The Okoshira Corporation has a very interesting way of dealing with customer complaints. They're big enough to have their own 'court' process, where aggrieved customers and their lawyers can present a case before an adjudicator. They have some kind of complex agreement to avoid actual lawsuits, and enough legal oversight from the court system to ensure that they handle complaints fairly.
In the last year and a half, however, they've found a great way to win more of their cases. The big, fancy visitor elevators have had an interesting upgrade in their elevator music tracks. It's just a little thing, but anyone who's spent a few minutes in the elevator on their way to the 69th-floor courtroom is likely to be a little distracted and less able to focus on their case.
Dana Sandbrook and Sabrina Kurtzweil are doctoral neuropsychology students at the University of Somewhere. They've been researching the effects that a repeated sequence of pure tones can have on the human thought process; starting with a simple metronome, they've found that a pure enough tone (like a perfect bell sound) can cause some kind of resonance, and particular sequences will induce a specific emotional state after a few dozen repetitions. They've made sequences of notes that can make you cheerful, or nervous, or a dozen other emotions. And they've developed software that can generate these sequences.
Donald Featherstonehaugh-Pettigrew, an Okoshira marketing director, agreed to do field trials of one of these devices. The tones would be played in one of the company offices. They would adjust the selected resonance, and try to see if there were tones that would drive pests away from the office, while proving stimulating and motivational to humans. As they hadn't tested their discovery on animals before, the scientists were eager to see how this turned out. But as well as the tests they admitted to, the Donald has decided to put the tones from the device in the company's elevator music. This is his big secret, known only to a few people in senior management.
After trying numerous variations of the sequences from the device's presets, he eventually settled on one that seems to work: Elevator music which is a powerful aphrodisiac. Complaining customers and their lawyers arrive in the courtroom just a little hot and bothered. Just enough to stop them making their case quite as clearly, letting the company win most of the debatable ones.
Alex Scott is a very successful lawyer, and one of the representatives of the court service who occasionally watches cases at Okoshira to make sure they're done fairly. Today, she's attending without any kind of warning, because she's looked at the statistics and she's sure something must be wrong somewhere, she just needs to figure out what it is.
Bob Lychgate works for Okoshira. He's not some important corporate person, or a lawyer, or a director or anything. Just one of the guys responsible for making sure that the building infrastructure runs smoothly. He's got a reputation for attentiveness lately, because a couple of times the new safety brakes on the elevators have locked on for some reason, and he's always been the person to notice the problem and release the visitors trapped in the elevator. Most times he notices that one car is stopped and gets it working again before the computer has even sounded an alert, meaning that trapped people are only trapped for five or ten minutes. Until the elevator company diagnoses the problem, he's helping them to avoid some pretty big PR issues over that.
Actually, Bob knows exactly what the problem with the elevators is. Listening to people as they came out of the lift, he started to realise that people were getting horny in the lift. He put it down to the vibrations of the mechanism, or maybe some chemical influence from the iridescent chrome panels on the walls. But he knows the elevators make people horny, so he ran a little experiment. He put a mechanical trigger on one of the lifts that would fire the safety brakes (designed to lock on if the cable is damaged). And he found that the effect is even more intense if someone is stuck in the elevator for 5 or 10 extra minutes.
Lately, Bob's been taking advantage of this. He sees an attractive woman getting into the elevator, and he turns a switch hidden somewhere among the ventilation ducting in the basement. The elevator will "malfunction" and get stuck on the 44th floor, the exact middle of the shaft. Nobody notices right away, because there's lots of elevators. Then Bob races up to his office, gets the place tidy enough, and goes to rescue the poor trapped person. He's a knight in shining armour, she's already turned on although she doesn't know why. He offers a cold drink in his office to help her calm down after the ordeal, and more often than not Bob gets what he wants.
Cali Spence is a customer, leading a class action lawsuit against Okoshira. This is a big case, and she's just hoping it'll go well. She'd be more confident if they could change lawyers, because at this point she's stuck with the representation of her ex husband, Marcus Wheatley, who she broke up with six months ago as she suspected he was having an affair with one of the senior lawyers at his firm; trying to get a leg up by getting involved with someone (Alex) who was soon to be a partner. Now, the only time they see each other is over this case, and she tries to avoid him as much as possible because whenever they're close, it's still hard to suppress the lust that's still there in her mind.
This morning, Bob's getting ready to try his usual scam. He's seen a cute blonde, noted that she's taking an elevator by herself (one of the less busy ones, around a corner from the lobby). He goes down to the basement, but he's a little distracted himself and sets the switch to jam the wrong elevator. He knows that he's got half-eaten pizza on his desk, and porn in the office, and lots of stuff he needs to hide away before inviting a woman in, so he rushes to the nearest elevator. The jammed one won't stop at any floors before 44, to stop anyone else getting in, so he'll be cutting it close to get there before his victim starts to get too upset.
So he's riding up in one of the customer-facing elevators, with a selection of different people who need to get to the upper half of the building. Alex, Cali, Bob, Marcus, Donald, Dana, and Sabrina. Seven people, in an elevator with a maximum capacity of ten; just about enough space for people to shuffle around each other without brushing against each other, but barely. Donald is being an ass, complaining that maintenance staff should take the staff elevators out of sight of the public in order to present an immaculate corporate image. He's interrupted by a loud clang, and the elevator stops.
Bob looks up at the floor display, and realises he's set his breaker for the wrong car. And he can only release it from his office. Donald is doing his best to distract the scientists (here to collect experiment results), so that they won't recognise the music as something they created. Dana notices pretty quickly, but doesn't want to say anything because she knows it should have been her responsibility to make certain only volunteers were subjected to their creation. They've all got reasons not to say what they know, they're all going to be in trouble if the truth comes out. But sooner or later they'll have to come clean.
The story basically follows 7 people, with different conflicts and tensions between them, stuck in an elevator for two hours with aphrodisiac beats playing through the speakers.
YOU ARE READING
💡🐇 Naughty Thoughts
RandomThis is a book of ideas, to go alongside my books 'Plot Babies' and 'Plot Bunnies'. These are the naughty ideas. They might include smut, hypnosis, kinky romance, or other adult themes. Ideas for regression and ageplay stories are in my book 'Plot B...