"Yeah..."

"Yeah..." You slur out.

"Oh, thank goodness. Sinking deeper and deeper for me now. Deeper and deeper. Visualize a staircase..." She leads you through several deepening exercises. Then come the questions.

"What do you know about mind control?"

Not much. Obviously there's a whole school for it in the multiverse. Closest you know of is some of the wilder XChange variants, and command collars.

"What is XChange?"

It's a **** that swaps people's physical sex. The default works for a day, barring pregnancy, there are month-long and permanent variants, ones that are reversed only by a certain number of orgasms or a specific counter-agent. Some can alter memories or personalities. It's quite fascinating. The base agent requires diphthalamide oxypheno-

"You know how to make XChange?"

There are several bootleg variants. Wasn't hard to powder some pills and reverse-engineer the formulae. Lot of casual XChange users in your world.

"Does this count yourself?"

Sure. You've spent many a happy day and some casual hookups as femme. It's so convenient to be able to change your outward appearance to match your feelings on any given day. Never taken the long-lasting or personality-altering variants.

"Could you make those?"

With the right equipment, absolutely.

"Do you have any XChange right now?"

In my bad, a few dozen pinks, some blues and purples.

"What does the color have to do with anything?"

Pink for a female body, blue for male, purple for femme-presenting with male genitalia.

"Oh! Futas! We have those. How about this control collar, what does it do?"

Command collar. It forces obedience. It was created to issue complex commands to dogs, but was quickly found to work on people. It can download instructions permanently.

"Were you planning on using XChange or this collar on me?"

Only in self-defense for the collar. Only with consent for the XChange.

"Hmmm... put on the collar."

You take it form your bag and put it on.

"Remember this and obey always. For reinforcement, download instructions. Never attempt to control my mind without permission. If you suspect I am under someone else's control, you will do whatever it takes to free me. And keep your side of the room tidy. End instructions."

"Now, 3, 2, 1, Wake!" She snaps her fingers.

"My name is Hannah. It's nice to meet you properly. I'm so sorry for that, but I couldn't relax until I was sure my roommate wasn't going to control me."

"Honestly," you reply, "I was thinking along similar lines. It does feel like a setup to compel us to control each other."

"Well, we don't have to play their game. I'm willing to take the same instructions, using the collar or your hypnosis, if it makes you feel better?"

You're not sure if it's the earnest look on her face, or the order not to use mind control, but you can't bring yourself to do that to Hannah, and tell her as much. You do show off your collection of XChange, your notes, and even your driver's license, which as all these last few years has pictures of your male and femme appearances. At her urging you pop a pink and the thing takes on a bit of an air of a sleepover - besides being in the afternoon.

There being a couple of hours until dinner, you need to decide what to do. You could hang out with Hannah, investigate the library, gym or computer labs, or any of the common areas. Hannah explains there's a town outside the campus, a kind of patchwork of neighborhoods stolen from everyone's worlds, the locals subtly mind-controlled to not notice anything unusual about the aliens and magical creatures now wandering about.