"Assuming you had enough skill at hypnotism to ensure that the revisions didn't disrupt the hypnotic effect, yes!"

"Neat!"

I have got to try to teach that girl some ethics, Edie comments wryly to the rest of the group. 

I suppose growing up under an evil god wouldn't be very good for that.

Yeah, it's not her fault she had a shitty upbringing, but.

She's the one who didn't want to go back to her world, right? Could try making it a condition of going with one of us, if she likes the sound of any of ours, except we're disproportionately dealing with disasters at home...

My world's disaster wouldn't affect her personally, there's that.

So maybe you can pitch her on it.

I think I'll see how far I can get without that, I don't think I want to try selling her on 'ethics are a thing' and 'this place/these places are great, and you can go there, only if you do ethics' at the same time. I don't get the impression she'd react well to a heavy-handed approach. What with the whole evil god thing.

The witch with the silk outfit says, "Why is this a required class? For people who don't have any magic or anything like magic, I can see it being necessary, but for those of us who do..." She waves a hand a little contemptuously.

"Interesting question. Why don't you come up to the front to help me with a demonstration? Aaaand..." her gaze sweeps over the room, landing on Chelsea. "How about you, too?"

"Me? Okay..."

The selected girls head to the front of the room.

She smiles at the two girls, one hand coming up to the witch's shoulder and the other petting Chelsea's hair. 

"Words," she says, "are more powerful than most people know. Tell me, have either of you ever heard the saying 'sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me' and thought it was complete nonsense?" 

"All the time."

The witch attempts to shrug off the hand. "Some words are actually magic," she says.

Her hand slips off. 

"You heard what I told your classmate about her magic songs. Words are more powerful than you'd like to admit. Sounds have more influence than you've had reason to realize. Sights can be more impactful than you would ever have imagined. You don't think that just by talking to you I can do anything of merit. You don't think my words can slip you into a trance. You don't think I can take control of you without using a hint of magic. You don't think that just by talking to you I can send you into a deep deep sleep. You don't think you're falling deeper and deeper under my entirely non-magical spell." 

Chelsea drifts off.

The witch lasts about a second longer and then she's staring vaguely into space.

She gently nudges the two of them further apart, then turns specifically to the witch. 

"I'm going to count down and snap my fingers, and when I do, you're going to wake up knowing that I could have made you do anything I wanted to. Hypnosis is no less powerful a tool for the control of others' minds than magic. Five. Four. Three. Two. One." She snaps her fingers right in front of the witch's face. 

The witch startles and scrambles back to her seat.

"Now, you." She turns to Chelsea. "You're a good girl, aren't you? You want to be a good girl for me. Everybody likes good girls." 

"Yeahhhh..."

"I'm going to count down and snap my fingers, and when I do, you're going to wake up and remember that good girls do not mind control others in class without teacher permission, even if it's not to enslave them. Five, four, three, two, one." Fingersnap. 

Chelsea doesn't startle, but she opens her eyes and shakes herself a little and goes back to her seat.

"Hypnotism's main advantage is the universality of its scope--there are beings immune to magic, beings with no biochemistry at all, beings that eat psionics for breakfast--but so long as a being has any sensory modality at all, it is, in theory, vulnerable to hypnosis. The other big advantage of hypnotism is that in order to master it, you must understand how the mind itself works--and that's going to be a huge advantage in all your other classes as well." 

"Does it require a lot of preparatory research to learn to hypnotize exotic beings or do the same general principles apply across the board?"

"The same principles apply across the majority of beings you might want to try to hypnotize; and even beings who require a different approach, you'll have a better idea of how to approach it once you know what you're doing in the usual case than if you were starting from scratch."