💡🐇 Naughty Thoughts

꩜ Influence Yourself

Laika Moore isn't quite sure how she went from being a popular nerd to an influencer, or really what the word means. She used to vent on a dumb video blog when things annoyed her, and nobody seemed to care. But now she's got so many fans that it's hard to read all the comments, let alone reply to them. People love her, and she can even make money by promoting some companies. She doesn't take it too seriously, but she knows it's big business and she's still amazed that she's made something of her life.

She makes enough money to ensure she always has the latest phone, the latest computer, and all the games she'd want to play. Not enough to get her own place, not in this city. But she doesn't have to worry about that because there's plenty of space in her aunt's attic. And her adoptive cousin, Harvey, is a big bonus. His little brother Wade is less pleasant to be around, but she tolerates the kid because he's family.

About the time her channel took off, she'd done a series of videos where she was wearing different stupid masks. It started because she'd started posting them live, and took a couple of weeks to realise that her mic had ended up in front of her face. Then after she got a 'petition' from fans who wanted to see her face, she moved the mic but did other things to hide her face, like having a channel icon and slideshow that would hide most of her, and then moved onto the masks. She never intended to hide her identity, but it made her feel braver about posting possibly controversial topics, criticising real-life friends who don't know she's talking about them, and maybe getting a bit more risque than she would normally be comfortable with.

Anyway, the mask became like her gimmick, the thing people know her for. She's the masked cool girl, and it kind of became a thing. Most of her friends don't know she does this, but even so she gives them hilarious nicknames whenever she's talking about RL experiences, so her viewers have no idea how much of it is real. And somehow, exaggerating her experiences always comes out hilarious.

Then she gets an email from one "fan". Wade. He's recognised her room in the videos, and made a big list of things that Aunt Cassidy would be outraged by. And things that would outrage her father (permanently absent, travelling to a new country every other week on business) would be just as angry about. So Wade delivers an ultimatum: If she likes being famous, would she be willing to let her followers influence her as much as she influences them? He asks to hypnotise her, saying that he'll give her a simple trigger that her followers can use. She doesn't believe it will do much; she knows that hypnosis can't make you do something you don't want, and assumes that her subconscious will protect her.

The first trigger is simple. She can't help grinning whenever someone sends her a 😁. But Wade also makes the session kind of addictive, so she finds herself wanting another one. The more she gets triggered, the more she wants to have a different trigger for variety. And before too long, Wade is taking her into trance again. He's using her excitement about being famous to suppress a lot of her inhibitions; tapping into the "don't care" attitude of her online persona, a character who feels safe behind her famous masks. This time the trigger is a little more in line with some of her edgier content: receiving a 💖 makes her incredibly aroused; maybe so much that she needs a second to catch her breath. It's distracting when this happens mid-stream, makes her lose the thread of what she was saying, and she finds herself explaining to the world that one of her fans has hypnotised her, and that she can't help responding in certain ways to some emoji.

She doesn't have to tell people what it does. But she was compelled to tell people that she's been hypnotised, that her triggers are all emoji. And while she's always watching the chat when she does a live stream (and she can't bring herself to disable it), there are at least a couple of people paying close attention, working out what emoji is eliciting a big grin behind the mask, or a gasp of surprise. And on her comments section, or on her fansite, Wade has been claiming responsibility. He tells her fans that she wants to be played with, and she can't bring herself to deny it. So people are sending him suggestions for what the next trigger might be, and he's picking from the most popular ideas. Laika soon finds that she can't resist his trance trigger, and in addition to her existing fans she's attracting a growing following from people resharing her videos on hypno porn sites. People sending her emoji just to see what happens, hoping that their suggestion gets accepted (Wade doesn't announce new triggers; either what they are or what they do. But when people have requested something, a lot of them will occasionally try it in the stream chat to see if their idea was chosen. Whether it's something that will make her remove an item of clothing, make her feel like she's tied to a chair, remove her ability to lie, take away her inhibitions, or force her to answer questions from the chat if someone asks something while she's not already talking.

And that's not the worst of it. Because these triggers aren't just for the stream chat. They affect her just as much in texts from anyone, and she's prohibited from asking people not to send her those emojis unless she also tells them what the effect on her is. That was bad enough before all the other fetishists started gathering around her channel; so now there are emoji that can make her desperate for approval, let people choose her outfit (and make her change on command if she dares to go live without wearing what her fans asked for), or even make her wet herself on command.

The only light at the end of the tunnel is that one guy she knew in school, who's now at the same college, seems to be putting 2 and 2 together. He sees her responses to texts, and spots the similarity to what the masked influencer has to do. And maybe this one guy might decide that he wants to shield her from her fans' influence, and maybe even give her somewhere to stay where Wade can't trigger her so easily. Maybe, if she's lucky. But can she trust her white knight?