Jamie laughed. “What do you mean you don’t like spirals?” Her laughter sparked a bit of feedback over Daniel’s Skype.

Daniel frowned. “They’re just…kind of tropey, I guess.”

Jamie giggled at him.

“They’re just not my thing,” he continued, defensively.

“Daniel, “ Jamie said, “We met on a Kaa forum. Your Twitter picture is a big rainbow-eyed snake. How can you say that you don’t like tropes?”
He responded irritably. “Just because I like ONE trope doesn’t mean I like them all. YOU were the one who scoffed at ME when I tried to hypnotize you with a pocket watch.”

“That’s because pocket watched are dumb. Clearly,” Jamie replied. She absentmindedly pushed away her cat who appeared to be trying to walk across her keyboard. “You know, I bet I could hypnotize you with a spiral.”

Daniel rolled his eyes. “I bet you could hypnotize me with a bar of soap if you wanted to. That still doesn’t make me like spirals.”

“True,” said Jamie. “How about this? I bet I could make you actually ENJOY being hypnotized by a spiral.” The cat poked his head back on screen.
Daniel raised his eyebrow.

“Without the obvious cheating I mean.” She shoved the cat to the side again.

“What do I get if I lose?” asked Daniel.

“The satisfaction of having been right,” Jamie replied. She shoved the cat to the side again.

“I’ll take it.”

“Great!” remarked Jamie.

A link to a spiral popped up on his screen briefly.

“Jamie. You just…have a link to a spiral ready? Right now?“ he asked.

“Hmm?” she asked distractedly, picking up her cat and placing him firmly off the bed. “Oh, yeah. Yeah I do.”

‘Do all hypnodommes do that?” he asked.

“Yeah, probably,” she said, matter of factly, looking offscreen. “Did you click on the link yet?”

He clicked on the link. A black screen emerged with green and yellow lines swirling into a spiral. He sighed, annoyed. “Yup- looks like a spiral.”

“OK good- go ahead and maximize the window. I’ll be able to tell when you do.”

Daniel was about to follow her instructions, when the small screen with his image from his webcam caught his eye. Like in a mirror he could see the reflection of the bright colored loops from the spiral in his glasses. It looked almost like they were reflecting in his eyes.

Huh.

OK- he had to admit that effect was appealing. If he softened his gaze, the illusion looked even more real, like he had already been entranced and his eyes were full of colored, mesmerized whirls. That was one of his favorite early fantasies- being hypnotized by a creature and left, dopey and defenseless.

He relaxed his jaw leaving his mouth open and tilted his head to complete the image. his reflection in the webcam looked totally dazed, totally gone.

“Ok Narcissus, “ he heard Jamie’s amused voice after a few moments. “It’s not fair to hypnotize yourself in order to get out of me hypnotizing you. Y’know- I didn’t even think about how your glasses would reflect the lights when that spiral came up. I’ll have to use that in the future. But I promised to hypnotize you with a spiral, not with your own reflection, ok? So focus here.”

Daniel felt his eyes look straight forward as his mind snapped to attention. “Focus here” was one of their oldest, strongest trigger phrases. Only, instead of looking straight ahead at Jamie’s face, he was now looking at a slowly turning spiral.

He had to admit, it didn’t feel quite as annoying as it had a few minutes ago.

“Good,” cooed Jamie, moving into her lower hypnotist voice. “Go ahead and take a deep breath and just watch the spiral right now. Let your eyes start to take it in. I know that you weren’t really into spirals before, but I wonder if watching something gentle and slow like this can just set your mind into a rhythm of my voice or the rhythm of my words or the lines circling around and around all in the same pattern. And you know what it’s like to be hypnotized, to be in sync with trance, and this trance can just start to form between the words, within the pattern, inside yourself all syncing up now and following along together.”

“And I know that you like snakey things, so I wonder what it would look like if this spiral was a snake. You could picture it as a snake winding round and round in a smooth pattern, tail to head, coiling around and around. That smooth motion hypnotic as it moves. Maybe you could even imagine what it would be like to touch that snake, starting with a finger on the outer coil and tracing it down and around as the coils tighten together and draw you further in. How ssmooth and sslippery that would be to trace that ssnake’s skin, going deeper and deeper within the coils, further and further in. Around and around."

"You can follow that sssensation or smoothness as that snake spirals more and more inward, coiling tighter and tighter and finding yourssself following it further and further into that snake’s sssspiral, coiled in further and further and fasssster into the center. And you can notice the tightening of the spiral there as you reach the ccccenter of the snnnake in the cccenter of the ssspiral and the coilsss just move around and around just ccccircling you now like the prey you are. And maybe there you feel a sssssqueezing ssensation- trapping you there in the middle. The spiral consssstricts around any thoughts in your head, ssssuffocating them, sslowly ssssqueezing them away. And with every cccircle, every ssssqueeze, every consssstriction, you grow more and helpless. More and more weak. More and more sssleeepy. More and more messsmerized. More and more my prey. Even more as the sssssnake constricts around and around and around.”

Then his thoughts squeezed out, sleepy and mesmerized, Daniel listened for what he would believe next.