But nothing lasts forever, especially anything involving such self-centered and un-self-disciplined people as the Indigo Children.

About the time I turned 16, the whole Movement came crashing down when the self-made video of two of the oldest and most influential Indigo Children performing some very intimate ‛healing’ on each other wound up on the Internet: they might have gotten away with it, given their own considerable charisma, except their private post-coitus conversation was all about how stupid their followers were. Those two idiots then accused someone they saw as a rival in the movement as the one who leaked the video, when, in fact, I know it was a jealous ex-girlfriend of one of the two boys. Pretty soon the whole Indigo Children Movement shattered into dozens of competing factions, all blaming each other. A real sweet setup turned sour by a couple of jerks who were about as ‛gifted’ as the average alley cat, with the brains and sex drive to match.

I quickly realized the whole movement was doomed at that point. The careful public relations machine we built so carefully suddenly collapsed under the weight of the external accusations and investigations, not to mention the internal strife and back-biting. It was swell con while it lasted: no bigger joke was ever played on a whole bunch of unsuspecting and ignorant rabble, and the biggest biggest joke of all was that in one case, me, they were right.

For all I was a part of the Movement, I never owed them anything, and it was time we parted ways. Truth to tell, I was actually looking forward to this: once I escaped the confines of the Movement, the pressure to conform and perform as expected of an Indigo Child would be lifted and I would be free to have a little fun.

Okay, maybe a whole lot of fun.

That left Becky as the only person present who hadn’t yet been hypnotized, and the rest of my victims were insistent that she share their situation.

Actually, they were insistent that she share the fun.

And so was I.

Because I saved the best and most impressive and most satisfying hypnotic stunt for last.

“Becky, it’s your turn,” I said, pointing to her.

Without needing any further prompting, she stood and came to the center of the room. She looked at me curiously: plainly she was expecting me to have her gaze into my eyes or watch my pretty pendant swing before her eyes or some other such stereotypical induction.

I knew exactly what I was going to do with her, but I didn’t know how I was going to get her to that state. One of my goals was to demonstrate and practice as many induction methods as possible to impress them into the minds of my victims, so I didn’t want to repeat myself. But out of all of the induction methods I remembered, none stood out as the one to use.

Then I remembered my wand. It was something I hadn’t played with for a while, my magic crystal wand. A shaft of translucent plastic, set with large artificial amethyst crystals on either end, it such a great prop as an Indigo Child that it became an unconscious part of my presentations and beyond, and it was an excellent induction focus. It was one of several gimmicks I had created for me as an Indigo Child: it proved so popular that I eventually licensed a company to produce ‛official’ copies. Therefore no one would ever notice that this, however, was one of the originals, with all the accessories.

It was perfect: the alchemical mixture of hypnosis and magic was just one impression of many I wanted to impress on their minds.

I produced the wand by way of a sleight-of-hand move I learned from a master close-up stage magician, to the appreciation of my audience, touching the hidden activation switch. The crystal on the end lit up, several tiny but very bright LEDs flashing and blinking away to produce a sparkling effect through the crystals: several more LEDs produced a tight beam of pulsating light focused through the facets of the crystal, not quite bright enough to cause discomfort but enough to dazzle and confuse. Other LEDs ran down the length of the wand itself, making it pulsate softly.

I paused a moment, sweeping the thoughts of my audience, but none connected the wand with the Indigo Child who popularized it, which was a good thing but also expected. Just being careful.

“Watch the wand, Becky: follow the lights of the wand with your eyes, just your eyes.”

I started moving the wand back and forth, up and down, and Becky obediently followed the motion with only her eyes. As she stared, she blinked several times, feeling slightly dazed and dizzy, but soon those feelings subsided as her mind started to shut down to compensate. Just the reaction I was waiting for.

“Keep watching the wand, follow the wand, see the lights in the wand. Follow the lights with your eyes.

“Your eyes are getting heavy, heavy, heavy … you are getting tired, sleepy. So sleepy, so very sleepy …”

I pointed the wand directly at her eyes. Another touch, and the pulsations became slower, brighter and darker, brighter and darker: Becky’s eyes started blinking in time with the pulsations. As the pulsations slowed even more, her eyes kept getting heavier and heavier until she could barely keep them open. It took only a softly spoken whisper of “sleep” to push her over the edge into deep trance. I could tell her mind was operating solely on automatic pilot. That was fine: I would supply all the guidance she would be needing for the next several minutes.

I shut off the wand and made it disappear in the same manner as it had appeared: one of the unfortunate necessities of its construction was that it had a short battery life, and it was almost drained and would have looked awkward if it had shut off any earlier.

Now to have a little fun. Becky, I knew, had a few body image issues of her own, nothing major: in fact, she had quite a remarkable body, but lurking under the surface of her personality was a predilection toward bulimia that she needed to resolve. That I would deal with later, but for now, just making her comfortable with her body image would be a great help. And getting her to reveal that remarkable body before her friends would be the start of that. I could read that I didn’t even need the supporting suggestions: based on everyone else’s experiences, she totally accepted the concept of being hypnotically commanded to strip on command without any hesitation, and that’s exactly what I was about to do.

“Becky, take off your clothes.”

“Yes,” she replied: that breathy response always thrilled me, but it was what I heard from her mind, her quickly thinking the phrase “yes, master” and then just as quickly rejecting it because I was a woman and she didn’t know how to or just didn’t want to respond to a woman in that way. Not to worry, I would eventually teach her the proper way of addressing me.

As I was thinking, she quickly removed all of her clothing, revealing, among other things, a belly-button piercing that she never spoke about, and a very impressive tattoo of a thorny rose on her upper thigh. Neither were anything to be embarrassed about but I could read signs of that deep in her mind, tied to her body image issues: both were tied to something disturbing in her past, something that I could help ease, but later. Now it was show time.

As Amethyst, I used to do a variation on this routine to demonstrate the power of the mind, so I could do the patter in my sleep. In less than a minute she was holding her right arm straight out before her, her muscles clearly tensed, a dramatic change to her passive countenance. I reached out and pushed on her right arm, then pushed harder: it didn’t budge. I even tried putting my weight on it, just a little, and still nothing.

“To Becky’s mind,” I said, by way of explanation, “her arm is immobile, and will remain that way to the limits of her strength, which can be quite surprising, as I will now demonstrate.”

A few more words and her arm relaxed back down to her side.

“For my finale, would someone get me a couple of chairs?” I asked, and Phil and Erik went into the dining room and returned with three chairs. I had the chairs arranged in a row, then instructed Becky to sit down on the middle chair. Another instruction, and she was reclining across all three chairs, positioned as I directed her.

I then started gently stroking down the sides of her body. “Becky, your whole body is becoming rigid, like steel, unbending,” I said. Pretty soon she was just as stiff and rigid as her arm was, her back arched so it barely touched the middle chair. I pulled out the middle chair, and Becky remained in position, stretched out between the two chairs. Impressive, but not as impressive as what I was about to do.

I put one foot on Becky’s stomach and levered myself to stand erect there. She accommodated my weight easily: one of the reasons I selected her for this routine was that she had been a star athlete in high school and still maintained her fitness. I stood there for several seconds as my audience gave me and Becky a rousing round of applause before I silenced it with a wave of my hand, then I leaped off to land lightly on the floor before her. I then quickly reversed the performance, putting the chair back under her body, relaxing her and then getting her to stand up, then getting her dressed again. Then I counted her back up to wakefulness and waited for her reaction.

She looked puzzled. “What … just happened?” she asked.

Spontaneous amnesia: Becky was definitely an excellent subject. “What do you remember?”

“I remember watching the wand then my eyes closed and I felt like I was floating … then here.”

“You were stretched out naked like a board and Crystal stood on your stomach,” said Paula.

“No way,” replied Becky. “Anybody got any pictures?”

The rest all looked surprised and some glanced toward their phones. They had all been so enraptured by the performance it was so easy to whisper to them to forget taking pictures. That meant one thing less to worry about later.