A short time later...

It started on a Saturday like any other. After Dale went flaccid halfway through his morning blowjob (she knew to just kept going until he stopped her), Jenna made him breakfast then headed out to meet her friend Ruby for lunch.

Jenna took a moment to savor the cool breeze of the early spring morning. She took a deep, slow breath. Dale liked his "Dale time" afterwards. He'd never said anything, but she understood implicitly that following a failed oral sex session most men would prefer to eat their eggs alone.

Which meant that this time was hers. She and Ruby were lucky to be married to guys that took care of them at all, and Dale and Jim actively encouraged them to develop a social life. Letting your servants make friends was the latest yuppie fad. Last summer it was mushroom logs.

Jenna chuckled remembering the weird high-res fungus photos that flooded social media for a couple of months, and adjusted her G-string. This trend definitely had better visuals. She smiled at the thought until her eyes locked with a young woman crossing the street about a block in front of her.

I should leave her alone.

Jenna stopped and put her hand against a lamppost. She had a sudden swirling vertigo in her soul. This... this was something new. A whole other- her eyes fixed on the woman, who was nervously making her way towards Jenna. She looked different somehow. She had a strangely apathetic gait. It didn't look like the short-lived and cartoonish return of 90's slacker fashion from last summer. Flannel and fucking mushroom logs.

No, she looked like a robot, or like she was being literally physically controlled from a microchip stimulating nervous responses from inside her brain. Not the dead eyes of drones without jobs or the ecstatic depths of the esoterically devoted. No, her eyes held... agency?

The woman was hurriedly rushing through the light uptown crowd of brunchers, and in an instant she was around the corner and out of sight.

"Just leave her alone," Jenna whispered. She didn't notice the similarly stunned, frozen silence of a handful of others in the crowd. Her eyes scanned the back of her hands. Dale's hands. And her hands.

"Ah!" she shouted, and jumped back. She looked up to see a few passerbys staring curiously at her. She felt the usual pulsing in the back of her self, keeping track of all the men nearby, ready to jump into action of any of them needed it. Unless it harmed her.

She suppressed her outburst this time, covering her mouth with her trembling palm. She took another deep breath, closed her eyes and pictured Dale. The cthonic waters stilled. There was something there, though. Not Dale, not any of the men around her, not a man at all. This thing was uncertain and strange and she felt herself coming completely unmoored from the world around her. She spun on her heels, instantly forgetting about Ruby and her plans and Dale's recovering ego.

Jenna needed her "Dale time".