Chain Store Tyrant

Melissa Chambers was having another great day. After cracking down on yet another lazy employee by giving them an earful about how lucky they should feel to have their job, she set about her usual task: Checking over the store for flaws. Sure, May’s Books may have been part of a national chain, but she was going to make her store the best in the chain.

After checking to ensure everything was clean, she patrolled around, returning to looking for anything out of a place, or an unproductive employee. Melissa knew her employees hated her, but she didn’t care. There was simply too much to do if she was to stay on top of the retail game.

“Melissa Chambers?” A feminine voice asked behind her. “I think you need to come with me.”

Hearing that caused Melissa to turn around, and come face to face with a woman that looked like an inspector. But why would her business be getting inspected? She had been doing quite well by the numbers corporate set out, and official inspections had been passed months ago. What was this about?

“Who are you?” Melissa asked. “I don’t know who you are, so I definitely won’t be going with you. Besides, I’m not going anywhere while my shop needs me.”

In response the woman flashed a badge showing her to be a plainclothes detective, named Paisley. But that just begged questions. What in the world had Melissa done to earn this attention?

“Ms. Chambers, we have reports that you unlawfully terminated an employee on a spurious basis,” Paisley continued. “Also that you fired this employee for the way he removed an old woman harassing a child?”

Melissa sighed as she remembered an incident she’d rather forget. “Look, I didn’t fire him over that. I fired him over-”

“A pre-textual reason,” Paisley interrupted. “You have no evidence he was sexually harassing anyone, or was committing any type of sexual crime. The evidence you claimed you had was a lie, because you claimed to have cameras where you didn’t.”

“How do you know any of that?” Melissa’s question revealed herself, but she felt helpless to respond any other way. “Who are you to say any of that? Who are you to-”

Before Melissa could continue her rant, she disappeared. Her employees would feel a sense of relief throughout the day, but be unable to understand why, only the sense that a tyrant was gone...

“You said you had issues at work?” Paisley asked. “About your boss, Melissa?”

“Melissa Chambers, or Ms. Chambers, both of which she insisted on,” Max said. “She can be very nosy, which as you might guess, is a rather poor fit for my condition.”

“Sounds like there’s a story there Max,” Paisley said. “Was it like what happened with Hanna?”

“Surprisingly enough, yes,” Max said. “She banged at the door while I was masturbating. Something about me taking too long of a bathroom break.”

“Did she discover you masturbating like Hanna?” Paisley asked. “It hopefully wouldn’t go as badly seeing as you aren’t in high school…”

“No, it just ruined my orgasm,” Max said. “And meant I was frustrated, then distracted at work. Also…”

Max trailed off for a bit before he continued, as he had to think through earlier advice given to him by Paisley. “… you told me recently that to have a healthy relationship, someone had to accept the horny side of me. How in the world could that happen in the workplace?”

“That’s an excellent question Max,” Paisley said. “Let me start with that in some cases, the best you’re going to get is someone accepting the horny side of you.”

“Wait, that’s not like last time,” Max interjected. “You said they had to… enjoy my condition, from the way you were talking about it.”

“It’s good to know you’re listening Max,” Paisley beamed. “However, I said something radical like that to you, because you need people who go beyond just tolerating your condition, and from what I can tell, that’s the best you’ve gotten.”

“What about my folks?” Max asked. “For that matter, what about you?”

“I’m sure your parents love you Max,” Paisley said. “However, I would remind you that they put you on drugs that made you suicidal, and stunted your puberty, because of your condition. As for me…”

The pause said something Max had chosen to forget. That Paisley was, at the end of the day, in a transactional relationship with him. She was not his friend, she was his therapist, and at the end of the day, that was a relationship paid for by his parents.

“...well, I can see you remember,” Paisley finished. “Otherwise, tell me, honestly, whether anyone in your life has ever done more than tolerate your condition?”

If it wasn’t for the AC in the room, the sound of Max anxious breathing would’ve been heard. All the while, the same thoughts spiraled in his head about how his condition had isolated him, about how everyone in his life seemed to tear away from him when they found out about it, or at best kept the kind of polite distance that one keeps from a sick man. Was that what he was?

It took everything for Max to say, “I think just you. And for you it’s a professional thing, a curiosity and a paycheck.”

“It kind of has to be Max,” Paisley said. “But it worries me how long that took for you to say. We’ve gone over a lot of people in your life, and we can’t find anyone who really accepts your condition. Someday therapy ends, and when that happens, you need to be able to build a relationship with someone that isn’t based on a transaction, or familial duty when it comes to your condition...”

“You ready Max?” Paisley asked. “Melissa Chambers is the next lady up for you to save.”

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” Max sighed. “Not that it seems to do much good for most.”

The hallway Max teleported to was one he was already sick of, despite having not been there that long. For once, he didn’t need to masturbate, but knew he would by the next contestant. Bitter experience had taught Max that his libido could sneak up on him if left unattended, even when talking with someone he hated.

So after jerking off, Max took a deep breath, and entered the bedroom once again. Looking at Melissa Chambers pacing around the bedroom, he paused to take in her body. She had all the signs of someone who stuck to a relentless fitness routine, given her health and surprising amount of muscle. It certainly made her ass quite nicely sculpted, and the rest of her body followed suit. In general, Melissa looked like a soccer mom if she worked out a lot, while not having quite the level of breast size Max often preferred. They were average, although he didn’t dare guess bra size because he knew that could vary a lot by brand.

Shaking his head to clear out a pile of immature fantasies, Max introduced himself to Melissa. “Ms. Chambers, I’m sure you have a lot of questions, but please listen-”

“MAX!” Melissa whipped around to scream at him. “YOU’RE THE ONE THEY’RE MAKING ME INTO A SEX SLAVE FOR?”

The screaming was so loud that Max’s ears were ringing, and he was reminded why he hated dealing with Melissa Chambers. Besides being a hardass of a boss, everything he knew about her reinforced that she was a Karen, in every internet stereotype that existed because of that name. A nosy busybody who could never mind her own business, and screamed at a level sure to rupture eardrums whenever she didn’t get her way. All of that was combined with her being an arrogant manager, so she combined the worst traits of a Karen with the worst traits of every arrogant full of themselves employer in the United States in an unholy union sure to ruin anyone’s day.

“As I was saying, you need to convince me that you deserve to leave,” Max adopted the tone of a frustrated teacher dealing with a bratty child. “You are doing a terrible job of it so far, given that all you have done is scream at me. Oh, and fire me, but that’s apparently because you spy on employees in the bathroom.”

The irony of Melissa doing something as gross and perverted as watching her employees use the restroom wasn’t lost on Max. Perhaps she was just taking notes from Jeff Bezos on employee management.

“YOU SET THIS UP, SO LET ME GO!” Melissa continued to scream, this time getting up in Max’s face. “OR ARE YOU A RAPIST ON TOP OF BEING A PERVERT?”

How did this woman scream so loud, and for so long? Why did she insist on getting in his face?

“Believe me, if I could just let you go, I would,” Max built up to doing so. “Because if you think I want to spend even a single FUCKING MINUTE in your presence, you are sorely mistaken. So please, help me get you the fuck out of here so we can both go back to pretending the other doesn’t exist.”

What followed instead was several minutes of Melissa bitching at him about how unacceptable it was that she was there, about how he was a perverted rapist that deserved to be fired, and that she couldn’t wait for the police to arrive to arrest him so she could testify against him in court. All the while, other than wondering whether he was going to take permanent hearing damage, all Max could do was try, in futility, to think of reasons Paisley would accept to let her go, as he wasn’t going to get any out of her. This tirade went on until Max was blinked out of the room, and for all he knew, just kept going until her voice went out...

Paisley this time chose what looked like a catalog for her reading material, and was amused at Max’s arrival.

“Surprised you made it five minutes,” Paisley said, turning the page. “I guess you value your principles more than your eardrums.”

Once he had gotten closer, Max realized he was staring at a catalog advertising sex toys, although many of them seemed to have other effects. For instance, the page Paisley was on advertised butt plugs said to cause ass expansion, and to increase the enjoyment of anal sex. Another page advertised gags that induced oral fixation and semen addiction. The tagline of “For Hosts, by Hosts,” was on the catalog’s cover, just like he had seen earlier, but in this case, the catalog was called A Host’s Things.

“Oh forgive me Max,” Paisley said as he looked at the catalog, “I sometimes prefer things to be a little more analog. And otherwise, a host needs every tool she can get, at least while it’s in budget. Now, are you going to try to save someone who screamed at you for five minutes straight?”

The question shook Max out of his stupor, with the catalog reminding him of what was awaiting every single woman he failed. “Look, I’m not going to sit here and pretend I like Melissa, or that she’s a great person. However, from what I can tell, while she’s a bit fussy, and she fired me for a shitty reason, she isn’t that bad of a person in the scheme of things…”

Max trailed off as he saw Paisley look at him like a parent hearing their child explain why they had their hand in the cookie jar. It was a bizarre experience that reminded him of how ridiculous his situation was.

“Max, there was no camera in the restroom,” Paisley said while whisking away the catalog. “Now, you couldn’t have known that, but the actual reason you were fired was your actions with the old lady harassing a child.”

Before Max could respond, other than his eyes going wide, Paisley just barreled forwards.

“While she didn’t find out about the Hanna stuff, she was angry about how often you took bathroom breaks as well,” Paisley got up to face him. “She was worried you had a traditional disability, but when she accused you of masturbating, your suspicious denial of it gave her an idea for how to fire you. So already, this woman is worse than you think she is, and we haven’t gotten to how she interacts with people besides you.”

“Well-” Max barely got time to speak before Paisley continued laying on evidence.

“She’s a member of an HOA, and the type that everyone hates,” Paisley said. “You’d be surprised what people will make time for when they want to punish their neighbors for daring to paint their house a unique color. She’s also the type to ensure zoning reform doesn’t allow apartment construction in their neighborhood through, again, exploiting abusive HOA rules. You should know how bad that type of thing is from your days on the debate team when you researched urbanism.”

“Okay, okay, so she’s a bitch,” Max said. “She wasn’t the best boss either, but that doesn’t mean she deserves to be stuck in-”

“Have I mentioned that you are far from the only employee she has been abusive towards?” Paisley’s question was a taunt. “Or that she’s a massive hypocrite who claims to have a tolerant workplace but always finds a pre-textual reason to get rid of anyone who has even a minor disability?”

That left Max stuck. “Be that as it may, there is still the question of her connection to me. I may not be able to add this to Hanna’s ledger, but other than…”

Max trailed off as he realized the fatal flaw in his argument. Melissa Chambers had been his boss for months. While they didn’t have a close connection, the argument that she was a stranger, like Max had tried with Shui, just wasn’t going to work.

“Your employer has a lot of connection to who you are as a person,” Paisley said. “In Melissa’s case specifically, she taught you that you were unable to function in a normal workplace. I’d also remind you that your parents threatened to throw you out of the house, in part, because of how poorly your first job went. The event that sent you crying back into my arms, and into the loving embrace of Harem Hotel.”

It was at that moment Max remembered something that made him furious. “You told me to get that job. You… you told me to go for it. You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you?”

Paisley, to his horror, didn’t even blink at that. “Max, I only told you to get a part time job. It was your decision to go work at the bookstore. And let's be honest here, you probably would’ve had the same result in any other kind of retail job. You could’ve tried working from home. Or being a pornstar for that matter.”

“Do you know how long pornstars have to wait to cum?” Max was incredulous. “Most of the actual shooting of porn is constantly stopping to reshoot so that the camera gets a better angle on the meat shot, or a woman’s tits bouncing from the thrusts. And I’m not sexy enough to be a camboy. Not saying I look bad just…”

Paisley finished for him. “You wouldn’t stand out on porn sites, sure. However, that probably still would’ve gone better than retail. Or do you think there’s a manager that would’ve been okay with you jerking off multiple times during the workday?”

“I…” Max struggled to answer because he realized he chose a job he shouldn’t have because he thought it would impress his parents. “If I tried working from home, or worse, using my body, my parents would’ve lost patience faster.”

“Would they?” Paisley asked. “Even if they did, what was the point of delaying the inevitable? Or blaming me?”

The questions burned, being harsher tough love than Max had ever received before. Others who had tried such treatment had always come from the perspective of someone telling him he had to overcome his condition, and that the world wouldn’t coddle him. Paisley by contrast had no time for any of that, and sent the opposite message: By trying to suppress his condition, he was only delaying the inevitable. He couldn’t have it all, and by trying to pick pleasing his family over doing what was best for his condition, Max had ended up with nothing. Well, other than being kidnapped by a multiversal reality TV show of course, where every decision he made would lead to the

“Well, to be fair, it wouldn’t have been exactly the same,” Paisley continued, “If your boss was male for instance, we would’ve had to do a rather extensive MtF transformation, and that’s a bit… polarizing.”

The joke just confirmed that Max had lost. He couldn’t defend Melissa anymore than a lawyer could defend a client with bloody fingerprints at the scene of a murder. The punishment was disproportionate, because it would be a disproportionate punishment Paisley walked over to him, and put her arms around his neck.

“Don’t beat yourself up Max,” Paisley said. “I’m very good at my job, and I pick your contestants carefully. These people doomed themselves long before you showed up.”

Paisley then let him go. “You have another contestant to save Max. Better get to it...”