"Oh hi!" the absolutely stunning, raven-haired girl said, her slightly nervous stance the only sign that she was in any way not completely at ease. "I'm Victoria. I found your ad," she waved the tiny strip of torn-off paper in her left hand meaningfully, "and I'm a freshman and I didn't want to deal with dorm life and I obviously need a place to stay and I'm not normally this talkative and I'm making a fool of myself, aren't I," she didn't so much finish as run out of breath and stop.
The two young women who met her at the door smiled at her welcomingly. "I'm Kat," the first said, smiling back and a bit bowled over despite herself. "And I'm Andrea," said the blonde just behind her, waving over Kat's shoulder and smiling at least as much. "Come on in," they said at the same time, then looked at each other and laughed.
So far, so good.
Victoria smiled and entered, with a natural grace that had been deliberately cultivated in her and of which she was basically totally unaware. "So, um," she began as she sat down on the extremely normal university-student-level couch in the living room to which they'd pointed her, "I've obviously never done this before, so do I start, or...?"
Kat smiled. "Well, you're our first applicant, so we have to ask some questions," she said, and they all laughed at how mock-formal that sounded. She would of course be their only applicant, because there had been no ads, there had been no piece of paper with strips half-cut on the corkboard at the student center or listing on the university's website or anything else Victoria knew as surely as she knew her own name she'd seen when she came for her orientation week.
Which was fine, because her name wasn't real until she'd woken up with it, either; nor had she in fact attended orientation week, though she and every participant would believe she had. Some things were too important to leave up to chance.
Andrea began. "What's your name?"
"Victoria," the nominal freshman responded. "Victoria--" she paused and laughed nervously. "You're going to think I'm a total idiot, but I've forgotten my last na--"
Andrea's eyes glowed a bright blue-white and Victoria's went blank. "Your name is Victoria Peters. Victoria Ellen Peters. Your father is Michael Peters. Your mother is Jessica Peters. They've been happily married for 20 years. You remember all of this and have remembered all this quite clearly." Her eyes returned to normal. There were easier ways to do this, but they'd discovered the hard way that those didn't always work so well, hundreds of trials ago.
"Victoria," the nominal freshman said, smiling and relaxed. "Victoria Peters. Nice to meet you," she said with a laugh and held out her hand. Laughs and handshakes followed. "Ok, that was easy. Try a harder one."
"What are you studying here, Victoria?" Kat asked.
A pause. "Um, this is going to sound weird, but--"
"Finance," Andrea said, warming up to this sequence. Knowing her as well as Kat did, it was easy to see that she was enjoying this on a number of levels, both because she was great at this, and because she was definitely turned on.
Victoria was not the first to be shaped this way.
"But what you really want is to marry and have a lot of kids. You're old-fashioned, like your mother."
Victoria's eyes returned to normal. "Finance," she said with that mix of earnestness and excitement most eighteen year-olds feel when announcing that sort of thing. "But between you and me," she said, mock sotto voce, out of the side of her mouth and with her palm raised to one side as if to shield from a hidden audience, "I wouldn't mind picking up a MRS-degree while I'm here."
Kat grinned again. "We're going to get along great," she said, as if any other outcome was even remotely possible.
