A Sister's Counsel
He sent a reply.
She was the perfect subject to experiment on — he'd paid for her, after all. He slipped his phone into his pocket and headed for the Cafe.
The bell over the door chimed. Inside, the place was packed with university students. After greeting the manager, Lee So-eun, he went straight to change into his work clothes.
"Sorry~. One of the part-timers suddenly had an emergency today, apparently."
"Huh? No, it's fine. Haha. I just start from now, right?"
"I'm counting on you!"
"Yes!"
He was an outsider anyway — there was nobody who would be calling him. The steamer hissed. He rang up orders while the espresso poured, then slid finished cups across the counter. Compared to before, it was a world of improvement; he'd gotten the hang of cafe work. Whenever he hit a snag, Lee So-eun showed him what to do.
"Whew! The crowd's finally thinning out."
Lee So-eun walked over to him, smiling.
"Haha, you're pretty tired, huh?"
"Me? This kind of thing happens all the time. More importantly, sorry about this. I'll pay you the proper hourly wage."
"Oh! Well then, thank you."
With a moment of breathing room, he started thinking about what hypnotic suggestion to plant on Lee So-eun. With Lee Dahye, the teaching assistant, he'd still been doubting whether the app was even real, and the instant it worked the rush had him forcing all kinds of crude suggestions on her. Doing the same to Lee So-eun could blow up in his face. A married woman, and him coming by every day asking her for that? It would be stranger if they didn't get caught. He needed a method that would let him fuck a married woman naturally.
The bell chimed now and then as stray customers trickled in. He sold them coffee and turned the problem over in his mind, but nothing good came to him.
"What's got you thinking so hard?"
"Ah, just a lot on my mind."
"Hmmm~, is that so? Well, I suppose at your age there's plenty to worry about."
Lee So-eun planted a hand on her hip and perched herself on the edge of the table beside her.
"Go on, spit it out."
"Pardon?"
"Your worries. I'm a life senior, you know. I'll give you some advice."
"Ah……."
The idea struck him as if lightning had passed through him. Something that hadn't come no matter how long he'd wrestled with it — and it arrived on a single sentence from her.
"Really?"
"Of course~. You did help me out today, after all."
"……You still have to pay me for today, though. If you try to call it even with some counseling……."
Lee So-eun cracked up and smacked his shoulder.
"Hey! I would never~! Do I look like that kind of person to you~? So, what's the problem!"
She looked genuinely serious, as if she actually meant to counsel him. He sat down on the rolling chair beside her and spoke.
"It's just… I don't even know what I should be doing going forward. Everything just feels... blank, you know~."
He started off ordinary. Lee So-eun shrugged.
"That's nothing~."
"Come on! How is that nothing~."
Then she launched into a proper counseling session, delivering a whole speech as she laid out her own values for him.
"Most of the kids in your department right now? Barely any of them actually go into their major, you know~."
"Eh, really?"
There was some pointed advice mixed in, and before he knew it he was actually being counseled.
Thunder rumbled outside.
"Huh…"
"Hm…?"
Now he understood why the Cafe had emptied of customers.
"Was it supposed to rain today?"
"Seems like it."
A torrential rain punched down through the sky.
"So! How was my counseling?"
"Thank you. It was a huge help."
"That sounded so hollow~."
He laughed at Lee So-eun's reaction and laid the trap in earnest.
"Then can I ask you for dating advice too?"
"Dating advice?"
"Yes, there's a girl I like. I just thought it might be nice to get advice from someone with... experience, every now and then~."
"Oho! Experience, is it!"
He grinned at how violently she reacted to the word. It wasn't his first or second day on the job; they were close enough now for jokes of this caliber.
To raise her concentration, he needed to draw her into conversation with him, free of any interruptions. A thunderstorm was the perfect setup.
"Ahh~, those were the days. Dating~."
He left her lost in her own daydream and spun his mind into high gear.
Only three chances.
Three hypnotic suggestions to decide the person she would become. Watching Lee So-eun drift through her memories, he considered what sort of personality would serve him best. A married woman who wouldn't get in the way — the kind who'd spread her legs whenever he felt like it. His groin was already tingling.
"Ah, right. Manager. I got this interesting app."
He pulled out his phone and opened it.
"Hm? What kind?"
They were close enough that she looked at the app without a shred of suspicion. He smiled and wiggled the candle on the screen at her.
"See this?"
"Yeah."
"Here~."
He tapped the button.
"Would you look at it for just three seconds?"
"What is it?"
There was no easier prey for hypnosis than a woman you were already close with. He had two minutes to plant the suggestions.
"Your name is."
"…Lee So-eun…"
"Your height and weight."
"…162 centimeters…48 kilograms…"
He was getting every bit of his money's worth. His heart was already racing. He wanted to bend this married woman over the table right then and there — just her upper body — and fuck her.
He rapidly planted the suggestions he'd prepared. They had to be as concise and brief as possible; the shorter they were, the faster her personality would reconstruct itself.
"You care for me a great deal, like a little brother."
"…Yes…"
It wasn't a difficult suggestion. He'd simply amplified the goodwill she already had for him, and bound it up with trust.
"So whenever I ask you for counseling, you always take it seriously."
"…Yes…"
It had to proceed in stages.
"The counseling can be about career, work, friends, romance, sex. Anything at all."
"…Yes…"
He checked the time. About a minute and ten seconds remaining. A stage-one suggestion didn't exert that much force. It was little more than a habit, something performed in the unconscious. But lay that unconscious foundation and then plant a stage-two suggestion on top of it, and the effect didn't just multiply — it squared.
"You want to hear out my worries no matter what."
"…Yes…"
"When it comes to counseling, you're confident."
"…Yes…"
For the time that remained, he repeated similar content. The core image was that she wanted to solve his problems no matter what it took. And then, an experiment he could only run on Lee So-eun — not Lee Dahye.
The candle, with ten seconds left, kept shrinking. The flame on the screen flickered out.
Expression began returning to her dazed face. What he wanted to confirm was whether, after the candle went out, she remembered that he had planted suggestions on her.
"Ah…. What was that…. Why'd you show me a candle?"
Lee So-eun frowned up at him.
"You were messing around again!"
"Ah, no. Maybe the app glitched?"
"What even was that? My head's spinning."
Pleasure flooded his entire body. It felt so good it raised goosebumps. Every experiment he ran was stripping away another restriction on how he could use this app. She couldn't remember — without him even having to tell her not to. Which meant he could layer in additional suggestions.
He put on a gloomy face.
"Manager, I've got a problem."
"Huh, for real? What is it? I'll hear you out, all of it!"
Unlike before, she took it seriously, looking straight at him.
After that, every time he came in for a shift, he did counseling. Every single day. What he'd learned through Lee Dahye was that the suggestions grew stronger with time. Which meant the more counseling they did, the stronger the suggestion became — so when the time came to put her under stage-two hypnosis, it would go far more easily, and far more powerfully.
This is fun.
He meant it. Even breathing was entertaining now. The girls who averted their eyes from him in the lecture hall would, someday, all be standing naked in front of him, shaking their asses. Knocking every last one of them up wasn't even out of the question. Though doing that might get exhausting, so he'd have to narrow it down to the pretty ones.
"Alright then, I'll be assigning a team project~."
At the grandmotherly professor's words, the class buzzed. Some people hated it, but most of the freshmen looked around with faces full of curiosity.