Jo stared at her ticket stub as if seeing it for the first time. It seemed strangely unfamiliar to her; she remembered going to the ticket counter and buying it, she remembered walking into the darkened theater and handing it over to an usher who guided her to her table, she remembered sitting down next to Chantal, but...all that seemed like the actions of a sleepwalker to her now, entirely detached from motive and logic. Things that had seemed perfectly sensible to her at the time now seemed like they'd been decided for her, and all her brain had been doing was stringing together a plausible-seeming set of reasons for doing the things she'd already known she was going to do.
She saw the name on the ticket. 'Madam Columbina - One Night Only'. Ah. That made a lot more sense to her, then. Jo had gotten used to doing unusual and inexplicable things whenever Madam Columbina was in town. It was always the same--her thoughts fogged over with warm and dreamy pleasure whenever she saw one of Madam's playing cards, and suddenly it seemed like a perfectly good idea to do things like host a strip poker game or wander off to a strange hotel wearing nothing but a string bikini or just turn on her webcam and masturbate herself senseless. Madam Columbina had a vivid imagination, and fifty-two potential triggers to play with.
At first, it had seemed a little...unnerving, to say the least, knowing that her mind and body were under someone else's control. But Chantal had explained a little more about how hypnosis worked to her, after that night when Jo first volunteered for Madam Columbina's stage show and wound up as one of her 'special girls'. Chantal told her that it wouldn't really be possible for Madam Columbina to have this much control over Jo's mind--over either of their minds--if they weren't getting some kind of unconscious reward for obedience that overwhelmed their conscious resistance to being hypnotized. (Or at least, that was the gist of it. Jo was cumming a little too hard at the time to remember all the details.)
With her curiosity satisfied, Jo took a moment to look around her at the other members of the audience. It was a small crowd, perhaps twenty to thirty--certainly nothing like Madam Columbina's usual shows. They were all women like Jo and Chantal, and many of them had that slightly glazed expression that told Jo that they had enjoyed about as much choice in their plans for the evening as Jo did. Those that didn't look clearly hypnotized seemed to be waking up like Jo. And Chantal, Jo suddenly noticed, who was staring at her ticket and blinking like she'd just woken up from a blissful nap. "I, um...hi," Chantal said, her voice still slightly muzzy from trance.
"Hi. Did you know anything about this?" Jo asked, holding up the ticket and gesturing to it with a trace of good-natured exasperation in her voice. Not that she was genuinely bothered by being drawn into another one of Madam Columbina's little fancies, but Jo did sometimes feel a bit at a disadvantage compared to her friend-with-benefits. Madam Columbina had originally drawn Jo into her influence because Chantal had a crush on her roommate, and the two of them had taken the opportunity to give Jo a few extra hypnotic suggestions that allowed Chantal to entrace Jo whenever the mood struck her. Madam Columbina and Chantal had a habit of conspiring to mess with Jo's head a little, and while she generally enjoyed the results, she was always a little suspicious whenever they were both involved in the same place at the same time.
But Chantal only looked at her in confusion--both the recently-awakened kind and regular, garden-variety bewilderment. "I, no, I'm as much in the dark as you are. I remember getting a text message back at the apartment, but--" She broke off as the house lights dimmed and the stage lights went up. "Oh, shhh, it's starting!"
Jo still didn't know what exactly was starting, but the calliope music cut off her train of thought as Madam Columbina took the stage. She wore her trademark jester's outfit, tattered and torn in a way that somehow made it look all the more beautiful on her, and her face was made up all in white with a bright red slash of lipstick across her mouth. She did a series of artful backflips and cartwheels to land directly in front of the microphone, and said, "Good evening, ladies and...well, it's just ladies tonight, I see! So many Isabellas, and not a single Silvio to be found. Oh, well. They say the course of true love never does run straight..."
She gave the audience a theatrical wink. "And tonight, we'll be putting a few extra kinks in it." The crowd laughed, and Jo chuckled along with them. She didn't know how many of them got the joke quite as well as she and Chantal did, of course, but she was already developing a suspicion that they weren't the only ones in the audience who Madam Columbina had singled out for personal attention over the last few years.
Sure enough, Madam Columbina said, "Before we do, though, I'd like to thank you all for coming out to this very important show, especially those of you who needed to do a little traveling to get here." Jo suddenly found herself wondering where exactly she was--she didn't have much memory between receiving Madam Columbina's text and standing outside the theater, and she knew from long experience that she was perfectly capable of carrying out complex, long-term actions under Madam Columbina's direction while concealing them completely from her conscious mind. She also knew that Madam Columbina always took care of her, though, so the thought faded into blissful irrelevance as the performer continued.
"I've always wanted to perform for all my special girls in one place," Madam Columbina said, "and looking out at all of you tonight is like a dream come true for me. For you as well, I hope...although I suspect some of you still think you might be dreaming." Again, that dazzling smile, made all the brighter by the vivid red around it. "But I promise, you're all wide awake...for the moment, at least. Can I get my first volunteer?" A forest of hands shot up. Jo was surprised to find that hers was among them.
"Hmm, let's see..." Madam Columbina's eyes sparkled with mischief. "Oh, so many choices...ah! Chantal!" She pointed over to Jo's table, at Jo's friend. Jo tried not to be disappointed; the word 'first' implied that a lot of them might get a turn at the stage before the night was over. "Yes, I think you'll do nicely for my first trick. Come on up!" Chantal jumped out of her feet and ran to the stage with almost indecent haste.
"Okay, Chantal," Madam Columbina said, pulling out a deck of playing cards. "Now, we've never worked together before, right?" That got an uproarious laugh from the crowd. "Now, I hold in my hand an ordinary pack of cards, fresh from the factory. Just a very simple, very ordinary deck of playing cards, still in their original wrapper, and you're going to take a moment and look through them to make sure that they're quite ordinary." She grinned mischievously. "And Chantal? As long as you're up here on stage with me, you're not going to have any...difficulties looking at those cards. Do you understand me?"
"Yes Madam," Chantal said meekly, taking the deck of cards from the other woman's hand. It always amazed Jo how swiftly her friend melted into helpless submission for Madam Columbina--all that confidence, all that teasing certainty simply vanished to be replaced by quiet adoration. Jo wondered if she looked like that when she was under Madam Columbina's hypnotic influence. If she did, she definitely understood why Chantal liked to hypnotize her so much.
Chantal tore her eyes away from Madam Columbina with evident difficulty, and peeled the plastic wrapper off of the pack of cards. She opened the box and took out the deck, freezing for a moment as she tried to figure out what to do with the wrapper and box. "Allow me," Madam Columbina said, taking both away and clapping her hands around them. When she spread them wide again, they had vanished. "It's the 'reduce' part of 'reduce, reuse, recycle'," she said with a curtsy. "Now, if you could look at the cards for me? Just make sure they're all there, and that none of them have been marked or altered in any way."
Chantal thumbed through the cards, examining each one quickly as they went by. Jo knew it was a good thing that Madam Columbina had told her she wouldn't be affected by seeing them--every one of those cards had a different post-hypnotic trigger associated with it, from a simple reinduction suggestion on seeing the Joker to a complex series of perceptual alterations that relocated Jo's clit to the tip of her tongue for the Ace of Diamonds. Some of them, Jo couldn't even remember until she actually saw the card; others, she couldn't even remember when she was looking at the card and following the suggestion. If Madam Columbina hadn't instructed Chantal to resist, that many triggers in rapid suggestion would probably have turned her brain to mush.
Instead, after a moment's glance, Chantal said, "No, they all look fine--no, wait. There's one missing." She frowned, rifling through the deck a second time, making sure that none of them were stuck together. "The Queen of Hearts isn't in there." Jo braced herself as Chantal said the name of the missing card--she knew from bittersweet experience that hearing the name of a particular card worked just as well as seeing it to induce the hypnotic effect. But nothing seemed to happen this time.
Which just meant that whatever that suggestion did, it was sneaky. Certainly Madam Columbina's reaction suggested that she was up to something; she furrowed her brow in comical consternation and said, "Are you sure? The Queen of Hearts wouldn't usually miss a party like this, not with so many delicious tarts in the audience." She smiled at the crowd's laughter. "I tell you what. Let's see if we can get her to turn up." She took the deck back from Chantal and began to shuffle it, sending the cards flying through the air in an expert series of tricks that sprayed cards flawlessly from one hand to the other.
