Alexa Sampson knew exactly why she had been hired.

She was a plucky young reporter with ambitious dreams, unrelenting drive and a willingness to ask questions others weren’t willing to.

But who cares about that when you got big tits?

At least that’s what the corporate new execs who hired her had been thinking when they signed the contract.

She was assigned the task of field reporter, she had approached the position with skeptical enthusiasm.

This enthusiasm was warranted, rather than send her on the important stories like hurricane watch or rising protests in America’s major cities they would send the photogenic redhead to where they deemed her talents best applied.

Like to the beach for a party celebrating the first day of summer, where they tried and failed to convince her to wear the smallest bikini she had ever seen. Or to Niagara Falls for the seasonal opening where they sent her below the falls with no rain jacket so her clothes would cling to her frame.

She straight up said no to the strip club.

She thought that when the world went into lockdown thanks to The Spell coming onto the scene that things would change, with the world changing so much her bosses would’ve been forced to allow her to broaden her horizons.

And it did, her first piece on the measures taken by the government to prevent the general public from falling victim to permanent nudity had been a huge hit.

But in her opinion, the executives took the wrong conclusion from the success.

The going wisdom that her name, paired with the word “nudity” was perhaps the perfect combination as far as online search algorithms were concerned.

So from that moment on she was the nudity girl.

When things opened back up and nudies were out in the open for all to see she wasn’t far behind, interviewing any remotely attractive person on the street regardless of how little they might’ve had to say. Attending their famous beach “Burnings” where young people tossed their clothes into the fire and galavanted across the beach, only cutting the camera when they suddenly began pairing off to ‘celebrate’.

Alexa even got her wish in a way, she finally got to report on a real-life protest.

So there she was on a cool Friday morning, standing in front of a camera in a blouse that was two sizes too small standing in front of a nudie rights rally.

In all fairness, it was an important story.

Relations between the naked and the clothed were at an all-time low, which is only to be expected when one-half of the population can’t touch the other half without ‘switching sides’ but things were getting very much out of hand.

Society had naturally segregated into these two groups, separating businesses to cater to these opposite markets, and while there were rarely any nudie businesses that would turn away clothed customers there were plenty of clothed businesses who would vehemently stick to the ‘no shoes, no shirt, no service’ rule.

Some stories even spread of employees being fired when they were infected, employees who had been at their places of work for upwards of a decade just dropped like a sack of potatoes, despite being infected through no fault of their own.

The most recent and perhaps largest example of this happening was a large supermarket chain, one of the largest in the country with millions of patrons and thousands of employees had suddenly thrown all of its nudie employees to the curb, both corporate and retail as well as ban all nudie customers from shopping with them.

This left huge numbers of people out of work and even more out of a place to shop in some areas after the large corporation had put its smaller competitors out of business in key areas.

An activist group called the “Nudie Inclusion Council” more commonly known as NIC had taken notice of the company’s discriminatory policy and had organized a massive protest outside their corporate office.

Naked bodies filled the street as far as the eye could see, dancing, chanting, and waving around signs.

And Alexa Sampson was there for all of it, with her cameraman and her producer Mikaela Slater.

“I’m not popping another button,” Alexa argued as the cameraman stepped off to the side to set up the laptop they were using as a teleprompter.

“Whatever happened to giving the people what they want?” Mikaela argued.

“No, not people. The comment section,” Alexa retorted, “Something tells me those animals are gonna be happy with the couple of hundred nipples in the background.”

“It’s not about what they see,” Mikaela explained, “It’s what they can’t see, ya see?”

“We ready to go?” The camera asks, mounting it back onto his shoulder.

“I don’t know Alexa, are we?” Mikaela asked, looking at her expectantly.

Alexa had a choice to make.

She didn’t want to be here, surrounded by nudies in every direction prepared to leave her permanently naked by the slightest brush of exposed skin, and she had a lot of exposed skin.

Every moment she spent there upped her chance of giving the horn dogs online exactly what they wanted.

With a sigh, Alexa reached down to pop another button.

“That’s a girl,” Mikaela smiled in self-satisfaction.

Alexa had an unmatched loathing of Mikaela, for everything she tried to be as a journalist, fair, honest and aware of whatever biases she might have. Mikaela was the opposite, as long as the suits were paying her checks she did whatever she told them to, everything bottled down to dollars, cents and ratings with her.

Alexa didn’t have long to glare at her producer before the cameraman began to count down from three.

The reporter plastered on her famous smile and began to speak.

“Hello America,” She greeted the camera while reading from the teleprompter, “I’m Alexa Sampson. I’m here today in New York where a massive protest spanning city blocks has broken out in response to the banning of nudies from one of America’s largest supermarket chains. People are up in arms over what the corporate office has called a necessary measure to protect, the health and safety of employees and customers well being.”

It was a dry milquetoast take on the whole thing, taking the company’s statement as gospel, but it was what she was told to say, you don’t mess with the execs if you want to keep working.

“The group NIC, who organized this protest, claim this is just another prime example of discrimination against nudies, taking advantage of a Supreme Court decision last week saying that a company could not be held liable in a court of law for terminating an employee for being unable to comply with the dress code, regardless of infection status.”

Alexa noticed Mikaela receive a call on her phone and stepped away from the camera to take it, pulling her attention away from her subject.

Perhaps it was a mistake but after being forced to spout corporate talking points, being forced to be constantly vigilant of the people around her and wearing such a ridiculously small shirt, Alexa decided to improv a bit.

“But it is discrimination,” Alexa said forcefully, completely ignoring the prompter in front of her, “It’s the very nature of the word. Systematically making a group of people with an immutable characteristic, a trait brought on by a freak of nature that no one, despite what the conspiracy theorist might say, had any will to create.”

The cameraman had begun to look uncomfortable and Mikaela had begun to notice that Alexa was going off script but was seemingly talking to someone important enough that she couldn’t just suddenly hang up to fix the problem.”

“Like so many cultures beforehand we allow ourselves to learn to hate our neighbour in the name of safety,” Alexa continued, sensing that she would soon be cut off.

“It is about safety!” A counter-protester shouted out as she overheard what Alexa was saying, “I can’t even take my kids outside anymore.”

Alexa noticed the heavy full body coveralls she was wearing, she looked, uncomfortable, sweating and frankly ridiculous in the hypochondriacal outfit.

“I’m sorry, I forgot the Spell was fatal to children,” Alexa argued sarcastically and perhaps more angrily than she wanted to.

“One slip up and they’re traumatized for life,” the protester continued, the way she clumsily staggered towards Alexa and the rank smell on her breath suggested that she had been drinking earlier in the day which was probably heavily contributing to her sunny disposition.

Alexa almost immediately regretted antagonizing this woman, but she was on camera so she could hardly take it all back now, not when she had just begun to say something of meaning.

“Then why is there no related condition in the DSM-5?” Alexa said, trying to right herself to a calmer tone and keep things civil, “For all the children whose parents took them to clothing-optional beaches, the cultures across the world where men and women bared it all in public before the spell was even named. Hell, even just walking in on people at the wrong moment in the bathroom. If your premise was true we would begin to notice a pattern among our youth. But that’s not even the issue at play here, even if there were such a condition, it’s not an excuse for a multibillion-dollar corporation to enact a policy that discriminates against a growing percentage of the population.”

Despite Alexa’s calmer tone, the protester looked nowhere near closer to calming down, her face was beet red and judging by the way she was holding herself she looked about ready to pounce on her.

Alexa made a note to hold the expensive microphone closer to her so it wouldn’t be knocked out of her hand.

Mikaela had finally put down her phone and was about to step in to intervene.

The cameraman grinned at the juicy footage he was getting.

“You like nudies so much?” The protestor sneered, “I think you’re on the wrong side of the street!”

With that, she took both of her hands and pushed Alexa back with a sharp shove.

As she fell backward she instinctively tried to regain her balance by putting her feet back under her, but much to her dismay the cheap high heels she was wearing weren’t up to the task of supporting her weight and shattered under the strain.

The world moved in slow motion as she entered free fall, she saw Mikaela watch on in horror, stepping forward as if she was in any way fast enough to stop what was happening a clean three meters away.

She saw the woman who had pushed her being pulled back by an older man from the clothed counter-protestors before she did anything more foolish.

Finally, she caught a glint of light from where the afternoon sun met the camera lens, ready to capture what was about to happen next.

Think of the most embarrassing moment of your life.

Imagine if that moment was broadcast on national television for half the country to see and spread like wildfire on social media.

Imagine the humiliation, the thought of everyone finding such joy in your lowest moment and spreading it to their friends and family to be discussed over cold beers and Sunday brunch.

Now in the social media age, some of you might actually relate to this sensation, some of you might know the feeling of going viral over a simple slip-up.

But you probably didn’t end up as the number one most-viewed video on pornhub.

That sensation was unique to Alexa.

The protest was only a couple of days ago, and in that time the video of Alexa getting into an argument with a counter-protestor before being shoved into a nudie photographer had gone viral across every social media site and x-rated video streamer.

Almost everyone on earth had seen the stitching in her blouse burst open, exposing her now famous large and perky breasts to the world. They could see her skirt fall off her hips revealing her god-given hair colour in enough detail to merit the video being given the tag ‘Hairy bush’. At about the three-minute mark, it cut away to the anchors back in the studio looking rather shocked before the clip ended.

According to the text under the progress bar, the video had only been posted three days ago but to Alexa, who had confined herself to her apartment since the incident, felt as if it had been three years.

A lot had happened in these three days however, despite all the views the clip generated the station went into panic mode.

Mikaela was almost immediately fired from her position as a producer but surprisingly enough the cameraman who intentionally captured the offence was simply put on paid leave until the whole thing blew over.

After feeding her a half-assed corporate apology Alexa was also let go from the station, despite how much they had flaunted her in the past the suits felt uncomfortable having a naked woman on the air. They gave her a tidy sum of ‘please don’t sue us’ money and sent her home, a box full of her things showing up by her front door the next day.

It wasn’t like she was actually going to sue them, if it wasn’t already career suicide to be permanently naked the act of suing your former employers was like dumping a toaster in the bathtub in the TV business, she’d like at least some hope of collecting a paycheck again thank you very much.

As she sat around her apartment with the curtains drawn and the light switched off she considered what options she might have.

She considered starting a blog or perhaps leveraging her newfound fame to get herself a column in a newspaper somewhere.

The only problem with that idea is that she was useless behind a keyboard, everything she attempted began and ended with a word salad to be smiled by the delete key, she was a talker, she was at her best when in front of a camera and allowed to let the story flow naturally.