Note to Reader: This story picks up shortly after the end of the earlier story "Alexa is Intrigued by a Streaker".
Thanks for reading!
One week after the event, Alexa was having doubts about the highly public striptease and naked walkabout she'd performed; not regrets, exactly - thinking about what she'd done that day never failed to excite her. The memory of her brazen behavior now provided her with go-to imagery when she felt like masturbating. What was troubling her was the realization that however exciting, what she had done had very little in common with what she had found intriguing in the first place about the female streaker whose appearance on a local TV news station had inspired her.
Where the televised streaker had seemed lighthearted, Alexa had been stressed out. Where the streaker seemed like she had been spontaneous, Alexa had planned out each tiny detail of her behavior. Where the streaker was clearly having fun, Alexa had been nervously following the rules she'd developed. The more she thought about it, the more it seemed in retrospect that the only part of her adventure which had truly been fun was her completely improvised interactions with the unexpected delivery driver and the passengers on a passing bus!
Alexa knew it would be difficult for her to emulate the TV streaker's apparently spontaneous approach to something as outrageous as running around while naked in public; by nature she was a planner, not the sort to just wing it, especially not about something as scary as streaking. From her research online about streaking's heyday on college campuses in the 70's, she remembered reading that a lot of people just got caught up in the excitement of seeing their fellow students streaking and suddenly found themselves imitating them. "Well, that's not about to happen anytime soon," she thought, "the woman on TV got me interested, but if I wanted to avoid planning all the spontaneity out of it I'd need some other sort of external prompt, something not under my direct control, to get me to suddenly drop my clothes and take off running!" Since she wasn't likely to happen upon other streakers to encourage her, and couldn't imagine what might work as a substitute signal to impulsively do something so rash, actual real-life streaking seemed to be part of her past, not her future.
With no expectation of actually doing it, thinking about what it might be like seemed harmless enough. Not having solved the problem of replacing the momentum seeing fellow students streaking could provide, Alexa began to think about other aspects of doing a typical streak, then realized she was on the verge of repeating the intense planning which had resulted in her previous naked escapade. To avoid turning any potential future streak into another tightly choreographed event, she decided to limit her planning to the most basic choices; location (her college), clothing (normal, no special outfit), timing (loosely, during her lunch break).
Since the college had canceled all summer classes due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and practically all businesses in the area were still shut down, the convenience store where she worked was still almost completely devoid of customers during her day shift; she hadn't had more than two customers in any one day in the last month, and most days she had exactly none. Given the negligible effect it would have on sales, Martin, the store owner, agreed that she could lock the store up and spend her lunch break somewhere else as long as she limited her absence to one hour or so.
With so little to consider in detail beforehand, Alexa was surprised at how quickly her comparing her own outrageous behavior to a more typical college student streak seemed to be leading her to consider actually doing what she'd begun calling a "Classic" streak! She took comfort in the fact that she hadn't figured out any sort of random replacement for seeing peers going streaking; without some external prompt to take the place of fellow streakers, she knew her tendency to overthink things would most likely make the experience more like work than the silly fun she thought it ought to be. "No danger of my getting naked in public again just to be following a script, even if it is one I wrote," she thought.
Alexa mostly filled her long, quiet days at work with reading books, but she needed some other diversion from time to time. One quiet Monday afternoon she was browsing the app store, looking for a good time waster of an app to download to her phone. She had been aimlessly browsing when a suggested app popped up and caught her eye. Called "The Randomaster", it was an all-purpose random item generator; capable of generating random numbers within a range the user selected, or randomly display a word from a user-defined list, or a card or multiple cards from a standard deck, dice, coin flips, or even a basic Yes / No choice.
She quickly grasped the potential for this app to set up a sequence of decisions based on randomly generated data. A sequence of the right data could be a signal to undertake a specific course of action, in this case streaking! This might allow her to react to external cues the way someone in a setting where streaking was common would react when seeing other people peeling off their clothes or already running around naked! "I probably should leave this alone," she said to herself, "but I'm curious to see how the app actually functions." She downloaded it and opened it.
Late that evening, after several hours of experimenting with the app's options and cracking open a textbook she'd kept from a statistics class, Alexa had developed a set of hurdles, all of which would need to be cleared in order for any streaking to take place.
1) Random number selection - The app generating a number between 1 and 20 (out of a possible 1 to 100) would represent the user (Alexa) seeing other people streaking or getting ready to do so, leading to the next hurdle.
2) Random word selection - The app generating a word (from a list created by Alexa) which might or might not be something within the usere's sight right then, wherever she happened to be at that moment. She would make at least a quarter of the words on the list be things likely to be present at a typical college quad, like ivy or sidewalks and the rest of the words not very likely, like porcupine or parachute. If the word randomly pulled from the list described something which WAS within sight, that would indicate she was being influenced by seeing other people streaking and was actively considering following their example! Leading to the final hurdle.
3) Random Yes / No choice - The app would display either a No, keep your clothes on and continue being a spectator, or Yes, take everything off as quickly as possible and go for a short run!
Alexa was pleased with the simplicity and decisiveness her three hurdle app setup possessed; the odds were stacked pretty heavily against actually leading to streaking any one time the app was used, but she thought that seemed appropriate; even at its most popular, it wasn't as if most people were doing it. She thought most students walked through the Quad at least 3 or 4 times a day; with that many opportunities, the three hurdles were likely to result in some naked foolishness on a daily basis!
Whether or not Alexa was inclined to take her chances trying out the hurdles herself was another matter entirely. She knew the odds of her ending up naked on the quad were slim, but not negligible, especially if she ran through the steps multiple times. Even the very slight chance she'd have all three functions of the app align and call for her to go running naked in such a public fashion and such a familiar place was enough to make her shiver whenever she thought about it.
Still, trying to duplicate the more whimsical nature which she believed to be typical of Classic streaking had become her goal; if she could combine the excitement being naked in public clearly held for her with a more playful experience, she'd feel like she had accomplished something worthwhile. She needed to know if placing her fate in the care of the app and its randomly generated choices would actually make the decision to streak feel less stressful, assuming it ever came to that.
Since she was supposed to only leave the store unoccupied for an hour, she decided that once the drive to and from the campus and time spent parking and walking to and from the Quad was all accounted for, she would have no more than 40 minutes available at the quad on any given day. She decided she would make an attempt to get through all three hurdles four times each day, setting her phone's alarms to go off at 12:10, 12:20, 12:30 & 12:40. She had thought she could add a fifth attempt at 12:50 but shuddered as she realized that though unlikely, it was at least possible that the time immediately after 12:50 wouldn't be available for her to drive back to work because she'd already be occupied, running around in the nude!
On Monday, May 11, Alexa ate her lunch in her quiet workplace around 11:30 to leave her lunch hour free for a visit to her campus, her first since in-person classes had been halted.
Having worked out the odds of her ending up naked on any typical four attempt day, Alexa had stayed with her initial idea to dress normally; her outfit was irrelevant, other than being reasonably easy to get out of in the unlikely event she somehow beat the odds and made it through all three hurdles. The faded jean shorts and t-shirt from a concert she'd been to a few years ago were not meant to stand out, but the shorts were short enough and the shirt tight enough that her presence strolling through the Quad was noticed by a crew of roofers working on top of Fortinum Hall. She noticed that she'd been noticed, and shivered a bit as she guessed that they were likely to be active there for several days. Kind of like her. "Oh, well," she thought, "a streaker at a spot like this has to more or less expect to have an audience!"
Not wanting to need to juggle a lot of belongings, besides her clothing she had only three items with her; her keys, her phone, and a paperback novel she'd brought to pass the time.
She was more than a little rattled by how close the first use of her app came to sending her streaking:
1st hurdle, Number: 18, leading to...