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.
The fucktoy relaxed her grip on Alexa's breast, letting her arm slide down to the mesmerized woman's waist. "But just because it wasn't the only way didn't mean it wasn't true," she continued, as casually as if she was chatting about a movie she'd watched the night before. "Katie's so deep right now, but she's aware of everything that's happening to you and she's finally beginning to question her entire sense of self. She's coming face to face with me at last and realizing that I'm the strong one, and she's just a pathetic little ghost inside my head. Soon I'll drink her up completely and I'll be the real one, not her. I'll still be able to act like her, of course, if Master needs me to fool someone into believing she's still normal, but it'll be just me inside this head. No more boring, stuck-up Katie."
That should have made Alexa try to resist the spiral. Hearing that should have made her realize that this was about more than just fighting the insidious hypnotic power of the images on the screen to keep herself from getting an inner fucktoy of her very own that would scheme up ways to enslave her ever deeper into Master's will until she gradually faded into irrelevance; it was about saving Katie from a subjugation so complete and total that the woman Alexa knew didn't even exist anymore save as a memory inside some brainwashed sex slave's head. If she didn't struggle her way free of the mesmerizing pull on her thoughts, Katie would simply give up and allow herself to be subsumed into the slutty, giggly persona Master made for her. Alexa should be resisting for both of their sakes.
Only she wasn't. She was just sitting there, staring vacantly into the pretty colors, occasionally letting her eyelids drift shut in another long, slow, lazy blink that somehow left her even more exhausted than before. A dreamy heat throbbed between her legs, distracting her until the majority of her dwindling mental energy was devoted to simply remembering she was having a conversation at all, and not simply unwinding her mind into the spiral until she climaxed. Alexa couldn't even summon up the strength to close her slack and drooling jaw, let alone fight the power that gripped her mind in drowsy lethargy. "I... I won't let him take you, Katie," she mumbled, but the words felt more aspirational than descriptive.