Wish You Were Here

Elizabeth assumed that email she didn't remember sending to herself was spam, but the picture loaded before she had the chance to delete it.

It was her own face, with her dorm room in the background-- apparently taken from her computer's camera, last night.

Weird. Well, it was a new computer. Maybe she'd accidentally hit the button for the camera some time last night, and it had helpfully mailed the photo to the default address. At least it was a good default.

--

The next morning, she had another email. Basically the same. From around 11pm-- the first one was closer to midnight. She'd been studying for her Psych class, so, she'd been using the computer. She spent a little time poking around the buttons on the keyboard, trying to see if there was some obvious accidental key combination that would take a photo.

After a moment, she decided to make crazy faces while poking at the keyboard. Then, if she got a photo in the mail tomorrow, she'd know she'd taken it then.

--

Sure enough, next morning, crazy faces. Well, mystery solved. She still didn't know which button or buttons she was accidentally hitting. And the timestamp was still after 11 at night instead of a little after 8 in the morning-- so there was something funky with the time settings somewhere, too. But at least she knew where the pictures were coming from.

--

Over the next days, Elizabeth continued to get accidental self-portraits in email every morning. Only one each day, so whatever key she was mis-pressing, she wasn't doing it too often.

She started to look at the pictures as a running log of how she was doing through the semester. As the days wore on, she really was starting to look more and more glassy-eyed. She ought to consider getting more sleep. But she needed the study time.

Then, one morning, her picture from the day before showed her holding up a piece of paper. Written on it in sharpie, in her handwriting, were the words "I am deeply hypnotized."

--

Elizabeth panicked. Her roommate came in to find Elizabeth standing in the corner with a pot of coffee and a bottle of no-doz, staring at a lump of pillows in her bed which covered up her laptop. Which was unplugged, closed, and duct-taped shut.

"Not the best morning in Study-land, I'm guessing?"

"I..." Elizabeth stopped. Punishing her laptop for imaginary crimes was eccentric. Telling her roommate she thought she was being hypnotized every night to take pictures of herself, was... deeply embarrassing. She couldn't bring herself to do it.

"I think I need a break."

"You think?"

She threw her laptop in a bag and went walking.

--

At the library, Elizabeth took her laptop out-- peeled off the duct tape-- taped over the camera, and went searching for evidence of her nightly doings.

Her deeply hypnotized nightly doings.

Peeled away from the horror-movie set-up, one reason she couldn't face telling her roommate about being hypnotized was that something about the idea really turned her on.

This was *not* the place to be having those sorts of thoughts. She was in a study carrel deep in the library stacks, but still, it was public, and anybody could wander by at any time. She looked around, and listened, and reassured herself that at least there was nobody anywhere nearby right at the moment. She could face her embarrassingly horny thoughts about being hypnotized in private.

But it was scary, right? Someone had been controlling her, hypnotizing her, without her knowledge, every single day, for weeks.

It was scary... but it was also scary in a way that made her want to put a hand between her legs. Someone had been *hypnotizing* her. *Without her knowledge*. *Every day*. *For weeks*.

Whoever it was, didn't seem to have done anything... *to* her. She was obviously getting more... and more... deeply hypnotized. She thought about how glassy-eyed she looked in the most recent pictures, and blushed. But she was *clothed* in all the pictures. She wasn't being hypnotized to send naked photos of herself. Or to do... other things.

Right. So. Who had been doing this? Had she been talking to someone in a chat program? Running... some sort of program that hypnotized her? Watching videos or something?

Still half-unwillingly turned-on by the whole scenario, she opened her laptop and began to search through it.

--

Unfortunately, in addition to being hypnotized every night, she was apparently becoming very good at covering her own tracks. Elizabeth found, on looking into it, that she had no browser or chat history whatsoever.

She also didn't have any chat friends she didn't recognize. *But of course, it could be someone I know*.

A close examination of all the photos-- she really was getting more deeply hypnotized every day! More helplessly susceptible every time... -- showed that they were, in fact, taken at night. She could see a bit of her window in some of them, and it was dark out, the dorm lights reflecting off the glass. Even the funny-faces one. Maybe she'd admitted to trying to figure out where the photos were coming from, under hypnosis... and she'd been told to make those faces again...

--

Ultimately, a whole day of fretting about it didn't bring her any closer to figuring out *who* was hypnotizing her, or how.

She had no doubt at all, though, that it was real.

She knew about when it was happening, and where: in her dorm room, after 11. Her roommate kept late hours and was never in bed before 1; Elizabeth was always in her room alone after about 10pm.

So that was when she was being hypnotized.

She could just... stay away, right? Not be in her dorm room. Leave her computer in a locker somewhere and not have access to it, not be near a computer, not be on her phone...

She was totally thinking like a paranoid person, except there really *was* someone out to get her.

Except... they'd *gotten* her. She blushed again. She hated the idea of hiding from her own dorm room, of being exiled to a coffee shop somewhere and not able to even go home, for fear of... except that also, really, *really*, she wanted to know what would happen.

She wanted to know what was going to happen to her next.

Ok, there, she'd admitted it. Now she didn't have to admit it to *anyone else*. She certainly didn't have to tell her roommate.

But, she was in her room by 10 that night. With her computer.

--

The next morning's photo had more writing.

The note this time said, "I want to be hypnotized."

Elizabeth blushed and shut her laptop immediately and gave completely noncommittal answers when her roommate buzzed in and out on her way to her morning class.

Because she did.

This was... not really okay.

But it was happening, oh god it was happening to her, and her hand was already inside her pants somehow, and as soon as she noticed that she noticed that her other hand was finding her nipple inside her shirt, and she was *definitely* not going to admit to *anyone* how hot the idea of *wanting* to be hypnotized was, *right now*...

--

Okay, the first step is admitting you have a problem.

*The problem is I WANT it*.

This was definitely not helping.

Somehow, even though she had no browser history, her fingers seemed to know how to find an awful lot of websites with photos of pretty young women who looked a lot like her, falling into deep trances.

Being hypnotized.

Just like her.

She spent most of the rest of the day, imagining what they might do, when they were told.

--

The next day's photo said, "I need to be hypnotized."

Elizabeth was past even trying to pretend this wasn't true.

Just thinking about what was happening to her every night was making her so wet that every little shift in her seat reminded her of how turned on she was.

She needed it to keep happening because this was the hottest thing she could imagine.

All day, during and between classes, she kept wondering if her hypnotist was there. If she would find herself walking off between the buildings, never remembering that she'd spent lunch being put into a deep trance again, instead of going to the cafeteria.

She took a lot of bathroom breaks. She bit her bottom lip, in the stalls, to keep quiet, and hoped no-one noticed how loud she was breathing.

--

The next morning's note was, "When I am hypnotized, I obey."

And this time, her shirt was unbuttoned.

--

It almost seemed anticlimactic. It almost seemed like a tease.

No, it *was* a tease.

She was being teased with how much she wanted it.

Because she knew that if whoever was hypnotizing her had told her, in that obviously completely mindless trance that she could not remember at all, to strip entirely naked, she would have done it.

Because by this point, she'd do it for them entirely awake.

And *just* getting her to unbutton her shirt, and nothing more, made her confront that. She couldn't pretend she was being made to go further than she wanted.

She wanted to beg to go further.

--

The next day's said, "I want to obey."

She was stripped to her bra and panties.

This was a little more like it.

Her roommate had almost planned to come home early that night. Elizabeth had nearly lost it, and had desperately convinced her that studying in the library was a much better idea.

Her roommate had assumed she was going to use the room for a date, which was a little too close to nearly the truth, but she'd tried to spin a convincing story of her own weird loner study habits... which was also a little too close to nearly the truth.

Whoever had been hypnotizing her was finally starting to take advantage of the power she'd helplessly fallen under. And she needed it to keep happening.

--

The next note said "I need to obey."

It was held over her breasts, which were otherwise naked.

She hadn't found the notes in her dorm room trash cans; she hoped she was disposing of them in some appropriately untraceable way. But she knew that it didn't really matter anymore, because the note was right.

She needed to obey her hypnotist.

Her history-less fingers on the keyboard had found her all sorts of stories and video clips of girls hypnotized to do things without knowing or being able to stop themselves, and the funny thing was that it wasn't just the sexual ones that turned her on. The thing that got to her, no matter what the women were being hypnotized to do, was the blank, empty, completely controlled look in their eyes. That look got her off every time now, and it got her off just as much in a girl commanded to be unable to unglue her hand from the top of her head as in a girl commanded to insert a vibrator inside herself for the camera as in a girl commanded to *feel* like she had a vibrator inside herself and come just from the hypnotist's words. It was the look of mindless, will-less obedience that made her come just from seeing it.

It was the look that she had, in the photos.

--

The next morning, the photo showed her completely naked, and kneeling on the floor. Her head was bowed, but she held up a note that said "I will obey." Because her head was bent low, it was possible to see that she wore a black leather collar around her neck-- the only thing she wore.

Curled into the back of the collar were the fingers of someone else's hand.

A knock at the door startled Elizabeth from her reverie, and she immediately got up to answer it. Halfway to the door, she realized that her laptop was still open, showing the photo of herself.

Looking down, she realized that she was still dressed that way. She was still naked, wearing only a black leather collar around her neck.

She started to call out, to say she would answer the door in a minute, to give herself time to put on a robe. But she realized that her hand was still moving, still reaching towards the door, still, no matter what she thought she wanted, turning the handle.

Opening the door fully, she closed her eyes and repeated the words from the note: "I will obey."

Then she opened her eyes, to finally, awake, meet her hypnotist.