Megan Makes A Remote Connection

Megan Angiamo was a bit surprised one afternoon when she checked to see what three teenage boys were snickering about as they huddled around a computer at the library where she worked. They either saw her coming or were actually NOT searching for porn online, which she would have bet was their goal.

The filters her IT consultant had installed caught most forbidden materials, but she had seen clever teens get around them before, so she was relieved to see a bare-bones chat site without any photos or videos on the monitor. One of the teens showed her the thread of texts he had been exchanging with his Mom. Megan thought the program looked harmless enough, so she left the boys with a warning to keep their voices down and made a mental note to check the website out in more depth later.

Keeping horny boys from using the library's computers to get a little thrill wasn't her favorite part of her job, not by a long shot. The topic hardly came up when she was in college pursuing her library science degree, but a lot had changed in the seventeen years since she'd graduated.

One thing hadn't changed; she was still the sole full time professional librarian employed by her hometown, as she had been since her predecessor retired unexpectedly only two months after Megan started working there. She loved her work, but having her only help come from a few part time assistants made it hard for her to get away for any long break.

Except for her college years Megan had lived in Westminster her whole life. For the most part she hadn't really minded life in the small town, but there were a few drawbacks. She would have gladly done without the gossip going around when she and her ex-husband had divorced; despite the rumors and stories, she was convinced that they had simply married too young at 21. She was as surprised as anyone when a few months shy of their seventh anniversary her husband told her he was leaving both her and the town they'd grown up in.

Looking back on her marriage, Megan had come to believe the breakup had been for the best. There had been more bad times than good after the first couple of years, but at the time the divorce hit her hard; she had all but become a hermit for the first post split year. She had no interest at all in starting up a new relationship for at least three years after the breakup.

When she began to think she was ready to at least try dating, life seemed to not want her to. For two years she spent every free moment helping her mother take care of her father as he slipped further and further into dementia, then spent most of the next three years helping her mother through a variety of illnesses, finally losing her last local relative shortly after her 36th birthday.

Megan's first actual attempt at a new relationship gave the local gossip grapevine more to whisper about. She had a few dates with a construction manager from out of town working on a building near the library. He was a charming first date and seemed by their second date to have long-term potential. Between their second date and their third, the local busybodies had somehow learned a lot about Tony, none of it reassuring.

The nosy scandalmongers had discovered that though not living together any more, Tony was still married, to a stripper who worked at a club a couple of towns down the interstate! One of the snoops made sure the the lurid story made it to Megan, who asked him about his wife. His face turned red as he ranted about her, "Kerry found out I liked to go to this club once in a while with a few guys I work with and just lost her mind. She actually began working there as a stripper herself just to catch me there, and then left me once she did!"

There was no fourth date.

Megan had been tempted to not even ask Tony if there was any truth to the rumors about him, his wife and their relationship, just to be able to have sex with an actual person for the first time since her own marriage had ended. Her own marriage had probably been doomed from the start, but the sex had been good enough that even most of a decade later she still missed it.

Between her parent's problems and the general lack of eligible men in town, she was in the midst of an epic sexual drought. She was pretty sure more than 95% of the local men she might be interested in were married; she wasn't about to get caught up in some other couple's drama, and shuddered to imagine what the local gossip network could do with that kind of material!

Between having no love life and working even longer hours than usual when pandemic related budget cutbacks eliminated what little help she had at the library, Megan had fallen into some bad dietary habits and put on a fair bit of weight. Being as petite as she was, the extra thirty-five pounds were noticeable. Before turning 30 she had always been fit, but the stresses of the last few years led her to depend more on fast food and snacking in front of the TV than was healthy.

It took a minor medical crisis to shake Megan up enough to break away from her bad lifestyle choices. What had been periodic minor heartburn grew into something that felt like a heart attack, earning her an ambulance ride to the local hospital. Getting dressed after the doctor on duty had quickly ruled out any heart problems and ended her crisis by treating her to some prescription strength acid-blocking medicine, she was as embarrassed by the doctor gently suggesting she ought to look into changing some of her eating habits as she was by wearing the decidedly unflattering hospital gown for the four hours she spent being observed and tested.

The morning after her visit to the hospital, Megan was at her desk in the office ten minutes before the library opened, as usual. She looked at the bag she'd just set on her desk. Contents: two egg sandwiches and a small slab of vaguely hash-brown like food, fresh from a drive-through a few blocks away. Her usual. "It's like I completely forgot about how I spent last night," she moaned. She realized that in many ways what had become her normal wasn't what she wanted out of life. She couldn't change everything she thought needed to be changed right away, but resolved at that moment to at least get control of her eating, and while she was at it, to get back in shape.

The evening following the afternoon Megan had noticed the trio of teen boys texting on a library computer happened to be exactly six months since her trip to the hospital. She had followed through on her vow to get back in shape, using the treadmill, rowing machine and free weights which had been gathering dust ever since her father had become ill.

She was glad she'd left the pieces of exercise equipment in the basement of the house she had inherited instead of selling them; she never liked working out in a public setting like a gym, and wasn't sure she'd have even gotten started if she'd had to share a workout space when she was at her heaviest. Even alone at home she stuck with baggy sweats when working out.

The six months had been enough time for Megan to lose most of the weight she had set out to get rid of. She was more than satisfied with the change in her appearance, knowing that the few pounds she was still above her goal were probably a result of added muscle. She was more fit than she had been since her days as a cheerleader in high school, and fit easily in the pre weight gain clothes which had been banished to the back of a closet. Besides her exercise regimen, she overhauled her eating habits, eliminating the foods that had gotten her into trouble.

Celebrating her achievement with a rare treat, a bowl of ice cream after her nightly workout, Megan could hardly believe anything could taste so good; six months without giving in to the ever present temptation to devour a tub of mint chocolate chip made her enjoy it even more than usual. She was still savoring her treat when she remembered she had planned on checking out the texting website the boys had been focused on.

She took her dessert from the kitchen to her desk and turned her laptop on. She entered the site's address in her browser; the home page was different than the page one of the boys had shown her, giving three options, Text, Video and Unfiltered.

She clicked on the Text link first, and was relieved to see the same basic text interface she'd seen the boys using earlier. She tried the Video link next, and was confused by what she saw. There was still an area for text, but most of the screen was filled by two windows, much like the video conferencing software she used at work. One window was filled with an image provided by her laptop's camera of her and her home office in the background, but the other window showed what looked like someone's living room.

Her confusion increased when the second window changed to a live view of a street scene, apparently in a different part of the world judging by the daylight! She was still trying to figure out what she was seeing a few seconds later as the image changed again, this time showing a pair of pre-teen girls sitting on a couch, staring at their camera, waving and giggling.

Still not quite grasping how the website worked, Megan clicked on the Unfiltered link, watching as the same basic layout came up on her laptop's screen. The first screen showed the same view as before, showing her own confused face. The other window was a different thing entirely, still cycling between various scenes but now mostly featuring an assortment of images thoroughly unsuitable for the library!

There were naked men, a few naked women, and several close up views of men masturbating! In less than two minutes Megan saw more cocks, erect and otherwise, than she had in her whole life up to that moment, even counting the one day on their honeymoon she had let Scott coax her into trying out the resort's nude beach!

Megan was so stunned by the flesh on display in the second window she forgot all about her own appearance in the first one. It was only when she noticed a series of comments popping up alongside the image of her that it fully dawned on her that the man slowly stroking his cock in window number two was able to see her! The comments wasted no time in making clear what the owner of the good-sized hard-on was hoping for.

"Show boobs!" was the entirety of his first message.

She wasn't sure why, but she automatically went ahead and answered the request, "No!" The flat rejection didn't seem to faze the man, who let loose a barrage of what seemed more like orders than requests.

"Show me!"

"Show!"

"Strip!"

"Boobs"

When there was finally a pause in the rapid-fire series of requests to see her body, she repeated her simple response, this time in all caps, "NO. WHY WOULD I?"

Despite technically having just asked the stranger a question, she decided that she didn't really want to get into a debate about showing her body. She reached for the button to click her viewer away, but hesitated a second as the latest comment from the guy onscreen popped up, "everything here is random and anonymous, so WHY NOT?"

Megan closed the browser and shut down her computer, shaken by the knowledge that minors may have been visiting this part of the site right under her nose in the library. She was also disturbed by having been even briefly visible on several stranger's screens; being anonymous meant not knowing whose body parts she'd been seeing, but it also meant she couldn't be certain she hadn't been seen by someone she knew!

The morning after she learned what the video chat site was about she made sure to block the site from being accessed with the Library's public wi-fi network. The three teen boys she had first noticed using the site came into the library after school; she kept an eye on them, but didn't have to wait long to get a pretty good idea what they had been up to before. They had been spending at least an hour at the computer the previous few afternoons, but were gone in less than 15 minutes now that their favorite website wasn't available!

Megan's blocking of the unacceptable website only affected the wi-fi available to the public, and she didn't get around to adding it to the admin wi-fi blocked list until it was time to close the library. She locked up and went back to her office to make sure the lewd website was blocked everywhere in the library. Before walling it off she opened the site one last time. She steered clear of the Unfiltered section, focusing on the Video link. "Someone must be supervising this part of the site," she thought, "there's no nasty stuff in this section." She actually enjoyed the G-rated section, with its wide variety of scenes, many clearly from all around the world.

Arriving at home a few days after the excitement of the inappropriate website, Megan made herself dinner, as usual. Something she'd heard on the radio about an earthquake in Pakistan made her think about views of the affected area she had seen at the family friendly section of the random video website. After she finished cleaning up in the kitchen she put off her usual exercise to see what views of far off places the website might offer. She sat down at the desk in her home office and turned on her laptop. She was at the website in a moment, careful to avoid the Unfiltered area.

Her experiment with scrolling through live streams at the inoffensive part of the site was fairly successful, with some interesting sights and a few actual conversations with people at various countries! The general tone was far more polite than what she'd experienced at the Unfiltered section, though the sight of a slim woman in a dressy blouse and skirt did result in a rude comment or two.

One night Megan ventured into the Unfiltered area (staying out of camera range) to see if her earlier experience there had been typical of its tone. It had. She did cross paths with a few people who seemed normal enough at first, but hardly any of them made it beyond two or three lines of chat before insisting on knowing if she was Male or Female.

She found the overwhelmingly Male users almost always cut off the chat immediately if she claimed to be Male too, but when she admitted she was Female, the vast majority of men turned predatory, DEMANDING visual proof of her gender, the more graphic the better. Though annoyed by their coarse behavior,she did feel some sympathy for the men pestering her. She could understand people, even rude ones, wanting to know what the gender of the person they were chatting with was, especially in the no-holds-barred world of the Unfiltered area!

Her evening routine was soon adjusted to include some time devoted to what Megan called her "low-budget world tour." As long as they didn't get too rude she wasn't at all bothered by a flirtatious tone a few men took, noticing some differences in how men in different parts of the world reacted to seeing her on their screen.

Even a little bit of flirtation from strangers was better than what she was experiencing in real life, surrounded as she was by married men. Several months into her new fitness program, her more toned look was earning her some attention, at least as much from the married men in town as the single ones. She noticed she was being noticed and enjoyed the attention; it had been so long since she'd been aware of her looks drawing interest she didn't much care who was doing the admiring.

Her weight loss gave her a perfect excuse to go shopping, as well as to update her style a bit as well. Her old outfits tended to be fairly dowdy, in part because when she began her career she had tried to dress in a more mature woman's style, thinking she would be taken more seriously than an inexperienced 23 year old. Now in her late 30's and established in her profession, she could, within reason, dress as she pleased.

Out went the heavy, shapeless sweaters, skirts ending well below the knee, turtlenecks and other matronly clothes. In their place came lightweight skirts which fell a few inches above her knees, fitted button-down blouses, silk camisoles, leggings and other items which helped bring her the sidelong glances she was coming to enjoy. She never looked less than professional in her new outfits, but was no longer anybody's idea of matronly.

Megan noticed that certain clothing choices seemed to draw more comments from her online acquaintances than others, generally not rude, but definitely showing more interest in her appearance. The combination of leggings, a scoop-neck t-shirt and a lightweight less than fully buttoned dress shirt seemed to be the outfit most popular with her video chat partners. She tried different combinations, none extreme or showing any significant skin. The trends were clear; fewer layers were more popular than many, and form-fitting was more popular than baggy.

One Friday night Megan inadvertently opened an investigation in a whole other area of how her video chat audience might react to her different clothing choices. She was wearing what was usually one of her less commented on outfits, a denim skirt with a black cotton button-down blouse. Even at work she never buttoned the top two buttons on this blouse; at that level there was no sign of cleavage or a bra.

As she often did when relaxing at home, she unfastened another couple of buttons as she made her dinner, enjoying a glass of Cabernet. She nursed a second, more full glass as she ate a bowl of fettuccine. "What the hell, it's Friday night and I'm not driving anywhere," she thought as she cleaned up, seeing that there was less than a glass of the dark red wine left in the bottle. She poured what was left into her glass and moved on to her nightly random video tour.

Somewhere between some tourist's live streaming of their visit to the Taj Mahal and a student at a college in England complaining of being bored, another button became unfastened. With only the lowest three buttons still fastened, the resulting gap between the two sides of Megan's blouse grew to show a few inches of her bra.

This particular T-shirt bra was about as plain a one as she owned. It was solid, gray, and covered as much as any bra she owned, but when a batch of comments came up on her screen complimenting it she finally tuned in to the fact she was now offering random viewers a peek at her lingerie! She quickly buttoned back up to her workplace look and shut down her laptop.

Over the weekend Megan kept thinking about the inadvertent and fairly limited flash of her bra to some random users of the website, "it couldn't have been any more than 45 minutes, but I got a week's worth of comments," she thought. The fact that the glimpse she had shown brought nothing but praise, combined with the fact that none of the commenters had the slightest clue who she was or where she lived made the episode seem harmless enough. "Imagine if I'd been wearing one of my sexier bras instead of the plain vanilla one I had on Friday," she mused.

Once the question of how her chat partners might react differently to a flash of a less basic bra came to her, it kept returning all day Sunday. She was certain the sight of the same amount of a briefer, lacier or less opaque bra would get a bigger reaction, so there wasn't much to be learned by showing off a bit of one of her sexier bras the same way she'd shown off the plain one the other night. To even think of putting herself on display that way she needed at least a hint of learning by doing research to justify the project.

The basic idea for an experiment which could actually result in new knowledge finally took shape on Monday as she was walking to work. She assumed a view of a more exotic bra would get a bigger reaction than a view of a similar amount of a plain bra would; by comparing the reaction to the sight of a small amount of her in a sexier bra to varying amounts of her in a plainer bra being visible she could arrive at a ratio of viewer interest in hot bra to plain bra, as judged by an unknowing multinational panel of voters!