It was easy enough, in the end. Mara approached it the way any sensible **** Miasma sorceress approached a problem, by finding the little weakness already waiting inside it and giving it a gentle push. The biologist only needed a nudge, nothing theatrical, just a wash of dizziness and that old private fear of losing control. By the time Mara was done, the climbing harness no longer looked adventurous. It looked precarious, foolish, one missed grip away from humiliation. The girl’s own mind did the rest, turning with perfect reasonableness toward softness, stability, and the nearest available symbol of horizontal safety.
She made for Mattress Madness as if it had been her idea all along.
The physicist required a slightly different touch, but not a harder one. Obsession, Mara had long ago learned, was often more useful than fear. He was already halfway gone inside some virtual battlefield in Galaxy Games and Gizmos, so all she really had to do was drop the right kind of nonsense into the right pair of ears and trust the species to disgrace itself. A quiet rumour here, a confidential tone there, some absurd story about an exclusive beta test for a hyper realistic physics engine that could only be reached from the supposedly shielded sleep pod section of Mattress Madness, and that was that.
The lie was idiotic, naturally, but idiocy wrapped in the language of exclusivity could move mountains. Certainly it could move one overexcited physicist. Before long he was out of his headset and marching for the mattress shop with all the fervour of a man who believed he was on the brink of discovery rather than being steered into soft furnishings by a goth witch with a paper cup full of bad omens.
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