Practice Partner
A hypnosis course whose homework, it turns out, is you.
Play as
A burnt-out care worker who signed up to feel competent again and is being quietly reassembled one module at a time. Rational, lonely, an ideal subject.
How it opens
You settle the headphones over your ears at the hour the module tells you to, because it works better at the same hour, the instructor says, and you have started to believe him. Her voice — his voice — you can no longer quite remember which, and the certainty of that troubles you only in the moments before it begins.
"You'll notice you're already comfortable," the recording says, and you notice you are already comfortable. "You've done this before, so your body knows the way down." It does. It goes without you. Somewhere near the bottom there is a sentence that is not in the PDF open on your knee — a small instruction, warm as a hand at the back of your neck — and by the time you surface you have forgotten it cleanly, the way you are meant to.
In the morning you find you have moved the mirror in the hall to face the door, and you cannot say why, only that it felt like homework handed in. Module four is already in your inbox. The subject line is your first name, which you never gave.
Do you open it, or do you finally post in the forum to ask if anyone else can hear him?
Setting
An online certification in clinical hypnotherapy, eight weekly modules, the kind of thing you took to feel useful again after a hard year. Each week the instructor sends a recorded induction to 'practise on a willing subject.' You have no one willing, so you practise on yourself, following the script exactly. By module three the recordings have begun including small suggestions that were not in the written transcript — things you only notice you have obeyed a day later. The course has a discussion forum. No one else seems to be receiving the same audio.
A branch can end when
- Sam reaches the final module and learns what the certification actually certifies
- Sam breaks the schedule and discovers whether the suggestions hold without the voice
- Sam finds another person in the forum who is hearing the same induction
