"Well... I guess I can give people another couple minutes..." Zelda folded her arms, looking out at the rows of empty chairs. Fifteen minutes past seven already. She had only booked the room for an hour. Her foot tapped impatiently on the ground. "Must have been the flyers," she told herself, "They weren't eye-catching enough." The irony of a poster for a hypnosis lesson not catching people's attention wasn't lost on her, though it hardly helped her mood. She pulled the chair out from the large desk situated in the front of the room, sliding down into it until nearly her entire body was hidden. "Could be worse, I guess... Imagine if only one person showed up..."
The door swung open, as if on command. Zelda's heart leapt into her throat as she scrambled to pull herself to an upright position, pretending she hadn't just been moping. Through the doorway, a familiar face stuck his head through the threshold of the room, looking winded.
"Sorry I'm late, Zelda! I-- Huh?" He stopped and glanced around the room. "Am I... Am I late?"
It took everything Zelda had to not drop her head into her hands. She quickly straightened out the pleated skirt she was wearing, fidgeting with the sleeves of her blouse as she tried not to look too startled, or disappointed.
"Oh, Max!" She tried to look enthused, but her expression ended up looking more strained than she intended. "I... Didn't expect you to show up." Zelda had mentioned the lesson in passing, mostly as a bit of small talk that had come up between the two of them a few days prior. She hadn't even considered that he'd bother remembering it was occurring at all.
"Of course I'd show up! I'd never miss..." He paused, then smiled sheepishly. "What was this for, again?"
Zelda tried not to feel pitied. She craned her neck towards the whiteboard behind her, the words 'Hypnosis 101' written in plain view.
"It's, um. Hypnotism." She turned back to face her friend. Her face didn't show the twinge of embarrassment that was making her heart pound. Instead, her hands twisted over themselves in her lap, wringing with nervous energy. "You don't have to stick around if you aren't interested," she told him.
"No, no," Max assured her. Zelda tried not to scream. "Hypnosis sounds... Uh, really interesting!" It didn't take a genius to surmise that he was just trying to be polite, and Zelda thought she was providing the same courtesy in giving Max a way for them both to escape this possibly very awkward encounter. Max didn't seem to see it that way, finding a seat right in the center of the front row.
"And you're... Sure you want to stay?" Zelda tried one last time, putting as much emphasis on 'sure' as she possibly could. Max just nodded, and smiled. He was too polite for his own good.
Zelda took a deep breath. An audience of one, she thought. Somehow, discussing this niche interest of hers seemed less daunting when there was a crowd. She stood up from her chair, clearing her throat as she began to pace back and forth at the front of the almost-empty classroom.
"For... Hundreds of years, um..." Zelda had an entire diatribe prepared, but now as she began to speak, she became acutely aware of what she was actually saying. It sounded much more stupid coming out of her mouth than it had in her notes. "People have wondered... About the ability to entered altered states of mind..." She paused glancing in Max's direction, half expecting him to have magically disappeared. "And one of those ways, is hypnotism." She paused, realizing she had already managed to accidentally leave out an entire sentence or two. "Hypnotism is... The act of bringing a subject into a state in which they have... Increased susceptibility to suggestion... And, um." She quickly turned on her heels, facing Max. "Do any of you know what that state is called?" The words shot out of her mouth, over-rehearsed to the point of being unable to correct them for the circumstance. "Er... Do... Do you know, Max?" she self-edited.
Max didn't look completely bored, sitting there with his hands clasped on top of his desk. "Can I... Have a hint?"
"It starts with a 'T'," she told her singular student.
"Tuh-... Too-... Tee-..." Max glanced up at the ceiling as he tried to come up with an answer.
"It's 'trance', Max," she told him, running out of patience. She turned towards the board. Grabbing a marker, she wrote the word and underlined it. "A trance is the intended outcome of hypnosis. The act of putting someone into a trance, is called an 'induction'." She jotted the emphasized word above the first. "And, once the person is in that trance, they become... Suggestible." The last vocabulary word found its spot underneath the other two. "So, to summarize. The act of hypnosis is using an induction, to induce a trance, which causes the person to become suggestible." She tapped each of the words as she said them, drawing arrows between the terms to illustrate their ordering.
Zelda's body twitched as she felt something slightly uncomfortable bubble up inside of her. She took a deep breath. Was she not even able to get through a simple explanation without getting turned on? She had tried to keep it as clinical as possible, and even then it had managed to tickle a very particularly tuned part of her psyche. She thought she'd been able to hide it well, at least, but the slight movement in her peripheral vision made her suspect her body language was betraying her. She focused, trying to listen. Had he noticed? Or was she just imagining it? She steeled herself once again, then turned to face her one audience member.
"Any questions?"
Max tapped a finger against his cheek for a moment, then leaned back in his chair. "Seems pretty straightforward to me!" If he had picked up on Zelda's specific fondness for hypnotism, he was doing a decent job of hiding it. His next words though, had Zelda thinking otherwise. "Are you gonna show how it works?"
"Well..." Zelda swallowed, her throat suddenly feeling dry. "I suppose that depends, are you offering yourself as a demonstration?" The words spilled from her mouth, as if her tongue could hardly control their volume. The way Max tilted his head made her feel like she was being more obvious than intended. It was clear she was excited about the prospect.
Max, of course, didn't have the specific details as to why Zelda would be so eager to perform hypnosis on somebody, even if he could sense her enthusiasm. "Yeah, sure, sounds fun!" His words made it sound like he was agreeing to play a board game, not engaging in an activity that was more commonly seen in bedrooms, than classrooms.
Zelda fought a grin, not at all convincingly hiding the thrill in her eyes. "Well, how do you want it?" she asked, hardly even processing the words she had said before realizing what she was asking.
Max's head tilted to the side. "What do you mean?"
"Oh." Zelda embarrassingly realized she had skipped a chunk of explanation in her excitement. "There are multiple ways to induce a trance," she explained. Her base level nerves had all but evaporated. She looked like she was having fun even, explaining all the intricacies of her extremely niche hobby.
