The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

“Hello again, Ral,” Michael said.

I stood there staring back at him, waiting for something to happen. He just stood there grinning.

“What do you want?” I asked. My voice was steady. Yay!

He shook his head. “Merely to help you.”

“Help me how? You’ve already got me standing on edge and have scared my girls.”

His smile softened. “I do apologize. I’ve not been very forthcoming with you, but as to how I can help, there are a great many things we should discuss. I’m sure I can answer questions for you and even teach you a few things. Most of which I’m sure you’ll appreciate later.”

The wind gusted, blowing the lower part of his coat to the side. He wore slacks and expensive-looking shoes. He dressed like he had money. Still, nothing about him indicated whether I could trust him or not.

“How do you know that I need any help?”

“Please, Ral. You’re young, impetuous, naïve and have others who look to you for protection and more. What I told you on the flight is true. You are condemned, and I may be your only salvation.”

Okay, this guy had me pegged pretty well. “Then I don’t understand why no one but you would help me.”

He smiled and seemed to ignore the implied question. “May I come in for a moment? It is quite cold out here.”

I looked back at the girls. They were standing at my back like they would duck behind me if something happened. I wasn’t sure just what could happen if he came in but if he was going to try something wouldn’t he have done so as soon as I opened the door?

I stepped back and the girls did too. The den was right there and I held out my hand, directing where to go. Michael nodded to me and the girls and then went through the other door.

I turned quickly to the girls. “Look, if he’s really going to help, that’s great; but I want to know that he’s on the up and up. Chloe, go upstairs and get my laptop. Yvonne, stay with me.”

Chloe nodded and ran up the stairs. Yvonne followed me closely.

The den was used mostly as Mom’s office. At one end was a desk built into the wall for her computer and shelves on either side. At the other end, next to the window facing the front yard, there was a table with four chairs. I had hated it but even though I had a desk in my room, Mom and Dad always made me do my homework here. It might have been so they could keep an eye on me, but I had always thought it was so they could glare at me longer.

Michael had taken off his scarf and long coat. He wore an aubergine shirt, a purple so dark it almost looked black, a black leather belt and those slacks. With his coat hung over his arm, he looked fairly comfortable.

When Yvonne and I walked in, removing our own coats, he turned and smiled.

“You’ll forgive my paranoia, but I want to wait for Chloe to return,” I said before he could say anything. He merely nodded and waited with us.

Chloe was back down within a minute. I took the laptop and sat down. Each of the girls sat on either side of me and I held out my hand inviting Michael to sit.

He watched me open the laptop and boot it up. “You know Ral, I’m already password protected.”

I looked up. It must have been obvious what I was going to do. “Then you have nothing to fear, right?”

He nodded. “And paranoia will help you; but you need friends, too, Ral. Friends that can do more than provide the energy for your power or fetch a computer for you.”

I scowled. I didn’t know if he meant that as an insult or if it was just me. If he could really answer my questions then I could tolerate some comments, either until I knew him better or decided to just throw him out. Once Master PC was up, I put in his first name regardless of him having a password or not. The search gallery didn’t have his face and there weren’t that many Michaels to begin with. I looked up and knew why he hadn’t shown up in the program. Michael wasn’t his birth name.

He must have known what I was going to ask and he confessed, “My friends call me Michael because of my mark.” He grinned as his golden halo appeared again.

“My real name is Frank Springbright. Michael is my name among the Mind Magi. You can look me up if you’d like.”

I did just that. Sure enough, his picture was in the search gallery, and just as he had told me, he was password protected. Eventually, I would have to learn how to bypass the password protection like Vikkor had been able to do.

“Let me see the laptop for a moment...” He held out his hand as if expecting to be obeyed.

I saw no reason not to allow it, so I pushed it to him.

He typed something in and turned the computer back to me. He had entered his password. His image spun on the screen, showing him in the same sitting position he was across the table from me. However, I was more interested in his command box.

There were a few things, like my girls and me, that rid him of common ailments, but there was also an amount of scribbled code like mine. He didn’t have near the volume of mine, which either meant he had limited abilities or I just had a lot more I didn’t know about.

I closed his profile and shut down the computer. He had proven he trusted me already by allowing me access to him in the program. It was a good start. “How did you know where to find me?” I had hoped that I had lost him after leaving the airport.

He grinned again. “It wasn’t all that difficult. I came here a couple of months ago looking because another Mage was sent here last year looking for you, but either he wasn’t skilled enough or something else hid you from him. I wanted to double check his attempt to locate you.”

As small as my hometown was, I might have known the man. “What was his name?”

Michael raised an eyebrow, looking at me like he was considering what I might know. “John Gilman. His daughter, Sally, attended the same high school as you last year.”

I couldn’t hide my shock.

Michael’s other eyebrow matched the first. “Did you know Sally?”

I nodded. “I knew her. We dated.” I never thought I would hear her name again and never, in my wildest dreams, thought she might somehow be involved in anything regarding Master PC. Of course, Michael was more than just modified by the program. He had abilities he was born with. He was a Mind Mage and if Sally’s father was too...

Yvonne leaned closer to me, still keeping a suspicious eye on Michael. “Isn’t she the one you broke up with just before starting school?” I had shared my memories of Sally with the rest of my women not long after school had started. We had all been trying to get to know each other better and everyone had been curious about my first girlfriend.

I nodded at her question.

Michael’s look shifted back to his knowing smile. “So John found you, but didn’t know it.”

“My abilities didn’t manifest until after I went to college. I didn’t even see my own mark until then. He probably just saw me as any other high school kid.”

“She said you and Sally dated,” Michael said nodding to Yvonne. “How serious was your relationship?”

I shrugged at Michael’s question. “Apparently not serious enough.”

“What I meant was how did you feel for her, really feel for her?”

I hesitated. Michael was asking something very personal. Not even my women asked questions like that. I didn’t have to think hard about how I had felt for Sally. I would have been perfectly happy to have spent the rest of my life with her.

“Hmm, I see,” he said as if reading my thoughts on my face. Which he probably did. “Do you know whether she felt the same for you?”

I looked him square in the eyes. He either assumed my silence showed the level or he read me again.

“I do apologize, but your response may tell me more than you know. Please, do you know how she felt for you?”

I broke eye contact and shrugged again. “I thought I did, but I was wrong. I wanted to take our relationship to the next level, a more intimate level, but she wanted to wait for marriage.” Finally, I looked back at him.

Michael looked away for a moment, gazing out of the window. It appeared he was thinking about what I said. Then he looked back at me and asked, “How insistent was she about getting married?”

His questions about Sally were beginning to really upset me. “What do you mean? What does this have to do with me being condemned? Why would you bring her up now?”

“Again, I apologize. Heartbreak is something even we Magi suffer. Still your answers are important. Did she offer to go to that next level if you agreed to marry her?”

I shook my head. “No. She just went on about wanting to be married.”

“I see,” he said solemnly. “Then maybe it wasn’t what I thought.”

“What was that?”

“Well, when Magi have children, usually the child is either mundane or a Mage. However, they could also be what one would call a Soul Mate.” He looked at Yvonne and Chloe in quick glances. “Tell me, do you feel as if you’re complete with your women?”

The girls knew the answer to that question as well as I. However the painful memories of my breakup with Sally, a pain that had dissipated over the last few months only to be brought, boiling, to the surface again in this conversation, compounded the incompleteness we all suffered. Even though we were so many, we all felt as if someone were missing from our group.

I placed my hands on top of both my girls’ hands. Each of them looked up and I met their looks. They weren’t feeling jealous of how I still felt for Sally, but both of them were feeling, like me, as if Michael was digging a little too deep in our personal lives. Physical contact helped all of us and I finally looked up at Michael. “My family. And no, None of us feel complete. It is as if somebody is missing.”

Either Michael hadn’t noticed our anxiety about his questioning or didn’t think it was important. He continued unabated, “A Soul Mate would give you that completion. But...” he said holding up a finger as if I were about to ask more questions, “...they are rare, and due to the nature of the bond forged between a Soul Mate and a Mage, should one die, so would the other.”

I sat back with a look of impassive boredom, even though what he said about Sally held my interest. “What are you saying, Sally is one of these Soul Mates? That if I found her and bound her to me that we would never be apart?”

Michael was obviously well practiced at seeing through masks like the one I wore. “Well, she hasn’t developed any abilities. Right now she seems to be mundane.” It was like he was trying to goad me into looking for her. If it hadn’t been for my girls sitting there with me and the ones waiting back home for my safe return, I would have. But what would they all think if I went searching for the young woman who had turned me away for just hinting at the very thing that forged the rest of us into such a tight-knit family?

“You’ve seen her? Recently?” I asked the questions before realizing just how anxious I was to know the answers. The months of being with my girls had meant so much to me, but the idea of seeing Sally again sparked a part of me that I thought was dead.

Chloe looked up at me. Her normally serene appearance was questioning now. Yvonne looked up as well. She was curious. Maybe they could feel the conflicting emotions in me. Our links allowed us to sense each others’ emotions, especially when we were physically touching, and I wasn’t locking down our links to prevent them from feeling mine.

“Oh, no, it’s been a few months since I was in New York. But I do track a great many Magi and their families. Now, that’s enough about others who aren’t here.” He looked at Chloe and Yvonne, telling me with his eyes that he knew we had gone too far on that subject. It wasn’t my fault. He started it. Right.

“I have a great many questions to ask about you,” he said, looking back at me and leaning forward on the table.

“I thought you said you knew a lot about me.”

“I know the basics about you. Your name, your appearance and such. What I do not know for certain, what I can only guess at, is what you can do.”

“Why do you need to know that?”

“If you were to teach someone how to use a computer, for instance, wouldn’t you need to know what they knew already? That way you wouldn’t cover unnecessary material.” Michael answered.

I nodded.

“What I offer is the one thing very few other Magi would offer: training. Normally it would be your parents who trained you and taught you about your abilities and what it means to be a Mage.”

“Wait,” I said holding up a hand. “I’m not a Mage. I’m a Child of the Program,” I said tapping the laptop. Though Professor Belton had told me that they weren’t children of the program, it didn’t mean that I wasn’t.

For the first time, Michael looked confused.

“I’m trying to find my biological parents to find out what changes they made to themselves and why.”

Michael shook his head. “No, you don’t understand then.”

I leaned forward now. “What don’t I understand? There’s no way I could be just born with such abilities. That doesn’t happen. This isn’t some comic book.”

Michael grinned again. “No, it’s no comic book, but that program has nothing to do with your powers.”

“What are you saying...?”

“Your parents were Mind Magi.”

My eyes must have been as wide as dinner plates. All of us sat there, no one saying anything. Michael seemed perfectly at ease, which got me to thinking about what he said. There were two very distinct points in that short statement. One, he was certain my parents had been Mind Magi and two, he had said “were”...

“What do you mean my parents were Mind Magi?” I asked with a slow, steady tone.

Michael didn’t flinch or look away. He met my gaze and all the intensity I mustered. He couldn’t mean what I thought he did. “Have you never wondered why you were adopted?” he asked.

“Of course I have. That’s my main reason for being here now, to find out why my parents left me and where they are now.”

“And your adopted parents never told you?”

“Just say it. Told me what?” I wanted, no, needed to hear the words.

Michael leaned forward and his face softened. “I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you then. Ral, your parents died not long after you were born.”

“How?”

Michael took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and exhaled slowly. Why should this news bother him? Unless he had known my parents personally. He opened his eyes and looked right into my own. “They died in a hurricane in the South Pacific.”

“A hurricane?” I asked. It seemed a bit far-fetched. “Why were they in the South Pacific if I was still an infant? For that matter, why wasn’t I with them?”

Michael sat back. Whether it was because of the questions I asked or the possibility that it tore him up to have known them and...

“You knew them, didn’t you?” I asked softer.

He looked back at me. It was an intense stare, but it softened. He nodded.

“I’m no expert, but I’d say their deaths affected you.”

Again he nodded, but couldn’t meet my eyes now. “Lee and Tara were well known and well liked among the Mind Magi. Their deaths were hard on a lot of us.” He looked up. “Like a few others, I have been looking for you since that day.”

I had also wondered why I had been adopted by the Settons rather than some relation, like an uncle. “You and I aren’t related, are we?”

Michael shook his head. “No, your parents and I were merely friends. I’ve considered it my personal pledge to find you and hopefully protect you.”

“Protect me from what? Being condemned? If my parents were Mind Magi, then wouldn’t I be one too? And if that’s the case, then why would I be condemned? What was my crime?”

Michael sat up. He seemed to compose himself or brace himself and then said, “I cannot tell you everything. I don’t know the whole story. What I do know is that you were not meant to be. You should not exist.”

“Not exist? What? Not be born? Not come from another dimension? What?”

“To understand better you need to know more about our society. You need to know our history and laws.”

I knew how to garner that information and quickly. I held out my hand, but Michael just looked at it and me as if completely unsure of what to do.

“I can share memories. You wanted to know what I can do, this will show you. At the same time, in the same blink of an eye, I’ll know the society you say I should know.”

He seemed hesitant, as if there were things he didn’t want me to know. “I know others who can do this. They can learn a person’s entire life history in a few seconds as if it had been their own.”

I nodded. “True, but I’ve learned how to be more selective of what I gain and what I give. I’m trusting you won’t go racing through my mind just looking up anything you want.”

“My main abilities are geared more toward tracking. When I meet someone, I can track where they go. It’s kind of like the bond forged between you and your girls, but very subtle and far less invasive. Other Magi have considered renaming me because I can follow someone, tracking them, and they would never know. It’s a lot like a big cat of prey hunting its target, only I use it for observation rather than attack. The dream I put you through on the plane was just basic images and ideas I can transmit, but I can’t affect someone while he or she is awake, and I can’t peruse someone’s mind like an open book. Whatever we exchange is completely under your control.” Still he looked at my hand, still unsure if he would accept.

“You can ask my girls. I don’t take this lightly. I don’t use it for ulterior purposes or ill-gotten gain. During these last few months, while I’ve been at school, I’ve refused to use this gift, so I wouldn’t cheat and gain my girls’ knowledge.” Yvonne and Chloe were nodding. They had been quiet through the exchange thus far and I knew they were only speaking up because I was now trying to get the kind of information I had been hoping for.

“I can shield against this kind of exchange. There may be things you’ll try for but not get. Things I don’t believe you should know,” he said as he held is hand next to mine.

I nodded. “Just like there are things about me I would rather remain personal.” I looked at our hands and asked, “ready?”

Michael braced. I was sure he had never done this before. He seemed to be concentrating and I just relaxed. If he couldn’t gain anything that I didn’t allow, then there was nothing to fear. I grabbed his hand.