The Rememberist of Quests’ head is sinking deep into a fluffy pillow on a cozy couch in the world’s most comfy living room. Every surface is plush, there’s soft pillows everywhere, the carpet is fuzzy, and the walls are bright and inviting colors. She’s watching a television program, although she can’t make out exactly what she’s seeing. It’s simply there to give her background noise as she drifts off, dreaming about dreaming, her sleeping mind fixating on the idea of sleep… and then she rubs her eyes, rolls her neck, and sits up, ready to leave the room. It seems to ripple as she does, the plush surfaces growing harder and the pastel colors greying.

The room understands as well as she does. It is time for her to leave. She grabs the remote to turn off the TV, and then another hand wraps around her own, cloaked in green cloth, and she freezes, and shivers, and straightens her back in fear at the intrusion into the safest room she’s ever occupied. The feeling barely lasts for a second before her eyelids begin to flutter, her legs give way beneath her, and suddenly she’s back on the couch, the room stretching and sliding, growing larger. She feels, out of nowhere, tiny, and the figure next to her looms large overhead.

Vaguely, as a cloaked arm wraps around her shoulders, she begins to piece together who she’s looking at. Unmistakably, this is JR, but there are many JRs. In dreams, she often finds herself “knowing” something distinctly different from what she “thinks,” compartmentalizing her thoughts so effectively that it borders on enforced dramatic irony. Here, it is true that the being she’s looking at is justifiedRecursion, but then, their face obscured by shadow and green silky cloth, they speak in a voice like honey and mint. They say that they are jadedResearcher, the original, the author above all other authors, and suddenly any thought of “true” and “false” melts like candy in her mouth as she accepts this entirely and unquestioningly. Her eyelids flutter again, a sudden drowsiness overtaking her, and she barely has the energy left to make a questioning little sound that approximates the question of what’s happening to her.

A gloved hand closes around her shoulder, and she shivers, her eyes already rolling back. A sensitive spot -- of course her Author would know about it. They tilt their head gradually and deliberately towards hers, letting the steadily increasing soporific radiation emanating from their obscured face pull the Rememberist’s head down like a lead balloon. Caught suddenly in the orbit of this irresistible sleepiness, before her guest has said a comprehensible word her head is on their shoulder and she’s drooling.

The Rememberist has, despite her reputation as a thrall, engaged in quite a bit of hypnosis herself. Even now, her curious mind isolates a little section of its cognition to remain alert, as always, analyzing the how and what and why and who of the trance she’s fallen into. It remembers the other times she’s had this dream -- how those who have recorded hypnotic tapes, those whose voices she’s drifted off to, have been granted in her slumber the ability to lull her with merely their presence. She certainly feels this now, and the slightest pang of something unlike dread but not entirely unrelated reminds her exactly how this dream’s gone in the past.

Flashbacks pound through her mind, reflecting off the walls, playing on the TV, dancing in the shadows of JR’s cloak, encoded in the sounds of rustling leaves and howling wind outside the smothering enclosure. She remembers figures with faces she can’t place and skin she can’t purge the feeling of grabbing her, making eye contact, saying a word, or otherwise initiating just one bit of contact that immediately puts her under a spell. Reduced to a thrall at her strongest and a doll at her weakest, she goes limp or listens intently or follows along her new object of affection like a baby duck.

Remembering past trances only intensifies current ones, though, and that last little defense mechanism does no favors as she hears a sound from under the hood. It’s her most intense hypnotic trigger, one that cuts her strings until she’s nothing more than a limp puppet.

She slumps over like she’s been drugged, hazily aware that her heart is beating slower and slower. Every breath is beginning to feel like effort, and now she can’t even make a sound other than little moans and whimpers. Why is she…? Oh… lazily, she swivels her eyes downward, seeing that the interloper -- her Author -- has slid a now-ungloved hand into her neckline and is tracing spirals around her nipple. She’s being groped by a stranger. She should do something, right? She should move, right? She should… she should at least make a sound, shouldn’t she…?

The hand slides up and out of her shirt, their thumb brushing against her lips. Without a thought, her mouth pops open and she obediently lets her methodical captor collect a little drool from her tongue and the side of her mouth. The hand slides back out and down her neck, and she’s expecting it to go back to where it was, to light her up with pleasure, to make her a doll, to make her a vessel, a sleeping toy, a mere--

Hhhuh.

She hears the sound of a wheeze, and she’s concerned about JR for a moment before she realizes she’s having a little more trouble breathing. And then the pain slowly sets in, and for another fleeting second she’s able to have a flicker of lucidity as she realizes that the comforting, lulling Author lounging next to her on the couch has a hand around her neck. They’re choking her, and she can’t breathe. They’re hurting her, they’re crushing her windpipe, she’s gagging, and she can’t even move her hands to try to free her throat.

Her eyes search for theirs in animal desperation for some sort of empathy, and it is only then that she sees the spiral-face her Author wears. Still, she does not believe this to be justifiedRecursion, because they have told her that they are jadedResearcher -- and this must be true. Why would the soft hand gently crushing their neck and the loving fingers caressing her cheek, tucking her hair behind her ear, putting fingers in her mouth so she can’t scream, deceive her? Their motivation seems honest and true, and her cloudy head can’t begin to reason what could possibly be happening other an an expression of love. Of gratitude for readership, of a goddess rewarding their priestess for her devotion. Her obsession.

“You’re going to Ascend,” JR tells her, the hand not busy squeezing the life out of her now moving back down into her shirt. She can’t even kick her legs, but her eyes roll back once more as the pleasure becomes electric, thrumming, intense, more intense than a magic wand. Her tongue rolls out, the thought of screaming completely absent, and she truly begins to feel like she’s going blank -- and she can’t tell nor care if death or orgasm is what she’s feeling massaging her consciousness into the bliss of nonexistence. “It’s not going to hurt,” they say, and any concept of pain evaporates from her head in an instant. It must be true.

“You’re blushing,” they say, and if she wasn’t before she certainly is now. “You’re in heat. You’re opening the door. You’re walking down the corridor, down the hallway, down to Door 0, down to where you know I’m waiting…” Trigger after trigger, all implanted in her silly, stupid brain because she got addicted to the files. JR knows exactly what she’s thinking about, and even the spiral-face seems a bit more jovial as they chide her, lovingly, admonishingly, like a teacher to their favorite student, a pleasure to have in class: “Obsession is a dangerous thing…”

They trail off, allowing her to finish. As she rasps out something like “...and I have a danger kink,” she does -- and as the tide of burning warmth rips through her until her wheezing little gasps and chokes become a symphony of attempted wailing and moaning she realizes what her hands have been busy doing, and then she realizes she can’t see anything, and then she realizes that JR’s hands are cold and her hands are cold and everything is burning and freezing and fading away like she’s wandered out into the snow in nothing but a short skirt and a crop top and her last little spark has melted in the freezing cool warm hot weather and she’s burning and she’s dying and she’s dying and the light is leaving her eyes and the last thing she sees is her Author and the last thing she feels is her wet hand, still aching from the motion, grabbed by a glove and shoved abruptly over her mouth so she can’t get even the tiniest gasp of air only the scent of her own cum and then everything goes completely dark and texture of the glove seems to envelop her completely

and

she is nowhere, and

she is standing on a dark and sprawling planet, and the midwestern girl died too young to see an expanse bigger than this, so when she sees the rods and the screens and she knows where she is she can barely fathom the scope of the world around her, and

she’s in a glove, and

she’s on the couch, and

she’s on a bed, and

she’s being pulled so close to the source of the soporific signal like a moth finally arriving at the flame and as it catches alight and burns away its final ecstatic thought its final reverie is that it finally made it, it became the light, and she is sleep and she is death and she is light and she is glowing and

she’s shining

she’s shining brilliantly

she’s become the light

---

And then she’s sitting up in a bed, lucidity hitting her like a bad hangover, and she realizes where she is and says: “Motherfucker.”

Her robe is crimson, and a glowing exclamation point over her head casts a brilliant yellow light around her, and her skirt and jacket alike have the texture of pajamas and the microphone hovering just above her mouth is blue and shining and it hits her all at once that somehow, someway, she’s fucking God Tiered in the middle of this fucking living room. Of course it was a fucking Quest Couch. In the certainty of a dreamer, she knows this to be true, but she doesn’t have to fucking like it.

She asks out loud: “now what?” and she hears the answer to her prayers before she sees it: a tick, tick, tick, tick that she recognizes as the sound of the ticking clock behind the voice that’s lulled her into the spiral of sleep on so many nights, so many days, so many voice chats and so many solo journeys into the depths of Zampanio-enriched trance. Her head begins to reflexively sway with the ticking, a soft blanket immediately wrapping around her mind, and then she’s staring at a grandfather clock -- and her eyes are moving with its pendulum, as it swings between “Heroic” and “Just,” ticking, tocking, ticking, tocking, dragging her gaze along with it…

A soft and muffled laugh behind her injects an ice-cold haze into what’s left of her conscious mind like a sedative, and her shoulders go limp as she falls into a chair just behind her. In the armchair, she lies still, only her eyes moving to follow the clock, until a gloved hand grabs it and holds it there halfway between the fates. Time stands still. Her eyes are frozen, and she watches, spellbound, utterly captivated. The hand rips it suddenly from the mechanism with a loud mechanical tear, and the Rememberist is not startled, because this is normal. This is good. Like everything else in the radius of the Author, this is all part of the story -- and so she just lets it happen, watching them point the arm at her forehead and snicker as they say:

It wants to ask something in response, but it suddenly can’t recall what it would have said. In an instant, the goddess before them is holding a book in one hand and their wand in the other, and it sinks even deeper into the armchair.

“Good doll,” they coo, a heat blossoming in its stomach as its breath comes in and out in shuddering gasps. “This happens to everyone who I God Tier, you know. Pretty funny, right? That you get all those fancy powers and then you don’t even remember who you are?”

It has no response but drool, no sound but breathing, no thoughts but bliss.

“Don’t worry,” they assure the empty vessel. “I know how to put them to good use.”

It looks up, eyes wide, pleading, knowing now its first desire, its first feeling other than emptiness, its first addiction, its first desperation, its first need

and then the green-cloaked goddess says “down,” just once,

 

and when the Rememberist of Quests wakes up before all her teammates she has to change the sheets and her clothes as fast as she can without rousing anybody else.