A Test Gone Wrong
By Limewah
Patron Reward for Flarfenarfle (June 2023)
18+

I ran my fingers slowly and gingerly over the helmet, staring back at my beautiful face in the opaque visor.
Man, I was the prettiest Arcanine who ever lived.
The helmet was still in its prototype phase, so it didn’t have all those signature little details that were hallmarks of the great Enrapture’s villainous aesthetic. No orange paint or spiral decals just yet; it needed to match my flurry orange and cream fur. At the minute it looked like a motorcycle helmet that had been jury rigged within an inch of its life - which, to be fair, it was. 
The helmet still had the flaking old black paint that it had when one of my goons picked it up from a thrift shop. But the cushioning inside wasn’t too worn, and it didn’t smell that bad. It’d do.

The outer shell wasn’t the important bit anyway. It was the guts that mattered. Some of my smarter lackeys had devised the latest in hypno-helmet technology, guaranteed to melt minds and rewire thought patterns until they would be totally, completely loyal to my will, hanging off every word and eager to obey my whims. 
I had plenty of gizmos like it already, obviously, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a chance to innovate now and again.

For example - a couple of small diffusers had been fitted inside it, just above each temple. They were always ready to spray out a special essential oil distilled from Enrapture’s intoxicatingly pungent musk. Just in case I wasn’t around to condition a prospective minion first-hand, it was nice to give them the opportunity to have a nice long whiff of my musk while the hypnotic patterns on the inside of the helmet did their work.
All that remained, now that the prototype was in my hands, was to test it.
A couple of my drone-suited servants stood by, and I could tell by their stiff, fidgeting movements that they both really, really wanted to test the new device out.
“Sorry, you two,” I said. “This one’s not for you.”
I couldn’t see them frowning behind the anonymising layer of blank latex. Poor things. I’d melt their minds a bit more later to make up for it. 
Using it on one of my minions was out of the question. All of them were way too brain-drained. Just me telling them it was going to work on them was enough to make it work. Which was hot, of course, but not practical. 

There were other ways of getting someone involved. My alter ego had legions of fans, after all. I could just pick someone at random from my fanclub for a private ‘date’ with the heart-throb Riley Flamewill, and they wouldn’t see it coming.
But, again, maybe that might have been a bit too easy. Especially if they were that star struck with me. For all I know, they could just pretend to be hypnotised just to please me.
Getting a superhero to test it for me on the fly was another option, but that came with its own risks; I didn’t want it to get smashed, these parts were expensive.

That left… well, myself.
It had been a while since I’d lost my self to another hypnotist, but I had a mind like a steel trap. If this helmet could hypnotise me, it could hypnotise absolutely anyone.
Plus, if it worked, I’d just have to let the battery run out. This thing was likely going to consume a lot of juice as it did its magic, probably only offering a half an hour or so of battery life. More than enough time to lay some hypnotic foundation before we’d have to plug it in again. It was worth 
testing that out as well, I supposed.

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