**Chapter 1: Malen’kiy**
**Ben**
Ben made sure the door was locked before he sat down at his computer. Down the hall, he heard Betsy getting ready for bed. He didn’t want to open the files until he knew she was asleep, so he wasted some time checking his email and pretending to work as he told her he was going to do.
Unfortunately, work email had the exact opposite effect on Ben that the files would. Everything was labelled as urgent or immediate. They wanted him to respond tonight or before work in the morning. Even when he wasn’t at work, he was working these days. You couldn’t get a moment of peace anymore. He could just imagine his phone vibrating in his bedroom with texts and more emails before court the next day.
The stress of his job is what brought Ben to hypnosis in the first place. He started off with listening to ASMR videos to help him fall asleep at night. He heard a podcast talking about it, and when he checked it out, he immediately got the tingles that helped him zone out and fall asleep. Not long after a few hundred videos, he found that he preferred hypnosis roleplays. In the comments, people always talked about how this didn’t really trance them, but it made them feel tingles.