Mei stepped down the halls of the university as if gravity compelled her to. She had her deflection spell active but she still sidestepped others to be certain she avoided contact. She clutched books and a mess of papers to her, so tight as if dropping a single one would mean the apocalypse, yet in such a mess that she surely pulled them into her arms without a thought to organization.

When she reached her study, she made sure no one else was in the hall before she popped inside, door open only big enough to grant her entry. She locked it after her.

“You little scamp—” When she turned to her new plant she gaped. “Not so little anymore.”

The table looked like it buckled from the added weight. The bulb only seemed a little bigger but its tentacle-like roots had grown, many more sprawled over the table and throughout the room.

Mei chuckled and bit her fist before she tossed her books and papers to a chair.

“I had no idea I had conjured up an aphrodisiac! That was . . .”

She blinked. Did some time pass? She shook her head.

“That wasn’t what I was trying to make, apparently, but fascinating nevertheless.” She chuckled. Somehow she had forgotten last night what she had even grown the plant for. Fortunately she kept well-documented notes on her research. She refamiliarized herself with them, and slowly the memories grew back into the proper places.

She remembered everything now, surely. Just the sudden excitement made her scatterbrained for a moment. It was perfectly normal to have forgotten your entire family in the face of an exciting new research opportunity.

Mei stepped over the roots splayed across the floor, taking care to sidestep when they shifted. Her mind kept flashing back to yesterday, but she shook it out of her mind. She approached the table.

“If you get any bigger, we’ll have to move you. For now, I have lots of experiments to do. Side effects, strength, dosage, risk factors—I don’t know if you’re dangerous yet. Too much could be addictive.” She leaned forward and burbled as if the plant were a baby. “You don’t want to hurt anyone, do you? You just want to spread joy like all good aphrodisiacs.”

She gasped as a tentacle slid over her shoulders and wrapped around her head.

“No, no, not yet.” She pushed the tentacle. “As fun as it was, first I need to—I need to, uh . . .” She felt a pulse of warmth through her head.

She looked at the plant and watched as it released a pink bubble.

“Oh, right, those bubbles! I need to figure out what those are. Some sort of . . . of something . . .” Another warm pulse, another bubble. “Wait, what was I testing?”

She realized she’d walked in front of the closed plant bulb, guided along by the tentacle wrapping further around her head.

“I was testing, I was testing . . .” She looked at her heap of notes. “I need to check my notes.” The tentacle turned her head to the bulb. “But it is so far away.” She found her pulse and breaths quicken. A tentacle curled around her lower leg, and she let it. “I should wait before jumping into the deep tests, but . . . but . . .” The plant bulb opened, revealing the deliciously pink pulsing rings Mei had lost herself in yesterday. “But, but, but, but—”

She giggled.

“Um, n-nothing wrong with starting the, the uh—” She found herself unable to resist smiling, especially when the tentacle hugged tighter around her neck. “The resistance testing! I need to test how easy it is to resist. It feels so hypnotic, after all.” She stared wide-eyed, legs wobbling as the tentacles wrapped her from the bottom up. “It’s like falling into . . . hypno heat . . .”

Mei’s vision narrowed to the plant bulb. Her pupils shrank, growing pink.

“First resistance test . . . is looking away,” she said. The tentacle held her head in place. “Can’t test when I can’t move my head. So I’ll test . . .” A thick tentacle curled under her butt and pushed her closer to the hypnotic plant bulb. “I’ll test how looonngg I can resissstt . . .”

She felt the pulsing pink spread over her vision. Her eyes filled with the hypnotic rings. If she couldn’t resist for long, was it all that safe?

Warmth pulsed through Mei’s head. She forgot about the potential safety hazard. She forgot she was testing for resistance. She forgot about resisting at all. Her thoughts began to pop away again as the bubbles did as well.

“What was I testing . . . ?” As the coils wrapped past her hips and bound her arms down, they once again lifted her off the floor. All her planned tests disappeared from her mind.

She could only remember one test now.

“Riiight, the . . . the . . . addiction tessstt.” She grinned, her eyes drifting up and down as she stared deeper.

She had to test how addictive the hypnotic aphrodisiac was, how addictive falling into hypno heat under its effects was.

Mei couldn’t recall why, exactly. Danger and safety had been absorbed out of her mind.

As the coils squeezed her chest, wrapped between her thighs, and fucked her body and her mind into helpless hypno heat, only a desire for deeper hypnotic lust throbbing in her mind, she knew why the addiction needed to be tested.

She needed to test how sublimely arousing addiction to the plant’s hypno heat was.