Steve Anders strove to be non-descript. Although he'd succeeded at almost everything else he'd ever set out to do, at this, he failed. He was a homely fellow, balding in patches, pot-bellied, with eyes so bad contacts wouldn't work. He was a 33 year-old man who looked to be in his fifties, and heading rapidly for his sixties. He sort of stood out in a crowd.
Underneath his business attire, the potbelly notwithstanding, was a man in good physical shape -- the belly was purely hereditary, and more muscle than fat by a good margin. His mind, though, was one of the finest on the planet, and he'd used it recently to leap ahead in the world.
He'd been the perennial research assistant to an old man who'd developed a special spray that would make anyone sprayed in the face highly susceptible to suggestion. The old man had made a tidy fortune altering minds across the country, never letting on that the finished product was Steve's, and not his, work. Never trusting Steve, he'd created the perfect chemical blocker for the spray, and was completely immune to its effects.
Or so he'd thought, because, as Steve constantly reminded himself, the old man was an idiot. He'd used the spray as a hammer instead of a scalpel to reshape minds. He'd never thought that perhaps, just perhaps, the mind could be made susceptible to suggestion in such a way that the blocking agent became useless.
Steve was not an idiot, and now had a gigantic fortune, a beautiful and devoted wife, and a butler who used to be his boss to show for it.
But, idiot or not, he trusted no one else with the spray, and in all honesty, got a thrill out of using it. He only took select calls now, from those who'd helped him up the ladder, or those who could and would pay an enormous sum for his services.
And that was precisely how he came to be in this beautiful girl's bedroom, smiling as pleasantly as he could, making small talk, and setting up the special metronome he'd invented as the young woman looked at him warily.
