When we’d gotten back home, Melvina immediately started cleaning up my room for me, so I made a quick call to Wallace and Shirly to come over. It really was something else to see her go at it. All my clothes were folded even neater than my mom did, the hard-to-reach spots under my bed and dressers were freed of years-old dust, and she even organized my manga collection. I could definitely get used to this.
Meanwhile, Tom flipped back and forth between his human and wolf forms a couple times just to try it out, before settling back into human form before my other friends arrived. Melvina had freaked out the first time, but my hypnosis had left her so open that just telling her she had nothing to worry about immediately convinced her to stop worrying.
Eventually, the doorbell rang, and Melvina was quick to answer it.
“Ah, Wallace, Shirly, please do come in. My Master has been expecting you.”
Both of my friends looked a little confused at first, but they quickly realized that Melvina being a cat girl, and my maid, were both perfectly normal, and not worth questioning. I motioned for them to follow me back to my room.
Shirly spoke up first. “So, what is it you’ve gotta tell us that’s so important you couldn’t say it over the phone?”
I grinned. “That would be THIS!” I dramatically held up the coin (by the metal, rather than the string this time, I wasn’t looking to hypnotize them yet.
Wallace tilted his head, examining it. “A coin with a spiral on it?”
“Oh, it may look like a normal coin, but this is the Coin of Control! It’s able to hypnotize anyone that looks at the front of it while it’s being swung! And so much more, once they’re under my control.”
Shirly folded her arms. “Sure it is. You gonna prove that by using it on us?”
“Nah, I already have a couple examples.” I said. “First of all, there’s Melvina, who I’ve got obeying everything I say already.”
“But that’s normal,” Wallace correctly pointed out.
“Rrrrright,” I said, recalling to myself that her being my maid was perfectly normal, and not worth thinking about. “I guess I’ll have Tom demonstrate with a self-trigger I gave him earlier, since that particular side of the effect is way more interesting than just making people obey me,” I gestured toward him, who seemed a little surprised, but quickly figured out what I meant for him to do.
“Let me howl,” he said, causing him to quickly grow his fur and tail back.
Shirly and Wallace instantly leapt back with a shout.
“Hold on!” Tom held out a paw. “It’s fine, I’m still me.”
Shirly took a few moments to catch her breath before choking out a “What?”
“H-how did you DO that, Tom?” Wallace stammered.
Tom shrugged. “It’s like he said, the coin doesn’t just hypnotize you, it makes whatever he suggests to you real. Even if it’s something crazy like becoming part wolf.”
“Well, as long as it’s just about the person being hypnotized,” I added.
“And you used it to make Tom some kind of werewolf?” Shirly asked.
“No, this is just a wolf version of me I’d drawn,” Tom said. “No full moon stuff.”
“You know what I mean!” Shirly huffed. “Seriously though, why’d you do that, Kyle?”
“I’d already pranked my sister for always making fun of me with this, so I wanted to try using it on someone who’d actually like the extra side effects.”
She hesitated. “I… guess that makes sense.”
I let the string drop, just slightly. “Would you like to try it? If you’ve ever fantasized about being something else, I could make it real for you.”
“Uh, not really,” Shirly said, though I thought she might just be hiding something. “Besides, if you had the power to control people with this thing, I’d think the first thing you’d do would be to make them do what you want. Like have the teachers stop giving us homework, or something.”
“It’s only been one day,” I pointed out. “And not a school day at that. Of COURSE I want to try that. Though I don’t think it’s gonna be easy to get some time with the teachers alone.”
"I'm not sure that's a good idea," Wallace said. "I'm pretty sure the teachers would get in trouble if they just skipped giving homework."
"Oh, they'll be fine!" I waved him off. "They can just write down the good grades for us in their records, when they need to turn it in to the principal, or whatever." I held out a hand to him. "What about you? Maybe there's something you'd like to be? Maybe some kind of alien? Or a superhero? Or do you like furries like Tom and I?"
Wallace paused. "I'd be lying if I said no, but I feel kind of nervous about this. I mean, I know you, and I don't think you'd go crazy and try to take over the town or anything, but I feel like the ability to control or change people like that is more power than any person should have. I feel better knowing you have it than some stranger, but still…" he trailed off.
I was so tempted to help the two of them see how much fun this could be to use, to just let it fall and make them tell me their fantasies before making them real, and then hearing how great it was… But that would just be justifying Wallace’s worries, wouldn’t it? Ugh…
“I don’t know if I’d go that far,” Shirly said. “I mean, we could use it to get annoying people to just leave us alone. I’m more weirded out by the whole furry thing.” She shrugged. “Maybe there could be some good uses for it too, like, if you can change Tom into a wolf, maybe you could cause a person to regrow a leg or something, too. That’d be pretty cool.”
“Yes,” Wallace conceded, “but you’d need to come up with some way to keep said miracle healing from being found out if you didn’t want to be swamped with people trying to take that coin and use it for themselves, or trying to exploit it. Better to just bury it, or something.”
Shirly shook her head. “Wait, you’re telling me if you found some sorta miracle cure for MISSING LIMBS, you’d bury it?”
“You’ve got a point,” Wallace sighed, “but that’s not all it could do! it could also be used to enslave people if the wrong person used it. At the very least, you’d need some way to keep people from realizing.”
“Oh, I’m sure there are good ways to do that,” Melvina spoke up, reminding me that she’d still been in my room cleaning the whole time.
“Look,” I said, “How about we just take a break for now. I’ll put the coin away, and we can all play some games for a bit, okay?”
Wallace frowned. “Alright.”
“Yeah, that’s probably a good way to cool down,” Tom said.
“Okay.” Shirly nodded.
I slipped the coin into my desk drawer as the others went to the living room to start up the games. I was a little disappointed Shirly and Wallace didn’t seem to want to try it, but pressing it really wasn’t a good idea tonight. Maybe I’d do something with it tomorrow, after school.