Scene with Wiseguy
When Wiseguy ( @hypnoobiwan ) was showing me the Nova Pro on Friday Night of Entranced, and I was in my formal Wonder Woman-inspired dress, Wiseguy joked about it being a brainwashing machine. I giggled about how typically comic book brainwashing Wonder Woman would be, but I was rather too fractionated to negotiated the scene. So, we agreed to postpone the scene until a later night. Of course, I wasn’t wearing a Wonder Woman dress Sunday night, so we had to change the plans slightly; instead of brainwashing Wonder Woman, he instead had a (hypnotically) bound Diana Prince.
First, though, he had to get me well and truly fractionated, because otherwise the Nova Pro gives me a headache. To do so, he installed a trance slider on my arm. Stroking down from my elbow to my wrist dropped me down, stroking up my arm woke me up. Then he started switching partway up or down and … well, I think his line was “are you nonverbal yet?” to which I responded with “almost?” So that should give a sense of how mushy my brain was when we started.
Anyway, to the actual scene:
I woke, bound to a chair, with a man who identified himself as an ‘extractor’ standing over me. I was woozy and it took a while for my head to clear. While I fought to clear my head and get my bearings, he took a moment to check my bonds. Then he told me why I was there - his employers believed that, since I work for Steve Trevor I would know where Paradise Island is. He wanted to know where.
Now, of course, even if I did know where Paradise Island is, I wouldn’t tell anyone; I owe Captain Trevor more than that. But I wouldn’t admit to even knowing, not even under torture, and I told him so.
But, apparently, he didn’t believe in torture. He had a device of some sort, with glasses and headphones, that he said worked better than torture. I was, naturally, skeptical of the effect of a light show and some noise, but he was scarily confident. So I tried to shake off the headphones when he placed them on me, but that only resulted in him duct taping my head to the chair and putting the headphones back, and the glasses as well.
Throughout the whole thing, he remained unfailingly polite, which was the most intimidating thing at all. We get trained for anger in the face of resistance, but not a sort of nonchalant good humor! I didn’t know what to do with that response, other than dig my heels in and be as stubborn as possible.
So he started up the machine to which the headphones and glasses were attached. The lights were, according to him, blinking at slightly different frequencies in each eye, and he also said something about there being two tones in each ear, again with slightly different frequencies between the right and left. Apparently, this was to train the brain into a receptive state where he could convince me to tell him what I knew.
Clearly, I couldn’t trust that he wasn’t right; the risk was too great. As a result, I boxed up my memories of what I might know about Paradise Island, sealed the box, and put it in a safe with a time lock on it, that wouldn’t release for 12 hours. If the machine really worked the way he said it did, then I’d be taking advantage of that. If it didn’t, well, no harm would be done, right? They can’t get information I can’t access.
The machine did … something. I’m not entirely sure what, but on top of the lights and sounds the machine made, he was also talking to me. And as he talked, it just got harder to remember why I was resisting him. The more I tried to ignore the sounds and lights, the more I tried to hold onto the idea that he was trying to get me to divulge secrets, the harder it became to think at all. And then he started stroking my arm.
I don’t know how he was able to stroke my arm through the rope, the rope was still there. But he was, and the contradiction of stimuli there just made my brain short-circuit somehow. All of a sudden, his words were changing how I felt, and the words he used were words like “obedient” and “compliant” and I couldn’t do anything other than let those feelings wash over me. I felt oddly relaxed about it all, too.
I couldn’t remember where Paradise Island was, though, because of the fact that I boxed those memories up, and when he tried to have me remember a flight path for a trip Captain Trevor had taken, the chart was blank. But I’d flown there before, and I could remember some of the flight, so he walked me through that. But I could only remember what the six pack showed when we were landing, at first. I could come up with air speed, altitude, how level we were flying, whether we were turning, our heading, and our vertical speed, but nothing else. Also, I remembered the instruments going crazy for no observable reason.
Eventually, though, he had me remember bits and pieces; how long we’d been flying at that heading, where we started from, were there other islands I could see, and so on. With those clues, and my memory that the water on the shores of Paradise Island was warm, he pieced together a location in the Bermuda Triangle. I don’t remember much after that; I must have fallen asleep.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ (end scene)
Upon Wiseguy waking me up from the scene, I naturally had to comment on the duct tape. “Duct tape? AGAIN?!”, or something along those lines, I think. Then we just talked for a while until I was sufficiently de-fractionated enough to trust my sense of balance.
Author’s note: To those of you who haven’t heard the story, at my first NEEHU, I had volunteered as a demo person for some hypnotic bondage Wiseguy was demonstrating in one of his classes. He used hypnotic duct tape to bind my feet together and my hands and head to the bondage chair we were using. The first thing I said upon waking up at that time was “Duct tape? In my HAIR?! REALLY, Wiseguy?!” - it’s kind of become a running joke. I’m willing to bet that that’s why Wiseguy used (hypnotic) duct tape to bind my head when I shook the headphones off, rather than more hypnotic rope.