✅ The Baby Makers

Young Girl

"Maybe," Phil said with a smile, and Ana found herself metaphorically on the edge of her seat, waiting for what he would say next. "I think it might be better for you to get a little younger again first. You enjoyed imagining yourself as a little girl again, didn't you?"

"Yeah," Ana nodded, and smiled. She knew all the theory about using age regression to undo learned behaviours for a while, and it was an interesting theory. But she hadn't actually tried it before, and she'd never thought it could feel so good. Her mind had been so calm, so refreshed. A sleek arrowhead of intent, a single thought just following along with Phil's words, rather than the jumbled cloud of analyses and second thoughts she normally had to contend with, second and third thoughts and parts of her psyche looking over her own shoulder in the hope of catching herself screwing up. It had been so simple, and she thought that after this visit was over, if she was right about the hypnosis practice here being of no concern to the Order, she might actually come back on her own. If, that was, she enjoyed the game they'd been preparing for.

"Well, we can go back there a little, if you'd like," Phil offered.

Fractionation, the word was right there in Ana's mind. A hypnotist would often awaken a subject, and then immediately start guiding them back into trance. You were awake and aware, but the habit of not questioning that person's words persisted for a while, so this time you would go back so much more quickly and easily. More completely controlled. A good hypnotist could take a subject down and up, down and up, down and up a dozen times in quick succession and they'd feel like their suggestibility was a yo-yo, when in reality it was more like descending a staircase, every step deeper.

Of course, she would have recognised exactly what the effects on her mind would be even without any education. She was a member of the order, and that came with certain special talents and senses. But it was nice to know the words for it, how the hypnosis specialists in academia and psychiatry described the effects they barely understood, and be able to describe it. With her natural senses, she would have known exactly what it was, but not how to put those concepts into words. "Fractionation" was one of the most recent words Ana remembered learning in school, and for a moment she was proud of recalling it so quickly. That pride would be Phil's suggestions in her mind, because she knew it had really been fifteen years or more since she learned that. I wasn't something to be proud of remembering, it was one of the basic techniques. It was interesting just how much her own emotional responses had changed already. And she wondered if she could imagine not remembering, not knowing what was happening to her.

"Maybe a little," she nodded. "It's nice to be young again. Before I started getting out of shape."

"Well, I left a little suggestion to make that easier for you. Do you remember?"

Ana just shook her head. She remembered accepting his suggestions, he couldn't take that away. She knew that everything he'd tried to set in her mind had been in the vein of what she was expecting, and there hadn't been anything to worry her. She'd taken it in, but she didn't need to remember the actual words.

"You seem a little nervous," Phil said. "Trying to work out what you're heading towards. You asked to be surprised, and maybe a little apprehensive, so that's what you're going to get. But don't worry, right now I'm not going to push you toward anything you're not expecting. I'm just asking you to feel younger. Any time I tell you how you might behave if you were a little younger, you'll find it easy to do that, and it will make you feel that much younger. I'm not making you more suggestible this time, or weaker, or anything else. Just younger, and more inclined to do childlike things until I ask you to grow up. Is that okay?"

Ana nodded, and got another warning from the extra senses buried in her hindbrain. This was a part of the suggestion he'd given her before, one last chance to back out now she knew it was for real. A safety measure, and that really made it easier to trust Doctor Phil. When he asked again if she wanted to feel younger, it was her voluntary nod that would seal the deal. It would make the post-hypnotic suggestion he just mentioned irresistible. Nodding now would condition her with a reflex action, so that any time he told her how a younger girl would respond, she would do it. She'd already nodded, so now it was just a case of accepting that change.

And he was being honest, she could sense that easily. She was giving him the power to easily make her mentally younger, but that was all. When it came to the actual centre of this exercise, her special senses would still give her another chance to change her mind. All she was agreeing to was becoming younger, the prelude to the main event, so she allowed that change in her world.

"Good girl," he smiled, "You really trust me, don't you?"

Ana was still smiling, but gave the doctor a withering glare. She might be going in for something she didn't understand, and he might be guiding her through something he'd done a hundred times before, or a thousand. But he still shouldn't be telling her she was a good girl, like some little kid. She had half a mind to say something really sarcastic, maybe comment on the guy's age. But she knew he was helping her, and she didn't want to upset him, so she toned it down to a glance of scorn. Maybe not as withering as she would have liked, either, because she didn't have the complete mastery of expression she was sure she'd had as a grown-up.

"Someone's a little sarcastic," Phil seemed more amused than offended. "Maybe you're a bit too old for that kind of language. A younger girl would feel a warm rush of pleasure on being told you're a good girl by an adult, and want to be called that more often."

Ana nodded. She could feel the edges of her thoughts getting just slightly fuzzier, her muscles feeling a little less toned. He'd told her how a younger girl should act, and she'd already accepted the command that would make those behaviours compulsive. She looked down at her hands, trying to see if she was physically shrinking, but quickly returned her hands to her pockets as she realised how ludicrous that was. It was hypnosis, not magic, and all the changes must only be in her mind. But that didn't mean they were any less real, and Ana was just as eager to see what Phil would ask her to imagine next.