Chapter Text
Hannah always wanted to be famous.
Or, perhaps more accurately, she liked the idea of being famous. Getting invited to fancy parties, having enough money to do whatever you want, getting recognized by adooring fans in front of her friends and family who thought she would never amount to anything! Probably. They never really said that outright, it was probably just her projecting some past trauma about not fitting in with the popular girls that she should definitely work on, but therapy is for chumps! (It’s not)
The trouble was, Hannah didn’t really have any way to get famous. She wasn’t nearly confident enough to be an actress, she didn’t have any strange or interesting talents, she couldn’t sing, play sports, anything, really. If you could get famous for being the most average girl on the face of the earth, she might have a chance at that. Even then, she was sure there was someone out there much better at being average than she was.
That being said, Hannah did have one thing going in her favor. This was 2026. Pesky things like talent weren’t exactly necessary to be famous anymore. If you had a smart phone, social media account, and a ton of time to burn on there, just about anyone could grow a following!
And so, when she wasn’t working her boring day job as a bookkeeper for a local pet store, Hanna was trying in vain to cultivate a following. The trouble was, she didn’t exactly have a theme or direction for her online presence. She sort of just posted about whatever she wanted. Shows she liked, pictures of her food, complaining about bad drivers. And when none of that inevitably took her to the next level, she tried hopping on viral trends and memes.
She tried it all, from learning all the latest tik-tok dances to reacting to reddit stories, to her latest goal to stay relevant. The Hypnosis Challenge. She didn’t know much about it, to be honest, aside from the fact that it was the latest thing everyone was talking about. The rules, from what she gathered, were pretty simple. All you had to do was download a ‘hypnosis app’ called Let it Go, let it work it’s supposed magic, go live on Instagram, and let your viewers tell you what to do for a couple minutes.
Hannah was almost 100% positive that the whole thing was a joke. Hypnosis, after all, wasn’t real. She supposed the point of the trend was to see how convincing you could be? Honestly, she wasn’t really sure, but it sounded fun, and hey, if everyone else was doing it, why shouldn’t she give it a go?
And so, one day after work Hannah got online and tracked down the app that she was pretty sure everyone was using. According to the description it was supposedly developed by some fancy scientists from Oxford or something, proven to induce a deep, hypnotic trance! Yeah, and all those vitamins that middle-aged women get tricked into selling totally work, too!
When that was ready, she started the long process of picking out a cute outfit and getting her make-up on. Hannah cared very much about her appearance, and not in a vain, confident way. In a very unconfident attempt to fit in sort of way. After all, if she was going to be live to the whole internet, she had to look presentable, right??
Though she would never let you convince her of it, Hannah was a very pretty young woman in her mid 20’s. She had long reddish-brown hair, the color of warm caramel, that she painstakingly straightened every morning because she got it in her head that her natural waviness looked bad. She had plain brown eyes, a very freckly face, and was perhaps a bit on the taller side. All things she was a bit self conscious about, for reasons she didn’t care to understand.
She spent a long time picking out an outfit that seemed cute, but also made it seem like she didn’t care about looking cute, and settled on a low cut green shirt with white polka dots and some black leggings. That would do. Not like she was going to be live, anyway.
After a solid 45 minutes of getting ready, she was finally ready to start her 2 minute live stream. Being famous wasn’t as easy as it sounded! She set up her phone in the ring light set up in a corner of her one bedroom apartment, made sure the background looked right, took a few deep breaths to settle herself… And went live.
“Hey everyone!” Hannah said brightly, not even bothering to check if anyone was actually watching. She was sure at least a few people would stumble in. While she may not be famous yet, she had been trying long enough to get at least a little following.
“Today, I’m going to be attempting the Hypnosis challenge! I’m sure you’ve seen people do it before, literally everyone’s been doing it lately! So, let’s see if it works on me!”
Making sure the stream was still going, Hannah opened up the app on her phone. Let it Go. She wasn’t really sure what she was expecting to find in the app. Maybe a stock video of some cheap spiral or a swinging pocket watch or something? Instead, she was immediately greeted with about 10 different terms of service and consent messages to read through.
Shit, I should have done this before I started! Hannah thought to herself as she quickly agreed to everything without reading any of it. Because who even read those things anyway?
“Okay, sorry guys, just trying to get in, and… Okay, there!” Hannah finally reached the title screen, with a bit button that said START “Let’s start it up!”
Hannah wasn’t really thinking about the app much as she started it up. She was more occupied wondering how she could fake this as much as possible. In movies and stuff people usually… I don’t know… crossed their eyes and stuck their tongue out? That seemed kinda silly. Maybe she could make it look like she just fell asleep? That’s what they usually said, right? You are getting veeeery sleepy!
Hannah started going through the motions of the app as she pondered this. To her surprise, it wasn’t a spiral, or a pocket watch. It was sort of a simple game of sorts, with a deep-voiced man telling her to relax or something. She wasn’t really paying attention, to be honest.
Damn, if some scientists at Oxford could get famous for making this joke of an app, maybe she was going about things all wrong! It was barely a game, even. All she had to do was… was…
Unbeknownst to Hannah, quite a few people had stumbled across her little stream already. And they watched eagerly as her eyes began to slowly unfocus.
The game itself was silly, but the voice… there was something satisfying about it. The way the deep tones seemed to rumble her chest. Maybe she could become a famous voice actor… It didn’t seem to hard… just read some simple lines… Telling people to… relax… open their minds… let go…
A few more people trickled into the stream as Hannah’s shoulders began to droop and her jaw started to fall open.
She hoped she was… making it look convincing… Because of course… hypnosis wasn’t… real…. Hannah wasn’t hypnotized… she wasn’t sinking deeper, deeper, deeper into a trance, just as the narrator said… She wasn’t opening her mind up to any and all suggestions… She wasn’t… She wasn’t…
She wasn’t. Hannah was no longer her usual anxious self. She was a blank slate. She was open. Mindless. Hypnotized. Ready to obey. And she just so happened to have a chat ready to play along.