#hypnocaption

"...must run 'till I'm fit..."

"...must run 'till I'm dumb..."

"...must run 'till I'm wet..."

"...must run 'till I'm hot..."

"...must run 'till I'm empty..."

"...must run 'till I'm ready..."

"...must run 'till I'm done..."

"Be careful with the merchandise. Yes, I'm referring to the girl. She, alongside many others, are the secret Master's Cosmetics products are selling like hot cakes.

They look so pretty with our products on but the secret is that they look their most beautiful when they are mindless, blank, not a single thought inside to burden or bother them. When our customers see the beauty that comes with the emptiness, they wish they can have that. Not only the products ... but the serenity that we purposefully associate with them as well.

There's a reason we are quite open with how addictive, how quite hypnotic our products are. People demand to be mindless and look beautiful. And we give them what they want.

The ones that reflect the beauty we sell them the most at the end, well, let's just say, they give us what they want at the end. Themselves. Completely. Good girls who will put on the very same lipstick you're applying on your former friend and in turn will be converted into those who will inspire new good girls.

Once you finish prettying her up, you won't remember any of this conversation. But you're still going to remember to treat the merchandise with care, won't you?

(This is a collaboration piece with @subliminalbo, who has graciously wrote the caption here)

Darrin had the reputation of being someone who could get his hands on anything or, in this case, anyone. The girls that he purchased at Romero’s underground auction were his hottest items. He already had a few interested parties lined up this evening, but time was limited. The clock started ticking as soon as the bidding was finished. He had to collect his merchandise and flip the girls for a profit before they returned to the auction house to be wiped.

Darrin recognized this night’s auctioneer as a Carpenter State professor, one who had been sold a few times at the auction herself. He felt oddly proud to see how the professor handled the spotlight. She was as brainwashed as any of the lots she sold, but even as the auction house rotated through its cast of mindless auctioneers, each one brought a bit of their own personality to the role. The professor spoke with an authority that Darren usually only noticed when the auctioneer was a local cop or politician. When she spoke, Darrin wanted to listen.

Darrin was over his self-imposed spending limit early into the night. The three girls he’d already purchased would fetch a big enough price on the aftermarket, but the professor’s words dangled over the crowd like bait on a hook. Then the next lot stepped into the spotlight, and Darrin knew that he couldn’t leave yet.

Her name was Jamie King. She looked like a movie star up on the stage. She first stood there in the default slave pose that all the girls assumed when they presented themselves before the buyers. Her expression was blank, her arms were slack at her side. The position was important because it reflected the emptiness of the merchandise. The fantasy of the underground auction was that the merchandise could assume any role that their buyers desired, and for that reason they had to be blank slates. Jamie didn’t need a personality for Darrin to see that she was worth more than all three of the other girls combined. He simply had to have her.

The professor began rattling off personal details as Jamie broke her default pose. She flashed a vacant, white smile, one hand confidently on her hip. The auctioneer said, “Jamie King, nineteen years old. This current Ms. Romero title holder is famous around town for her fiery personality on and off the catwalk, but don’t let that worry you. As you can see here, despite her insistence, she can be tamed!”

Fuck, Darrin thought. If I hadn’t already blown my money…

“We’ll start the bidding at five hundred,” the auctioneer said.

Jamie continued to snap into poses for the crowd as the paddles shot up.

The professor’s voice lit up like a rocket. “I’ve got six hundred, can I get six—six-fifty! I’ve got six-fifty, can I get seven?”

“Eight hundred!”

“Nine hundred!”

“One thousand!”

The speed of bidding made Darrin’s head spin. One thousand became two, then two became three, and within a few seconds, it had entered the teens. The big spenders had shown up that night and they were jacking prices into the stratosphere. Darrin couldn’t get a number out, even as he held his paddle half-way up. He was about to drop it down, concede defeat and collect his merchandise, when Jamie’s gaze met his.

Her eyes were as blank as any of the other girls on that stage. There was nothing beneath the girls’ faces, their conscious minds turned off. But Darrin would swear that there was some awareness there inside of her. Even having been subjected to the auction house’s brainwashing and paraded up on a makeshift stage in some dingy River City warehouse, Jamie King walked that stage with her pride intact. Maybe she was a slave for the night, but tomorrow she would still be Jamie fucking King.

She flashed a crooked smile, reaching out with her index finger to draw Darrin in, daring him to make a bid.

Twenty-five thousand.

Darrin’s eyes widened. At first he thought the voice was a bid, but the professor was still looking for sixteen and she was a fraction of a second from ending the bidding there. The voice was in his head, and once he made sense of its meaning, he couldn’t deny that it must be some kind of fate that he would be standing there as Jamie King took the stage.

Darrin’s paddle shot up as he cried, “Twenty-five!”

“Sold!”

Jamie returned to her slave pose at the drop of the professor’s gavel, but she couldn’t cover up the prideful smirk that stayed frozen on her face. She was Jamie fucking King, but she’d only just learned the weight of that distinction at the start of the semester when she met the very professor who had just sold her at auction, the professor who called her into office hours to chat about her behavior in class. Jamie had rolled her eyes through that conversation with a dozen other teachers, but it was different when Charlotte Blake spoke.

When Charlotte spoke, Jamie listened. 

They had taught her to look her target right in the eye before she pulled the trigger. But when she did, she realized just what a mistake this had been.

Her target looked so majestic. Even if she'd pulled the trigger, would the bullet be able to do anything against such a divine figure? She had her doubts.

Why did she ever want to shoot in the first place, why couldn't she just let their gaze consume all her thoughts instead? Why couldn't she just worship? Why couldn't she just obey?

They always said that Thirteen is an unlucky number, though she had to disagree.

It was only a fleeting sense of pride and joy when she managed to decrypt the final step of that weird but fascinating ARG that took the internet by the storm. As she spent months discovering clues and solving all the small pieces that led to the whole, she found herself curious for more than just the puzzles themselves: Who created this? What is their goal? But the most important question was: What's going to happen at the end of this?

The answer was a screen that wiped out all those questions from her mind. Along with it, went that sense of pride and joy. And any other feeling. And thought. The glowing green and the all-consuming black took everything and she could do nothing but to stare and remain on stand-by.

On the other side of the website, they stood with all the answers. They expected the game to be a huge success. They expected all the puzzles to filter out the exact type of mind they could use. They expected the spirals at the end would easily turn the lucky winner's tired and overworked brain into an empty bowl which they could fill with their control. They expected this methodology to yield them the very rare combination of total obedience and retained intelligence.

What they didn't expect was their little enslaved analytical puzzle-solver being this smoking hot, which was a pleasant surprise.