Loralee almost thought she was dreaming. She'd been fighting sleep for almost an hour now, cramming hard for an Italian Cinema midterm that loomed like an iceberg on her study calendar, and despite the three empty energy drinks sitting on the table next to her it really wouldn't have surprised the petite redhead if she'd nodded off face-down in her books and drifted into weird Argento dreams of women in gauzy nightgowns stalking the sorority at night after everyone had gone to bed. She had to surreptitiously reach over and dig her fingernails lightly into her arm to make sure she really saw what she saw.

But no. It was real. Lia was walking through the common area in the middle of the night, her face splashed with lurid green light by the stupid lava lamp that some long-forgotten student had bought for the sorority house back in the Nineties. She had on a white baby doll dress that looked like it came out of Darcy's Armani collection, a slack-jawed expression of total vacancy on her porcelain cheeks, and her eyes.... Loralee felt a chill run down her spine, the product of too little sleep and too many giallos combining to make her imagination run wild. She could have sworn that in the moment she looked up, before Lia turned the corner and went down the hall to the kitchen, she saw her friend stare at her with empty, sightless eyes.

Loralee bounced to her feet, a wave of adrenaline giving her new energy that she had absolutely no intention of wasting on studying, and raced down the hallway after Lia. Surely she had to have imagined it. People didn't really have totally white eyes, not even in the movies. That was all special contact lenses, or post-production digital effects or something. Lia's pupils couldn't have simply vanished, and--and if they had, how could she even see? If she was really wearing opaque contacts, she'd be stumbling into walls and tripping over all the shit the sisters left in the common room at the end of the night. She wouldn't be gliding smoothly through the silent darkness like some kind of creepy phantom straight out of 'Suspiria'. She'd--

Loralee reached the kitchen door just as Lia opened it, two bottles of soda dangling from one hand, walking directly at her as though she didn't even realize the redhead was there. Loralee had just enough time to let out an embarrassing squeak of shock and dismay and fumble her body backwards onto the carpet before Lia smoothly and easily navigated her way around the supine young woman to head back the way she came.

Loralee sat there for a long moment, gaping in stunned amazement. She'd seen it this time. There was no mistaking it. Lia's eyes were a smooth, featureless white.

Only they weren't. It was a hell of an optical illusion, especially for someone like Loralee who'd spent the better part of the last week glutting herself on Bava and Fulci and Soavi, but she'd just managed to spot the tiny flickering rim of the iris and pupil this time, fluttering just beneath Lia's trembling eyelids as she stared vacantly into nothing and drifted her way through the dimly-lit hallways. Seeing couldn't have been easy for the blonde woman, but she must have had just enough vision to manage it... and she must have been sleepwalking to look like that. Loralee stumbled back to her feet, grateful that the only person who saw her wouldn't remember it the next day, and went after her friend to help guide her back to her room safely.

Only Lia wasn't heading to her room. It didn't take Loralee long to catch up with her--the blonde was moving gracefully, not swiftly--but when she did, she noticed that Lia was heading to an entirely different floor and an entirely different bedroom. "Hey, um, Lia?" she murmured, tugging gently on the hem of the baby doll dress in an effort to rouse the somnambulist. "Um, you're--you need to wake up, you're... I think you're headed to Darcy's room."

Not that it was a huge surprise that a slumbering Lia might head to Darcy's room when her consciousness was disengaged--ever since she won that stupid bet with Darcy last year and got unfettered access to the dark-haired woman's entire ensemble, she'd spent more time in Darcy's bedroom changing outfits than she did in her own. But Darcy was probably asleep at this time of night, and being intruded on by a sleepwalking blonde climbing into bed with her was probably the last thing she wanted. Loralee needed to wake her friend up before this whole thing got incredibly awkward. "Lia? Lia, rise and shine, hon. It's time to wake up."

But Lia didn't notice. Even as the two of them went down the hallway together, Loralee awkwardly skipping along to try to keep pace with her friend's gliding gait without actually bumping into her, the blonde woman never deviated from her course and never changed that blank, empty expression of hers. It only deepened the surreal feeling that Loralee had somehow accidentally stepped into an Italian arthouse horror movie, finding herself the plucky young ingenue who had to unravel the mystery of a sinister somnambulist who visited other women's rooms late at night while the sorority slept.

Of course, if this was a giallo, she'd probably find out that Lia was drugged, or hypnotized, or under the spell of a sinister witch with the power to cloud minds. She'd walk into Darcy's room to find the brunette waiting for them both in the nude, possessed of decadent sexual desires and the lurid power that only really works when everyone is secretly just pretending. And then, like all the doomed heroines Loralee had spent the last few months studying, she too would fall into the thrall of the succubus or the lesbian seductress or whatever inventive wank fantasy some forty-something Italian dude had come up with--

Lia pushed the door open. The two of them both beheld Darcy, completely nude on her bed with her legs gently parted to reveal her smooth, slick cunt. And Loralee's jaw dropped all over again when she heard her friend drone out, "I obey, Mistress."

Darcy looked at Loralee with a trace of irritation in her hazel eyes. "You'd probably better come in," she grumbled, reaching for a silk bathrobe and slipping it on as she rose to her feet. "This is probably going to take a little explaining."

Loralee didn't want to hear the explanation--she wanted to drag Lia out of the room and slap her awake from whatever weird trance Darcy had lulled her into. She wanted to freak out and run and wake the whole dorm and tell them all that holy shit, that weird hypnosis bet Darcy had made last year had actually been a real thing and Darcy had secretly won it. She wanted to wake up and find out this was all just a totally bizarro dream brought on by too much Red Bull and too many late night movies... but Lia was already walking right on in and sitting on the bed. And Loralee couldn't just leave her. "This better be good," she growled, stepping inside and closing the door behind her.

"Well, I think some of it is pretty much what you expected," Darcy said, sounding almost playful as she took one of the sodas out of Lia's unresisting fingers and opened it. "When I hypnotized Lia last year, I discovered that she had some... hidden interests, and we've been discreetly exploring them together ever since. Oh, I know that it looks a little bit sinister right now," she added quickly, in response to Loralee's incredulous gaze. "But I promise you, I'm not doing anything she didn't agree to when she was wide awake and able to give meaningful consent. It's only a little startling to you because you weren't expecting it."

Loralee didn't know if there was ever a situation where she'd be 'expecting' to see her friend sitting on Darcy's bed, legs parted, shoulders slumped, her eyes rolled back so far in her head that only the whites were showing. But she had to admit, she couldn't exactly prove that there was anything suspicious going on here. She didn't really know anything about hypnosis beyond a bunch of lurid bullshit she learned in the movies; it was distinctly possible that this was just some kind of a weird kinky sex game between the two of them and Loralee was just being a naive and narrow-minded prude.

Still, though, she had a good idea of how to test Darcy's claims. "Okay," she said, crossing her arms and glowering at the dark-haired woman. "If it's all okay with her, then you won't have any problems waking her up." She glared at Darcy, daring her housemate to try to find an excuse to avoid having her bluff challenged.

But Darcy merely reached over and put her hand on Lia's shoulder, giving it a few gentle squeezes. "Pet, in a moment I'm going to wake you," she cooed, her voice suddenly soft and soothing and erotic. Loralee suddenly understood how Lia could have fallen for her so easily. "Loralee's going to be here, but that won't startle or upset you. She's aware of what we do together and she's not here to pass judgment on you. Do you understand?" Lia nodded, her face still slack and expressionless. Loralee watched suspiciously, unable to shake the instinct that something hinky was going on even if she did second-guess it.

Lia blinked heavily, her eyes refocusing on the world around her from whatever inner world they'd been gazing into. "Um... hi," she murmured, her cheeks flushing a little as she carefully closed her legs. "I, uhh, I guess you saw me getting drinks, huh?" She didn't sound like someone who was secretly pleading for help in escaping from the decadent clutches of a lesbian seductress. She also didn't sound like a brainwashed puppet. She sounded like Lia, only a Lia who was a little embarrassed that one of her friends had found out about her kinky habits. Loralee relaxed a little.

She looked over at Darcy. "So the two of you are....?" Loralee's mouth opened and closed like a goldfish for a moment as she struggled to put the relationship she'd just uncovered into words. None of it felt comfortable in her mouth, and certainly a lot of it didn't fit the image she'd developed of Lia over the course of their friendship--the blonde always felt so confident, so poised and aggressive and certain of what she wanted at all times, that it seemed almost impossible to imagine her as a passive plaything for anybody. In the end, Loralee simply let the sentence die unfinished, trusting Lia to do the emotional labor she didn't feel up for.

"Um, yeah," Lia murmured, looking down at the floor with a meek expression that looked almost entirely alien on her. "That first time, when she hypnotized me, she, uh... she told me she wanted to do stuff with me, sexual stuff, and she told me I would like it so much I wouldn't want her to ever stop. And I... I don't. I know that sounds weird, and I know it sounds extra weird coming from me, but I--I like being able to let my guard down and just relax into someone else's control. I like knowing that I can trust her to take care of me and make me feel good. And I like...." She was blushing furiously now, the prohibition on her reactions apparently not extending to a little sheepish embarrassment. "Oh fuck do I like being hypnotized. It's so goddamn hot, Lora. It's the best thing ever."

Now it was Loralee's turn to blush. She hadn't exactly thought much about other women, despite being pretty chill with other people's sexual orientations as a general principle, but something about the way Darcy lounged on her bed awaiting the return of her hypnotized sex slave with her legs parted and the smell of her cunt filling the whole room... it touched something, a desire the red-haired woman didn't even know she had. And in the middle of the night, with the rest of the house asleep and the evening already tinged with the surreal quality of a waking dream, she found the idea of exploring that desire strangely fascinating. "Can I try?" she blurted out, almost before even she knew what she was going to say.

Darcy looked at her, unable to disguise the naked avarice on her face. "Are you sure?" she asked, the husky growl in her voice making it clear what answer she already hoped for. "I mean, you're beautiful, and I... I won't say I haven't thought about you when I saw you hanging out with Lia. But you don't really know what you're getting into. There's a lot more to it than just fetching me drinks in the middle of the night, you know. I'm going to ask you to give up a lot of your autonomy to me. You might find yourself doing things you never imagined yourself doing."

Loralee was imagining them right now, her fantasies suddenly blossoming to life at the hidden prompting of Lia's meek, submissive posture and the memory of her empty eyes. She pictured herself looking like that, gazing sightlessly at the ceiling and thinking of nothing but the delta between Darcy's thighs, giving herself up to pleasures that she couldn't yet understand and yet wanted to dive into wholeheartedly. "I, I don't care," she exclaimed softly, possessed of a sudden wild freedom that left her almost giddy with anticipation. "Please, hypnotize me. Do whatever you want. I, I accept. I consent to everything."

Darcy's lips spread into a wicked smile. "Everything?" she asked, closing the distance between them in a few swift strides and taking Loralee's right wrist in her left hand. "You consent to going into a deep trance for me, sinking and dropping and losing control of your will to my absolute power over you like a good little slut for your Mistress?" The brunette's right hand came up to Loralee's eye level, fingers fluttering left and right, up and down, moving in a constant motion that Loralee struggled to follow even while she felt her arm being swung back and forth until it moved loosely like an old doll's joints.

"Because I promise you, Loralee, you don't know everything I want to do to you. You don't know how much pleasure you're capable of, how much submision you can give once I take your mind and make it mine." Out of the corner of her eye, Loralee saw Lia slumping back into insensate hypnosis, the mere invitation to surrender herself as good as an induction after months of conditioning. Loralee thought about reaching that depth of obedience and her cunt instantly slickened with arousal. She felt like a plug that had been waiting its whole life to find a socket, and only now knew what electricity felt like. Her entire body tingled with the anticipation of her first trance.

"I consen--" she managed to murmur out, in the instant before Darcy's right hand dropped and her left hand pulled Loralee forward and the entire world rocketed into an oblivious void of deep, helpless trance.

THE END