"Do you know what the difference is," Louisa asked, "between a calendar and a clock?" Jon stared back at her, his muddled mind blank with incomprehension as he tried to come up with an answer. He knew that answers existed--he knew a lot of possible answers, from form to function to style to purpose to size to color. But sifting through them all to find the answer the beautiful woman with hazel eyes and long chestnut hair and wide, smiling pink cheeks wanted to hear felt too much like effort when he was this deeply hypnotized. The harder he tried to come up with something, the more difficult it became and the more delightfully absurd his own inability to respond became, until finally he just giggled and shook his head. The gentle squeeze of her fingers around his shaft told Jon that was exactly what she wanted to hear.

"Good boy!" she exclaimed, kissing him on the forehead. "Of course you don't know. You don't know because Mistress hasn't told you yet, isn't that right?" Jon let out another vacant titter, the patronizing warmth of her cooing voice wrapping around his mind and swaddling him tightly in sleepy ecstasy. He knew that normally there was something beyond the blankness in his head, an intellect so sharp it occasionally cut itself, but the depths of Louisa's beautiful hazel eyes banished all the pressure to be witty and clever and right about everything. He only needed to think the thoughts he was given to think, and that made Jon so blissfully happy he couldn't stop himself from giggling.

The hand on his cock helped. Every time it tugged on his shaft, Jon felt another delightful pulse of pleasure surge up into his drowsy, obedient brain... and hours of delicious conditioning had taught his mesmerized mind that the better he felt, the dumber he became. And the dumber he got, the better it felt to sink into trance for his Mistress and let those warm, happy currents of sleepy bliss carry him along into blank, befuddled rapture. Jon never knew that becoming stupid was a skill before he and Louisa tried out intelligence play, but now he realized he had a natural knack for it. And for the first time in his life, that sounded kind of nice.

"Now. Calendars and clocks." Louisa's voice brought his mind to attention, her tone becoming firm and commanding without ever losing that quality of loving condescension that swept him deeper into her power. "Let's talk about a clock first, shall we?" Jon nodded, the motion automatically bubbling up more vacant laughter from his sleepy brain. Agreeing always made him feel amiable, and that led his thoughts down a rabbit hole of associations straight back to more of that same dumb, happy bliss he craved so much. It was another way his Mistress had trained him to be hers, and Jon loved knowing he'd responded to her training so perfectly.

"A clock," she continued, her hand continuing to relentlessly stroke Jon's cock at just the right pace to keep him wonderfully close to orgasm without allowing him to spill over, "is one of those devices that's very useful when it's working, and even more useful when it stops. A clock that's ticking could be running fast or running slow. It could be gaining minutes, it could be losing minutes, it could be set to the wrong time zone or simply the wrong time. But when you listen to that delightful, soothing silence of a stopped clock, there are two times a day when you know it's exactly right. Doesn't that sound nice, sweetie? Letting everything inside go silent and knowing how rare and precious it is when you give the right answer instead of saying something silly?" Jon nodded again. A part of his brain kept trying to poke holes in the argument, but every time he tried his train of thought got all muddled up and eventually his mind simply collapsed into vacuous acceptance. It was always easier to agree with Louisa.

"Now a calendar, on the other hand... a calendar takes work." Louisa shifted position, lying next to Jon with her lush breasts pressed right up against his side and her hand still working his shaft with that same patient rhythm. The steady dribble of precum welling up from his cock left her fingers well-lubricated, stroking freely and without friction. Jon had no trouble centering his whole attention on that playful, perpetual tug. His eyelids fluttered shut, but in his mind he still saw his Mistress's beautiful hazel eyes.

She gave his nipples a gentle nibble. "You know what I mean, don't you, good boy?" she asked, despite having to understand that Jon's distracted and vacant mind didn't know anything anymore until she told it to him. "Every single day, you have to go to that calendar and cross off a date or tear off a page or circle some upcoming occasion. And when you get to the end of a week, a month, a year, that calendar is... useless. It's done being right forever. Every calendar, no matter how full of cleverness it is, reaches a point where it's done being clever for good. No matter how hard you work at keeping it up. No matter how much effort you put in."

Jon's brow furrowed for a moment, struggling to think of the exceptions he knew had to be there somewhere in the back of his blank, bewildered brain... but it was simply too hard. It was too much effort to think for himself when Mistress was right there, giving him thoughts that his programming kept telling him were better and smarter and cleverer than anything he could come up with himself. And when he finally gave up trying to think of an answer and started thinking about his difficulty thinking, the feedback loop deepened until he finally released all the tension and struggle and resistance in another helpless giggle. And the laughter relaxed his mind even deeper into drowsy ecstasy for Louisa.

"Good boy!" she cooed, giving him a slightly harder tug in response. "A clock requires some work, too, I suppose--you have to keep winding it, and charging it, and putting in new batteries, and resetting it every time it stops--but it's nothing like a calendar. A calendar always gets stuck, in the end, on that one last day that's all it knows. It doesn't have anywhere else to go when it stops. It drifts along in that single moment of time while everything else flows by around it. Imagine being stuck in a moment like that, sweetie, mm?" Jon didn't have to. Not when trance stilled and silenced his perception of time and made the bliss of Louisa's touch stretch out into a languid eternity of bliss.

"Imagine getting lost in that timeless time, always knowing that there isn't a right answer to give because you're all out of those clever, correct responses." Louisa stroked him a little faster, building the pleasure, promising him a climax with her fingers that her lips refused to yield up. "Imagine knowing that no one is concerned anymore about what you might say, what you might think, because you're just... decorative now. Think very hard about what that would feel like, my darling little poppet." Jon didn't have to think. The pulsing arousal in his cock supplied every sensation and emotion he needed at the moment.

"Oh, I know you're still thinking about the clock, dearest," Louisa mock-pouted, her words manufacturing Jon's response rather than predicting it. "You're thinking about what it would be like to be right, oh... once or twice a day, never knowing when it was until someone smarter and cleverer told you. It would make you feel so deliciously dumb to have to need someone else to tell you when you were right and when you were wrong, wouldn't it?" Jon squirmed, sensual embarrassment filling his head and making his cheeks blush a bright, prickling red. Part of the thrill he got from intelligence play was knowing how humiliating it should be to be utterly bereft of his usually sharp intellect and hearing, in Louisa's loving and patronizing tones, exactly how safe he was to let his guard down and feel stupid without shame for a change.

"Of course it would," Louisa answered, once again filling in the void of absent-minded confusion in Jon's head with the certainty of her words. "But I can't stop thinking about that calendar. That poor silly calendar, all out of cleverness, drained of everything useful and only wanting to be pretty and happy and blank. You could be like that, sweetie. You could have the satisfaction of knowing that there was nothing left in that adorable little brain of yours, knowing you were perpetually perplexed without me to guide you--that means 'always wrong', poppet," she added, seeing his brow furrow in desperate bewilderment. His cock twitched, the deepening fog in his head combining with the pleasure of Louisa's touch to bring him ever closer to a climax that lay just on the other side of her permission to come.

She gave him another playful kiss on the forehead. "I suppose I could always let you decide, dear. What would my good little slut rather be, mm? A stopped clock, or a used calendar?" Jon opened his mouth, more to moan than to utter anything coherent, but she stopped his speech with a long, slow, sensuous liplock that completely derailed whatever train of thought he might have had and left him panting and shuddering with arousal. "Before you answer, let me go over it again. Because I know you're thinking very slow right now." Jon nodded. He couldn't think of anything more to say than that.

"The clock is right, but only very rarely," she purred, fixing him with a sensual stare Jon could feel straight through his closed eyelids. "And it never, ever knows when it's right and when it's wrong. It needs someone clever around it, someone who can help sort out all that silly fluff in its workings and think for it when it's slowed to a stop. I think my darling boy would like to be a stopped clock for Mistress." Jon's head bobbed up and down, stuck in a perpetual loop of acquiescence now.

"The calendar, though... the calendar is right just once, and then never again. It's decorative, but utterly useless. And it's always stuck in the moment." Louisa's hand worked relentlessly up and down, overwhelming Jon with pleasure, never giving him a chance to think for himself. Not that he wanted one, but he could feel the wonderful struggle in his own mind between his natural determination and the power of Louisa's programming. And he loved knowing that he would lose, each and every time.

Louisa shifted position again, this time straddling his leg with her thighs and riding his shuddering body while her hand continued to stroke his cock. "So what does my good boy want, mm? What does he want to be? How does he want to sink into his Mistress's loving control?" Jon's eyes rolled back in his head behind his closed eyelids, pleasure and desperate need mingling freely now to shut down his brain and make thought an impossibility. He knew, deep down, that the answer didn't really matter--this was only play, and Louisa would never take away his intellect permanently despite her pretense to the contrary. But he also had the exhilarating, delirious conviction that she could if she wanted to, and that made him so turned on that he couldn't even think.

And in the end, that was all he could tell her. "Y-you," he stammered, his voice shaky with arousal. "You decide, p-please, please Mistress, please...." Jon felt a wave of deep, potent hypnotic relaxation wash all the way up his body and crown out of the top of his head as his mind collapsed into utter vacancy, unable to make decisions, unable to think for himself, and loving every second of his own complete and total helplessness. A part of him wished he could drift like this forever. A part of him wished it wasn't a game.

And that part of him was what finally moaned in orgasmic bliss when he heard Louisa say, "That's the right answer, sweetie. And it's the last one you'll ever have. Come." His cock jetted out fountains of pearly semen, gushing all over his chest and Louisa's fingers, and he felt himself descend into sleepy vacancy so deep and profound that his inner narrative finally went silent. He smiled and giggled again, but this time it was the empty laughter of a mindless toy. A toy Jon knew Louisa loved to play with, and a toy she would take care of all her life.

THE END