Doctor Marcia Harden looked down at the thin sheet of transparent plastic slowly extruding itself out of the machine--the machine she'd built, to her own specifications, after months of painstaking and secret labor. It was all worth it, she decided. Every second of working and reworking complex chemical formulas, every minute of crafting precision-tooled parts, every late night of concealing the existence of the entire experiment from her assistant Colleen. It was all worth it, and the proof was right here--it worked! It actually worked! And to think, they'd called her "mad"!
They, of course, were the tiny invisible pixies with the faces of Ben Franklin and Isaac Asimov, the ones only she could see. Even now, they continued to call her "mad", mocking her with their objections, their so-called flaws in her brilliant scheme. But now, she had the answers for all of them.
"It'll never work," Franklin said. For some reason, he always had the voice of Marilyn Monroe, but she'd gotten used to that by now. "The chemical can induce a suggestible state, Marcia, but you know it breaks down too quickly in contact with oxygen. How long do you have to introduce it into the victim's bloodstream? A minute? Less?"
"She could always put it into an airtight cannister, spray her victim with it," Asimov replied. She'd always liked Asimov better, even if he did have a tendency to sprout tentacles with lion heads when he thought she wasn't looking. "It's a mind control drug, it won't matter if the victim knows they're being dosed. Marcia can just command them to forget later."
"The required dose is too large!" Franklin shrieked, a chorus of invisible laughter following his every word. "She can't avoid inhaling it herself! How do you just casually wander up to your potential lesbian sex slave while wearing a full bio-hazard respirator, huh? How do you hold them down for the five minutes necessary to spray a full dose into their nostrils?"
The lion heads snarled at Franklin while Asimov responded. Marcia waited patiently. She'd heard them argue like this countless times; she knew exactly where they were heading with it, and she was waiting to interrupt with her masterstroke. "Then perhaps an injector? Find some way of putting it into liquid form, and--"
"Liquid form? Liquid form?" Franklin snorted. "The chemical doesn't liquify until it hits -175 degrees Celsius. Inject that into your sex slave, they'll die long before they can frig you to orgasm."
"Maybe you're right," Asimov said, his tentacles drooping in sorrow. "Maybe there's just no way to make practical use of her discovery. She'd have to be quite, quite mad to keep trying."
"Oh, very mad," Franklin said. "Very very very mad."
Marcia knew where the conversation was headed next. They were going to keep repeating "mad", over and over, while swooping around her head until she got dizzy. Then they'd sing show tunes. But this time, she had the answer. This time, they'd have to admit she was sane. "Mad, am I?" she snapped out. "Could a madwoman have done this?" She pointed to the machine.
The pixies looked at each other. "What is it, then?" Franklin asked cautiously.
"The perfect delivery vehicle for my mind control drug," Marcia exclaimed triumphantly as she snatched a sheet of plastic from the mouth of the device. "Each one of these sheets of plastic has a full dose of the drug, cunningly sealed into dozens of airtight bubbles of thin plastic to keep it safe from the depredations of that cruel beast, Oxygen. The gas is odorless, colorless...nobody would even suspect its presence. I can leave it anywhere, and nobody would take it to be anything more than plain, ordinary bubble wrap."
The pixies seemed frozen in confusion. Marcia took advantage of the silence to press her case. "Don't you see?" she said. "It's a well-known, proven psychological fact! Nobody can resist squeezing the bubbles on bubble wrap! My victims will see the sheet of plastic. They'll pick it up, little knowing that each bulge contains the seeds of their eventual enslavement as my sapphic sex toy...and then..." She squeezed the bubble tightly, feeling it slowly swell up around her fingers, until finally...POP! The bubble exploded with a satisfying crack.
"That's only a small dose, of course," she said. "Not nearly enough to make my potential victim as docile and suggestible as they're going to be. But that's the beauty of it! Colleen won't suspect that she's just inhaled a potent hypnotic drug. She'll just remember the feel of the bubble wrap under her fingers, the delicious sound it made as it popped, and then..." Marcia squeezed again. "I've done studies, you see. They called me mad for studying bubble wrap's effect on the human psyche, but I proved it! Nobody can resist the timeless allure of bubble wrap." She felt the pocket of gas collapsing under her fingers once more, heard the thrilling snap of its violent expulsion into the atmosphere. "Nobody."
"Um..." Franklin seemed concerned, for the first time since he'd begun manifesting in her bedroom late at night, back when she was sixteen and just beginning to fantasize about having an obedient lesbian sex slave. "But if it's...I mean, shouldn't you...but how do you...?" He paused. Marcia was almost worried; she'd never seen her invisible pixie antagonists so confused. "You just dosed yourself," he said at last.
She looked down at her own hand, still tightly gripping the sheet of bubble wrap. A thrill of horror ran through her veins for a moment, but she calmed herself down. "It's only a couple of bubbles," she said. "A tiny amount, really. I could probably even squeeze another one with no ill effects."
