Mathew and Ashley had been friends since childhood, they lived right across the street from each other and did everything together. Ashley was always in the lead, dragging Mathew to almost every adventure she wanted. Mathew was timid and most of the time just did whatever Ashley told him to do. Growing up, Ashley turned into a bombshell blonde, the perfect DD rack, just the right height at 5’5”, and a curvaceous body toned with hours spent in the gym. Mathew never really bit much bigger, barely breaking the 5’9” mark, always skinny but toned just enough from his hard, labor intensive jobs, and a ratty looking man bun acquired from years of not cutting his hair. Ashley graduated high school and proceeded to move onto college with a full scholarship while Mathew had to work days to afford his night classes. They weren’t joined at the hip like they used to be but Ashley still made the effort to hang out with him, despite his social awkwardness and her sorority’s dislike of beta males. Ashley was moving into her capstone project for her senior year, being the extremely intelligent girl she was she had taken on a massive project, building a machine that could be used to hypnotize people. That was the simplest way she could describe it. The focus was set to help people overcome fears or bad habits, for example smoking or the fear of flying. The machine would take in a “patient” as she liked to put it, then expose them to audio and visual, sometimes even physical stimulation, to essentially rewire their brain to accept what ever they wanted. With tests, they were finding that even people that showed strong resistance to hypnosis could be hypnotized and in little as one session quit smoking for example. The machine was getting a lot of attention and buzz around campus, and Ashley was close to publishing her research, she just had to test how far the machine could be taken, spending countless sleepless nights writing a variety of programs for any number of applications. Now she just needed a willing subject. Ashley approached Mathew on a Wednesday night, waiting for him outside of his last night class. “Hey Pat, so I was wondering, would you be willing to give my machine a test run for me, I know you’ve been wanting to quit smoking for awhile now and the machine could help you kick the nasty habit” she said, her innocent smile always Pat’s first warning when she was up to something.
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