"Don't look now." Dani whispered. "That one." She gave a tiny jerk of her head.
Jerruunta and Jayu waited a few seconds, then looked over to see a harried looking young blonde waitress at the coffeehouse where they had hoped to find potential recruits.
Dani waved her fingers, and the waitress came to the table, thinking that the strange black woman needed a refill.
"How would you like to get out of here?" Dani asked as she held out her cup.
"What do you mean?" the blonde woman--her name tag said "Nancy"--asked.
"Out of this job, out of this life." Dani answered.
"Yeah, well I kind of need to make a living." Nancy answered.
"You got break time coming up?"
Ordinarily Nancy would have told a customer that it was none of their business, but there was something almost hypnotic about Dani's gaze. Nancy had always thought of herself as straight, but this woman's power and confidence were arousing strange feelings.
"Uh, yeah."
"We'll meet you around back in fifteen minutes, OK?"
Nancy blushed. "Uh, OK." she answered, then scurried off to a table of businessmen.
"Still got it." Dani laughed. Jayu rolled her eyes.
+++++++
"This is crazy. You can turn me into a black woman and I join your lesbian space army? What is this, some kind of joke?"
"Look." answered Dani. "You can work at this dump and other places like it for the rest of your life getting your ass grabbed by morons, or you can accept our offer. If we can't give you a body as great as the ones we have, you can laugh in our faces and go back to your job. Nothing lost. So what will it be, Nancy? Do you have what it takes to be an Amazon?"
Nancy stole a quick glance back to the establishment, then looked Dani in the face. "OK, do it."
Nancy's hair steadily darkened, till it reached the same velvety black as Jerruunta's. Patches of black emerged on her skin, then grew and merged to cover its entire surface. Her muscles grew slightly, although not enough to interfere with the proud feminine lines of her new body. "It worked." Nancy pronounced, with a tone of awe in her voice.
"Of course it did." Jayu answered. She handed the newest Amazon an iron rod. "But if you have any doubts, try bending this."
A few seconds later Nancy was holding a rod bent nearly double in her hands. She handed Jayu back the rod, reached into her purse and took out a cell phone and pressed the speed dial. "This is Nancy." She took a deep breath. "I quit."