"Too strong?"

Tanya Jefferson's eyes fluttered open and she picked herself up off the soft floor. "By a good bit, I think. I couldn't keep my legs under me."

Callum nods, putting a spray bottle labeled '#6' aside. "I saw you go down." He writes a couple notes on the clipboard. "Still, until then..."

"Yeah, you got about fifty seconds or so?"

"Give or take." He looks at the stopwatch in his hand. "I wasn't too precise on the starting and stopping, but that's about right."

"And for those fifty seconds?"

Callum refused to meet her eyes. He avoided eye contact most of the time. "What do you remember?"

She sat on a tall stool by a long metal-covered table. "The spray hit me, and my heart started rushing, but that's probably mostly because I find this whole thing sexy as hell."

The Black man in the long lab coat laughed, a sound which would have sounded mirthless from anyone else but struck Tanya as genuine. "If you like that, well..."

"Let me guess," Tanya said, following the forgotten suggestion to unbutton her jeans. "You have chemicals that make people aroused?"

Callum watched as she casually pushed her pants down far enough to reveal her white underwear. "Been working on a few things here and there," he replied, taking a couple notes. "Why do you find this sexy?"

The brunette scratched her temple. "Uh, well, it's hard to explain. I'm a bit of a mind controller myself, an Alterist, and I love making new programs and putting together new ideas and changing people. So I'm here helping an honest-to-goodness chemist come up with an instant spray-on obedience potion..." She shrugged. "Hot."

He nodded. "Anything else you remember?"

"Hm." Tanya bit her lip, thinking. Without conscious direction, she started stroking herself through her panties. "There was the rush of it, but then everything got blurry. I knew you were talking, but I couldn't keep the words straight in my head. Or really anything straight at all. And then, uh, about a minute in—"

"Forty-eight-point-two-nine seconds," Callum clarified coldly.

Tanya laughed. "Yeah, then, my legs just turned to jelly and everything went black." She stood up, using one hand to hold her pants in place. "So, when do we try number seven?"

"I'll get you some water and we'll give it a few minutes to clear your system." The scientist put his notes down and filled a glass for her.

"How do you know it's cleared my system?"

"You'll tell me."

"Ah." Tanya took the offered drink awkwardly in one hand and had a sip. "How will I know?"

Callum raised an eyebrow. "You'll notice, don't worry."

She looked over at the row of as-yet-untested bottles on the counter and hid her reaction behind a bigger drink. "The things I could do with aerosolized hypnotism..."

"Yeah? Like what?"

Tanya laughed. "Orgies, my friend. So many orgies." She put the glass down and looked herself over. She looked at Callum, who clicked his stopwatch and made a note. "Why am I holding my pants up instead of wearing them properly?"

"I see the drug's out of your system," he said, picking up bottle number seven. "Ready?"

Tanya put her jeans back on her hips and did them back up. She turned to say something snarky,

and heard the hiss

and the world went blurry again.