Unbelievable

“Explain to me again why we had to wait for a full moon to do this,” Shelly asked Debra.

“And why do we… have to be… outside?” added Lisa, through clothing-induced grimaces.

“Just… trust me, okay,” was Debra’s unsatisfactory answer. “You do want to be able to wear clothes comfortably again, don’t you?”

Lisa nodded desperately and Shelly bit her lip. Having to wait for a full moon night had given them enough time to do some experiments that satisfied Shelly about the psychosomatic origin of Lisa’s condition. Despite reporting extreme discomfort when wearing clothes, Lisa did not exhibit a fever or any physical symptoms apart from occasional sweating. If they could fix her psychological aversion to clothing, she would be normal again. And maybe Debra had the solution for that. Shelly was naturally skeptical of the efficacy of something like hypnotherapy, but she believed strongly in placebo effects.

It was midnight, a few nights after the Freshers Streak. Lisa, Shelly and Debra were standing in a circle on the flat roof of Lisa and Shelly’s college dormitory. Claire was a few feet away, securing the lock on the roof access door. She pulled on the handle a few times and then gave the girls a thumbs up, a heavy key-ring dangling from her fingers. “No-one’s coming up here now.”

Lisa stalked over to the door and gave the handle a hard yank herself to be sure. Then, with a sigh, she pulled the nasty olive dress over her head and deposited it on the ground.

As always, her relief appeared instant. She visibly relaxed as soon as the fabric was off her body, and her mind was clear. But at the same time, she was naked outdoors, among a group of clothed people. The cold night air whipped across her skin, giving her goosebumps. She looked around sheepishly towards her friends.

Shelly caught Lisa’s gaze with a reassuring look, holding easy eye contact. Claire and Debra, not yet quite accustomed to Lisa’s nudity, tried to look everywhere else.

“Okay,” Lisa said, padding over on bare feet to join her friends in the middle of the roof. “Let’s get this over with. Hypnotize me!”

Debra pulled out her pocket-watch and started speaking to Lisa in a calm, even voice. Before coming up to the roof, she’d advised Claire and Shelly not to listen too closely to what she was saying when she did this, to try to occupy themselves with other activities or just think about something else. While Claire stared off the edge of the roof, Shelly gathered up Lisa’s dress and put it down on top of a towel, where she’d laid out some of Lisa’s other clothes. If Debra’s hypnosis stuff was as effective as she claimed, Lisa would be coming down off this roof in a full outfit.

Picking the outfit had been an emotional affair, and the first time Lisa had opened her closet in weeks. Ultimately, she settled on the same outfit she’d worn on the day her condition manifested. Black bra and panties, tight white jeans, black sleeveless top, boots, and a fitted purple sweater. Exactly the tight, head-to-toe covering that would really put this cure through its paces.

“Okay ladies, you can come back now,” said Debra. “She’s primed.”

Lisa stood completely still, arms at her sides, staring blankly into space. The only movement she made was the slow rise and fall of her chest, breathing in and out, and the occasional blink of her eyes. She didn’t react even the wind picked up and whipped her blonde hair up behind her.

“This is kind of creepy, Debra,” said Shelly. “Where’d you even learn to do this?”

“I could tell you,” replied Debra. “But then I’d have to kill you.”

Menacing silence hung over the group for a brief moment before Debra let out a peel of too-loud laughter. Shelly and Claire nervously joined in. Lisa did not react.

“So, what do we do now?” asked Claire.

“Anything we want!” said Debra, spreading her arms theatrically. “Lisa, give us a spin.”

Instantly, Lisa twirled around on the spot.

“Do some jumping jacks!”

Lisa started doing rapid jumping jacks on the spot, boobs bouncing and ass jiggling.

“Now twerk!”

“No! Stop that!” interrupted Shelly. “Lisa, just relax for now.”

Lisa glanced up at Shelly, her body already bent in a twerking position, ass in the air. For a moment, she froze, and then seemed to suddenly deflate. Her muscles all relaxed at once and she dropped onto the floor, lying in a splayed out position.

Debra smiled sheepishly. “Sorry, I get a little carried away sometimes.”

“We’re not here to mess around with Lisa and make her embarrass herself,” Shelly said. “We’re trying to cure her. Lisa, you can stand up now.”

Lisa pulled herself to her feet. Her body was streaked with dust from the floor.

“Dust yourself off.”

Lisa methodically brushed and patted her body until it was relatively dirt free.

“Now, Debra, what should we say to her so that she can wear clothes again?”

Debra put a hand to her chin. “Well, for a start, we should probably have her get dressed, and see how that goes.”

Shelly nodded. “Okay. Let’s go with the dress first, and then have her put on the full outfit if that works.”

Claire frowned. “I think we should try the outfit first. We already know she can wear that dress for about ten minutes at a time, so we’ll have to wait even longer than that to see if the hypnotherapy is working. You said she really struggles with tight clothing.”

“Hmm, yeah, I guess that’s a good point,” replied Shelly. “I’m just worried she’ll have a panic attack. It’s happened once or twice during our experiments that she’s just gone catatonic and I’ve had to undress her.”

“That won’t be a problem,” said Debra. “She is completely under my control, and will not do anything unless explicitly ordered to by one of us.”

Shelly side-eyed Debra. She thought there was a hint of overconfident bluster in the amateur hypnotherapist’s voice. But she owed it to Lisa to at least try this. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go with Claire’s plan.”

“Lisa,” said Claire, relishing her turn to issue commands, “please walk over to that pile of clothes and put on the panties.”

Lisa obeyed, trooping robotically to the pile of clothes. She bent at the waist, scooped up the black panties, and stepped into them. Expression still blank, she pulled them up over her crotch. Then, having run out of orders, she stood still with her arms at her sides.

The other girls stood just as still for a long moment, watching Lisa for a reaction. There was something incongruent about the black panties and how they divided the smooth, even skin of her torso from that of her legs. Having been constantly naked for weeks on end, occasionally wearing only a towel or a loose dress, she looked decidedly odd in panties. It was like putting a collar on a wild animal, Shelly mused, immediately chastising herself for the comparison.

“How do you feel, Lisa?” Debra asked.

“Fine,” Lisa replied sharply. “A little cold.”

A little cold! The girls’ eyes widened and they let out whoops of joy, high-fiving each other. Lisa hadn’t mentioned being cold once since this ordeal started.

“Okay, okay,” said Shelly. “Let’s not celebrate prematurely. It’s great that she’s feeling cold, and even better that she’s standing calmly without fidgeting or trying to pull her panties off, but she’s not even decent yet.”

“And she’s still in a trance,” added Debra. “Remember, we can do whatever we want now. The real trick is to get her to do things after she comes out of it.”

Shelly and Claire nodded sagely. “Lisa, put on the bra,” said Shelly.

Lisa reached down and picked up the black bra. She put it on, did the clasp, and returned to her zombie-like stance.

The girls waited a full minute to make sure she didn’t have any adverse reactions, and then Debra ordered her to put on the rest of the outfit. Shelly’s experiments had shown that Lisa’s private parts seemed most acutely affected by her condition, perhaps another indicator of its psychological origin. If she could put on underwear, she could probably handle the rest.

Lisa pulled her jeans on first, and then her top. She sat down on the ground to put on her socks and boots, and then pulled the sweater over her head. As she pulled her hair from the back of her sweater, Shelly recognized the confident, self-assured girl she’d known for a week as her first college roommate, Lisa Fletcher.

Standing there in an ordinary outfit, Lisa seemed an entirely different person from the demure, nervous room-bound involuntary nudist Shelly had gotten to know so well. But then, her natural confidence had shone through on numerous occasions, especially the night of the Freshers Streak. She had stood up to Bethany and saved Shelly from a humiliating streak, at great personal cost. Shelly hoped one day to repay her.

Claire put a hand against Lisa’s forehead. “Her temperature feels normal to me. I think this is working.”

“Okay girls,” said Debra. “Now comes the hard part. In a trance like this, Lisa has no problem wearing clothes. But if I were to end the trance now, she’d instantly revert to her old self. She’d go into panic mode and rip the clothes off, probably. What I say to her now is crucial for preventing that.”

A solemn silence descended on the rooftop. Debra stood in deep thought for a while, and then finally opened her mouth, looking directly into Lisa’s vacant eyes. “Lisa, when I clap my hands, you are going to come out of this trance and return to normal. Once you come out of the trance, you will notice that you’re wearing clothes. This is normal for you. You’re comfortable with wearing clothes, and it’s something you normally do. As soon as I clap my hands, you will feel comfortable, relaxed, at ease, perfectly happy. You will no longer feel hot or claustrophobic when wearing clothes. You will feel normal.”

Debra looked to Shelly and Claire for approval. Both nodded. Then, ever so slowly, she brought her hands up in front of her. She spread them wide, and then brought them together in a loud clap, which seemed to reverberate through the night air.

Lisa slumped out of her trance, blinking rapidly. She brought her arms up in front of her and stared at them with disbelief. Then she looked down at her body. Her eyes met an expanse of purple wool and white denim. Finally, she looked up at her friends.

“How do you feel, Lisa?” asked Shelly.

“I feel… normal.” Lisa’s tone was flat. She sounded a little bored. “Pretty normal.” She started swinging one of her feet, kicking the ground with her boot. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

The other three looked at each other quizzically. Frankly, they had been expecting a very different reaction.

“Don’t you… notice something different about yourself?” asked Claire. “Something that didn’t used to feel normal?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Lisa replied, pointedly staring off the edge of the roof. “Something’s a bit different, but it’s very normal.”

Shelly couldn’t contain herself anymore “Lisa, you can wear clothes again! You’re fully dressed and not freaking out! We did it, Lis! Debra’s hypnotherapy worked!”

“Of course it did,” Debra added smugly. “You’re welcome.”

Lisa glanced at her friends. “Yeah, I guess so. Everything’s back to normal.”

“Aren’t you happy about this?” asked Shelly. “You can go outside again!”

“I was outside this whole time.”

“I mean, in public, among people!”

“I went to that party, didn’t I?”

“But now you don’t have to be naked! Isn’t that… isn’t that what we’ve been trying to do for weeks on end?”

Lisa’s gaze was fixed on something out in the night sky. She had walked to the edge of the roof, and her back was turned to her friends. “I don’t have to be naked,” she repeated. “I can be normal.”

Then she pulled her sweater over her head and tossed it off the roof. “I hate normal! It’s boring!”

The other three girls rushed to Lisa’s side as she fiddled with her right boot, pulling her back before she threw anything else off the roof. Debra and Claire held her arms, and Shelly stood in front of her, making confused faces.

Lisa pulled off her right boot and sock, and the left soon followed. Both boots bounced on the ground as she threw them aside. Then her hands were on the waistband of her jeans, undoing the button. Her hands moved in a controlled, methodical manner quite different from the usual frantic pawing. Once her jeans were loosened, she hiked them down along with her panties in a single, fluid motion.

“It didn’t work!” Shelly cried.

“Oh no, Shelly, it worked.” replied Lisa. “I can wear clothes now. I just prefer not to.”

Debra and Claire stared in horror, still gripping each of Lisa’s bare forearms. She shook them off with a single, effortless shrug. Then her top was over her head and down on the floor. Her bra soon followed. Once again, Lisa stood naked on the rooftop. But there was strange, triumphant look in her eyes now, one that Shelly had never seen before. The way Lisa puffed out her chest, stood with her legs apart, hands firmly on hips. She was reveling in this.

“Thank you, Debra,” she said. “You did cure me. I don’t feel anything when I wear clothes anymore. But, at the same time, I would prefer not to. I mean, look at me. I’d rather be free and beautiful than commonplace and stifled.”

Lisa’s hair billowed out behind her in the wind, and Shelly thought, with some embarrassment, of the way she’d compared her friend to a wild animal earlier. She really was beautiful, and it seemed in some way a shame to cover her lithe body, a body that made Shelly green with envy, having to look at it in all its perfection every day. When she was having a particularly bad body image day, the vision of sculpted and toned Lisa brought to mind her every unsightly deposit of cellulite.

Once she tore her eyes away from Lisa, Shelly grabbed the other two girls and made an impromptu huddle. “What do we do now?”

“Well… she’s kind of cured, right?” said Debra. “Like, she even said she doesn’t feel anything when wearing clothes. Maybe she’s got in touch with her inner nudist or whatever, but that’s not too bad. Lots of people are nudists.”

“Yeah,” said Claire. “As long as she can wear clothes around campus, she can be a normal student again.”

Shelly was quiet for a moment. “I guess you guys are right. I mean, it’s a little weird that her personality would just— Hey, what’s she doing now?!”

Lisa was violently rattling the roof access door handle. “Why won’t this open!” she shouted.

“It’s okay, Lis, I’ve got the keys,” shouted Claire, breaking up the huddle. “Just get your clothes back on and we’ll leave.”

Lisa stared contemptuously at Claire. “No. I don’t want to wear clothes anymore.”

“But… but you have to!”

Lisa tossed her hair back. “Who says?”

“It’s, like, the law!”

“Law, shmaw. I wear what I want. And right now, that’s nothing.”

The three girls returned to the huddle.

“This isn’t going to work,” said Shelly. “I don’t know what you did to her Debra, but I don’t think this is what she really wants. And anyway, she can’t just go around naked on campus!”

“Well, there was that party…” Debra said.

“Don’t make me remind you how that ended,” Shelly snapped.

“Maybe she could go around on campus though,” Claire said. “Naked, I mean. I was trying to do some research on her condition, and I read about this naked college student in Vermont. She was like, a religious nudist, or something, and the college had to allow it.”

“You can’t believe everything you read online,” Shelly replied. “I really don’t like this, guys. This isn’t the Lisa I know. We need to get her back to normal.”

“Hey ladies, what are you whispering about?”

The three girls almost jumped out of their skin as Lisa appeared behind them. She had moved very silently, and very quickly from the door to the huddle. There was an air of menace to her presence that made everyone quite uncomfortable.

“You know, there are a lot of benefits to going natural,” she said. “I did some reading online, and they say it improves your blood-flow, and makes you more aware of your body.” At some point, she had grabbed Claire by the forearm, holding her tight in a vice grip. “It’s also great for body image.” At this, she grabbed Debra’s forearm in her other hand. “I think more people should try it. Starting with you lot.”

At this, Lisa released Debra, pushing her across the roof, and almost simultaneously pulled Claire back towards the door. In a flash, she had her hands down the waistband of Claire’s yoga pants and yanked them down. “Nice thong!” she said, quickly pulling that down too.

Claire stared in shock as Lisa continued to pull at the pants around her ankles, and then lost her balance and fell on her bare buttocks. She saw her yoga pants, held up triumphantly in the air, scrunched into a ball, and then lobbed. Straight off the roof.

“What the fuck, Lis?”

But Lisa had already pounced on her next victim, Debra. An expanse of pale stomach showed under the fabric of the pink t-shirt Lisa was forcing over her head. As Debra’s head came free of the t-shirt, she clutched at her bra protectively, but she was no match for Lisa’s surprising strength and speed. The bra tore off, and she was left with only her hands for coverage as Lisa tossed her aside, taking only a moment to throw the shirt and bra off the roof before heading for Shelly.

“Debra! Claire! Help!” Shelly cried, inching backwards.

“Let’s get her!” roared Claire, her face beet red from the exposure of her bottom.

The two half-dressed girls rushed at Lisa. Shelly, sensing that they would need everyone to restrain her, stopped edging backwards and rushed towards her friend, ignoring the crazed look in her eyes. The wild animal comparison now seemed more apt than ever.

Debra caught her by the left arm. Claire caught her by the right. Shelly caught her in the middle.

With a surprised gasp, Lisa toppled backwards, struggling, but firmly pinned to the ground.

“Quick, Debra, get her in a trance again!” shouted Shelly. “I’ll hold her!”

Debra rolled off the feral naked girl’s left arm, allowing Shelly to take her place. She fumbled through the pockets of her jeans, searching for the pocket-watch. Then she remembered that she’d stuffed it in her bra. The bra that Lisa had thrown off the roof.

Debra’s eyes widened in horror. Shelly and Claire looked at her pleadingly, struggling to restrain the restless Lisa. She glanced around the roof desperately.

There! Something small and round, glinting in the moonlight. Debra rushed for it, picked it up. Her pocketwatch had fallen out in the struggle!

She scooped it up, gave it a grateful kiss, and then rushed back to Lisa. “Lisa,” she said. “Please look at me now, Lisa. Focus on my voice.”

Claire and Debra dutifully filled their minds with thoughts to avoid focusing on Debra’s voice, but being so close, they couldn’t help but overhear snatches. Debra’s voice became harsher, stranger, and the words she said didn’t sound English. They barely sounded human.

Lisa stopped struggling. The trance state took hold once more, and she lay motionless on the ground. An exhausted Shelly and Claire stood up from the ground, looking around at each other and at Debra.

Claire pulled at the bottom of her tank-top. Debra wrapped both arms around her bare breasts. Shelly politely looked away from both of them.

Defeated, Debra turned to Lisa. “Lisa, stand up.”

As Lisa stood, she addressed Claire and Shelly. “I’m just going to undo everything.”

Then, turning back to Lisa, she said, “When I clap my hands, Lisa, you will forget about the last order that I gave you the last time you were in a trance. It will be as if you were never hypnotized in the first place.”

Debra clapped her hands.

Lisa blinked out of her trance. Her face clouded with confusion as she looked from the topless Debra, to the bottomless Claire, to the disheveled but still fully clothed Shelly. “What happened to you guys?” she asked. “And when are we going to try this hypnotherapy thing? I want to wear clothes again!”

Shelly embraced Lisa with a cry of joy. Shrugging to each other, Claire and Debra joined in, making a big group hug.

“I love you all as well,” said Lisa, slightly taken aback. “But we should really get down to business. And Debra, Claire, as much as I appreciate the solidarity, it’s really not necessary. Unless you need it for hypnotherapy or something.”

Debra put a hand to her chin. “Skyclad could help,” she muttered.

“Skyclad?” repeated Shelly. Her mind had started making connections. “Full moon? If you told me, you’d have to kill me? I’m starting to think there’s more to this ‘hypnotherapy’ than you’re letting on.”

Claire frowned. “Yeah, Shelly’s right. And those sounds you were making when you tranced her… I don’t think that’s something hypnotists do.”

“W-what’s going on?” Lisa asked.

Debra looked down at the ground. “I’m… not a hypnotist,” she whispered. “I’m a witch.”

“A witch?” Shelly repeated incredulously. “Now I’ve heard everything! Do you have a broomstick?”

Debra shot a withering glare at Shelly. “Please spare me the skeptic talk. I’ve already given you ample demonstration of my powers, haven’t I?”

Shelly wanted to say something, but thought better of it.

“Look, I really shouldn’t be telling you this,” continued Debra. “But the truth is, Lisa’s under the influence of a curse. I noticed it in her aura as soon as I met her. I… made up the hypnotherapy thing as an excuse to try curse-breaking. It helps that I like collecting pocket-watches.”

Shelly and Claire stared at Debra in disbelief.

Lisa stamped up and down with frustration. “What are you talking about? What the hell is going on?”

“You’re cursed,” said Debra. “And I need to figure out how to lift it.”

To be continued…