Penny looked over at the ticket counter. Looked over at the middle-aged man with the salt-and-pepper hair talking with customers with a gentle ease.

She'd seen the man dozens of times. Their shifts seemed to line up pretty commonly. A familiar stranger, someone she hadn't ever really spoken to. He must have been at least two decades older than her. She doubted they had much in common.

But.

Last night, she'd read a story. Thought it was kind of interesting. One of the minor characters had her name. Penny. Described as 'a pretty little blonde blue-eyed thing, probably barely out of high school'. And while she was a little older than that—she'd been out of high school for four years—she did often get mistaken for younger. And she was blonde, and blue-eyed, and little, and pretty, if she did say so herself.

The events of the story lined up with an incident she remembered from two months before. That was definitely weird, but strange things happen regularly, right? Eight billion people on the planet means that one-in-a-million chances should occur eight thousand times a day. It was probably bizarre coincidence, but that's all it was. Someone with her name and appearance happened to be a minor character in a story that mirrored an odd event that went down a few weeks earlier.

She could sort it all out, of course. All she had to do was to ask him. That older man handling travellers.

It wouldn't have really stuck with her, she thought, but for the blue-haired woman that had caught her eye, and that name. Not the blue-haired woman's name, she didn't know that, but the woman she had taken with her. That coincidence was just too far. Luxury deSanos. The sort of name that doesn't get away from you, especially when paired with the sort of unusual—

She was spiralling a bit, much as she had a few times since she'd read the story. She'd even dared reread it on her phone on the bus ride over, after making sure that no one could see over her shoulder. It wasn't the sort of story that nice girls would read in public. Or in private.

It wasn't a long story, to be sure, but the second time she'd read it last night...

If it was a true story, then she had been ever, ever so close to an event that was something she'd dreamed of since she was a little girl.

And there, at the ticket counter, was the key that might open the door to that event, to that story.

To that world.

Her mouth ran dry thinking about it as her co-worker announced the boarding for the plane at the gate. She struggled to maintain her composure as she scanned boarding passes to completely oblivious passengers who just wanted to get to where they were going.

Nothing unusual happened. If something unusual had happened, it would only have reminded her of that story, and possibly shaken her to a point that she would have needed a break.

It was dumb. It was stupid. It was way too enticing.

It would be just a little question.

But then, she would be admitting to... to so much. It was a little question, but it wasn't an innocent question.

The gate closed. The area behind security was all but empty. There were a few people who were very, very early for the next flight out. There would be almost no better opportunity. Penny drew the rope from the stanchion and blocked the door off. The ticket counter had no line up.

She walked across the floor, eyes on the middle-aged man reading something on his computer terminal.

When she was halfway there, Lukas looked up at her, shock in his eyes. Three quarters of the way there, and she saw him mouth the words, 'you know.'

She nodded.

He nodded back, regained his composure, and stepped out from behind his work station.

Penny didn't know what do say. She hadn't thought about what to say. She was slightly worried that she was going to be hurt, somehow; fiction about people discovering secret societies or organizations or enterprises tended to involve an element of danger for the discoverer, and that was really all that she had to go on.

Lukas shook his head as he approached. "You don't need to be afraid, really."

Penny covered her mouth with her hand, then remembered what she'd read: Lukas was an expert receiver for psychic waves. His teacher, the story said, could practically read minds.

"Story?" Lukas raised an eyebrow, a gentle smile that almost looked natural and not carefully arranged on his face as he spoke.

Penny's hands went to her cheeks, which were rapidly growing warm as she remembered what the story had been about... and why she had been reading it.

Lukas' laugh was soft, surprised, and genuine. "Oh my, it must be some story indeed." His voice was low and comforting, not at all threatening or threatened.

"Can you... can you really...?"

He lifted a hand and wobbled it. "Neh, some. It's easy for you right now, since you're..." he paused. Penny sensed that he was searching for words. "Broadcasting, I suppose. But for most of these people around here?" He shrugged, looking around. "It's like trying to eavesdrop on a conversation in a noisy room. If the person you're listening to is shouting, you can grab a few words here and there."

"And I'm shouting?"

His smile brightened and he raised a hand again, putting his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. "Only because I know what to listen for." He looked again. "Tortured metaphors aside, we probably shouldn't talk here and now. Too many people, too much to do. When's your break, or your shift done?"

Penny took a deep breath. She was really doing this. "I'm off at three."

"You drive?"

"Bus."

"I'll drive you home."

Penny couldn't help but grin. "Just home?"

Lukas laughed. "I'm not taking you anywhere you wouldn't want to go. I promise. If you don't mind waiting for me to finish at four."

"I can wait."

Lukas nodded. "I know how much you want to."

Her blush returned as he went back towards his work station. He didn't see it, but she knew that he didn't have to see it.

Just try to get through the day, she thought, heading back towards her own gate. Focus on work.

It wasn't easy. Especially at lunch. She felt an urge, a nudge to go and talk to Lukas. To get any more information. She wondered if that urge was entirely from within herself, then shook her head with a laugh. Of course it was internal. If she was being controlled at that moment, she wouldn't just be being nudged to talk to Lukas. He was just the only person she knew that had any connection to the story. She had kept trying to steal covert glances over at his ticket counter through the morning, to see if he was just going about his day or if he was doing anything unusual, talking to anyone different. She thought he might have caught her once, but brushed it off as just her overactive imagination.

He can afford to be patient, she thought, and he can probably contact anyone he needs to on his own lunch break.

She briefly considered running, at lunch. Trying to get away. That, too, led to its own fantasies, of being hunted, stalked, ambushed... She shook them free of her head. That was fun to read about, definitely, but paranoia isn't a great way to live a life, and the experience of being surprise-attacked kind of eliminates all the fun of being stalked.

Being stalked would be fun, Penny reasoned, if she knew she was being stalked, if she was catching little glimpses and clues of the stalking, and if she knew that the consequences of being caught would be more fun. Other than those conditions, though, the slow dawning of distrust that she was feeling about everyone around her was less than comfortable.

Okay, okay, it's not that bad. If anyone around me was doing mind control, they'd already have been doing it, and I'd already be... Right, can't keep thinking that way, or I'll be spending a good chunk of my lunch break in the staff bathroom trying to silently get off.

The sandwich she'd brought was a good distraction, and she forced her mind to it, and to the bottle of lime-flavoured sparkling water she had to wash it down. The world looked better when she wasn't hungry, even if the break room was much less interesting than the world outside it. She'd often needed that calm space, away from people and work and the constant hustle, and today was no exception. She finished her food and leaned back in her chair, checked her phone to make sure that the alarm was set to remind her to go back to work, and closed her eyes.

Of course, in that half-aware space near sleep, she would dream. It wasn't helpful. The free-association her mind travelled off into largely consisted of imagery inspired by the stories she read at home after settling in under the covers, definitely the sort of pictures she shouldn't be contemplating at work. Her attempts to force her dozing brain onto a more respectable track were entirely unsuccessful, and the soft alarm bringing her back to consciousness was met both with frustration and a sense of relief.

Perhaps, unhelpful though it was, it served a certain purpose, as the images seem to have calmed her waking mind some. She was almost able to concentrate on her work, a challenge on most days. Regardless, she got through to the end of her shift, changed out of her uniform, wondered exactly how and where she was supposed to meet Lukas for her ride home, then realized it probably wouldn't matter that much.

Penny headed out to the public area of the airport and found a comfortable seat on a soft bench near the luggage carousel for the arrival gates. It was a good spot for people-watching, one where she'd spent a little time now and again waiting for friends to pick her up or for an infrequent late-night bus. It wasn't people she was watching, though, as she opened a video app on her phone. In truth, she wasn't really watching the videos, either; her mind was definitely on something other than cute kittens playing with toys far too big for them.

She tried, though.

She didn't really intend to spend that hour glancing over her phone, wondering if she'd see the blue-haired beauty from the story she'd read, wondering if every unknown face (and there were more than a few) might be someone connected to the telepath network. She did allow herself to indulge the paranoia for a few minutes, after which she berated herself and went back to cat videos. And much like the half-dreams and visions she'd had during her short lunch-break nap, the little moment of fantasy seemed to help. Not entirely, of course, but enough that she stopped watching the clock and looking aside at everyone who passed nearby.

Penny wasn't sure when she started to feel strange. There wasn't much more of a way to describe it. A fluttering in her chest, a fuzziness in her mind, a tingling in her fingers and toes. It wasn't enough to override her interest in the videos she was watching; in fact, it almost made the videos more interesting.

"You're..." she said. There was someone she was trying to say it to.

"I am, yes," came the reply. "Hope you don't mind."

Hope you don't mind. The words rang in her head, drove her back to her phone. The refrain that Rady used again and again in the story that brought her to this point.

Penny wanted to look up, to see that shock of blue hair she knew had to be nearby, but she just couldn't.

"It's alright, Penny."

And it was.

"Lukas told me what you told him. We're just all going to go for a drive, 'kay? Hope you don't mind."

She was supposed to object. She couldn't think about how, but she knew that she ought to.

"After all, he did say he'd drive you home."

And that was that. Cat videos.

Cat videos on the bench, cat videos on the way out, cat videos in the car. She knew why she was watching so many cat videos, which didn't change the fact that all she wanted to do was watch cat videos. All it did was add a strangely hot edge to those videos—or, rather, to the act of watching them. The videos were irrelevant, and still fascinating, and the more irrelevant they got, the more fascinating they became, and that worked to make the situation even more arousing.

"How do you see this playing out?" Rady asked her at one point, she didn't know when, from the back seat of the car.

"Uh," Penny answered. "Honestly, I don't know. The fantasy, or the reality?"

Rady giggled a bit. "Let's have the fantasy, first, I kinda want to know what the appeal is, hope you don't mind."

Without looking up from her phone, and with no hesitation, she started telling one practical stranger and one complete stranger her sexual daydreams. "I dunno, I've always just... loved the idea of controlling people, and being controlled. Like ever since I was a kid. Found videos and stories and pictures of mind control and hypnotism and... yeah, that. I'm loving this, by the way, even if that's probably because of you—"

"Yeah, partly," Rady interrupted. "Hope you don't mind."

"I don't." Penny smiled into her phone screen. "But that's probably also because of you, right?" Without waiting for an answer, she continued. "So yeah, when I found that story and it looked like it happened just... just like inches away from me, I had to..." She trailed off, captivated by the sight of a kitten attacking a child's toy. "Anyway, I, um, kind of hoped this would happen and kinda hoped it wouldn't. Hoped it was all fake, but also hoped it was... well, this, right? So the fantasy is that I get brought into this secret psychic society of yours and have all kinds of weird, fun, sexy adventures."

"Mhmm." Rady seemed accepting, and non-judgmental, of that answer. "And the reality?"

"Shit, I should probably be terrified right now, yeah?"

"Probably. But yeah, that's me, too. Hope you don't mind."

"I don't. You said you're taking me home?"

"Yeah, eventually, yeah."

"Okay. So I mean, the reality is, the worst of it will probably be all of this is just a lost day, right? You wipe my memory or whatever and I come to work on my next shift and Lukas is just some guy at the ticket counter and you're maybe a local stranger who I've seen a couple times and that's just about the end of it, and I probably feel an urge never to open that story again and that's that, yeah?"

There was a pause while a calico exchanged clawless baps with a tabby.

"That's... mhmm, that's one outcome," Rady said. "Most likely, anyway. Hope you don't mind."

"I... guess I don't, really."

"How do you feel about that?"

"Honestly?" Penny took a breath. She felt compelled to the truth, and experienced no shame in giving her answer. "Even that idea makes me really damn wet, you get it?"

Rady chuckled, sympathetically. "Yeah, I do, Penny."

"She's being honest," Lukas said from the driver's seat. Penny had practically forgotten he was there.

"Yeah, I am. But I guess it would be worse if I were brought into your little psychic circle as.... I dunno, a drone? A completely locked-down robotic slave?"

"We don't do that," Rady said, pretty quickly, almost sounding a bit suspicious.

"No? Well I guess that's good," Penny replied. "But I mean, the fantasy of that is hot. The reality—"

"Yeah. That's so damaging. And really, it takes so much out of everyone involved. It's super dangerous."

"But you could—"

"But none of us would." That seemed like the final statement on the matter. "So, while we're still having this little drive of ours, we're gonna move into the next step. Don't worry, you're gonna get home, but if you could just stop whatever video you're watching, load up the story on your phone, and pass it back to me? Hope you don't mind."

The next moments were a bit of a blur, the sort of reality-fading-into-mystery that Penny knew well from being too tired to keep awake despite trying very hard to. She knew that she passed her phone to Rady in the back seat, and also that there was a wave of what felt more or less like exhaustion running through her as she did, and she looked over at Lukas at one point, but the world went a shade of grey and the passing clouds started to dance oddly in the sky, a slow, deliberate ballet of water vapour in curious shapes pulling her attention into mysterious mythologies. Rady and Lukas were talking but it wasn't really important, not like the demigods spinning around each other out the car window. The clouds started to develop colour and detail that they hadn't before, and Penny realized that she was asleep. Her eyes snapped open for a moment, but the clouds caught her attention again, and soon abstract swirls were building meaningless tales in her mind.

When her eyes opened again, it was gentle and relaxed, and looking up into the artificial lighting of a parking garage.

"We have a little stop to make, before we get you home," Rady said.

"'Hope you don't mind'," Penny said with a little grin, making Rady laugh.

"I guess I'm a bit obvious sometimes, yeah?" Rady got out of the car and stretched, and Penny followed suit. She felt joints pop, and wondered just how long she'd been sitting there asleep.

Rady led Penny through the garage and into the building. Lukas, she noted, stayed behind.

"You have questions?" Rady continued as they waited for an elevator.

Penny laughed. "Of course I have questions! So many questions!"

Rady nodded, smiling. "What's a good one?"

"Oh! well. Hm. Did the story I read actually happen?"

The elevator dinged and the door opened. "Sure did. Eh, mostly. Some of it is a little exaggerated, but the bones of it are real." Rady pressed the button for the tenth floor as they stepped inside.

"Okay, and where's Lux now?" The elevator door closed and the carriage lurched into motion.

Rady shrugged. "Back to her day-to-day life. Integrating. We keep in touch, I'm not her handler, though."

Penny thought she saw a little glow in Rady's cheeks at the answer, though she couldn't be certain of that. "So it's not instant assimilation, then?"

"We're not the Borg, Penny." Rady laughed.

Penny blinked. The elevator stopped. "I don't—"

"Star Trek. Don't worry about it." The door opened and Rady led Penny down the hall. "A friend of mine lives here. You're meeting a lot of new people today, I guess. Hope you don't mind."

"Not sure that I can mind, Rady," Penny said as Rady knocked on the door.

"Not if I've done my job!"

The door opened, and a short, dark-skinned, bespectacled man stood there. Penny guessed him to be about thirty, though his clean-shaven face and short dark hair made it hard to judge.

"This is the gate attendant?" he asked in a light voice with a mild British accent, opening the door wider. "Come in, come in."

Rady led Penny in and slipped off her shoes. Penny followed suit. The living room they stepped into was charmingly furnished, with several soft-looking chairs and a couch arranged in a circle around a glass coffee table. The upholstery on the furniture matched the colour of the closed curtains on the large western view window.

"Would either of you like a drink?" their host asked as Rady and Penny took seats side-by-side on the couch.

Penny was going to refuse. "Water, please," she said instead. She looked at Rady, who smiled and shrugged.

"Got any wine open, Devon?" Rady asked.

"I put a bottle of white in the fridge the moment you called," Devon replied, moving to the kitchen.

"Perfect."

Penny turned to Rady. "Why did you make me ask for a drink?" she asked in a low voice.

"Because the way my control works sometimes makes people forget to take care of themselves," Rady replied. "You've been with us a while, aren't you thirsty? Hope you don't mind."

Penny's mouth was dry. She nodded. "Okay."

"Besides, you're not, uh..." Rady sighed a bit. "You're not really one of us, not yet, anyway, so you have to..." She shrugged again.

"—Be made to get used to the control." Devon finished, returning to the living room. "Habituation, we call it, for those that aren't receptive."

"Hey, uh..." Penny began, taking the water Devon offered gratefully, "why didn't Lukas come with us? Thank you."

Devon handed the glass of white wine to Rady. "It is best that Lukas and I spend as little time as possible together." He sat opposite them in a comfortable-looking armchair. "Let's just say that we don't get along, in person."

"You interact fine online, though," Rady added.

"It is much easier to do so." Devon smiled. "Now, to the matter at hand."

Penny took a long, slow drink as Devon turned to her expectantly. She extended that drink a little longer than she needed to, to maintain the silence. Braced for an answer, finally, she looked at Devon. "What is the matter at hand?"

Devon held up two fingers of his left hand. "The matter is twofold: First, we must deal with the fact that a story of our little game has reached the greater world, and second, we must decide what to do with an individual who seems to have, shall we say, pierced the veil somewhat."

"Well, um, the story suggested that if Lux didn't join, her, uh, memory would be erased..."

"Trying to prevent personal harm by offering us a way out we know well about," Devon said with a small smirk. "Or perhaps merely a request for more information as to your own future. It is understandable that you might be worried. Do not be. You will leave this apartment intact, in mind and in body. You have my word."

Penny sensed, somehow, that that promise had great weight, and felt that her response was equally important. "Then... I can remember this, and—"

Devon shook his head. "That is yet to be determined. You already know that Radiance here can affect memory, and I am significantly more powerful than Rady. You may not be the same, Penny, but you will not be harmed."

"This isn't... dangerous, really," Rady added. "Just... unprecedented. We're not threatened by you, so we're not a threat to you. Make sense, yeah?"

Penny nodded. That did make sense.

"Like, I mean..." Rady laughed. "Dev and I control minds. I'm already strong enough to influence people who aren't even that good as receivers, and Dev's even stronger. You're not nobody, Penny, but you're not a real danger to us."

"So you're not even considering hurting me, then," Penny concluded. "Yeah, I follow."

"And that in turn means you have nothing to fear from us."

Something about the way Devon said that made Penny's heart flutter, and her head fuzzy. "You're... doing something." But he was right, she knew she had nothing to fear.

"Fun, isn't it?" Rady said, her smile evident in her voice.

Penny couldn't argue. "Yeah, that's... uh, that's why I was on the site where I found the story..." She sounded drunk, to her own ears, but she didn't feel it.

"Between the two of us, you haven't a hope, I'm afraid." Devon was talking this time, and for some reason, the idea of not having a hope felt absolutely wonderful.

"The truth will just pour out of you now," Rady continued.

"I was, uh... nineteen. Yeah," Penny said, nodding. "Nineteen. Um. There was a guy. Asked me to coffee. Older guy. Not very good looking. Uh, and not that much older, you know? Maybe seven or eight years. I just moved here. Not just. Um. Six months before. Followed my boyfriend here. He went to college here. Then he dumped me for a guy in his program, but I already had an apartment, so... um yeah, got a job, kept doing it, and then there was a guy. Cory. Or Gary? I dunno. Asked me to coffee. I'm babbling."

Devon cleared his throat and she turned to face him fully. He didn't say anything, just held up a finger, and her eyes locked on his. She kept talking.

"Free coffee is free coffee so I went, and he did some... weird... I guess it's a pickup artist technique or something? Anyway I counted a bunch and I felt smiley and floaty and, uh..." Penny shrugged. "We had dinner, saw a movie, took me home, he was an asshole, I left in the morning and ghosted him, but something... um... woke up, I guess? Inside me. I started searching for things. I don't even remember how I started searching. But yeah, somehow I found that technique, and then other things, and then mind control, and... I mean, I don't like the idea that we're all just programmable robots, you know? But I like the fantasy and—"

"Very good, thank you," Devon said.

Penny instantly fell silent, and her eyes left Devon's as she looked down at her knees. Her face was on fire. Not just her face, she realized. She was hot, she was wet. Whatever he'd done to her, she wanted more. The praise he'd given her, those four simple words, made her heart leap. She shivered in the warmth of the apartment.

Rady pressed something into her hand. A phone. Open to its internet browser. Penny looked up and met Rady's gaze, and a flood of information bubbled up from somewhere. She looked down and started tapping on the screen, inputting a familiar web address. She saw the title of the story appear, then handed the phone back to Rady.

Her blush, now, was mixed with actual embarrassment, not just arousal. She folded her hands together in her lap and said nothing. Rady, meanwhile, read from her phone and sipped at her wine, and Devon merely watched on.

"Just skimming through," Rady said, "But I gotta say, yeah, that's pretty much how it happened."

"Think Lux would have leaked it?" Devon asked.

"No, not her. Not Sophie, or Lukas, and I sure didn't."

"So what does that mean?" Penny asked.

Devon chuckled. "It probably means that there's someone out there who's highly receptive and who's a writer. Inspiration just popped into their head, whoever they are."

"So..." Penny thought a moment. "So whatever Rady was putting out, psychically, someone else was picking up, and they thought they were just making up a story for us kinky mind-control lovers?"

"There's more of us than you might think." Rady replied with a grin.

"I'm afraid that I do not have much to offer," Devon said, putting his mostly-empty glass down and rising to his feet. "My groceries do not get delivered until tomorrow, and I did not have plans to have guests this evening."

Penny looked up, confused.

"You are staying the night?" Devon continued, raising an eyebrow.

His tone implied it was a question.

The shiver down Penny's spine told her it wasn't.

Rady also got to her feet and picked up her phone. "I'll —" she began.

And then she just... stopped. Stood there. Penny could see the gentle sway in the other woman's stance, see her blink, but that was all she was doing.

The air felt strange. Penny's breathing felt strange.

The adrenaline was rushing through her body. She could feel it. She was warm, head to toe, inside and out.

She shivered, despite that.

"— call Sophie and tell her I'll be out late," Rady continued. Her voice sounded flat, unmotivated.

"Oh God," Penny whispered. It was the only thing she could do.

She watched as Rady almost mechanically worked her phone.

She couldn't look away.

Rady lifted the phone to her ear smoothly. "Hey love," she said. Her voice was still monotone. "I'll be staying with Devon a while. Don't wait for me." Rady paused a moment. It sounded like there was a giggle on the line. Rady nodded once, said, "Love you too," and hung up. Her arm fell to her side and she was still again.

The whole exchange took seconds, maybe half a minute. To Penny, it felt like hours.

"I wish Radiance's help with this... project," Devon said.

"Project?" Penny kept watching Rady. "You mean... me?"

She felt Devon's hand on her shoulder, though he hadn't moved. It was oddly comforting.

"I've long wondered, if someone was willing..." He trailed off a moment. "Well, we know that those who can transmit can strengthen their ability with practice, just as those who can receive can improve their understanding of the world around them through effort."

Penny nodded. Rady nodded as well, staring blankly.

"Rady can affect you, influence you, because she has trained. Just as I can influence her."

"And me," Penny said.

"And you," Devon confirmed. "What you're experiencing now is a psychic stasis. Rady is more completely enthralled at the moment, because I wish it so, but you cannot build the will to move, and barely enough to speak or think. It is a powerful mental weapon I have available to me. What Rady can do is impressive, very impressive, but there are likely none on earth like me."

A line from the story that led her here came to her mind. Human beings are psychic like you wouldn't believe.

Devon smiled. "You are, indeed."

Penny blinked.

You are. He'd said you are.

Not we are.

"And so you understand."

"Does... does Rady...?"

"Everyone knows, in our little circle. Rady and Sophie, Lukas, Lux, others you might or might not meet."

"I would never have guessed," Penny said. Rady seemed to smile just a little bit at that, and Penny understood that Rady was partially mirroring her host's expression.

"I have been here a long time. A master both of projection and reception before coming, too. I developed an interest, studied your kind over decades. The advent of the telecommunications and the internet have been a great boon, as I do not leave my apartment unless totally necessary. I stay hidden. The circle, those who need to, meet here. This is a sanctuary, a place of advice, of comfort."

Rady broke her silence. "Of love."

The word shocked Penny a little. Her heart beat quickly. Her eyes dipped involuntarily to take in Rady's form.

Devon's voice seemed to come from all around her. "Those who serve me, and serve with me... we often become very, very close. The stories you have read, the story that led you here, I imagine gives you some idea of what might come next. But I can see in those fantasies you are carrying close to the front of your mind, what you wish."

Penny took a deep breath, as Rady placed her phone on the table and slowly started to lift her top. Penny's heart was pounding in her ears, but that psychic lethargy still held her in place, held her gaze on her disrobing...

Kidnapper.

It wasn't really true, it didn't fit the situation, but that was the word that came to her in fantasy. It was the word that was used in the story she'd read.

"Yes," Devon said. "You want us to control you. You want us to hold you captive, not against your will, but because you have—"

—and with Devon, in perfect unison, Penny spoke: "No will to resist."

"But more than that," he continued, as Rady tossed her shirt aside mindlessly. "I can see that urge within you. To do what Rady here has done to you. To be able to find new members and bring them to me."

"Whether they want it or not," the two women said together, their voices similarly dull.

"I think you will make a fine project, Penny," Devon said as Penny stood. "Giving you the fantasy, the fantasies you want, will tell us if it's possible to unlock a hidden potential within you, or even if you can be trained into power even if you're not born into it."

Penny nodded and lifted her arms over her head, letting Rady pull her blouse over her head.

"And even if you're not able to learn to learn to transmit..."

Hands not her own and not Rady's unhooked her bra.

Devon's breath was hot on her cheek as he whispered in her ear. "Then you can still make wonderful practice for those who can."

Rady stiffly pulled Penny into a kiss, and her few remaining thoughts dissolved into mist and echo, swamped in telepathy and arousal, leaving her only the curiosity about what the morning would bring, and the slow, beautiful sensation of an enslaved Rady kissing her way down to Penny's breasts...

The next while became a complete blur of sensation. Hands, lips, bodies. Memories slipping into echoes, as though every thought were being reflected off distant mountains before she could remember to think it. At one point, with her bare body laid out on Devon's bed and neither of the others touching her, Penny orgasmed multiple times. Rady, in dull monotone, explained that she and Devon were seeing just how much focus and energy it took to broadcast that powerful feeling to someone who wasn't naturally receptive, and Penny recalled dimly begging for the experiment to continue.

She was never entirely sure if Devon's cock was truly deep inside her, if Rady really ate her out, if she had honestly cleaned Devon off after he and Rady made love in the bed beside her. She couldn't focus through the haze of lust and telepathy, and the way that one memory was replaced with another and another and another made her unsure if any had been replaced at all or if she was just diving down into her deepest fantasies and imagining the whole night.

And that, too, was one of her deepest fantasies.

Penny wasn't wholly surprised or completely confused when she woke up at home, impossibly, lying naked on top of her covers. She had expected something like that to happen. Even wondering if it had all been a dream was part of the experience, and she knew that, even to the point of giggling a bit at the cliché thought of, was it all a dream?

The shower was just on the edge of scalding when she got in. As she washed up, a voice drifted through her mind.

That's right, Penny, just let that nice hot water wash away what's left of those memories...

She shivered, despite the heat.

Don't worry. We learned a lot last night.

"We did," she whispered, her hand groping at her breast, inhaling deeply through her nose.

By the time you finish the shower, you won't remember. You'll get to work feeling wonderful and refreshed.

She nodded, gasping as her hands worked.

And tonight, we'll introduce you to a few more friends...

She took a moment to briefly wonder where that fantasy had possibly come from before the swell of it washed all her worries away and intensified the motions and direction of her hands. She'd woken up a bit needy but had thought she could ignore it, but the idea that a mind controller was wiping away her memory was just too much for her to leave alone.

Penny had woken up a bit early, so she had the luxury of some extra time in the shower, which she put to the best use she could think of. After getting off deliciously, she took her time getting cleaned up, head to toe, enjoying herself.

The day looked impossibly good. As she got ready for work, she sung a little tune to herself. It was going to be a lovely day. She was convinced.