Not Just A Blob Pt 08

This story follows the short descriptive tales of the Blob, a fictional alien character, based in a post war-time, 1960's-esque civilisation. Miranda, a buxom girl of big heart and even bigger breasts, and her friend, Jane, a small and stout beauty of dark hair and hypnotisingly striking features, find discarded barrels of alien fluid. Overcome by the mind controlling power of the alien essence, the two girls mate, being assimilated into the first of a new race of slave women designed for only two purposes until their demise; to spread the precious will sapping fluid to every other human they can find, and give birth to humanoid aliens bred with the genetic ability to survive in Earth's climate.

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PART 8

The Filly Catches on

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Cassandra was sitting in her dorm at the table with her stable-mates, Jackie and Rose. Rosie, in her usual pious way, was sitting flatly in her chair, sipping on some tea and mending a hole she'd torn in the underarm of her undershirt the shift earlier, reaching to help contain a patient that shouldn't have been able to move. As a lover of order and cleanliness, Rosie was only satisfied enough to relax and rest when her uniform was in proper order. Despite how objectifying the women's uniforms were, Rosie took great pride in hers, and, perhaps in her own way, it paid off for her. Rosie had to be one of the only women there over eighteen who had had very few, if none at all, forced encounters with the dominant male doctors and specialists employed in the building. If she had, she didn't talk about it and her pristine uniform certainly didn't show it.

Jackie, Rosie's diametric opposite, sat slumped in her chair, a smoke hanging from the corner of her lips. She spread her legs wide, man-spread style, and her free hand dangled between them lazily in stereotypical fashion. She wore only her undershirt, her out-jacket flopped over the stiff chair back in a vein effort to help cushion the solidity of the appliance in her back, while her shoes and socks were gone and her top untucked from her pants. Her light-pink underwear was just visible peeking past the hem of her pants.

Unlike most of the women at the hospital facility, Jackie wore tight, plan white pants not unlike white jeans or skin-tight cargo pants. Not being a nurse, Jackie, and about twenty-or-so other women and men at the hospital, were part of the maintenance team, a group tasked with the upkeep of the mechanical, electrical and general physical integrity of the place. Equipped with their wired mic and earphone kits and a over-shoulder-and-belt tool belt kit, if the crew weren't buried to their waists in a wall cavity, underneath in the basements sealing leaks or behind a desk or theatre control panel soldering a new switch to a circuit board, they were rushing about the halls and floors towards the next repair job. Either through higher skills in applied repairs over nursery or simply through being unfit to nurse, the team had grown to become a busy but integral part of the hospital's upkeep and a valuable force of dirty-handed, grit-faced tough-nuts ready to get a job done so people could work and they could finish their shift. Of course, many of the more experienced team members remained on call, so while a shift might have a welcome end, each time one retired their rest was only as long as it took for something to go wrong again.

Cassandra, for her part, was the middle child in the group of three. The eldest of them all by a year and a month over Jackie, Cass had less unique traits to her name. A good nurse who worked hard, she rarely received important promotions and oftentimes overworked herself for little or no praise in return. She had had her fair share of male admirers and, while not specifically bisexual, saw her few relationships shared with women in her time as the best ones she had ever had, especially over any shared with a man. Sitting at the table with the others, Cass just rested, trying to relax the ache in her neck from bending over a patient that, for the best chance during surgery, had had to be laid on the floor in a mould-mattress. Cass had been holding the subject's body weight off his back and on his side for four hours and when she finally got to let go, she had practically retained the shape she'd been holding all the way back to her dorm.

It was late. The three girls were sitting around their small dorm table in the dim light of their room bulb, quiet and still. Rosie quietly clicked away with her needle, sewing up her pulled gash, while Jackie sprawled back in her chair, quietly dragging on her fag and trying to hold her head up from where she hung it over the seatback. Cass just sat and thought. This was one of the few times the three of them got to themselves and, while they were forced to share their alone time with two other people, they took the break from the high-speed, super-loud rush of medical emergencies whenever they could. Having one was better than having none at all.

Cassandra was a tall girl with a flat, even stomach and respectably vivacious bosom. Milky white skinned with an intricate multi-coloured dragon that wound its way up from the tail looped once around her ankle all the way up the outside of her body, past her breast and ended in a glaring, fierce head just above her jawbone, Cass was pretty in a common but stunning sort of way. She had an even height of around 5' 10'' and bore straight brown hair that licked about her shoulders and face with a seamless thin fringe and perfect eyebrows. Her eyes were a deep brown and they topped a fair nose speckled with thin freckles. Her lips ended in twin dimples that seemed to be the invisible pin-points for her permanent look of very cute contemplation, something complimented by her big wide eyes which glazed over and became even wider and softer when she did lose herself in thought.

Rosie, for her part, was a small girl, perhaps about 5' 6'', with a tiny frame and perky triangular breasts capped in thick, puffy nubs that often bore out through her tight top in the cold, an issue only worsened for her by the suspending force of the nurse's cup-less bustier-esque top-jacket which presented her oversized nubs even more frontward than her already perky bosom was. With a tiny waist and round bubble-butt, Rosie's pocket-sized form was small but infinitely cute. Otherwise quite plain, Rosie's hair was a shock of curly black hair and she wore thick glasses that made her already child-like appearance even more cartoonish. She forever adjusted her glasses atop her small nose as though they were constantly slipping from her face and would unconsciously perk her lips in a frowny grin as she did so, as though the act disturbed her, but only for as long as she did it before she forgot about it.

Jackie was, again, the exception. Unlike the others, she was not a nurse and her appearance echoed it. Tall and thin with a bosom only just perceptible in a nurse's tight shirt-and-out-jacket combo, Jackie's legs were thick and strong from running around the hospital and climbing the inside of elevator shafts, as were her arms which were uncharacteristically muscular for a woman of her weight. She was flat stomached and thin with curvaceous hips but her backside was plain and, while firm, uninteresting when much thicker, fatter ones were always available. She had a shock of dead-straight black hair that seemed to always be able to hang perfectly from her head bar one single lock that was always waiting on her hairline ready to drop into her face at any point it wanted and her blue eyes glowed out through the dark bordering her hair provided them, twin points of bright light. She had light olive skin and a charming symmetrical lick of freckles across the bridge of her thin nose. She liked to keep her hands in her pockets a lot and pursed her red lips in a thin serious line whenever there wasn't a smoke between them, which was any time she was off work.

All was peaceful in their dorm. With the single light and the ever-present rim glow from inside the phosphorus architraves, it was romantically dim and still. No one spoke, neither wanting to nor needing to. Each woman just relaxed, their respective days having taken their tolls on them, whether for tearing their uniform, working them too hard, or just having them exert themselves non-stop from shift start to shift finish. Jackie's smoke was absorbed by an exhaust vent above the table designed to negate the necessity for windows by exchanging air from the outside through ventilation both into and out of the room, saving the other two women from inhaling the innocuous fumes. Though cigarettes were rid of any physically harmful chemicals decades ago, illegal harmful supplies still found their way into pockets and, in an effort to not completely strangle sales opportunities, all efforts had been made to maintain the sensation and experience of smoking, down to the taste and texture of the exhaled smoke.

The girls sat quietly, the dimly glowing holographic clock in the wall washing over to ten pm. A subtle sensation seemed to hang in the room, of safety and warmth. It was relaxing, and as each girl began to tire from their long day, they felt their muscles letting go and their aches beginning to unknot in their tendons and joints. A minute ticked past and like that it was 22:05, then 22:10. When at last Rosie set down her needle and raised her wrists to the air above, yawning wide and long, the air seemed to cool and the girls all realised how tired they were feeling. Cass stretched and stifled a yawn herself as she stood up, groaning as her thighs and calves protested the act. Jackie picked up the butt of her cigarette from the floor where she'd let it drop and rubbed her neck with a grimace as she realised that lying back on the chair so much hadn't been a great idea for her spine.

A beeping rang out and Cass turned to look at Jackie. Jackie rolled her eyes and swore at no one in particular before reaching for her beltline and twisting a switch on a unit clipped there.

'Seven-seven, are you there? Repeat seven-seven, Jackie we need your help over here. We're on floor four, eastern elevator shaft, man. Someone's managed to get the lift stuck down the bottom again and no one can get in, they're forcing more weight onto the other lifts instead of waiting. You know the routine, Stickie, sorry but we need you for this one.'

The call came out of the small speaker in the unit's side and ended just as Jackie clicked the cable for her headset in, wrapping the sleek compact earpiece and mic around her ear once more from where it had been dangling from its cable hanging out of the neck of her shirt. Jackie didn't bother saying anything and just gave the others a tight but friendly wave as she strode to the door and left, mumbling a complaint as she went. They watched her go quietly.

'Jee, she sure does get called out a lot.' Rosie said softly. Cassandra nodded to herself and patted her stomach.

'Yep, sure does. That's the Techies though, always on call.' Techies was the nickname the staff gave to the tech crew Jackie was a part of. 'But she's not called Sticks for no reason, I guess they wouldn't call her if they didn't need her after the shift she's just run today.'

Jackie had been given the nickname amongst the tech crew, Stickie or Sticks, because of her thin, flat frame. When a section of the hospital suffered compression failure between two foundation bulkheads in the lowest basement, the techies had put remote expansion charges in to take over supporting the weight of the hospital in that section of the floor, but one had failed. A hundred and fifty metres away from an access hatch the size of a pizza pan, none of the bigger men had been able to fit and - no one said it out loud but they all knew it, it was as plain as, well, tits on a bull - none of the girls had been 'small' enough to make the run either.

Except for Jackie.

While they might have made it through the manhole, the failed jack in question was wedged on the other side of a thin gap in two damaged bulkheads. Younger and even thinner then, Jackie had made the dangerous call to make the journey herself and had not only fit through the hatch easily but had been able to slide down the entire distance between the inwardly shattered foundations and resolder sheared wiring that had been cut when a patch of lose concrete had driven its edge into them that afternoon. It took her ten minutes and twelve seconds. After pulling her out of the access hatch, she and the crew around her immediately noticed that part of her shirt and pants had been scraped away, revealing the slightest edge of areola to the open air, something Jackie quickly covered up with her hands, trying to check for any on her backside that might be even more revealing before one of the guys draped an oversized coat around her shoulders, sparing her embarrassment.

Later, Jackie would tell of how the gap between the bulkheads, brittle and sharp, the solid concrete having shattered inwards towards each other, had only just been wide enough for her body to fit through, even forcing her to exhale completely to drag her contracted chest past an extra-tight scar in the foundations. Then, thanks to the rubble, the compression charge had been shunted further away and had been sheared from the cabling, so she had had to clear away massive boulders and drag a hundred-kilo jack backwards to the correct position before she could solder the connections and return through the Jackie-sized slot in the bowels of the hospital to the manhole. No wonder her shirt had been ripped, they agreed with her. Jackie had had her body pressed so tightly in a gap as big as she was that the jagged concrete had sliced through her clothes. Young and fresh to the crew, from that day onwards Jackie had been called by her nickname Sticks for her thin but strong frame and ability to fit in tiny spaces. No one made fun of her torn clothes, nor did they doubt her toughness and determination to get the job done. She had earned her place in the Techies. She was one of the team now.

Yawning again, Cassandra and Rosie turned in for the night. It was late, just after ten thirty, and while Rosie's shift began at eight the next day, Cass's would begin at ten to six and she was already too tired to stay away as it was. Numbly, Rosie set down her needle and shirt on the table, never noticing it fully, her brain set on sleep now. Cass went over to the sink in the corner of the room, drowsily unbuttoned her shirt and discarded it into a basket behind her, sitting outside the small, wall-less tiled wash area. She ran the tap and wetted a face towel, running it over her face and hair and tucking it under her arms, rubbing away her day's sweat. She let it soak and used her still wet hands to unzip and drop her skirt to the tiles before washing her body, tucking the edge of the towel around her bra and underwear but not bothering to take them off. When she was done, she adjusted her straps, jostled her panties about to get them comfortable once more and rinsed down the sink after her, tossing the wet towel into the basket after the shirt.

Cass padded across the carpet to the triple-sized bunk bed they shared and climbed the steep but soft stairs that led up to her level. Embedded in a cut-out in the ceiling, Jackie's bed sat on the ground level at a normal height, while Cassandra's was just inside the encompassing edge of the cut out and, high above her, Rosie's bed was up inside the ceiling, perhaps the most private sleeping space of the three. Though hers was the hottest from the effect of warm air rising, it was also edged on all sides by the walls and accessed only by the compact stairwell from below. It even featured its own rim lighting since, unlike Cass and Jackie who were level with or below the rest of the room's rim lights respectively, her bunk would be almost always in complete darkness without them.

On the wall side of the bunks stood a tall shelf that reached the entire way up into the ceiling cavity and inside it was built a myriad of multi-sized drawers, shelves, cupboards and units. Designed to be each girl's personal storage space, they could keep any personal belongings they might own in them and each had a specially made shelf with clips and holders for charging their work devices, from smart-pagers to porta-screens, phones to torches and for things like Jackie's radio, as well as individually plumbed water dispensers and an automatically refilled supply of painkillers with regulated authenticated access by computer to prevent overdosing.

Outside in the room proper there was little more space. With the room being perhaps twice as wide as the sleeping cut-out in the ceiling, there was enough room inside it for a rounded table to sit three and shielded cut out areas dedicated to a sink, a shower and a laundry. On the smallest edge or the room - at the foot of the bunks - stood three large lockers and in these the girls would store their work clothes and tools. Each locker was internally serviced by an automatic refreshing system that cycled fresh, disinfectant-and-deodoriser-infused air through them whenever the doors were closed and the system helped to keep each set of uniforms clean enough to wear throughout the wash cycles. Perhaps the only system not fuelled by automation was the cleaners who came around weekly and collected the plastic baskets of dirty clothes and towels for refreshing. Even the baskets had self-contained fresheners in them that wicked odour and wetness from the fabric and stored them in compressed filter pads which were cleaned each week with the clothes.

Much of the rooms inside the living level of the hospital were fashioned this way. Tiny in terms of width but high, these designs were made possible by the extra-large porous concrete designed a century before as a revolutionary new material that could resist vibration, shock, damaging wind and rain and even radiation. The downside to the material's near-indestructible integrity was that it took much more width to be effective. This, however, did not stop each individual building's designers from realising that, while the walls should be made from the safe minimum thickness, the internal walls could afford to be shrunk, cut into or altered to allow for unique spacing and optimisation of structure. It was thanks to this resistive material that the nurses in the hospital could have their own compact but tall rooms, as well as being the reason the hospital, designed and built years after the town around it, had survived the horrific fallout that had decimated much of human kind.

As Cassandra went to her bed between Jackie's empty bunk and Rosie's waiting top level, Rosie stood from her chair and gently placed her finger femininely on a tile just inside the largest, and emptiest, tiled space. As she stepped onto the tiles proper a shimmering wall glistened into place behind her, forming the two missing walls siding off the shower alcove. A few moments after the fields materialised, they smoothly turned from invisibility to a milky opaqueness, obscuring Rosie from view inside the area. Seconds later, a shirt sliced perfectly through the shield, the light wall breaking in perfect shape with the shirt, showing nothing around the edges and forming instantly back behind it faster than was visible. A short while after, Rosie's skirt followed suit, appearing from inside the shower, followed in turn by her socks, bra, and finally her panties. The water began to flow from a previously retracted ceiling spout and before long steam was being vented out around the gap in the ceiling made to house the shower head, sucked up and away through the fresh air system.

Cass sat back on the bed, herself stripping too. Once in her bed, she removed her underwear in the comfort of the privacy her bed was given by the level edge of the ceiling. Though not completely obscuring her from view, her mattress was positioned on the frame so that only someone standing just past the edge of the bed would be able to see her. Anyone further out into the room would be able to see the bottom of its frame only. Tossing her worn undergarments into her bedside drawer where she'd take them from in the morning and dump in the cleaning basket, she settled down under her sheets and gazed silently up at Rosie's empty mattress, the romantic warm glow of the rim lights glowing all around the small girl's bed frame.