The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

At exactly 12 noon on March 7th a dark-haired young woman walked into the First Federal Savings Bank in Tahoe City, Illinois.

She was petite—tiny, really. Her hair was shoulder length, done up in pigtails, and she wore dark aviator-style sunglasses that looked somewhat comical on her small pale face. A navy blue track suit and sneakers gave her the appearance of a high school or college athlete. At that quiet hour before lunch the bank was empty of customers, but she threaded her way through the maze of velvet ropes obediently, her sneakers making no sound at all on the carpet.

At the counter she passed a note across.

The teller, a middle-aged, doughy man with bifocals that hung on a chain around his neck and rested against a great belly, gave her a puzzled look. He picked up the note and read it.

It said:

GIV ME ALL MONEY OR ELSE. NO DYE PAKS. NO ALARMS.

thx! xoxo

He looked from the note to the girl, to the note, to the girl.

“Um,” he said.

“For reals,” the girl said.

“Young lady, you may think this is funny, but even as a joke this sort of thing can get you in a lot of trouble.”

“If I was kidding I would have drawn a smiley face. Chop chop.”

The teller stared at her for a long, incredulous moment, then shrugged. As ridiculous as it was to be held up by what appeared to be a freshman sorority pledge, they had rules for this sort of thing, and the rule was to hand over whatever was in the tills and let the police take it from there. It would be less than two thousand dollars anyway, hardly the price of a human life. Hardly the price of a prison sentence either, but that wasn’t his problem.

He opened his cash drawer and nodded to the other tellers to do the same. They watched the girl with raised eyebrows. One of them mouthed seriously?

At least no one was being emotionally traumatized by the robbery.

Less than a full minute later he handed a canvas bag full of all the money from the tills across the counter. The girl took it with one hand, blew a kiss to him with the other, and padded out through the maze of velvet ropes the same way she had come in, the dumbstruck eyes of the bank employees on her back.

Too easy.

Raven pushed through the heavy glass doors at the front of the bank and onto Main Street. The sirens had already begun: police headquarters was only two blocks down. She figured she had about ninety seconds before the bank was surrounded by blue lights, megaphones, and trigger happy young men who had been hired for their ability to follow orders rather than their intelligence. They probably wouldn’t be a problem for her, but it was best not to tempt fate.

She walked to the corner of the bank, then down the narrow alley beside it, emerging on a narrow street that ran parallel to Main Street. From behind her came the squeal of tires as police cruisers laid rubber on their way out of the station to make their two block trip to the bank. Sirens echoed through the maze of old brick buildings. Once she was out of sight she dropped her backpack to the ground and stuffed the canvas bag of money into it.

She gripped her track suit with both hands and, like a smaller, cuter Superman, tore it away.

It split neatly down the sides—it was the kind Olympic athletes wore to stay warm between events, with hidden velcro seams up the sides for quick removal—and was flicked to the gutter where it was forgotten until hours later when a forensics expert picked it up and decided to study it in the hopes of learning something about superhumans. All he learned was that she preferred peach shampoo.

Underneath it she was wearing a skintight suit of black spandex and nothing else.

She was stunning.

Her body was an athlete’s, tight and lithe, but because she didn’t have to work out 40 hours a week like an actual professional athlete, she hadn’t lost her feminine shape.

Her legs were spectacular. She was proud of those in particular. Shorter girls tend to have stubby legs. Not her.

As goods as it looked, the outfit wasn’t for show; it was for decreasing wind resistance. She produced one final item from the backpack: a bike helmet, the dorkiest part of her costume, but necessary.

Having super speed was not all it was cracked up to be.

When she first discovered her powers she’d decided to test them by running as fast as she could down the street. She got into a runner’s crouch at one end of the street she lived on and looked to the end. It was about a quarter of a mile long, lined with the shoddy buildings, broken sidewalks, and the faded and forgotten children’s toys in overgrown front yards that are typical of a lower class neighborhood in any city. No cars. Her friends looked on from her front yard (a three foot patch of grass between the building she lived in and the sidewalk) dubiously. They hadn’t believed her when she told them what she could do. Who would?

She winked at them, took off running as fast as she could—

—and woke up a week later in the hospital.

She had run all the way down the street and slammed into the building at the end before she’d even had time to react to what her body was doing.

It turned out she really could move at superhuman speeds. She just couldn’t think at superhuman speeds.

That was her paradox. If you were to move that fast, you had to be able to think that fast, which was impossible unless you had the brain (and eyes) of a computer. The human eye only processes about twenty-four images a second, the same as a movie projector. If The Flash actually existed and wasn’t just a comic book character, he would have to have the mind of a supercomputer, and if he had that, being able to move fast would be the least noteworthy thing about him.

So Raven needed the bike helmet.

The sirens got closer. They echoed off of the buildings, back and forth along Main Street, down alleys, filling up every little space. Blue lights flashed on the building next door. They were out front of the bank; in a minute they’d have it surrounded.

Raven zipped up the backpack, strapped it tightly to her back, and waited. Her pigtails poked out from under the helmet cutely.

This was the fun part.

A police cruiser came around the corner nearly on two wheels and came to a screeching halt in front of her, leaving a thirty foot trail of rubber behind it. Two large and young officers leaped out of it, guns drawn, huffing and puffing like Dobermans.

“Ma’am, did you see anyone come this way in the last minute?”

“No,” Raven said. This had happened before, too. They didn’t even have a description of the suspect yet, they were just responding to the alarm.

On cue, their radio crackled. “Suspect is a woman in her late teens or early twenties, black hair, approximately five foot two, carrying a green backpack.”

The officers looked at each other, then at her.

“Yes it’s me!“ she shouted. Was is that hard to believe she could rob a bank?

They pointed their guns at her lamely. She was unarmed (her outfit made that very clear), young, pretty, and half their size. She probably weighed as much as one of their legs.

“Um, please turn around and put your hands behind your back,” one of them said.

“I will if you can catch me,” she grinned.

There was a blur, and suddenly she was behind them, standing on the hood of the police cruiser.

Oh Christ. She was one of those.

One of the officers spun and aimed his gun at her chest. The other put his gun back in its holster and sighed. There would be no point.

“Forget it, Jim,” he said.

“Freeze!” Officer Jim barked.

“You can’t hit her. You’ll just end up putting some holes in that building back there, maybe kill some kid playing in his living room.”

“Don’t move!”

The other officer rolled his eyes and said something into the radio. Much like bank employees, they had rules for dealing with criminals with superpowers, and the rule was to do nothing and call a S.W.A.T team. Doing anything else would only result in injury, death, or worse, embarrassment at the hands of a girl that on her tiptoes was only as tall as their chests. On the other hand, they weren’t allowed to let her go free either. It was just one of the many paradoxes sprinkled throughout the legal system.

“You’re cute,” Raven said to Officer Jim. “I don’t mean what you’re doing with the gun there, I mean your face.”

“Get off of the car and place your hands behind your head!”

“Ok,” she said. She hopped down, raised her arms prettily, and laced her fingers behind her head, smiling at him.

Officer Jim hesitated. The gears in his thick head grinded visibly. He looked to his partner for help, got none.

It was up to him to catch a supervillain. Him alone! What would the headlines say? The mayor would shake his hand personally. Flashbulbs, pictures on the front page. He would say something humble, that it was his duty and he was only doing his job. All of this went through Officer Jim’s mind in less time than it took to narrow his eyes.

He holstered his gun, fastened the little strap over it, glared at the girl, and lunged for her.

He caught a bunch of air in a bear hug.

She was gone.

His partner was laughing.

“Well, what was I supposed to do?” he said, straightening up.

His partner shook his head and grinned. Officer Jim had lipstick on his cheek.

Raven zipped down streets and through alleys, keeping to a speed she could handle: about 90 miles an hour on straightaways and 30 on turns. On a wide open stretch of highway she could reach 150 easily, but after that wind resistance became a problem.

Stopping could be a problem, too. A big one.

Her abilities were analogous to those of a sprinter: a runner can go from zero to full speed in almost no time at all, from a crouch. That same runner won’t be able to stop instantly, though, and neither could Raven. The main difference between her and a normal athlete was that she—and she didn’t know how, no one did, although the theories were plentiful, from the scientific to the religious to the mystical—could somehow produce more energy than was physically possible.

Even if she could stop instantly, it would kill her—the old joke about how “it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop” was exactly right. It seemed that some rules of physics applied and not others. It was different for everyone that had an ability: one rule of the universe, just one, seemed not to apply to them. Or, more accurately, to her, because for reasons that were just as unexplained, only women ever developed abilities, and only women born after October of 1981 at that.

History bored her.

She took a turn a little too wide, kicked off of a building, and sent herself flying towards a dark alley. They couldn’t catch her, but if she hung around too long there would be enough of them to get annoying and then one of them might get lucky: a lucky shot, or a cruiser parked around a blind turn for her to trip over. She’d had her fun and now it was time to go.

The alley was narrow and long, with trash barrels and dumpsters at regular intervals beside dark doors with flaking paint. She looked to the end, took a quick inventory of every object she would have to dodge, and picked up speed.

By the time she saw the trap she was going 50 miles an hour and it was far too late to stop.

It looked like a clothesline, hung about ten feet from the ground: too high for anyone standing in the alley to use, and too low to be reached by the windows above. That in itself wasn’t strange; alleys were dirty places, little frontiers not owned by anyone, gathering junk for years, decades at a time. As she got closer—about three-quarters of a second later—she saw what looked like a thick black rope hanging from the center of the clothesline.

Then, when it was a mere thirty feet away, she saw the trap: a network of thin black ropes or cables, stretched across the alley like a giant spider’s web.

A net.

No.

Her eyes went wide as she realized what was about to happen. She leaned back, trying to stop, but at 50 miles an hour her momentum was far too great.

Her sneakers made two long streaks on the greasy pavement as she frantically tried to put the brakes on, and then they caught on something hard—possibly something placed there specifically to trip her at that point—and sent her flying through the air.

The net snapped free of the wall and encircled her upper body as she tumbled into it.

Her arms, which had been pinwheeling comically as she soared through the air, were knocked down and pinned to her sides. Her wrists were pinned to her hips. Before she’d even come to a complete stop she was wrapped up exactly like a fly in a spider’s web, and then the material snapped backwards like a rubber band. For one terrible moment she thought it was going to slingshot her back the other way, but no— it held her tight. She rebounded through the air, then back the other way, then back the other way, getting more tangled up in it each time.

No.

She bobbed in the air, kicking and screaming with rage.

The material was flexible but deadly strong. She thrashed. The web tightened. She thrashed. The web tightened. Her elbows were squeezed against her ribs painfully, her breasts pushed upwards.

It was no use. She was caught, held irrevocably in the stretchy black strands, a cute little villain ready to be sent to a cute little prison.

A small figure stepped out from behind a dumpster in the shadows of the alley.

It was a woman—or a girl. She was wearing what looked like a purple HAZMAT suit minus the mask. It was like the Girl Scout version of a Ghostbuster’s uniform. It was ridiculous. Enormous round glasses, almost goggles, sat on a button nose. She had not gotten the memo that superheroes are supposed to dress sexy.

She approached Raven and looked her up and down curiously.

“Bank robbery is a felony,” the girl said.

Raven spat and cursed.

“My name is Paladin. I’m making a citizen’s arrest, authorized under city code three four seven dash—”

“Fuck you,” Raven screamed.

The girl was unfazed by the verbal abuse. She produced a small gadget from her pocket and pressed a button on it. A barrier slid out of nowhere at each end of the alley, cutting them off from the rest of the world.

“Mirrors,” Paladin explained. “They’re at an angle, so to anyone passing by from the direction of downtown—the direction the police will be coming from—it will appear, at first glance, as if the alley is empty. Of course it will only stand up to a cursory inspection, but I’m hoping it will buy a few minutes, on the off chance that—”

“Fuck you,” Raven spat again. She kicked the air in the direction of her kidnapper and the net constricted around her even more.

“The more you struggle the tighter that will get. Eventually it will cut off your breathing and you will lose consciousness, which suits me just fine. But if you keep screaming like that, then someone will call the police, and then you’ll go to jail.”

Raven paused her useless, mid-air tantrum.

“You’re not turning me in?”

“I hadn’t planned to, but you’re making it difficult to avoid.” The girl—Paladin—began to rummage in her large pockets again. Her face was placid, unperturbed. There was an odd lack of expression in it that was unnerving. It was like she was observing a bird caught in a net, not a human being.

“Then what do you want?” Raven’s face didn’t show it but a wave of relief, elation nearly, was spreading through her. She wasn’t going to jail. Who was this girl? Didn’t matter. She wasn’t going to jail.

“I want to rehabilitate you and help you become a productive member of society. Prison is nearly useless for that end—in fact, it’s a detriment. Even if someone did decide to change their ways they’ve been marked by the system as a convicted criminal and getting a good legitimate job is difficult. Statistically, ninety percent of convicted blah blah blah...”

Oh God. She was one of those.

Some costumed vigilantes, the especially idealistic ones, didn’t believe in prison. They thought that if you could only get through to a criminal you could convince them to give up their life of crime and everyone would be happy and hold hands. The poster child for the movement was a woman that went by The Green Ghost, or maybe The Green Gale. She’d started out as a petty criminal, using her powers to rob liquor stores or whatever, got caught, got put into some new 6 month rehabilitation program, and when she came out she was clean and went on to be one of the most powerful and famous heroes in the city. She toured the country giving lectures on the virtues of talking to budding villains rather than just locking them up.

Raven almost threw up a little.

It was good, though. It meant that even though she was the one who was currently tied up, she had the upper hand, in a way. Something was wanted from her, something she could pretend to deliver until she could get the hell out of there and relocate to someplace with less capes. Maybe Mexico City. Maybe the Bahamas.

She hid a smile and pretended to be furious.

“Fuck rehab,” she said.

“It’s not rehab.” The girl removed Raven’s bike helmet and aviator sunglasses, which Raven was helpless to prevent, and produced something from one of the enormous pockets. It looked like a set of headphones, but too small to fit on someone’s ears. She stood on her tiptoes and reached up to place it on Raven’s head.

Raven jerked her head away, suspicious.

“What’s that?”

“A neural dampener. These—” she indicated the ‘earpieces’ of the headphones—“emit a weak electrical pulse at the same frequency as brain waves. That’s how your brain works, with tiny electrical signals. This will cause interference in your frontal cortex, and the result is that you’ll be unable to form conscious thoughts, yet the rest of your nervous system will continue to function. It’s the simplest way for me to transport you without you doing something unexpected.”

“What?“ What?

“It won’t hurt. You won’t feel anything at all, actually, or even be aware of time passing. It will be like a deep, dreamless sleep.” She reached for Raven’s head with the device again.

“Are you crazy? No, wait. Wait. Wait. I’ll come with you. Look at me, I can hardly move. I won’t do anything.” She talked fast, trying to make eye contact while at the same time trying to keep her head away from the suddenly sinister-looking device. Who knew what it would do to her? It was a running joke that the science types had gadgets that constantly malfunctioned, exploding or turning on their creators and generally causing more havoc than the havoc they were trying to prevent. It was funny, especially when some wannabe hero blew themselves up, but this was her brain. What if she never woke up? What if it made her a vegetable? Had it been tested? She was suddenly very scared, more scared than she was of prison.

“Please stay still,” Paladin and her maddeningly placid expression said.

“Get away from me!“

Raven shrieked and tossed her head—

Metal touched her temples—

The world receded.

She had only an instant of sensation—her body relaxing, her chin dropping forward against her chest, her eyes closing—and then she stopped remembering.

She hung limp in the net, her legs loose, the laces of her sneakers swaying lazily six inches above the pavement.

Lights, bright lights.

Raven jerked as she came back to herself. She had to get away, keep tossing her head so that that girl couldn’t put the thing on her head, maybe someone would come along and—

She blinked. She wasn’t in the alley anymore. What?

“I told you you’d be unaware of the passing of time,” Paladin’s voice came from beside her.

Raven tried to turn her head towards it and couldn’t. She tried to sit up and couldn’t. The light was bright, painful, almost in her face.

She was strapped to a table, or a gurney. Straps everywhere: on her ankles, above her knees, on her wrists, above the elbows, and a thick and heavy strap across her forehead keeping her head from turning even an inch. She pulled against them, her confusion turning into panic.

“What is this?” she shrieked.

“I’m going to rehabilitate you. I told you that when we met. The dampener hasn’t affected your memory, has it?” She leaned in and scrutinized Raven’s eyes. “Can you tell me your name?”

“I know my name! You said we were going to rehab! Where am I?”

“You’re in my lab, and I said no such thing. I said I was going to rehabilitate you.” She withdrew from Raven’s limited field of vision, leaving Raven with just the obnoxious light to look at. She closed her eyes to block it out, but that was somehow scarier, so she opened them again.

She tried to see what else she could see. To her right, from the corner of her eye, she saw a metal track along the ceiling with something hanging from it at intervals, she couldn’t see what. Something silvery and long.

There was the top of what was undoubtedly a computer screen, more than one of them. Behind her—or rather, above her, in the direction her body was pointing—was what looked like an enormous silver tube, human-sized. Typical mad scientist stuff. Straining so hard to look around with just her eyes began to make her dizzy.

Down, past her nose, she could see only the tops of her breasts and a black blur that meant she was still wearing her costume. Good. Somehow she’d expected to be naked. But no, villains did that, and this girl was not one of them, or claimed not to be.

The scant spandex unitard suddenly made her feel vulnerable, though, and she became aware of her body, and was glad that her kidnapper was a woman.

Rehabilitate. The word had a sinister ring.

She flexed her hands and pulled at the restraints. Her body felt dopey and slow and weak. Paladin must have been watching, because she said:

“I gave you some mild muscle relaxers. I was worried, considering your abilities, which I don’t fully understand, that you might hurt yourself in an attempt to get free.”

“Let me up,” Raven said thickly. Then, swallowing her pride, she added through gritted teeth: “please. You’ve got me. I’m not going anywhere. You don’t have to keep me tied up like a... a... dog,” she finished lamely, not able to think of something that one did keep tied up.

Well, one kept kidnapping victims tied up. Is that what she was? She’d been taken off the street, drugged, and bound.

This was not the typical hero routine. Something was off.

“Ok,” she said after a minute of silence in which her request went unanswered. “So what is this... rehabilitation, exactly.”

No answer.

Paladin approached from the right, her stupid boots squeaking on the floor. She was holding a small, clear plastic mask. It had a round rubber band on each side and a thin plastic tube attached to the front, which ran out of Raven’s field of vision towards the head of the bed.

A gas mask.

“What is that? Hey.” The mask was placed over her mouth and nose, and the little rubber straps were wrapped around her ears to hold it in place. ”HEY.” Raven tried to turn her head away, but of course, couldn’t. Straps, straps everywhere. Panic welled up within her. A gas mask?

“What is this? HEY. Answer me.”

Paladin moved out of sight again. Her voice, when she spoke, was tinny and high, almost childish. It skittered up and down the polished walls of the sterile room. “That machine behind you is called Excalibur. It uses a combination of electro-magnets, lasers and microwave beams to pinpoint and alter specific areas of the brain.

“In your case, the parts of the brain related to motivation and impulse control will be corrected to remove your violent and antisocial tendencies.

“When you wake up you will no longer feel the need to participate in criminal behavior—in fact, you’ll be unable to. You will have the desire to participate in society in a positive way, and to live a productive life.” She said it casually, as if describing how cookie dough became cookies.

A cold stone settled in Raven’s stomach.

It was a joke. It had to be. The old scare ‘em straight routine.

If it was not a joke, then she was dealing with a crazy woman.

“Heh,” Raven made herself say. “Heh. Ok. You got me. You’re funny, Paladin. It was Paladin, right?”

Keep talking.

Use her name frequently.

Make a connection. That was what they said kidnapping victims should do, right?

“People always think I’m joking,” Paladin mumbled. “It’s strange.” She pressed some buttons on the instrument panel. “This will give you a pleasant, drowsy feeling, and you may hallucinate lightly for a moment. You will be unaware of the procedure itself. In this latest version surgery isn’t required, so you’ll be up and around in a few hours.”

The machinery above Raven’s head began to hum, and underneath that sound was another sound. It was innocuous, barely audible, but sinister: the machine was hissing.

Gas.

A moment after she heard it she felt it: a light breeze blowing on her lips from the front of the little mask. Colorless and odorless. She suddenly knew that it was not a joke, or a scare-her-straight routine, and it was not the elaborate machinery that finally convinced her, or the straps, or the gas mask: it was the girl’s small pale face, and her maddeningly placid expression behind those glasses and that button nose. That face didn’t joke; it didn’t know how.

“Whoa. Wait. Shut it off. I’ll give the money back.”

“I’ve already returned the money you stole.”

“There’s more! A lot more! I’ll tell you where it is!”

“Yes, you will. After the procedure you will answer any question I ask. The part of your brain that helps you lie will be inhibited.”

Hiss, hiss. A colorless, odorless gas that would make her feel... pleasant.

Drowsy.

Unaware.

And then...

She forced herself to be still and speak calmly, even though every inch of her body wanted pull against the restraints. It took all of her will just to keep her voice level.

“Paladin. You’re not thinking this through. When the local capes find out about this they’re going to come after you. It won’t matter that I robbed a bank, this is against the rules. Every cape in the city will come after you, and if you somehow stop them then every cape in the country will, and the police, and if you stopped them then the national guard would come, then the real military—

“It’d be like killing a cop, Paladin. Never ending escalation. Think about it.”

She paused to let this reasonable (and very true) argument sink in, aware of every second that passed and the hiss that went along with it. Then she followed it up with what should have been a home run:

“Take me to jail. I want to go to jail.” She really did. “You can’t not take me to jail if I’ve committed a crime and want to turn myself in. There’s laws. You’re a hero, right?”

That should have sealed the deal. It would have, if she had been speaking to someone with the slightest bit of reason.

“The way that the people who call themselves ‘heroes’ do things obviously isn’t working or the world wouldn’t be the way it is,” Paladin said. A look of disgust flashed across her face. It was the only real emotion she’d displayed the entire time and it was gone as fast as it came. “If they try to stop me from doing what’s right then they, logically, are on the side of wrong. I’ll take care of them if and when that happens. I’ve already planned for every possible outcome of this situation.”

And there it was. She was talking about going up against every hero in the city on the basis of being more right than they were.

She was crazy. Toys in the attic, bars on the windows, crazy.

Paladin adjusted a dial, squinted at a screen, pushed her glasses up her cute button of a nose, then adjusted another dial. “Please breathe normally.”

“Listen—”

“Shouting is not breathing normally.”

Raven lost her brief battle with composure. She was getting lightheaded. ”HELP!“ At the top of her lungs. ”HELP!“

Paladin was still talking; Raven wasn’t listening. She shrieked incoherently, trying to shake the mask off, anything, but the bonds were so tight and numerous that the only part of her she could move was her midsection. She managed to lift her ass a full inch off of the table. The flexing of her muscles was visible through the black spandex as her limbs strained uselessly against the bonds. Even in her panic she was attractive.

Hiss, hiss.

A dense, heavy, pleasant feeling began to fill her body.

It was like the Valium she’d once taken recreationally, but more so. Much more so. It hit her hard, then harder.

Her limbs became loose, rubbery, difficult to coordinate. Trying to move them was like trying to move spaghetti with her mind.

Anyone, she was screaming, but the sound in the room was becoming distant. Even her own voice sounded muffled, like a clock radio tucked under a pillow, a morning DJ saying something garbled and unimportant and only partially understood. She lost track of what she was saying. The clock radio trailed off.

A joke. Had to be. A scare-her-straight routine.

Little motes of nothing danced across her vision, merged, became nonsensical things. They became a sunset, pink and orange and dimming.

She was in it, dimming with the sun.

She was...

Paladin squinted at a wide LCD display, scrutinizing data that made sense only to her. Whether it was good or not was unguessable from her face. She seemed to have only two expressions: the placid blankness, and a light frown when she was thinking. She never smiled.

The white desk in front of her ran the entire length of the room and was lined with banks of computer servers, monitors, keyboards, strange instruments with enigmatic functions. Everything was custom built and therefore a bit haphazard, but effort had been made to keep it orderly.

Above her and behind her six enormous mechanical arms hung from a U-shaped metal track on the ceiling. The arms were currently hanging limp, but within them glittered many chrome pistons, rods, and motors, hinting that they would have enormous power if they came to life.

The room was white and spotless from floor to ceiling, all except for one wall. In stark contrast to the rest of the room, the wall with the door in it was painted black. She’d done that when she was younger and more idealistic; it symbolized that the outside world was evil and that only in her lab was light and truth.

Now that she was older it seemed silly. But wasting time and paint to correct it would also be silly.

Behind her, on the opposite side of the room from the computer equipment, the small time criminal that went by the name Raven lay drugged and motionless, still strapped down.

Her large dark eyes were unfocused, half closed. Her breathing was slow and even.

Her lips were parted slightly beneath the gas mask, the source of the invisible drug that kept her in a twilight state between consciousness and unconsciousness. It was a rather simple combination of chemicals for its profound effect, but then, all drugs were. It kept Raven’s mind, for lack of a better term, open and ready.

She was cute. Pretty, even. Nicely shaped, as her skintight costume was helpless to hide.

She would be useful for other things than just what she could do with her powers.

“It may be a long time before you’re self-aware again,” Paladin said over her shoulder. “I would have told you that earlier but you were upset enough already. Which was irrational, by the way. You clearly couldn’t get free; that energy would have been better spent on mentally preparing yourself for your new changes.” Her tone was that of a teacher scolding a student for doing something stupid but harmless.

“I think you’re right about other costumed vigilantes coming after me for this. There will be a lot to do to prepare for that. You will be my servant and, when necessary, bodyguard, until that’s finished.

“Don’t worry, it will be like before—you won’t have any sense of time passing. While you serve me you will have a limited consciousness that will not store memories.” She entered one final sequence of commands into the control panel. “Lilly, start the procedure.”

Lilly was the computer system. It wasn’t artificially intelligent— not yet, anyway—but Paladin often spoke to it as if it was.

The machinery around Raven began to hum again. She hadn’t been able to see it before (being strapped down and all), but the bed she lay on was actually part of a much larger device. It resembled an MRI machine from a hospital: a thin bed on rails that slid into a large tube. In this case the tube was silver, and while some parts of its operation were similar to an MRI machine, its function was decidedly different.

The bed slid slowly into the tube, taking the insensate Raven with it.

When it stopped the metal tube had encircled her body completely. It hummed again, several different tones of hums: machinery moving within machinery. From somewhere within the tube two red lasers focused on Raven’s eyes.

Raven’s pupils contracted, trying to shut out the light: a natural reaction, purely physical.

Hum, hum went the tube as hidden electromagnets and microwave beams located and isolated the area of her brain that controlled involuntary physical reactions.

Several small adjustments were made. New pathways were opened, others closed, others opened and held that way.

Raven’s pupils dilated, widening with eerie speed until her irises were nearly invisible.

The part of her mind that controlled the contraction of her eyes had been put on hold.

Hum, hum.

That was it; no more changes were outwardly visible, but the machine had begun its work and it would continue for hours, altering the petite criminal’s mind. The gas would keep her mind in an open and pliable state so that it wouldn’t try to repair itself mid-procedure, as it would normally if its connections became scrambled—for example, after a bump on the head.

For the next six hours Raven lay immobile, and the entire time there was only one outward sign that she was doing anything other than sleeping:

Forty-five minutes into the procedure her left foot twitched briefly as the area of her brain that governed voluntary muscle movement was altered. The machine quickly adjusted and re-did the maneuver, and her foot stopped twitching.