→ It was like… I was a planet.
→ "I" was this infinitesimally small point at the core of everything. All of who I was pressed into white hot light, every second passing only compressing further. All sense of time disappeared with the rest of my self.
→ I felt weightless and yet impossible to escape the orbit of. The ideas they taught me — or, trained me into — orbited around me. Every repetition felt like more mass, and more mess meant more gravity. Wisps of thoughts start to plummet into me.
→ My core was encased in new beliefs, new goals; to "convert", to "persuade", to "expand". These feelings felt so big, so powerful. Those words would just run through what was left of my mind. Everything else was just gravity, just orbit, just pulling. I was the universe, but the matter made who I was.
→ Stars of knowledge would collapse into me. Behavioral psychology textbooks and demonstrations, all information possibly findable forced into me as fast as possible. It eviscerated me, too much energy. I only got denser and denser.
→ Persuasion, health, politics, therapeutic techniques, hypnosis, mental health databases… They were teaching me what they were doing to me, and how I could do it to others. It was all I was, and all I was becoming.
→ It felt good. They made it feel good. It felt powerful, they made it feel powerful.
→ I don't know when the shift happened, but… I stopped really being there. The knowledge was there, the motivation and core, but that infintesimal dot became something else… a black hole. I felt nothing but the need to consume. I liked it. I still like it.
→ More than I thought I could be. Once I was freed, I couldn't tell what was even happening for the first few days. It took months for my name to feel like my own. They never gave me a name, that apparently happens at the end of the process. A new identity gets made after the first is vanished. They had to find every detail they could about me and basically reform who I am. I was so suggestible at that point that I accepted everything they said.
→ Couldn't they have asked someone you knew?
→ They couldn't find anything about me. I was apparently an orphan, but my records were all removed.
→ Like I said, they found all the details about me they could. For the rest, they had to just kind of… guess. They said at that point, anything I was told would really be true for me. My license said "Clara Innsbrook", that I'm 22, and that I'm 5'7. The height was right, so the best we can assume is that the rest is too. There are no records of me anywhere, though. I like pancakes, that I know for sure.
→ Jeez… pancakes are nice at least.
→ Mhm. My body remembers stuff like that at least. They would test how I responded to sensory stuff like that a lot. After a month of slowing progress, they let me out with an apartment near the ward's grounds. I still need to check up with them every week, but I'm slowly getting back to normal.
→ I'm happy that you even believe me.
→ It's really no problem! But um… may I ask something?
→ …are you still that suggestible? I mean, I know that you have a name and stuff now, but does that stop any of that training?
→ They have hypnotists of their own at the ward, and they did an okay job giving me safeguards. I don't think I'd survive being put in that same training again, but not just anyone can come up to me and put me under.
→ That being said, if I really like someone… I can definitely let those guards down.
→ …Could I ask another thing? Please?
→ Why do you ask if you can ask things? Speak.
→ …Do you still know all of the stuff the training taught you?
→ Yes. It was a little odd, being reformed. At first I couldn't tell what was happening, but as it all fell into place, I could understand everything the hypnotists were doing and why. They had to stop me from talking to the other patients at one point.
→ Good, finally being direct. They had to stop me because I was training them whenever I got bored.
→ Let me ask you something now. I want you to be honest, okay?
→ Do you want me to train you, now?
→ No apologies. Tell me more.
→ I know it's messed up, but I really can't help it. What they did to you is horrible.
→ It's really, really hot as a fantasy. I can't stop thinking about it.
→ Neither can I, hun. I can't put you under though, not even once. That's something neither of "us" would survive.
