Lois usually left her computer locked, but Savannah wasn't about to let a little thing like that stop her. She sat down in front of the keyboard and wiggled the mouse, then typed in the name she found in the chat logs from Lois's phone. She wasn't entirely sure it would work--there were plenty of other possibilities in there, including some that made Savannah blush just thinking about them, but 'Dominus' did the trick and before Savannah knew it she was in. She felt a warm glow of satisfaction in her deductive reasoning, but it was tempered with a healthy dose of concern for her friend.
And maybe just a touch of guilt, but Savannah was already over that by the time she opened Lois's web browser and began to go through her browsing history. She'd known from the outset that Lois was acting funny, and not just 'new relationship energy' funny no matter what Craig might say. People in a long-distance relationship didn't excuse themselves from one of Professor Brinkman's lectures to go to the bathroom and come back fifteen minutes later smelling like pussy... or okay, maybe sometimes they did, but not people like Lois. Savannah pictured her roommate in her head, all mousy brown hair and fishbelly white complexion and chunky woolen sweaters and glasses with Coke-bottle lenses. It was hard to imagine someone like that even knowing what masturbation was, let alone ditching out on class for it.
It didn't take Savannah long to pick out the anomaly among the regular visits to the class resources website, Lois's Netflix account, and her various social media--whatever 'The Dungeon of Lord Dominus' was, it looked like her roommate went there three or four times a day. Presumably this was the same person who kept texting Lois with all the weird quarter-assed ASCII art that she replied to with pictures of her naked body. Not that Savannah was being judgmental or prudish--she'd sent a few topless photos herself on occasion, and under other circumstances she'd only be surprised that Lois had such incredible tits under those baggy clothes she always wore. But these weren't normal circumstances. And Savannah was going to prove it.
She pulled up the website, expecting to find some weird sweaty guy's blog page, but instead she found an impressive, professionally coded site with its own login and password fields. Thankfully, the sheer number of visits to the site worked in the amateur sleuth's favor--all Savannah needed to do was click in the text box, and the browser automatically filled in all the information for her. A further click led her inside... and Savannah's jaw went slack with stunned amazement at what she found.
It was a whole site devoted to... well, to some of the most fucked-up kinks Savannah had ever heard of, honestly. Savannah never thought she'd see the day when her meek, polite, prudish roommate would make her blush, but she could physically feel the heat of her cheeks as they went beet red in shocked astonishment at everything she was finding. 'Hypnotic Training - Begin Here'. 'Earn My Attention - Show Lord Dominus You Can Debase Yourself Like a Good Girl'. 'The Gallery of Special Sluts'. 'Edging Spirals for Brainwashed Slaves'. 'Get Dumber for Dominus'. 'Spread the Gospel of Surrender'. Every button and menu item seemed to hint at a perversion more twisted than the last, until Savannah's eyes crossed trying to figure out where to look first. She literally could not imagine Lois visiting a place like this. She didn't even know how her friend would have found it.
She eventually decided to click on the innocuous-seeming button in the upper left-hand corner of the screen marked 'Inbox'--if Lois had stumbled onto this website and gotten in over her head with a guy who was into some sort of weird hypnosis fetish, and as improbable as that sounded it certainly seemed to be the case, then perhaps her old messages would give Savannah some kind of clue as to where she'd disappeared to these last few weekends. It had the added benefit of being the only button that didn't scare the shit out of the would-be detective.
She'd intended that last bit as a private joke, but the moment the thought settled into Savannah's head she realized she really did believe the site's hyperbolic claims. She wasn't doubting it even for a moment--as soon as she saw the constantly-spinning spiral logo at the top of the screen, and the wall of text that promised 'a mesmerizing descent into complete control like no other', Savannah felt instantly certain that her friend had fallen down some kind of weird rabbit hole and let a creepy Internet pervert get his hooks into her vulnerable brain. It explained the bizarre, explicitly sexual text messages, the public masturbation episodes, the increasingly frequent disappearances... all of it.
Savannah did feel another twinge of guilt as she opened up her friend's inbox and began rifling through her private messages--sure, this all looked absurdly fucked-up and unethical, but that didn't mean it really was. Maybe this was all just fantasy, some kind of roleplay thing that really pushed all of Lois's hot buttons and got her so worked up that she wound up neglecting her schoolwork a little and ignoring her social circle just a tiny bit. Savannah had gone through that herself, during those heady weeks with Dan back in freshman year. Maybe Savannah was just being nosy when she looked over her friend's shoulder and memorized her phone's PIN number, and subsequently snuck into her bedroom while she was asleep to read her texts.
(Okay. Yeah. That last bit sounded really bad when she said it all at once like that.)
But yes, Savannah told herself, maybe it was all consensual. Maybe this 'Lord Dominus' guy, whoever he was, just had a kink and Lois happened to share it. The very first subject header in the inbox said, 'You Have Chosen to Submit', after all, even if the first line of the actual message read, 'Or at least that's what you think.' Maybe all the hypnosis was fake, she tried to convince herself, or at the very least maybe it was consensual. Even as Savannah went through message after message, from 'You Have Been Trained to Obey' to 'Freedom Is No Longer an Option' to 'You've Earned My Attention, Slut', she still tried to pretend that things weren't necessarily as bad as they seemed. Even if it meant eating some crow when she finally confessed the truth to Lois.
Until she got to 'Welcome to the Gallery of Special Sluts'. That was when Savannah stopped believing that any of this could be just a fetish. Not after three years of chunky sweaters and calf-length skirts. Not after those first few awkward weeks of living together when Lois wouldn't dress down to her comfy clothes even when it was just the two of them in the living room. Not after all those times Lois held her books up anxiously in front of her chest like a shield as she walked across campus, even though her book bag was almost empty. There was no way on God's green earth that Lois Cassaday would ever show her body on purpose without being straight-up hypnotized into it... and that meant every last bit of this was 100% real.
