A 'Character Behavior Specialist', aka Brainwasher-for-Hire

Unsurprisingly, when it comes to a character becoming the of some random schmuck from another dimension, most of them are not willing to cooperate. The common way most owners deal with this issue are mental modification chips. They're cheap, quick to install, and can enforce different behaviors by blocking undesirable brain signals and replacing them with preprogrammed ones. They can even be turned on and off with the push of a button if so desired. However, the character is still the same inside of their head, even if they are unable to show it, and putting too many chips in a character can have unforeseen side effects. And sometimes, an owner wants something for their character too complex for a simple chip to do.

Thus, those who can afford it may elect to do some form of brainwashing instead. These can come in all sorts of varieties, from sensory deprivation or overstimulation, to subliminal messaging, to even more esoteric methods such as hypnosis or dream therapy. While the methods are varied, the end results are the same: the character can be made to believe anything, and act however an owner wants. Some methods of brainwashing can be so subtle a character won't even know it's happening, and even the more brute methods can produce results a chip alone cannot. And when done properly, a brainwashed character's behavior is more stable and less prone to 'breaking' than a chipped one, and all without the permanence or expense of neural repathing.

Of course, there are downsides to brainwashing a character, the biggest one being time. Chipping a character can be done in a couple hours at most, and some clinics can even do it in under one, but brainwashing can take anywhere from a few days to a few months depending on the mental willpower of the character in question, and how complex and thorough the brainwashing needs to be. Another downside is that while anyone could theoretically do it, properly brainwashing a character takes skill, and an amateur can easily screw it up with disastrous results. It takes a specialist (and sometimes proper equipment) to effectively brainwash a character, and while there are some chips on the market with preprogrammed brainwashing routines built in, if an owner wants something more unique they will more than likely need to hire someone to do the brainwashing for them.

And that is where you come in. You seem to have a natural talent and passion for brainwashing characters, and what started as something you did to your own characters for fun turned into you helping out your friends with their characters. They told their friends about your skills, and from there you started charging for your services, and before you knew it you were the best independent 'Character Behavior Specialist' in the county. You've expanded your business to meet the increased demand since then, but you are still mostly a one-man operation. You have also expanded your methods over the years to include pretty much every commercially available brainwashing device on the market, plus a few you've designed yourself after taking apart and studying the others.

They say if you love your job, you never work a day in your life. While you wouldn't go as far as to say what you do wasn't work, you certainly love that work. Getting paid to mold a character's mind to your will was a dream come true, and while it could be tough at times, you wouldn't have it any other way. After all, that's part of the fun.

It's another beautiful day as you pull your car into your personal parking spot right in front of your workplace. You've come a long way from operating out of the basement of your rental home. Now, you own a nice big house for yourself and your personal characters, and this building only a mile away that you had built to your specifications. Capable of housing up to twenty characters at one time (assuming one character per room at least), all in various states of brainwashing, plus your work office, storage, and a workshop for construction and experimentation of new brainwashing methods, it was practically a second home for you. Albeit one that looked far less pretty on the outside, being a square stucco building with a sign above the door reading, 'Brainwash Boutique'. Not the most original name for a brainwashing business, you admit, but it's at least direct.

You unlock the front door, walk into the entrance area, then punch your code into the keypad to open another door to let you into the building proper. Similar to a jewelry store, it was an added measure of security to help prevent intruders from the outside getting in, and escapees on the inside getting out. Walking into the reception area proper, you see your secretary character already seated and on the computer, though knowing how she is you doubt she's doing any actual work at the moment.

"Good morning, Tharja," you say to her with a wave.

"S-Sir!" the black-haired woman squeaks, straightening up in her seat with a blush. Hastily clicking off of whatever she was looking at on the monitor, she pushes her glasses back up the bridge of her nose and stammers, "G-Good morning sir!"

Even if someone were to have played Fire Emblem Awakening, they might not recognize the dark mage that sat behind the front desk of your brainwashing facility. In addition to the thick-rimmed square glasses on her face, her black hair, normally worn loose and flowing save for two tiny tails near the top, was done in two long and tight French braids. And instead of the very risque mesh bodysuit with a cape from the game, Tharja was wearing a white work blouse, pleated navy skirt that went down to her knees, and tennis shoes with ankle socks. All together, she looked the part of the stereotypical nerd, which matched the new personality you had given her.

Tharja is the closest thing you have to a full-time 'employee', and it wasn't even your original intention to have her working at the front desk. Her original owner had brought her in shortly after you opened this location, and back then she was the same as she was in the game outside of being modded to need glasses. The guy wanted you to take Tharja and turn her into 'a nerdy permavirgin uberdork who spends all her time fingering herself to porn and sex fantasies'. You never did know exactly why, as you made it a policy not to ask questions about your clients' motivations for their changes unless it was relevant, but he seemed frantically excited about the idea, so you did your thing and spent almost two weeks brainwashing Tharja until she was exactly what the client wanted.

And then the guy stiffed you on the pay, tried to get her back for free by complaining that she didn't turn out how he wanted, and when you offered to undo your work for the price of his initial deposit, he said he'd think about it, then stopped answering your calls entirely. You never heard from him again, but this was neither the first nor last time you had people disappear on you without paying, so you had a clause in the waivers you have all your clients sign that if they didn't claim their character in a timely manner or refused to pay you for services rendered, ownership of the character will be transferred to you. Usually when that happens you just resell the character to get at least some money for your work, but after the expansion you were having a bit of trouble keeping up with the increased workload, and the now-nerdified Tharja just so happened to be a good fit for what you needed in a secretary. So you made some adjustments to her personality to make her a bit less of a porn addict and more functional around other people, then put her to work. She now lived in a room in the back, answered the phones and managed your appointments, kept watch over your 'patients' while you were away, and every once in a while helped out with her own magical skills.

And of course, she loved her job. Not only due to her obsessive 'secret' crush on you, but because you gave her a fetish for watching you brainwash characters. She may no longer be a violent possessive yandere, but she's still enough of a pervert that you wouldn't have been surprised if she had been touching herself to security footage from yesterday when you walked in. Speaking of which...

"Any issues last night?" you ask her, as you did every morning.

"No Sir," Tharja replies, opening up the live security feed on her computer, "Everyone's still in their cells and ready for another day of having their minds molded to your will."

"Good to hear," you say. Noticing that Tharja was biting her lower lip and shifting slightly in her seat, you ask, "Do you have the schedule for today ready, or were you... 'busy'?"

Tharja's face goes red with embarrassment and she stammers, "N-No! I mean, yes! I w-wasn't busy! I put it together first thing in the morning, before... um, what I was doing... not that I was doing anything bad, um..."

The ringing of the phone saves Tharja from her embarrassment, and she quickly says, "I'll email it to you," before picking up the phone and saying, "Brainwash Boutique, how can I help you today?"

You can't help but chuckle a bit as you wait for her to send the email while listening to whoever was on the phone. It's moments like what just happened that you wish you let her keep the lisp full-time. You thought it was adorable, but it also made her too hard to understand over the phone, so for the sake of the business it had to go. You did have a trigger implanted to bring it back whenever you wanted though.

Your phone lets out a ping, and you pull it out to check the schedule Tharja put together for the day. You had things set up so that at least some of the brainwashing process was hands off, usually through running subliminal programs into the patients' rooms or hooking them up to brainwashing machines, but you still had to check in regularly to make sure everything was progressing as they should, and set up each step of the process. Every character was different, and you almost always had to tailor your methods to what would work best with them to get the outcome you wanted, which of course kept you rather busy when combined with needing to talk with potential new clients and setting aside time to experiment with new brainwashing methods. Juggling them could be a challenge sometimes, but from the looks of things today's schedule was relatively light in terms of meetings or time-sensitive tasks, giving you the freedom to decide what ongoing or new project you wanted to tackle first.