Running through the cold evening air, feeling the chill biting into her hot flesh as if it were a cold utensil attacking a freshly cooked meal, Samanithia - Sam for short - did her utmost not to look at the vast number of things around her that could suck her mind in and capture her oh so easily hooked brain. Ordinarily the streets of New York weren't that much of a trap for even the easily entranced, but for someone as trance-saturated as Sam, even a colourful poster could trigger that all too familiar sensation, and when you were as conditioned as she was, it would be almost impossible to halt the fall down that slippery slide.
Glancing up as she ran through the nightscape, Sam caught sight of one of the multitude of glowing neon signs above her in her periphery, and for a heart-stopping instant felt herself jerked almost physically towards it, as if an invisible string tied around her brain had been tugged, the string's tail running down her neck and out through her chest, fingertips, and legs. Time slowed for an eternal moment and she almost made the fatal move of turning to stare into the blinking lights. She resisted. Just.
San continued to run. It was late - or rather, early, around 2 am. The streets of the city that never sleeps were quiet, but busy - to Sam they were simply a blur of images and sounds, voices and actions not to focus on, desperate not to let into her addled mind for the risk that they would be the simple, benign movement or word or beat that would set one of her endless number of triggers into play, ending her escape before it had even begun. She ran on, head low, hair flying, lose clothes jostling about her body as she made every conscious effort she had to get away from what her life had become in the past - well - only god knew how long, really. Had it been weeks? Months? Perhaps years had passed - Sam couldn't tell. She couldn't remember much beyond the last trance, and the one before it, and the one before that and the countless ones prior to those. Only the trances themselves.
Sam turned a corner and halted, just long enough to scratch her sweating skin through the hastily zipped jacket. It was oversized and made for the wrong sex, but it covered her, and that's what mattered. She could feel the scratchy insides of the thick hoodie scraping her nipples and rubbing over her as she ran, but she didn't care, couldn't stop to care. If she stopped to feel them, she'd remember what that feeling linked back to, remember what usually happened anytime her nipples felt good, remember what he did to her to help ease her into her trance -
- Sam violently slapped her fist lengthways against her forehead, jolting the memories aside, desperately trying to derail that memory-train before it reached her station and collected her up for the ride. Any thoughts like that at all - anything to do with her body, or to do with flashing lights, whispered words or flicked actions; anything at all could be a trigger. Sam was so very used to slipping into one of her innumerable trances under so many different little focusses and phrases that by now, anything and anyone could start it, triggering the implanted subroutines in her mind that would shut down her will and put her deep under once again. Doggedly, Sam bent back to the run.
She had gone maybe six blocks so far and was closing in on a seventh - a long way to run, but barely out of the driveway for her captor. Even as she pushed one heel ahead of another set of toes, she knew he would be out looking for her, driving slowly by, cruising with that smug grin and lazy arm flopped against window frame, searching patiently until he found her.
Sam had been with him for three months in total since she'd responded to the ad in the paper for his hypnosis treatment. A kinky woman and caught in a dry spell between relationships, she'd gone in search of something to help her gain confidence and get her rocks off better than the increasingly strange porn she was watching, in her apartment on her own with the lights off and a special toy gripped in sweaty hands did for her, and she'd found his ad. Desperate, horny, and willing to embrace one of the fetishes she hadn't indulged that much in before, she'd phoned him up. They'd made a time and as per his slightly unusual instructions, she'd caught public transport to his residence for their first meeting.
At first it'd been slow, with Samanithia barely remembering anything after their sessions, feeling no less aroused and most definitely no more confident in herself. But, with no new dates and herself not one to give up early, she'd kept going back, and after two weeks had started to discover a new-found joy in her body. At first it had simply started out as more and more tight, skimpy clothes, then later in how she presented herself
au naturel
, and then later in how she acted - her body language began to morph before her eyes, and she watched the hottie in the mirror straighten her back, push out her titties and sway her hips more and more - but later it turned into more and more frequent sessions, with Sam finding more and more black spots in her memory, moments in which she'd thought she'd gone into another room to grab something or do something or turned on her computer to check her emails or her phone for texts, but that she had no recollection of doing. Time seemed to pass her by in these empty moments without her actually doing anything.
Six weeks into her sessions with him had seen Sam starting to skip out on work. She began acting strangely, staying indoors and more and more frequently visiting him, even outside of their appointments. She developed more and more empty holes in her memory, and before long the holes started growing more common than the memories, those memories becoming more and more disconnected and alien as she slowly forgot the neighbouring memory links that bound them to her.
At some point in time, Sam began to forget entire days. Then those days turned to weeks. She stopped coming home, and instead stayed at his place full time, devoting more and more of herself to their sessions until they were all she could think about. Eventually, Sam began to forget who she was, forget what she was. By this time, she was three months into a vicious regiment of deep-mind hypnosis that was slowly but unendingly eating away at everything individual in Sam's mind, until all that was left was an obedient, brainless body, unthinking and uncaring about anything but the next command.
Something changed. She wasn't sure what, and she had no desire to dig around inside her own mine-field of a brain to find out. One day she'd just woken up, aware and conscious, naked in a foreign bed, smelling of sweat and sex and animal instinct. As fear gripped her heart and adrenaline began to surge through her veins, she'd done all she'd been able to think to do, and grabbed the nearest clothes and run. Before she knew it she was pushing her bare feet into the cement in a desperate effort to get as far away from him as she could.
Sam slowed. She didn't know where she was going. She knew she had an apartment - she must've had somewhere to stay before wherever she'd woken up - but she didn't know where. She'd forgotten it, just like she'd forgotten everything else. She was sure the memory was inside her somewhere, but it was locked behind the waiting memories of trances past, ready to snare her fleeting consciousness and wrap tightly around it, never letting go. Another sign above her flickered as it changed to a new ad, and the sudden brightness of this mostly white sign startled her. She caught the reflection of it in a puddle on the pock-marked roadway and for a few seconds felt a wave of calm enter her as she stared with ever widening eyes at the screen as it twisted about, enticing her to look at the product it was trying to sell her in its centre. It took a super human effort to tear her eyes away from the puddle, but not before she almost had a panic attack at the lost calm and safety the lights brought her.
Palming her chest as she began to pant, and already breathless, Sam staggered backwards, slumping against the rough wall, her legs shaking with the effort, the adrenaline, and the fight not to let go. Her ass pressed into the rough brickwork and as she let herself slide down the wall, the jacket hitched up her back, leaving her skin to scrape on the rough stone. It hurt, but she barely cared, the pain apparently being one of the few things that weren't programmed in as a trigger in her mind. She felt cuts open as she plonked down on the pavement, the chilly surface biting against her warm flesh, but she didn't have the mental capacity to show herself concern. Gathering up her legs and holding them tight, she put her head down, unable to handle the effort of thinking about not thinking.
Someone passed her by, and as she listened to the footsteps, she felt the rhythm tick-tocking inside her, her body synchronising itself with it unbidden. Unknowingly, she leaned towards the passer-by as they disappeared. The screen above her flashed again and the thick red colours bled through her closed eyelids and into her very soul. Nearby must have been a pub or club, because she could hear voices mingled with the thumping beat of a dance floor echoing down the street towards her, and mixed in the unclear mess of words and shouts she thought she caught the word "foxes." Her heart skipped and she felt a shiver wash through her, but she forced herself to ignore it, to believe she'd heard wrong. The tingling wave zeroed in on the exact spot she knew it would, down between her legs, but with an incredible force of an incredibly weak will, she made herself believe she'd heard wrong. The tingling slowly died away, and the ever-present strings slowly relaxed, only to be picked up again by another half-trigger somewhere else.
