Copyright 2015, 2021 Lisa Summers
All characters depicted in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Sometimes Evil doesn't get punished.
Sometimes Evil takes over the world.
And FIT is oh, so Good at being Evil!
Chapter 1
It had been two weeks since Samantha Crowder met Erin Rider at Java Joe's, and one week since the cute young girl had "shpritzed" her body spray on the receptionist's wrist. From that moment on, Samantha's life had begun to change radically. Her wild, sexual dreams had become part of her actual life, confusing her, but also invigorating her until the mysterious Erin actually came to see her. Their lust-filled coupling and the instructions that Erin gave Samantha set her on course for a new and different life.
Chapter 2
An inner office door slammed open, and an angry but dignified looking woman in her forties with short black hair, slowly put on her suit jacket as she walked stiffly toward the exit, passing through a nicely appointed lobby as she did. On the wall behind a receptionist's desk was a sign, individually hand carved cherry letters spelling out, "Beginnings Fertility Clinic." In smaller letters on a plaque under it was carved, "Where Your Family's Life Begins." She was followed by an attractive older blonde woman of about fifty, disappointment written on her attractive face.
"I'm sorry I was forced to make that decision, but there was really no choice," the older woman said quietly. "We'll mail your last check to your home...You may not return to these offices again." She was the epitome of calm, but there was an underlying anger, too. She turned and walked back to her office, not looking back, as the black-haired woman stood staring in disbelief at the older woman's back, then she, too, turned and entered the open elevator door, stabbing at the button.
Silence once again reigned in the lobby, as two young women who had been frozen watching the drama, shifted their positions.
"What was that about?" asked the smaller of the two, petite Chinese-American Lihua Chen, as she stood talking with Samantha Crowder, the tall, blonde receptionist at Beginnings Fertility Clinic in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
Samantha winced. "I knew that was coming," she said. "Alexandra Neuwes, the Director, you know of course. The woman who was just fired is - was - Betty Linden from Marketing. She had a proposal for Alexandra to endorse Michael Bloggins, the Republican candidate for Mayor of New York."
"Yeah, so?" Lihua responded. "Wouldn't a fertility clinic usually support one of those 'pro-family, I'm not weird' types of candidates...you know, someone button down and straight laced?"
"Oh sure," Samantha replied. "But Bloggins' wife once had an abortion when she was a teen. That's enough to sour Alexandra on Bloggins, no matter what his position is on anything else. She is absolutely dead set against abortions, anytime, for any reason."
"That sounds pretty restrictive," Lihua said. "She seemed pretty calm about the whole firing thing, though. I've seen bosses get a lot angrier than that."
"That's the angriest I've ever seen Alexandra," said Samantha. "She's always on an even keel, never emotional." She shrugged. "But this is a fertility clinic after all, plus it's a personal thing with Alexandra. I'm not really sure why." She shrugged. "All I know is, if she thinks anyone here is in favor of abortions - under any circumstances - that person's gonna be gone. Betty isn't the first person here to run afoul of that unspoken rule."
"Hi, ladies, what's going on?" A deep male voice asked, as a handsome thirty-something man in a nicely tailored sport coat and slacks entered the lobby from the hallway leading to the clinical area. Dr. Vince Barton was a contract physician who worked at Beginnings twenty hours a week supervising most medical procedures. Lihua looked at him appreciatively, but Samantha ignored him.
"Oh...apparently Betty Linden from Marketing ran afoul of Alexandra. She just got booted," Lihua said.
"Yeah, I heard something like that was coming," he said. "Too bad, she's a nice lady."
"Yeah?" responded Lihua. It was a poorly kept secret that Vince was working his way through Beginnings' female staff. Lihua barely knew him since she was so new, but she wouldn't have been surprised if he'd chat her up at some point.
"So...Samantha, what's going on in your life?" he said as he turned the full force of his magnetic personality on the attractive receptionist, in what Lihua could tell was his oily pick up opening line. She wondered at what point his eyes would actually lift up from Samantha's breasts.
"Nothing much," she said, then looked at the clock on the wall by the elevator, "Oh look at that, I've got to get going, I've got a personal appointment at three." Vince and Lihua looked pained, and Samantha was smiling broadly.
Lihua piped up. "Oh right, I'm supposed to cover for you - can I visit the ladies room, first, I won't be long..."
"Sure," replied Samantha. "And don't forget to wash your hands and use hand sanitizer. Alexandra always preaches that as a medical facility we must avoid spreading germs. And you don't want to make her mad, right?" She smiled at Lihua, ignoring Vince. Lihua grinned back. Apparently Samantha was mad at Vince about something, or just wasn't interested in what he was selling.
Looking at the door to the elevator and thinking of Betty Linden's day, Lihua said, "Definitely not." As she walked off towards the ladies room, Lihua saw Vince turn hesitantly back to Samantha as if to say something more, then apparently changed his mind, as he was gone by the time that she got back to the lobby.
When she returned, Lihua said, "Okay, take your time, anything that keeps me from my witch of a roommate, Leslie." Samantha glanced at Lihua.
"Not getting along?"
Lihua shook her head. "We're totally mismatched, two completely different personalities. One of us will be moving out within a month or so, I imagine."
Samantha shrugged, heading into the open elevator. "Good luck with that."
"Thanks," responded Lihua, but her words were spoken to a closing elevator door.
Lihua sat down and took her place at the reception desk. As a recently hired junior accountant at Beginnings, Lihua was usually called on to cover for other non-medical staffers when she wasn't doing her own work. "Good luck," she called out absently to the closed elevator door.
Lihua reviewed the company directory again, if and when she got a call or a walk-in. There were thirteen medical staff at Beginnings, ten women and three men, plus Dr. Vince. Lihua was the product of a tiger mom, and felt as though she, and everything that she was responsible for, had to be perfect at all times. Unfortunately, with Lihua, being perfect at some things meant that she was terrible at others, like understanding Leslie's point of view.
Her roommate Leslie Banner, on the other hand...well, best not to think ill of someone. But Leslie was really far too laid back about cleaning and organizing their apartment, and didn't seem to care about Li's feelings. Lihua, or Li as her friends called her, was currently focused on her studies for grad school, but didn't consider cleaning as something beneath her.
"If I could have read Leslie's mind when we talked about rooming together, I never would have done it," she thought. Li and Leslie had known each other at NYU, but only remotely and were rapidly learning that there were more threats than threads to their friendship.
Chapter 3
As for Samantha, currently striding along the wide city sidewalk, she completely ignored all distractions. She was on her way to a co-op office building three blocks away, for the most important appointment of her life to date. The office building on 11th Ave was nondescript, as many in that area are. She took the elevator to the fifth floor, pushing the button several times, as if that would lend speed to her ascent. Exiting the elevator at her floor, she found an anonymous wooden door in an otherwise completely empty small foyer, with an engraved placard next to the door that read, "Annex," and a small security camera set off to the side.
Samantha pressed a small doorbell like buzzer. The camera swiveled toward her, paused, and then a pleasant set of chimes sounded to let her know that the door lock had been released. When she entered, the door closing firmly behind her, it was as though she had jetted halfway across the world to a decadent salon of Paris.
There were perhaps a dozen women in an open area of approximately 1,000 square feet or so, decorated much as one would imagine the boudoir of a French courtesan of the late 1800s might have been, although much updated for modern tastes. The older women, those in their 40s to 60s, were mainly attired in long, loose flowing robes like caftans, many diaphanous or even quite obviously transparent. The younger women, composing roughly half in attendance, and ranging in age from eighteen to their early thirties, were wearing short chemises or pegnoirs, again diaphanous at the most modest, and two were completely naked.
There were comfortable settees and divans scattered about in what must have been some positive feng shui, but to Samantha it all just seemed random but convenient. In addition to the sitting areas, there was a quiet pool fed by a lovely fountain in the form of a beautiful, gowned woman in marble, water pouring from a basket that she held. Samantha was informed that it was a statue of Sappho of Lesbos, and now you and I know that too.
There was another pool across the room from that, a jacuzzi, heated and bubbling away silently but no less merrily for the lack of sound. Soft chamber music floated throughout, seemingly whispering into the attendees' ears sweet melodies, but also subliminally reminding the women of the magnificence and beauty of womanly life and love - not that they needed it, but FIT believed that everyone, everywhere must be persuaded in one of the thousands of forms of persuasion that exist on this earth, that they, the members of Females Inherit Terra, or as it was known outside of their own world, Family Interactions Therapists, would soon rule all of the earth. That, after every single woman on earth had become a lesbian, and every male was dead.
Persuasion as a means to an end for the ladies of FIT consisted of mainly pleasant, though devious means for the women who had not yet been converted, and of deadly, usually fatal encounters for males - all males. The Annex, the salon she had just entered, was used both for training new FIT agents in means of seduction, and as a rest haven for the active FIT agents in the Brooklyn area.
Women in FIT were initially converted by infecting them with a virus solution which had been created decades before, in Australia, completely by accident. It had the wonderful effect - to the mind of the converted, anyway - of changing the thought patterns of females, completely remapping their brains so that they were totally dedicated to converting every other woman to the new way of being.