Everyone in it is 18+ and everyone outside should be as well. Inspired by Anynom’s “Deprogramming”. Don’t make me spell out the sorority name’s pun.
Spellbinders Saga
By Arthur N. Owen
Volume I: Chance of a Lifetime; Chapter 5: Special Instructions
David Wilson practically skipped to the dining hall to meet up with his tutoring client. Tonight’s girl, sophomore Kelly Stone, was the ultimate catch. He’d had a crush on her for six months. He was so into her he hadn’t sent the subliminal video, preferring the honor of hypnotizing Kelly in person. He also regretted the trigger included in said video (Kelly Brains to Jelly) and hoped he could settle on a better one.
It wasn’t even Kelly’s looks that drew David to her (though she was quite attractive). It was her wild spirit. The incident last semester that had made sure no one in their class would EVER forget the name Kelly Stone had caused his attraction to her. Kelly had been caught sneaking into her then-boyfriend’s dorm room. While this would normally fall in the category of prohibited but mundane, she had snuck in by climbing up the side of the building to the fifth floor-only to find him in bed with another woman. She grabbed a prop sword from his dresser and was about to attack him with it when campus security illuminated the confrontation with a spotlight and a lucky photographer caught the whole scene. Because the other woman was also violating res-life policy (and thus so was the now ex-boyfriend), the three of them got minimum punishment. However, the photograph was on the front page of the next issue of the school newspaper, with the headline, “REVENGE OF THE SEXY NINJA,” a nickname that had stuck with Kelly to this day. Not that it wasn’t appropriate, as Kelly was extremely athletic, having been in gymnastics and martial arts since she was old enough to walk, and learning parkour and Savate from her roommate currently. Kelly no longer minded being called “Sexy Ninja”, she had somewhat embraced it.
Their meeting in the buffet line was nothing if not memorable. When an upperclassman cut in front of them, Kelly berated him while making a shaking motion with her hand that he couldn’t see. David immediately understood and shook the senior’s cola can while he was distracted by Kelly. Five minutes later, as they sat down, they were treated to the sight of their target drenching himself with soda. David was treated to another wonderful sight-a mischievous look in Kelly’s brilliant blue eyes that made his crush on her grow even more.
Like many of his clients, Kelly had a source of anxiety. It stemmed from the imposter syndrome she felt at her sorority, Tau Nu Alpha. Kelly had only pledged because she was a legacy-her mother had been a member. While this would be a source of pride for most women-Tau Nu Alpha was one of the most exclusive sororities on campus-it only made Kelly miss her mother more. Eliza Stone (formerly Laurent, as she had been known during college) had died from cancer when Kelly was eight. While Kelly normally loved competing with people, a dead woman makes for a poor rival. The previous sorority president was the daughter of Eliza’s former roommate, so she had looked out for her during freshman year and pledging. However, that woman had graduated and the newly elected president, “Empress” Erica Miyamoto, had decided to single out Kelly as an example of lowered standards, with the “Sexy Ninja” incident being brought up almost weekly. It didn’t help that Kelly hated to conform if she could avoid it, preferring the “less traveled path” whenever possible. The less traveled path frequently included parkouring up the side of the sorority house, rather than using the front door (even when she wasn’t trying to avoid the matron), which Irked Erica to no end.
The acronym for Tau Nu Alpha was made into an ironic standard for the sorority. There was an implication that every sister of the sorority had to be attractive, and not a single one of them, going back to their founding, failed that test. Even Ingrid “the Insomniac”, the matron, was beautiful for her advanced age. David’s research into Kelly’s mother revealed that she had been gorgeous, a near doppelganger for Charlize Theron. While Kelly inherited her mother’s golden blonde hair, sparkling blue eyes and pretty elfin face, she only stood a hair over five feet, and her breasts barely qualified as B cups. The only part of her body that could qualify as exceptional were her legs, and even those were diminished by her small stature. Kelly might not think herself hot enough to be a Tau, but David disagreed vehemently.
The class that Kelly needed help with was algebra. Despite being the daughter of an accountant, Kelly claimed that her sisters inherited all of their father’s skill in math, but she did not. David was able to help her through the material, but at about 8:30 he decided to switch to the other thing. Since Kelly had not been “primed” with a subliminal video, David had created a program which caused a spiral to appear on the screen of his laptop, while still showing the existing content. After pulling the computer away from her to activate it, then giving it back so she could stare at the hidden spiral for a minute or two, he began the induction. “Kelly, I know you need to learn the material, but it’s boring to look at it for so long.”
“Yes...Boring” she said. Her posture was starting to relax, but it almost looked like she was fighting the effect.
“You’re bored and you’re tired of looking at it. So very, very tired, aren’t you?”
“I’m...very...tired.” Kelly said, softly and sleepily. Her eyes were starting to blink heavily. David watched her head succumb, but her body resisted. It didn’t make any sense. Sure, someone as energetic as Kelly would not want to sleep much, but the need would remain.
“You don’t want to look at the work anymore, do you, Kelly?”
“No...I...don’t” No one should be dropping this quickly, even if they weren’t sleeping enough. Had Kelly been hypnotized before?
“Well, if you close your tired eyes you won’t have to look at it, right?”
“Yessss...close...eyes” and she did just that, slumping in the chair. Immediately the look on her face went from placid to terrified, despite her eyes still being closed. “No, no, not again!” she said. It was like she was having a nightmare, something that shouldn’t be possible.
David needed answers “Kelly, have you been hypnotized before now? If so, by who?”
“Yes.” she said “Dr. Paterno hypnotized me. I’m his slave.”
“His WHAT?!” said David, nearly shouting. David put Kelly in a waking trance so she could communicate better. She then spilled the entire thing to his astonished ears. She had taken Professor Paterno’s introductory psychology course the previous semester. When she was in danger of falling it, he had brought her to his office and hypnotized her. From that point on, she was actually in a waking trance, forced to obey the pitiless professor and satisfy his sexual needs. He hadn’t even given her the luxury of amnesia-she knew everything he’d made her do, but she couldn’t say a thing until David had inadvertently weakened his control. According to Kelly, there were currently five other students in his power (two in each grade level counting her for the sophomores-he hadn’t had a chance to nab any freshmen yet). David figured that her subconscious mind recognized that someone else trying to control her mind might free her from Paterno, and it had surrendered to seize that opportunity.
David figured that Kelly was fighting Paterno’s control as much as she could (though with little effect). He knew she had a vivid imagination, so he figured he could arm her subconscious with the means to liberate itself. “Kelly, what’s your favorite movie?”
“Seems like a weird time to ask that, but it’s Mars Attacks.” she said. David now knew how to help her.
“I need you to visualize all of the terrible programming that Paterno put in your head. Let it coalesce into an image of something you need to confront. What do you see?”
“It’s him. It’s Paterno. He looks so smug.” Kelly said. That made sense. The man who did this to her was a better example of a monster than anything her imagination could conjure, and someone human looking worked better with the fantasy David was going to use.
“Yes, it’s Paterno. But it’s also General Decker from Mars Attacks. He’s in the bunker with the President when the Martians break in. Look at Paterno in the general’s uniform.” David painted the fantasy in her mind.
“General Paterno” Kelly said. A smile started to form on her face, the first since she’d gone under.
“Okay, that’s what we’ll call him. He’s threatening the Martians, forgetting how badly the humans have been losing at every turn. Forgetting that they had shrugged off the most powerful weapons in humanity’s arsenal. Forgetting that they’d just breached what was supposed to be the most secure place on the planet and killed everyone they found besides him and POTUS! And what did the Martians do to the foolish general?” David needed Kelly’s “demon” to be weakened in her eyes so she could vanquish it herself. He grabbed something from his closet.
“They shrunk him.” Kelly answered.
“Yes Kelly, they shrunk him.” He handed her his Nerf pistol, though the darts had been removed. “Here’s the shrink ray. I think you know what comes next.” Kelly pulled the trigger as hard as she could. Her mesmerized mind saw “General Paterno” getting smaller and smaller as he continued to yell. By contrast, her smile was getting bigger and bigger. After about a minute David said “Okay that’s enough. Don’t want him to vanish on us. General Paterno is still there, still screaming, still oblivious to how pathetic he has become and how pathetic he was even before he was downsized.” Kelly laughed at this, which was progress in itself. You could not give someone a sense of humor through hypnosis. “You can still see him, can’t you. Where is he? Point him out.”
Kelly pointed without hesitation. “Next to your garbage can.”
David turned over a plastic cup and placed it on the floor where Kelly was pointing. “The general is still there, he’s just under the cup. Do you remember what happened to him next?”
Kelly said, with a mischievous smirk. “He gets stomped.”
“Yes, he does. When I count to three, you will stand up and stomp the cup until General Paterno is dead and gone. When he is gone, all of the horrible programming will go with him, and you will wake up from your trance, liberated. Do you understand?
“Hell yeah.” David could tell that the Kelly he had fallen for was rising back to the surface, for good this time.
“1. 2. 3.” Kelly stood up and walked over to the cup on the floor. While the general in the film had been crushed to death with a single stomp, Kelly stomped the cup half a dozen times, twisting her foot on the last one for good measure. You could barely tell it was ever a cup once she was done, and you definitely couldn’t call it one anymore. Immediately after that, she collapsed onto David, sobbing.
“Thankyouthankyouthankyou!” Kelly said. She was no longer leaning into David, but hugging him tightly. “My Hero! I don’t know why you hypnotized me...but for tonight I really don’t care because I’d still be a slave if you hadn’t!”
“Don’t celebrate yet, Kelly” warned David. “You might be free, but Paterno still has five other girls in his clutches, and maybe more who graduated.”
“Nah, he wipes them as a ‘graduation present’ unless they’re staying here, which none did as far as I know.” said Kelly, wiping her remaining tears. “You saved me, you can stop him and save the others.”
“It isn’t as easy as that.” explained David. “Right now, the only advantage we have is that he doesn’t know I freed you, and any action we take will lose that. You go at the king, you best not miss. Unless we can expose what he’s done, he’ll just keep enslaving students.”
“So how do we expose him?”
“We can’t.” explained David. It was a similar speech to the one he had given to Brandon, but now he and Kelly were on the helpless end. “Hypnotic enslavement is so unbelievable we would get laughed out of the police precinct. We have no evidence other than your account, and if you testify, it’s your word against the other five girls, programmed to back him up. On top of all that, the law doesn’t want to pursue something like this because of what the existence of mind control would mean to justice in general. My dad’s a lawyer, so I know that the burden of proof is on the plaintiffs, which would be us. Unless we can get some hard evidence, all we will accomplish by pursuing this is putting targets on our backs!”
Kelly looked like a child who’d been told Christmas was cancelled. “If you can’t even protect me from Paterno’s wrath, I might as well go back to him.”
“THAT’S IT!!!” shouted David, excitedly.
“What’s it?” asked a confused but hopeful Kelly.
“Paterno doesn’t know he doesn’t control you anymore. He wouldn’t find it suspicious if you came to his office.” offered David.
“Sure, but then what?”
“Then you sneak into his computer and help me hack it. We can find the evidence there.”
The mischievous look was back. “I’m liking the plan so far, and I can sneak by him no problem. But what if he tries to control me and gets no response?”
Now came the crucial part for David. “With your permission, I can hypnotize you again.”
“And what good will THAT do? Paterno is already out of my head.”
“Yes, and I can lock it down. Put in programming to make sure he can’t get in again if he tries.”
“I don’t want you to put anything in there that isn’t necessary. I’ve spent too long in Hypnoville already, I’m in no hurry to go back.”
“If I wanted to take advantage of you, I would have done it the first time I put you under.”
“Fair enough,” conceded Kelly, sitting back down in the chair. “Permission granted. Hyp me.”
What Kelly didn’t know (though she probably suspected) was that David would have taken advantage of her if someone hadn’t been in her head already. Now that the previous occupant had been evicted, it was time for HIS programming to move in. As he pulled out the hypno-coin, he decided that he wasn’t going to put in any programming that wasn’t specifically for the purpose of protecting her or him. “Kelly, follow the coin.” David said, moving it in a figure 8. “If you want to stop Paterno, you have to trust me. Do you trust me?”
This was the third time Kelly had been hypnotized, and the second time tonight. Her eyes, following the spiral on the coin, were already starting to glaze over, “I...trust...you...David.” she said, smiling.
“Good, Kelly. Trust that you can let your mind and body rest and both will be safe with me. Trust that this is the only way to stop him so you want this to happen.”
“Safe...with...you...Want...to...happen” she sighed.
“Good. You will go into a trance on the count of three. One, two, three!” Kelly’s eyes shut and her face slackened, but her body remained upright in the chair. Since David’s subject was fully aware that she had been hypnotized, metaphors and trickery were unnecessary. So long as Kelly was convinced that this would lead to Paterno’s downfall, her mind would welcome his programming. “The deeper you go, the stronger the protection I can provide, Kelly,”
“O,,,kay,,,” she mumbled,
“Count down from ten and go deeper with each number,”
“Ten, Nine, Eight, Sseven, Sssssix, Fffffffive, Ffffffffffffourrrrrrr, Thrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, Twooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, Onnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnne,” she counted. Her body remained upright the entire time, her head only slumped over when she reached “two”. David had to admire how much control she maintained of herself, even this deep. He also admired the peaceful look on her beautiful face, a first for him, considering how energetic she was.
“Alright, Kelly. You can return to this safe, deep place whenever I, and only I, say the words ‘Special Instructions’. Nothing and no one else can bring you here, and you wouldn’t want that to happen anyway, would you?” instructed David.
“No...Only...trust...you...with...my...head” Kelly’s peaceful smile had grown. She still might not want to live in Hypnoville, but with David as a tour guide, she wouldn’t mind visiting once in a while. He took her to better spots in the town than Paterno had, anyway.
“Good. Now here is what else you need to know to stay safe,,,”
“,,,You will remember only your trigger and that your mind is safely locked without it. Count to ten with me and wake up, understand?”
“Understood.” said Kelly. “One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten.” Her eyes blinked open and she gave a smile. “When this is all over, we’re going to have a long talk about why you were hypnotizing me...”
“DAVID, I KNOW YOUR CLIENT IS STILL HERE! HOGAN HASN’T SEEN ANYONE LEAVE THE BUILDING IN HALF AN HOUR! WHOEVER IS IN THERE WITH YOU SHOULD HAVE LEFT AT LEAST TEN MINUTES AGO!” Regina interrupted whatever Kelly was going to say, loudly knocking the whole time. David stood up and walked to the door and opened it while Kelly gathered her books. As soon as Regina saw the short blonde she glared at her and said. “Get. Home. NOW!”
Kelly was still a little groggy from the hypnosis and mildly disheveled looking. David told her. “We can meet for breakfast tomorrow and talk about the next steps.”
“Okay. It’s a date.” Kelly said with a mischievous grin. She gave him a quick hug and a peck on the cheek before running for the elevators.
As soon as Kelly was gone, Regina looked at David quizzically. “Your client stays late, comes out of your room a mess, you talk about seeing each other tomorrow, and she kisses you goodbye? I don’t want to know what really happened, do I?” David was surprised that her programming hadn’t stepped in, but Regina was giving him just enough of the benefit of the doubt to keep it at bay.
“No, you don’t.” he said. “Fortunately, you won’t have to. R.A., Relax Absolutely,”
This time Regina’s eyes were closed for just over a second before she exclaimed “Ready to Accommodate!”
“Regina, you will believe that my client had already left when you knocked on my door. You will not remember any specifics about her because you two never interacted. You will defend this position vehemently if Hogan or anyone else decides to push the issue, You absolutely KNOW that my client was gone when you got here. Repeat that,”
“Your client was gone when I got here, Master.” On one hand, because Regina hit him first tonight instead of last, Kelly had more time to return to bed before curfew. David figured that with Regina denying Hogan’s claims (he rarely would push disciplinary measures unless one of the RA’s was backing him up, since the residence board typically believed RA’s over guards) if Kelly could get back to the sorority house fast enough, she’d avoid getting in trouble. On the other hand, Regina would be missed if David played with her before the rounds were done, and he had no excuse to see her after if he wasn’t last,
“Good girl. What happens when you wake up?
“Whenever I leave the wonderful relaxed state, all memories of it remain there until Master allows me to return. I will believe whatever Master tells me occurred and ignore all evidence to the contrary.”
David gave her wonderful breasts a quick squeezing and woke her up. He made a mental note to finally give her sexy body some real attention next time. “My client’s gone, no need to cause a commotion. Goodnight Regina.”
“Goodnight David.” the radiant redhead said, and continued her rounds.
David decided to consult the section on Rivals, now that he’d found one (the rival hadn’t found him though-yet!)
Part 4 - Rivals
- The first thing you should know about rival hypnotists is that there are more of them than you realize, and most of them are more skilled than you. Not more skilled than me, but more than you.
- The Golden Rule is the best advice when dealing with rivals-Treat them (and their property) as you would want you and yours to be treated. In most cases this will prevent conflict.
- If you enthrall or attempt to enthrall someone under the power of a rival, that is called poaching. Poaching is the ultimate breach of etiquette between controllers.
- There is only ONE defense that a rival may accept for poaching-ignorance of the thrall’s status. Bring the girl back to her master and apologize as profusely as you can.
- If this does not appease the rival, you may have to give up or allow use of some of your thralls as penance, or start a war. If your gesture of apology does not work, contact me immediately.
- In the event that you (and by extension myself) have had girls poached, and an apology is not forthcoming, contact me immediately. I will resolve this matter personally.
- Essentially, as you are only my proxy, any matters involving rivals should be brought to my attention as soon as possible, even if you have already resolved them.
David shuddered at the instructions. Even if Kelly was not his thrall now, he had still poached her from Paterno knowing that he was poaching. As far as controller etiquette was concerned, he was the one in the wrong, so he was unsure if Malcolm would support him. He had just opened up a world of hurt on not just himself, but probably Kelly as well (though she was unaware). He doubted he would get much sleep tonight.
Kelly made it to the Tau Nu Alpha house at five minutes to ten. As was her typical move when coming in after curfew, she climbed the tree next to the west side of the building, jumped to land on the rain gutter, flipped over the nearby flagpole and landed on the roof section in front of her window, tapping on the glass. Monique Valjean, Kelly’s roommate and best friend in the sorority, opened the window and pulled her inside,
“Your night must have been tre bien if you were out that late, mon ami!” Monique whispered, assuming that the rest of the sisters were asleep. “Is he as good as everyone says?”
“Oui, Oui.” said Kelly, undressing and putting on her pajamas. “Best I’ve felt in months. You ought to pencil him in.” Kelly had some French ancestry on her mother’s side, so she knew a little of the language, but Monique, as the first-generation daughter of Haitian immigrants, was as fluent in it as English (along with Creole, Spanish and Italian) and had taught her a lot more.
“I just might, if he can make you feel that good, Bonne nuit, Kelly.”
“Bonne nuit yourself, Monique.” Kelly said, sneaking out to use the bathroom. It had been a good night indeed. David had given her so much hope and joy that she figured she would sleep like a baby.
And both David and Kelly turned out to be correct.