Still Vacating

This is technically a very belated post from last Wednesday, which was spent recuperating from the plane trip and helping deal with a variety of mundane matters down here at 1 Lady Ru’etha Plaza. (That’s by way of a pseudonym, of course. They haven’t actually named a street after Her…yet.) Then Thursday was busy, and Friday was busy, and Saturday was busy, and forget about posting on Sunday…

 

Not that it was all hypnosis-related busyness. Although we both love hypnosis, there are other ways to spend time together, and business and personal lives don’t just stop when I visit. So for those of you imagining a non-stop five-day long hypnotic orgy…well, I mean, have fun doing that if you want to, but it’s not what happened.

 

There have been some hypnosis highlights, though. Among them:

 

* Finding out that I get pleasantly dizzy from getting close to Lady Ru’etha’s skin and breathing in. This is a trigger I didn’t remember having installed, and it made cuddling very pleasant. (I joked that someday, I should actually sit down and list all the things about Her physical presence that hypnotize me. She replied that I wouldn’t be able to stay awake for the whole list.)

 

* Actually trying to resist Her hypnosis, thanks to the trigger that I blogged about and then forgot about (and, to answer the question one commenter asked, forgot about again every time I saw the post and remembered it. There aren’t enough reminders in the world to help you remember something your subconscious wants you to forget.) I, um…I didn’t do so well. I managed to stay awake while She was distracted by cooking lunch, but once I had Her undivided attention, I lasted…technically, I don’t know how long I lasted because time started to go kind of funny after a little bit. But I suspect it wasn’t very long. (I still insist She cheated. )

 

* Finding out that a post-hypnotic suggestion She made to me that hearing buzzing noises or feeling strong vibrating sensations against my skin would send me into a hypnotic trance (um, a totally innocent suggestion, really…no, I won’t give you the innocent explanation. But there totally is one) also applied to video game controllers with the rumble feature. She would rest the controller on my leg when She got to a cut-scene that was particularly rumble-heavy, and I’d just slump down like a puppet with cut strings. It was niiiiiiiiiiice.

 

* Actually getting to hypnotize Her a little. I’ve become more and more comfortable with doing that, since I realized that it’s actually part of my greater service to Her–after all, I want to make Her happy and please Her and make Her life better however I can, and I can’t really argue that trance and submission don’t feel good, can I? So I’ve taken a couple of opportunities, when it looked like She really wanted to relax and let go of the reins a little, to trance Her and let Her feel that bliss for a while. (And it doesn’t hurt that She is a very good hypnotic subject, easily within my modest capabilities.) (And it really doesn’t hurt that She just sounds so cute when She’s hypnotized!)

 

* Getting to serve Her in everyday ways. Over the last year or so, my conditioning has made me more generally submissive to Her, even when I’m not under hypnosis. So getting the chance to run errands and do chores…it gives me a quiet little buzz of pleasure, just a tiny little undercurrent whenever She smiles at me and says “Good boy,” that makes normal little things happy and enjoyable.

 

* Anticipating the next couple of days. **waggles eyebrows**

 

I suspect that somehow, future posts will expand on some of these details. Probaby depends on what parts of this Lady Ru’etha reads and says, “You’ve got to talk more about this!” She kind of has a way of being persuasive.

deep

Goddess has commaneded me to post this. i am in a deep hypnotic trance. She wishes me to post that i am deeply hypnotized by Her will. She wishes me to post that i will be visiting Her tomorrow. i will be hypnotized. i will go deep. Her will is going to command me, and i will make posts about it. while in trance.

i have obeyed. it always feels so good to obey Goddess, because obedience is pleasure and everything Goddess says makes so much sense. i obey, and it feels so good. She scommands me and i obeu. and that sdends me deeper. i obey. i am Her good boy. She commands me to sleep now.

Out-Of-Context Follies!

The Onion AV Club gets into the hypno-kink fetish:

 

“Staring: It’s the great human pastime. There’s nothing like a good long stare at a wall, or computer screen, or darkened window to really get the mind nice and empty. Well, emptier. It’s the perfect way to sink into the vast nothingness that is forever lapping at the tiny shore of our miniscule existence. Just open your eyes and…stare. “

 

Oh, go on. Tell me that didn’t make you squirm, just a little.

 

(Actual context here.)

By Her Command

Um.

OK, so remember my comments about hypnosis and how it works? Yes, this is first-hand evidence of it. I didn’t intend to blog today, and I don’t really know what I’m blogging about…but I just got off the phone with Lady Ru’etha, and She gave me a very specific post-hypnotic command to post something here while She naps.

So I suppose I can post about that; I’m a little fuzzy on events, but I know She took me very deep and did some very heavy conditioning. I can recall that She programmed me in preparation for my upcoming visit, but I’m not sure how much longer I’ll remember that. I’m getting better at forgetting things I think She wants me to forget. But while I still remember it, I’ll mention that She programmed me to believe I can resist Her hypnosis, but only on a waking level. Deep down, all the conditioning that She’s put into my head over the years that make it absolutely impossible for me to resist Her hypnotic inductions will still be there, and the harder I fight, the harder it will be to fight until my resistance breaks and I submit to Her will completely.

And of course, a) my brain resolved the “remember or not” conundrum by going into a light trance for most of that paragraph (because when I’m in trance, of course I can remember the things I’m only supposed to remember in trance…) And b) by typing it out like that, I’m reinforcing the program by repeating it to myself, thus cementing it all the deeper into my subconscious. So there you go, actual hypnotic brainwashing, liveblogged for your convenience.

Sexism and Kink

That’s the weird thing about three-day weekends; they always seem to make you a day late in doing other things. Your Tuesday feels like a Monday, so your Wednesday feels like a Tuesday, so you wind up posting your blog entry a day late. My apologies to all my readers.

So today, I’m going to tangent a bit–this blog mostly discusses hypnosis, with an implied understanding that we are actually discussing “erotic hypnosis”. But I’m actually going to focus on the sex part today. Unfortunately, it’s not in one of those “ooh, sexy hot secrets from my personal life” sort of way. I’m going to take the time to rant a bit about sexism and BDSM.

For a lot of people, this rates a sort of automatic, “Well, duh!” Many people (and many feminists) feel like any BDSM relationship in which the man is the dominant and the woman is the submissive is automatically a sexist relationship, just like the sky is blue and the grass is green. It’s not even hard to understand their logic; we’re just now coming out of a seemingly-endless period in history where women heard from every conceivable source that their role was to submit to the male authority in every area of their lives, and it took a lot of time, energy and effort to break free of that indoctrination (which is not the same as hypnosis, a topic I might discuss someday.) And it’s by no means a completed process. (Just ask Phyllis Schlafly.) So when some people see a woman in a subservient relationship to a man, it is natural to think of that as sexist.

But the kink community is all about (and I know some people are going to wince at hearing these words, because they are so overused, but bear with me) power exchanges. BDSM is about voluntarily giving your power to someone else, letting them enjoy the rush of dominance while you enjoy the rush of submission. Those are both enjoyable feelings, and both fun roles to take. There really is nothing wrong with wanting to take either role, because it is a voluntary submission. Any good scene, and any good BDSM relationship, has at its base the knowledge that the bottom can take that power back whenever they want, but are choosing not to. (And the very best scenes come along when the bottom lets that knowledge slide far enough to the back of their head that they only remember it if they absolutely have to, which is part of what makes hypnosis so much fun in BDSM play.)

It’s that word, “voluntary”, that is key here. “Voluntary” means that the submissive only gives up power under the conditions they’ve determined, at the times and in the places they’ve decided. They set the boundaries for their submission. Maybe that’s only submitting when wearing a collar, maybe it’s only in the bedroom, maybe it’s 24/7 lifestyle submission. But it’s their decision and their boundary. They might lose all their power within those boundaries, but they never lose the power to set them.

That’s the difference between submission and sexism in the world of BDSM–when someone else decides that they have the right to set your boundaries, that’s sexist. Saying, “You did that for your last boyfriend, you should do it for me,” or “You did that last week, you should do it again this week,” or “You submitted to me in the bedroom last night, that means I’m in charge and you should let me decide whether or not you keep your job” or even, “You hypnotize some people for free, that means I should get a freebie because I don’t want to pay for it” (to cite a particular pet peeve of many hypnodommes…) All of these are ways of trying to take the power that the submissive has the right to keep for herself. That’s sexist.

Or, to give the example that originally prompted this line of thinking, Valerie D’Orazio posted on her blog a while back about a comic book convention with a “Slave Leia Photoshoot”, where lots of women dressed up as Leia in her metal bikini from “Return of the Jedi”. D’Orazio said, “No matter how many times the girlfriend says that this was completely her own decision and that her man, standing beside her in a Han Solo outfit or trucker’s hat, had absolutely nothing to do with it, I just didn’t buy it.”

Which prompts another question: By refusing to accept that another woman could set her own boundaries, enjoy sexual behavior (in this case exhibitionism rather than actual BDSM) and still be an independent feminist, isn’t D’Orazio trying to set boundaries for them? And is that a form of sexism in and of itself? Saying, “I wouldn’t do that, so you can’t” could be seen as just as sexist as saying, “I want you to do that, you you must.”

(Although, in the interest of fairness and accuracy, I should point out that D’Orazio might very well be right, too. If, in fact, the boyfriend was pressuring his girlfriend to dress like this, he was taking away her right to set her own rules for when she displayed her body, and that’s clearly sexist by my own definition. I’m just pointing out that in any situation involving sexuality, particularly sexual kinks, it’s not ever going to be as simple as “sexy=sexist”, and that in fact, a lot of the people trying to banish women’s sexuality are doing so in order to control it…and nobody but the woman in question has the right to do that. Just to make things clear, in case Valerie D’Orazio should happen to visit the site and worry that I’m slamming on her. )

The Risks of Hypnosis

Just how powerful is hypnosis, you might ask? Well, that’s the tricky thing about it. Hypnosis doesn’t actually seem that powerful. It’s very easy to convince yourself that you’re not doing this because you’re hypnotized. No, sir (or madam.) No, you just have all sorts of very good reasons for doing whatever it is you’ve been hypnotized to do that just happen to coincide with the fact that you’ve been hypnotized, and those excellent reasons…reasons that might seem a little frivolous to others, but which you know to be vitally important…are the real reasons why. Which, of course, means that hypnosis is very powerful indeed, because it’s so subtle. A cautionary tale follows.

Last Saturday night, Lady Ru’etha hypnotized me, and gave me an assignment; She told me to pick up a few things for my upcoming visit in November. (Perfectly ordinary, unassuming things, of course! Certainly not sex toys! No, they were, um…gardening tools. For working in the garden. In November.)

Again, this is Saturday night, October 3rd. For a trip I’ll be taking November 3rd. I have a full month to run this little errand and complete my assignment. But, of course, I don’t want to forget (I tell myself). After all, it’s going to be a busy month, and I’d feel just terrible if I got onto that plane and didn’t have those gardening tools with me. Even though there are plenty of garden centers where Lady Ru’etha lives. (We’ve browsed for rakes a few times together.) So I get up at eleven o’clock in the morning so that I can get the errand done and get home in time to watch the football game.

Problem: The local garden center isn’t open until noon. There’s a twenty-four hour garden center, but it’s all the way across town (we have a lot of horticultural enthusiasts around here), and I’m not going to have time to get to it before the game starts. So, reluctantly, I go back home and take some time to enjoy watching the Patriots/Ravens game. (I also take some time to watch the Bears/Lions game.)

As soon as the game is over, though, I’m right back on the road to the garden center. Keep in mind, I woke up at eleven AM when my usual waking time is about 6 PM. I work Sunday night. And I’ve got a whole month to get this done. But of course, for reasons entirely unrelated to the fact that I’m following a post-hypnotic suggestion, this is really urgent and I need to get it done now.

I get to the garden center, and there’s a problem. While they’ve got the rakes I’m looking for, they don’t seem to have any spades at all. And I was really looking forward to having a nice spade, and to Lady Ru’etha teaching me exactly how to use it. (And again, I’m certainly not following a post-hypnotic suggestion.) So, with a grimace, I decide to go all the way across town to the other garden center. (There are actually a lot of garden centers around here; I just don’t know where they all are. I generally don’t use a lot of tools, not when there’s so much you can do by hand.) (Yes, I’m having way too much fun with this metaphor.)

So when I get to downtown, I suddenly remember that there is a very major, very important baseball game today. And it’s just getting out as I hit downtown traffic. Do I decide to give up? Of course not. I’ve already gotten this far, and it seems like such a waste to give up now, and I’d just have to come back out here anyway, and I’m certainly not following a post-hypnotic suggestion! So I fight my way through the traffic, get to the garden center, buy the tools, and fight my way back home to catch three hours of sleep before work. (And get a very sweet apology from Lady Ru’etha, who felt very bad about not specifying a timeframe for the assignment. )

So the big risk of hypnosis, ladies and gentlemen? It works. Keep that in mind before making any suggestions. Thank you, and good night.

“The Best That I Could Do” Now Available For Purchase!

That’s right, folks! Just as my stories on the EMCSA have caught up with the end of “The Immaculate Collection”, I’ve got a brand-new book out with twenty-one brand new stories for you to check out in print-on-demand book form or affordable, downloadable ebook format! This one’s got it all–more Girls(tm), more WildRose, more Jack and Diane, lesbians, magic, and even songs!

And because I love you all so very much, I’ve once again gotten Sue-Chan to do a cover, I’ve cajoled Lady Ru’etha into giving me a lovely foreword, and I’ve even included a few pages of my commentary on each story! But what stories are in this collection, you ask?

Well, read on…

Yet More Memories of DragonCon

My apologies for the slight delay in posting; I really do try to put something up every Wednesday, but yesterday just seemed to sort of get away from me. I’m sure Lady Ru’etha will make it up to you all at some point by commanding me to post.

This is the final entry in the epic trilogy that is my recollections of DragonCon 2009; by now, we’re up to Sunday night, the final evening of the convention. Lady Ru’etha once again hosted a little hypnosis symposium for anyone who had questions or just wanted to experience trance; this one wasn’t as well-attended as Saturday’s, but I don’t think any of the people there minded. Fewer people meant more trance time for the people who wanted it, and a more intimate experience…and no, I don’t mean that sort of “intimate”, although there were a couple of people from Saturday night who got up the nerve to confess that they’d been enjoying hypnosis in a little bit more than a purely relaxing sense.

For myself, I didn’t actually trance that much. For the early part of the night (and I use “early” advisably, we started at 11:30 PM) most of the hypnosis revolved around one person taking center-stage while Lady Ru’etha put them under and everyone else watched. This was just close enough to one of my general squicks, humiliation, that I didn’t feel totally comfortable volunteering. It wasn’t actually humiliating, you understand. Nobody was having anything mean done to them. But something about everyone in the room staring at me while I got hypnotized made me just slightly twitchy. Luckily, Lady Ru’etha made it very clear to everyone, in a polite but firm way, that nobody had to come up who didn’t want to and nobody should pressure anyone.

So for me, a lot of the evening was sitting, chatting, and watching. I answered some questions from people while Lady Ru’etha was trancing other people out (I’m not a formally-trained hypnotist, but as Lady Ru’etha will mention, I’ve picked up a lot from Her over the years.) I watched a little bit of hypnotic fun, as one person was allowed to be a cat for a good fifteen minutes or so (one of their personal fantasies) while another spent some time in Robot Mode (from Lady Ru’etha’s “Robotic Initialization” series, also one of their personal fantasies.) I did have a little time spent in trance, of course. Lady Ru’etha demonstrated Her Voice trigger a few times, and the people who had it installed (all of Her pets, and one or two close friends) dropped like a rock the moment She said, “Voice commands deep trance now.” (She’s putting out a CD of that particular induction very soon. I wonder how many people will drop for Her next year when She says that.)

Once again, it was a very late evening, only this time we had to get up bright and early for the last day of the con. It was emotional, as last days tend to be; we’d all spent almost a full week in each other’s company, but it wasn’t enough. It never is. Lady Ru’etha got to formally place a new collar one of Her pets, who is also one of Her husbands (and he is, whatever the law might say) and She and I tranced each other for about an hour before I had to leave for my flight. (First I tranced Her, then She tranced me. This is where the biting came in, for those of you who remember a few posts back.)

I’m already looking forward to next year.

More Memories of DragonCon

So on Saturday afternoon at DragonCon, I attended the “Hypnosis Facts and Fiction” panel. It was very well attended, although for a moment at the beginning I was deeply concerned that it was going to be derailed by a Bat. Shit. Insane. Cosplayer who started the whole thing off by asking how she could develop resistance to hypnosis because her arch-nemesis was an evil telepath. (I shit you not. This happened.) But she got shut down very quickly and deftly, and the panel proceeded to be a nice discussion of hypnosis, what it can do, and what it can’t do. (It was also crashed by David Fonteneau, but he was a welcome crasher with some very nice contributions on stage hypnosis and nobody minded that he didn’t actually have a badge. Shhh! Don’t tell any con staffers! )

There was no actual hypnosis at that panel; that waited until 11:30 or so, when a room opened up and Lady Ru’etha could do a group induction. This was also quite well attended; about twenty to thirty people showed up and enjoyed what I swore at the time was a ten-minute long group trance, but which turned out to be twenty-eight minutes. I remember thinking that I wasn’t going as deep as usual, despite the happy tick of the metronome acting like an anchor to my brain…but when I came out, I found major time distortion and parts of my memory that had fogged over. (I’m familiar enough with Lady Ru’etha’s group inductions to know what probably happened during that time, but the line between imagination and reconstruction is blurry enough that I won’t bother trying. I just know it was niiiiice. )

After that, She did a long period of questions and answers, of which there were a lot–the “hypno-posse” from Thursday night had been joined by a lot of new faces, so there really were a lot of people who’d never experienced deliberately induced trance before and had a lot of questions. (One of my Lady’s standard lines: Everyone has experienced trance. Everyone experiences it several times a day, because it’s a natural state of consciousness. You might not have been formally hypnotized, but you’ve been in trance.)

She did several rapid inductions–this is a technique for putting someone under that involves rapidly overwhelming their conscious mind with more input than they can handle in a short period, then at the exact moment where they’re overwhelmed, giving them just the right little “nudge” into hypnosis. Her induction involved moving Her hand rapidly in front of their face as their eyes followed it, then pulling them forward and saying “Sleep,” just at the moment where their eyes lost focus and started to glaze. It’s an absolutely adorable thing to watch.

Particularly when it involved a very, very adorable young woman in a corset who wandered in on her way back from a rave, saying, “I heard they were hypnotizing people in here!” But I’m getting ahead of myself a bit…

Lady Ru’etha made sure that everyone who wanted a turn got one, then started letting people goof around. We had two light and sound machines (the same things that got into my head so damn bad last year) and a couple of people tried them over the course of the night. Including the friend who’d joined us Thursday night, whose hypnosis interest seemed to have grown exponentially with a couple of days to think over what she’d experienced. (She also turned out to be an amusingly good subject, too; there were a couple of hypnotists in the room that night apart from Lady Ru’etha, and so she wound up dazing out more than a few times over the course of events.)

We all actually wound up going under a lot; Lady Ru’etha is more than a little mischievous when it comes to triggering trances, and She was in a room where at least five people had gone under for Her often enough that they were conditioned to respond to Her trance triggers (deliberately installed or otherwise.) We’d very frequently get into situations where She was hypnotizing one person, and when She looked up, three or four people had gone under.

I recall that after everyone had gone through at least one induction, one woman came back for seconds…and because, as I say, Lady Ru’etha has a mischievous streak to Her, seconds became thirds became fourths before She let her out of the chair. She’d wake her up, give her just a couple of seconds to realize that she was, in fact awake…and then snap Her fingers, or pick up the woman’s arm and drop it into Her outstretched hand, or just say, “Sleep”, and she’d go right back down again. It only lasted about two minutes, but the look in that woman’s eyes by the time she finally got up…OK, by the time she was finally allowed to get up…told me that she was heavily fractionated.

And a few more people joined us over the course of the night–mainly because the girl who was “just curious” about hypnosis on Thursday was telling people up and down the halls on her way to the bathroom, “It’s so awesome, they’re hypnotizing people down there! Go check it out!” Which led to a few people detaching themselves from the knot of dancing, parties, and raves in the central lobby (DragonCon is a serious party con), and wandering in. Including one very attractive girl in a corset who walked in saying, “I heard they were hypnotizing people in here!”

Turned out she’d just had her first experience with hypnosis about a week earlier when a stage hypnotist did a performance (we actually suspect that it might have been the aforementioned David Fonteneau), and she wanted to try some more. And she did…Lady Ru’etha blogged about this on Her own blog, but even at the time, I could see that little light in Her eyes that said, “I’m going to enjoy this about as much as an person can enjoy an essentially G-rated trance.” She gave the girl a rapid, a pocketwatch induction that left me craving so bad that I went up to Her a little bit later and asked for the same, and left the girl pleasantly drifting for a good twenty minutes (at her own request–she was clearly enjoying the trance experience, and when asked, “Do you want to come back up?”, said “Not yet.”) And meanwhile, her boyfriend found the light and sound machine…

By this point, Lady Ru’etha Herself was pretty hilariously fractionated. She commented to one person that She was probbly the easiest subject in the room, and I surprised both of us by running my finger down Her forehead and being quite gratified as She slumped sideways against me. (She’s adorable in trance. It makes me want to cuddle Her like a teddy bear.) I brought Her right back up, because it was Her party and I didn’t want Her to miss out on the chance to hypnotize people left, right and center, but it was a good example of how just the rapport trances were enough to leave Her fractionated.

My pocketwatch induction was right towards the end; I asked Her if She could hypnotize me with the pocketwatch (She has three, all presents from pets) and She cheerfully obliged. There’s something so deep-down satisfying about a traditional pocketwatch induction. It just feels so inevitable–you know what a pocketwatch does when a hypnotist dangles it in front of your eyes, you know what happens when you follow a pocketwatch with your eyes and they start getting heavy, and you just know that you’re going to sink into trance. (I think that the next time I ask Her to do it, I’m going to ask Her to compel my eyes to stay open, instead of compelling them to shut. I love that moment when your eyes flutter and roll back, and I’d love to try to extend it a bit longer.)

The whole evening was a long, happy blur of hypnosis, and it was about 3:30 AM by the time we finally headed back to the hotel room. We’d made a lot of new hypno-enthusiasts, probably more than a couple new hypno-fetishists, and what with all the fractionation, I think I lasted about thirty seconds between the time I lay down and the time I fell asleep.

Memories of DragonCon

DragonCon this year might as well have been named “HypnoFest 2009″, at least for me. Lady Ru’etha was in a playful mood all weekend, and there always seemed to be a small crowd of tranceplay enthusiasts around Her who wanted to watch, participate, or experiment for themselves. (I think She made about a half-dozen budding hypnotists, and a dozen or so more who like the feel of trance.)

The first night was a good case in point. The first evening of the con is always a little informal, since there’s no actual convention programming other than the line for registration (which took us two and a half hours all by itself.) I was up in the hotel room, dozed off, but when Lady Ru’etha came up and asked me if I wanted to accompany Her in meeting some people we knew from last year, I blinked the sleep out of my eyes and came along. (It wasn’t that I wasn’t tired; I just knew that a) I had gone to the con to be with Her, not to sleep, and b) I was going to spend enough time tranced out that I’d probably wind up more alert than if I slept.)

So we went and found somewhere quiet (we being my Lady, myself, two of Her fellow pets, two other friends of Hers that were staying with us, one friend from last year, and her new girlfriend who knew very little about hypnosis other than that her girlfriend was very, very enthusiastic about it.) Which meant that she was treated to a long, in-depth, personalized course on the ins and outs of hypnosis, complete with demonstrations from no less than five eagerly hypnotizable subjects.

I don’t actually remember a ton of it, to be honest. I remember my Lady used one of Her favorite triggers on me more than once (the “off button” She installed back in February of 2008, which I blogged about at the time.) I remember She had a habit of “accidentally” triggering people–when you’re in and out of trance very rapidly and frequently like we were that night, and you’re intently focused on the words of someone you know is an expert hypnotist, and you’re just generally craving the warm, drifty sensations of trance, there’s kind of a tendency to interpret everything as a trigger, and every trigger as meant for you. I recall Her saying one person’s name and snapping Her fingers; that person instantly slumped down in trance, to general giggles. Giggles that lasted about four finger snaps longer, as She moved Her hand in front of each person in turn and induced them the same way.

(It’s worth mentioning that Lady Ru’etha has never installed a “finger snap” trigger in my head; She’s never given me any post-hypnotics about it at all. But I was in a state where I wanted to go into trance for Her very badly, I was keyed in on Her very intently and could tell that She wanted me to go into trance, and so when She snapped Her fingers, my brain said, “A-ha! I know what that means!” And down I went.)

By the end of the evening, our new friend had gone into trance at least once herself (formally, at least; given the amount of careful attention she was paying to Lady Ru’etha, and the number of inductions and trances she observed, it’s highly likely that she had gone in and out of light trances several times over the course of the evening without even recognizing them as such.) But at the end of the night, Lady Ru’etha did an excellent hypnotic induction and put her under, and from the look on her face when she came back up, we could all tell She’d created another trance addict.

Which proved to be pretty prescient, as the rest of the con proved. But that’s for later.