She'll go through the standard opening lecture that's been repeated some uncounted number of times, while you pay attention in helpless fascination and remember the tiny little fragment of information that She deigns to warn you about in advance.

This is not where you thought you were going; this is the university that teaches mind control.  Some other universities pretend to teach it too, but ignore all those, they might as well not exist.

There are classes here on every form of mind control that exists.  Magical, psychic, hypnotic, neurosurgery and neurochemistry, nanotechnology, sheer persuasion.

These are your fellow students.  More than half of you will leave the year enslaved to others of your number.

The system is not fair.  Some of your fellow students are already more powerful than you.

It is not so much unfairness that you cannot rise above it.  It is a very common outcome for the least powerful of new entrants to leave with some of the most advantaged students as their helplessly adoring slaves, if their will and wit is the greater.

Your rooms have been assigned to you already.  There are classes where you pair with roommates of your own choice; this is not one of those.  You will be rooming in triples, in dorm rooms that have every luxury you can imagine and some you can't.

The University teaches subtlety.  When you enslave a fellow student, you must bring them to Mesmerra's office to report your success.   If anyone else detects you and reports you before then -- such as one of your victim's allies, or your own enemy -- your enslavement of them is undone, and you will receive a penalty.

People may not be mentally assaulted in class, nor in the dining hall, nor the library; anywhere else is fair game.

For the first week, no student may be enslaved by any tools more mystical or material than simple hypnosis without computer aids; unless, of course, they have been persuaded to permit the use of more powerful arts upon themselves, by some contract or verbal assent.

Study well and quickly how to defend yourselves, or make pacts with those who can, or simply find a kindly-seeming owner to whom to give your despairing self; for this first week of shielding will not last long.

And then Mesmerra is gone; and the students are freed from their hypnosis, in an auditorium filled with strangers.

They find themselves already holding numbered keys to their dorm rooms; and so three among those students will all find themselves all holding violet keys with the number 9 written there.

Jisa spends about three seconds being incredibly bemused and annoyed that her shields aren't working - without quite making it as far as 'upset' or 'terrified' - but it doesn't take more than another five seconds after that to decide that if all she's being forced to do is pay attention, it could be a lot worse. She wants to pay attention! It seems pretty important! She hadn't exactly planned to attend a university that teaches mind control, but if she's being offered the opportunity, she would be insane to turn it down. 

There are a lot of words she doesn't know! "Neurosurgery" and "neurochemistry" and "nanotechnology". A different person, who wasn't Jisa, might feel intimidated by that obvious sign of ignorance. In fact, Jisa is mostly just bursting with curiosity. She's about to find out! There are classes! 

(Jisa is, at least for the moment, pretty confident in being one of the more powerful students. Probably not the most powerful, but enough to look after herself. She's been training as a Mindhealer since she was seven, after all, even if she might be at a bit of a disadvantage in using it for the mind control. No one could possibly say it was unethical to learn how to defend herself, though!) 

She frowns thoughtfully at the key in her hand - it's a little spooky that she doesn't remember how she came to be holding it - but then lights up when her eyes land on the other two with matching keys. She forges her way over. "Hi!" 

That... didn't feel right. For a moment there she didn't have control of her own defenses. This had never happened before, and much to her shame, her first response was to frantically search through her mind for any hint of a distortion, any possible sign or shred of an instruction that could be left by a more powerful controller than herself. Then she cursed as she realized she wouldn't be able to tell if there was any, would she?

"So this is what it feels like?" she thought, "Presuming there is a compulsion of course."

There was nothing to be done about it now. She couldn't really sense anything, and could only hope all her patients had felt the same. That's how she liked to think of them -- her "patients". Not that she was a doctor or anything. She had thought she was a healer of a sort, but more a spiritual one: helping people realize their deeper selves and follow their natural inclinations. Till she learned about mind control, and it sounded entirely too familiar.

Her nostrils flared slightly as she settled herself back into her body. Now was not the time to be lost in thought ... She finally noticed she was holding a violet key, and someone was moving in her peripheral vision and possibly greeting her. She turned toward the girl walking up to her and smiled. "Hi!"

Harlotte's mind is spinning with the implications that there are so many civilizations full of people who all want to be friends and can interoperate at the level where they can go to school together! She's going to make so many valuable connections here! And probably as many as several of these worlds would benefit from Harlotte coming in and showing them better ways to run their planet!

She vows to herself to use her enslaved minions only for good. Or for awesome. But not for evil. At least, not unless that evil is contributing to a greater good. Obviously! Because Harlotte is a good person, and always wise and benevolent to all.

This is mostly theoretical so far, of course, other than Harlotte's high school, youth orchestra, swimming club, and newspaper carrier's union.

Harlotte wonders if maybe she should start some extracurriculars here, the better to get to know her future servants and select the best ones. A steeplechase club, maybe? Or a geocaching club? Oooh, or mock trial. Debate! What could be more fun than yanking the arguments out of your opponents' heads and replacing them with nonsense?

She'll start by assessing her roommates to see if they'd make better co-conspirators or minions.

"Hi! I'm Harlotte! What are your names?"

Should she give her real name? On the one hand, maybe she should think about that for more than half a second, and it might be better (she is moooostly thinking 'more fun' rather than 'safer') if no one knows who her parents are. On the other hand, it seems like the people here are from all over the– not even just all over the world, all over all the worlds, so what are the odds that anyone is bothering to keep track of the king's relatives in a backwater like Valdemar? Besides, it sounds annoying to have to keep track of an alias. 

"I'm Jisa! ...What sort of place are you both from?" Is that a rude question to ask? Maybe it's better if she offers something on her end. "The world I'm from has lots of kinds of magic. Although most of them aren't mind control." 

Harlotte is happy. Jisa is ... not obviously happy?

Reflexively she reaches out a tendril to Jisa to try to determine what is blocking her, but cuts herself off before anyone hopefully notices. Proooobably a bad idea to apply non-consensual healing to your unknown power level co-manipulators. Maybe. Possibly.

Whatever, let's see!

"I'm Nova. I'm from ...", wow-this-is-way-to-complicated-to-explain is what she would like to say. "Virginia."

She deadpan stares at Jisa, daring her to doubt this completely useless explanation of anything.

"I don't know what the difference is between magic and powers. I have some powers, though I'm still learning how they work. I kind of thought I was actually healing people while I was apparently mind controlling them? I still disagree with that framing though. I'm curious how your mind powers work, but maybe we should head to our rooms first. What do you guys feel like?"

Wait, Nova and Jisa already have experience with magic and mind control? Harlotte had been assuming that everyone was here to learn mind control, not that they would already have it. In Harlotte's experience, most people who believe in mind control are just very suggestible people and fall for things like "hypnosis," which is clearly fake. Most people do the things that Harlotte tells them to do because her ideas are very good and for no other reason.

She says to Nova, "Studies on my world have shown that in many cases, a lot of the benefit of medical treatment comes from having an 'expert' medical practitioner caring about you and cooing over you and giving you a pointless pill to swallow once a day. And then other times the pill actually does something. So maybe the way your healing works is mostly through the power of suggestion and it's not magical at all!"

"I think we should go check out our rooms, but let me just finish handing these out first."

While the other two were talking, Harlotte was also making a couple of dozen little slips of paper with the following message written on them:

She's reaching out to students all around her, smiling and offering the slips of paper.

...sure, they'll take those.

"Not so happy after all," Nova thinks while noticing her attempt at "smile and nod" coming out more as "smirk uncontrollably". This opportunity feels too good to be true honestly.

"You know, that's such an interesting theory! Would you mind if I tested my 'powers' on you? I bet it's all just placebo like you said. We could do a controlled trial back in our room, with a witness!" and she nods to Jisa, "if you care to watch the show?"

(Jisa is briefly distracted by the concept of lightning talks, picturing mage-students climbing up onto a stage to throw lightning at each other while...having a debate...? Probably it means something other than that, this wasn't advertised as a mage-academy. Well, she'll find out later!) 

She is - awfully suspicious that Nova-from-Virginia's proposal isn't exactly being offered in a friendly way, but it's definitely a snappier response to Harlotte's annoyingly dismissive claims than she was able to come up with on the spot. "Sure, I can watch. With Mindhealing Sight, if you like."

She wonders if Harlotte is about to argue that that's not magical and is entirely the "power of suggestion", whatever that even means. ...She also kind of wants to ask what in the world a "pill" is, but asking a lot of probably-stupid questions will feel less embarrassing once she's had a chance to successfully show off that she does know some things, actually. 

Harlotte considers this intriguing offer.

All paths to success here are going to involve successfully navigating many mind control attempts. It might not be such a bad idea for the first one to be soon, and under somewhat controlled conditions. The key now is to stack the deck so that even if Nova's powers are real -- and they easily could be, she has wings so why not magical dominance -- Harlotte still gets her way in the end.

"Let's do it tonight at the lightning talks! Your talk can be a demo. Unless you have a better idea of what you want to talk about?"

Why does Harlotte get to decide what they are doing tonight? Did Nova agree to lightning talks? Why is everyone going along with this?

She is increasingly unsure if she is actually a more powerful mind controller than Harlotte-the-deceptively-dismissive-cheerleader. She tries to detect if Harlotte is casting spells, using powers, or otherwise radiating influence on pretty much everyone nearby. Except she doesn't know how to do that apart from wishing really hard that she did. Being used to being the only powerful being in the neighborhood is not really turning out to be a competitive edge. At all.

At least it seems clear what Harlotte wants: control. And possibly excellence? If anyone radiated overachiever any harder, she might go blind. It wouldn't be a bad idea to ally with her either, possibly. Let's see.

"Sounds like a plan. A demo tonight, with an arbiter using Mindhealing Sight," she says, quietly thanking fortune for sending her at least one room mate from the world of Obviously Named Powers.

Sure! Jisa smiles cheerfully at both of them. And gesture toward what looks like the exit, since it seems like Harlotte is just about done handing out papers? 

...And, come to think of it, Jisa is going to sneak some peeks with Mindhealing Sight at her prospective roommates. She's not about to break the first-week rules, but Sight doesn't actually do anything except observe - it shouldn't even be noticeable, though she might be hedged out if either of them is shielded - so surely it's not against the rules. 

(Beyond the exit lies an atrium branching into colored pathways, one of which clearly matches in color the keys they were given.)

When Jisa looks at Harlotte's mind, she's impressed with both the beauty and the variety of plants. There are vines and weeping willows and daisies and cacti and lilies and... garden vegetables, apparently? And big hedges surrounding some parts, so big that Jisa can't see in unless she zooms in through them, and that maybe feels a bit intrusive. The garden is not organized at all, there are asters right next to a venus flytrap right next to an oak tree right next to some potato plants.

The overall effect is confusing but stunning. There's a certain color coordination to it, despite the chaos.

Jisa's Mindhealing sight is blasted with a pure, blinding radiance as Nova walks by on her way down the path matching the Violet of their keys. It takes a few moments for the light to coalesce into the shape of a verdant garden, overflowing with flowers, vines and trees bursting with life.

And fire.

As each branch, tendril, and leaf burns to ashes, new ones sprout from the surroundings -- ever growing, ever renewing.

It's the power of the Dark Phoenix tempered by the healing magic native to the body it currently possesses. It's not entirely clear if the two are in synergy or if the flames may yet devour the life it is feeding off. Nova's powers seem to still be developing, but Jisa senses a joy, exhilaration and determination to the interplay she is witnessing.

....Wow. Jisa manages not to react visibly, she thinks, but, just, wow. Nova is clearly going to be a lot more interesting than Jisa had been taking into account! Where is this "Virginia" place, anyway? Jisa has more urgent questions about now! 

Harlotte seems great! Jisa is pretty sure they're going to get along fine! She indeed shows no sign of being Gifted at all, though if there are alien powers that show up as fire to her Mindhealing Sight then maybe some just don't show up at all. 

It's not far to their collective dorm room; or at least, the distance has been set to Low for now.

The bedrooms have style controls, but it might take a while to figure out how to use them.  Here's the presets that the bedrooms are initially set on; there's more than three, extras for any slaves you successfully acquire.