To Wystie’s prompt: ~A cult~

Nancy hadn’t, really, meant to start a cult.

It had started innocently enough, after all: she’d been lonely in her new city, so she’d made a list of things she could do and liked doing. Then she’d put together four of the least weird, and put out an ad on craigslist.

They’d met in her apartment, at first. It wasn’t the best idea, but the thin walls in her complex and her nosy neighbors, usually flaws, meant that any screams would be quickly noticed.

Three people showed up to the first meeting, seven to the second. By the third meeting, she’d rented them a room in a local church for their meetings; by the seventh meeting, she had to move them to an old storefront a couple blocks away.

Word got out, not just from the cragislist ad but from word-of-mouth; her original core of people told more people, who told more people, and soon she was charging $20 at the door just to cover the price of punch and pizza, rent and supplies.

She hadn’t realized she had a cult until she had to appoint people to guide groups of new recruits. Those first three attendees were her choices, of course, Maxine, Erica, and Terrance.

That’s when stuff sort of took a left turn. Maxine was fine, dealing with people who were mainly interested in the crafts and the cooking. Erica took the people who liked the old-fashioned stuff and got them building a library of resources. But Terrance, Terrance found all the people who really, really wanted to belong to something.

When Helen showed up and they had uniforms, she knew something had gone horribly wrong.

When they put the Grand Poobah hat on her head, however, she questioned the wrong part of the equation. After all, it had been her idea, right?

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