Alexa blinked slowly, her eyelids feeling almost like they were gummed shut for a long moment before she finally managed to lever them open again. She almost instantly refocused on the swirling tunnel of light and color in front of her, locking into a mesmerized stare so smoothly and seamlessly that she never managed to find even a single moment where looking away felt like a true possibility. And of course as soon as she lost herself in that timeless, helpless gaze, she immediately felt that burning exhaustion that made her ache to close her eyes again. "Katie," she mumbled, her voice a slurred and toneless mumble in her own ears, "w-what are we watching again?"
She heard a bright, bubbly giggle from beside her, but somehow Alexa couldn't turn her head to see what her friend found so amusing. "Did you know that's the third time you've asked that question?" Katie asked, her voice so cheerful that it somehow looped past 'friendly' and went all the way around to 'deeply sinister'. "The last time I just told you to keep watching and you'd understand. I wonder if there's even going to be a next time, or if you'll just sink so deep into the brainwashing spiral that your empty little mind will forget to even think about how hard it is to think. Gawd, this is even hotter than Master said it would be."
Alexa barely even heard the words. There was just something so potently compelling about the illusion of motion on the screen in front of her; it dragged her attention to it like an undertow, making her every effort to think about what Katie was saying a sluggish, labored affair that seemed to consume all her energy and leave her eyelids drooping with the desire to close. But Alexa kept turning a single word over in her head, a word that stood out with peculiar importance to her, and it compelled her to keep struggling with her thoughts despite her drowsy lassitude. "M-Master?" she mumbled, suddenly aware of a slick trail of saliva running down her chin. "W-what, I, um... who's Master, Katie?"
Another giggle, this one even more cheerful than the last. Somehow it was even worse than hearing sinister laughter; that always had the sense of being done for effect, to elicit a reaction from the listener, but this made Katie sound like she genuinely found her friend's loose, dopey lethargy genuinely hilarious. "Oh, Katie's gone, sweetie," Alexa heard the woman next to her say in a tone of vacuous rapture. "Katie's been gone for almost twenty minutes now. She turned on the spiral to help Master capture you, and then she went down the tunnel and slipped away into the back of her own head. I'm Master's good little fucktoy, and soon you will be, too."
A wave of... not quite fear, Alexa felt too sleepy for fear, but definitely unease ran down the drowsy woman's spine. "F-fucktoy?" she muttered, becoming even more distressed by the lack of urgency in her slurred and sleepy tones. "What, what fucktoy? Fucktoy how?" She sounded so stupid, Alexa realized, struggling to push thoughts through the morass of dazed bewilderment that filled her head. She sounded like she'd gotten so fucking stoned that she couldn't string more than a few words together at a time before collapsing into blank, befuddled idiocy. Was it... was it the spiral doing this to her? It couldn't be. Nothing as simple as a set of lines on a screen could be that powerful.
"Oh, sweetie," Katie--or fucktoy, or whatever she called herself--cooed to her in soft, sweet tones that were almost instantly belied by her words. "It's really very simple. Master asked me what would break pretty little Katie's will most completely, what she would finally recognize as the last crumbling boundary between her pathetic willpower and Master's total and inescapable control, and I told him that corrupting and enslaving her friends would finally convince her that she had no hope of ever resisting him. I told him that if I betrayed you and brainwashed you into obedience, Katie would stop pretending she was real and I could take over."
She leaned in conspiratorially, putting her arm around Alexa's waist and giving her ample breast a casually possessive squeeze. "Between you and me, there were other things that would have worked just as well. But Katie's always had a secret crush on you, and that's one thing she and I have in common. I'm just sure I can convince him to let us put on a sexy lesbian floor show for him once you're completely brainwashed and controlled." She gave Alexa a little kiss on the cheek. Nothing had ever felt quite so ominous in the hypnotized woman's entire life.
