”
“Early on it said to read this or listen to the audio file daily, so we don’t need to listen to that, as it’ll likely be the same thing as this.”
“I agree. Good to know we don’t need to waste our time on another diatribe. Anything else?”
“I mean, yes, in that this is all super weird to me. But I don’t know what’s important for Charlotte’s sake and what isn’t. I was hoping you’d tell me, because this is just not my area of expertise.”
“Fair enough,” he answered with a small chuckle. “So first, early on, he reinforces that he is her Owner and she is his property and that she doesn’t want anything unless he tells her that she wants it. That tells us that this is definitely not a willing partnership: Charlotte loves to be controlled and ordered around, but she always wanted to remain herself and follow her own dreams and desires. That also means that this between them didn’t start this way, but slowly, or not-so-slowly since this is Charlotte and her insane susceptibility here, morphed into this, by which time he made Charlotte too ensnared to effectively fight it.”
“Fucking asshole,” Sophie muttered bitterly.
“That’s an understatement. Second and way more importantly, a bit farther down,” he scrolled a little down the page, “he reinforces that the old Charlotte is locked away and that the Charlotte he created is the one she is now.”
“Yeah, I didn’t get that part.”
“Basically he commanded at some point that Charlotte would lock away her entire personality somewhere secure in her mind, and he created a new one for her to act upon, likely wholly different from the real Charlotte. That explains why she’s acted so differently.”
“Christ, you can do that?!”
“In theory, yeah, but it requires an incredible depth of trance. And I’d say it’s possible here…”
“Since Charlotte’s Charlotte, yeah, I get it,” she interrupted. “That doesn’t sound good though.”
“On the contrary, my dear Watson, that is excellent news. That means that the real Charlotte is still in her mind, just shackled up. That is what has been fighting the few times she’s been able to fight his programming.”
“So we can free her?”
“I think so, yes.”
“Thank fucking God.”
“Thirdly, and potentially minimally of the four things that stood out to me, there are commands to want to go out almost every night to be as slutty as she can with women and try to sleep with them. This tells me that he is incredibly jealous of other men with her and so wants to keep her away from men, but doesn’t see women as a threat. He also clearly enjoys making her do things that the real Charlotte wouldn’t do: she had told me that she can recognize when a woman is beautiful, but doesn’t feel any sexual attraction to them. He probably gets off on this aspect of the control, in fact.
“Lastly, here at the end,” he pointed to the screen, “is a bit that will be our saving grace and proved one of my guesses right. ‘Your Owner is the only man who can hypnotize you.’ He says man and not person. This confirms that he fears other men but doesn’t see women as a threat.”
“Which means I have to hypnotize Charlotte…”
“Yep. Always a chance that Charlotte could have taken the original, Anglo-Saxon sense of the word to be any human, but I doubt Charlotte is that well-versed in Old English etymology.”
“Is anyone?” she asked as dryly as he had ever heard before.
“Well, me, obviously.”
“I mean this in the best possible way, but you are very nerdy. I completely understand why Charlotte fell for you so hard.”
“Thanks.”
“Any time. So that’s that file. But what’s next?”
“Well, these are the only files we found, and they’re evidently the most important as they are daily and solidify his control over her. But there must be one-off files to do random commands and whatnot. Since they’re not in this folder, they’d have to be online somewhere. Hopefully Charlotte was as careless with her browser history as she was with hiding these files.”
He opened up a browser window on the computer, and was about to open the History tab when Sophie pointed and excitedly said, “There!”
He looked to where she was pointing; it was the leftmost button on the browser’s bookmarks bar. It read, simply, “Hypnosis Commands”.
“How could she be this lax?” Sophie asked, incredulous.
“I have absolutely no idea,” he answered. “These would be so easily found by anyone she might as well have a giant arrow pointing to her saying, ‘Hypnotically Brainwashed’.”
He clicked on the link, and it took them to a hypnosis forum site. At the top was a Messages link, which brought them to a page of messages all from one account. He scrolled through months’ worth of messages to get to the first one, which was on the day after Charlotte walked out of his apartment for the last time, and clicked on it so they could read it together.
“Hi, Charlotte! My name is Braydon, and it’s nice to meet you. Although I’m sorry it’s under these circumstances. I saw your post explaining that you just broke up with your Dom and wanted to find someone to do some hypnosis with. Maybe we can talk more?”
This seemed more like the end of an initial message, yet the message went on for a while, based on the scroll bar to the right. Continuing to read through, he saw that Braydon—stupid fucking name for a stupid fucking asshole, he thought to himself—very deftly segued into an induction. The induction part of the message was largely finished by the bottom of the screen, and he sat there stewing in hatred for a moment before looking over at Sophie. Her eyes were heavily lidded and face was rather slack. Evidently she had gone into a partial trance from this. He smiled slightly.
“Sophie,” he said forcefully. “Sophie, wake up!” he said while snapping.
This brought her back to the present and she blinked a few times before asking, “Whoa, did I just get hypnotized by reading that?”
“A light trance, definitely. It’s OK though, this was pretty skillfully done, there were no suggestions given at all, and you’re nowhere near as susceptible as Charlotte, so nothing will come of it.”
“Still, it’s a bit embarrassing.”
“It’s OK.”
“You’re a little turned on from that, aren’t you?”
“...No comment.”
“God, you and Charlotte are weird. Again, I mean that in the nicest way possible.”
“I’m sorry, I really can’t help it.”
“Anyway,” she said, rolling her eyes. “So we know what’s happened, and that’s all good. What’s next?”
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Next, we coach you up a bit on hypnosis, so you can hopefully get Charlotte into a trance and break her free. Let’s say that on Saturday, you come over to my place for that. The sooner we do, the better. I don’t want this asshole doing any more damage to her if we can avoid it.”
“Yes! I agree. 9 o’clock?”
“That’s… rather early.”
“Well, I’m a morning person and I want to get to know as much as possible in as short of time as possible. Like you said, the sooner the better.”
“Yeah, fair enough.” He exited everything on Charlotte’s computer, shut it down, and closed the lid. He checked the time and saw that it was shortly after 11. “Alright, we’ve done our job here and learned what we could. I’m going to head back to my place. I’d rather not get caught in a student’s dorm this far after hours. I’ll make my way out, and be careful not to be seen. Have a good night, Sophie, and see you at 9 on Saturday.”
“Good night. Thank you again so much for everything with this.”
“Of course. Anything to help Charlotte.”
He made his way back down the hallway, down the stairs, and out the same side door he entered without seeing anybody. As he walked home, he began to brainstorm the best ways to help Sophie learn hypnosis and, more importantly, how to break through Braydon’s programming. It was less than an hour until Friday, so he had only a little more than one day until an old student became a new student, and the most important lessons he would ever teach would begin.