002 ✿ Dream [Interactive]

[hypnoun]

Warning: None? This is a dream, so I doubt any hypnotism she might do will actually carry over into reality. :|a If headcanon counts as a warning, then, yeah.
Effects: Interactive!

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[hypnoun]

The urge to laugh once she notices the look on his face is so strong, she barely manages to suppress it. She watches as he makes his way out of the "audience" and towards the stage, the spotlight following his every step as Rei kept the same, polite smile plastered on her face. It was painfully obvious that he desperately wanted to get the hell out of here, to the point that if Rei had been anybody else, she would have felt pity for him.

Obviously, she did not.

Instead, she continues smiling at him, as if she were oblivious to his discomfort despite the obvious look on his face. He seemed to be a rather ordinary person, there was no outward sign of him being one of those who she could easily manipulate with her hypnotism, which meant she had to rely on either pure luck, or a little bit of cooperation here.

"Unfortunately, I can't reveal that just yet. It would spoil the surprise for the audience, after all." And then she gestures to the gray mass that was meant to pass off as her audience. She didn't really care spoiling it for the audience, nor did she really believe it was an actual audience, but she wasn't about to admit that. She would simply play along as she always had done, and continue keeping up with her act.

After she is done with that, she focuses her attention back on the man standing in the stage along with her. She clasps her hands together in the same, overly cheerful manner she had done earlier, and begins to speak once again. "Now, if you don't mind... What is your name, sir?"

[insorrow]

Ken is not... what he is for nothing.

There is something very wrong about this and he doesn't understand what - he knows it's not the faceless, formless mass that is the crowd; it's not even winding up in a television studio when he could have sworn he was just trying to go to bed. It's nothing he can put his finger on, he just knows that nonetheless It Is There. He knows that he wants to get out of here, and he knows that he can do nothing of the sort.

Story of his life, he guesses. Ken simply stands there smiling like an idiot while the little hostess talks. She's telling him absolutely nothing that's at all reassuring - the audience, he wants to shout, isn't even damn well real! - and all he can do is nod and grin like he's got a vacancy in the top storey of the tower and wonder why in the goddamn world there don't seem to be any doors out of this place. He can't even work out how he'd go about getting off the damn stage without ending up back in the audience and what good would that do?

It occurs to him he doesn't even really know what this girl intends to do-- and she's fallen silent. She's smiling expectantly up at him and oh Hell, she just asked him a question didn't she?

"Ken," he says awkwardly. He uncrosses his arms, just so he can rub at the back of his neck. "My name's Ken. What do you want me to do?"

[OOC: Ken may actually prove pretty damn manipulable. Profile is here: long story short he's an assassin with a dead mother and serious abandonment issues because Weiss Kreuz is insane.]

[hypnoun]

She watches him as he speaks, watches how awkward he looks at this very moment and how his actions only reaffirmed that fact. It was almost hilarious, really, but making fun of her volunteers simply wouldn't do. Not when it meant that it would simply make them more suspicious of what she planned to do and how.

...Speaking of which, if those suspicions existed, she would need to ease them soon. They would be rather detrimental to her act if she did nothing about them.

"I see." She says, as if she were thinking about his name for a moment, before continuing speaking. "Thank you, Ken-san, for being my volunteer for the night." And then the so-called audience begins to clap, this time a little bit louder as if they were applauding him for being brave enough to volunteer for this.

As soon as the audience quiets down, she motions towards one of the chairs in the middle of the stage, and begins speaking once again. "Well, if you could sit in this chair over here..." However, once she is done speaking, she briefly glances at him with a look. A look with which she was trying to tell him how sorry she was for dragging him into this, and how she would try to make this quick for both of their sakes.

It was a complete and utter lie, of course, but nobody would ever know that unless they were inside her head.

[insorrow]

"That's okay," Ken manages, when she thanks him. He isn't at all sure if it is, of course, but some things a guy just had to say--

And then the applause began, and Ken's eyes widened, just a little, but surely enough that the girl had noticed. Okay, now that was eerie. He'd thought the silence from the non-audience was on the weird side, but having the damn things actually applaud was somehow only worse. They were,'t real, so what the Hell was making the noise? It was all Ken could do not to flinch, and only remembering - yeah, hi mom - that he was being watched and then some kept him from it.

Her smile is at least somewhat reassuring. It doesn't go any way toward changing the fact he has no idea what this girl wants with him or what she thinks she's about to do, but it helps a little and that, Ken thinks, is about as good as it's likely to get. Returning the smile - awkwardly, always awkwardly, but anything else really would have been too much to ask for - Ken sits, hands curling almost instinctively about the sides of the chair as if he's prepared, any minute, to push himself back to his feet.

He's blushing, isn't he? Yeah. Ken never was much of an attention-seeker, not even back in the day, and this is just-- it's nothing he'd ever have sought for himself...

Maybe that's why he feels so nervous.

"So," he asks, looking up at the girl and hoping against hope that, at least, he doesn't look quite as embarrassed and on-the-spot as he feels, "what now?"

[hypnoun]

With each action he took, it only increased the hilarity of the situation, really. She watches his mannerism with a barely noticeable look of pity on her face, just in case he was observant, and decides that, yes, he would do nicely. Even if he wasn't affected by her hypnotism, he seemed to be the type that would surely play along with her little act if she were to give him a shove in the right direction.

Once he is sitting on the plastic chair, gripping the sides so he could easily get back up on his feet and away from the stage if it ever became necessary, she smiles and turns away from the camera and towards him. A horrible thing to do and completely against basic stage ethics, but it wasn't as if her audience would care.

It was all part of the show, either way.

Rei leans over, closer to him, until her mouth is close to his ear and out of the audience's sight. If he was observant, perhaps, he could see her expression immediately shift from the confident, upbeat one she had been using this whole time to a somewhat embarrassed, apologetic one, with perhaps just a little bit of relief mixed in. "U-Um... I'm sorry about this, b-but could you please play along...?" She begins, stuttering and speaking far too low and far too quickly for the audience and all the microphones to understand. "When I say l-love, you will do as I say... A-Alright?"

She then pulls away without even waiting for a response, turning to face the audience as if she hadn't just shifted personalities moments ago, and begins to speak. "I have just inserted a hypnotic switch into Ken-san's mind. When I say a certain keyword, he will think one of the other chairs is a another human being until I say otherwise." And then she glances at him, smile still plastered on her face. "Do you believe that, Ken-san?"

[insorrow]

Love?

It's an odd word to choose, or Ken thinks it is. His brows quirk upward.

(Maybe it's just because she's a teenage girl? Ken's never been good with girls and would be the first to admit that he's absolutely no expert with things like this, but... He thinks back to Sakura, and to the little group of high-school girls who'd haunted the shop back home, and maybe in context of that it doesn't seem quite so odd. Girls' minds can tend to run to things like that, when they hit their teens. Sometimes.)

He didn't really notice the shift: Ken's observant but only up to a point, and reading a person - rather than a mood or a situation, or a strange environment - has never been one of his strong suits. On some level, though, he notices the change.

Because the girl sounds different all of a sudden, and not nearly so sure of herself. Maybe she doesn't want to be on TV either? It's a dream, right? And lots of people dream about doing stuff they'd never want to do for real and the whole point was you just stood there and had to make it up on the fly... maybe that was what was happening here, with her? Yeah it was one Hell of a specific dream, but that didn't have to mean anything at all.

Play along? Play along with what? He still doesn't know what the Hell this girl wants from him, so how is he supposed to--

Are you even a hypnotist, he wants to ask, but can't because she's turned away to talk to the audience again. Ken tries to pay attention to what she's saying, because that - oh, great, pretend a chair's a person - would be what she wants him to play along with, right? Great, so this girl's possibly not a hypnotist but is dreaming about being one for some reason and either she gets to embarrass herself in front of an entire audience of... of gray things by revealing that she isn't a hypnotist, or I do by pretending she is and basically doing whatever the Hell she says until she decides the show's over. Great, what was that about rocks and hard places?

"Do I?" Ken asked: you, Hidaka, are the worst audience volunteer ever. "Um, would it help if I did?"

[hypnoun]

"Perhaps." She giggles, not mockingly, but more as if she were laughing with him. It's only possible because of the sheer amount of time she's spent forcing herself to be nice and to laugh along with humanity's stupidity (instead of, you know, at it), but she manages. "Just relax, Ken-san, that would help."

And then it's the audience's turn to laugh. It sounds fake and forced and similar to those laughing tracks they used in old TV shows. It's more than just a little bit creepy, but Rei doesn't really care. She pretends to not notice how disturbing it all sounded to a normal person, and continues with her performance.

The audience eventually quiets down, just as they should, and Rei turns to face Ken once again. She had already given him the instructions, now it was all up to luck. He could play along, leave her to embarrass herself, or, perhaps, it could work.

There was no way of knowing until she tried.

"Now..." She looks at him straight in the eye, raising her arm until her hand was inches away from his face. It was finally time to see how this would all turn out. "Love."

[insorrow]

Relax?

Yeah, that was going to be a lot easier said than done in this situation (and he still had no idea how he'd gotten himself into it, did he?). The girl might as well have asked him to grow an extra head, it was just as impossible to imagine successfully doing it, still less that it might actually help things along at all. If he could just work out where the goddamn door was-- the audience laughter doesn't help ease his mind at all. It sounds wrong, forced - fake, like something that could be switched on and off at will. He winces slightly, turning back to the girl.

(Ken doesn't want to be relaxed, is the truth of it. He just-- he's alone on unfamiliar territory, and look what happened the last time he tried that... He doesn't want to, not under these circumstances. It's not a good idea and that, Ken tells himself, is where it ends.)

He's still clutching the arms of the chair as the girl raises her arm, and frankly it's all he can do not to flinch away from her. He doesn't expect it to work: of course he doesn't but he's so keyed up and uncomfortable that it doesn't really matter either way. Here's him stuck somewhere he can't even remember showing up, and a stranger with her hand in her face - when had that ever ended well? - and him with no way out of here--

And that's about it.

Thought cuts out neat as if the girl had reached out and snapped off a light. All he's left with is an instruction: that and the girl, and the sudden and certain knowledge that someone just over there was looking right at him as if they were waiting for him to say something. Ken turned from the hostess to... well, to whoever that was, blinking as if he was trying to work out where in the world they thought they'd come from.

"Um, hi?"

[OOC: Hope that worked for you? If it doesn't please just PM me or something, and I'll edit.]