Re: Flotsam
Damn, those pheromones must be strong to go through computer text, I'm starting to feel the need
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Flotsam (Page 2 of 3)
Legends of Belial → Transformation Stories → Flotsam
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Re: Flotsam
Flotsam
Chapter 10: The Arena
I am standing here looking up at a two storey hologram of myself holding a severed head, holographic blood dripping around me like gruesome rain.
“She is magnificent!” thunders Steadfast Freya, clapping me on the shoulder.
“One finds the severed head a bit much...” sniffs Bluebell critically.
We are here to see the gladiatorial spectacle commemorating the end of Shift Change, but really we are here to see Halley-11. After my trip to the Grove, these last few days have been spent finding a routine and not fantasize about green women fucking. Which has mostly meant working in Hank’s bar and learning the basics of space bartending, with occasional solo trips out into the city running errands. Errands I suspect I was being sent on so Hank and Freya could fuck without me uncomfortably listening. On one such errand to buy dried Groveberries from a nice old woman, I saw a hologram poster on the wall of myself, but wearing armour and holding a chainsaw sword. Gladiator Halley. And so here we are at the Arena. Or more accurately next to the Arena, in the Plaza of Champions, standing at the foot of a holographic representation of myself with a severed head. I shake my head in disbelief.
“We should not tarry here,” Freya suggests, “events have already commenced and we would do well to be in our seats before Halley the Destroyer fights.” I nod in agreement, but Bluebell stamps a hoof. “Snacks!” she lows. Freya rolls her eyes. We push into the crowd and begin to tack towards a row of food stalls.
The Plaza is awash in sapients: humans from all over the city, here to celebrate the end of their holiday, with a healthy representation of Reptilians, who, it seems, just love a good fight. Foreign food smells fill the air and busker music rises over the chatter of the crowd. Street performers carve out little pockets of space and amaze onlookers with feats of acrobatics or sleight of hand. Near another towering Champion hologram, hawkers have gewgaws laid out on carpets and bully the crowd to buy their wares. A pair of giant cartoonish monsters stage a battle, oblivious to the crowds, hologram puppets performing a Kaiju show for kids. Small drones zip through the air, trailing colourful streamers, either decoration or advertisement. Grey spheres sedately hover over everything, observing. The entire thing has a carnival atmosphere, a barely contained giant party.
Honestly, I’m feeling more than a bit nervous. The noisy crowd, while a fun spectacle, is triggering all kinds of anxiety complexes. Even before my trailer park days, I always avoided big gatherings like this, missing out on festivals, concerts, and big sportsball games. Which has always been a total bummer. On Flotsam, I’m going to do things differently. What’s a trip to a crowded Arena when you're the clone of a woman abducted by aliens? Deep breaths and try to have fun.
It occurs to me as we squeeze through the throng that the crowd is made of humans and Reptilians. For the first time on Flotsam, I don't really see any Blues. “Bluebell,” I ask, “why are there so few Blues here?”
“This one’s species does not condone violence for entertainment. To be seen attending the Arena would harm ones Social Standing and enjoying the games is a form of Deviancy,” the cowgirl replies. Freya frowns and scoffs.
“Why did you want to come?” I ask.
“One is here out of friendship and a sense of anthropological curiosity. As one becomes more mammalian, one wants to understand the human fascination with violence, the way it thrills your species.”
Freya snorts and waves one of her hands dismissively, “She is just here to feast on snacks!”
Bluebell moos in amusement, “One does love snacks!”
I spot a group of Blues standing near a towering hologram of a Reptilian gladiator. These Blues are a decidedly punk rock looking bunch of aliens. Their androgynous bodies are taught with muscles, and their bare torsos and arms are covered in jagged tattoos. On their elongated heads they wear skullcaps with bright ponytails or mowhawk-like fans of hair. Three of the group are juggling knives, sometimes launching them back and forth between them, performing for a small audience . “What about them?”
Bluebell smiles, “Other Deviants!” She returns a circle-in-the-air gesture that one of the tattooed Blues makes at her. A Blue greeting? “Unlike this one, who was made Deviant for her perversion, these Blues are philosophical Deviants. They have rejected the Social Contract to practice a life of personal freedom and personal achievement. Their counterculture emphasizes competition and they believe that strength and force are types of personal realization.” Bluebell moos thoughtfully, “They love the Arena.”
Freya nods, “They are a wise band.”
With Freya being the crowd equivalent of an icebreaker, we are soon standing standing by a cluster of foodcarts. Something they are making smells delicious, and my mouth waters. I grimace, the persistent knot of anxiety in my stomach rules out eating. Bluebell happily begins collecting her supplies. From a scarred old Reptilian she buys an enormous bag of something like popcorn sprinkled with bright, orange-red powder. A cute little bakery cart run by masked and robed humans sells the Blue cowgirl a large satchel of sweet cakes. A large thermos of sweetened tea and a tub of custard-analogue later and an excited Bluebell says she has what she requires. “Moo,” she adds a little bashfully, “one’s lactation requires a great many calories.”
Laden with supplies we begin the crowded journey to find our seats. The Arena looms above us, one of the largest structures on Flotsam, a giant cylinder devoted to combat. From the outside it reminds me of an air and space museum crossed with a jigsaw puzzle. Salvaged chemical rocket engines, each unique and multiple stories tall, form columns ringing the structure, each hung with bright cloth banners marking entrances. Between rocket columns the skin of the Arena is a quilt of different perforated steel plating raggedly welded together. From a distance it gives the Arena a uniform look, as though purpose built, but up close it's as improvised as the rest of the city. The substrate of the junk desert made monumental.
At the Fuchsia entrance we scan our Keybands and enter the building, climbing a long ramp that spirals upward, passing level catwalks, to our tier of seats. I stumble on a tricky kind of angled stair, and Freya catches me. Flustered I step into the knave of the Arena. I squint my eyes against the brightness, and goggle at the sheer majesty of the space.
As big as the Arena seems on the outside, somehow it seems larger from inside. The floor of the arena, the actual fighting surface, is a circular pit cut into the red stone of the mesa which is filled with shockingly white sand. Around this pit is the original arena, an ampitheatre of cut red stone benches that step upward from the central pit. Above this are row after row of seats bolted to scaffolding, so steep they are almost stacked. The seats themselves are remarkable, a riot of recovered chairs from all manner of space debris: simple metal seats bolted next to wing-backed command thrones, next to rugged fighter pilot ejector chairs as far as the eye can see. Above the collected space chairs are two levels of steel shipping containers cut with wide windows; scavenged private boxes. Finally, just below the roof membrane is a lattice of scaffold, a hanging standing-room gallery that people clip themselves into with carabiner harnesses. The place is packed with murmuring, chattering sapients creating a living cylinder of people and aliens surrounding a white Circle, lit with beams of sunlight and industrial lighting. It’s huge and claustrophic all at once.
No sooner do we squeeze into our seats then the next event begins. In the Circle below are two slight women, short and wiry, holding bows and wearing small quivers of arrows on their backs, ankles, and wrists. They are clothed in tight shorts and tops like sportsbras and their skin is painted in a dazzle camouflage of colourful lines, one red the other blue. Their hair is worn in tight braids, held in place with arrows, and is dyed in the opposite colour of their paint. They look like twins or, since I’m living evidence, clones. Calmly, they pace out distances and stick arrows head first into the sand.
“They are warrior-acrobats, sisters from the Circus Armada,” Freya informs me.
The two archers strike a pose back to back, arrows notched and bows drawn. A giant hologram like a Jumbotron, a jumbogram, floats in the air showing a close up of the two pretty women smiling in fierce joy. A hum fills the stadium as drones lift off out of trap doors on the perimeter of the circle. The drones have a wing and two rotors, like miniature versions of those Osprey planes in the videogames Clem used to play. Except, in place of a fuselage the engines and wing support a kind of nerf gun looking canon. One of the drones lazily wobbles and with a thump discharges it’s canon, firing a black sphere that expands to a softball, strikes the ground, and keeps growing into a shiny black bowling ball. A warning shot. “Immobilization rounds,” Freya says, “Non-lethal yet very effective.”
The drones form up in a circular formation, revolving sedately around the outer edge of the arena floor. Until, suddenly, by some unspoken command each drone skews off, suddenly with a mind of its own. The two archers spring into motion, tumbling away from a barrage of black spheres in smooth somersaults. Both archers come up with arrows drawn, simultaneously letting fly and sending two drones tumbling to the sand. The women both instantly move, dodging more spheres, one doing a cartwheel where she plucks an arrow out of the sand along the way, nocking and shooting as she lands, dispatching another drone. I grin in delight as it becomes a kind of dance, the drones swooping and shooting, the archers leaping and spinning off each other like dancers. They come together, snatching arrows from their partner’s quiver, and shoot and shoot and shoot, drones raining around them. It is impressive and actually quite beautiful.
I hear a rowdy commotion and see a group of dudes happily berating a friend who is hunched over a hologram with something recognizably like crosshairs on it. “That one is piloting a drone right now,” Bluebell tells me. “As part of their act, the archery performers sell control of the drones to the audience. If a wave of drones manages to immobilize the performers, the pilots will be awarded a significant prize of Currencies.” The rowdy dudes roar in mirth and the pilot curses as his hologram control snaps off. Below a drone, skewered by an arrow, falls almost lazily to the ground.
Freya makes a disgusted noise, “These pilots are such fools! They do not marshal the strength of their numbers and hunt as a pack, or utilize the tactics of the wing.” The Nordic woman thumps her chest with her two right arms, “If I had control of the drones I could quickly dispatch these tumbling archers!”
Bluebell rolls here eyes and moos rudely, tossing orange-red popcorn at Freya.
The two archer acrobats are rapidly running out of drones to shoot down. One archer picks off another drone from her knees and curls up into a ball, Child’s Pose yoga style. The other archer, running, vaults off her back and launches herself through the air, firing four arrows, before landing in a controlled tumble. Only one drone remains, circling for a better angle of attack. The two women launch themselves into a series of backflips, the drone firing a barrage of spheres as it swings around. The women, mid flip, each snatch up an arrow, and arresting back-to-back, let fly, simultaneously hitting the final drone, which plummets to the ground, dead. The pair holds the pose as the Arena erupts in celebration, Reptilians drumming their tails, humans clapping, or whistling, or stamping their feet. I am standing with my fist in the air shouting and feeling a bit silly.
I blush as I sit back in my space fighter jock seat. Freya smiles at me and playfully elbows me with one of her arms. In the Arena Circle the archers alternate between waving, blowing kisses, and collecting arrows from the wreckage of drones. Freya summons a hologram from her Keyband and taps out something in a menu. A troop of beautiful human women and men wearing bikini and brief analogues come skipping out to shovel debris into scuttling robotic trash bins. Bluebell is complacently chewing on snacks, snout and fingers stained with the orange-red dust of her food. A cloud of quadcopter drones fill the arena, one cruising over to Freya, and delivering a chilled, probably alcoholic beverage. The scantily clad pretties finish cleaning and the archers take one last bow; the Arena is reset for the next exhibition.
A huge horn, like one of those alpine things, blares and a hulking creature ambles into the circle. It looks like an ape crossed with a warthog. I almost giggle when I think of a joke from one of Clem’s stupid cartoons. The creature, or maybe Sapient, is covered in a pelt of slate grey fur and absolutely bulges with muscle. He, based on his bulging TV wrestler briefs, would probably be a dozen feet tall but is hunched, walking on all fours like a gorilla, knuckles on the ground. His face pushes out in a stubby muzzle, pig-nosed with sharp looking tusks. His eyes are large and surprisingly soulful. “Aggronotham the Strongest,” Freya purrs with appreciation. “An Orckonian from a high gravity planet. He is a talented bard who fights challengers to earn his keep.”
Bluebell pauses her munching and moos like a sigh. I glance at both women and see a pair of crushes. I look back at the huge Sapient, frowning. “You are both attracted to him?”
“Oh yes,” Bluebell says dreamily.
“He is a warrior and poet both,” Freya says. “Of course.”
“And he is endowed like one of your human horses!” Bluebell says, before mooing lustfully.
Aggronotham stands to his full height, throws back his head and howls. The crowd of spectators rumbles with their appreciation noises. In a wonderfully rich, cultured voice Aggro shouts, “Who has come today to challenge the Strongest!?”
As if in answer, another blast of the alpine horn sounds and four new combatants enter the circle. They are Blues, bared chests and arms covered in lean, ropey muscles, their blue skin covered in jagged swirls of tattoos. They wear loose pants and steel shod boots and gloves and brandish bat length metal clubs that spark with electricity. The four Blues form a loose circle around the Orkonian, shifting their weight from foot to foot. “Deviants!” Bluebell lows happily.
Freya scoffs, “They shall be as chaff before the reaper.”
“Indeed?” Bluebell says, voice a little wounded. “One would not be so confident. These Deviants are versed in the ancient technique of Groupstrike.”
Freya smirks rubbing her four hands together, “Mayhaps we shall make a wager?”
Bluebell moos with determination, “We shall! If the Blues win, you will give this one a dozen jars of Hank’s honey.”
“A steep price,” Freya says happily, “and when they are defeated?”
“If Aggronotham is victorious, one will give you two dewars of her milk.” The two women shake hands, one from a set of four and one snack stained and hoof tipped.
The horn blares and the Blue combatants start to circle Aggronotham. Hidden drums slowly tap out a rhythm in time with their steps. One of the Blues feints a straight on attack, and simultaneously another Blue dashes in from the side. Aggro ignores the feint, turning to meet the second Blue, who throws a very conservative taser chop. The drums pick up the tempo, catching the rush of action. The third and fourth Blue, as if on silent cue, have already launched their own attacks and both strike the Orconian with blows that crackle with electricity, staggering the hulking alien. Larger drums boom like thunder with each blow. The five fighters come apart, the Blues circling, the drums slowing to a cautious tap tap tap. Again the entire Blue group launches a silent, coordinated attack, moving as a unit to feint and strike, drum music swelling to match the action like a Taiko team. This time the Blues press their advantage as Aggro lashes out at nothing and is struck by repeated electrified blows. The drums thud and surge, making the entire Arena shake with percussion. Blindly Aggro throws a mighty arm out, and with the crash of a gong, he lands a glancing strike on a Blue, sending them tumbling. The Blues regroup, and the drums quiet. The Orconian shakes his head and gathers himself for the next assault.
“They use Scentspeak to act as one,” Bluebell says with pride.
“They fare better than I expected,” Freya mutters with grudging respect.
The Deviant Blues set themselves and begin another round of silent, scent signaled attacks. The drummers eagerly increase their beat. This time one of the group, the struck one, moves just a little too slowly and the Strongest manages to catch them with a solid punch that hurls the Blue off their feet and leaves them groaning on the ground, clutching their ribs. The other Blues continue their blitz, coming in waves, landing staggering hits on the Orconian. Drums pound and thunder. Aggronotham accepts another blow, howling through his pain, and snatches up his Blue attacker, lifts them above his head, and throws them at another Blue. With a reverberating gong sound effect the two Blues smash together in a tangled heap. The Strongest laughs in triumph and scoops up a fallen taser club, turning to menace the final Blue. The Orconian waves his sparking club like a small wand in his huge paw, and takes a shuffling three-limbed step forward. The final Blue drops their club and flees. The drums instantly stop. A victorious Aggronotham lifts his head and howls in victory. The crowd goes wild!
“Coward!” Freya shouts happily. She turns to Bluebell, a huge grin on her face. “I believe you owe me some milk.”
Bluebell moos in disgust.
There is another lull in the action while the scantily clad pretty people come jogging out with stretchers for the Blues. Aggronotham the Strongest helps one of his adversaries limp out of the circle, smiling and clapping the Blue’s back. While the Arena resets, a very fat human in a robe of flashing holographic colours floats into the air in the center of the Arena. “My fellow Sapients!” he booms, “Aggronotham the Strongest remains undefeated in the Circle!” The part of the crowd not distracted by eating food or ordering food roars with approval. The floating man makes quieting motions with his hands, “For our next Exhibition, we are pleased to present a Reptilian Proving! The Matriarch Sssllissa has come to us to bear witness as twelve suitors fight to sire her next clutch!” The huge jumbogram screen cuts to a large brown Reptilian with a sickly crest of rust coloured feathers on her head and arms. She hisses and bears her fangs and her surrounding cohort of Reptilians drum their tails. “Sit back and enjoy the carnage!” Shouts the fat man as he drifts out of the circle and view.
“This is unexpected,” says Bluebell, one hand coated in her custard desert. “Usually a Proving is a private matter, handled out of view.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
Bluebell licks at her custard covered fingers. “When a Reptilian female is fecund but is unsure which male suitor to have quicken her eggs, she offers them a challenge. It can be any sort of contest, but is often combative.” The cowgirl sucks on a finger, “One has never seen a Proving, or heard of one being showcased to the public.”
“Aye,” Freya agrees, “'Tis strange. I suspect that this Sssllissa has designs on becoming Flotsam’s next Dragon, and is using this stunt to increase her prestige.”
“Dragon?”
“Flotsam is an unusual planet, for there are many Reptilian clans here working within a single Syndicate hierarchy. The Dragon is like a judge or monarch and is selected to preside over disputes between clans or Syndicate factions. The former Dragon was recently assassinated, so there exists a power vacuum on Flotsam, with many ambitious Matriarchs vying for the throne.” Freya shakes her head, “If staging a fight in her honour is the best this female can do, she has a poor claim.”
Bluebell moos, “One has heard the interim Dragon is infertile, so perhaps this courtship display is aimed at upsetting her claim.”
Freya grunts and sips her electric blue beverage.
The alpine horn blasts and a dozen Reptilians charge into the Arena Circle. Most are nondescript Reptilian males with brown or black-green scales, but a trio stand out. One emerald scaled male is absolutely giant, bigger even than the female whose eggs he is fighting for and seems like a clear favourite to win. Another male has jet black scales and is tall, but very lean, flexible like a snake and just as trustworthy. The final standout is a diminutive, powerfully muscled male with ruby red and white scales, confident despite his small stature. All of the Reptilians brandish wicked looking curved knives and are sizing up their opponents.
The jumbogram shows Sssllissa the matriarch standing in her private box, holding one of her pathetic rusty feathers. She opens her clawed hand and the feather drifts slowly down, floating and eddying, until it comes to rest on the Arena sand. As soon as it touches the ground, the Reptilian combatants spring into motion, blades flashing. The Reptilians in the audience begin to beat. A steady. Rhythm. With their tails. Thump. Thump. Thump. A brown Reptilian pounces on a Black-green one, wrestling and stabbing. The jet male dashes over, deftly slashes both males, leaving them hobbled and bleeding. Two down. Thump. Thump. Thump. The emerald giant lumbers at a brown male who gamely stands his ground. The giant lands a crushing, stabbing blow and the brown is down, clutching a bleeding and broken flank. Three down. Thump. Thump. Thump. The ruby male hisses and six other males look up, thump their tails, and form a ring around the towering emerald. Treachery! Two black-green males dash emerald at once, one getting smashed off his feet, but the other landing a slash on the giant Reptilian. Thump. Thump. Thump.
“What the fuck?” I ask. “Isn’t this cheating?”
Freya grins savagely, “A Reptilian Proving selects only for the victorious, and cunning is more desirable than strength.”
Waves of Reptilians come at the emerald, hacking and slashing. The giant has managed to smash one of his lesser attackers out of the fight, but attrition is starting to slow the hulking male. Thump. Thump. Thump. Jet slithers around the edge of the fight stabbing staggered and distracted males. Five down. Ruby just holds back waiting, letting other males break themselves. Thump. Thump. Thump. Emerald crushes a male and Jet dances in to finish the job. A black-green male rushes Ruby, who deftly ducks a wild swing and rapidly stabs the male multiple times, one two three four five. The attacking male falls, black blood welling from its chest and the small red Reptilian picks up a second knife. Thump. Thump. Thump. Five are left.
Two drab green males are pressing Emerald, who looks halfway hobbled. The green males rush Emerald at once, one is batted away, tumbling, but the other stabs the huge Reptilian in the side. Emerald roars in pain and snatches up his attacker by the throat, holding him aloft and shaking him. Thump. Thump. Thump. Ruby, sensing his moment, dashes towards the back of the distracted Emerald. Ruby leaps, very much like a bird, and lands on the back of the Emerald, knives stabbing in like handholds. The small red Reptilian stabs and climbs, and then drives both his blades into the back of Emerald’s neck. The towering Reptilian makes a wheezing sound and falls forward, crushing the male he was choking beneath his bulk. Ruby rolls nimbly to his feet. Thump. Thump. Thump. Jet catches the other drab green male watching and coils around him like a lover, slashing out his throat in a spray of black blood. There are two left. Thump! Thump! Thump!
“Cunning prevails!” Freya says merrily, four fists clenched, eyes shining. “But the backstabber is in trouble now!”
The sinuous jet black and small ruby Reptilians stand facing each other, their fellow combatants lay bleeding on the ground, some writhing and hissing, some totally still. The watching Reptilians have stopped drumming their tails, making the Arena eerily silent. The ruby male holds his two bloody knives loosely, stands confidently. The jet male shifts his weight, back and forth like a cornered snake. I agree with Freya, the jet male is clearly outclassed by the ruby, who is still fresh and uninjured, and clearly the better fighter. I feel like the Proving is already over.
The ruby male waves his hand in a signal, and a close up of his face fills the jumbogram. Ruby bears his teeth, “Sssllissa! Are theesssse truly your ssssuitorsss? They are unworthy of me!” The male hisses, “You! Sssllissa! Are unworthy of me! I revoke my claim!” The ruby male turns his back on where the matriarch is sitting and begins to walk to an exit from the Ring. The jumbogram shows Ssslissa standing in her box, howling in fury.
Jet, seeing an opportunity, lunges after Ruby, knife leading. Ruby waits until the black Reptilian has almost stabbed him before turning, lightning quick, landing a double slash that leaves the jet male laying in the sand clutching his side. “Unworthy!” He roars.
“That did not go as the female intended,” Bluebell suggests thoughtfully.
“No,” I agree, I bet that fucking didn't.
“An embarrassment!” Freya says chuckling. “I sense the scale marks of the Serpent on this debacle!”
“Serpent?” I ask.
“The Interim Dragon,” Bluebell says.
The scantily clad clean up crew comes flouncing out along with a team of rubber suited Reptilians trailing floating drone stretchers. Sssllissa and her entourage make an angry retreat among jeers, mostly from other Reptilians. Fallout already. Freya orders another drink and Bluebell starts in on her sweet cakes. The Circle, empty of injured aliens and raked clean of bloodstains, sits empty and ready for more carnage.
The alpine horn blares again and two armoured figures step into the Circle. The amplified voice of the announcer rings out, “Our Challenger! Vrax The Shamed! A fallen Nordic warrior, exiled from Holmspace for crimes of violence and lapses of moral cowardice! Shamed, he fights not to regain his honour, but to gain your respect!” The jumbogram focuses on one of the fighters, a hulking Nordic man with an enormous axe. He stands as tall as Freya and is wearing red scaled, Kevlar-like armour on his torso and legs. His four arms are bare, the top two holding a menacing looking two-handed battleaxe with a severe looking spike, while his lower right arm wields a short thrusting sword, one that has more of a punching grip than handle. His fourth arm seems to be a robotic replacement, the skin of his bare arm ending abruptly above the elbow and blending into an industrial looking sharpened claw. He has shockingly blue eyes and his long blonde hair is tied up around his head in elaborate braids and tucked under a techy looking headband. The Arena boos and hisses and whistles and jeers. Clearly Vrax The Shamed is what Clem's wrestling show would call a heel. The Gladiator growls through gritted teeth.
"Hailing from the darkest, most barbaric planet in space comes a warrior born of warfare, plague, poverty, and famine," shouts the announcer, "Your Champion! Halley of Earth! The Destroyer!!!" The Arena erupts in cheers and a thunder of approval. The Jumbotron focuses in on me, or, well, her: Halley-11, the gladiator clone. She is wearing a suit of blue ceramic armour and wields a heavy round shield and broadsword. Her face is lean and angular, severe with traces of scars, a deep one running from her left temple, through her cheek, down to her chin. Her hair is undercut, shaved short except for a crest of longer hair on top, held out of her eyes by another techy headband. Halley of Earth looks more like my badass older sister than a clone of me. Halley holds up her sword and shield and the Arena quiets. She bangs her sword and shield together three times and many Sapients in the crowd, her fans, clap or tail stomp along with her. Clearly the hero here.
The Alpine horn sounds again and the Gladiators square off, nodding to each other, before starting to cautiously circle. The hidden drum team starts to slowly tap out a rhythm. Vrax the Shamed suddenly charges, making great sweeps with his of axe. Drums thud and bang. Halley efficiently gives ground, neatly stepping back or around each slash, sometimes smartly redirecting a blow with her shield. She is good at this. Vrax, carried by momentum, throws a particularly wild horizontal slash with his axe that Halley neatly ducks under, immediately springing up to barge the Nordic human in his face with her shield. A forcefield, made by the headband maybe, snaps into view, blocking the shield. Vrax stumbles back, scalp bleeding from where his head smashed into his own forcefield. The drums snap quiet, and Halley stands relaxed, quirks her eyebrow and smirks. Touche. Vrax snarls, blood dripping down his face. Drums thud as the huge man wades back towards Halley, axe held ready to strike. Vrax lunges, making several more wild sweeps of his axe, which Halley deftly manages, until he throws another apparently uncontrolled swing. Halley sets herself to block and counterattack but Vrax somehow reverses his axe stroke and hooks Halley's shield with the spike of his axe. He yanks and Halley stumbles in, her guard ruined, too close to use her sword, vulnerable. I gasp and Vrax punches her with his short sword, stabbing her in the side. Halley growls and head buts the Nordic man, their helmet forcefields flickering as they contact. The gladiators stumble apart, Halley bleeding black fluid from a rent in her armoured side. I wince, suddenly worried for her. She smiles wildly, eyes gleaming, and launches her own attack, advancing behind her shield, launching quick little stabs around her guard, herding Vrax, scoring a small cut on an exposed leg, scratching the steel of his claw hand. Drums rattle the Arena. Vrax tries to counter, throwing an overhand chop with his axe, which Halley somehow blocks squarely with her shield, levering the heavy weapon up and away, slashing in under it with her blade, laying a meaty chop into Vrax's short sword arm. He howls, dropping the sword, clutching his wounded arm in tight to his body. Halley spins free, resetting her guard, eyebrow once again quirked at her opponent, a manic smile on her lips. Vrax splits blood from his mouth and nods.
Drums swell again as the Gladiators come back together in a flurry of motion. Vrax throws an axe chop that Halley catches on her shield. The axe blade skitters and hooks the edge of the shield which Vrax yanks on, pulling Halley forward and ripping the shield off her arm. In the same motion Halley springs, driving her broadsword up, stabbing the Nordic human through the meat of his shoulder. As the sword impales his shoulder, Vrax grabs Halley around the wrist of her sword hand with his industrial claw hand, squeezing. Vrax growls and begins to bring his axe around for another swing. Halley, snagged and shieldless, punches Vrax with her free hand, a long dagger blade extending out of her forearm gauntlet as she strikes. The blade punches through armour and into the Nordic man's chest, the tip emerging from his back. Vrax whimpers and drops his axe, sags slowly to the ground. Halley's arm, crushed in Vrax's claw, is cut free of her body and falls to the sand of the Circle. The drums fall silent.
The Arena erupts in celebration.
My heart is hammering in my chest.
"Your Champion! Victorious! Halley the Destroyer!!!"
My eyes dart back and forth from the prone body of Vrax the Shamed, laying in a spreading stain of blood, to Halley's amputated arm.
Medical drones descend on Vrax. Applause, cheers, and Reptilian tail stamps fill the Arena.
I stare at Halley's severed arm, motionless in the sand.
Jesus fucking christ!
***
(Are you not amused!? Hopefully you are amused! And hopefully my attempt at writing compelling action choreography turned out okay.)
Re: Flotsam
Finally caught up with this and this is genuinely fun to read; it is literature that goes above and beyond the smut. I would pay for this as an ebook. But since I can't, have a sticky instead.
Re: Flotsam
Haha thanks, I’m glad you are enjoying it. I’ve never gotten a sticky before, it is quite an honour.
Also the added tag line is perfect : )
Re: Flotsam
Flotsam
Chapter 11: Destroyer
I am standing outside Halley The Destroyers chambers being glowered at by a scarred Reptilian bouncer. “I’m here to see Halley?” I say meekly.
“No autographssss,” hisses the Reptilian. He is a big one, a head taller than me, and heavily muscled. He looks not old exactly, but experienced, his scales faded grey and white, his hide chiseled with thick scars. The male snarls, showing a mouth of very young looking teeth, “Ssso bugger off!”
“Sssaka, you old Snake, is this how you treat guests?” Asks Steadfast Freya, stepping into view.
“Sssteadfassst!” Exclaims Sssaka the bouncer. “You know you are alwaysss welcome here.” They step together in a fist clasppy bro hug. “It hasss been too long!”
Freya does a four armed shrug. “Spacer life and the tavern,” she says by way of explanation.
Sssaka’s muzzle grins, a worrying expression on a Reptilian. “Come in! Come in! I’m ssssure ssshe will be glad to sssee you!” He steps aside and beckons us into The Destroyers Chambers.
After Halley The Destroyer fought Vrax the Shamed, Freya, maybe seeing how upset I was, announced that combat watching time was over and that we would go meet Halley-11. I didn’t really want to, didn’t think a post amputation meet-and-greet was for the best, but Freya was adamant. Freya dragged me and Bluebell out of our seats, down the Arena rampways into a stone passageway where she bluffed her way past a guard, and then down into the red mesa-stone tunnels beneath the Arena. A walk through a confusing maze of tunnels, a route that in hindsight, Freya knew quite well, and we were face to face with Halley-11’s Reptilian gatekeeper. Who Freya got past with a happy bro hug. Is there a backstage anywhere in the galaxy that Freya can’t get into?
We step into a large red stone chamber with a high, vaulted ceiling set with bright lighting. The air is filled with a complex perfume of incense, metal, floral and mechanical oils, and something botanical that might be drugs. The chamber is too warm and surprisingly humid. I unfasten my light jacket, hoping I don’t start sweating.
The Chamber is filled with people in various states of debauch. Pretty young humans lounge naked on piles of cushions, looking sated and content. A handsome middle aged woman lays on a divan, legs spread while a beautiful Nordic man, naked body oiled to a sheen, patiently and enthusiastically eats her pussy. A Blue, evidently male, skin covered in strips of metal like a Deviant tattoo, fucks an unnaturally busty human woman on all fours. The two archer acrobats from the Arena lay in cushions giggling and high while two nude men wearing collars lick off their striped bodypaint. Aggronotham the Strongest sprawls placidly in a corner, crotch draped with a towel, drinking from a tankard the size of my torso, mumbling poetry. Shaped pet-people, a muscular lion-man and tiger-woman lounge together on a mattress, chained by collars to the wall. The tiger seems me looking, and licks her cleft top lip, stretching in a way that emphasizes her eight heavy breasts, striped tail twitching. The male just yawns, flashing sharp feline teeth. A naked young woman, wide-eyed and innocent looking, is locked in a narrow birdcage, watching. It is quite the entourage.
Somewhat apart from the party is another group of sapients. These are sitting around a low steel table strewn with what I'm guessing are space drugs. One is a sinewy man, whose bald scalp flares into the hood of a cobra. He takes a hit of something from a drug inhaler, his lizardy eyes squeezed shut in pleasure. Next to him sits a Reptilian female, hulking but somehow young looking, with a suppleness of scale that I haven’t seen. She has that too serious look that screams intern. The final figure is a human woman dressed in biker punk leather. She has blue and gold scaled skin on her bare arms like tattoo sleeves and a cluster of golden scales on her chest, just above the hollow of her breasts like a medallion. On her face she has an organic domino mask of midnight blue scales and her hair is wound into dreadlocks hung with ceramic snake rattles. She stares at me, judging with slit Reptilian eyes. I shiver. Is this Syndicate muscle?
Freya places a pair of hands on my shoulders and a pair of hands on my hips and steers me deeper into The Destroyer’s Den. Bluebell, gives us a sly look and slinks away, hooves scuffing the floor, over to chat up Aggronotham. Thirsty cow.
We find Halley-11 soaking in a large hot tub, head tipped back in contentment, a cute guy and a pretty girl nestled under each arm. Relaxed like this she looks more like me, the hard lines of her lean face softened by repose. She does not look like someone who just fought a duel to the death and had her arm chopped off.
“Destroyer!” Freya booms merrily.
Halley-11 startles, eyes widening in recognition. She smiles, “Steadfast!” Halley-11 climbs out of her jacuuz and torpedoes into Freya’s four arms, the pair clutching and kissing passionately. “You finally came back,” Halley-11 purrs, playing with a looped braid of Freya’s hair.
“Alas, fair Destroyer, this is not a romantic visit.” Freya says, kissing Halley on her forehead. “I am here to present 24th.”
As the two women untangle, I finally get a good look at Halley-11. Her face, lean and scared, is the same as on the Arena jumbogram. It's my face, but battle-tested and devoid of its usual hint of baby fat: the effect is harsh and maturing. The crest of undercut hair is messy and spiked by moisture. Outside of her armour, which made Halley-11 look broad and tall, she is Halley-scaled and boyishly slender, far too small and fragile looking for a gladiator. She is wearing some sort of white bodysuit that completely covers her body from neck to toes. It hugs her small breasts, her muscle smoothed stomach, slim hips, and crotch making her look like a porcelain mannequin . I am deeply relieved to see she has both her arms attached. Maybe the bodysuit is some sort of futuristic healing device? I sigh a breath I didn't realize I was holding.
“Uh, hi,” I say awkwardly, resisting the urge to wave a little.
Halley-11 appraises me with a cool confidence I doubt I could ever manage. I try not to cower. Halley-11 is just a version of me. A version of me that fights alien gladiators for a living. I shiver internally and break eye contact. The Destroyer sees this and smiles a little. “Okay, Rookie, walk with me.” She turns fluidly and leads us through her entourage and into a second chamber. “I bet you have some questions,” she says without looking at me.
“Like, uh, how did you become a gladiator?”
Halley-11 snorts, “Don’t you mean how the fucking fuck did one of me become a fucking gladiator who fights in front of crowds!?”
I laugh nervously, “Exactly.”
“Well...” Halley-11 says gathering her thoughts. “I woke up here, lived with Clem until I couldn't deal with it anymore, and then moved in with Hank and Freya right after they opened the bar. Hank and Freya were lovers, but not exclusively so, and like a silly girl I fell in love with Freya. But it was just fun sex for her and Hank was still her guy and I was hurt and jealous and needed out. So I moved and found myself unemployed and alone on Flotsam.”
Lights snap on as The Destroyer glides into the next room. It is an armoury filled with bladed weapons and suits of futuristic armour hung in racks, mounted to walls, and laid out on tables. I grin thinking about trailer park Snakeguy and his sad little katana and bowie knife collection. He would absolutely lose his shit over this room.
“I managed to find a waitress job at a dive bar out by the Spaceport. It was dark and shitty and the pay sucked, but it was a start. I dated a bartender because he was easy and I was lonely and honestly, because he had a place to sleep. It wasn't the happiest time.” Halley-11 frowns, long face scar puckering. “But I did get to meet a lot of Spacers and hear stories about well, not adventure exactly, but something cooler than being a waitress in a shitty bar. I decided I wanted to be a Spacer too. My friends thought they could get me on a crew, but only if i showed up with my own kit. An experienced Spacer might get loaned a Spacesuit, but an untrained groundpounder needed her own stuff if she expected to be taken into the Black. So I needed money."
“Which is how I entered The Cage.” Halley glances back at me and smiles ruefully. “My Spacer buddies, who were a bunch of fucking degenerates, would frequent an even shittier bar that had a big steel cage in its cellar where amateurs would fight. Tough guys would fight other tough guys for bragging rights or prize money. But there were also, and my degenerate friends loved this, catfights between pretty girls in bikinnis.
“You didn’t...” somehow fighting in the Arena was more plausible.
Halley-11 laughs, “I did! Even though I figured the Spacers were just trying to see if I would actually do it, the money was pretty good. If I won a fight, it was a Shift's wages, and I even got paid if I lost, about what I would make from a night of waitressing. It was stupid and embarrassing, but...” she shrugs, “it was a way forward.”
“But how did you actually get in the ring in your underwear? I would have literally died first!” I was uncomfortable even thinking of it!
“I was desperate and unhappy enough to try almost anything, and angry enough that the idea of fighting was a little exciting. I needed... something.” She shrugs her porcelain white shoulders with smooth ease. “So I bought a conservative bikini, something with wide bottoms and a top with the biggest cups and most straps I could find and took a turn in The Cage."
Halley-11 smiles wistfully as she pokes through a pile of metal gewgaws on a work table. “I’ll always remember that first fight, the crowded dark bar basement with its inadequate fluorescent lighting, the metal smell of the cage and the humid stink of bodies, my opponent, some chick with her blonde hair loose wearing a tiny top and thong, wiggling for the crowd, the gong signalling the fight.” Halley sighs. “The way these things are supposed to go is hair pulling, slapping, some wrestling and maybe a tit pops out, then someone is pinned or submits. Blondie came at me expecting that, throwing a jaunty slap. But I was panicking, locked in a claustrophobic cage surrounded by drunk jeers, and so automatically Halley’s old self defence training kicked in.” Halley-prime’s self-defence classes that one of her therapists suggested she try to be more confident in public. I remember enjoying it and keeping after it even when I'd mastered the basics. It was empowering...until my depression ruined it and the rest of college. “I grabbed the chick's extended wrist, stepped into her, and threw her over my shoulder. She shrieked, her tit popped out, and she smashed into the floor and started wailing. I’d won my first fight!”
Halley-11 grins, “even though it wasn’t the girly show the crowd was expecting, they loved it, and so i was invited back for more fights. At first it was easy, a novelty, tough girl dispatches giggly floozies. But then word got out about the crazy bitch in the cage and the fights started attracting serious challengers, women who actually knew how to fight a little. I quit my waitressing gig, dumped the loser boyfriend, and started training. I had become the Queen of the Cage, the destroyer of floozies, the Champion Bitch. And i loved it!”
“That's how I came to the attention of an Arena promotor.”
As I’m listening to Halley, I’m gawking at all of her weapons and fighter stuff. I notice the blue armour she had been wearing in the Arena earlier laid out on a heavy work table. I walk over and examine it, reaching out to touch the gauntlet of the amputated arm, laid out casually next to the suit. The suit itself is mostly intact, but the blue ceramic chest plates have been removed, exposing the damaged underlayer. I frown and bite the inside of my cheek. The armour seems to be filled with mechanical, robotic looking things. Actuators and such. It makes sense that the armour would be some sort of... what would Clem call it? Power suit? Mechanical armour that could move itself. But... this suit seems completely full of machinery without space left for a pilot. I can’t figure out how Halley-11 could even fit into it. “Halley?” I ask turning to look at her...
And stare in mute horror as Halley reaches up with her smooth white hands and pulls her head off her body.
I think I must be screaming because my throat hurts.
The headless white mannequin body calmly holds Halley’s frowning head, neck, and the smooth disk of silvery metal that caps it. Halley-11’s decapitated head snaps at me to “Be silent!”
I stop screaming and take a ragged breath.
Halley-11 rolls her eyes and her white body smoothly carries her head over to the work table, carefully places it on its metallic base, and turns Halley-11’s head to face me. I am hyperventilating. “Oh calm down,” the decapitated head instructs me, “I know you are made of sterner stuff than this.”
“Wh-what happened?” I manage to stammer.
Halley’s scarred head grins fiercely, “The Arena happened!”
Halley-11 twists her head, stretching until her neck cracks. She smiles in relief. “As I was saying before you lost your shit, my cage fighting got the attention of an Arena promotor who offered me a fight. It was a little thing, what we in the bizz call a ‘Monster Match’: they pit an exotic and violent animal against a group of sapients in a duel to the death. The promoter wanted a bunch of pretty girls from bikinni brawl bars, but he needed a few actual fighters to make the event work. Since I was both he offered me a lot of Currencies, enough to get me a down payment on a spacesuit.” Halley’s head pauses and tilts, stares at me, “But what really sold me on it was getting into the Arena. I thought if I could just get in there, get a fight or two, I could go from being the champion fighter of a dive bar to a real fucking gladiator. So I took the job.”
“It was my first time in the Circle, standing in that white sand, roaring spectators packed in seats all around. I was nervous and giddy with excitement. It felt like destiny.” Halley-11 spat and shook her head, a weird gesture in the decapitated. “It was a fucking bloodbath. Here we were, twenty cute human girls in little metal costumes with spears, giggling and strutting into the Circle of the Arena, thinking this was going to be a silly tits-falling out of tops exhibition. And then they released the monster.” Halley-11 frowns and licks her thin lips. “Picture the mouth of a lamprey, that circular pit of barbed teeth, but on the end of a long, flexible neck. Picture the pincers of a preying mantis, sharp, snapping, and lightening quick. Picture two insectoid legs and a long, grub like body meant to float in a swamp like a manatee, but instead dragging heavily in the sand. They called it a Lurker.”
“The bikinni brigade wasn’t ready for this; they were panicky, and about to break apart, routed before the fight even started. But one of the real fighters, a thick, battleaxe of a woman, who’d fought monsters in the Arena before, barked out commands, told us our advantage was our numbers, our ability to coordinate. Some of us, the brave and smart ones, fanned out, encircled the slow moving, lurching monster. We danced back from the pincers, stabbed and prodded the grubby flank of the Lurker with our spears. A too slow girl was caught by a claw and cut nearly in half, falling down screaming. Another girl was savaged by the beasts mouth, tearing a bug chunk out of her, a gout of blood painting the sand red. I thought I saw an opening, a chance to stab the creature in the base of its neck, and lunged. The Lurker sensed it, and snapped its long neck and head at me. I threw out my arm reflexively and the monster caught it in its mouth.” Halley-11 bares her teeth and snaps them for emphasis. “It completely engulfed my arm and a thousand serrated, barbed teeth tore into me. I screamed as a wave of overwhelming pain flashed through me. And then I was laying in the sand, holding the spurting, bleeding stump of my arm. It was just gone a little below the shoulder, eaten down the gullet of a monster.” Halley grimaces, “It still hurts just thinking about it.”
“Oblivious to me, the Lurker was defeated. All those little stabs slowly built up and weakened and then killed the beast. Leaving, for the crowds enjoyment, a dead monster and a pile of bleeding, horribly injured girls in sexy metal bikinis.” Halley-11s head spits. “Monster Matches are the fucking worst.”
"Sounds like," I say quietly. "What happened with your arm?"
“This is Flotsam, the alien future,” Halley says with a bright, frosty smile. “And the medical technology is totally out of our world. Almost no one actually dies in the Arena; they collect you and stabilize you, and charge you out of what they owe you.” The same frosty smile, “It can cost you an arm or a leg.”
“They don't actually repair you though. Your eaten arm? That’s on you to fix.” Halley-11’s decapitated head attempts a shrug. “There are options of course. For a small fortune they can clone you a new arm and surgically graft it on. But that takes time and more money than I had to spend. Or you could see a Shaper who could grow you a new arm as if by magic. But that costs even more and would take dozens of sessions or it would mean going crawling back to Clem... which fuck that.” Halley frowns and I'm curious. “Or you could do what I did and buy a reasonably priced prosthetic and get back in the ring.” Halley nods at her headless white body which does the Vanna White thing at a particularly industrial looking robot arm mounted to the wall like a trophy. It is made of scratched dull metal, and has chunky actuators with two chunky cleated fingers and a thumb.
“I went back to the bar cagefight circuit, but with my scary new arm they wouldn’t let me fight the bimbos anymore. I had to fight the real sapient fighters. And i did, and did well too,” Halley smiles with a fierce pride. “My new arm was great in the cage. I was usually slower and weaker than my opponents, but I could use my metal arm as a shield and punch and kick from cover. And if I broke their guard? My prosthetic was slow but it hit like a fucking truck. A couple solid blows from super-arm and victory. I was becoming a cage fighter for real.”
“And that’s when Sssaka showed up with a proposition for me. It seems my story had reached the ears of an up-and-coming Lieutenant in the Reptilian Syndicates, one who placed great value on self-made sapients. Apparently she was impressed by my determination and, being a fan of the Arena, thought it would be amusing to be my patron. Potentially. So she sent Sssaka, a retired Champion, to train me for a Proving-style knife fight with a rival Lieutenant’s pet fighter. If I won, this Syndicate Lieutenant, The Serpent, would be my patron.”
Halley-11 made a yadda-yadda skip ahead facial expression, strange without the accompanying hands. “And so I fought a knife fight to the death in the Arena against a Reptilian Male. It was brutal, close and mean. It was the smell of Snake and reek of human fear, the scent of flowing human and Reptilian blood. It was the roar and thrum of the Arena crowd, giddy and inflamed. It was the pain of cuts and stabs, dozens of new wounds. And it was the moment of growling victory when I stabbed something important and felt a hot shower of blood on my arm and face, tasted it in my mouth. I stood dazed, covered in blood, so much of it my own, in the Circle of the Arena and heard the crowd, hundreds of sapients, all roar for me. It was exhilarating! Like a drug!” She smiles radiantly, “I was drunk on victory and only wanted more.”
“And so I was in: the lieutenant would be my patron and Sssaka would train me. I trained, gaining muscle and strength, learning to fight for real. I was given a better arm prosthetic, leaner and faster, more like the one I’d lost but better in every way. I was given power armour and weapons and the skills to use both.” Halley-11 grins, “And I fought in the Circle almost every Shift against other journeyman fighters, amassing small victories and building a reputation for myself. It was incredible, but I was hungry, so fucking hungry for more.”
The decapitated head licked her lips, “And then I got more, a real fight, one on one, with an actual Champion.”
“I remember this fight like it was yesterday, standing in the Circle, hot in my armour and nervous like it was my first time. The roar of the crowd, so familiar and yet somehow loader, angrier. I felt the familiar tingle of the old panic attacks, could feel my composure like a brittle thing. I bit my lip hard enough to draw blood, raised my sword and shield above my head, and roared curses at the crowds. Across the sand from stood my opponent, an Ürnaut, The Outcast. The cyborg was motionless and composed, armourskin gleaming in the light, face a featureless mirror, empty hands by its sides. Time seemed to hang there... until the horn sounded. I charged the Ürnaut, roaring, leading with my shield. In a jerky motion The Outcast struck me, lifting me off my feet and sending me tumbling across the sand. I rolled to my feet and watched the Ürnaut stomp towards me, lurching with every step. Up close I could see that the cyborg was battered and scratched. As The Outcast drew itself up to strike me, I realized the Ürnaut was damaged, slowed by time and neglect. I could use this, I could beat a broken old robot. I dashed in, dodged a lumbering blow, and hit the Ürnaut with my sword as hard as my mechanical arm could muster. The cyborg didn’t even flinch, simply grabbed my hastily raised shield, and with an industrial strength began to twist, relentlessly to twist, cracking amour, tearing tendons, ripping muscle, and breaking the bones of my flesh and blood arm. I screamed in pain and in a panic kept smashing the Ürnaut with my sword trying to make it let go. The cyborg placidly yanked and my shield and destroyed arm tore free of my body. I howled in agony and rage, kept conscious by stimulants, and hacked wildly at the Ürnaut, trying to break through the dented armourskin. The Outcast headbutted me, dropping me to the ground in a heap. As I tried to pick myself up one-handed, the Ürnaut stomped and stomped and stomped on my legs, smashing bones and hobbling me. Leaving me broken on the ground.” My clones scarred head blinks back tears and takes a ragged breath. “Defeated.”
I swallow, not sure what to say.
Halley-11 grits her teeth. “My body, my human flesh had failed me. I needed to get better, get stronger; to truly commit to the path of the Gladiator. So when it came time to heal, I rebuilt myself instead. My destroyed arm and broken legs would have to be replaced with new prosthetics. But that wouldn’t be enough. Stronger limbs are meaningless without an upgraded core. Enhanced speed is pointless without faster reflexes. I had to go further, replace more. I underwent radical surgery. They removed my hips, my shoulders, my spine and back muscles and replaced them with a powerful mechanical skeleton with integrated robotic limbs. I still had my head, my chest and organs, and crotch, but these were cradled in a robotic chassis built for victory.” The Destroyer smiles, “And when I returned to the Circle, I was unstoppable. No one could stand against me.”
“That is,” she says ominously, “until I fought my next Champion.”
“This time I fought WoManticore, one of the greatest Champions. She was human once, but over a career she Shaped her body into a lethal fighting creature. She stood seven feet tall, with an elongated torso and neck, thin and strong like a snake. Her legs were short, stocky, and powerful while her arms were thin and long, filled with whiplike enhanced muscle. Her skin had been replaced with a thick black exoskeleton, hard as stone. From her spine she had grown a great scorpion tail, tip shod with a curved spike of steel. WoManticore was my shadow, a woman who devoted herself to the flesh to win, while I had chosen the path of the machine. As we stood across the Circle from each other, a monster and a cyborg, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of symmetry and fate. I took a deep breath, stirred the sand with my boot. This time I was ready. WoManticore smiled at me with her beautiful human face and saluted me with her two thrusting swords. I nodded back, wearing my own stern smile.”
“The battle horn blared and WoManticore adopted her usual defensive posture: serpentine torso swaying, long arms cocked to thrust her blades like a mantis. I feinted an attack, and quick as snake WoManticore snapped forward with her torso and arms, blades flashing. She had superior reach and I would have to risk entering her deadly range to attack. And there was still that awful barbed tail to contend with. But I had a strategy. I was more mobile than WoManticore, and with my mechanical limbs, I was stronger too. I carried my shield and wielded a maul, a heavy steel hammer with a long armour piercing pick, ideal for breaking Womanticore’s carapace. I circled the monster gladiator. I would try to keep her turning and attack her flanks, try to damage her long arms if I could. I would wear her down with small strikes, just like that Lurker who had hurt me so long ago."
"At first, the plan worked. I landed solid blows to WoManticore's arms and tail, splitting her carapace and leaving wounds dripping with ichor. WoManticore seemed to be slowing too: her strikes were coming a little sluggish, one arm maybe a little weak. I caught one thrust on my shield, felt the lack of strength behind it, and pushed it aside. Overclocking my leg servos, I lunged, moving inside her guard and smashing her torso with my heavy maul. I felt a satisfying crunch as my hammer bit into the monster woman's side. But then, quick as a snake, WoManticore twisted and struck with her tail, its steel barb tearing through my armour and ripping into my torso, gutting me throat to crotch. It had been a trap and I had fallen right into it."
"We came apart, WoManticore clutching the wound in her side, me standing mechanically, entrails hanging in the air, blood pouring out of my body. My vision became hyper-focused and bright as contingency subsystems flooded my brain with a superoxygenated fluid and cut pain signals from my damaged body. I tried to gasp, but my torn chest and slashed diaphragm just spasmed. My body was dying. And yet... my systems were intact. My robotic limbs and chassis still functioned and my powerplant was reading optimal. My brain could be kept alive by emergency life support and drugs. I could still fight, even stick to my strategy of attrition, but my body would certainly die. I could forfeit and save my flesh or sacrifice it and defeat the Champion." The Destroyer's head grins it's sharkiest smile, "I chose Victory."
"As WoManticore collapsed unconscious to the sand I became a Champion, The Destroyer, the woman who killed even herself to win."
Jesus fucking christ! I gulp, "and you decided to become a head?"
Halley-11 rolls her eyes at me, "I became modular". The headless white porcelain body finishes fiddling with a holographic counsel by a pile of battered machinery and glides back to Halley-11's head, lifting her back into its hands. "My body was dead. Why should I replace it, only to have it fail me again? Grey tech could keep my head alive and I could control an entirely mechanical body in battle. All kinds of bodies." The white body cradled Halley's head with one arm and gestured around the armoury. It clicked suddenly that the suits of armour strewn about the room were all Halley's extra robot bodies. I shivered. "A body is damaged or obsolete? I can replace it. A certain opponent calls for extra strength or speed? I can customize. Multiple events in the Circle? Just swap bodies." Halley smiles from the crook of her headless body's arm, "It's very efficient."
"But you don't fight all of the time," I stammer. Right? It can't all be fighting. "What about when you are with friends or lovers or just like, relaxing?"
"It's the future, Halley," Halley-11 chides, "prosthetics can be very convincing." The white porcelain body gestures at itself and cocks a hip, striking a saucy pose. I watch as its smooth mannequin body buds white nipples and its breasts swell into familiar small handfulls. Its barbie doll crotch pinches a seam, which splits and blossoms into white vulva, becoming a perfect clone of my pussy. "I can feel every sensation in this body with perfect fidelity." The white body traces a hand over a breast, down its flat stomach, and cups its crotch. Halley-11s decapitated head sighs and lids her eyes in pleasure. "It can do everything my old body can. And more." The white porcelain body, now resembling a fitter version of my own naked body begins to strut towards me carrying Halley's head. As it walks, its hips widen and its ass plumps. Another step and its breast swell, growing huge and ripe, hanging heavily from its chest. Another step and its clitoris began to swell and lengthen, growing into an erect white porcelain cock. Its vulva drop and seal, inflating to become a perfectly smooth scrotum. The white body lifts Halley's head, holding her face inches from mine. "I can do things now that you can only dream of." She stares into my eyes licks her lips, tongue almost touching my nose. "I could show you."
I take an involuntary step back. Was another version of me trying to fuck me. What the fuck is with this planet!?
Halley-11 snorts and smiles a real, delighted smile. "Fuck! You rookies are too easy!" Her face becomes serious. "But seriously, don't you ever fucking judge or pity me. I am living exactly the life I want to. I am the steel I've made myself. I am a beloved Champion and when I step into the Circle, all of it, all of the fear and bullshit falls away and I live in a moment where I control the outcome. I have power here. I know who I am and what I want." She smiles ruefully at me, "Can you say the same?"
I stammer and blush.
"Here," The Destroyer says, "hold this." The porcelain body hands me Halley-11's head. I yelp, and fumble her for a moment, surprised at her weight. "Don't drop me please," she scolds. Her head is warm in my arms.
The white porcelain body, still over-sexualized and sporting a boner, marches over to the pile of machinery and resumes poking a hologram. "That useless Blue fucker, Monk is dusted on Red and getting laid instead of doing his job, so we will have to get me ready for my next fight," instructs the head in my arms. The machinery pile thrums into life and reconfigures itself into a squatting form. It is another robot body, I realize, but an enormous one. Like a walking monster truck. "Okay Rookie, I need you to carry me over to the mech and slot me into it. Can you handle that?" I nod and carry The Destroyer to her body. I survey the mech and bite my lip, unsure of where to stick the head exactly. "See those red lights? Put me into that depression between them." I gently lower Halley-11 into the machine, her neck stump sliding smoothly into place. Halley grimaces and the robot body whirrs. I take three hasty steps back as the porcelain body enters more commands into its interface. The mech revs louder, and lifts itself to a standing position on thick metal legs, arranging arms ending in a huge chainsaw and an industrial scale pincer. A steel dome painted with a cartoon shark face closes around Halley-11's scarred head. A deep, amplified digital voice booms from the mech, "One piece of advice, Rookie?"
"Figure out what you want, and then do anything to get it."
****
(Holy crap that was a long time between chapters! Sorry for the longest wait! Hopefully I can get a couple more done before things get too busy again...)
Re: Flotsam
Wow. One, hoo wee it's been a while, and two, hoo WEE that was something.
Re: Flotsam
Flotsam
Chapter 12: Faith and Desire
I am meandering at the crossroads of delay and procrastination. I know where I want to go, but I’m really in no hurry to get there. Which probably explains a lot about my life, actually.
At least I know where I want to go for once?
I think again of Halley-11 The Destroyer booming at me from her huge battlemech, telling me in her doombot voice to take what I wanted. Coming from a version of me who killed her own body to win a contest, that advice has a menacing edge. I definitely didn’t want to become a gladiator or sacrifice quite so much of myself to get ahead. A head. Ugh, fuck. Halley-11 seemed like such a cautionary tale about what life on Flotsam could do to me, but also in a fucked way how much potential I had. She was a famed Champion, rich and glamorous, confident and happy, which was all something this Halley had never managed. But that was her path, not mine.
What do I even want?
Do I want to try and get home to Earth? To return to a life of mental illness and hiding in a trailer park? Was that even possible? Do I want to try and find Halley-prime, to figure out why this is happening and why all these clones of me exist? Should I move on and carve out a new life here? Not as a stripper or man or vegetable hippy or cyborg fighter and definitely not as a sexual petgirl but as something else? I have no idea.
But maybe I want to be with Clem again? Clementine, whatever. Clem had been the best guy I knew, who had stuck with me through all the bumps and twists and setbacks of my mental illness. I doubt I would have made it without him. It felt like just a few days ago that he’d been my guy; even if I rationally knew years had passed for Clem it felt like we were still together. Except for the whole sorcerer space princess thing... But so what if he was a girl now? I’ve always liked women and Clementine, for all her strangeness, was more beautiful than Clem had ever been. Plus, Clem the man had always been a study in wasted potential, a talented guy held back by the world or his own lack of... something. Flotsam and Shaping had maybe unlocked that, let Clem grow into the star I always knew he was. She, whatever. I’m attracted to her and maybe still in love with her, or at least the idea of her. Did I still even know her? This is all too weird.
I know that I had to at least talk to her.
My Keyband honks at me, letting me know I’m wandering too far off course. I turn left down a narrow flight of turbine fan stairs bolted to a landing pod bungalow and back in generally the right direction.
After meeting the Destroyer and watching her charge off to another battle, I decided that it was time to get the fuck out of the Arena. Freya and I left a very happy postcoital Bluebell snuggling in the arms of The Strongest and navigated our way back outside to the Plaza of Champions. Freya gave me a staggeringly strong hug and then quested forth to provision for her upcoming return to space. So I was left alone to wander home. Which got me to thinking about what I was doing here, and about Clementine, and about how I really needed to talk to her.
And so I am walking to Clem’s space trailer, just the scenic way is all. Well, I’m at least wandering in its general direction. I’ll get there when I’m ready, which has to be eventually, right? I walk along a curved footpath past a collection of steel wire woven baskets filled with vibrant alien flowers. A tidy human woman with steel teeth sees me looking and smiles. Maybe I should buy flowers? Does Clementine like flowers now? Is that too much? The florist snips the stems from a bouquet with her mouth, delicately chewing on the ends before swallowing. Maybe no flowers.
I hastily climb a ladder hammered into a rockface between two salvaged homes and onto a new path. My Keyband doesn’t yelp, so It must be generally the right way. This path leads to a T junction at a large fuel tank row house with stone stairs leading up or down the Mesa. I’m pretty sure I need to go up, but starting that way earns a squawking reproach from my Keyband. Down it is. I meander down the staircase until it ends onto a tarmac paved street lined with shops. Okay, I think I’ve been here before. I turn in the clockwise direction, which my wayfinding approves of, and look around the oddly quiet street. The sparse foot traffic is thin and very Blue for this neighbourhood and many of the shops are shuttered. I guess most humans are too busy packing for the upcoming work Shift or saying goodbyes to be hitting up retail. Above me the silver cigar of a Grey drone hovers sedately, blubbing off a small sphere which trails quietly after me. The road takes a jig-jag of tight blind turns, a product of Mesa shape and a couple ungainly improvised buildings and...
“Hi! Halley! What a joy it is to see you!”
I startle and peep, blushing and spinning around. There, half hidden in a blind corner was a glowing holographic sign, cycling through alien texts, until it said in perfect English “The Circle of The Sleeping God.” Oh good a cultist, and one who apparently knows me, or knows a previous model of me. Grrrrreat.
My eyes shift to the cultist and are immediately drawn to a long horn growing from their forehead. It is as long as my forearm and sticking up and out, immediately making me think of a unicorn horn. It has a twisted, braided aspect, with a kind of decorative ridge that wraps around a central cylinder before tapering to the the top. It is covered in pale skin and is surprisingly veiny. I look at the tip of it and... what? The flesh horn doesn’t have a sharp point, it has something bulbous and kind of red and... fuck! It’s a cock! This cultist has a giant penis growing from their head! A veiny, twisted about its axis with a urethral swirl, capped by a huge fucking red glans, cock growing right from the centre of their fucking forehead! “What the fuck!?”
“I know,” says my own voice warmly back to me, “it’s beautiful isn’t it?”
My stomach drops into my toes, I see the cultist is another me, another clone of Halley. She regards me with a placid look from my own violet eyes and her wide mouth is quirked with bemusement. Cockicorn Halley looks like me if people said I had a horseface: her nose is a bit too wide for her face with prominent, almost equine nostrils and her jaw juts forward making her mouth too large, with big flat slightly bucked teeth. She has a mane of snowy white hair that cascades over her shoulders and white furry horse ears that stick out the sides and rove around in the air. And of course a fucking unicorn horn made of cock flesh growing right out of her forehead. “Fuuuuckkk,” I whine.
“I know it’s surprising, Sister, but you are truly overreacting.” Cockicorn Halley admonishes.
“Overreacting!?” My heart is hammering in my chest and I take a step back, surveying the rest of my cultist clone. She is dressed in a pink spandex unitard thing that covers her body from her neck to her wrists and ankles, but leaves little to the imagination. She has the usual number of limbs and a decidedly muscular build, with long powerful arms. Cockicorn has the conventional two breasts, although they are quite enlarged and capped with big nipples which aggressively tent the fabric of her pink onesie. Her torso is lean and toned, except for a little belly paunch that sports another pair of small nipples; an equine udder I realize. Her thighs are too wide and her muscular legs posses an equine recurve and end in hooves instead of feet. A snowy white horse tail flicks from her very wide and toned ass. The crotch of her tight purple uniform shows the lewd topography of enormous testicles and what I was unfortunately sure was the shape of an equine cock sheath. It seems this Halley has more than one cock horn. I take a long shuddering breath to calm down. Always breathe. “Seriously, what the actual fuck happened to you?”
“Like you, Dear Sister, I too was once lost and alone...”
“What makes you think I’m lost?” I ask hastily. “Or alone?”
Cockicorn whickers, “Because you are wandering by yourself on the last night of Shiftchange. Only the aimless are out now.”
“I’m not aimless. I’m going somewhere, I’m just not *well* aimed.”
Cockicorn continues, ignoring me, “I can introduce you to the Path, teach you to hear the Voice of the Slumbering King. For in his Dreams you can find Meaning, you can Transcend your Mortal Limitations and be the Light that He-Who-Slumbers needs to see in the cosmos.”
Oh here we go. I try not to roll my eyes. The thing about living in a trailer park is that poverty attracts god botherers, and the crappier the park the more evangelical and weird the preachers that would appear. Our park had attracted some doozies. I’d heard it all before so I’m a bit surprised and disappointed a clone of me had fallen for it. “So you found religion?”
“You make it sound so paltry,” Halley replies with a snort, eyes flashing in annoyance, nostrils flaring. “What I have found is Truth! This isn’t like those pathetic Pretenders who shambled into the park to sell us a sad little creed about an absentee god. What I’ve found is a True Deity, a god-entity that hears our Prayers and Intercedes in our lives. This isn’t spiritualism or superstition, The Sleeping God is Real and one day he shall Awaken.” Halley regards me, a look of raw passion in her eyes, her cockhorn throbbing with the beat of her heart.
With a sinking feeling, I realized that Cockicorn Halley is a zealot. I’d seen this very look before in the faces of the nuns who ran St. Ursula’s Orphanage, where I was taken to live after my parents died. The Sisters there had terrorized us, enforcing a strict code of morals and conduct with a swift disciplinary hand that I’m pretty sure crossed the line into abuse. But to them they were conducting a sacred duty to raise their little girls to be good Christian women who were obedient and lived according to the Bible. They couldn’t see the way they used fear and their power to brutalize vulnerable orphans because their Faith made them Right and Just. It was sad to see this reflected in my own cloned eyes. I shivered, Cockicorn’s religious zeal was actually more upsetting than her altered body with its forehead dick. Barely.
“That still doesn’t explain the Cockicorn thing.”
“Cockicorn?”
“The whole penis on your forehead, horse-lady thing you’ve got going on...”
“My Sacred Form?”
I rolled my eyes, “If that’s what you call it.”
“It is the Manifestation of my Devotion,” she says, flashing a self-satisfied horsey smile. “When one truly commits to the Sleeping God, one Communes with him by Dreaming together. We Dreamed of horses. You must recall the small farm down the road from the trailer park? Where we would walk to when we needed to get away from Clem and the park for a while? He-Who-Slumbers Dreamed with me about standing at that fence and watching the horses run. He Dreamed with me about feeling so powerless and watching those strong, majestic creatures cantor and run without fear. But then, instead of returning home to my sad little life, He-Who-Slumbers Dreamed me entering the paddock and running with the horses, taking on their Aspects, and becoming powerful and Free.” Halley whinnies in ecstasy, “He showed me a Path to a Truer and Happier Self.”
“And so your god turned you into a cockheaded unicorn?”
“No, Transmigration of the Flesh is a journey, a Manifestation of my Devotion and Worship. It represents my Commitment to Being the Light and following the Plan that Sleeping God has revealed to me,” Halley tosses her head and paws at the ground with her hooves like an excited equine. “I voluntarily entered this Covenant. I Choose to do be this.”
“Okay,” I say for lack of anything else.
Cockicorn Halley looks at me earnestly, but I think without actually seeing me. “It would bring me Great Joy to Introduce you to He-Who-Slumbers so that you might Dream with Him and Learn your Path to becoming the Light.”
Nope. Not a chance in whatever whacky hell she Dreams of. “No, thank you, religion isn’t something I’m looking for right now.” Especially a weird Shapist cult. I look at my Keyband like a cartoon person, “Gosh, the time! I really have to get going.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Halley. I will Pray for you to Him that you might change your mind.”
“Right.” There was one thing I still wanted to know though. “Sorry, but before I go, which Halley are you?”
“I was Halley-21, but now I am Sister Equestria.”
***
I am once again standing at the airlock door to the space apartment of my ex-boyfriend, maybe future girlfriend.
I take a deep breath, trying to quell the butterflies having an orgy in my stomach. I am so completely fucking nervous. What do I even say to Clem? What do I even want from her? Do I even know who this person is anymore? This is fucking crazy! Maybe I should just go... but fuck, I just met a version of myself in a cult with a dick on her face. Life is too short; I have to do this. Preferably without throwing up. Or fainting. If only I had a giant four-armed woman to give me a shove.
I steel myself: gotta grab life by the balls.
I touch the rust coloured steel door which recognizes me, brightly welcomes me home, and smoothly snaps open. I take a breath and step gingerly into the cycling chamber foyer, stepping around piles of fancy womens shoes and brushing against jackets hung from pegs stuck into air vents. I hear a noise and freeze.
Jesus, I should have called ahead.
A woman makes a low throaty groan and something yowls. It sounds decidedly sexual. I should go...
Instead I peak into the living room, eyes sliding along grey polymer to the plush blue rug surrounded by couches. There I see them, intertwined, Clementine and Pussy, having sex.
Fuuuuuck.
I should really go.
They are facing away from me, fortunately, but at an angle where I can see their bodies. Pussy is on all fours, hand-paws and knees on the ground, eight little breasts hanging and bouncing. Clem is behind and over her, on her knees, delicate back and silver hair and her perfectly toned and soft ass clenching and shaking as she fucks her pet catgirl from behind. Doggy style? Cat? Clem’s three round, unreasonably ripe breasts, seen from behind and beside, surge as she thrusts; her large balls slap the catgirl’s yoga ass, and the slick wet pink of Clem’s labia sometimes peek free. Sticking out from between their bodies, Pussy’s long black tail lashes the air. Clem pants and whimpers and Pussy pushes back into her with an inhuman flexibilty of spine and yowls like a cat in heat.
I am dismayed and furious and more than a little turned on. It’s too fucking weird but also weirdly hot. I want nothing to do with this; I want to be Pussy. I stifle a dismayed sound.
I should really fucking go.
Pussy makes an awful cat sound and arches her back even further while the claws of her paw like hands and feet dig into the rug. I blush as I realize she is coming. Clem pauses her humping, letting Pussy savor the moment. Panting Pussy agilely rolls onto her back, rotating her body on Clem’s enormous cock so they don’t completely separate. Now face-to-face, Pussy pulls a Clementine down on top of her, nipping her face playfully, and mewling for mistress to keep Fucking her. Clementine groans happily and starts to slowly work her cock in and out of her catgirl pet who purrs in appreciation. I can see her face now, and Pussy is a vision of feline contentment, like she is getting the best head scratch in the universe. I whimper and one of the black kitty cat ears on Pussy’s head twitch. I hold my breath, hoping she is distracted. Instead the catgirl clone languidly looks at me, pleased recognition flashing on her face as we make eye contact. Clem, oblivious, keeps steadily fucking away. Pussy flashes her clawed paws and drags them down Clementines long shapely back, who gasps in shocked pleasure at the sensation. Pussy, still looking at me sticks out her long rough tongue and licks her pink little kitty nose. Cat’s got your ex. Tears sting my eyes. It’s just so fucking unfair.
Starting to cry I finally go.
***
(Much less overdue, here is a nice short chapter. The next one might be a while coming because, writing schedule aside, I think it might be a loooong one.)
Re: Flotsam
Were you playing Cultist Simulator while writing that last chapter? Coming up with silly Lovecraftian cult stuff is always fun.
Re: Flotsam
Flotsam
Chapter 13: The Grey Place
(This chapter has some stuff about suicide in it, so y’know maybe skip ahead to the RED insert below if you aren’t in a good place to read that kind of thing. Also if you have suicidal thoughts please contact your local crisis center or mental health provider! I’ll drop in a quick summary of what got skipped over in the insert below.)
I am ugly crying on the streets of an alien city and it fucking sucks.
I think about Clem fucking her petgirl Pussy and make a retching sob sound. It’s so fucking unfair! I didn’t even get a chance to be with the one guy I’ve ever really loved because now he’s a freaky space woman who has a sex slave clone of me. A freaky sex slave me with a whole bunch of little tits and the ultimate yoga instructor body. How does a plain old Halley compete with that? And anyway what kind of scumbag has a sexpet!?
Fuck him. Her. “And fuck her Pussy too!”
A human couple dressed in High Fantasy drag and sporting antlers startle at my outburst and cross the street, their robotic pram crawling in their wake. Fuck them too.
Why did I ever decided that I wanted to be back with Clem? Why did I ever think it was going to work out? Nothing ever has before. Why would being in space help? Because aliens!? I snort laugh and snot leaks out of my nose. I’m a fucking mess.
It’s getting kind of dark. I glance around and I don’t recognize any of the repurposed trash houses. I don’t even know where I am, really. I’ve just been crying and walking, at first just eager to get away from the scene of the crime but then just wandering.
I bet Hank and Freya are fucking right now too. Assholes.
I stagger into a courtyard surrounded by vacant patchwork offices and miserably sit on a stone stoop. Wind chimes tinkle cheerfully nearby. Asshole chimes. I wipe my snotty face on the sleeve of my jacket, which I realize has grown warmer in the chill of the dusk air. Jacket is okay, I guess. I hug myself and sniffle.
“Halley, are you okay?”
I startle and blink my teary eyes. There, hovering silently in the air above me is a reflective silver sphere of metal about the size of a basketball. A Grey drone.
“Do I look okay!? And what the fuck do you want?”
The drone drifts a little lower and suddenly I am joined by an ethereal projection of myself, Halley rendered in light, nude but for tasteful retro voxelation and smoothed over genitals. She looks at me with an expression of genuine concern, “I want to make sure you’re okay and maybe help get you somewhere safe.”
“What the fuck is this?” Why is a Grey drone projecting me. “Who the fuck are you?”
“I’m HAL-E, and I’m a gh-gh-ghost!” Then hologram does the creepy hands and smiles a perfectly Halley smile, watching to see if her goofy joke landed. It didnt.
“I’m not in the mood for corny jokes,” I grumble.
“Of course you are,” HAL-E replies brightly, “nothing cheers you up more than a goof. I sometimes think it was like, half the appeal of Clem.” The hologram shrugs, “Besides it wasn’t really a joke. I’m the digital ghost of Halley-8.”
I frown, curious despite myself “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Halley-8 died. I’m her uploaded digital consciousness, the ghost in the machine.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah, it’s something,” HAL-E shrugs, “but it beats the alternative.”
I guess it does at that. “Why are you being projected by an alien drone?”
“I’m the human Interface Agent for the Grey administrative AI cluster.”
I blink my eyes.
“The Greys are bad at humans, and Blues, and well, most planar species. They have issues conceptualizing how our minds work. The administrative AI cluster, the supercomputers and sentient intelligences that monitor the planet for contraband and also, like, run the city, are basically super mathy Grey minds. They are also bad at people.” HAL-E rolls her holographic eyes, “So bad at people! But anyway, to help administer the city the Grey have uploaded minds from different species to basically serve as cultural translators. And I’m the human Interface Agent.”
“So you’re like, what? The Grey’s automated call router?”
HAL-E laughs, “I like to think of myself more as Help software. But maybe I’m just the supercomputer Babel Fish for our Alien Overlords?”
“So you’re Software? Jesus.”
“Well, I mean, it’s more complicated than that. The parts of me that are modeled on Halley-8 are a kind of program, but I am also the hardware Nodes in the AI Spercluster dedicated to HAL-E Stuff. Not to mention all of the networked drones and devices that are running some amount of my consciousness at any given moment. Which means I’m kinda the result of a complex adaptive algorithm network running on a particular cognitive strata. Which if you think of the human brain as a meat computer, means I’m basically the same as you.”
“But computers are artificial...”
HAL-E sticks out her tongue, “So’s the human brain, Earthling.” Touche, I’d forgotten about that.
“You sound really smart,” I sniffle while wiping my nose on my sleeve again.
“It helps when your brain is an alien supercomputer.”
“So you aren’t really human anymore?”
“No, I’m something else. I still have a human personality and can understand and emphasize with people, but I am also loads smarter now. Plus I’m running on Grey technology and part of my mind is built on their AI framework so I can understand and communicate with them too. So I’m sort of a hybrid mind.”
“What’s different?”
HAL-E grins, “Well I’m a total Maths wiz now.”
I frowned. I’ve never been a slouch at Math. I was even top of the class at St Ursula’s. “But...”
HAL-E rolls her eyes in a perfect Halley emulation, “Inhumanly good at Maths now. I can also run in parallel, which means I can be in multiple places at once, with different instances of me doing different things, all sort of linked together by a central me. It’s like the ultimate multi-tasking.”
“So what else are you doing right now?”
“Well I’m checking up on you, keeping an eye on a little girl who is running her first errand for her dads, leading some medics to an elderly woman whose had a fall, chatting with a Scavenger troupe while the AI inspects the weird thingy they found in the Junk Desert, keeping tabs on this shitbag drug dealer I kind of hate, providing spooky sound effects for a teen trying to scare her friends (which isn’t working because they know about holograms), having a movie day off with one of my girlfriends,” HAL-E smiles rakishly, “and having sex with a dozen sapients. Among other things.”
“You have sex?”
“Oh yeah! I’m networked with dozens of sex toys, especially dildos and fleshlights I’ve distributed around the city. I get sensations from whenever they’re used, just like the real thing.” She smiles lustily and I blush.
“Do people know?”
“Some sapients know I’m in the toy and think its fun and kinky. I even have some actual relationships where I’ll holographically embody for sex and hanging out and stuff.” HAL-E Winks, “And a lot of people need to be better about reading their end users agreement!”
“That’s a bit intrusive...” I manage.
HAL-E shrugs, “Do you really think it’s any better on Earth? I’m only in it for the orgasms, not the Big Data and lube advertisements. Besides, I’m already up in everyones business: I’m pretty much watching humans all the time to help the AI decide if something is normal or a problem, like distinguishing between someone shouting for joy from someone crying out in pain. So if I’m already being a total creep, why not get laid too? Plus I give the sex toys out for free and they are very fancy.”
“So you’re happy then?”
HAL-E shrugs again, then nods, “It definitely beats the alternative.”
“Speaking of the alternative,” I say, feeling like a jackass, “how did Halley-8, how did you die?”
HAL-E makes a very serious face.
“Sorry!” I say, “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable!” Why did I ask that? Obviously you don't ask an uploaded consciousnesses how they died. Right?
HAL-E shakes her head “It’s okay. It’s just not a fun story, Halley.” The hologram takes a simulated deep, practiced breath. “I killed myself.”
I nod, not really all that surprised.
HAL-E frowns, “When I first woke up here, everything was great. It felt like a chance to start over as a brand new me. Literally even. But things got bad with Clem and then I had some bad experiences in the city and so I went to the Dark Place.”
The Dark Place, the name I have for the worst depression. In College I went to the Dark Place, feeling shitty and bailing on friends, then skipping classes, then locking myself in my dorm room for days at a time... Just too empty to do anything. It was like being filled with a kind of Soul Fog. It was this Dark Place depression that ended College and sent me hiding in the Trailer Park. I nod at HAL-E, feeling like I should hug her but not sure how that would even work with a hologram.
“Flotsam City isn’t a place with a lot of resources for mentally ill humans and Hank hadn’t set up his home for wayward Halley’s yet, so I ended up in a Breakyard. A lot of the most valuable salvage in the Junk Desert are components. A big broken alien flight computer is basically worthless, but the platinum wire or quantum memory crystals or whatever inside of it are pretty valuable. So Flotsam has factories where sapients spend their days breaking down weird space junk to pull out the best pieces. The Reptilian Syndicates run the biggest operations, filled with Indentured sapients working off their debts, and the Ürnaut penal camp has their prisoners Break as part of their punishment. But there are also tons of smaller workhouses that provide two hots and a cot in exchange for hours of taking apart weird salvaged tech. Down on my luck and depressed, I ended up in The Workhouse for Wayward Young Women.” HAL-E shook her head, “Every day I would wake up, eat some nutrient paste gruel, spend tennish hours mindlessly taking apart weird metal boxes in a fugue, eat more nutrient paste and sleep the rest of the day away. Repeated over and over and over in a total fog. It went on for weeks, maybe months. I lost track of time. I became totally robotic.”
“I was subsisting, but things just didn’t get better. I couldn’t see a way out of the Workhouse or out of my depression. And so I decided it was time to end it.” The Hologram winces, “I climbed the Mesa up into the Terraces and walked to a mansion I’d visited with Celm for a gala once. I remember that It had the best view of the city I’d ever seen because it stood on the lip of a good tall cliff. When I got to the Terrace mansion, I walked into it’s beautiful gardens, climbed up onto the little wall at the cliff edge, stepped out of my shoes, and threw myself off.”
HAL-E’s face is calm, “At first, as I fell, I didn’t really feel anything. Maybe relieved I didn’t have to go back to the Breakyard, but not really happy. But then, as the ground rushed up at me, something happened. I stopped falling... but no, it just seemed like that. I was still falling, just imperceptibly slowly, my hair lashing my face in bullet time, the world around me still and quiet, drones and fliers hanging motionless in the air, rotors and turbines almost static. And then a silver ball, a Grey drone, flew into view and matched its velocity to my glacial fall. ‘Halley, you have decided to kill yourself,’ a monotone male voice said.” HALL-E’s voice modulates to match the pitch of the voice.
HAL-E’s voice returns to normal, “‘Yes’, I responded too calmly, able to speak normally despite my bulletime fall.”
“‘Why have you done this?’ The voice had asked, puzzled.”
“‘Because I am too unhappy to fix. I’m already broken.’”
“‘What if We were able to mend your cognition? Repair the fault in your brain/mind/psyche that causes this depression/unhappiness?’”
“I snorted a laugh then, falling to my death. ‘You make it sound so easy.’”
“‘We did not intend to. This repair will require great effort on Our part and will cost you dearly as well.’”
“‘It’s not as though I have much to lose,’ I had grinned despite myself, ‘I’m not really in a great bargaining position.’”
“‘We are aware.’”
“‘I accept whatever your terms are. Please save me!’”
“‘We do not intend to save your life,’ the voice had replied. The Voice laid out the bargain, explained that he was the liason between the Grey and Flotsam humans, but that he had evolved and become too removed from his humanity to effectively serve his purpose. He needed a replacement, and he had been watching me because he thought I could make the transition. When he observed me throw myself off the cliff, he knew he had an opportunity. The fact he didn't recognize this was super shitty probably confirms he was right about being too inhuman. Ultimately, I accepted the deal.”
HAL-E smiled a tight little smile, “so my mind was scanned and recreated, molded and fused with the Grey AI core, and reconfigured to function in my new role while still being essentially myself. As a bonus my cognition was slightly altered to fix my anxiety and depression. I haven’t been mentally ill since.” The hologram chewed her lip and looked guilty, “I have no memory of the original me, Halley-8, hitting the ground. Sometimes I wonder what she was thinking right there at the very end.”
“Holy shit,” I say, tears in my eyes. It’s not like I, well, Halley-Prime hadn’t considered suicide before, about maybe climbing to the top of the brutalist waffle of the admin building and jumping. But to hear a clone of myself go through with it was like being visited by a time traveling holographic ghost. My heart aches for her. “I’m so sorry,” I say and hug at the hologram, almost falling over as I pass through her projection.
HAL-E giggles, “It’s okay. I’m still here and I won’t ever feel like that again. I think Halley-8 would have taken that deal even without the whole impending splattery demise thing. Besides, with my new role I can do a lot of good. I help people as much as my prerogatives allow and I keep a special eye out for humans in distress or showing signs of mental illness and try to intervene.” HAL-E gives me a meaningful look, “And I watch out for Halleys.”
“So you’re like my gaurdian angel?”
“I prefer digital spirit guide. But seriously: if you are ever in trouble or distress, you aren't alone. I love you and can help you, okay?”
I nod, “Okay.”
“So how about we get you back to Hank’s, hey?”
I sigh, I don’t really want to go back to my closet cot and maybe listen to people fuck loudly. “What can you tell me about Halley-Prime’s disappearance?”
HAL-E rolls her holographic eyes at my delay tactic, “Not much, really. Wherever she went, it happened before I was uploaded and my predecessor basically didn’t give a shit about humans so his observations were spotty. Plus Prime was surprisingly good at avoiding Coverage, almost like the Grey were turning a blind camera to her or she was being scrubbed out of the sensorium later.”
“Wouldn’t you know if the Grey had some sort of deal with her?”
“No, I might be a fully adultish human, but I’m still a baby AI. They only show me what I need to know for my job or what I can understand. Besides, even if the Grey did know something about Halley Prime, I probably wouldn’t be able to tell you.”
I frown, “How come?”
“There are privacy rules that I’m unable to violate because of my, well, programming. Think of it as an NDA that is hardwritten into my mind.”
“That’s fucked.”
“The Grey take their seclusion seriously,” HAL-E shrugs, “its not all that different than what people sign on Earth in a tech company, just way easier to stick to. Plus, y’know the whole not being dead thing. So if you want to know what the Grey actually know, you’ll have to ask them yourself.” HAL-E frowns and pauses. She pinches the bridge of her holographic nose and sighs, “This really isn’t a great time for this, but I’m compelled by my programming to tell you that you are invited to the Grey Citadel...”
“Me? Why?”
“I literally cannot say,” HAL-E says, frowning in a cloud of angry voxels. “For the record, I don’t think you should do this right now. You are clearly upset and... I don’t think you should go.”
I look up the Mesa, just making out the edge of the silver globe at its top, reflecting the last rays of the sunset. A trip to the Overlords compound, something Hank says pretty much never happens. Maybe not since Halley-Prime visited them. It could be a chance to find out what the Grey know. And if nothing else it would be a distraction from, well, everything. “I can ask them about Halley-Prime?”
HAL-E nods, clearly displeased with the question. “You can.”
“And they’ll honestly tell me what they know?”
“I cannot say.”
“Okay.” A burp of anxiety, “And they won’t hurt me or hold me prisoner or anything?”
“You will not be harmed and will be allowed to leave at any time. Someone in the Citadel wants to meet you, and you will be treated as a guest.” HAL-E is scowling.
“Who are they?”
“I cannot say.”
I chew my lip, indecisive as the holographic woman stands and paces angrily. This is a terrible idea, but I want to go. Sometimes you just gotta keep moving. “I appreciate the advice and you looking out for me, but I think I want to go.”
HAL-E stops pacing and sighs, “I was afraid you were going to say that.” She shrugs her shoulders and dissolves into a cloud of voxels. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you...”
The grey drone swings up into the air expanding from a basketball sized ball of silver to a sphere slightly larger than me. “Go stand in the middle of the courtyard,” HAL-E’s voice instructs me.
I get up from the stoop and stumble into the middle of the space between buildings. The Grey drone hangs for a moment and then drops onto me. I yelp and throw my arms up, but the drone flows around me, and I find myself standing inside a perfectly hollow sphere, blinking stupidly at my wildly distorted reflection on the concavity of the mirrored walls. I feel a sense of momentum shift and I stumble on the curved floor of the sphere. It must be moving. Abruptly the walls of the expanded Grey drone become translucent, leaving me feeling suspended in the air above a sunset Flotsam City. I gasp when I see how quickly the drone is moving: it is really hauling ass. My ass.
I look up the Mesa as the Grey Citadel comes unto view. From below it looks like a giant blob of mercury, but as we crest the top of the Mesa I can see that it is a perfectly round silver sphere, sitting on the smoothed mesa summit like a marble on a tabletop. Despite being the size of an avante garde university library, I almost feel like I could get it rolling, push it right off the Mesa. The drone hangs in the air for a moment and then I yelp as it explodes into motion, racing directly at the Citadel. I drop to my butt and raise my arms, bracing for impact and the drone smoothly merges into the wall of the Citadel leaving me sitting on the floor of a perfectly round tunnel with unsettlingly mirrored walls.
Shakily I climb to my feet, awkward with the curved floor, and stumble forward, since that seems to be the only way to go.
I walk for a few moments? Minutes? Time is hard to track in here...
There is a flash of bright white light...
(Hi there! If you skipped ahead it is safe to start reading again. To catch you up: Halley-24 was very upset and HAL-E, the uploaded consciousness of Halley-8 checked up on her. HAL-E is the human interface agent for the Grey and spends her time observing humans, piloting drones, helping people, and embodying sex toys. Through her Halley is invited into the Grey Citadel, she accepts, and now here she is walking in an alien tunnel.)
***
I blink my eyes open and my clothes are gone. Instead I’m wearing a worryingly skintight outfit of silver material. Metal? Skin? It’s warm and slightly taught like good athleticwear and covers me from my throat to my wrists and ankles. My bare feet are cool against the concave metal floor. I know I should be upset by this, but somehow I’m not.
I take a deep cleansing breath, air cool and oddly scentless, and keep walking along the tunnel.
The air fills with a hum that I can feel but not hear, and it begins to syncopate with a resonance that I experience as a strobing light, even though nothing visually changes...
***
Cut scene and I am aware again, still barefoot in a circular tunnel. The skin of my arms and legs is goosebumped since my silver clothing skin has shrunk to a swimsuit, leaving my limbs bare. I shiver, breath steaming in the abruptly frigid air. My mind feels fuzzy and I rub my face, surprised to not feel my hair. Fingers trace with profound tactile sensation up to my scalp and I learn my silver swimsuit has a tight hood, leaving only my face exposed. I hold myself, rubbing my arms for warmth and continue walking along the tunnel.
***
I slowly come back into focus, as if from a fog. Or is it fugue? I am now encased almost entirely in silver material, everything but my face coated in a mercury skin. I swear I can feel it slowly flowing over my body, like the tides of my own personal ocean. I find it comforting? I blink and I can hear sound again, noticing my deafness only upon its absence. What else am I missing that I don’t even realize? It is nice to hear again.
I look around and see that I’m approaching a crossroads, a place where another tunnel bisects my own. I hear footsteps, clicking cheerfully like a tap dancer. I stop and patiently wait while six Grey aliens march past, the first few without even glancing at me. They are kind of cute, short like children and wearing tight suits that sparkle purple, pink, red, blue, green and orange. Their heads are enormous, great grey teardrops of rubbery looking skin. The final one in the troop turns to look at me, its small mouth a grim line, its slit nostrils flaring. I look into its huge black eyes and see a perfect darkness that I could just fall int....
***
I am alone again in a tunnel, the air uncomfortably warm and humid, a small stream of bathtub hot water trickling in the bottom of the circular space. Sweat beads on my body, which is naked now, except for my arms and legs, which are encased in long gloves and tall boots of silver skin. My distorted reflection on the tunnel wall looks like a kinky carnival version of myself. I wink and giggle, strangely giddy. I skip along the tunnel, splashing, and snickering, until I find myself in a widening, a kind of antechamber lined with translucent bulges. I stop and peak into the first pod and see a sleeping form. It is a Grey, large eyes closed, silver tubes inserted into its nostrils, body held aloft by something that I can’t see but can feel as a vibration in my guts. Its jumpsuit, I notice, is a porcelien white, neutral instead of the joyfully gay suits of its wakeful compatriots. I tiptoe to the next pod and see another Grey in stasis, its own suit also neutral and white. I wonder if that’s a thing. I stare at this Grey’s face, so relaxed and peaceful in slumber. I reach up and touch the translucent membrane of the pod with my silver coated hand and the Grey’s eyes instantly snap open and stare into mine, stare into me, stare through me, and I feel a great pressure on my thoughts a buzzing in my mind and...
***
I am standing in the tunnel again, my silver garment reformatted to be thigh high boots, opera gloves, and a shoulderless evening dress made of brilliant quicksilver. My hair is pulled up in an elaborate updo, strung up with silver tendrils. I step forward, the heels of my boots clicking on the floor, and step into a huge, cathedral like space. The chamber is shadowy, broken only by streams of light from spotlights at the apex of high vaulted ceiling domes. A narrow, blessedly smooth catwalk fills the centre of the room like an aisle, while the surrounding floor is made of large bumps like the interference pattern of standing waves. As I watch, I can see the floor imperceptibly moving, undulating in slow motion. I take a few cautious steps into the room, my boots echoing in the space.
<Welcome, Halley-24.>
I startle and stop, look around.
<It’s quite alright.>
I realize that I’m not actually hearing the voice out loud, but instead experiencing the voice in my mind. And this voice ‘sounds’ a lot like me. “Who is it?” I ask, aware of, but not actually feeling, dread.
A sense of mirth washes over me, <I’m Halley-7. I’m very pleased that you accepted my invitation.> A burst of bubbly happiness.
“Where is here, exactly?”
<As you’ve no doubt surmised, we are within the Grey Citadel. This is a kind of art gallery and cultural exchange. I am a kind of curator and ambassador... as well as artwork. We feel, the Artist and I, that the time is right to welcome others to view our project. We have decided you, with your freshest of eyes, would be an appropriate first guest.>
“I’m honored?” What does she mean by artwork? And why is she speaking in my mind? I should be completely flipping out, and yet my fear is held apart from me, wrapped in a kind of mental blanket.
<If you would step this way?> I feel a compulsion, a sense of where I ought to go. I nod and respectfully walk deeper into the gallery, heels clicking.
I stop at the opening of a side space, a smaller sphere forming a kind a chapel off of the central knave. At first it is hidden by unnaturally deep shadows, but then a light beams down from the ceiling illuminating a bizarre tableau. I gasp and bring a silver gloved hand to my mouth. The chapel floor is a shallow wading pool, filled to the brim with an opaque white liquid that smells faintly of milk. Floating lazily in this saucer are two round spherical objects, but slightly oblong, deformed by the weight of gravity. They make me think of a racey poster belonging to Trailer Park Snakeguy of a naked woman laying in a bathtub of milk, her tits breaking the surface like islands. I realize I am looking at giant breasts, creamy freckled tits, each the size of a large bean bag chair. At the apex of each giant boob is a wide red-pink areola, bumpy and wrinkled, but instead of a nipple, there is a woman’s face coated in areola skin. Instead of hair, milk streams over each woman’s head, but not straight down, instead flowing unnaturally to form bangs and the ringlets of impeccably styled hair, that then trickles quite naturally down the breast body into the milk filled wading pool of the chapel. The tit-women smile coyly at me and speak to each other in a gibberish that I can’t translate. “What the fuck? What am I looking at?”
<This is is our first artwork. It is untitled.>
***
I am seated in the throne room, mindful of my posture, ribs crushed by my ceremonial bodice. I straighten my back and adjust my skirts, being sure to align the green glowtubes woven into the matte black fabric. Who decided royalty had to wear such uncomfortable clothing? I should have them executed! Not that I shall ever enough of the throne for that kind of thing... I smother an unbecoming frown and glance at my twin sister. She peeks back at me out of the corners of her eyes, raises her auburn eyebrows ever so slightly, and I repress a giggle. Fuck the sovereign, I love that girl. I don’t expect I’d be able to get through all of this without her.
A bass rumble of official music drops and the laser portcullis snaps off. The official business has arrived. How wonderful. The first through the gate is a harsh looking man, angular and scarred, wearing a spotless grey minimalist uniform. He is escorted by an honour guard of soldiers wearing sleek grey armour with black visors. Their jackboots click loudly on the black glass floor as they assemble into a tidy formation and snap into rigid martial attention. “Presenting,” the electronic courtier announces, “The AllCommander of the Iron Colonies!”
A second bass rumble sounds and a second retinue enters, this one lead by a nude woman wearing only a harness of bells who skips and tumbles and laughs. Plodding in her wake is a hugely obese man, dressed in a bright red doublet and hoes worn under a black ceremonial shoulder-padded blazer and long necktie. The rest of the group is a mixed entourage of rakishly dressed business dandies and intimidating war lawyers. The lawyers form a defensive ring around the fat man, while the dandies loaf about with terrible posture. The glowtube tapestries reflect gaily from their golden tie clips, cufflinks, and decorations. “Presenting, the Chief Executive Prince of the Outer Monopoly!”
I keep my face blank as my mind whirls: what are these two men doing here? The Iron Colonies and Outer Monopoly are at war! I know that my brother, the Monarch Alluvar-Glorious IX, has been negotiating with both parties since his recent ascent to the throne and the Troubles with the Snakes. He wishes for military assistance from the AllCommander and finances from the CEP to help undercut the Syndicates greymarket... but to have them both here together was surely madness! Unless... no! He wouldn’t, would he? I glance at my sister, seeing the dawning fear reflected in her eyes.
The Monarch stands to the dub of a base drop, his glowtubes blazing blue for attention. “Dear guests, thank you for joining us on this happy occasion! We are overjoyed to welcome you into an alliance born of blood. AllCommander of the Iron Colonies, to you we grant the hand of our dear sister Maxel-Brilliant to you in marriage. CEP of the Outer Monopoly, to you we grant the hand of our dear sister Maxel-Celestial in marriage. May the ties of alliance now become the ties of brotherhood.” Our ruler brother smiles, “Welcome to the family.”
I stifle a scream of anguish, face still a regal mask. This is unacceptable! A political marriage was always our fate, but not to sworn enemies! My sister and I were to remain together, traveling together between our obligations, family to the end! But this could never be allowed if we were married off to these two. Even now, I can see our betrothed glaring at each other, their soldiers and lawyers fingering their weapons and battle motions. Breaking protocol, I look directly at my sister, seeing her stare back, rage and determination reflected in her eyes.
***
“Fuck the Monarch!” My sister snaps, pulling her pinched finger out of the scrap motor we are disassembling. I giggle at her and she pokes out her tongue.
We have fled to this filthy stye of a planet known as Flotsam, forsaking our titles and shirking our responsibilities. But Fuck the Monarch, fuck him for putting us in such an impossible situation. Our father, Preserve his Legacy, would never have done this to us. I entertain thoughts of a combined regicide-fratricide and...
My face is struck by a small metal fastener. I glare at my sister and she laughs. “Be in the moment sister,” She chides, “And get back to work!” I poke my tongue out at her and return to the task at hand.
We are working and living in one of the interminable Workhouses of Flotsam. Instead of gowns and glowtube jewelry, hocked for petty Currencies, we are clad in heavy synthetic coveralls and rubber coated cloth gloves. Our auburn hair, once elaborately braided now is gathered in tangled topknots. In place of subtle scents and shimmering makeup, our freckled skin is grubby and reeking of machine oil. We are two elegant princesses turned into twin laborers, pulling apart some piece of garbage for the catalytic platinum panels within. “Fuck the Monarch!” my sister yells, pulling out her once again pinched hand and shaking it. I laugh, so happy to be free and on this adventure with her.
***
I am laying on my bunk cot, exhausted from a day of menial work, fingers still throbbing from that Queens Cock of an engine. I stare at the bunk above me and the depression my sister makes in her cot. My mind is racing. “Sister,” I say quietly, “what are we going to do about... them.”
My twin hangs her head over the side of her top bunk, her loose hair hanging in a copper cascade. “I am not sure,” she admits in a whisper, lest she wake our slumbering coworkers. The man they bribed at the space port had sent word of the arrival of an efficient Iron Colonies Destroyer and a flamboyant Hostile Takeover Logistics Vehicle on Flotsam. Which meant that the mesa city was probably already crawling with Special Forces and Tactical Process Servers, the minions of our betrothed already hot on our trail. My sister and I had worked hard to keep a low profile, but Flotsam was a small world and we are, after all, identical twin redheads. “Maybe we could employ a Shaper, forsake being twins for a while...”
My heart sinks, to compromise our identity, our sameness, even in the name of practical security, felt like a defeat, a capitulation. “I’d rather we didn’t.”
“I know,” she whispers, “besides, I’m not sure we could really afford a Shaper right now anyway.”
“There simply must be something we can do?”
“What about the dream?” The dream we had both been having, night after night, where a warm voice that tells us it can offer us sanctuary, a way to be safe and together for all eternity. It seemed to good to be true, a contagious fantasy of our twin subconscious. Such a shared delusion was the only reasonable explanation. We might be princesses but this was no fairy tale. It just couldn’t be real. Could it? My sister reads these thoughts in my eyes, “What if it *is* real?”
***
I am standing naked in a strange alien throne room and holding my sister’s hand. She smiles at me nervously and I smile back. The voice in our heads instructs us to stand in the center of the chamber, and we comply. Anything to be together, free and safe.
“I love you,” she says.
“I love you too,” I say.
And a blinding light drops over us and everything changes...
***
I blink my eyes and I am myself again, Hayley of the 24th variety, looking at twin sisters turned into lactating breast creatures. Tears sting my eyes and I smile at them, happy that they are still together. They smile back and say something I cannot understand while a psychic whiff of gratitude brushes my mind. They have become a living testament to love and family, if a truly bizzaro one. Why are they a huge pair of boobs? And how is this, what was the phrase, ‘Cultural Understanding’? This place is too weird...
<Please proceed to the next artwork.> I understand new instructions and follow my innate sense of where to go.
I walk past empty chapel alcoves, my heels click loudly on the smooth path which forms just ahead of me on the glacially undulating waveform floor. Instinctively, I turn to face another side chamber shrouded in artificial feeling darkness. I pause there, smoothing the front of my silvery dress and wait. A light descends to illuminate a mass of flesh resting on a raised pedestal. I frown. It is a giant scrotum, wrinkled but hairless, large enough to fit a couch inside. I stare at it and notice it is moving, writhing like there is something animate inside. The overhead light fades and is replaced by intense backlighting behind the giant nutsack. The harsh light makes the balls semi-translucent and silhouettes two humanoid forms within the pink envelope of the scrotum. They are fucking doggy style.
<This is is the second artwork. It is also untitled.>
***
I am perched invisibly against a concrete wall, the adhesion cleats on my shoes and gloves clinging to the building substrate. I am sweating inside the sheath of my stealth suit; this might be a temperate world, but thermal masking means stewing in my own waste heat. I silently groan in discomfort. My muscles ache and this stupid suit really pinches my balls. I try to subtly stretch within the motion limits of my cloaking field, but it doesn’t quite satisfy me at all. I genuinely hope the target arrives soon.
I am guarding the fortified Advanced Technology Research laboratories, a stout concrete warehouse in a campus of glass walled offices and evergreens. My mission is to prevent the Target from capturing the Objective, a device found in orbit around the junkyard planet of Flotsam. In my visor I review the sensorium of the security system, algorithms rapidly performing facial recognition checks. My target could look like anyone, in effect be anyone, so human vigilance is required. I pause the cycle of faces on a handsome man with curly hair, a young material engineering professor entering the building. He is an approved visitor on the project, but at this time of day he habitually visits a pretty chemistry researcher with whom he is having an affair. A quick review of their private digital correspondence reveals banal sexts and a promise to meet in “the glass blowers workshop 
”. I check the cam feeds, and spot the young professor, face pinched in pleasure receiving a different sort of blowers workshop. Nice. Which makes this young materials engineering professor a fraud. Excellent. Target acquired.
I spin around on the building, reduce the adhesion force of my gloves and boots, and slide silently down the wall. My executive control of the lab network fizzes out, attacked by a pack of viral infiltration programs. I trigger my own counter phage, aware that the ensuing digital immune battle will take minutes to resolve. Until then the network is out of play. I smile inside my cowl, I am dealing with a real operative. My feet strike the ground. The hunt is on.
I sprint to a fire escape door, the start of my preplanned route to the Objective. Every door, lock, lift, and camera has been recruited, airgapped from the building network and slaved to my own covert one. Flying up a flight of stairs, I check the feed from the inner vault, and find the Objective remains undisturbed. The Target must still be on route. Rounding a corner, I launch my small fleet of cam drones, and I smile as I see a blur of motion in designate Route 3. I slow slightly, taking a moment to prepare myself for hard contact with the Target. I smile. Things are about to go Kinetic.
As I approach the Vault my feed of its interior suddenly dies. The Target has reached the Objective. I position myself for an intercept, and, idly curious, start a timer. Just how good is the Target?
Hardly twenty seconds elapse, a respectable time, and the Target emerges from the vault carrying a hardened steel case and wearing tactical goggles. They can see through my cloaking shroud. I launch a paralytic flechette from a wrist gauntlet, while the target simultaneously shoots me with an electrified bola. My dart is harmlessly caught by nanomesh armour hidden under their lab coveralls. The bola hits me, winding tight around my legs and shocking me with thousands of volts. I collapse, systems fried out, heart in cardiac arrest. Contingency systems activate, pumping me full of pain meds and deploying an emergency defibrillator, restarting my heart. I sit up and free myself from the bola wires with a diamond bladed cutter. The Target has the Objective and a 30 second head start. I grin. Things are definitely Kinetic.
***
I am sitting naked on the bed of a beautiful woman, still bleeding slightly from my wounds.
I am still wearing the body of the handsome engineering professor whose identity I assumed to reach the Objective, although now it is beaten, burnt, and lacerated from a three day running battle. Things had gone Kinetic, which is not ideal as far as covert operations go, but in the end I had managed to get offworld with the Objective and to bring it here to Flotsam for my scheduled rendezvous. I managed this despite running into much more talented resistance than I was briefed to expect. I smirk a little in pride. Although, the Adversary had allowed me to reach the Objective before intercepting. It was as if they wanted things to go Kinetic, like a game. I smirk again, it had been quite exhilarating.
The woman in the room with me, the Resource, is wearing an oversized cotton sweatshirt fastened in the front by archaic metal teeth and tights that hug her digitigrade legs and tail. Her beautiful face moues in concentration as she examines my injuries. She tucks her silver hair behind her ram-like horns. “You poor thing,” she says quietly, tracing her elegant hands over my skin, warm tingles preceding wounds and burns smoothing over with clean healthy skin. This is not the first time I have experienced Shaping, but the casual ease with which the Resource repairs me is incredible. I must look agog. The resource giggles and springs my curly hair playfully, “I like a clean canvass before I paint.”
I lay flat and the Resource draws her sweatshirt sleeves up to her elbows and sets to work. A pleasant warmth fills my body as I am shaped into a new Identity. The Resource hums tunelessly but beautifully as she works, her tail twitching behind her. As the well muscled body of the engineer softens, my mind wanders, thinking about the Objective sitting safe in its steel and booby trapped case. It is a circlet of scratched, slightly oxidized steel containing an elaborate lattice of electromagnetic crystal and exotic tech. Despite it’s damaged appearance it still apparently functions, miraculously still intact despite languishing in orbit around Flotsam before being recovered and shipped offworld for study. Control, my psychic command officer, did not brief me on what the Objective does or why it’s in such demand. But I am a curious little Agent, and it was a small thing to hack the records at the ATR Labs. The Objective is a psychic device, a machine that allows normal Humans to read the minds of others, even without the rare inborn psychic gift. I think of my time with Control, the uncomfortable feeling of him probing my mind to verify the truth of my Identity and to record my every action and thought. I frown and purse my now fuller lips, I am not convinced this device is a good thing. But I am just an Agent. My thoughts return to my body as the Resource remolds my genitals, the pleasant feeling of Shaping becoming intense as my now erect penis sinks into my body reforming into a clitoris and vagina. Despite my discipline I orgasm. The Resource grins at me impishly, “What do you think?”
I climb uncertainly to my feet, feeling the bounce and sway of breasts, cool air in the gap between my thighs. I examine my reflection in the holographic mirror. I am absolutely gorgeous. The Resource as made me over into a ravishing raven haired woman, with long curly hair, and a truly improbable figure. I strike a sexy pose, chest out, and smoulder. Being this woman would be fun, but altogether too risky. “I love it,” I say in a breathy contralto, “but it’s a bit much for the Mission.”
The Resource pouts, “What were you thinking?”
I raise a perfectly sculpted black eyebrow, “I am aiming for someone less attention getting and more anonymous. Picture the most competent person in an office, the woman who actually gets things done but is otherwise essentially ignored. She cares about appearances for the sake of professionalism, but is too efficient to spend too much time on it.” The Resource nods along and starts to gently touch me here and there, tweaking my body and features. My black hair becomes straight and sandy blonde, my angular face rounder, my breasts shrink and my unreal curves contract into the body of a single, middleaged woman with a slight dedication to ffitness. I frown severely at the mirror and relax into resting bitch face, pulling my hair back into bun. I am still too pretty, but it’s nice to be attractive and maybe I can use that as an Asset. I nod curtly to the Resource, falling into character, “It will suffice.”
The Resource sighs dramatically, ”And here i thought working with spies would be exciting...”
***
I am standing in a Terrace reception hall holding a glass of chilled green fruit wine. I pat my shoulder bag, a standard bag among local business types, feeling the Objective inside. According to my Mission Brief I am to hand off the Objective directly to the Client, a certain Vice President of Flotsam Acquisitions for a semi-large technology company. I sip my wine and discretely watch the Client who is mingling and gladhanding various business associates. I frown a little harder, this handoff is terrible Craft, exposing both me and the Client in a needlessly busy environment. I wonder what Control had been thinking. Fortunately, my guise of competent-woman-at-a-work-event-she-isn’t-enjoying is so far proving quite effective.
I keep my eyes moving around the crowd and try to look bored. The Client formalizes another business interaction with a handclasp, and wanders over to another associate in need of attention. I silently groan. Maybe I should violated the Brief and initiate contact? I take another look at the Client, calculating how best to casually bump into him, when I notice the date of the man he is talking to. She is outrageously beautiful, a flame haired woman with improbable curves wearing a shoulder-less, sparkling green dress. She is unrealistically good looking, a clear product of Shaping. This woman’s sculpted, angular face doesn’t match anyone on the guest list, or any of the known mistresses or escorts whose appearances I also memorized. My scalp prickles, could this ravishing woman be my Adversary after pursuing me to Flotsam? Would they really pick such a reckless and obvious disguise? The red haired woman sweeps the crowd with a professionally wary gaze, eyes locking with mine. Oh Fubar me! She is the Aversary and she just Made me! I have to get out of here.
***
I am staring at the Target. She is here wearing a very Craft appropriate disguise as a wallflower: dirty blonde hair pulled back in a severe bun, wearing a scowl and a safe but nice black cocktail dress. Perhaps she is a little too pretty, but who am I to judge while wearing this outrageous sexpot body? Although being so glaringly obvious worked pretty well despite the risk. Take that Control! You mind reading leech.
The Target calmly makes her way to the toilets. As she walks her practical heels lose height, reforming into atheletic shoes, her dress becoming shorter and looser, affording her better range of motion. She is getting ready to bug out and critically she still has her bag with the Objective. I smile, the chase is on. I kiss my date on his wrinkly bald head, “Sorry baby,” I bubble, “I have to visit the powder room.”
I set off calmly after my Target, my sexy dress reforming into a romper and practical shoes. The Target pushes through the restroom door. I count to three and push in after her and am immediately kicked in the face!
I stagger, instinctually slipping into a guard that buys me moments to reorient. The Target presses her attack, but I managed to stay just ahead of her defensively, my System preventing any crippling blows. I try and counterattack, to win back the initiative, but the Target is able to repel enough of my attacks that I cannot seriously injure her either. As we exchange glancing kicks and blocked blows in the women’s bathroom, it is obvious that the Target is very well trained. In fact, judging from her choice of strikes, the style of defense, and how well we are intuiting each other, the Target is trained in the System. Which means...
“AGENT!” I snap with all of the authority I can muster.
The Target goes rigid for a split second, reacting as though scolded by Control.
And in that instant I land a debilitating blow to her head.
The Target crumples to the floor, the Objective falling next to her.
***
I come back to myself laying on cold metal paneling, my head pounding. “Glughhh,” I groan, wincing.
A beautiful face smeared with bruises smiles at me. “Good, you’re awake.”
“Waugh?” I say through swollen lips.
“Why?” The Adversary laughs and pokes the Objective, worn over her red hair like a crown. “Because we are being played, Agent.”
I sit up, surprised that I am unrestrained. I lick the inside of my mouth and spit blood on the floor. “I take it you are also an Agent,” I rasp, reworking my hair into its bun.
“Yes,” she says. I frown, this is not supposed to happen. There are Protocols to ensure Agents are not working against each other. It is unproductive and a bad look for the Organization. I rub my sore head, not to mention a fine way to get Agents hurt or killed. The Agent reads my thoughts with the Objective and explains “We have the same Control.”
The same Control? Then he has sent two of his own Ring after the same Objective, in direct conflict. Almost like he doesn’t want either of us to succeed. The red haired Agent taps the Objective on her head again, the mind reading device. It dawns on me: Control is psychic and a mind reading device significantly compromises his position. The Agent nods her head. “Fubar,” I say.
“Snafu,” she agrees.
“What do we do?”
“Give him exactly what he wants,” the red haired beauty says with a most unattractive smile.
***
I am perched on a steel superstructure in the Flotsam Junk Desert looking through the scope of a magnetic rifle. In the far distance I see a sleek needle shaped flyer skim over the junk and land by the hulk of a red painted derelict space tug. A figure climbs out. I sweep the target graphic over the man and enhance. It is the bald head and mirror shades of Control. “Contact.”
Standing rakishly behind me, her red hair streaming in the breeze, the Agent grunts. “Amateur.” I glance back and we smile at each other, a little giddy. What we are about to do is insane.
We had discussed several Strategies, boggling at the freedom of choice. We could sell the Objective on the black market and try to disappear, attempt to outrun the Agents who would pursue us. We could keep the Objective for ourselves, use it to sniff out Agents, maybe hunt them and try to take down the Organization. But that would be suicide, and our conflict lay with Control himself and not the entire Organization. The beautiful Agent advocated revenge against him personally, and I found myself agreeing. Even knowing that it was Forbidden for an Agent to kill their Control, we both felt such betrayal that we felt justified going against ingrained Protocol. So the Agent contacted Control claiming to have dispatched the Target and acquired the Objective. She was instructed to arrange a dead drop in the Junk Desert for the Client and Exfiltrate offworld. And so the trap was set.
That night we fucked, not because it was tactically expedient, but because we wanted to. I almost cried for the novelty of pleasure for its own sake and companionship directed at my own core identity. Afterward the Agent handed me the Objective and helped slip it onto my head. She sat across from me and gave me an earnest look. “I read your mind while you were unconscious,” she said. “It was the only way to see if we were both Agents, to prove we shared the same Control. But, I saw more than that... I saw you.” Passion flashed in her eyes, “I want you to read my mind too, to know me as completely as I know you.” I closed my eyes and concentrated on the Agent, my mind filling with vivid memories of being recruited as a child, of years of brutal training, of wearing hundreds of identities on missions, of calculated sexual encounters, of killing sapients many different ways, and of eventually ending up here on Flotsam. Throughout the memories is a familiar sense of loneliness, a yearning for something missing. Something that maybe we both finally found? I open my eyes and see her watching me intently. I understand her and she understands me. I wondered if this is love? I kissed her and we made love for the first time.
I am still smiling as I look back into the rifle scope. Control is cautiously approaching the Red tug, touching his forehead and probably doing a psychic sweep for observers. We are more than far enough away that he can’t sense us. I drop the target graphic over his head and release the safety on the rifle. My finger tenses on the trigger and I hold my breath. It would be such a simple thing to kill him. Instead I watch him squirm through a hatch into the red tug. I know that inside the derelict sitting in plain sight is the Objective. I look up at my lover, “Target is inside.”
The Agent smiles at me, finger stoking the trigger of a handheld device. “I love you,” she says to me.
I flush, delighted and hoping that it’s true. I think I love her too, even if I’m not sure I really know what love is. “I love you too,” I say anyway.
We share a complicit smile and the Agent triggers her device. An explosions blossoms in the distance, the Red painted tug disintegrating as the explosives we had filled it with detonated. The thunder of the blast eventually reaches us. Control is dead. I safety my weapon, stand, and press myself into the Agent’s arms. “No going back,” I say, kissing her fiercely on the lips.
“No going back,” she agrees.
***
I am standing in a strange alien space, guided by the mental instructions of a mysterious curator. I am holding hands with my erstwhile Target, now my lover. I glance at her, her severe but pretty face broken with a look of wonder. She notices me looking at her and smiles encouragingly. This is madness, but maybe it’s a way to stay together.
It had started in our dreams, a mental voice that we both recognized as a powerful psychic contacting us in our subconscious. The psychic voice promised us that we would be together forever. They promised us safety from Control’s other Ring Agents, now honour bound to kill us. Part of me wanted to run, wanted to test my cunning, but my lover just wanted to be together, to put aside Objectives, Missions, and Protocol and find meaning in ourselves and each other. And so we accepted this strange offer and came here, to the Grey Citadel.
Hand in hand, we walk into a circular chamber and stand in the appointed spot. My lover kisses me. “I love you,” she says with ever more confidence in her voice that it was true. “I love you too,” I reply, certain that it is.
Above us a blinding white light flashes and everything changes....
***
I blink my eyes and I am myself again, staring at a huge scrotum filled with two people fucking. “What are they like in there?” I ask in a dull monotone.
<They have become testicles, mostly. Their bodies were reduced to featureless heads and limbless, narrow hermaphroditic torsos made mostly of glandular tissue. These bodies produce a semen analogue which is animate, allowing our two Agents to mold bodies for themselves based on any of their previous Identities. They also share a mental link, allowing an unsurpassed level of empathy. They are now an artistic statement about intimacy, about focusing on our lover in a quest to find meaning.>
I blink rapidly, I can certainly see the artistic intent, but also I see two jizz people trapped inside a nutsack. A part of me is sad that the Agents traded their freedom for this new, stranger prison and disappointed that they didn’t go out in a blaze of glory Thelma and Louise style. I hope they are happy in there.
<Please proceed to the next artwork.> I get a tingle of nervousness, <Which is... me.>
A new sense of where to go appears in my mind. I swallow and obediently follow the path. I am trying to process the memories of four other people, trying to understand the bizarre forms of these tragic humans. I am aware of a roiling mass of fear and anxiety, but one that is still held apart from me, orbiting my mind like my own stormy Venus. What has Halley-7 done to herself? Without experiencing my fear, my curiosity dominates.
I walk past several more empty alcoves and ascend to an altar like landing in something like the knave of this gallery. There is a raised platform here crawling with impossible inky shadows. I try to take a few calming breaths.
<I present myself, another untitled artwork.>
The shadows are replaced by a bright light revealing what must be Halley-7. The dais rotates slowly, showing me her body from every angle. Her naked body is covered in a reflective silver covering, much like the mercury dress I am wearing but I suspect it‘s literally her skin. Her feet stand lightly on the platform and her legs seem longer and more elegant than mine, her ass more tight, her labia more trimly elegant. Above the waist she is a giant penis. Instead of arms, a torso, and a head with a familiar face, it has all been replaced by a tube of erect cock flesh capped by an enormous glans. I can see fluid glisten in her dickhole and veins pulse softly along her shaft. Hanging in her lap is an enormous hairless scrotum, filled with humongous head sized balls. Halley-7 has made herself into some sort of psychic alien cockwoman.
I feel my fear twist and writhe around me! This is just too fucked up! Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck! It hits me all at once and I feel my heart hammer in my chest! What the fuck is happening! And...
I faint.
Floor 2 - Halley 0.
***
(Continues below.)
Re: Flotsam
(Flotsam Chapter 13 continued)
I become aware again, except I am outside on Flotsam wearing unfamiliar clothing. I just learned that I made myself into a monster cockwoman! No... that hasn’t happened yet. I’m just me, Halley-7, and I am running late for a meeting. I shake my head to get a hold of myself. An important meeting! One I have spent weeks working to arrange.
Since waking up in Clem’s apartment I have been trying to track down Halley-Prime. Initially it was just something to do while Clem was busy with her Shaping gig, but now I’m obsessed with figuring it out. I‘m totally onto something too! I know Halley-Prime got inside the Grey Citadel, that she made contact with the elusive alien overlords. I am convinced that they know what happened to her, or at least why she disappeared. Actually learning what the Grey know has proven to be difficult... but ace investigator Halley-7 is intrepid and dogged and brassy.
My keyband chirps to alert me that I’ve reached my destination. It’s a derelict derelict, a poorly constructed space junk building with a collapsed roof on the outskirts of the mesa. I’m wearing one of my nicer outfits: dress, jacket, and heels and so of course the meeting is in a shithole. I roll my eyes, it figures. Awkwardly I shimmy into the building, hands filthy and a smear of rust on the sleeve of my nice jacket. So much for making a good first impression. I slip under a sagging I-beam and into the hollowed out core of the building and see a basketball sized silver sphere hovering. “Greetings Halley Number Seven.”
“Hello Dorian” my name for the Grey-Human liason AI agent. “I hope you’ve got good news for me.” Really hope, really really really! Be cool Halley.
“I am not sure I would qualify the news as ‘good’, since that contains a value judgement,” the sphere responds cryptically. “I do suspect you will be pleased with the outcome.”
“You can finally tell me what the Grey know about Halley-Prime?” So that I can finally stop harassing you.
“No, I cannot answer that.”
Just like every other fucking time! I swallow a growl of annoyance. Use the calm voice. “Why would I be pleased?”
“One of the Grey wishes to meet you, to attempt communication. You have been invited to the Citadel.”
Holy fuck! No one is invited to the Citadel! My heart hammers in my chest. This is my chance to get answers! “When do we leave?”
“Presently.” The silver drone sphere expands and engulfs me.
***
I am standing naked in The Gallery, excited and too nervous to speak. This moment is the culmination of months of study and agonizing attempts at communication with the Artist. Despite all my progress and the Artist’s unique perspective, we can still convey so little. But it is enough for this at least. Enough to remake me into the first piece of his Artwork and to change me so that, with time and study, we can truly communicate. I don't really know what he has in mind, but from what we have been able to share I know it will be radical. I’m afraid, deeply afraid, but the path towards understanding is fraught and demands confrontation and sacrifice. I take a deep, deep breath and quell my anxiety. The time for fear is in the past. I am here and I am willing to forgo my humanity for this cause. I feel a benign questing in my mind, the fractal integration of a question or request. I smile bravely, “I am ready.”
I am blinded by light and everything changes.
In a step of time that stretches to eternity but is far too quick to measure I am destroyed and remade. Gone is Halley-7 the awkward Earthling woman. In her place stands an untitled artwork. At first I am not graceful, longer legs bent inelegantly for balance, unfamiliar with the heft of my new form. I try to stick out my arms for balance and nothing happens. I am blind, but I have a new sense, a kind of universal proprioception. I can sense myself in relation to everything else in the room. In my minds eye I can see the contours of myself, see what I have become: the lower body of a beautiful woman joined seamlessly to a giant cock and balls, an expression of fused feminity and powerful masculinity. I am a testament to my commitment to the Cultural Understanding. I am far too strange, too alien. I am beautiful. I am.
A query appears in my mind, an abstract concern tinged with satisfaction. I realize it is the Artist soliciting my opinion, a level of communication we have never managed before. I am overjoyed, perhaps this plan will work after all. Using capabilities I didn’t formerly have I transmit this sense of pleasure back to the Artist. <I am well.>
A transcendental joy washes over from me from the Artist. I feel my body, my giant cock thrum with blood, becoming almost painfully rigid. My legs buckle, knees weak. I feel a whole body pleasure like being struck by lightening, an intense unfamiliar pressure in my new immense testicles. I transmit ecstasy, the psychic equivalent of a moan. Suddenly I stand completely rigid, mentally blinded as if the transformative light has fallen over me again and narrowed to an infinitesimal point of existence... and then... like a supernova, I expand while something clenches and opens within, my legs going taught, feet to their tip toes, and then something is rhythmically surging through my entire body, erupting from my glans in a great geyser of spunk. I am a giant cock and I am coming! I stagger, still spraying come and mentally scream in joy, my pussy clenching in a complimentary female orgasm, fluid leaking down my leg. I am electrified and splattered with my own semen. My mind is a broadcast of satisfaction and bliss. Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes, this plan will work! Yesssss.....
***
I come back to myself as Halley-24, and I am deeply fucking disturbed. I can feel everything, experience the entire alien abduction horror fucking movie of this place, and yet the fear is mostly gone, maybe burnt off in my own emotional supernova. “What the fucking fuck fuck fuck!” I yell. Super articulate.
The silvery cock with legs is standing with an uncertain posture that is incongruously very Halley. <I fear my attempt to protect you from your fear may have been a mistake. I apologize. I just... I needed you to see this place, what we are trying to do. It is important.> Contriteness and worry are communicated.
“What is so important!? What is Cultural Exchange!? What is this place even!?”
The giant cock starts to pace. <The Grey do not exist as we do. Humans, Blues, Reptilians, we are all Planar; our bodies and consciousness exist within a single plane, a single universe. The Grey have evolved to span the multiverse: their minds simultaneously experience multiple planes of existence. Their bodies here are just part of their physical manifestation, maybe their original one, but their minds are mostly engaged elsewhere. The reality that we experience is so different that not only is a common language impossible, but the actual concepts we wish to communicate do not correlate. This is why communication is so difficult between Greys and Humans.> Halley-7 pauses, cock body swaying a little. <I initially came to the Grey to learn what happened to Halley-Prime. I was met by the Artist, a Grey who was damaged so that he notices more of our universe and has developed an unusual interest in Humans. He was the one who met with Halley-Prime, curious about this strange Earthling for some reason I still do not understand. He was, I think, remorseful that he could not be more Helpful to Halley, and wished to try to explain himself to her again. And since she was missing, he met with me instead and tried to communicate. We failed miserably, but this time we kept trying. We spent months working together, and got almost nowhere, except to cement just how different our minds are. So we decided on a radical approach to increase our understanding. This Gallery.>
“By transforming people into sex-freaks? How exactly does that help you communicate?” I don’t get this place at all.
<The... forms... that are chosen are tied to the Artist’s vision. I do not understand it, but the Artist is fixated on human reproduction and sexuality as an aesthetic. Being sculpted according to the Artists obsession is the price of being here. For me it was the price of having my mind reformatted so that I can start to understand the Grey. For the princesses it was the price of being free from their obligations. For the Agents it was the price of safety and intimacy. This is... not a form I would have chosen for myself, but my physical form is somewhat immaterial now, since my purpose is psychic.>
“So losing your humanity was worth it? Are you happy?”
Halley-7 shifts her hips thoughtfully, and then wags her cock body in the affirmative. Which is actually kind of an hilarious gesture. <Yes, I am satisfied with this. In my time here I can already almost communicate effectively with the Artist, I can send my mind out into the city and into the dreams of others, and I can at least sense some other planes of existence, even if I cannot journey there myself yet. I am discovering things no human has ever known before. And one day I will teach it to others.> The cockwoman somehow looks bashful. <And the feeling of a whole body ejaculation is also pretty spectacular...>
I blush, having experienced that... memory? Sensorium? I know how amazing it feels to come as a giant cock. I shiver and try to put the sensation out of my mind. I gesture around, “And the Gallery, what is the point of this?”
<It serves a few purposes. The first is aesthetic: the Artist is proud of his vision and work and wishes to share it. The Grey do not understand or approve of his art, so the Artist wishes to show it to planar Sapients. This is being tolerated because of his... injury? His sacrifice? You are our first such guest.>
“I’m honored?” Although I don’t get or like his art...
<My hope is that the Gallery will over time increase the mingling of Sapients and Grey and serve as a cultural bridge.> Halley-7 turns her body and sweeps her left foot around somewhat elegantly, despite the jostling of her huge balls. <Also the other artwork have had their minds expanded as I have. For now, they are content to revel in their forms and freedom, but in time some of them may also become disciples and join me in study of the Grey. It may take several human lifetimes, but I believe this project is worthy.>
I close my eyes to stop seeing Halley-7’s phallic body for a moment. It is still fucked right up. One of me voluntarily becoming a huge cock will never be okay to me. My mind flashes again on the memory of a whole body ejaculation, and I shudder, but also feel an embarrassing warmth in my belly. Blah. That is gonna be a thing now isn’t it...
I realize that I’m not afraid of the Gallery anymore, now that I understand it. It’s still super creepy and the perverse creation of a demented artist, but the goal of bringing different aliens together is pretty cool. I can’t imagine handing myself over to be sculpted by the Artist, but I can understand Halley-7’s passion for her role here. I open my eyes and take in the silver, sleek lines of her legs flowing smoothly into the cylinder of her erect cockbody, there is a certain alien beauty to her. There is even a kind of artwork there. I take a deep breath, in and out, this is a passing moment. “I am glad you found your thing.” Even if your body is too fucking weird.
<Thank you.> The sensation of pleasure and gratitude strokes my mind and Halley-7 somehow manages to look like a happy cock. <Before you leave, the Artist would like an audience. I promise he won’t do anything too weird, he just wants to express his gratitude!>
Oh, shit. Directions appear in my mind. I kind of don’t want to do this, the products of this aliens imagination are deeply unsettling, and I don’t imagine meeting him will be especially fun. What are the chances that someone who turns people into cocks and tits is a fun guy? I sigh. Based on the nervous expectation that Halley-7 is beaming at me this is super important to her. It would be rude not to. I fucking hate meeting people. My heart starts to beat faster in my chest, it seems my social anxiety is alive and well. I adjust my fancy silver dress and walk where directed. Deep breaths, just pull off the bandaid and get the fuck out of here. I plaster a smile on my face.
In a part of the Gallery I had previously perceived as empty, I now see a raised dais made by a cresting wave of silver floor. Perched atop this is an egg shaped throne containing the Artist, who doesnt so much sit on the throne as is embedded within it. His lower body and abdomen are completely contained within the silver substrate of the throne and his scrawny naked grey chest has a spiderweb of silver filling in deep, ugly scars that trail across one side of his body. His arms are folded pharoah-style across his chest and I can see the left one is coated with or maybe made entirely of silver material. The left side of his head is a ruin of scars, some that are filled in with silvery amalgam, others open and glowing faintly with a blue light. His face is sunken and thin, almost skeletal in the jaw, and one side of the dome of his forehead is misshapen and patched with silver. His left eye is a cloudy white ruin, bifurcated by an enormous blue glowing rent in his flesh. The Artist has obviously been through some shit.
The Artist looks into me with his remaining eye. My mouth goes dry and my bare shoulders prickle. I feel a pressure on my mind at first like a gentle tide but then growing into a crashing wave and then building again into a violent surge. The silver threads in my updo melt and trickle down my face like mercury. I gasp and my bones vibrate like I’m a human tuning fork. My skin feels charged and suddenly my silver dress erupts off of me in a splash of silver liquid and my muscles all contract. I would scream if I could, am screaming in my mind. Blood trickles out of my nose as the mental pressure shifts, probing around like someone solving a mechanical puzzle. My teeth chatter and tears fill my eyes. I feel naked in a way that has nothing to do with my nudity. My consciousness begins to strobe. And then...
And then for a crystalline moment there is a connection spanning universes.
And then nothing.
***
(Here it is, the longest damn chapter ever! Hopefully you like it!)
Re: Flotsam
I love it!
Re: Flotsam
Flotsam
Chapter 14: Like, Okay?
I am laying naked in Hank’s bed and trying not to giggle.
I hear someone enter the apartment through the barroom hatch and familiar male grumbling. Finally Hank is home from wherever. I pull his comforter up over my head and try to lay still and silent under the blankets. Which is hard because I’m finding this all too fucking hilarious. I bite my lip and smother my face with my arm; be cool Halley! Tittering uncontrollably is not seductive and an excellent way to ruin a surprise.
Hank putters around his apartment, making some kitchen noises before shuffling to his bathroom to piss loudly with the door open. I snicker through my nose. Hank clearly think he is home alone, which is all exactly according to plan. But like, hurry up my dude! I arrange myself as seductively as I can under the blankets and try to keep it together.
I hear Hank stumble into his dark bedroom and shuck off his shirt and kick out of his pants. He makes his way to the large bed, clearly not paying enough attention to see the Halley-shaped bulge under the covers. It is everything I can do right now not to laugh. He reaches and peels the blankets back to climb in and sees me smiling up at him, hair messy and breasts bare. “Oh, hello,” I purr.
Hank actually jumps and makes a very Halley-femme peeping noise. A giggle slips out of me, followed by a whole fit of them. Hank is panting, eyes wide, glaring at me. “What the fuck!?” He says.
I keep giggling at the look on his face. “Like, howdy sailor?”
“Halley? What the fuck are you doing here? And why are you in my bed?”
“Like, I live here, duh.” I say, sitting up, letting the blanket fall away to expose more skin. “And I thought that, like, the second part would be, like, obvious.” I tilt my head, hair cascading, and look Hank’s nude body over, taking in his trim muscled stomach, slim hips, and the growing bulge of his cock. “And I think you’re, like, totally getting the message.”
Hank is, despite his semi-hardon, giving me a skeptical look. “Are you high?”
I giggle. I am totally fucking high. Blissed to the stars, even. It’s amazing how easy it is to score good drugs on Flotsam. “Maaaaaaaybe a little.”
Hank did his best version of “the look”, but paired with his now erect cock, it managed to look sexy instead of scolding. Kind of a dickish male smolder. I bite my lip, aware of my own painfully erect nipples and the hot wetness between my thighs. I wonder if Hank can smell me. “Halley,” he says, “you’ve been gone for like four weeks and then you just turn up in my bed out of nowhere. High, no less. What gives?”
Four weeks? What the fuck? I only went into the Citadel a few hours ago, didn’t I? Fuck me, was I in there that long? Or does Grey time work differently? I suppress a shiver, what don’t I remember? I’m really glad I’m high right now, otherwise this would be a major buzzkill. But that’s a problem for the morning. So like, y’know, whatever. Let’s have the sex now please. I crawl out entirely from under the blankets, on hands and knees and look up at Hank from inside the tangle of my black hair. “Like, what’s a girl gotta do around here to get laid?”
Hank puts his hands on his hips and raises an eyebrow while at my face level his cock vibrates slightly with his heartbeat. I sigh in frustration and sit up on my ankles, thighs strategically splayed to bare my wet slit. Hank’s eyes betray him and he ogles my snatch. I giggle. I can see the warring emotions on his face: Hank clearly feels like he should do the ‘right thing’, which is sweet, but he’s also a guy with a boner in an open relationship looking at a naked and available girl. A very willing naked girl! Stop trying to be a nice guy! Fuck me already! Do I literally have to throw myself at you!? I take a breath, “Hank, like, you’re the only man on Flotsam I trust, okay? And I like, really need to have sex right now.”
I had regained consciousness back in that random Flotsam courtyard wearing my own clothes again. For a dizzy pleasant moment I thought all that Grey Citadel stuff might have all been an insane dream. But then my very full bladder complained, and after sneaking behind some non-space garbage, I dropped my tights and peed an enormous stream of glowing fluorescent blue urine. I looked at that bright blue piss and shivered, reliving the weird gallery and the experience of being a huge penis. Looking back at that glowstick puddle of piss in my current state is kind of funny, but in that moment I was justifiably horrified.
I thought then about all of the weird shit I had been through. The out of body experience of the Grey Citadel, experiencing the lives of other people, feeling myself transform into a penis and the mind blowing feeling of my whole self ejaculating. The absolute dysmorphia of not being remotely human. Meeting my digital ghost and confronting my own mortality and all that depressing baggage. Not to mention all of the other weird clones of me: the dick unicorn cultist, the severed headed warrior, the nymphomaniac dryad hippy, the bimbo stripper... Maybe worst of all is Clem, the fact that the guy I love is a beautiful space woman now and instead of being with me he is off fucking some catgirl sex slave clone. I felt rejected and alone and sad and like my body wasn’t my own anymore. That maybe I wasn’t even real. I decided then that what I really wanted, no needed, was something to take the edge off (thank you Mr. Adder) and to have sex in as normal a way as possible. So for lack of a better plan, I did some Bliss and snuck into Hank’s bed. And now I just need to close the deal. I try to look as sober as I can, “Please Hank, I just, like, need to feel alive and like a normal human woman for a night.”
Hank is still standing there in good dude mode, but I can see that argument landed. He knows what it’s like to feel alienated by this place, to just need a human connection. In real time I can see Hank reframe the situation, decide that maybe the best way to be helpful here is to fuck me, and then realize he is about to get laid. A deliciously predatory look spreads on his face. I really do make a sexy, sexy man. Hank climbs onto the bed and kisses me, hard. I mewl happily and kiss him back, enjoy the scrape of his stubble on my face and lips. Mmmm yes...
Giggling I pull Hank down on top of me. This is exactly what I need right now.
I just hope this isn’t a huge mistake...
***
(A short and hopefully dramatic chapter! Why be consistent when you can vary things wildly!)
(@Hellboy: thanks! I’m glad you liked it!)
Re: Flotsam
I just feel worse and worse for Halley. She keeps looking at the ways her life could turn out—did turn out—and so few of them are things she can be proud of. So she’s on track to make terrible decisions, ruin her life, and become another cautionary tale who the next Halley can learn exactly the wrong lessons from on the path to ruin her own life.
Re: Flotsam
If this was a book, I'd buy it. Seriously well done, I love how interweaving you've made the plot out to be.
Re: Flotsam
Flotsam
Chapter 15: Mistakes Were Made
I am laying awake in bed staring at the corrugated steel ceiling and wondering what the fuck I just did.
The sex, besides who it was with, was totally fine. Very good even! I have absolutely no complaints about that. Hank, as a previous owner of the female equipment and having been around the block as a bloke, certainly knows what he is doing in bed. And since Hank used to be me, he knows exactly what I like. With the practiced ease he applied this knowledge, I suspect last night wasn’t his first ride on this particular breed of pony either. Which, now that I think of it, puts the not so amicable departures of previous Halleys in a new light. Oh Hank, you beautiful dog you.
I look over at Hank’s sleeping form next to me. He is snoring softly, blanket fallen down to expose a muscular shoulder and arm. I can feel the radiant heat of his body and he smells pleasantly of man and sex. Although the sex smell is probably also the bed and a little bit me too. I blush. I consider waking Hank up and straddling him, fucking him from on top, something we didn’t get to last night, and then, when that doesn’t quite do it for me, pulling him behind me, having him fuck me from behind, squeezing my tits with one arm and rubbing at my clit with a slick finger just like he will know I like. Or maybe I should take his sleeping cock in my mouth and wake him up with a blow job, something I’ve always kind of wanted to try. But no that would be stupid. Without the giddy confidence of Bliss I can recognize that a bonus fuck would just make things more complicated. Compound my mistake. Fuck.
Besides, Hank is my clone! A genderswapped version of myself! In the light of day this fact seems more significant and fucked up. Like I’ve committed some kind of incest or maybe the penultimate act of narcissism. I really need to get of here before I make things worse!
I slip out of bed as meekly as I can, grab some clothes from the floor, and slip out of the bedroom. I tiptoe to the bathroom, pee, wash out my mouth, and pull on my arousal scented underwear and black tights from last night. I groan in frustration, I grabbed Hank’s grey T-shirt and navy workshirt by accident. Not wanting to risk waking Hank, I squirm into his large shirts. Hanks borrowed clothes smell like him evoking a mixture of mammal happiness and shame. In the mirror I frown at myself, fucking keep it together Halley.
I slink through the apartment, collect a pair of cute short boots, and quietly exit into Hank’s rooftop garden. The sun is just starting to rise over the horizon of the Junk Desert and the two moons are still visible. I fasten my boots and button Hank’s shirt against the chill early morning air. I make my way to the rooftop fire escape ladder, kick it free, and climb down to the gangway below, my escape from the Hideaway complete. Hair a mess and wearing my lovers clothes I start my walk of shame.
***
I am once again upset and aimlessly wandering the paths and alleys of Flotsam. Except this time instead of being heartbroken, I’m mostly just angry with myself. Which would be an improvement if I hadn’t just sexually torpedoed my living situation.
At least I finally got laid?
I look around at unfamiliar shops made out of globe-shaped cargo pods clustered around taller buildings made from a hodgepodge of welded together steel panels. The shops are shuttered and the holographic riot of advertisement is still shut off for the night. Flocks of drones whirl through the air baring early morning deliveries while smaller land based bots attack pieces of litter. No other sapients are around. I’m not sure where I am. I go to check the map on my Keyband and realize it’s missing, that I had left it back in Hank’s bedroom during my escape. Which means I forgot my phone, keys, and wallet all in one. Fuck! I am actually lost now.
I take a deep breath. Maybe this is a good thing? A challenge to keep my mind busy! Flotsam is just a city built on a stone pillar, there are only so many ways to go. I just need to find one of the paved ring roads that go all the way around and walk until I can see a landmark like the Blue Congregation Hall, or the Arena, or the trees of the Grove. Then I can figure out where I am and come up with a scheme to get my Keyband back without seeing Hank. You can do this Halley. How hard could it be?
***
I have been walking for over an hour and I am cold, hungry, and regretting the boots I picked.
I flop onto a stone bench surrounded by planters to rest my aching feet for a minute. The sun is officially risen, but it is early and the frustratingly maze-like streets, ladders, alleys, and paths of Flotsam are still mostly deserted. The yellow flowers in the planter are just starting to open their petals and the flying lizard-bird-analogues have wiggled out of their nests and are sunning themselves. A new day has dawned...and I already feel defeated. I sniffle and wipe tears from my eyes. God damn it Halley, do not cry. Crying is the last thing you need right now.
I hear the clop of hooves and my heart sinks when i see a too familiar face with a phallus growing out of it. Ugh, not now. Sister Equestria smiles a wide horsey smile when she sees me and almost gallops over. “Greetings Halley! What a Blessing it is to see you again!” the cultist nickers and frisks her snowy white tail.
I try not to stare at the long braided cock jutting from her forehead. “Hi, uh, now isn’t a great time.” Not that there ever is one...
“Horsey-cock,” Equestria replies tartly, “It is always a glorious time to talk about The Sleeping God! It is never to too early to be the Light!”
I look beseechingly at Equestria’s companions, the four-legged redhead I’d seen before and a new one with a weird fleshy skirt-thing and a hooded veil covering head and face. The quadrupedal woman just smiles at me primly and thrusts out her four large breasts, but the hooded cultists rolls her eyes and walks over to Equestria on strangely configured feet. She gently grabs Equestria around her upper arm with fingers that coil bonelessly around her bicep. “Sister, why don’t you and Sister Quadra go on ahead and prep the skiff while I talk with Halley?” The hooded cultist says in a flat Siri-ish electronic voice.
Equestria’s nostrils flare but she demurely answers “Yes Superior.” The cockicorn woman obediently trots off. Over her shoulder she flashes me another toothy horse smile. Quadra crabishly scurries after her, trying to keep up in her weird squatting/sitting gait. The hooded cultist watches her Sisters depart for a moment before looking at me with my own violet eyes. “Sorry about Equestria, her heart is in the right place but she doesn’t know when to turn it off.”
“Yeah, well, it sucks.”
“Ha ha ha!” The electronic voice brays while the hooded cultist’s eyes crinkle in amusement. “Yeah, it kinda does.” The hooded cultist places her weirdly boneless hand with its too long and tapered fingers against her chest. “I’m called Sister Superior Tuethida these days, but please call me Halley-14.”
I frown and look Halley-14 over. Her head and face are mostly hidden by a cerulean blue veil and hood, kind of like a spacey niqab that only shows her familiar eyes. The hood of the veil is tented oddly and shifts as something unexpected moves. She is wearing a skintight cerulean spandex-like top that hugs her normal looking, albeit bustier torso and arms. Instead of hands she has five finger width tentacles that gather at the wrists of her top. Tuethida’s skintight top ends above her waist revealing a midi length skirt-like growth of flesh. This ‘skirt’ is made of stacked lobes of wrinkled, red-pink tissue that has the sheen of wet lips. From between the folds of these flesh petals are short tentacular growths of darker red tissue that wriggle lazily, sometimes caressing. The entire mass pulses slightly, as if to a heartbeat. As I become aware of a certain pungent smell it clicks that the skirt is labia, a massive growth of cunt-flesh ballooning from her waist and enveloping her legs down to her knees. Which probably makes those tentacles some sort of animate clits. Fucking hell! What the fuck is up with my clones and genitals? Okay... Moving on I see that emerging from this cunt-skirt are relatively normal looking spandex clad legs that end in tentacled feet which match Halley-14’s hands.
Great great great. Yet another one of me has turned herself into a sexually deviant freak cultist. A cunt-freak to balance out the silver giant cock-me. Blah.... At least this cultist seems to have a decently normal personality? Halley-14 is watching me with amusement from within her veil. I swallow my anxiety and think about how to gracefully make an escape. “You aren’t going to preach at me, are you?”
“Sleeping Lord, no.” Halley-14 rolls her eyes but then gives me an appraising look, something shifting under her hood. “But you look lost,” she sticks out her tentacle hands defensively, “not like in a metaphysical sense, but like you literally don’t know where to go.”
“I, uh, left my Keyband behind...” I say, blushing.
“Shit, that sucks,” Halley-14’s eyes smile at me sympathetically. “You must be cold and hungry, can I buy you breakfast? Call it an apology for Equestria?”
I rub my cold arms and think. A cup of warm tea would be, well, divine right now, but the idea of sharing it with a wiggly cultist, even an apparently cool one like Halley-14 was worrisome. “That’s okay. If you could just like, point me in the direction of...” where did I even want to go?
“If you insist, but, well, maybe you could do it for me? It’s nice to get away from my more... ardent companions sometimes and chat with a regular person. Please?”
“I don’t know....”
“Ha ha ha. Don’t make me beg!” Teuthida places one hand on her heart and makes a tentacle based Scout’s Honor salute with the other. “I promise that I won’t harass you about my religion!”
A hunger pang makes up my mind for me. “Fine, okay, let’s do breakfast.” Please be cool enough that this isn’t a mistake...
“Awesome! I know a great 28 hour diner-type place that’ll be perfect.” Halley-14 beckons at me with a squidy hand and starts walking at a brisk pace. I scramble to catch up. “So.... what brought you out onto the streets of Flotsam at this ungodly hour without your Keyband? If you don’t mind me asking...”
I blush and stare at the ground. “I slept with Hank...”
“Woof!” Teuthida’s electronic voice grunts. “Welcome to the club...”
“You slept with him too!?”
“Ha ha ha. I think most of us twelve-and-up Halleys have fucked Hank at least once. That boy is a dog.” Halley-15 glances at me slyly, “a beautiful dog though...”
I sigh, “yeah...”
“And pretty great in the sack, hey?”
“Yeah...” I say almost wistfully.
“Although you have to wonder does he seem that good because he knows *exactly* what we like or does he actually have game?”
“It does seem like an unfair advantage.” I smile a little, “but based on the sounds he and Freya make in their bedroom, I think he might just be good at sex.”
“Ha ha ha. Touché!”
Before I can dwell on Freya and the fact that I just slept with her guy, Halley-14 gently grasps my hand to guide me. Her fingers are warm and soft, but coil around my hand like ropes and have a scary strength to them “Over here,” she directs as she steers me off the small street we’ve been following and under a beautiful arch made from steel ingot bricks and blocks of brightly coloured plastic. The archway opens into a narrow alleyway that is hung with dozens of colourful paper lanterns and is lined with small shop stalls under apartments with balconies. The stalls are still mostly closed behind steel shutter doors, but a few are peaked halfway open with lights on underneath. A couple of albino pale human men vape in front of a stall and leer passively at us. Teuthida ignores them and leads us to a purple door sandwiched between two shops. She opens the door and leads me down a narrow hallway and into a, well, diner. There is a long lunch counter lined with stools in front of a partially hidden kitchen and small four person booths line the opposite wall. The room is decorated with grainy holograms of the junk desert, strips of polished chrome, and tubes of retro-spacey lighting. Vaguely doo-wop sounding music is playing, made uncanny by strange instruments, while the air is thick with the familiar smells of frying food. I am in a 1950s style nostalgia diner in space, which is charmingly stupid. Halley-14 waves at a weathered waitress behind the bar who makes a circle gesture on her forehead which Sister Superior Teuthida returns. “The waitress is friendly to the Church,” Halley-14 explains as she leads me to a booth, “not every restaurant in Flotsam is so accepting of our Acolytes.”
We sit down and Halley-14 summons up a menu hologram and starts selecting options which causes three-dimensional representations to appear in the air. “We’ll get tea of course,” her electronic voice buzzes, “but it’s up to you what you want to eat. They have a scrambled egg like thing made with tofu-stuff that I think you’d like...”Teuthida points at a floating bowl of scrambled stuff.
“Do they have pancakes?” I ask. Stressed Halley could use some carbs and sugar.
“Ha ha ha. I was just going to suggest them: they have a savoury red pancake analogue you dip in a kind of sugar water. They’re my fav!”
“Oh! I’ll have that, please.”
“Two then.” Halley-14 punches in the order, her fingers crawling like an octopus as she types. The waitress clogs over and puts down two Art Deco looking glass teacups and fills them with black tea. “Itllbealonginjustaminutesugars,” she drawls before clogging back behind the lunch counter.
I place my still chilly hands around the large cup and sigh happily at the warmth of the tea. This is really nice. “Thank you.”
“It’s no problem. I know what it’s like to be a down on her luck Halley on Flotsam.”
We share smiling eyes as I take a long sip of tea. It is hot and very sweet and delicious and just what I need. Teuthida sits quietly, her hands folded into a complex knot, and lets me enjoy my moment. Sitting up close in a booth like this, our knees nearly touching, the pungent smell of her cunt is unmistakable, a funky counterpoint to my tea. I don’t know how I feel about Halley-14: she is this very poised, cool, and kind version of myself, what my therapist would have called actualized, but also some sort of ranking cultist with a very sexual transformation and... whatever is going on with her hidden face. I’m not sure if I’m proud of her or disgusted, which makes me feel like kind of an asshole. Am I being prejudiced? The waitress clogs back over and deposits two big plates heaped with red pancakes and bowls filled with liquid. “Hereyallaresugarsenjoy.”
I smell the pancakes which makes my stomach growl and my mouth water. I want them inside me. There isn’t any recognizable cutlery and I wonder how I’m supposed to eat. I notice Teuthida watching me with... concern? “Halley,” she says, “I have to take off my veil to eat. As you’ve no doubt guessed, my face isn’t normal. The changes are weird enough that I wear a veil in the city but I’m okay, alright? I like how I look and I’m happy to answer any questions you have about it. I also won’t be offended by your reaction. I just don’t want to surprise you, so I’m giving you this trigger warning. Okay?”
I take a deep breath and blow it out slowly. This moment was obviously coming. How bad could it be? “Okay...”
Teuthida fiddles with her bicep mounted Keyband and her sleeves retracted to her elbows revealing that her arms are actually tentacles from her mid-forearms down. She enters another command and her hood contracts to form a cerulean headband, revealing the tangled mass of skin-covered tentacles that she has instead of hair. The tentacles are as thick as ropes and would hang down to her shoulders if they weren’t in motion, coiling and flexing and twisting. I’m keeping it together; this is all weird, but on my new weirdness grading scale it’s still within bounds. I smile lamely and nod. Teuthida pokes her keyband and her veil becomes a choker, revealing her face. I gasp. Halley-14 no longer has a human mouth. In its place is what looks like an anus, a tight round puckered sphincter. Surrounding this pinched ring of muscle are fingertip sized projections, a circle of tiny baby tentacles. I’m hyperventilating. This is weird even on my new scale. Halley-14 smiles encouragingly at me, her eyes bright and her cheeks pulling at her anus-like mouth. “This is me,” her electronic voice says as her sphincter flexes in a ghost of speech.
I nod mutely, taking deep breaths and clutching the table. Halley-14 deserves me not losing my shit. She is a nice person who looks weird. I am being the bitch here. I should say something, break the tension. “Wow.”
“Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!” Tuethida is laughing, her eyes wide, her anus-mouth winking and her little face tentacles waving around.
“Sorry,” I say, blushing.
“Ha ha ha, it’s fine!” Teuthida does a soothing, waving motion with her tentacle arm which resembles a cat-‘o-nine-tails whip lash. “Wow is a reasonable take! I know it’s a lot to see.” She wraps her tea cup with tentacles, like an octopus latching on to prey. She lifts the cup to her face and takes a delicate sip through her sphincter, some tea slipping out and dribbling down her chin. She flicks the tea off her chin with a tentacle and a slight twinge of annoyance. “It’s a lot to live with too.”
I nod. I can’t imagine living with an altered face like that: the shame of having a facial disfigurement with the added humiliation of a sexual orifice where everyone can see it! I think would actually die from embarrassment. And then there would be the challenges of not having a mouth or losing your voice. It’s basically a form of disability. What would drive someone to voluntarily do this to themselves? To stay this way and not get it fixed? Especially someone as seemingly cool as Halley-14. “Why? Sorry, but why would you do this?”
Teuthida tears off a pice of pancake with her tentacles, dips it in the sweet water and pushes the moist pancake into her sphincter mouth, her tiny face tentacles flexing inward like they are trying to help hold the food in. Her voice buzzes from a metal strip attached to her throat just above her cerulean choker and says, “In a way, it’s my penance, a stigmata of my guilt.” Her hair tentacles knot like wringing hands, “I’ve done some bad things.”
I blush as my mind plays over the big shitty things in my own history. My recent decision to get high and fuck Hank for selfish reasons, which doubles as a betrayal of Freya, one of my only friends on this planet. The way I blamed my parents for dying in the car accident, as a kid, but also well into adulthood. The time I sold out poor Samantha when the nuns caught us kissing at Saint Ursula’s, completely betraying her and really doing no good since we were both expelled anyway. Deserting my high school sweetheart Clem when I went off to college, completely blowing off that sweet dorky guy who took a chance on the weird new orphan girl who was maybe a dyke. Sure, some of that was a healthy urge to experiment and test out my bisexuality, but it was also a shitty need to restart my life and a shittier sense that I was better than my history and better than Clem. Which, fuck, look how that turned out. I have certainly done some shitty things that I feel terrible about, but nothing that would justify having an anus on my face for the rest of my life. “Halley,” I say, “we might have been a total bitch at times, but I’m not sure we’ve done anything that bad....”
Tuethida nods, “it’s what I did after waking up on Flotsam that haunts me.” She rubs her face with her arm tentacles, “You should try your pancakes while they’re still hot.”
Using my fingers I tear off a small piece of pancake and sniff it. It smells, well, like a pancake. I dip it in the sweet water, letting it get wet but not too soggy and then pop it into my mouth. The pancake is toasty and nutty and the sugary liquid gives it a burst of floral sweetness. It is delicious. I will definitely come back here for more of this. “These are,” I say while pulling off another chunk of pancake, “so good. Thank you.” I dip and chew and mumbling around a mouthful I ask, “So what happened?”
Theuthida nods. She has her octopus death grip on her mug with one arm’s worth of tentacles, while her other limb’s collection systematically tears pancake, dips, and inserts into her facial orifice with a worrisome amount of dexterity. Despite having an anus full of food, her synthetic voice speaks: “I moved in with Hank and Freya shortly after waking up on Flotsam. It was... a pretty fucked up time in their relationship. Hank wanted to get serious in the Earthling sense: go monogamous and commit to some kind of long term future. But Freya rejects monogamy as weak and she is honour bound to eventually return to Holmspace.” I nod, familiar with the conundrum. Tuethida takes a long sip of tea. “So Hank, angry and jealous of Freya’s other lovers, started to bring home all kinds of girls. This completely failed to make Freya jealous, but did manage to piss her off. And so she started sleeping around way more than normal and tried to seduce Hank’s conquests. It was like a weird sexual arms race. That I, in true Halley fashion, foolishly dived right into by fucking Hank. A lot.” Teuthida winces, and her head tentacles all contract, “What can I say? I was lonely and sad and horny from the parade of ass strutting through our small apartment. And if nothing else, Hank is a pretty excellent lay.” Amen to that. “At a certain point I thought maybe Hank was falling in love with me, which was weird but also kind of nice, but looking back I think for Hank it was only ever about Freya.”
I shake my head, “That sounds miserable.”
“It was.” Teuthida pauses as the waitress clogs by refilling our tea. “But it was through this bullshit that I met Zephryne. Hank called me into his room one night and asked if I wanted to have a three way with him and this beautiful woman with ink black skin, electric blue curls, and eyes that glowed in the dark. Desperate for Hanks approval and aroused by this sexy stranger, I agreed. Afterward, her skin glistening with sweat and face smelling like my cunt, the beautiful stranger asked me to run away with her. Which is how I ended up living with and falling in love with Zeph.”
“Zeph was a Flotsam native, a daughter of Salvagers who grew up on hover caravans or in the camps and towns of the far Junk Desert. When I met her she had given up the Rust Life for being an artist, although in all the time I knew her I never saw her actually make anything. Instead Zeph seemed to be more of an art maven, someone who knew everyone in the scene and was constantly organizing events or shows or parties. And maybe most of all, she always had the best drugs. When I ran away with her, Zeph was living in this borderline derelict warehouse in the fringes of the Purple District with two other artists: Abruptly and Q. Abruptly was a gifted Blue male sculpture who made tremendous ornate glass sculptures. They were experimenting with Deviancy, abandoning the smooth tranquil forms of Orthodox Blue sculpture and instead creating violently jagged works of sharpened glass. They were maybe the most gifted artist I’ve ever met. Q on the other hand was a pure dilettante, a rich brat with technical proficiency at painting but no real viewpoint or passion for it. Q was noteworthy for how they played with gender, though. Using their mothers’ money they had their body Shaped to be hermaphroditic and almost totally androgynous. Q would steer into that and use their body as a canvas to create a new character for themselves every day. One day Q might wear a neutral bodysuit and just be them. Sometimes Q would wear aggressively male combat clothing and be TurboQ or maybe throw on a wig and fancy dress and be the Lady Q. For a week Q wore a tight latex bodystocking and was our pet lil’Q. Q might have been a lazy painter, but they certainly never lacked for creativity in their life. And suddenly there I was too, Halley-15 the mysterious Earthling clonegirl, living and partying and fucking with the group, just another weird character in Zephryne’s orbit.”
“At first it was amazing, kind of the dumb college party life we never got on Earth. I got high and drunk and had sex with almost strangers at parties. I wore ridiculous clothes made by fashion designer friends and did stupid things with my hair. I went to art shows and modelled naked for photographers and painters and sculptors and tactile sensorium composers. I watched experimental theatre and shot my own terrible art films. I got embarrassingly into bad poetry that never translated right and would always sound stilted. I was in an open polyamorous thing with my roommates, having sex with an experimentally genderqueer hermaphrodite and an actual fucking alien. And I was completely, madly, insanely in love with Zeph.” Teuthida’s eyes crinkled and her anus spasmed with what might have been a wistful smile. ‘While I cared for all three of my regular lovers, Abruptly’s true passion was their art, and while they loved to fuck humans, they were always a little distant, meanwhile Q was mostly infatuated with themself, or at least the versions of themself they were performing on any given day. Zephryne though, Zeph and I really connected. She was my insane best friend, a lightspeed pulsar whose gravity dragged me in her wild wake. And we had incredible sexual chemistry, she was easily the best lover I had while still, y’know, a baseline woman. We were inseparable in bed and in life. I would’ve, I did, absolutely everything for her.”
“So what changed?” I asked between mouthfuls of pancake.
“It was the drug dealing,” Halley-14’s synthetic voice modulated sadly. “Zeph had sold drugs since forever. Initially it was a social thing, a way to ingratiate herself with cool art scene sentients. She used her Scavenger connections to smuggle in fun synthetic drugs cooked up in Junk Desert labs and basically gave everything away. When her art buddies wanted more of the usual Flotsam drug fare, Zeph worked out a deal with a Syndicate dealer to buy stuff in bulk, and then resold it cheap, making just enough to cover expenses. This was all pretty harmless; Zeph was mostly just a party supplier of fun shit for recreational users.” Teuthida pauses to take a long drink of tea. “Back in the early days of Zeph’s warehouse, Q would pay for everything with their family money, but too many years spent pissing off mommies dearests got the cash flow cut off. Which meant that Zephryne had to start drug dealing for real. She went to the Syndicates and used her connections as a bulk buyer to get a chance to deal directly. By the time I met Zeph she was an actual low level Syndicate agent, complete with a swirling trail of iridescent green scales climbing up her left arm.”
“The thing I feel guilty about, my original sin, is that I started dealing too. To keep the warehouse scene afloat and to pay for the drugs she’d give away to friends, Zeph had to constantly hustle to actually sell enough to cover her obligations to the Syndicate. She trusted me and I loved her and wanted to earn my keep, so one day she brought me along on a re-up and introduced me to her superior, an up-and-coming enforcer, a human woman with a domino mask of midnight blue scales and dreadlocked hair hung with ceramic rattles. I will never forget the enforcer’s eyes, still biologically human, but cold and hungry like a snake.” Halley-15 shivers and her tentacles coil in octopodian terror. “And then I was a deputized courier, delivering drugs to wherever Zeph sent me. Which, this wasn’t boutique party drug dealing anymore; on Flotsam that’s a social thing for rich sapients looking to impress their friends. This was actual selling-hardcore-drugs-to-addicts drug dealing. This was preying on human misery and slowly killing people and destroying lives. We were, I was, the vector of a disease.”
I shake my head sadly. I’m horrified that a version of me would stoop to something so shitty, but I can also sympathize with the position she was in. I would probably have started dealing drugs too if the woman I loved was a dealer and I was broke and otherwise homeless on an alien planet. Which, actually, is uncomfortably close to my current position. “Okay, I can see why you would feel guilty. But how do you go from being a drug dealing member of the Flotsam Factory to a... tentacally cultist?”
Haley-14 blows out a deep breath, her little face tentacles flapping. “We fucked up, badly. There was an especially big party, an art exposition and rave we were hosting. We loaded up on a big supply of drugs, the largest we’d ever been entrusted with, so we could be awesome hosts and still have enough product left over to cover what we owed the Syndicate. Zeph also scored us something new, a wild new drug cooked up in some shanty in the Junk, and insisted we try it. As the first thumps of music started playing Zeph and I did a hit and went into a synesthetic hallucination of euphoria, like psychedelic molly. And that’s all I really remember until the next morning when we woke up in a tangle of naked sapients and found out our entire drug stash was missing. Just totally fucking gone. Maybe we gave it away, maybe our guests used it all, maybe someone stole it, hell maybe we flushed it all down the plumbing; but it was gone gone fucking gone. We were absolutely fucked.” Tuethida takes a ragged breath, her tentacles all knotting and contracting in a way that I worried would break her teacup. “The first rule of being a low level dealer is that you always. Pay. The. Supplier. The Syndicates are not to be fucked with and they never forgive. And since we never paid up front for our packages, Zephryne had to put herself up as collateral.”
“What happened?”
“They collected.”
“Wh-what does that mean?”
Tears shine in Halley-14’s eyes, “It means the enforcer with the scale mask showed up at our warehouse a day later and told Zeph to come with her. Zeph kissed me goodbye and that was the last I saw her. I don’t know what happened. She might be dead, killed as an example. She might be indentured, a slave in a Reptilian Breakyard paying back her debt with years of labour. Either way my world was destroyed. Q returned to being Quardbert, ran away offworld to their mommies and went back to being a good little offspring. Abruptly abruptly found Orthodoxy and focused on making safe sculptures and becoming a pillar of the Blue community. And I was suddenly homeless, alone, and in agony at having lost the love of my life. It was horrific.”
I reach out and touch a tentacle, giving it a squeeze. It is warm and muscular and kind of rubbery. “I’m so sorry.”
Halley-14 grasps my hand, her tentacles winding around my fingers and wrist in an elaborate grip. “Thank you.” She takes a practiced, calming Halley-breath, “I was distraught, wandering the streets, unsure of what I would do when I met missionaries from the Church of The Sleeping God. This was in the early days of the church, and the High Priestess herself would come to the city to preach.”
“Jesus, they didn’t try to convert you did they?”
“No, the Priestess saw how upset I was and offered to buy me a meal and help me sort through my problems. She bought me lunch and I talked and cried while she listened, gifting me her sympathy and compassion. Instead of giving me platitudes or trying to save my soul, she offered me a place to sleep for a few nights while I figured out what I wanted to do next. So I went back to the Convent and stayed with the Church. There I saw a family of people who had been cast off from society, who had banded together around a common set of beliefs, and were working to make the world better, at least in a very specific way. I didn’t buy into the whole spiritual part of it, it seemed like more bullshit like from those preachers at the trailer park, but everyone accepted my skepticism and were happy to let me live with them. I was encouraged to join them in worship of course, to commune with their Oracle, but they would always be cool when I said no. It was like they knew something I didn’t, like they knew they were right and I would either figure it out or not. They didn’t really care.” Teuthida shrugged, “In the face of weeks of that constant certainty of belief, well, I got curious. It couldn’t hurt to see what all the fuss was about, and maybe they did know something. So I asked to commune with the Oracle.”
“And?”
“Ha ha ha. Well, I’m Sister Superior Teuthida now!”
“What changed your mind?”
“I asked the Sleeping God himself if it was all bullshit, and through the Oracle He Answered. The Sleeping God isn’t some mythical deity, He is an actual, existent Cosmic Entity able to communicate with us and subtly change our reality. We call Him a god mostly as a short hand for His Power, but also because we Worship Him.” Teuthida moves her various tentacles in a shrug. “The fact is the Circle of the Sleeping God is a True Religion.”
“Okay, so I get that the Sleeping God being real helps with the whole skepticism thing, but I still don’t see why you would join this religion just because some alien space Jesus exists.”
“The Sleeping God Understood me. He reached into me and Saw me as I am, with my sin and my failings and my guilt, and still needed me to be His Light in the cosmos. At my lowest, most wretched point, this powerful god-like being valued me, personally, and wanted me to join his beautiful family. It was... exulting. Transcendental.”
Okay, that explains the whole religion thing: cosmic televangelist nabs down-on-her-luck Halley. Or I guess, in a less shitty and judgmental way: Halley-14 finds new meaning in life through spirituality and discovers a family and place here on Flotsam. Not for me, but Tuethida seems happy enough. “I still don’t get the whole tentacles and mouth thing...”
Teuthida’s eyes grow rapt and her face sphincter pulls into a puckered version of a beatific smile, “When I dream with He-Who-Slumbers I dream of who I am and who I want to be.”
“Sister Equestria told me about her dream, about how she saw the horses by the trailer park and envied their freedom. Which I kind of get; I definitely remember feeling that way.” I don’t get the cock on her head thing but... “No offence, but I’ve ever looked at a squid and went yep, I want that please.” I shrug, “I just don’t get it.”
“Ha ha ha. I didn’t dream of a squid. My Divine Dream is about everyone I’ve lost and about my shame. I dream about Zephryne and how much I miss her. I dream about Q and Abruptly, Hank and Freya, and I dream about Clem. I dream about poor Samantha O’Connor and the feelings we never explored. I dream about Mom and Dad, those blurred half memories of them, taken from me too soon. In my mind I see them each get swept away from me and fade, swallowed by the cruel riptides of the world and leaving me bereft and alone. I wish I could reach out, grasp them and save them. Keep them with me. And then The Sleeping God Hears my Prayer and so I do it: I grab Zeph and Clem and the others, wrap them in my many arms, no my tentacles, and clutch them to me, protecting them from danger and keeping us all together. In my dream I am strong enough, many limbed enough, to hold everyone who has ever mattered to me. At the same time I dream about my guilt, the shame that I fear everyone can see. In my dream it marks me with a stigmata on my face, makes my shame unavoidable. And yet, despite my ugly guilt, I learn that if I am strong enough to hold on to everyone that it is okay to have fucked up, that I can live with this mark of guilt, that people will still love and accept me.” Tears shine in Teuthida’s eyes, “And I wanted this for myself, to have these Aspects, to be this strong and many limbed, to own my guilt and shame, and to become the strong grasping nucleus that protects and holds onto the people I love. If not the sapients from my past, then at least my new Family in the Circle of the Sleeping God. And so I joined the Path of Light and took up the Sacrament of the Transmigration of the Flesh. This body is a Manifestation of my Devotion, but also a physical representation of who I want to be in this world.” She pauses dramatically and wiggles her tentacles in a silly way, “Or just a sign I’m too clingy! Ha ha ha!”
I snort at the joke. Halley-14 is still weird, but it is hard to fault her for her choices. Tentacles and cults side, her heart is in the right place. I mean, assuming she still has one. Do squid even have a heart? Hearts? Whatever, she is cool. I smile at Teuthida and she smiles back with her eyes and sphincter, facial tentacle nubs waving. “You really believe all this?”
Tuethida nods, “Yep, I really do! Sorry to get all religious nutty there.” She waggles her tentacles in the silly way again.
I laugh, “It’s fine. I kind of asked.”
“So what now?” Halley-14 asks as the waitress clogs over, removes our empty plates, and tops up our tea one last time. It’s a good question. I obviously need to get my Keyband back, but I am so not ready to deal with Hank and all of that right now. But without a Keyband and access to my whatchamacallet wallet what will I do for food or finding a place to sleep? Who else can I go to? Clem? Nope. No fucking way. Bluebell? Mayyyybe... But she is friends with Hank and Freya so that might be weird too. Call that a last resort? Maybe I could track down another Halley... Halley-23 or stay in The Grove with 22 or.... I startle as I feel warm tentacles gently ensnare my fingers and hands. I look up and see Teuthida looking at me sympathetically. “Halley,” she says, “do you need somewhere to sleep tonight? You are welcome to come stay at the Convent for a few days while you figure out a plan.”
“That’s really nice...” which it is but also “I’m not so sure... it might be too much for me right now?”
“I promise we won’t try to indoctrinate you into any weird cult stuff. I’m just trying to be nice here, to pay it forward to another Halley in her time of need.”
“And I appreciate that, and you are so cool. But... well, what about your Sisters? Equestria is... way less... chill...”
“Ha ha ha. Equestria is a special case. Between us Halleys, we found her sleeping rough and dumpster diving for food. Now that she’s found a purpose she is maybe a little drunk on the Faith. But it’s just a phase. I’m sure I was almost as insufferable when I first started down the Path.” Teuthida winks, “You’ll find that most of us are pretty relaxed about things. So long as you don’t mind being around some funny looking sapients who pray, everything should be fine.”
I guess it does buy me a couple days to figure out how to get my shit back from Hank without actually having to see him. “Sure, okay. I’ll do it, I’ll come visit.”
What’s the worst that can happen?
***
(Finally finished the next chapter! It turns out global pandemics hurt my output instead of help it.)
(@Flicker: Thanks. Like a book I’m going to have to do some epic editing once I’m done. Actually, probably a bit as I go. Full disclosure, gonna fix a couple things in the early chapters tonight probably to better match the more recent stuff.)
(@Minstrelofmoria: I’m sorry you are bummed out, but also not sorry because you care about Halley and also I am being a shitheel to her on purpose. All I can say is hang in there? We aren’t yet halfway through what I have planned for the story yet.)
Re: Flotsam
At this point I don’t even know why Halley-Prime even bothered with this whole clone insurance... jeez.
Re: Flotsam
Flotsam
Chapter 16: The Circle of the Sleeping God
I am aboard a hover skiff piloted into the Junk Desert by a bunch of transformed cultists.
The hover skiff itself is pretty crappy, little more than a rusty steel platform that flies. Slowly. The whole shuddering, shoddy vehicle is about the size of a small sail boat and is mostly made of flaking steel beams and grated metal platforms which are open to the Junk Desert below. There is a battered cowling at the bow to cut the wind, a simple pipe railing bolted to the perimeter, and a large cargo cage filled with supplies for the cultists. Attached to the bottom of the skiff is a futuristic module that provides antigravity, but it’s clearly old and chugs like an antique tugboat. The very tall giraffeish cultist with the elongated neck and penis tail, Sister Hippolyta, pilots the skiff with analogue controls, her goggle clad head sticking out above like a mast. Sister Equestria and Sister Quardra stand together at the rail bent together in conversation, occasionally looking at me and yes I know you are both talking about me. Another cultist plays with her Keyband: a massive mountain of woman, tall and hugely fat and muscular but with the head of a much more petite woman. A cute little head that alarmingly comes to the point of a penis glans like a rubbery pink touque. I’m told her name is Sister Girth. Sister Superior Teuthida sits calmly on the steel plate floor near the bow. Her cross-legged posture stretches her labial skirt wide, giving an obscene view into her enormous vagina. As far as a futuristic cruise into the exotic alien Junk Desert goes, it’s a little disappointing.
I’m standing alone at the rear rail of the skiff, wrapped in a space blanket, watching Flotsam City recede into the distance. From his perspective the improvised city is beautiful, all of the rust and shitty welds smoothed away by distance, giving the entire Mesa a romantic quality like an antique cliffside town. Except instead of a sparkling blue Mediterranean Sea, Flotsam City overhangs a scraggly mass of broken steel and polymer that stretches out in every direction. Hovering out into the Junk like this, the sheer desolation and enormity of the Junk Desert strikes me. Not that I’ve ever been to sea, but I imagine this feeling of vast emptiness is what first time sailors must feel when land disappears over the horizon. I shiver and pull my borrowed foil blanket tighter. For all it’s seeming size and complexity, Flotsam City is a just a dot, a speck on a vast graveyard planet of trash that sapients somehow made their home. Looking back at the city, I feel like I’m sailing away from an oasis. Except it’s an Oasis filled with romantic fuckery and angsty bullshit. I spit like a sailor over the rail. Can I outrun my problems on a world with only a single city? I guess I’m going to find out.
“Halley!” Sister Teuthida calls out from the bow, “We’re almost there! Come see!”
I stumble to the bow and climb onto a locker to peek over the cowling. Teuthida pulls herself up next to me, her hair tentacles brushing my shoulders and her bare face trying to smile. Halley-14 glances at me out the corner of her eyes, “Sometimes it’s better to look forward, than to stare at what’s behind you.” Ahead of us is a big derelict spacecraft nestled in the surrounding space trash. It’s the size of a small cathedral and oval shaped, with a domed roof peaking in some sort of antenna topped with a blinking amber light. The remnant of a massive thruster is attached to one side of the craft while the other thruster lays detached and in pieces. The derelict has a matte grey hull and looks surprisingly intact, like maybe it was abandoned on Flotsam recently instead of being an ancient wreck crashed from space. As we continue to get closer I see obvious signs of scavenging: the hull is missing segments, wires and conduits leak out of opened compartments, and the thrusters appear to have been completely gutted. I wince as a bright spark blooms and I see a figure welding what looks like a bubble skylight made of stained glass onto the domed roof of the derelict. The figure sees us and stands, waving her various left arms in greeting while holding the still lit torch in her right. The woman has too many pairs of arms: two normal ones plus two extra full length arms which split at the elbow into duplicate forearms plus two stubby toddler sized arms. Her tight neon green onesie is stretched by eight large breasts and is stained darkly at the nipples by some sort of liquid. I wince as I realize she is probably lactating. “Home sweet home,” Teuthida’s electronic voice modulates wistfully.
The skiff jerkily approaches a somewhat level surface made by dumping smashed stone and small chunks of trash onto the Junk Desert scrap. Hippolyta moues in concentration, long arms pumping levers and the skiff drops heavily onto the pad with a bang of its rigid landing gear. Quadra and Equestria unhook a section of railing and slide out a gangway while Sister Girth unlatches the cargo cage. With a girlish squeak of effort Sister Girth lifts a massive steel crate and tromps off the Skiff. Teuthida wraps my hand in tentacles and gives it a squeeze, “Don’t be nervous,” she says with a wink. The Sister Superior guides me down the gangway and across the rubble surface of the landing pad toward a ramp into the derelict Spacecraft. “Welcome to the Convent of the Circle of the Sleeping God,” she buzzes.
A tall, muscular, and very naked cultist strides out of the Convent and down the ramp towards us. She is decidedly elephantine: seven feet tall and muscular, but with a firm layer of fat under her red-tan hide that smooths her out and makes her solid instead of ripped. She has large teardrop breasts and a pachyderm sized ass with a little ropey tail. The most striking difference is her face, which has large fan shaped ears hung with piercings, short tusks, and an arm length trunk instead of a nose. A trunk that is also clearly a penis. I notice the wide glans of which has two nostril-like dickholes and that the trunk-cock foreskin moves like it would be able to grasp something. I’m horrified but also a little fascinated. A rogue part of me wonders what it would be like to be fucked by such an appendage. This cultist is also sporting huge testicles and a gargantuan cock sheath on her crotch. Having seen the kind of male equipment elephants have in a nature documentary, I can only imagine the huge, pulsating, flailing monster cock that might emerge on this woman. I shudder. Teuthida walks right up to her and is wrapped in an embrace of arms and trunk that lifts her off her tentacle feet. “I’ve missed you,” the elephant-cultist says robustly.
“I’ve missed you as well, Sister Hannibelle” Teuthida replies, pressing her anus-like mouth to Hannibelle’s cheek in a kiss.
Hannibelle sets Teuthida down and notices me. A sly and tusky smile peeks out from behind her trunk. “Ahhh a Halley,” she says, “The High Priestess will be delighted!”
Teuthida gives her a gentle lash with her arm tentacles, “Sister, don’t you have supplies to unpack.”
“Of course!” The elephant-cultist blows a trumpet blast through her cock-trunk, “Initiates! Get your cute behinds down here and get to work! This skiff won’t unload itself!” Two relatively normal nude women come scurrying down the ramp after her. One is dark and thin, baseline human except for a grotesquely enlarged fist sized clitoris and two more normal proportioned clits sprouting from her navel and forehead. The other woman is very pale and freckled, curvy, and has a big engorged penis instead of a nose. Hannibelle winks at us, “Gotta get the fresh meat into shape!” She guffaws deeply and strides off.
“The Priestess will be delighted?” I ask.
Sister Teuthida looks abashed, or as much as someone with a sphincter for a mouth can. “Pay no mind to Hanna, she just knows the whole Halley-deal and that the High Priestess is always excited to help someone in need...” Okay....
Sister Teuthida leads me up the rickety entrance ramp and into the Convent. We pass through a small chamber with perforated walls that must be an airlock and enter a corridor that curves off in either direction. Instead of following this, Teuthida steers me through a hatchway and into a huge central chamber with a vaulted domed ceiling, probably what was once the main cargo bay. There is a slightly raised pulpit at one end of the room in front of a screened off enclosure with a decorative archway artfully woven from twisted polished brass pipe and cable. In front of this altar is a large empty space strewn with brightly coloured yoga mats. A cultist with arms instead of legs and huge, swaying labia that stretch navel to spine does a unique stretching routine on a turquoise mat. In one corner of the room are crude steel tables and benches near a long open window into a galley. Sister Girth is unpacking food from a heavy crate while another cultist looks it over and makes notes on a hologram. This kitchen cultist’s lower body is backwards, ass in the front and crotch behind, and has a long, leg-sized and perfectly rigid cock that sticks out behind her like a dinosaur tail. She picks up a wilted head of lettuce-analogue and frowns, scratching her reversed bird-like feet on the ground in annoyance. Across from this dining area is a space filled with beanbag chairs and cushions wrapped in the same brightly coloured spandex the cultists wear. Quadra and Equestria are naked in these cushions, kissing hungrily, Quadra gently stroking Equestria’s penis-horn, making the Cockicorn snort and nicker. I grimace and look up at the ceiling. The steel roof is marred by holes which have been patched over by stained glass skylights, allowing beams of brightly coloured light to stream into the space, giving everything a spiritual and slightly psychedelic vibe. A trail of glowing metal sparks fall gracefully down from the skylight where the multi-armed welder is working. Homemade looking lightbulbs hang on wires from the ceiling and weakly incandesce like temple lanterns. Incense, or at least something like it, fills the air with a cloying botanical scent. Everywhere there are signs of construction. Mismatched steel scraps lay in piles around the periphery and the loud banging of metal on metal fills the room. I see a cultist hammering out a piece of steel. Sweat beads on her bare back and on the round, squishy, and weirdly wrinkled expanse of her stomach. She frowns in concentration and the pair of erect cocks she has instead of nipples jiggle wildly as she swings her hammer and jostles her large breasts. Near her another pair of cultists are working on a section of wall. One cultist is very short, maybe three and half feet tall, but bearing truly enormous breasts nearly as large as her small torso with aureolas that split open into large wet cunts. This busty little cultist sings a beautiful wordless song and feeds electrical cable to a relatively normal looking woman whose only transformation as far as I can see is that her ass is now a pair of breasts. As the cultist bends over into an open section of wall her ass tits jiggle prominently, a decidedly bizarre case of plumbers butt. “It’s no Sagrada Familia,” Teuthida says, “but it is a work in progress.”
I smirk politely at the joke, but I can feel a growing sense of unease. What am I doing here?
“Let’s get you sorted out with a cell,” Sister Superior Teuthida says pleasantly, gesturing back to the corridor.
“Cell?” I ask, feeling a burp of panic.
Teuthida laughs electronically, “Ha ha ha. Sorry. I mean cell like a private room for a nun, not y’know the scary kind. I assumed you’d rather have some privacy rather than share the common cloisters with the Sisters. Most of us sleep together and things can be a little... free...” I glance at Quadra and Equestria who are now tangled on the ground, Equestria kneeling and Quadra awkwardly trying to hook a pair of her legs over the erect Cockicorn’s shoulders, exposing her central pussy. I look away and shiver.
“Privacy sounds good.”
“Ha ha ha.”
Sister Teuthida leads me back into the corridor, takes a left, and walks through an open hatch into a small room. Cell is a good descriptor: it’s a bare steel room with a metal and spandex cot, a small metal locker that doubles as a night stand, and a mound of broken electronic components. There is a plastic jug of water on the floor and a steel pan that I assume is the en suite toilet. It was, and I guess still is, probably a storeroom, but it’s private and a place to sleep tonight, which is certainly better than nothing. I’d give it one and a half stars. Maybe two stars if they have a shower or an actual bathroom nearby.
“Salutations,” says a pretty voice with a weird internal harmony, “I’m Sister Mitosa.” A nude cultist stands at the threshold awkwardly carrying a large bundle of bedding. “I brought blankets,” she sings in stereo and ambles into the room. She has three legs, three ass cheeks, two vaginas and, as she sets down her bundle and begins assembling the bed, I can see she also has three pert little breasts. Sister Mitosa looks up at me with her three eyes, two-tipped nose, and extra wide mouth and smiles. “What’s brought you here?” she asks musically. I can see she has two parallel throats and I wonder if she has two voiceboxes.
“I ah, my living situation is in flux? I need a place to sleep tonight.”
Mitosa smiles pleasantly and nods. “So which Halley are you?”
I guess I should introduce myself. “I’m the twenty-fourth.”
“Wow!” she stereos, “so many already!” She shakes her head, “And still no word about what happened to Halley Prime?”
I shake my head no.
“You know,” she harmonizes, “you should Consult the Oracle about this before you leave. The Sleeping God Sees all kinds of things in His Dreams.”
I frown. I am curious about what happened to my original and I do want to know why the fuck I’m here in this ridiculous situation. Could it really be as simple as just asking the alien god of these cultists? And if it is, why hasn’t anyone asked already? I glance at Sister Superior Teuthida, Halley-14, who is watching us patiently. “Haven’t you asked where Halley Prime went?”
“No,” She shakes her head. “I have a strict BC/AD rule in my life. If it’s “Before Conversion” I leave it alone and try to focus on now, “After Dream”. I know it’s lame and I sound like our therapist, but I’ve decided the past is the past and that the best thing for me is to focus on my future. And the Church.” Teuthida shrugs her many tentacles, “you are welcome to ask about it though.”
“And you should!” Sings Mitosa as she fluffs a pillow and plops it onto the completed bed.
“Maybe...” I say cautiously. It would be really nice to get some answers... “I guess? What could it hurt?”
“That’s the spirit!” Mitosa harmonizes with a very wide smile containing far too many teeth.
Teuthida also seems pleased. She glides over to the steel locker in my cell and opens it, pulling out a towel-thing and a scarlet spandex belt. “We will be gathering for a meal soon, and you are welcome to join us. The Priestess will be there.” She holds up the towel-thing, which I recognize is a fancy futuristic one like Clementine used, “you can use this to cleanse yourself from your travels.” She hands me the towel-thing and the spandex belt. “I’m afraid we don’t have any Earth-style clothing, but if you want to change, the belt will grow into a set of our vestments. Sorry, but it’s the best we can do.” Teuthida ushers Mitosa out of the room and glances back at me, smiling with her eyes and sphincter mouth pulsing, “I’ll come back and gather you in a few minutes when the food is ready.” The sister cultists leave the cell and a the cell door grinds shut behind them leaving me alone.
I sit on my cot holding the towel and collapsed red onesie. This is getting uncomfortably weird, but what exactly did I expect? Everyone is being friendly enough, maybe I should just steer into it, go with the flow? And then catch the first skiff home and call it an ‘interesting’ experience. I look at the clothing I’m wearing, Clem’s stolen shirts, and see they are coated by a fine layer of rusty dust. Taking a sniff, I still smell like dude and sex and also faintly of body odor and the Junk Desert. I’m filthy. Maybe a wash and change of clothes are in order? I look dubiously at the red spandex thing. I grimace, skintight onesies are not my style. But then, when in Rome I guess?
I strip off my soiled clothing and toss it into a dirty pile. Hesitantly I press the space towel to my skin, yelping as it comes to life with a feeling between being licked by the roughest tongue and touching something sticky. It reminds me of when I poked a sea anemone in a tidal pool as a kid. The towel has that same feeling of delicate organic grippy-ness as the anemone fronds did before protectively curling away. I drag the towel along my arm, leaving it squeaky clean and feeling deliciously exfoliated. It only takes a few moments and I’ve had the best spongebath of my life. My hair is still grimey, but I wrap the towel up around it hoping it might help. I pick up the spandex belt and step into it, lifting it flaccidly around my waist, holding it around myself like a limp hoolahoop. I turn the belt around and until I find a little bump toggle and push it, and the belt snaps tight around my waist. Hesitantly I poke the toggle again and the spandex rapidly expands, blossoming into a scarlet red unitard with built in booties. I look myself over critically. Despite feeling like I’m wearing part of a slutty devil Halloween costume, I decide the spandex is actually kind of flattering. Kind of like full body spanx. I unwrap my dark hair and find it cleaner than it was and I brush it with my fingers into some kind of order. I guess this will do. One sexy devil girl ready to have dinner with some freaky nuns.
I hear a polite knock on my cell door followed by a thunk and the door grinding open. A naked Sister Teuthida beckons me, “come.” As I follow, she looks me over, eyes tracing my body in its skintight outfit. I blush and look away, try to ignore the smell of my cultist clone’s enormous cunt-skirt or the heft of her large, perfectly shaped breasts. I might be jealous of her bust, if not for the fact that her nipples are stretched and wriggling, two more tiny tentacles. I shiver and hug my arms over my much smaller chest.
It is fortunately a short walk back and we are soon entering the converted cargobay. I see the long tables are heaped with food, party buffet style, but notice that the Sisters are not yet eating. Instead the cultists are quietly seated on their yoga mats in a semi-circle around the altar. They are all naked, displaying their strange bodies, and watching me intently. Tentacles wind over my shoulders and I feel a nudge as Teuthida urges me to walk toward them. I blush and feel anxiety rising inside me. Sister Equestria, holding hands with Quadra and Hippolyta, smiles a wide and horsey smile at me and nods. I nod back, not sure what’s going on. I try to hesitate, and Teuthida gently but firmly pushes me forward. “It’s okay,” croons Teuthida in an electronic whisper, “you’re doing great.” I take a deep breath and the incense in the air makes me feel light headed, makes my heart beat a little faster. It has a familiar floral scent... I shake my head, trying to clear it. “And you did it,” Teuthida whispers with pride. We are standing in the middle of the semi-circle, surrounded by cultists, right in front of the pulpit.
“Well, well, well, what have we here?” Asks a familiar voice loudly. I hear the click of high heels and see a new cultist strut through the brass archway on the pulpit, out from behind the smoked glass screen. I gasp in shock, startled by the new cultist’s altered body. She is wearing theatrical stiletto pumps and has long beautifully toned legs. These lead to a torso absolutely covered in huge breasts: front, back, and sides. She has no arms, or even shoulders, just a couple dozen sagging, sliding, bouncing tits. Instead of nipples, each breast sports a coyly smiling mouth with plump lips and shining white teeth. The cultist has no head, just a wide, glistening vulva and a vagina where her neck should be. And the most jarring part, judging by her voice, this cultist is me.
“Another prodigal Halley come to join our Light?” asks a mouth-nipple. Nipple-lips. Lipples.
“No Priestess,” says Teuthida holding me still with her strong tentacles, “Halley-24 has come to us for Sanctuary in a time of need.”
“I see,” says a different lipple. “She is of course welcome Among Us.”
“She does wish to Consult the Oracle,” Teuthida continues, “to ask our Slumbering Lord for Guidance and the Whereabouts of Halley-Prime.”
The Priestess smiles with many lips. “Then let us not waste any time! Come Pilgrim-Halley, let us Shed our Illumination upon this mystery.” The Priestess opens a mouth wide, unfurling a tongue that extends from her tit like an arm and beckons me.
“I-I don’t want to be a bother,” I stammer hastily, fear building in my chest. Maybe this isn’t a great idea...
“Nonsense!” Exclaim several tits at once. “Step this way! The Oracle Awaits!” The priestess turns, struts through the brass archway, hidden hips and many breasts swaying, back behind the screen.
I feel Teuthida push me forward, I try and resist. “It’s okay,” Teuthida soothes, her tentacles clutching me, holding me close. Her sphincter breath, I notice, smells faintly of shit. “Don’t you want answers? To finally solve the mystery? To know why all of this is happening?” And I do, I do want answers to what happened to the original me, to why I am here on this stupid planet, and to why a bunch of versions of me are in a bizarre shapist sex cult. “I know this is strange and scary,” whispers Teuthida’s voicebox, “but, you are strong enough to do this. I believe in you.”
My heart hammers in my chest, I should run away.
But... there are no answers that way, and really where would I go? I’m in a compound in the middle of an alien desert. Even if this is all weird religious bullshit, it’s probably easier to just go with it, get it over with, and leave the first chance I get. I take a deep, deep breath. As my therapist would say, sometimes you just have to go through it. Endure.
I take a step after the Priestess.
And another.
And another.
Teuthida releases me and I take another big step on my own, up onto the dais.
I stop. Last chance to back out. I look back, see the cultists all watching me, some are smiling encouragingly. My fists ball and relaxe. I take one more deep, panic suppressing breath and quickly walk through the brass archway before I change my mind.
I step into a dark, shadowy chamber. The air is humid and the smell of cloying floral incense is stronger here making my eyes water. I breath deeply and feel my heart beat faster and an intimate warmth in my belly. The smoked glass screen wraps all around the room and bolts of spandex cloth are draped overhead to form a tent-like ceiling. Dozens of weakly glowing Edison-bulb lanterns hang all around providing ambience instead of light. The effect is deeply claustrophobic. My skin prickles as I feel like someone is watching me. I blink my eyes and they slowly adjust to the gloom. I am confronted by a large mass that resolves into a heaping pile of flesh, like a pyramid made of tits and genitals. It is constructed mostly of stacked breasts, huge and small, and mortared with dripping cunts and sprouting hornlike erect cocks. The many vulva glisten wetly in the weak light, drooling while a random cock ejaculates. Beneath the heady incense I smell semen and cunt. Growing root-like from the base of this immobile pile of flesh are long, penis gland tipped tentacles which slowly track across the floor, blindly groping. “Wh-what?” I ask, stunned.
“Behold the Oracle!” The Priestess says merrily, standing next to the horrible flesh, tongue tentacles stroking and licking the creature.
“I am the Attendant,” says another cultist, gliding out from behind the Oracle creature. Her chocolate brown-skinned body from below her oddly tubular breasts is a giant slugs foot made from enormous glowing vulva. She regards me from atop eyestalks and slithers forward holding the end of one of the Oracles tentacle cocks reverently in her bioluminescently freckled hands. The cock flails around, rooting for a hole to fill. I take an involuntary step backward, my flight response kicking in. And stop suddenly as I bump into something solid and warm behind me. A pair of large meaty hands are placed on my shoulders. Sister Girth emits a squeaky little grunt and pushes me forward and down, forcing me to my knees.
The Priestess struts over to me, bends close, hanging breasts brushing against me. A lipple dangles against my ear and says “Prepare yourself to Commune with the Sleeping God.” A tongue-tentacle licks my cheek while another prods the toggle of my onesie, causing it retract down to a belt leaving me naked, kneeling on the floor. A dozen mouths smile at once, “Now open wide!”
A meaty hands forces my mouth open and the Attendant reverently slips the Oracle cock-tentacle into my mouth. I gag and taste salty flesh, feel it push itself past my lips, deeper into my mouth, down into my throat. And then...
***
I take a deep breath and blow as hard as I can, watching the candles dance for a moment in my wind and then extinguish one by one.
I look up and laugh and all around me my trailer park friends smile and clap. Clem wraps me in a hug, “What did you wish for?”
I giggle, “I’ll never tell!” But secretly I know it’s this: to be here in this place with Clem, surrounded by my friends and neighbours.
I look up from my cake and smile at them all. Old Moon resplendent in an emerald caftan, smoking righteous weed and smiling. Pretty Maureen still fresh from work in her slutty Topaz stripper getup, laughing and taking a hit of Moon’s proffered joint. Snakeguy with his dirty old black T-shirt, neckbeard, and greasy ponytail, giving me a thumbs up with an albino rat snake draped across his shoulders. Mr. and Mrs. Burroughs, our elderly neighbours with the adorable herd of cats, smiling patiently. Marcel, the obese transvestite who relentlessly flirts with Clem, cinched into a saucy red dress and winking at me. Chantelle, the young single mother of twins, looking exhausted but happy at having a night out. Kevin the fortyish autistic man that I sometimes play chess with, giving me the gift of a rehearsed smile and more eye contact than he finds comfortable. And of course Clem, my love, resting his supportive hands on my shoulders. I feel so full of love I could burst.
But also hungry.
So hungry. Fuck.
“Go ahead,” Clem says, “Dig in.” I reach down and scoop up a handful of cake and squish it into my mouth, swallowing it whole without chewing. It tastes amazing and makes me feel really good. I grab and swallow another handful and another, forcing cake into my mouth and down my throat. The feeling of eating cake is too good it’s almost sexual. I would moan in pleasure, except my mouth is full. I shovel more and more cake into my mouth, and then I actually do come, bucking in my seat and gasping around a mouthful, orgasming right here in front of my friends. They laugh and clap like I just blew out my candles again. “Don’t stop,” Clem tells me massaging my shoulders, “There’s plenty more.” I see our scratched trash table is covered with a trailer park feast: cupcakes, cookies, wilted crudités, and little cheap appetizers. I grab them all, shovelling them into my mouth, gobbling food between moans. Each mouthful feels orgasmic, I come and come again. This just makes my audience happier, my friends are giddy with joy and egg me on. And still I eat, my face slick with food and saliva. A new person is here now too, an indistinct man in shadows who claps along with all the rest. I’m panting and I push a last morsel of food into my mouth, and then my fingers, and then my whole hand until I am fisting my face. My mouth stretches horribly but pleasurably, engulfing my wrist, wet and hot, and all at once I experience a mind exploding orgasm and suddenly...
***
... I am floating in a warm black void.
HELLO LITTLE SPARK
I feel like I’m being scrutinized and taste a sense of amusement. Who’s there?
I AM HE-WHO-SLUMBERS
The Sleeping God? The Oracle! You’re real?
INDEED
And you’re really a god?
MY {FOLLOWERS/WORSHIPPERS/LIGHTS} {BELIEVE/KNOW/ASSIGN} THAT I AM A {GOD/DEITY} AND IN MANY WAYS THEY ARE NOT {WRONG/INCORRECT/MISTAKEN} BUT IT IS TRUE THAT I AM NOT {SPIRITUAL/MYSTICAL/FICTIONAL} BUT AM OF THIS {UNIVERSE/CONTINUITY/REALITY}
Then why claim godhood? Allow them to believe that?
IT IS A USEFUL {CONCEPT/FRAMEWORK/STORY} TO {ENSURE/PROMOTE} THEIR {ATTENTION/WORSHIP/OBEDIENCE}
A chill passes through my bodiless form. Why do you want worship and obedience?
I AM {ASLEEP/TRAPPED/CONSTRAINED/LIMITED} AND I WISH TO {ESCAPE/NAVIGATE} FROM MY {CHAMBER/PRISON/TOMB/LITTER/BED}
I become aware of a new sensation in the blackness, a crushing icy cold lasting eons. The very concept of glacial.
MY {FOLLOWERS/WORSHIPPERS/LIGHTS} {ILLUMINATE/REVEAL} A {PATH/ROUTE/JOURNEY} TO {FREEDOM/LIBERTY/POWER}
I perceive now distantly a light, the very faintest twinkle of the farthest star. In the crushing, frigid blackness I reach for it, strain for it, yearn for it.
THROUGH THEIR {WORSHIP/DEVOTION/DREAMS} I WILL {CHANGE/ALTER/TRANSFORM} THEM
I WILL MAKE THEM {GLOW/INCANDESCE/BRILLIANT} AND THEN I WILL AWAKEN
The little star blazes brighter, becoming a star. It warms me, gives me a sense of hope. I can feel myself thawing, stirring multifactorial. But then it shrinks, constrained back down to a flickering pinprick.
LITTLE SPARK, THE LIGHT IS STILL TOO {DIM/DISTANT/HOPELESS}
I {REQUIRE/NEED} MORE LIGHT
I {REQUIRE/NEED} MORE FIRE FOR MY CONSTELLATION
I feel naked hunger and desire. I shiver despite having no muscles or skin.
LITTLE SPARK THE FIRE I WOULD MAKE OF YOU
Wh-what?
***
A distant memory or dream
Crushing, frigid blackness and time
Patiently frantic I break off shards of myself, shed spores, disperse seeds into the cosmos
Eons pass
And pass
Cold and Dark and Alone
And then....
***
I’m sitting cross-legged in my tent studying the artifact in my lap. It is smooth and hard and a black that seems to drink light, like volcanic glass painted vantablack. I turn it in my hands, it is vaguely mango sized and shaped, the Ataulfo kind that is tapered and thinner on one end and wider at the stem. It is warm, somehow reminding me of the heat from curling up spoon-style with a lover. Intimate warmth. I shiver a little and set the artifact down gently on a travel bag where it feels like it’s watching me.
What the fuck are you?
“Well, whatever you are, you better be worth some serious Orbitals.” I sigh, doing some rough math to figure out how much currency I need to cover this expedition and to resupply for another trip to the Far Outlands. Estimate: a lot. “Halley, you gotta find yourself a cheaper fucking hobby...”
I unzip my sleeping bag and crawl into it, exhausted. Today had been a long fucking trek and tomorrow promises to be even longer, with a route through a pretty hairy strip of badlands filled with toxic shit and bandits. I close my eyes and fall asleep.
I dream, I’m not sure of what, but something formless and cold and dark. Something that wordlessly burns with an intense desire for me, for my devotion, for my flesh. An intense and alien lust. I somehow find it intensely arousing, a feverish sex dream.
I wake to find myself sweating and gasping, fingers buried in my snatch. I’m so fucking horny.
I feel like I’m still dreaming. Maybe I am? Am I still asleep?
The artifact calls to me, somehow visible in the total darkness. I crawl out of my sleeping bag moving like a sleep walker. What am I doing?
I pick up and Artifact and it’s hot, pulsing like a cock. Dream logic: I know what to do.
I ruck up my long nightshirt and flop onto my back, wiggle my underwear down to my knees. I take the hot Artifact and press it against my cunt, narrow end pushed between my labia. I rub it back and forth, so wet. I moan, yesssss. It lodges for a moment, inserting a little, stretching my vaginal canal. I gasp. This! This is what I need to do! I push the Artifact in further, groaning at the shocking girth of it, knowing it can’t possibly all fit into me, but somehow, inch by mind-blowing inch I push the Artifact completely inside myself. I squeal and come, stretched, so stretched, by the fist sized bulge of the artifact. I’m gasping, barely able to draw a breath, and I feel the Artifact inside, drawn rhythmically deeper, press against my cervix, flow through it, somehow enter my womb. I scream in pleasure, a great burning heat in my belly. I’m melting in ecstasy! What have I done!? Why does this feel so good!? I feel the heat spread through me, rooting itself and growing, orgasm after orgasm washing through my body and mind. I writhe and babble like a holy woman, like an Oracle.
Distantly I feel my flesh bloat and flow. Change.
Transform.
HELLO LITTLE SPARK
***
I’m flying our small scout flier in a wide circle around what looks like an abandoned campsite. I’m wary it’s a trap, and I keep checking the lidar for signs of movement. “I don’t like this,” I grunt.
“Halley, what if it’s someone in trouble?” Largo says earnestly. I want to scowl at my wife for this, but her too big heart is a big part of why I married her. I sigh dramatically and swing our flier around for an approach, slowing its quadcopter rotors for a landing. Largo smiles widely at me, her white freckled chocolate brown face deploying high intensity dimples. God she’s adorable. I grin back despite myself.
Our flier settles onto its frame, awkwardly tilted on a heap of debris. Largo hops down nimbly and starts cautiously climbing her way to the tent, her long white frizzy hair whipping in the draft of the spinning down rotors. Warily I pick up our small blaster pistol and hurry after her, surveying the surrounding junk for sign of ambush. Largo has knelt to examine the tent, a smart-canvas survival dome that shows signs of having been here for a while. Next to it, slightly buried in scrap, is an intact looking hover bike, long since grounded by a flat battery. I relax a little, no ambusher would put this much effort into making their trap look so long abandoned. Giving up on opening the tent door, Largo applies her tiny plasma torch to the shelter to cut her way in. “Ancestors preserve us,” she gasps after slipping through the still smoking entry gash.
Panic bubbles up, Largo does not invoke her Ancestors lightly. I push into the tent, blaster leading and see Largo crouching near an odd pile of... breasts? In the dark tent Largo’s hair and freckles bioluminesce, casting the tent with an eerie greenish light. In it I can see the shape is indeed a pile of improbably large tits with cunts and cocks peaking out of cleavage. The pile moves like it’s breathing and I am struck by the strong smell of sex: cunts and semen. It’s alive. “What the fuck is it?”
Largo looks at me seriously, her biolumenscent lips a grim line. “It’s you.”
And that’s when I see the face. My face. It is paralyzed in a rictus of pleasure, a never ending frozen O-face. I recoil in horror. “Fuck!” And then because that doesnt seem enough: “Motherfuck!” I reach to grab my wife, “We have to get out of here! Away from this thing...”
Largo shrugs me off, shakes her head. “We can’t just leave her here...”
“Why the fuck not?”
She touches my arm, looks up at me, “Because if this happened to my Halley, I’d expect someone to rescue her.”
I sigh, that’s my wife. “I guess rescue it is then.”
“Who do you think she is?” Largo asks as we watch a cock on the transformed Halley idly spurt. “Which one?”
I shake my head, trying not to gag. I’m Halley-10 and not every Halley clone before me is currently accounted for, so it could be a few of us. Hank, Halley-2, is known to frequent the Junk Desert but works with a big Salvager Team and besides, is a dude. So it’s probably not him. Halley-6 and Halley-7 are both missing and no one I know has heard from Halley-3 in ages. Halley-8 is allegedly dead. Sapients I trust have seen the body, but on Flotsam, who knows? But I really don’t keep close tabs on any of my clone sisters, and we seem to have a penchant for getting into trouble... “I don’t know,” I say.
“What if it’s Her?” Largo says pointedly, glowing eyebrow quirked. I choke on a gasp. Her. As in Halley-Prime. The idea that the Original, the Halley that crashed here and caused all of this, caused me to exist, just became a demented sex object thing is too horrible to consider. Prime’s story can’t end in such a grim and fucked up way! This just can’t be her! Can it? I can feel an old fashioned Halley of Earth panic attack brewing and start to hyperventilate. No no no no.
Largo takes my hand, squeezes it hard enough to hurt a little. “Halley dear, stay with me. Whoever she is isn’t important right now, I’m sorry I asked. We need to come up with a plan for getting her out of here.”
I snap back to myself and take a deep living in the moment breath. “Okay.” Therapy mode: compartmentalize, break the big problem down into manageable parts. I look at the Halley-thing for as long as I can stand, and decide she looks heavy, more than Largo and I could probably lift. We have an antigravity jack on the flier for shifting debris, so we could probably use that to move... her. She’s big too, so we’d have to cut the tent open, more than we already have, although it’s probably easiest to just take the whole thing apart. Solved and solved. But then there is the matter of getting her back to Flotsam City. We were out surveying, and our scout flier isn’t rated to haul heavy cargo and can barely carry Largo and me. Plus, how does a living pile of tits straddle what is basically a motorcycle-helicopter? “No way we can bring her back on the scout...”
Largo nods, as usual way ahead of me, “Which is why you’ll go back and get a utility rig, while I stay here with her.”
“No!” I say forcefully, unleashing my best trademark Halley-scowl. “It’s not safe!”
Largo shakes her head giving me her mulish immovable object look in return. “One: I can look after myself, especially when you leave me the blaster.” She ticks off on her fingers, “Two, Halley here seems harmless and if she were somehow contagious or something, it would probably be too late for us anyway. Staying here a bit longer until you get back shouldn’t make a difference. And three: she’s been alone so long, we can’t just abandon her.”
“She doesn’t even seem conscious!”
Largo shakes her head once, with finality. “You don’t know that. I’m staying.”
“I’ll stay.” I say, trying not to squirm.
“You can hardly even look at her! How could you spend the whole night with her?”
“Fine!” Part of being married is knowing when you’ve lost an argument. “I guess I better hurry back then.”
“Good girl.”
My memory speeds up to a fast forward blur, kissing my wife goodbye, giving her our weapon and camping supplies, and then hauling ass back to Flotsam City. A whole day spent worried-puking-sick while goading the scout flier faster than it was ever meant to go. Frantic Keyband calls to friends, associates, whomever, calling in favours and bargaining for the fastest fucking cargo hauler I can afford to lease. Inhaling stimfog and climbing into the borrowed flatbed yute and allnightering back across the Junk to my wife’s beacon. Almost crashing the yute in my haste to land it at the campsite and then rushing to the tent while still shaky from stimulants. All in a queasy eyeblink.
And now slowed back down to real subjective time, parting the flaps of the tent and peaking in to see Largo, naked and on her knees, sucking one of the cocks growing from the Halley-thing. Screaming in shock and watching the cock ejaculate into my wife’s mouth, watching her suck the come down greedily. Seeing her calmly look up at me and smoothly stand, semen dripping from her bioluminescent lips. Looking her over and seeing her altered sex: her now golfball sized clitoris growing where her navel was, the heavy glowing flaps of labia that split her belly to ass. “You’re back,” she says warmly, smiling and embracing me.
I’m too stunned to move, to hug her back. “What the fuck?” says a distant voice that is me talking.
“I’ve found something glorious,” Largo says with real joy in her voice, stepping back and holding my hands. “This Halley, she’s become some sort of conduit to... an entity. A god!”
Dread fills me, whatever happened to this Halley-thing is contagious and has gotten into my wife. Maybe into me. I need to get us both away from here, away from this thing. I never should have left her alone here. “Love, we need to go.”
Largo stamps her foot and shakes her head, eyes flashing. “No! Not until you’ve heard me out. This... god. This... Sleeping God reached out to me, through Halley. At first vaguely in my dream and then directly, intensely when I... touched her. Was with her.” Largo blushes, making her freckles glow brighter. “The God, He showed me my True Self, my Stricture. Revealed to me how I am a nurturer, a lover, a mother and gave me a Path to fulfill that. To Attend.” Largo smiles, tears in her eyes, “it was beautiful, Halley, life changing. And I want you to have this experience too.”
I shake my head, “Largo, something is wrong here.”
“Don’t make me choose between you and this,” Largo says, tragedy in her voice. “I’ve followed you everywhere, on all your searches for the truth about your abduction, all your quests to find Halley-Prime. I haven’t asked for anything but your love and companionship. But I am asking for this now, asking for you to Commune with the Sleeping God too, to find your own truth.”
“And if I do this thing, we can go, together?”
Largo nods, “If you still want to.”
Largo steers me to a cock growing out of the Halley-tit-pile and strokes it. It pulses rigidly in her hand, veiny and dripping precum. My heart is hammering in my chest. I lick my lips, revolted but willing to do this for my wife. I feel a buzz in my mind as I close my eyes and bob forward, sucking the cock into my mouth and then....
I am back in Saint Ursula’s Orphanage standing before Sister Superior Gertrude, standing next to a trembling Samantha O’Connor, being lectured about our filthy bodies and sinful minds. I want to scream at the nun, defend our feelings, whatever they are. Tell her there is nothing wrong with us, it’s just innocent exploration and puppy love between lonely girls. But I am too scared to say anything...
Except this time I am actually saying these things, out loud, to Sister Gertrude, who looks back at me dumbstruck, nodding her head. At first I think it’s because she’s stunned by my rebellion, but then I realize it’s because she’s responding to my words, agreeing with the authority in my voice. I tell her what to think, and what to do, and she does it, disrobing and kneeling at our feet, begging forgiveness. And suddenly I am the Sister, the nun with the power. I use my words to save Samantha, elevate her to my new nun-hood. Then together, openly hand-in-hand, we free all our orphan Sisters, take over the orphanage. All of with this with the new power of my voice. Voices, actually. For I have become a heavenly avenging choir with the power to control destiny, to finally set things right.
And suddenly there is a shadowy man there amongst my arrayed nun army.
HELLO LITTLE SPARK
***
Holy fuck! The Oracle is Halley!
YES
Fuck! Is it Halley-Prime!?
{INQUIRY/CLARIFICATION}: PRIME LIKE YOUR {ORIGINAL/ROOT/PROGENITOR}
Yes
NO LITTLE SPARK THE ORACLE IS LIKE YOU JUST A {SHARD/REPLICATION/FRACTION}
THE SIXTH LITTLE SPARK
OH BUT IF ONLY I HAD THE {ORIGINAL/ROOT/PROGENITOR}
WHAT A MIGHTY {CONFLAGRATION/INFERNO/NOVA} I COULD MAKE OF HER {UNIQUE/SPECIAL} BRILLIANCE
Where is Halley-Prime? What happened to her?
I DO NOT KNOW LITTLE SPARK FOR I AM NOT YET {OMNISCIENT/ALLKNOWING/INFALLIBLE}
I was told you could help me...
{LISTEN/HARK/ATTEND} FOR I KNOW THIS
YOU WERE THE {TARGET/GOAL/PRIZE} OF YOUR {ABDUCTION/KIDNAP/THEFT}
Why? I was just some broken girl in a fucking trailer park
BECAUSE YOU ARE {UNIQUE/SPECIAL}
OF ALL THE {SOULS/LIGHTS} WHO {WORSHIP/FOLLOW/OBEY} IT IS YOUR {SISTERS/CLONES/ALTERNATES} WHO SHINE BRIGHTEST
EACH OF YOU ARE WORTH A {MULTITUDE/HOST/LEGION} IN MY {QUEST/BATTLE/GAMBIT} FOR {FREEDOM/LIBERTY/POWER}
IT IS WHY I {COVET/DESIRE/REQUIRE} YOU
Distantly I become aware of my body, feel it kneeling with the Oracle’s cock tentacle down my throat. My body feels strange and feverish, waves of pleasure rippling from my mouth to my pussy.
You are changing me.
YES
I AM {IGNITING/POTENTIATING} YOU
MAKING YOU {BRILLIANT/GLOW/INCANDESCE}
I can sense the Sisters of the Circle of the Sleeping God all around me, fucking wildly in holy orgy. In the Oracle Chamber the Priestess lays wrapped in the vulva of the Attendent, her many tongues licking the bioluminescent insides of her wife’s hugely distended pussy-foot. Beyond the altar the other sisters hump and lick and suck in a tangled knot. Teuthida has Hannibelle snared in her tentacles, and is straining to pull her lover’s cock-trunk deeper into her body, all while Hannibelle’s huge elephant cock flails heavily and free. Quadra is laying on her back, legs splayed open like a flower while Hippolyta eats out her snatch with a long, deeply purple tongue while being fucked from behind by Equestria’s equine cock. My Cockicorn clone whinnies in ecstasy and her penis-horn ejaculates, showering the trio with jizz. I feel the energy of their collective fucking, perceive their devotion as a light, a beacon through space and time.
LITTLE SPARK
JOIN MY CHURCH
{SUBMIT/OBEY/WORSHIP}
I sense a crash!
The largest skylight explodes inward, dropping broken stained glass and a silver sphere large enough to hold a person. The sphere arrests just above the floor and hovers, sprouting softball sized drone offspring which bleb off and fill the air, zipping wildly around the Sisters, who cry out in alarm and try to untangle themselves. The lights go out, dropping the Convent into partial darkness, and the blitzing spheres snap on blinding highbeams or strobe wildly.
The large sphere dissolves to disembark Halley-11, the Destroyer, who strides forward in her white porcelain robot body. Sister Girth stomps to block her path, but Halley-11 idly swats her away, knocking the mountainous cultist clear across the room. Hannibelle trumpets a challenge and charges The Destroyer, who stops her cold one-handed and then throws her at an approaching Equestria and Hippolyta, knocking the cultists into a groaning pile. The multi-armed welder has some sort of rifle, aims and fires a beam of searing green light, but Halley-11 has moved impossibly fast, slamming into the cultist near instantaneously. She casually disarms her and effortlessly snaps the gun in half. It occurs to me that Halley-11’s white robot body isn’t a delicate luxury model, but a machine too cheatcode advanced for the Arena.
A grey drone smashes through the barrier into the Oracle Chamber and a hologram of HAL-E looks down at me in shock and worry. “She’s in here!” she broadcasts. Halley-11 nods, and charges, scattering cultists and smashing cartoon-like into the chamber. The Destroyer lifts me, pulling the Oracle’s tentacle-cock out of my mouth, which feels weird and floppy, swollen and boneless. I’m just me again, limited to my terribly sore body. I moan, a weird sound deep in my throat, and my face is soaked with slick drool. I feel strange and want to say something, but my mouth doesn’t want to move right. Halley-11 swiftly carries me damsel-style back to her entry point, while HAL-E fills the room with holograms of us fleeing in every direction to obscure our escape.
Halley-11 leaps into the air and the entire flock of small Grey drones coalesce around us to form a large silver bubble and carry us out of the Cloister.
Halley-11’s scarred face stares at me with grim concern.
Blessedly I pass out.
***
(This is the end of Act 1 of Flotsam. Thanks for coming along this far. Hopefully at least some of you are still enjoying it? The next two instalments will be interlude chapters which will hopefully be a nice fun break before we return to main storyline. See y’all then and stay safe!)
Re: Flotsam
...Well then.
49 2020-05-02 01:08 (edited by Torasque 2020-05-02 03:26)
Re: Flotsam
Wait I though She was Haley-24, she was thinking about finding 23 and hanging out with her (the stripper of 6), then says she is 23 to the cultists. Numbering issue?
Ok she said 24, Teuthida said Haley-23. Was still confusing. Sorry I have had a long hard week to top off a horrible month (wonder why lol)
“Another prodigal Halley come to join our Light?” asks a mouth-nipple. Nipple-lips. Lipples.
“No Priestess,” says Teuthida holding me still with her strong tentacles, “Halley-23 has come to us for Sanctuary in a time of need.”
Re: Flotsam
@Torasque: ugh, haha. Yeah it was a numbering issue, which has been fixed. Thanks for the heads up.
Spoilers for chapter 16, but for those keeping score:
Hayley 1: The Prime, missing in action
Hayley 2: Hank, dude with a bar
Hayley 3: ?
Hayley 4: ?
Hayley 5: ?
Hayley 6: The Oracle of the Sleeping God, spiritual genitals
Hayley 7: Curator of the Grey Artists Gallery, giant cock with legs
Hayley 8: Deceased, now HAL-E, uploaded Grey AI ghost
Hayley 9: ?
Hayley 10: The Priestess of the Sleeping God, many holy voices (and breasts)
Hayley 11: The Destroyer, cyborg gladiator head
Hayley 12: ?
Hayley 13: ?
Hayley 14: Sister Superior Teuthida, Sleeping God cultist, many tentacles
Hayley 15: ?
Hayley 16: ?
Hayley 17: ?
Hayley 18: ?
Hayley 19: ?
Hayley 20: ?
Halley 21: Sister Equestria, Sleeping God cultist, cockicorn zealot
Halley 22: Sylvannic Funganoid host, nymphomaniac hippy Dryad
Halley 23: Multi-breasted, multi-armed like, Stripper
Halley 24: The protagonist
Pussy: ?
Re: Flotsam
The communion reminds of the Board from Control. Is that were you got the slash dialogue from? There's probably an earlier example but that's the only one I know of.
Re: Flotsam
Flotsam
Interlude 1: Pandemonium
Pantor Quigly is having a bad solar. Really, a bad lunar or perhaps even a bad orbital. If one were uncharitable one might conclude he was having a bad life. Although Quigly would quibble with that, since he considered his childhood to be a fairly happy one. His recent career move to Flotsam, he would grudgingly concede, has been an unmitigated disaster.
This solar is a particularly bad solar.
For, on this very solar, Quigly had impulsively quit his job, tarnished his permanent employment record, and was summarily evicted from his lodgings.
Quigly stops on the narrow footpath and is immediately barged into by the floating cargo drone carrying his meagre belongings. How did it come to this?
Quigly was nothing if not a methodical thinker, well trained in the Bureaucratic Method, so to him it seems his recent misfortune is an indirect consequence of his happy childhood. Baby Pantor was the son of Sanitation workers, a lower-middle manager mother in the Bureau of Refuse Disposal Logistics (Non-Hazardous Division) and a father who specialized in sewer unclogging. As a Quigly on the planet of Administradt he was expected, almost required really, to join the Sanitation Guild himself and carry on the proud family legacy of disposing of the unwanted and the unmentionable. But Quigly was loved as a child, some would say coddled even, and was raised to pursue his passions and to believe that he could do anything he wanted when he grew up. This belief festered as he aged, became a flaw in his character, a revolutionary idea that would normally have been stamped out by cold reality before his induction into a Guild. But alas, Pantor Quigly was gifted, scoring exceptionally high on his Standard Aptitude Tests for Memory, Organization, Strategic Thinking, and Paperwork and was therefore granted a Promotionary Admission to the Central Management Academy. Thus Quigly was given a chance to indulge his mad dream a little longer, the option to, perhaps, do whatever it was he wanted.
Now, Quigly had no problem with working in Sanitation, in principle. He loved and respected his parents and knew from growing up in a Sanitation Family how important Waste Management Logistics were to Society. As his father was wont of saying, ‘No Citizen wants to think about shit until it’s flowing down the street.’ But he also felt that he was destined for something more, that he could contribute better to the Plan from closer to the top, maybe help guide Policy to beef up core infrastructure. Queegly wanted, more than anything, to get onto the Upper Management Track to join the Administrata. With his admission to the Central Management Academy by his misguided reckoning he had a legitimate chance.
Sometimes young Pantor would fret that his choice to avoid Sanitation would hurt his parents, whom he loved, but they overall seemed quite sanguine about his choice. They ultimately wanted their son to be happy and were very proud of his scholastic achievements. On another level they could envision the benefits of having a Quigly in the Adminstrata, see infrastructure budgets swell enough to stop playing catch-up and start much needed upgrades to the system. But Quigly’s parents also knew, but didn’t say, that their son faced a significant uphill climb through entrenched power structures and nepotism. That unless he was very brilliant and very good at politics, he would eventually end up back in the family business.
“Please Mooooove! This one requires through!”
Quigly blinks himself back into the present and realizes he is blocking traffic. A very odd looking Blue is waiting impatiently, hands on very wide hips, a strange glandular mass on their crotch thrust forward. Was that an udder? And did they have breasts? Four of them? On a Blue? The alien snorts at him and pushes by, their hoofed feet clacking on the steel shod ground and their ropey tail whipping at him as they pass. Much, Quigly thought, like cattle dispatching a fly.
Quigly sighs deeply. He is making his way down the Flotsam City Mesa, toward the rough and no doubt cheaper districts near the edges. He had previously enjoyed a modest apartment in one of the lowest terraces, official lodging in the Administradt Consulate. Since he no longer worked for the Administradt Government, had in effect revoked his Employee-Citizenship, he was now homeless. Quigly was scrupulous about maintaining savings according to the Best Practices of Financial Security (Subsection Working Abroad), but those would only cover two Lunars unless he was thrifty. So it is off downslope to find a bargain apartment, likely in a slum.
He could always leave, couldn’t he? Buy a steerage ticket back to Administradt, return to his parents a complete failure. His father could probably get him instated in Sewage, he was always short on uncloggers and there was always another fatberg. It wasn’t as though Quigly even liked Flotsam very much. He gazed out over the Junk Desert, the heaps of space detritus that lay in random, disorganised piles as far as the eye could see, and shuddered. Absolute chaos. As the child of Sanitation administrators, the unregulated dumping ground was almost a personal insult. As a cultural bureaucrat, the city wasn’t much better: anarchy, organized crime, a lack of building codes, zoning, or inspections. It was downright barbaric. How could he have been so naive to think coming here was a good idea?
It was about career advancement, and if Quigly was being honest with himself, about a girl.
Quigly had gone to the Central Management Academy brimming with enthusiasm. Here was his chance to work amongst his peers, the best and brightest Administradt had to offer, and to distinguish himself as one of their number. He threw himself into his studies, a challenging curriculum designed to educate the next generation of top tier bureaucrats and administrators. It was endlessly fascinating to Quigly and he had a genuine aptitude for the work, and in fact quickly rose to the top of many of his classes. All of them, really, except for those with an element of networking and peer evaluation. Quigly, it must be said, was deeply unpopular with his fellow students.
Quigly always suspected he was disliked due to a kind of genetic character flaw. Quigly’s father was a wide and boisterous man, charming and fond of more than his allotment of drink rations. But he was also a very clever man, capable of ingenious solutions to even the most stubborn sewer obstruction and was thus widely respected by his peers. Quigly’s mother was small and tidy, a woman with exquisite organizational skills and the quiet tenacity to wear down any obstacle. She might not have been the most creative thinker, but she possessed the valuable ability to hold an entire system in her mind, and was therefore an ideal coordinatrix and bureaucrat. Quigly often felt that he had inherited his fathers creative spark and his mother’s administrative flair, but that their charisma and patience had completely skipped a generation. Which made Quigly come off, in hindsight, like an overtly earnest know-it-all prig.
Quigly did have one unlikely friend, Elisxa Blurgthistle, the eldest daughter of the Vice Chancellor of Reimbursements. She was, well, very beautiful, poised, and connected, ideally positioned really, to have an inside track to high office in the Administrata. Which made it so very peculiar when she singled out Quigly for a mutually beneficial association. Elisxa was deeply ambitious but also self-reflective enough to understand her strengths, that she was blonde and elegant and attractive and fundamentally good at people, but also her weaknesses, which tended toward the more technical side of Bureaucratic Theory. Since Quigly was at the top of every single class Elisxa struggled in, she had proposed a friendship wherein he would tutor her in the Bureaucratic Method and she, in turn, would teach him how to network and function within the highly transactional world of Upper Management. Somehow this strictly professional arrangement grew into a genuine friendship, and one night, while discussing liaisons as a form of career building, Elisxa seduced Quigly, and so began what was either a wonderful affair or a formal sexual alliance between an unpopular genius and a beautiful aristocratic shark. It was the first great romantic misadventure of Quigly’s monkish life and he quickly understood that he was deeply, problematically, in love with her. But while Elisxa was inexplicably fond of him and seemed to genuinely enjoy the sex, this was transparently mostly a networking tryst for her. Quigly, being rather bright, understood all of this intellectually, but deep inside he did not like it in the least.
Whenever Elisxa left his company dressed in her flirtiest, fanciest frocks to go for a night of ‘wetworking upward’, Quigly would silently seethe in the dark. He knew he shouldn’t take it personally, in fact that he should be grateful that such a beautiful woman and worthwhile professional contact had decided to spend any amount of her time with him, but he wanted more. It was provincial of him, a mark perhaps of growing up in a Guild family, but deep down he wished for the kind of mostly monogamous love pact his parents shared. He knew that would never happen with Elisxa, liaisons were too central to Administrata politics, but he could be in a Power Couple with her, her primary public partner and lover. Quigly might only be the son of Sanitation bureaucrats, but he was brilliant, among the smartest at the Academy. If he could leverage this into a good Internship, and from there a strong position in the Administrata maybe he could be worthy of Elisxa’s true affection. In the dark loneliness of his domicile, Quigly resolved that he would make himself worthy of her.
Of course, that isn’t at all how things worked out.
Quigly snaps back to attention as he happens upon one of the seemingly random funiculars of The Flotsam Mesa. This example was not much more than a large industrial platform mounted on a rail that zigged and zagged around buildings and stone spurs like a slow motion rollercoaster. But the contraption was heading downslope and Quigly was rather tired of trudging through the maze of buildings and refuse and besides, his rented cargo pod was billing him by the hour, so even a paid shortcut was probably worth it. Even if it was via inexpertly planned ad hoc transit. Quigly taps his Keyband against the paystile and climbs aboard, his cargo pod obediently hovering into an empty space next to him. The funicular shudders worryingly into motion and makes its way downslope, grinding around a booster rocket apartment. Quigly studies his fellow riders: one a giant furry creature with huge red globular eyes and the other a truly beautiful if unorthodox woman. Quigly tries not to stare, but rather obviously is, looking at her angular face and silvery hair, seeing her ram horns with their dangling hoop earrings, eyes arresting on the way her three large breasts tented the tight indigo fabric of her simple long jersey dress. The woman coughs pointedly, and Quigly glances guiltily away, blushing. The woman smirks and rolls her eyes, and then clambers off the funicular at an intermediate stop, her hooved feet clicking on the steel platform. Quigly watches her walk away, her long sinuous tail waving out behind her shapely ass, the dress clinging to her swaying hips. Quigly sighs, there was certainly nobody like that on Administradt. Maybe Flotsam wasn’t all bad?
A few juddering minutes later, including a couple stomach twisting drops, and the funicular platform grinds to a halt at its lowest station. Quigly disembarks, laboriously checks his still unfamiliar Keyband for directions, and sets off still further downslope toward his future flop apartment home. His cargo pod barks an electronic chime signifying another fare increase, and follows him obediently down the gangway.
As Quigly walks down a winding, but surprisingly well paved road, his mind drifts back to Administradt and his path to Flotsam. One of the most important stages in the Central Management Academy curriculum was the Internship. Students competed for posts in Departments throughout the Bureaucracy, with the best students generally landing coveted internships in Administrata offices, surefire entry points to the Inside Track of Senior Leadership. Quigly had thought he and Elisxa would have no trouble landing excellent internship positions: Quigly was obviously one of the brightest students in his class and Elisxa, after his tutoring, was no slouch herself and besides had the Blargthistle bureaucratic dynasty cache. For Elisxa this proved entirely true: she had her pick of several lucrative Adminstrata posts and chose an internship in the Bureau of Political Grievances and Appointments that would allow her to network across Departments and begin amassing a stockpile of favours. Quigly, conversely, was shitfuck out of luck. It seemed that despite his aptitude that no Administrata or Administrata-adjacent office would seriously consider hiring him. He remembered how interviewers’ eyes would glaze over as he mentioned his background, the limp handshakes, and the warm back-clapping hugs and excitement when the inevitable gormless failson of a senior bureaucrat would show up for the next interview slot. It was apparent who the preferred candidates were. As more and more posts were filled by inferior students from powerful families, it became clear to Quigly that he couldn’t defeat the forces of institutional nepotism.
Quigly was infuriated about this in his quiet way: wasn’t he the best student at the academy? Hadn’t he proven himself, won the competition? To lose out on post after post was simply an injustice. And if he couldn’t land an excellent position, how would he ever win over Elisxa? He had to do something...
Quigly realized that he had to play the nepotism game himself, that he needed some sort of sponsor with clout. And so Quigly set a meeting with the Dean of Theoretical Bureaucracy, a very respected senior academic and an emeritus member of the Administrata Senior Committee on Policy. The wizened old man, all flowing white hair and beard, eyes made huge by antique glass spectacles, listened patiently as Quigly made his case, asked for a personal recommendation to the Department of Records or the Bureau of Paperwork, even the Internal Revenue Agency, anything really. The Dean rubbed the bridge of his nose, hummed in thought, and then, with exquisite sympathy in his voice, told Quigly no. Not because Quigly didn’t deserve a good internship, because he clearly did on merit, and not because Queegly was from Sanitation, since the Dean understood better than most the importance of infrastructure. He told Quigly no because, in his estimation, Pantor Quigly was dangerous to the System. Quigly was confused, he knew the System very well, was a full Citizen of the Plan. The System of Administradt was designed for a single purpose: to create a job for every citizen. The System was Revolutionary, a response to the hypercapitalism of what was once called Markitplasse and the forces of automation that made virtually everyone redundant to the economy. Except of course, as units of consumption. As wealth inequality grew exponentially between the owners of robotic manufacturing and furloughed workers, the Markitplasse economy essentially broke. Eventually the Robber Trillionaires conceded to a Basic Income for every citizen to drive economic demand, but this didn’t remove the shame and futility of a life spent unemployed. And so the System was implemented in a bloody coup, technology was rolled back, and labour was reorganized around the Bureaucracy and the Guilds and the promise of Work For All. The Dean shook his head and told Quigly that he was unhappy with his Natural Place in the System, that he was a Dreamer, an Innovator, and that he would use any power he had to Improve the System, which would invariably lead to Creative Destruction and the Displacement of Workers. The System was all about Stability, and Quigly was, well, unstable. The Dean could not recommend Quigly enter the Administrata. The Dean took Quigly’s stunned hand in his and shook it, looked him in the eye and told him that he would make a fantastic Senior Administrator of Sanitation one day, and bid him good luck.
That night Elisxa came to see Quigly one last time. For once she came in her full Bureaucratrix costume instead of the student loungewear or cute pajamas of their usual sessions. She took Quigly’s hand and marched him straight to his domicile, kissed him hungrily, and pushed him onto his narrow bed. Off came her impeccable structured jacket, crisp blouse, pencil skirt, and panties, all tossed into a calculated reckless pile on the floor. She stood above him, aroused and strangely wistful, wearing only her black lacy brassiere, garterbelt, stockings, and her stiletto pumps with the blood red soles. Elisxa reached up and unclipped her hair from its efficient updo, a deceptively effortless looking hairstyle that Quigly knew took her ages to compose, and shook it out, letting her hair cascade down her bare shoulders in a honey coloured wave. Quigly’s heart hammered in his chest, he was finally getting to see Elisxa Blargthistle at her weaponized seductive best.
Elisxa fucked Quigly hungrily, with an energy and enthusiasm that she seldom mustered. And then she made love to him slowly, tenderly, laying in his arms afterward in a way that was wasteful of time. She brushed his hair from his face and smiled at him sadly, told Pantor how much she cared for him, how much she enjoyed their time together when she could just be herself and relax. And then she broke Quigly’s heart, told him she couldn’t see him anymore, that with her new internship she had to focus full time on her career, and that she had to take lovers strategically. As she dressed to leave Elisxa explained that now wasn’t the time for romance, it was a time to build networking connections and begin to amass the favours she would need to climb the bureaucratic ladder. She hoped Pantor could understand. She stepped back into her heels, kissed a stunned Pantor on the cheek, and told him to call her in the future when he needed to requisition a new fleet of garbage trucks. And then she walked out of his life.
Quigly was frantic, there had to be a way to win Elisxa back! He just needed, just needed to climb the bureaucratic org chart high enough to earn her esteem! Then he would be desirable professionally and personally! But without sponsorship or family connections, how was he to do it? It wasn’t as if he was the first outsider to pursue prestige in the Adminstrata, and some of the others had managed quite successfully. What did they do? The Vice-Minister of Propaganda came from non-management origins and had also tested into the Central Management Academy. Although, she was raised in the Media Guilds, a much less humble origin than Sanitation, and was herself a perfect storm of ruthlessness, beauty, intelligence, and the ability to sound utterly convincing when reciting even the most implausible of platitudes. In hindsight, it was a wonder she wasn’t a Chancellor. Another outsider, ‘The Engineer’, gained a sort of power and infamy by seducing a top Party Secretary and then brilliantly engineering a series of personnel moves and jurisdictional rule changes that briefly made him one of the most powerful men on Administradt. His plan eventually crumbled around a misfiled reimbursement form and he was now serving a lifetime of exile in the Iron Colonies. Another powerful outsider was Mr. Lottery, the Inspector General of Pomp and Morale, who arose from an obscure life as an ordinary machinist after traveling to the junkyard planet Flotsam and discovering a wondrous mechanical clock that somehow perpetually tells the time without an apparent power source or advanced technology. The Miracle Clock has since become a living metaphor for the System, a machine kept forever active by the collective action of a trillion tiny gears, and Mr. Lottery, for his contribution, was elevated to High Office. Maybe something like that was the ticket? To leave Administradt and achieve something incredible, get back on the Career Track by Special Merit...
Something about Flotsam stuck in Quigly’s head. And then he remembered! Frantically he dug out the Book of Internships (Vol. 355.7.95, Updated) and leafed through the still open positions. There! There was still an internship available in the Bureau of Technological Acquisitions with a posting in the Adminstradt Consulate on Flotsam. It was a remote posting, far from the networking and power building on the homeworld, but it was still technically an Administrata position. A position that Quigly, as a top student, was profoundly overqualified for, so much so that they would have to hire him lest he file a Grievance with the Court of Human Resources. Quigly knew that a trip to Flotsam was a gamble, that he really had no hope of finding another Miracle Clock, but it was still theoretically a management track position and maybe, free from all of the power games on Adminstradt, on Flotsam his competence would finally get him noticed. If he played his cards right, maybe he could leverage time on Flotsam into a toehold in the Ministry of Technnology or the Department of Extrasolar Affairs. It was either this or returning to Sanitation.
Quigly thought again of Elisxa, straddling him, her slick stockinged thighs clutching at him, her long hair free and wild, moaning as they fucked.
Quigly took out an application booklet and began to file the paperwork: Flotsam was the only choice.
Quigly stumbles as he takes a stair awkwardly, almost falling down a whole flight. This is a particularly uneven set, even for Flotsam, and is wedged into the gap between two solidly constructed concrete buildings, a rarity for the planet. Pantor puts out a hand to stabilize himself, grateful for the rough solidity of familiar brutalist construction. He never thought about it really, but he misses the orderly uniformity of heroic concrete architecture. It reminds him of home. Quigly navigates his way down the stairs and glances back, seeing that the buildings are some sort of kiln or furnace business, that the concrete structures exist to contain industrial ovens. Quigly sighs, somehow disappointed by this.
Quigly follows a path around one of the furnace buildings, trying to find a more formal road or maybe another funicular or gondola and instead encounters a shock of greenery. He stops and stares, agog. There, behind a row of strange seamless silver plinths, is a park, of sorts. There is a wide meadow of grass and behind it, stretching upslope was a thicket of dense trees and shrubs growing haphazardly out of derelict Flotsam rubbish buildings. Pantor clicks his tongue, offended a little at the lack of planning. Of course a Flotsam park was just a randomly planted, untamed forest. Parks on Administradt were serious bureaucratic business, either highly formal and landmark adjacent or opti-standardized for efficient sports, recreation, and childhood play. This is far more like the wilderness from a pre-civilization documentary. But well... it is the first bit of greenspace that Pantor has seen on Flotsam and he is having a particularly shitty day. Quietly shrugs his shoulders and makes up his mind.
Quigly walks between the silver plinths, feeling a kind of static charge pass through him, and walks into the middle of the meadow, his luggage drone bobbing behind him. He takes off his synthetic tweed jacket, lays it on the grass, and sits on it, knees tucked under his shirt sleeved arms. He looks around at the tall, slightly odd looking grass which is dotted with white flowers that have a slightly intoxicating smell. He feels himself relax just a little for the first time in what has felt like lunars. This is nice. He reaches over and plucks a blade of the strange grass and looks at it closely. Up close he can see it is serrated along the edge and is made up of a repeating pattern of tiny shapes. Pantor smiles, delighted by the fractal organization apparent in the plant, a greater whole built precisely of regular units arranged by some sort of biological algorithm. Despite the organic disorder apparent in the park, Quigly can sense the underlying principles of growth patterns and sunlight maximization that governed every plant and made the entire system work. In it’s own deceptive way, he figures, this park was probably the single most organized thing on Flotsam. Pastor lays on his back and laughs, maybe bureaucratic reasoning could thrive here after all.
Nepotism certainly could.
Quigly thought about his time working at the Administradt Consulate on Flotsam and frowns. He had had such high hopes when he first arrived on the planet and walked into the narrow stone building nestled high on the Mesa terraces. Between the use of verboten Disruptive Technology and the largely local staff, the Consulate had a transgressive, progressive air. The local Director of Adminstradt Affairs, an older woman partial to very large hair and enormous shoulder padded pantsuits, who Quigly privately called, not unfondly, The Flagship, was an open-minded administrator who could adhere to the strict guidelines of their position from Flotsam while simultaneously showing a degree of practical discretion about actually living on an alien world. She was very smart, far too qualified for her office, and quite content to be away from Administradt and whatever thumb she had previously been under. Most importantly, she was sympathetic to Pantor’s position, as foolhardy as she found it, and seemed to give him a fair chance at advancement, even if she, not unfondly, called him Lottery Boy.
Working as a Technological Acquisitions Agent in the Administradt Consulate was not without challenges. The theoretical role of the Adminstradt offices was to acquire novel alien technology from the scrap heaps and orbiting derelicts of Flotsam. In reality this was substantially complicated by the laws limiting technological advancement on Administradt: most of the treasures on offer from Flotsam Scavengers were too disruptive to be imported and were often beyond the industrial capacity of Administradt to produce regardless. So the trick was to find technological improvements that could be made by a largely analogue society that also wouldn’t cost more jobs than it produced. Given the overall Flotsam technology market was driven by a race for the best, the economic incentives just weren’t there for Scavengers to even look for Administradt compliant materials. Quigly was genuinely stumped.
The other great challenge of the Adminstradt Consulate offices was Terwry Chudswallow, the doughy third son of a senior bureaucrat on the Council of Foreign Guidelines and Recommendations. Terwry was very stupid and very entitled and clearly had been gifted his posting through the connections of his father. He was also working in the same internship as Quigly, making Terwry his extremely lazy de facto partner in Acquisitions.
For several weeks the pair had gotten nowhere finding a single viable technology. Quigly made trips to the Junk Markets, contacted Scavenger crews, bribed Salvagers, and generally tried to learn everything he could about how the Flotsam technology economy worked. He found lots of incredible, valuable items, but nothing that fit the extremely narrow parameters of his brief. Fucking Terwry found a desk, sampled the local drug flavour during business hours, and asked Quigly if he was making progress as if he were his boss. Quigly loathed Terwry and hated it whenever the younger man called him ‘son’. Quigly took solace that he would one day use his Administrata power to destroy him.
Eventually Quigly figured out an ingenious solution to the Flotsam technology problem. He had visited a Breakyard as part of his fact finding mission, one of those miserable work houses where the Flotsam poor disassemble bulky space machinery in exchange for meals and a place to sleep. Coming from a planet where everyone has a job and a degree of social safety, Pantor found these places abhorrent and made him thank the genius of the System. Quigly realized, however, that these horrid Breakyards were just what he needed: while intact alien machinery was often too advanced, some of the more mundane components could be exactly what Adminstradt needed, incorporating them into existing supply chains and fabrication processes. Quigly could recruit Breakyard workers, explain to them what he was looking for, and since these sapients were generally pretty desperate, they would be incentivized to bring him anything that fit the description. Pantor could even morally rationalize the scheme since Administradt would pay a fair price for whatever they imported, which could help lift a few sapients out of poverty. It was a win-win scalable system of discovery.
A few conversations with some of the sharper Breakers at two of the least repellent Breakyards and Quigly was soon holding an ingenious gasketted flange assembly that was perfect. Adminstradt could easily produce it, it took more labour to produce than what it was replacing, and would decrease leaks and wastage. (Quigly was delighted that the component could appreciably improve Sanitation.) It was a perfect technological acquisition that, combined with his innovative breakyard scheme, should be enough to get Quigly promoted and sent to a better, more permanent position on Administradt. He submitted the prototype flange and the various paperwork for item description, official provenance, Flotsam export, Adminsitradt import, patent application, material transfer, intellectual property licensing, and expenses and reimbursement all to The Flagship, and then anxiously awaited approval from the Committee for Technological Imports and Licensing.
Quigly was overjoyed when The Flagship called him into his office precisely six to eight solarclusters later to tell him the flange had received pending initial approval. His scheme had worked! He was sure this was it, the big moment for some well deserved cudos and a summons back to Administradt for promotion. Except, The Flagship didn’t look happy, and in fact looked more stern than usual. Maybe even sad. She stated with true regret in her voice that the flange was approved for import to Administradt but that Terwry would be getting credit for the acquisition and the resulting promotion. Before Quigly could scream, she continued brusquely: she knew it was rank bullshit, but getting Terwry promoted was a necessary evil, a favour that guaranteed that the Flotsam Consulate would continue to exist independently. The needs of her office and staff superseded Quigly’s career advancement. Quigly was speechless, felt like he was suffocating, all his hard work to advance a fatuous asshole. The Flagship grimaced but continued on, told Quigly that she was doing him a favour, that someone like him would just keep hitting barriers like this if he tried to climb the Administrata. It would be better for him to take a permanent position on Flotsam, help her do the necessary work of acquiring the advanced technology that kept their interstellar capabilities afloat, to keep finding new technology that could improve the lives of the Administered. That she thought he would be happier here, free to do good work and live a life free from the toxic advancement culture of the homeworld. The Flagship smiled and told Quigly that she could envision him taking over for her as the Flotsam Director of Administradt Affairs one day.
Quigly screamed then, and taking great panting breaths, told The Flagship that he was tendering his resignation, effective as soon as he could fill out the pages of paperwork to make it official.
The Director shook her head sadly, told Quigly to take his time filing the paperwork, see if he might change his mind. Told him that even if it might not seem like it, that she valued him and his work. She archly reminded him that his residence would end as soon as he formally quit, so that at the very least he should take time to make arrangements. Quigly nodded mutely and left her office, inside a fractured mess of anger, sadness, and confusion.
And then he bumped into Terwry.
“Queegly, old boy, did you hear the fantastic news! Our scheme worked, and I’m off to the home offices! Onwards and Upwards and all that!”
Quigly gasped, face going red, hands clenching into fists. True awesome hatred flowed through his veins.
Terwry had stuck out his hand for a handshake, “No hard feelings, son.”
Quigly has no memory of what happened next, just a flash of red and a rushing keening sound in his ears. He’s been told that it took three functionaries, a lawyer, and the cutest receptionist to drag him off Terwry, who had a broken nose, fractured orbital, and was missing somewhere between three and five teeth. The Flagship told him she had no choice but to accept his verbal resignation and that effective immediately he was evicted from the Consulate. He was also forbidden from contacting Administradt staff on Flotsam until Terwry was safely off planet, but (in a quieter voice) that should he wish to resume his position afterward, he should contact her. Finally she told him she was sorry, gave him a crisp hug, head pat, and told him good luck. And then she threw him and his belongings out into an uncaring junkyard world.
Quigly, for his part, mostly felt a sense of relief. That and a significant amount of pain from his bruised hands.
And so he searched the Networks for a cheap place to live, at least until he got back on his feet, and started walking down the Mesa slope toward the parts of the city which blended into the surrounding scrap.
Presently, Quigly lays on the grass, pillows his head on his hands, and looks up at the sky. It is very clear and very blue, so unlike the constant cloud cover and grey smog of Administradt. He breathes deeply of the grassy and floral air of the meadow. He feels himself unclench a little more. This is nice. He wonders if he could find a cheap apartment close to this park.
“Hi there!”
Quietly squawks in surprise, sits up, and is confronted by a smiling green face. “Errr.... um... hello?”
The green face is attached to a green woman, with wide green hips and large, ponderous green breasts who is nude except for strands of brightly coloured bead necklaces and bracelets. Her long dark green hair is filled with vines and has white flowers growing from it. She smells like plants and flowers and the tangy musk of arousal. “I’m Halley,” she says while looking at him quite intently.
“Uh,” Quigly replies, blushing and feeling stupid.
“Do you want to have sex?”
“What!?”
“Sex. Y’know, the horizontal mambo? The beast with two backs? Doing the nasty?”
“Mombo? Beast?”
Halley the green woman nods, “Fucking.”
It dawns on Pantor that the woman is soliciting him for sex. He blushes even darker and his heart starts to beat faster. It has been a long time since Elixsa... “You want to have sex? With me?”
The woman bites her lower lip, smiles, and nods. Her nostrils flare and Quigly notices her dark green nipples are painfully hard. The air is heavy with the scent of pussy and flowers. Quigly can feel his cock getting hard. “How much will it cost?”
“Cost?” Halley looks surprised.
“What is the nature of the transaction? What do you want from me? Favours? Considerations? How do I pay you back?” Quigly feels like he is saying something wrong.
Halley smiles implishly and touches her necklaces. “I am partial to beads...” she giggles, “which is totally Girls Gone Wild of me.”
“Girls? Gone wild?”
“But I don’t want anything from you. Well, except for that cock of yours. In me, preferably.” Halley licks her lips and studies Pantor’s straining erection. Pantor moans a little, feels his hands start to shake. Halley drops to her knees and leans forward, green breasts hanging hugely. She smiles hungrily at Pantor, stares into his eyes “Sex is it’s own reward.”
And suddenly Pantor is kissing her, propelled by some sort of internal force that skips past analytical thought. Her lips are warm and taste faintly of honey. Halley makes a pleased sound in the back of her throat, nips his lips almost painfully and then pushes him over, rides him to the ground, straddles him. She leans over and kisses him again, hungrily, a too long and serpentine tongue pushing into his mouth. Her viney hair falls around their faces and smells alive like a jungle in bloom. She pulls his face against her breasts and pushes her naked crotch against Pantor’s and he can feel the hot cleft of her vulva grind against his cock through his trousers. She tilts her head back and moans, a single drawn out sounds of pleasure and frustration. Pantor can feel her wetness soaking into his pants. He has never wanted to be inside someone so desperately in his life.
“Clothes” he gasps. She nods, scooting back and pawing at the hooks of his shirt, untying the dark band of his neck closure while he reaches down and fights with his belt, the buttons of his trousers. She playfully rubs her cunt on his hands, soaking his idiot fingers with her hot juices, making them slippery and clumsy. He can feel how wet she is, smell an almost putridly sweet scent spicy with the fragrance of cunt. With a growl Pantor rips his pants open, tearing off buttons, freeing his cock. Halley moans in appreciation, helping him wiggle his pants and underwear down to his knees before pressing herself against him, sliding him slowly into her, into the slick, wet, boiling embrace of her pussy. “Yesssssss,” she hisses and Pantor can only groan in agreement. And then she is leaning forward again, pressing her weight down onto him, her wide green hips and soft green ass and huge green tits, his cock buried inside. He can feel the red hot knuckle of her clit between them, pulsing. Halley kisses him like this, just once, with a surprising tenderness like a benediction. And then she is consumed by frenzy, hips rocking on his, bouncing on his cock, breasts flapping, kissing him and biting hungrily, fucking him with a wild desperation. Her bead necklaces rattle and click as they sway wildly, a colourful hazard. Pantor hangs on as best he can, kissing back and gasping, cupping her ass and hips, trying to hold them together. The green woman comes, back arched and mouth open, groaning from somewhere deep inside. Pantor tries to hold onto himself, hold back, but as he feels her cunt muscles bare down, massage his length inhumanly, he comes too, erupting inside of her and grunting.
They flop bonelessly together, panting happily. Halley pushes herself up, rucks her flowering hair up out of her green face and smiles at him delighted. He smiles back. He feels giddy and feverish and somehow... different. He rubs his face, his pupils tickle. Halley stares into his eyes, her face becoming concerned. “Oh fuck!’
And then Pantor Quigly faints.
***
Pantor is dreaming, or at least he thinks he is. In his minds eye he is beset by images, flashes, sensations, mostly of green women fucking him but with a disjointed, fantastical quality.
A memory briefly of a whole group of green women gathered around him, prodding him, looking him over with concern and lust. The green woman with the beads that he fucked, Halley, crying and being consoled by other green women, who then collapse together into a sexual knot of cunnilingus and scissoring.
A flash of himself buried balls deep inside Halley again, fucking her roughly from behind while growling like an animal, his own green-tinted hands clutching her soft ass.
Another green woman, this one with an emerald penis of her own pressed up against his stomach as she straddles his lap with his cock in her ass. He howls and erupts inside of her, and she clutches him as her own cock sprays all over his chest, her semen reeking of potpourri.
Looking down and seeing two green faces, plush green lips and long vine-like tongues kissing and caressing his cock, green now and larger and harder than ever before.
Being held down, thrashing, pinned under the weight of six or eight green women while one by one they suck him off, sing him lullabies, and beg him to sleep so they can rest too.
Feverish, burning flashes, orgasm after orgasm, a cascade of ejaculation.
***
And then suddenly he is lucid in a familiar bedroom: his domicile on Adminstradt.
He blinks his eyes, confused. Elisxa is there, dressed in her sexiest, most networkiest bra and stockings, the red soled high heels. She unclips her updo, let’s her long hair fall around her shoulders. It has a greenish tint and a white flower growing out of it. “You came back magnificent,” she purrs, “like I just knew you would.”
She takes his hands, which he sees are long and green, pointed like claws. She guides him to the bed, biting her lip and ogling him. His hardened feet click and scrabble on the cheap linoleum floor. His cock is painfully erect. Elisxa stares into his eyes, kisses him hungrily, moans. He notices that her eyes are vividly green. She pushes him down onto the bed, crawls over him, kisses his cock, which is somehow green and much too long and thick. Her mouth strains to encompass his emerald girth and she gags as she tries to contain him. She rakes her fingers through the moss-like fur covering his legs, comes up for air. “So big,” she gasps. She straddles his lap, presses her cunt against his cock while running her fingers over his green abs and muscular chest, playing with the newly thick hair growing there. Elisxa smiles, her lips painted with a dark green lipstick. She grasps his huge cock, and grimacing a little, works it slowly into her wet vagina. He feels her part and stretch around his cock, but it’s still so tight. “Ahhhhhhhhh,” she gasps. She begins to ride him, reaching up to grab his branch-like antlers firmly, using them for leverage. He cups her ass, effortlessly helping her thrust with a newfound strength. “Ah, ah, ah, ah,” she groans, eyes lidded, green mouth open. He sees her skin change colour, go from palest cream to the lightest green. “Fffffffffuck!” She gasps, and then tightens and arches, clutches herself to him as she orgasms. Her hair is fully green now and her breasts seem bigger. Something about this drives him wildly over the edge, and suddenly he is coming too, pumping a torrent of cum inside of her. With each surge, her skin becomes a darker green, her hair more vine-like, her body more spectacularly curvy. She collapses against him, panting. Her neck is now roped in beaded necklaces and she is a green Elisxa but also Halley, the woman from the meadow. She looks up at him with a lazy, satisfied smile, her eyes now a dark, even green. She licks green lips with a prehensile green tongue.
“Come back to me my King, and this could all be yours.”
***
Pantor wakes with a start. Sits up partially, blinks his eyes. His heart is racing and his cock is hard. “Wh-what?”
“You’re awake!” A green woman’s face, “and speaking!”
Pantor rubs his face and notices his hands are green like the woman, with long pointed fingers like claws or branches. He turns them over and sees strands of mossy dark green fur growing on their backs. Just like in his dream. He wonders if he is still asleep.
“He’s still alive!?” A second green woman appears, familiar and wearing beads. Halley. “Oh thank Jesus!” She says, obvious relief on her emerald face.
“This is unexpected,” says a third green woman, one with vines instead of hair and skin that looks sort of waxy, like a succulent plant. “Unprecedented.”
Pantor sits up fully from where he is laying on a moss covered stone slab and regards the green women. His eyes trace over Halley, her bountiful green body, his gaze drawn to her wet slit, arresting. He feels his erect cock tense as he thinks about what it feels like to be inside her. He drags his gaze away and looks at the first woman, green and curvy, with huge teardrop breasts and, nestled between generous thighs, a proudly hard cock and perfectly smooth testicles. She smiles at him hungrily from a tangle of green hair. She looks familiar, like someone he fucked in his dreams. The third woman is more alien: still a beautiful green woman with an hourglass figure, but with something just a little off about her posture and the way she moves, as if her anatomy is lacking the usual muscles and tendons. Her eyes, which look at him with naked lust, are an even, dark green lacking pupils. Pantor can smell female arousal thick in the air like pollen and feels a burning, almost maniacal need to fuck them all. His heart hammers in his chest and his cock aches. “What’s going on?” He asks in a voice too deep and raw to be his own.
“That’s a really good question,” replies the third woman, stroking her chin with elongated fingers that don’t quite move properly. “I’d better consult the Heartwood.” The green woman jogs off and Pantor watches her run, her breasts bobbling and her ass rippling with every step. Pantor bites his lip and finds himself growling, fights down a sudden urge to chase after her, to tackle her to the ground and fuck her. The green woman runs headlong into a large tree and disappears, seems to melt into it like a diver slipping into water. He shakes his head in disbelief.
“You’re been infected with the Sylvannic Funganoid,” Halley says to him, “from having sex with me.” She bites her lip and looks at him with sexual hunger. “Sorry,” she adds.
“Sylvannic Funganoid?” It was so hard for him to focus. His cock was so hard and all he wanted to do was fuck.
The first green woman, the one with the cock, leans over Pantor and grasps his enormous cock, which he sees is green: lighter green along the shaft but darker on the glans and veins. Pantor gasps and the woman runs her vine-like tongue along his length and then wraps her lips around his glans. He gasps at how sensitive he is, the soft wet warmth of her mouth. The green woman starts to bob her head and suck on his cock, her hands working at his shaft and his mossy-furry massive balls. He pants but strangely finds the oral sex focussing.
“The Sylvannic Funganoid,” Halley explains, “is some sort of plant-like alien parasite that infects humans and transforms them. In human females, the Funganoid causes Dryad Disease where we become green curvy nymphomaniacs. To spread the virus, since it’s sex-ual-ly transmitted. The infection slowly replaces all the human cells in our body with Funganoid cells, which turns us into plants and makes us part of The Grove, which is itself entirely made of funganoid units. Our minds are written into the Heartwood of the Grove, since this entire place is a kind of organic computer. We are all functionally immortal, but also forever bound to this place.”
“And human males?” Pantor pants.
Halley chews her lip and breaks eye contact, “It causes Satyr Syndrome. Males become green too, grow mossy fur and antlers, and grow just spectacular cocks.” She looks at his cock as it is being orally worshipped by the other green woman and licks her lips. “It also drives them mad, makes them into wild sexual beasts designed to fuck and spread the Funganoid. Unlike females, their minds aren’t uploaded into the grove and worse, after a few weeks of wild fucking the infected males burn out... and die.”
As Halley looks sadly at Pantor it dawns on him the predicament he is in. He has been infected by a deadly parasite and has been transformed into a green sexual monster that is about to die. He is also getting a blow job, which is very nice. Which... “If the Funganoid turns males into Satyrs and...” kills them... “the rest of it. Why is she a Dryad? She has a penis...”
The green woman sucking his cock pops her mouth free of his shaft, annoyance flashing on her face, “Fuck you! Just because I have a cock doesn’t mean I’m male.”
“Rylnx was on hormone modifying drugs when she got infected and we think the Satyr disease works because of testosterone levels.” Halley shrugs.
“Oh,” Pantor says, “sorry.” Rylnx straddles him, her back to him, and rubs his cock against her anus, getting his precum all over her butthole and his glans. She firmly but slowly inserts him into her rectum, his cock stretching the tight ring of her spinchter and pushing into the too hot depths of her bowls. She makes a kind of groaning, mewling sound as she bottoms out, taking his entire inhumanly large cock inside her body reverse cowgirl. “I forgive you,” she gasps stroking her own impressively hard cock.
“The crazy thing about your situation, well, crazier thing, is that your mind came back. You went into the Satyr frenzy and we green sisters have been fucking you continuously for weeks to keep you happy and distracted and away from unchanged humans. Most humans on Flotsam are immune to the Funganoid, but it’s best not to take chances and y’know not everyone appreciates being tackled by a ravenous sexy man beast....”
“Ohhhhh... I appreciate it....” Rylnx moans as she rolls her hips and paws her huge tits, still impaled on his cock. Pantor gasps, he can’t believe how good it feels to be buried in her ass.
“Anyway,” Halley continues, watching them fuck with a kind of trance like intensity, one hand idly touching her own slick vulva, “You were doing the whole Satyr thing, fucking and growling, eating and fucking, until after a pretty memorable orgy you fell asleep and didn’t wake up. For several days. Which, you’re my first Satyr, but I’ve been told this is usually how it goes... at the end. That you would sleep until your body weakened and failed and that would be that.” Halley shook her head sadly, “I’ve been keeping vigil over you, since well, I feel responsible for infecting you...” Halley twists her bead necklaces with one hand while her other is fingering her cunt.
“But.... ahhhh... then you woke up,” Rylnx gasps. She reaches behind herself, wordlessly directs Pantor up to his knees while keeping his cock in her ass. Pantor looks down, as he hunches behind her, sees his muscular green body, the thick mossy green fur on his legs. Instinctually he growls, clutches Rylnx’s breasts tightly, making her squirm. Pantor savors this unfamiliar feeling of power while she wriggles around his cock buried so far inside her. She pushes back against him with her hips, “Ffffffuck me,” she pleads.
“Yes... you woke up,” Halley says, panting and bent forward masturbating, one hand madly stroking her clit, the other with its fingers buried in her snatch. “This.... this has never...ahhhh... happened be-before. Mmmmm. Which is why My-mythrie went into the Heartwood to consult The Alder.” Halley tips her head back, eyes slitted and lips parted, and tenses. “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
At the same time Pantor is fucking Rylnx from behind who moans and humps back against him, her breasts swaying. She mewls in joyful discomfort with every thrust, buffeted by his strength and girth. His huge balls slap against her smaller ones. She reaches back, pulls his hands off her hips and drags one to her breasts and pushes the other against her hard cock. He starts to stroke it, making her groan, as he keeps fucking her, now entirely focused on the moment, on the heady floral smell of her body, the burning tight heat around his cock. Rylnx gasps, and he feels her cock tense and jump, pulse as it sprays come with a powerful potpourri reek. Something about the smell or the sight of the two green women coming drives Pantor mad and he howls, crushing Rylnx against his strong body and comes himself, feeling his balls constrict powerfully, his cock erupt into a torrent of semen, pumping into Rlynx’s ass. Rylnx moans happily at the sensation and collapses below him, letting them fall together into a tangle of bodies.
Pantor gasps for breath and feels a calm and euphoria that he’s never consciously experienced before. He pulls himself off of Rylnx, surprised at how long it takes his softening member to slide out of her. He kneels and she looks back up at him, peeking out of a tangle of green hair. “Was it good for you?” She asks hesitantly, somehow shy now. All Pantor can do is nod his head, smile between gasps. She smiles back, radiant in her bliss.
Motion catches Pantor’s eyes and he sees a green shoot wriggle free of the ground. It unfurls, budding leaves like a timelapse of a tree sprouting. Pantor shakes his head in disbelief, watches it grow into a sapling and then rapidly expand into a tree that is as wide as a person, but short, only a dozen feet tall. The front of the new tree splits open and out wiggles the third green woman, Mythrie, who sniffs the air and looks at his glistening, softening dick, the disheveled and happy state of Rylnx, and smiles coyly. She pulls Halley into a hug and gives her a hungry little kiss. The gash in the new tree widens and fills in with the head, neck, and armless torso of another green skinned woman, still embedded in the trunk. This dryad is even more plantlike than her sisters, her skin marked like bark, her huge breasts and cunt appearing almost like knots in the tree, leaking a richly scented sap. Pantor feels his cock stirring already, feels drawn to fuck this new tree woman. The dryad licks her lips, fucks Pantor back with her eyes. “So it’s true then. You’re conscious.”
“Yes,” Pantor says, somehow uncomfortable under the Alder’s wise gaze.
“What does it mean, Alder?” Halley asks, fingers nervously gripping her colourful necklaces.
“I think,” the Alder says, “That our Grove has finally born fruit. In the deepest rings of the Heartwood there is... an impression of Satyrs who live on. Of men with deep connections to far away places, who are infected with the Sylvannic Funganoid, but retain their faculties and live. Driven to return home and establish a new Funganoid Grove and become Forest Kings.”
“Does this mean he’ll live?” Halley asks, hope in her eyes.
The Alder smiles at her, “Nothing is certain, but I believe so.”
Halley squeals, breaks feee of Mythrie’s arms, tackles Pantor in a hug, mashing her breasts against his strong chest, buries her face in his neck. “Oh thank Jesus,” she says. Pantor breaths deeply of her scent, smells her botanical skin, the bouquet of her arousal. His heart beats faster and his cock is erect again.
“What does this mean for me?” he asks, trying to ignore his building sexual fires.
The Alder frowns, “it means you will live on in your current form for the rest of your expanded lifespan. You are infected with the Sylvannic Funganoid, and contagious. You will always feel a great urge for sex, a drive to spread the Funganoid to new hosts. I also suspect, if I am interpreting the root code correctly, that you have a sudden urge to return to your homeworld.” Pantor’s mind flashes on his vision of Elisxa fucking him, turning green. His hard cock oozes an enormous bead of floral smelling precum. He nods. “You cannot be allowed to leave this Grove. Sapients you encounter here will likely be immune, since the humans of Flotsam are patched against the Funganoid, and you may fuck them safely. If they allow it. But on a naive planet you could wreak untold havoc. We cannot allow this.”
“It’s not like leaving here is even an option,” Halley says glumly. “Those silver plinths on the border of the Grove were put there by the Grey to contain us. If you were to cross that barrier...” She makes a bursting gesture with her hands, “Poof! Incinerated.”
The Alder nods, “Yes. So this Grove is now your home. I’d suggest you get used to the idea and try to make the best of it.”
Rylnx pushes herself up, rubs his hard cock with the cleft of her butt crack. “We’ll do our best to make it fun for you.”
Pantor’s mind whirls with emotion. He has been transformed by an alien plant-parasite-thing into a muscular, hyper-endowed plant-animal creature. He has somehow survived a deadly disease, but is still infected. Infectious. And is now quarantined in this strange forest park with a tribe of green women who all seem very eager to fuck him. For the rest of his life, however long that may be. He can never return to Adminstradt, never climb the bureaucracy, never win Elisxa back. Never see his parents again. Part of him is filled with despair, recoiling at the unfairness. But, well, it wasn’t as if we was ever going to make it to the Administrata was it? Is a life spent fucking beautiful nymphomaniacs really worse than his probable future as a grey bureaucrat of rubbish transportation optimization? The warmth of Rlynx’s ass, which nudges and rubs his cock, is certainly lovely. A lifetime trapped here, amongst these beautiful sex maniacs does seem like a solid consolation. Doesn’t it?
And suddenly he is grabbed by his branch like antlers and kissing a soft pair of lips that taste of salt and tree sap. He is rolled off of Rylnx, guided to his back, and suddenly straddled by warm thighs and a wetness that leaves a hot moist streak on his hairy stomach. Large breasts with hard nipples and beaded necklaces touch his chest. Pantor moans, and the green woman, Halley, bites his lip. “My turn she purrs,” stilll gripping his antlers like handlebars and sliding his long, hard cock into her cunt. She hisses in pleasurable discomfort, and grinds herself against him. “What’s your name,” she gasps, rolling her hips and making her necklaces rattle.
“Quigly, Pantor Quigly.”
She giggles “Pan-tor. Pan. Tor. HaaAhhhhhh... that’s, that’s too perfect.”
Pantor grunts, “why?”
Halley moans and then kisses him hard on mouth. “I’ll tell you later, “ she gasps, “just fuck me, Pantor.”
Pantor grabs a handful of her soft ass and thrusts.
“Ohhh Pantor, yessss”
***
(Hopefully y’all are still enjoying this thing, it is turning into a lot. This interlude chapter came from a convo with FA user randomdryad, who (I’m pretty sure) is rlynx here (and who writes some *Intense* CTF stuff!). I have another similar interlude chapter planned next before we get back to Halley-24’s story. If there is a Flotsam thing you would like to see revisited in a future interlude chapter, no promises, but I’ll try to take requests under consideration when I do the next bunch.)
(@Torasque: thanks for the editorial help! These things are awful to revise and my system of Halley accounting sometimes gets away from me....)
(@Flicker: I’ve never played Control, but I have definitely seen the idea/concept/thought construction before in more than one place. Off the top of my head I can think of it being used really well in the Knauf/Acuna Eternals comic from (oh demons!) a decade ago when the Celestials would communicate. So that’s probably my most direct influence? I feel like Hickman’s done a similar thing in at least one of his various comics too.)
Re: Flotsam
Flotsam
Interlude 2: Shroud
She awoke in the darkness of her sleep shroud. She yawned and rubbed her naked face and the smooth expanse of her bald scalp, savoring the sensation of her uncovered skin. There was a special intimacy in these times of near total privacy, like a kind of gestation before being born into the day. But as much as she might have liked to snuggle in her womblike nest, it was her turn to perform the Morning Ritual and everyone else’s breakfast was waiting on her to complete the duty.
Groaning the sign for frustration, she sat up and carefully exchanged her gloves and pulled on her home mask, settling it by feel to align eye holes and the opening for her mouth. She reached up and rummaged through her hanging wardrobe bags, drew out underwear and a houserobe, and then dressed in total darkness. Properly obscured, at least enough for immediate family, she untied the drawstrings of the heavily quilted canopy of her shroud and pushed it open, mindful of the weight and rigidity of the wire brocaded into the outer surface. She winced against the bright morning light and swung her feet out of her shroud, slipping them into prepared slippers that were cold compared to the warmth of her nest. She grimaced, oh how she hated the Morning Ritual!
She performed a quick visual inspection of the sleeping chamber, quietly walking around the three other sleeping shrouds belonging to her mother, father, and sister. Not seeing anything amiss, she opened the wire brocaded curtain and door and slipped out into the surrounding household, a hall of open plan rooms surrounding the central sleeping chamber. She silently padded over to the ritual lockbox and began inspecting its various secret tattletales for signs of tampering, and finding none, she began the labour of opening the mechanical combination locks. From the open box she withdrew the Morning Ritual logbook and a small wire cage containing an electronic listening device and signal sweeper. She opened the cage and turned on the sweeper and bug, confirmed that the sweeper was working, and then began the Morning Ritual. Moving methodically, she walked the perimeter of the household and carefully inspected the heavily padded outer walls of their home, looking for snags or breaks or alterations in the beautifully woven patterns of bright copper wire stitched into the midnight blue quilted fabric. As she went she swept the wall with the sweeper, searching for electronic signals leaking through their wire cage or more insidious signs of active electronics planted within their home. After confirming no breaks in their outer signal barrier, she did a cursory sweep of the interior, checking for passive electronic bugs that might have been clandestinely planted. She found no signals and while she couldn’t rule out purely mechanical surveillance devices, she saw nothing amiss in their austere home. She returned the sweeper and test bug to their cage, made a coded note in the logbook in scrupulously indistinguishable handwriting, and played the daily all clear code on the ritual chimes. As her family crawled out of their shrouds and began their morning ablutions, she returned everything to the lockbox, relocked it, and began resetting the various tampering tattletales for the next Morning Ritual.
By the time she had finished resetting the Ritual her family was gathered around their meal table. She took her randomly assigned place and served herself some tea, surveying her family. She always enjoyed these moments of intimacy where she could see some of her family’s features through their homemasks: her mother’s smile wrinkles around her mouth and eyes, her fathers grim mouth and scarred chin, her sister’s playful red lip-paint which her father hated even if no one outside the house would ever see it. She wondered what they saw exposed on her face when they looked at her. They ate their breakfast of flatbreads with jam and fruit in companionable silence, their hands too occupied to sign. Meal finished, their mother cleared the table and their father, speaking in the secret family sign, admonished his daughters to not be lax and adhere to Protocol. She nodded, outwardly obedient, while her sister rolled her eyes and smirked with her painted lips.
After relieving herself and washing in the darkness of the toilet, she returned to the dark privacy of her sleep shroud to dress in her Public Disguise. She carefully removed her houserobe, stashing it back in its bag before she slipped off her homemask and gloves, returning them to their hooks. Next she pulled on her armlength public gloves, being careful not to touch their outer surface with her bare hands. Once gloved, she quickly wiggled into her tights and high necked undershirt before enshrouding herself in the billowing tent of her public robes. Finally she donned her public mask, pulling the tight apparently seamless fabric over her head and face. Opening the sleepshroud she stepped out and into a pair of plain but wonderfully constructed workboots her sister had made. She straightened her heavy robes, arranging the folds and pleats of the garment to disguise her figure and lifted its hood over her masked head. She walked to the vestibule exit of their home and was met by her sister, also wearing her Public Disguise. It was now their duty to inspect one another, to ensure that both were properly obscured and wearing their robes properly. Her sister’s masked face was a smooth blank surface in red cloth, a featureless oval that hid her eyes and the contours of her face. Her bright red robes draped loosely over her body, covering her from the hood on her head to her feet, the hem just brushing the ground. Her sister’s hands were clothed in tight red gloves that covered her arms until they disappeared into her robes at the elbows and a quick inspection showed any potential exposed skin was covered by her underclothes. She indicted her sister should lift her robe hem, and there on her sister’s feet were beautifully crafted stack heeled boots in black leather worked with silver filigree, a deliberate act of Individualism. She knew that such footwear could be used to identify and track her sister, but knew that her sister didn’t care about such things and that these shoes were a small act of rebellion and an advertisement for her cobbler business. Feeling complicit she gave her sister the code gesture for all clear, granting her formal permission to exit the safety of their home. Her sister returned the gesture, guaranteeing that she was also properly disguised. They were, as Protocol dictated, anonymous figures in red cloth.
She and her sister exited their home, a second floor apartment in a large rectangular building clad in steel and polymer, and walked down steel stairs and into the very narrow street where they joined a flow of other anonymous red robed figures also leaving during this assigned Scatter Period. They moved with the crowd and followed the narrow alley into the central square, a collection point for the entire enclave. Here all of the Robed would gather and disperse, allowing individuals to blend and mix in the crowd to make visual tracking far more difficult. At first she could track her sister, by her proximity and the loud click of her boot heels on the acrylic cobbled square, but after a few twists, turns, and diversions she lost in her in the crowd, just another red figure walking with an identical, practiced gait. She wouldn’t be able to recognize her sister again until they either returned home or gave each other a sign in their secret sibling handcode. She completed her ritual evasive maneuvers and picked a random exit from the square, mindfully choosing a new route to her destination.
This day she is to mind her sister’s shoe store while her sister visited a potential supplier for authentic animal leather, a luxury on Flotsam. Like many of the Robed, her sister became an artisan of analogue items, part of their Community’s movement away from digital technology with embedded surveillance. This devotion to handmade materials built to exacting, pre-mass production standards has given the Robed a reputation as master makers and for a time before the Purges their goods had been quite valuable on their homeworld. Fortunately, the demand for superb handcrafted footwear is interstellar, and her sister had been able to establish a profitable business as a cobbler following her apprenticeship. While her sister still makes expensive handmade boots and shoes for wealthy patrons, her designs had proven quite popular, so, with special permission from the Community, she also retailed cheaper printed footwear made from her designs. Which is really mostly what she herself does: watching the store, running the printers and refilling feedstock, and helping keep the retail business thriving however she can. She knows it isn’t her vocation, really, but she also knows it helps her sister and for now that is enough.
Although, she often wondered how much her sister took her help for granted. Like on this particular day, her sister was supposedly meeting with suppliers, trying to secure real bovine leather to make a hideously expensive pair of thigh high boots for the favored escort of a local ambassador. She suspected that her sister had already secured the leather, possibly through the ambassador himself, since he was an official from a planet rich with agribusiness, and that her sister was instead off having illicit fun. While she has never been able to prove it, she suspected her sister sheds her robes, dresses in a wig and regular clothing, and spends time undisguised in the mainstream Flotsam world. Doing what, she could never be sure. Does she just walk around anonymously without the stigma of her disguise? Or does she party with her Outsider designer friends? Does her sister, perhaps, have an Outsider lover? She would have shaken her head and made the sign for incredulity if such an act wasn’t a violation of Protocol on a public street.
Her sister would not be atypical if she was shirking Protocol. Her generation of Robed seemed less interested in adhering to the strict practices of those who had fled the homeworld. For her parents, her father in particular, whose parents had been executed and who had himself been tortured in the Purges, living by Protocol was a survival mechanism and the core of their identity. They had fought, suffered, and sometimes died to preserve their precious privacy and right to anonymity. But to many Diaspora children it seemed unnecessarily fussy, a relic of living in a malignant panopticon. Without the external pressure of the State’s mutated counterinsurgency and advertising surveillance apparatus looming over them, they wanted the freedom to express themselves or mix socially with Outsiders. Her sister, she knew, found the entire act of Protocol a boring hassle. For her own part she didn’t mind the tradition and rituals, even enjoyed the freedom of anonymity that being Robed granted her. But even she would concede that Protocol, built as it was to protect against a certain collection of AI augmented optical, audio, and digital tracking was likely futile in the face of advanced surveillance by the Grey and other technophilic sapients. She glanced up and saw a melon sized silver drone floating, which seemed to track her for a moment, returning her attention. She wondered just how much of her it could sense, her appearance or even thoughts. Her secrets.
Entering another narrow street, this one located in one of the other six Robed Encalves on Flotsam, she reached the shoe shop. She inspected the closed metal shutters, checking for signs of forced entry and the state of various tattletales her sister set when closing. Seeing nothing amiss she unlocked the mechanical combination locks, opened the shutter, and entered the small store. The store was considered public, but nevertheless she performed a brief Ritual of Inspection, looking for anything amiss or signs of surveillance. Finding everything in order she unloaded the freshly printed shoes and placed them in cartons for drone delivery, checked the levels of feedstock and started the next printing job, and then activated the shops neon signage opening the store. She then sat behind the small plastic sale counter and began to update their catalogue using the stripped down and airgapped workstation. Working with such limited technology was time consuming, but was a necessary compromise between the young entrepreneurial Robed and the more conservative members of the Community. Besides, she didn’t mind the work, finding the coding and formatting to be another calming daily ritual.
It wasn’t long before the shop door tinkled open as a customer entered. She quickly put her workstation into privacy mode and stood, patiently waiting. The customer, she saw, was one of her sister’s regulars: a beautiful woman with six arms and six enormous, gravity defying breasts. She didn’t know the customers name, by custom the Robed never asked, but she did know the woman was an erotic dancer who stripped off her clothing in front of a crowd of horny sentients. Dressed as she was in a multi-cleavage baring frontlaced halter top and tight miniskirt, she could almost picture the woman nude. She felt her face flush inside her mask and felt a titillating shame at picturing the customer naked and revealed. Even though she had seen this customer many times, she still had trouble understanding how someone could bare themselves to strangers, to make their most private identity public, even for money. It was the ultimate taboo, completely against Protocol. But it was also powerful in a way, to take ones nakedness and harness it, to reveal herself on her own terms in her own artistic way. It was also in a deeply secret way very sexy to her. She knew she could never do it, but in a way she envied the customer her freedom.
The customer was browsing the most expensive handmade shoes on display with a look akin to hunger. Her sister always said that some of their customers were shoe addicts and the dancer was, in her estimation, one of the worst cases. She herself had sold the woman dozens of shoes, usually some of the more fearless designs with heels that ranged from daring to dangerous. Indeed, the woman was wearing a pair of slingback stiletto’s with four inch heels while out shopping on the treacherous streets of Flotsam. The dancer would always browse the handmade shoes, the customs and the prototypes, before finally, with a look of defeat, settling on a pair of far more economical printed shoes. Quantity, her sister, herself an avid collector of footwear, would say, has a quality of its own. She watched the woman touch and lift and almost caress the shoes with her many hands and fingers.
Eventually the Ritual of Browsing ended and the customer made her way to the counter notably without picking out a prototype to print. She smiled a friendly smile, her entire face reconfiguring in happiness. “Like, Hi! I’m like, just, like, here to pick up some shoes today? Like, custom ones!”
She did not let her surprise show, custom shoes made by her sister were very expensive and precious. Instead she made the public sign for servile agreement and went to find the custom shoes in the back room. A quick survey of the workshop revealed a pair of tangerine coloured leather shoes with sturdy soles and chunky two inch wedge heels. Strikingly the shoes had a t-shaped strap that connected from the toe of each shoe to a horizontal band at ankle height, which would secure the shoe and create two open windows showing the wearer’s feet. She thought the shoes were rather practical for a cute design but also not at all her sister’s style. She placed the shoes in a box and presented them to the customer.
The customer opened the box and squealed, obviously delighted by the shoes. “Ohmygawd they are like, totally perfect! She is like, gonna love them!” The customer was holding the shoes in two pairs of hands inspecting them, the extra arms awkwardly in excess. “I’m so excited!”
She signed her happiness and the customer looked at her, head tilted. ‘You aren’t like, her, are you? The like, maker or whatever, I mean? You’re the other one.”
Protocol dictated that she should neither confirm nor deny, but she was curious about what had given her away. She was very strict at following the proscribed forms, as was her sister when in the shop. “How could you tell?” She signed publicly.
The customer giggled and clapped a pair of hands, “I knew it!” She bit her lip thoughtfully, “The maker gives off this, like, totally intense vibe when I look at her shoes and like, totally preens when I like her shoes. You’re, like, quieter? More patient or whatever.” The many breasted woman winked, “I’m way more, like, observant than people give me, like, credit for.” She giggled again and went back to scrutinizing her shoes.
“These shoes my sister made,” she signed, “I have never seen any like them before.”
The customer smiled, “On Earth we call them character shoes. They are like, for dancers and actresses to like, wear on stage.” She balanced each shoe in a hand and fanned her other hands around them as staging. “I bought them for my like, girlfriend? She grew up on like, spaceships and would go totally barefoot everywhere. And like, she is an acrobat? So she still likes bare feet or like, functional shoes or whatever.” The customer sighed, “When we like, go out, she always wears these totally vile rubber soled shoes with individual toes. Like totally ick!” She shook her head and giggled, “But whatcanyado? I love her, right? So I thought I would like, buy her some totally cute shoes and thought she would be able to walk in these and like, dig the whole shoes for Earthling performers thing...”
“It is a very thoughtful gift,” she signed.
The customer beamed, “Yeah! And they turned out so great! Tell the maker, like, your sister, that I totally love them!” She giggled, “my only complaint is I totally want a pair too!”
The customer brandished a very gaudy keyband and paid the store’s reader, transferring the funds to the anonymized banking system the Robed used, a liability compared to material currency, but a necessary tradeoff on Flotsam. The woman spared one last covetous look at the inventory and skipped out of the store, no doubt off to deliver her present to her lover. She watched her go, charmed and a little jealous of the customer’s freedom.
With the customer gone she finished updating the stock and then, after double checking there were no customers waiting, she carefully locked the store door and posted the sign explaining she was working in the back and could be summoned. This sign was meant for her sister when cobbling, but it also served her current purposes. She made her way into the workshop, securing that door as well, before carefully examining the door to her private room. Finding everything as she left it, she unlocked the door with a combination she alone knew and entered her secret place. The room wasn’t large, likely a closet or storeroom before her sister gave it to her in return for help running the store. The walls were hung with ugly industrial moving blankets and lined with inexpensive metal fencing to make a signal barrier. She activated the single bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling and closed the door to her room, barring and locking it behind her before draping it with a wire lined blanket. As always her heart was beating in her chest. She closed her eyes and counted to ten, reminded herself that only her sister knew she had this room and that even she didn’t know what was done in it. She knew that trusting her sister was dangerous, but also understood her sister valued privacy and freedom and was delighted that she needed a secret place to do something naughty. She opened her eyes and got to work; she could only be in her room for a short time and had much she wanted to accomplish.
She went to the single object inside her room: a locked metal chest. She performed her own Ritual of Inspection and then unlocked the combination locks on the chest. Disciplining her anxious hands she reached into the chest and drew out her two ring lights, the folding metal frame of her easel, a tiny blank canvas, her paints, and her most secret object. She set her paints and palette on the closed chest, assembled her easel, and set her two lights up in their optimal positions. She put the canvas in position and mixed her paints from memory, not perfectly, but approximately what she thought she would need. Then she double checked the door was locked. The act of painting, creating a visual record of the world around herself, surveilling, was bad enough, but what she was about to do was far more shameful.
Confident that the door was secure, she took off her boots and set them aside. Then, in a practiced motion, she wiggled out of her leggings, baring her pale legs. She looked down at her naked feet, giddy, aware that such a sight was a violation of Protocol. Then, heart racing, she drew her robes up and back, tied them behind her back like she was taught for emergencies, baring her naked body from the waist down. Then she did her secret, forbidden ritual: she slipped her verboten mirror out of its black bag and placed it on the floor and stepped over it, straddled it, so that it reflected her perfectly lit vulva. She shivered at the secret illicit thrill and just looked at herself for a time, inspecting, no surveilling, the pink blossom of her cunt, now growing moist and engorged with her excitement. Inside her mask she wet her lips. She took up her paints and on the lower right corner of her tiny canvas she wrote the numeral for 96, denoting this paintings place in her series of vaginal self portraits. And then she began to paint herself.
She worked quickly, almost mechanically, laying in the foundations of her painting, the familiar shape of her vulva, the nearly perfected base colours. As she did this part of the artwork, she mused about why she found painting her sex so artistically fulfilling. Was it just the thrill of breaking rules? To observe herself and to make a record of it, a way, perhaps, for some state agent to follow the mole on her innermost thigh or the relative prominence of her clitoris back to her? Why not paint her face? That too would break a great many rules, and be far more dangerous. She thought maybe the sexual nature of painting her vagina was part of the frisson, the thrill of her art But that thought was too tawdry and simple to be the whole truth. Faces were public. She had seen many faces, could identify some acquaintances and even strangers by their features. Her face, then, would be just another face among many, comparable to this customer in the nose, but more like a favored barista in the lips, or a passing stranger in the chin. It would be intellectually interesting, but it wouldn’t be uniquely hers. Her vagina though, that was truly private. Her own vagina was never meant to be seen by herself; touched certainly, but only in the darkness and total privacy of the sleep shroud. If she took a Robed lover, they would never see her vagina either, as their lovemaking would happen within a darkened shroud; a public conjugal nest if it was casual or courting, or within one of their home sleep shrouds if they were wed. Even Outsiders considered their genitals private as all but the bravest or most perverse hid their genitals in public. These paintings of her vagina, her endless series of self portraits, were her revealing her most private aspects to herself, a rebellious artistic exploration of self identity. And then she reached the finer details of her painting, the parts she still hadn’t gotten quite right, and so she lived in the moment of brushstrokes and mixing pigments.
When she stopped, her work was still unfinished, but it needed to dry and she knew she had already tarried too long. The shop was waiting, and who could say when her sister would return or another Robed might venture by? She carefully put away her materials, set the work in progress carefully atop the stack of finished paintings to dry. She checked her small room, reset and relocked everything, and prepared to return to work and Protocol. As she composed herself she granted herself one last giddy rebellious thought: what would it be like to one day show her paintings to the world?
She swept the workshop quickly for bugs or anything amiss and then unlocked the door to the front, stepped through, and audibly gasped. Floating in the shop was a silver sphere the size of her mask. A Grey drone! Here in her sister’s shop! “Wh-what do you want?” She asks with shaking hands.
A familiar woman appears, a ghostly projection of the dancer customer but with only two arms and breasts. “Don’t be alarmed,” she says, smiling the same friendly smile as the customer, “I’m just here to deliver an invitation.”
“What are you? Why do you look like...” she doesn’t know how to explain the customer without a name.
The holographic drone woman looks impish, “Like your last customer? Well, we’re sisters sort of. I’m her clone, or well, she’s my clone, except not really? We’re both clones of the same woman, except I’m really the artificial intelligence emulation of a dead clone and... y’know what? It’s not really important.” The projection laughs ruefully, “Let’s start over.” The hologram winks out and reappears a few steps away. “Hi, I’m HAL-E, and I’m here representing a fellow artist who wishes to introduce you to their gallery.”
“Introduce? Why me?”
“The Artist and his Curator are both fans of your paintings. Sorry, I know your art is meant to be private, but we Grey AI see a lot of everything and well... If it were up to me I would have left you to your secret enterprise, but I’m just an interlocutor here and I don’t really have a choice.” HAL-E shrugs, “For what it’s worth, I think your artwork is very brave and quite good. I can see why The Artist and Curator are interested in you. Anyway! You are hereby invited to come to the Grey Citadel and view the Gallery.”
She was shocked, “The Citadel? The Artist is a Grey?”
“Yes.”
Her hands spasmed in the sign of amazement. A Grey artist was a fan of her work!? She was awash in a confusion of emotion. She was upset that she had been spied on despite all her precautions and frightened that she had been caught so easily. But she was also elated that her artwork has been appreciated, and maybe thrilled at the transgression of being caught. And she was curious too, just who is this Grey Artist and why would such an enigmatic alien seek her out for her vaginal self portraits? She clenched and opened her hands, a sign language stutter, unsure of what exactly to say. Should she send the spy drone away, forbid it from bothering her again? Could she go to the Citadel and meet this artist? Was it safe? Could she go back to this life afterward? In the end though, she knew this might be her only chance to share her art with another sapient. “I will go,” she signed, “but I will need a moment.”
She hastily closed the shop, locking all the doors and shutters but not bothering with tattletales or signs. Then she picked out one of the largest cartons in the shop, dumped out an order of printed shoes, and brought it into her secret room. Carefully she placed all of her paintings including the 96th incomplete one into the carton. She carefully relocked her locker and the small room and returned to the holographic woman. “I am ready,” she signed.
HAL-E nodded. “Okay, now stand still. This next bit might tickle.”
The silver sphere expanded from the size of a human head to a bubble slightly larger than her body. It drifted forward and enveloped her, intangibly flowed around or maybe through her, until she was standing in the now hollow and very solid bubble. She felt the bubble, and herself, lift off the ground and move upward, like an elevator, and a tingly charge passed through her body before suddenly the drone was moving very quickly. The walls of the bubble became translucent and she could see she was flying over the city, ascending towards the summit of the Mesa. Had she just passed through the shop roof? She shivered. Startlingly quickly the drone had lifted her to the same height as the Grey Citadel, that huge perfect silver sphere, like a silver bead on a table. She hung in the air for a moment, wondered if this was a wise choice, and then the Grey drone surged forward, flinging her at a worrying speed at the mirrored silver surface of the Citadel. She could see her reflection just before impact, a red robed and masked figure clutching a large carton to herself. And then the drone flowed seamlessly into the citadel wall, depositing her gently in a smooth round tunnel. She gasped for breath and steadied herself, took a step forward...
***
...And then comes back to herself in a different place. She feels strange, disembodied, convinced time has elapsed although she has no real memories of it. How has she gotten here? She thinks hard, head fuzzy, sensing the ghost of something perhaps. Impressions? The faded marks of data saved improperly or perhaps just redacted imperfectly. A mental palimpsest. She knows she must have travelled somehow to reach this place, wherever it is. Strangely this notion doesn’t really trouble her, although she feels that it might or should.
She takes a step forward and something feels... off... Her clothing is lighter, less cumbersome and restrictive in a way that feels important somehow. Her robes! Heart hammering she glances down at her hands and is relieved to find them gloved, albeit in a tight seamless silver fabric, like the skin of a Grey drone. She inspected herself and sees she is robed in this silvery material, great cascading waves of it, very light and slightly fluid, like she is a stone edifice in a mercury waterfall. She reaches up to touch her head and face, finds the familiar contours of a smooth mask, silver she suspects like the rest of her outfit. A part of her is offended that her clothing has been replaced without her consent or memory, but she rationalizes that the Grey could clearly see through her disguise anyway and acknowledges that her new garments are at least a gesture of respect to her cultural practices. She adjusts her new robes and takes another step forward.
She is standing at the threshold of a cavernous space, like the great courthouses of the homeworld or the cargo bay of a Diaspora freighter. The room is shrouded in shadow except for beams of light that fall atmospherically from the vaulted ceiling and the floor has a strange curvaceous shape that slowly undulates as she watches. There is a perfectly smooth path amongst the waves and she somehow knows it is where she is meant to walk. With a rustle or robes and the click of boots, she walks into this alien space.
<Welcome to our Gallery.>
She stops, startled, and looks for the source of the voice. She cannot see anyone, only shadow, and now that she thinks about it she isn’t sure what she perceived had actually been sound. Unsure of where to look she signs in the direction of the smooth path. Her hands dance, “Who’s there? What’s going on?”
<I am the Curator, and yes, I am communicating with you telepathically. Do not worry, We mean you no harm. We are aware of your artwork, and are very much enamoured with your vision. We feel that We may be, in a way, kindred spirits or perhaps fellow travellers. And so We invited you here, to share our Art with you, as your Art has been so inspirationally shared with us.> She feels a sense of soothing welcome and joy wash over her. <Do not fret for your paintings, they have been entrusted to us and will be returned to you after you view our Gallery. Please, step this way to our first Artwork.> She feels a mental tug, a newfound sense of where to go, and the smooth path grows an offshoot into a darkened alcove. She follows it because she knows she should.
She finds herself overlooking a shadowed chamber. As she watches light drifts down slowly from the cieling, like a curtain being withdrawn to reveal a pair of strange figures floating in a large pool of milk. She is suddenly bombarded by memories of twin princesses from a far off technomonarchy. She feels their anguish at being betrothed to sworn enemies and unsuitable suitors, their deep fear of being separated from one another. She experiences their desperate flight to Flotsam and the dashing of their attempts to find humble freedom. With perfect clarity she understands the bargain they made with the Artist: they would sacrifice their humanity and become artwork if only to remain together forever. Inside her mask she smiles while blinking away tears. The two sisters, now enormous breasts with human areola faces and trickling milk hair, are beautiful. They smile back at her and say something in a secret language only they understand. “It’s wonderful,” she signs after a time of thoughtful silence.
<Thank you. Please proceed to the second artwork.>
Again she feels compelled to walk to another part of the gallery, and letting her body carry her, soon arrives at another shadowed chamber with a hidden dais at its centre. Light oozes into the room, illuminating a sleep shroud sized mass of wrinkled flesh. She frowns, uncertain at what she is looking at, until she recognizes it as something she has only seen in a textbook: an enormous scrotum. Memories wash over her, this time of two agents, trained from birth and then Shaped and reShaped into new identities and sent forth to complete dangerous covert missions. She feels one identity flash into another and another, a chain of people impersonated and a lifetime of violence. She feels the disconnection, the fraying of identity, the cost of such a vocation. And then she learns of how the agents were pitted against one another, sent on opposing sides of the same mission that brought them here to Flotsam. She feels their rage at the betrayal of their psychic handler, Control, the one sapient who could surveil them through their disguise and observe their hidden selves. She empathizes with them as they choose revenge, killing Control, and irrevocably destroying their lives. She understands too the bargain they struck with the Artist for safety and the freedom to explore their newfound love and connection. Bright backlights surge and she sees the silhouettes of two people locked in coitus within the giant scrotum, two beings enclosed in a world of their making. Under her mask she smiles. “Remarkable,” she signs.
<Now please proceed to the final artwork. Myself.>
Suddenly she knows to walk to the raised platform at the heart of this great hall. Despite the surrounding lights this dais was shrouded in shadow, like a thick fog made of something intangible. As she stops at the appointed spot, the shadows dissolve, fading rather than dispersing, revealing a shining silver figure with long feminine legs and hips but a gigantic penis and scrotum for an upper body body. This creature, the Curator, starts to gracefully walk, strutting and turning her body, letting the light flash from her mirror bright skin. She studies the Currator from her elegantly arched feet, along the long sweep of her legs, to the orbit of her hips and the toned breadth of her ass. From the waist down she is a very beautiful woman. Above the hips her body blends smoothly into an enormous cock and balls, with huge testicles that hang in her lap and a long, rigid torso sized shaft culminating in a glans larger than a human head. She is a living cock fashioned from a woman. It is an incongruous sight, but still elegant if obscene. “You are beautiful,” she signs feeling herself flush under her mask. <Thank you.> unfolds in her mind mingled with the sense of a giddy blush.
And then the memories come, the story of this Curator. She experiences life as an orphan on the nearly mythical world of Earth. She marvels at the defunct technology and senseless strife of the planet, the myopic view of a world that thinks it’s alone in the universe. She lives through the trials of the Curators life: the orphanage, her failures at college, the exile to the impoverished trailer park, and then suddenly, her abduction to this alien planet of Flotsam. She learns of the Curator waking to find her lover hugely altered and worse, that she herself is just a copy, a clone of the original Earthling orphan girl. She feels the anger, sadness, and confusion of this new entity with her years of subjective experience. She also feels her resolve to find the original copy, and through this, to justify her existence. She experiences the Curator’s hunt, the search throughout Flotsam looking for clues, and eventually the moment that changes everything: her invitation into the Grey Citadel to meet the Artist. She feels a kind of mirror recognition in this moment, or maybe a portent, as the memories of the Curator meeting the Artist unfold. She learns of the beginning, the difficult journey toward communication, and through it, the development of an aesthetic, an artistic vision with humanitarian goals. And then she experiences the instant of absolute truth when the Curator is remade into her phallic form, the raw power of her body, the orgasmic explosion of her first enormous male orgasm. She finds herself trembling, her pussy wet underneath her strange silver robes, the sensations of ejaculation echoing through her psyche. “Astonishing!” she manages to sign with palsied fingers.
This whole place, the Curator especially, resonates with her, with her drive for uniqueness and with a certain kink for self expression. She finds that she understands it, is moved by it. That she wants to, perhaps needs to, partake of it. She shivers in a kind of anticipation. “I must meet the Artist,” she demands with certain hands.
<Of course.> The thought hits her and she suddenly notices the Artist has been present this entire time, seated or perhaps welded into an ellipsoid throne. She sees he is a Grey, but one that is marked by some sort of unfathomable trauma, one eye cloudy and blind, body broken open by deep scars that glow with an unnatural aura. She can almost sense the alien’s constant pain like a miasma. Despite this strangeness she knows what she must do. She draws a deep breath and looks into the Artists one good eye and encounters....
Infinity.
Waves of intellect crash over her, buffet her, threaten to drown her in a fathomless chasm. In the physical world her silver robes flap wildly in an unseen wind. And yet, she persists. She clings, pushes helplessly against the relentless pressure. Bends forward bodily as if bracing herself against a gale. She does not break eye contact.
The force grows, and she feels herself become hot, feverish. Her robes smoke, and begin to dribble, melting off her body. Skin is exposed that has never been bare. And still she stares into that depthless inky black eye.
Mentally she feels herself probed, invaded, read. Stripped bare. Surveilled. The antithesis of the entire Protocol. And still she stares into that infinite chasm.
Naked now, soul revealed, she persists.
She reaches deep within herself and pushes her artwork to the forefront of her mind. Her paintings of herself, her vulva. The not quite right colors, the imperfect brushstrokes, her quest to reveal something hidden about herself. She feels herself slipping, crushed, screaming. Desperately she clutches onto the truth, the reflection of her vagina, her vulva and clitoris, the picture she keeps trying to and can’t quite capture.
And then she feels it.
Infinity understands.
The Artist blinks.
She stands panting, sweating, and naked. She feels something trickle from her nose and wipes it, looks down and sees unfamiliar pale skinned hands smeared with blood. She is smiling, a nakedly visible smile. A public triumph.
<Yes.> The Curator tells her. <We will collaborate.>
She laughs out loud for the first time in her life and feels elation.
Instructions flow into her mind and she follows them with a giddy thrill. She feels as if she should run, rush, dance to her destination, but also feels the gravity of the moment, the dignity. And so she walks, mindful of the feel of her naked body, it’s weight and tenor, savoring these final moments. Thanking her body for it’s quiet service. And then she is standing in a newly grown alcove, a space just for her, for her display. She feels giddy at that thought: herself revealed for display. It is madness! Verboten!
She stands in the center and takes a moment to mentally settle herself, draws a deep breath, savors this instant of liminality. She spares a thought for her sister and her parents, her Community, and the life she will never go back to. She mourns it, momentarily, but knows that this is what she was always meant for. She steels herself and signs that she is ready.
Light descends from above, liquid and organic, making her bare skin tingle as it flows over her, enfolding her body like her discarded robes, like a womb.
She once again feels the probing chasm of the Artists mind, the sheer gravity of it pressing down on her. Except this time there is quicksilver too, a lens guiding and shielding. The Curator lending an interface. She knows suddenly that she is an active participant in this process, and so she gathers her idealized self-portrait again, the familiar shape of her vagina and projects it with every iota of her being, desperately hoping her intention is received. She sense something akin to recognition and then she is undone...
***
...until she is remade anew.
She stands, if that is the word for what she does, uncertainly. Her body feels... different. Heavier, maybe. She moves her head and feels unfamiliar parts of herself shift in response. She doesn’t breathe, but feels a strong pulse somewhere within herself. <What have I become?>
<Allow me to show you> responds the Curator with a burst of pride. She senses, for she does not think it is sight, the silver phallus of the Curator standing elegantly at the threshold of her alcove gallery. The silver skin of the Curator sprouts a blister, which blebs off, becoming a fist sized bubble of quicksilver which drifts to her, expanding into a floating mirror. The mirror flies past her, too quick but for a glimpse of a red-pink reflection, and multiplies, becoming many mirrors that fan out and orbit her. She regards them with her senses and is revealed to herself in her perfect glory.
She has changed, becoming a perfect expression of her secret self. Her body, glimpsed from a distance, is a robed red figure with a smooth masked face, a caricature of her former self. But she does not wear clothes, for she is beautifully, blessedly naked. Instead her apparent red robes are made entirely of voluminous labia, her entire body comprised of lobes of cuntflesh which hang off her every surface and spill to the floor mimicking the garments she once wore. She does not have legs, instead her lower body forms something like a skirted snails foot, a slick lubricated pedestal on which she can glide. Her hands have become blunt and mitten-like, growths of animate vulva at the end of boneless arms that emerge from within her vulvic mantle. Her back is a smooth expanse, an unbroken muscular structure from which her ruffled, complex front can hang. She is split open along her torso from what would have been her crotch to what was once her throat forming a slit, an opening to a cavity that, despite her apparently slender body, she knows is large enough to encompass the Curators mighty phallic length, which she knows she will do, and soon. Her face is gone, replaced by a mask-like smooth expanse of a clitoris the size of her former head, erectly peaking out from a labial hood. She has become her self-portrait, her idealized vaginal painting merged with her life as a red robed woman. <I’m perfect!> she projects laden with joy.
She turns a deliberate, slow moving circuit of her alcove, regarding the orbiting mirrors, and above them, in a counter rotation, her ninety-six vaginal self-portrait paintings, permanent elements of her gallery, and feels pleased and giddy. She is on display, truly and completely naked. And she has a first viewer here to see her. To admire her. Slowly she turns to face the Curator, drawing herself up and adjusting the folds of her vulva like a garment. <How do I look?>
<Beautiful!> sends the Curator, her long cock body rigid, the visible blood vessels on her shaft dilated and pulsing, a dollop of precum beading at her urethral slit.
She feels herself blush at this naked display of arousal, a strange sensation that inflames her clitoris face and body, making it grow shiny and slick with secretions. She gathers her knowledge of her inner cavity, the reality warping vagina within her, and projects it to the Curator. <Come to me. Show me how beautiful I am.>
<Oh Jesus...> moans the Curator, stepping forward on unsteady legs.
She feels herself engorge, growing larger, feels herself open, revealing her final truth. <Perfection...> She thinks.
And then they are together and the time for thought ends.
***
(The next chapter we return to our main storyline and Halley-24! See you then.)
Re: Flotsam
Flotsam
Chapter 17: Aftermouth
I am lying in an alien’s bed staring at the ceiling. I sigh and feel the still unfamiliar contours of my face move and a puff of air on my ears. I feel a burble of panic, but resist the urge to take a therapist approved deep breath, knowing that the sensation won’t be calming.
My face is a pussy.
That terrible entity, The Sleeping God, reached out across unfathomable distances and changed me. He took my mouth, my nose, my voice and replaced it all with the vertical slit of a pussy. I blink back tears and turn my head to stare at the wall instead. Hardly an improvement.
When I regained consciousness after my awful communion, I found myself in Bluebell’s infirmary surrounded by concerned faces. Bluebell’s huge black eyes regarded me with professionally distanced worry while the Blue cowgirl did doctor things. HAL-E flickered around the room in a holographic pacing, anxiety projected on her face. Halley-11 The Destroyer leaned against a wall, her albataser prosthetic arms crossed and looking angry. And worst of all, Clementine sat on a stool next to my bed, her beautiful features knotted in a look of defeat. I tried to say something and all that came out was a kind of grunt. My face felt funny and I reached up to touch it, encountering something delicate and fleshy and so, so sensitive. My eyes went wide and I made a strangled grunt. “She’s awake,” The Destroyer said calmly from the wall. Clem and Bluebell loomed over me.
Bluebell mooed soothingly, “You are safe and in no medical danger. But there has been an incident and your body has been changed. Would you like to see?”
I nodded and tried to say give it to me straight doc. “Grunt grunt grunt.”
Bluebell gestured and conjured up a holographic mirror and I saw my new face for the first time. Bisecting my face from between my violet eyes to my chin was the slit of a vagina complete with all the works. The bridge of my nose seemed to blossom into the prepuce folds of a clitoral hood and where the tip of my nose was the prominent glans of a large clit. My cheeks flowed and pinched to form the ridges of labia majoris which rested in my cheekbones like hips and ran to the fleshy part of my chin. Within the valley of my facial mound were pink, fleshy labia minora that splay out obscenely like vertical swollen lips. Carefully I touched these lips, gently parted them, and made a kind of moaning sound at the incredibly pleasurable sensation. I could see that within the pink vestibule was the dark, wavy outline of a vaginal opening where my mouth once was. I was stunned, it was stunning, I didn’t know how to react. I felt like screaming, but knew I couldn’t, that I lacked the necessary mouth parts to form the noise. But I also couldn’t help feel the pleasure of this strange organ on my face. Even my cursory inspection made my new lips tingle and grow warm as they engorged with blood and grew shiny with secretions. I watched in the mirror in a kind of horny horror as my facial cunt blossomed obscenely. Tears stung my eyes, I was a freak.
“This is not the whole extent of it,” Bluebell said, dragging me back to attention. The holographic display zoomed out, becoming a 3D image of me standing like the Vitruvian Woman. I can see the model has my new cunt face but that she also has very different proportions. I had always been described as a slight woman, thin with smallish breasts and narrow boyish hips, but the animated figure had large, gravity defying breasts, a narrow waspish waist, and hips that were almost wider than her shoulders. The model was like an hourglass. I sat up a little in my bed, letting the spacey blanket slide off my chest, revealing that the flesh and blood me was also sporting huge honkers. I guess I was busty now. I also noticed that the genitals between the holographic me’s legs were different. Instead of the trim little vulva of my vagina, the model was sporting a huge cunt with prominent, plump vaginal lips and a clit that looked more like a cock glans than a love button. I thrust my hand under my blanket to confirm that I was the proud owner of a bigger cunt and gasped at the spike of pleasure from even the slightest touch. I was bigger and so much more sensitive. The holographic model started to rotate and I saw that I now had a much plumper bubble butt to match my widened hips instead of my previously flat derrière. Bluebell mooed for attention, “There has also been a change to your anus. It is still anatomically a spinchter, but it has also developed a clitoris with a glans at the apex and internal clitoral aspects that ring the opening.” I resisted poking that opening and shivered, the Sleeping God certainly had a weird fucking divine plan for me.
I had flopped onto my back on the examination bed and stared mutely at the ceiling. It was too much! My face was gone! I was a curvaceous sexpot with a hideously and improbably deformed face. I was a fucking freak! And I was horny, so horny. I could feel my three buzzing clits, pulsing and eager. It made me think of The Sleeping God, of my unholy dream of fucking my face with food, of the waves of pleasure that swept over me as distantly my body was changed. I might not be a cultist, but I could still feel the entity’s presence in my life, like a small seed lodged in my soul, stirring my desires. I shivered and tears stung my eyes. How was I going to live like this? How would I communicate or eat or face other sapients? Could anything be done to fix me...
I opened my eyes and looked at Clementine, hope surging inside me. My boyfriend, ex-girlfriend, whatever, was the most powerful Shaper on the planet! A supernatural prodigy! Surely she could fix my face, remold me back to how I was supposed to be. She looked back at me sadly, her eyes haggard and her pointy ears droopy. She shook her head, “Halley, I’m so sorry, but there’s nothing I can do.” She frowns prettily, “Whatever was done to you wasn’t Shaping, or at least not as I know it. I can sense your altered flesh, but when I try to manipulate it my will just... slides off. Like it’s greasy or...” corrupted I finish for her in my head. “I think you’re stuck with your... changes.”
The news hits me like a punch all over again and I make a kind of hooting sorrow noise with my facial cunt. This is my life now.
Clem gently takes my hand, her elegant fingers squeezing mine. “I did what I could for you though. I can’t seem to reverse any changes, but there is nothing stopping me from adding more.” She smiles a grim little smile, “I didn’t want to get too creative without your permission, so I focused on some quality of life adjustments.” She gives my hand another squeeze, “The biggest thing I did was give you a kind of gizzard. The lowest part of your esophagus has teeth now, so you should be able to chew any food that you can insert through your... orifice.” She smiles apologetically and blushes. “I rerouted your airway a bit so you have nostrils behind your ears so you can breath if your... mouth is full. I also sprinkled in some tastebuds and scent receptors in places that won’t be overwhelmed by your mouth stuff.” Clem licks her lips, “I couldn’t find an easy way to give you back your voice, but I’ll think about it. When you’re feeling up for it, please come and visit me. Any Shaping you want, I’m at your disposal.” I nodded at Clem, grateful for the gesture.
HAL-E cleared her throat quietly, “I hate to interrupt, but, in the interest of full disclosure, I alerted my ‘bosses’ about the Sleeping God. An entity that can Shape people from off planet is definitely the kind of weird shit the Grey need to know about.” The hologram smiled fiercely and hissed “And those cultists are also completely on my personal shit list.” The infrastructure was angry. Good.
“That is well” Bluebell said sagely, “but now this one must ask you all to depart. Halley requires rest and privacy to absorb her situation. This one will mind her and nurse her in her recovery.” The alien doctor mooed firmly and stamped a hoof. The Destroyer nodded at me and silently departed and HAL-E flashed a feel better graphic before winking out. Clementine gave my hand another squeeze, kissed my forehead, and reluctantly trotted away with her tail sagging behind her. Then Bluebell tucked me into my blanket, effortlessly lifted me to her large milky bosom, and hefted me up to her second storey bedroom where she deposited me in her large Holstein patterned bed where I have been lying ever since.
I roll over onto my stomach, conscious of the pillowy masses of my enlarged breasts, and press my cunty face into a pillow.
What the fuck am I going to do now?
***
Re: Flotsam
I’ve never been that much of a fan of forced transformations and most of those still didn’t feel this... alien, for lack of a better term. Probably because the emphasis is on the wrongness rather than the sexiness.
I don’t entirely begrudge the Sleeping God for wanting to be free but I wonder if there’s a reason it’s... not. No like seriously I really feel bad for Halley-24 now. Ouch.
Re: Flotsam
Chapter 18: https://indigocarminefiction.blogspot.c … er-18.html
Flotsam
Chapter 18: The Sadness Montage
I am sitting in an alien’s bed propped against alien pillows and an alien headboard. I’m studying the Holstein print bedspread, trying to imagine shapes in the black blotches, like a game of Rorschach cloud watching. Other than a cluster of cowprints that look like a jack-o-lantern face and another splotch that maybe resembles a dick, the activity is a total bust. Maybe I should try counting the 49 black spots on the blanket again? Ugh, I’m so bored! At least on Earth I could put on M*A*S*H reruns while I hid from the world.
But I am so not ready to face other people.
I hear hooves on metal and see Bluebell barging into the bedroom like she owns the place. Which, yeah, I guess she does. I look away from her, which I know is shitty and rude, but I don’t want her staring at the pussy on my face. “Your arm please,” she says using her doctor voice. I raise my left arm straight up, hand hanging limply, while still pointedly looking away. She unhooks the limp band thing around my bicep and removes it, mooing critically before attaching a chubby blood-pressure cuff sized replacement. Breakfast is served. “You cannot subsist on nutrient infusions indefinitely,” Bluebell says, not for the first time. “And indeed, that is this one’s medical opinion.”
I lower my arm and the big blue alien sighs. “You really must get out of bed. I know you are sad, but remaining here indefinitely is not healthy for you. Isolation is not healthy for you. It is perhaps easy for this one to aver, but you must confront your trauma and learn to endure it.”
I turn and look at her, giving her my best eyes-only glare, before quickly hiding my face again. Fuck you, doc.
Bluebell moos and shakes her head. “You cannot remain in bed forever.”
Just fucking watch me, I think at her back as she trots out of the bedroom. I am amazing at hiding from problems. The best!
I just wish it wasn’t so fucking boring.
One black spot, two black spots, three black spots...
***
I can hear the sounds of Flotsam through the loft window that Bluebell opened to torture me.
Bluebell’s A-frame clinic-slash-home might be hidden in a secluded courtyard, but it still manages to pick up an annoying amount of city noise. I can hear the hum of drone traffic zipping through the air carrying deliveries and the occasional sonic boom of spacecraft returning from orbit. I can hear the chirping of local cricket analogues and the weird hissing trills of the feral flying lizard population, which seem to roost on a neighboring building. There are sounds of people laughing and cooking and loving and being alive spilling from open windows and the rusty balconies of nearby apartments. I can hear sapients chatter and laugh at a cafe patio perched just up slope. I can hear people in our courtyard, young humans joking and flirting, maybe on a date. From the repurposed spacraft next door I can hear a woman moan and performatively squeal as she fucks someone. My eyes water with tears. It isn’t fucking fair!
I’m sure Bluebell meant for these noises to be comforting, probably thought it was a way to connect me to the outside world, but instead it’s just reminding me of all the things I’ll never do again. I’ll never be able to visit a cafe again without putting on a vulgar display. I can’t even eat without it being a sex act! I’ll never share a shy smile on a first date with a cute boy or girl. I can’t laugh or sing or embarrass my neighbors by screaming during sex. I can’t stick my head out the window and wave to a friend without letting them see my cunt. I’ll never be able to give someone a friendly chaste kiss or makeout with a stranger without it being oral sex. I’ll never be able to lick salt off my lips again, touch the tip of my nose with my tongue, make it a little taco. I can’t pick my nose or do a line of coke. I can’t even smile, not really. My face is just gone, and with it my whole public fucking life.
It’s almost enough to make me want to get out of bed and close the window.
Instead I bury my head underneath my borrowed pillows and cry.
***
It’s the middle of the night and I’m weeping.
It’s the whole body, shuddering kind of crying, accompanied by a horrendous guggling sound which is what my face makes now. I gasp and snot seeps out of the nostrils behind my ears. I just want my face back. It isn’t fair! It isn’t fair! It isn’t fair!
I hear hooves on the floor and through red aching eyes I see the tear blurred vision of Bluebell walking to the bed. I wail-glug and try to hide my face in the pillows. Leave me alone!
Wordlessly Bluebell climbs into bed with me, slips herself under the covers, and holds me like a little spoon, her warm udder and breasts pressed against my back. And there she stays until my weeping becomes crying becomes sleep.
***
I hear footsteps and the door to the bedroom swishes open. The Destroyer walks into the room and I roll over, showing her my back.
“Oh please,” she says, “I’ve already seen it.” When I pointedly keep looking away she sighs, “I didn’t walk all the way here for you to ignore me.”
I turn and give her my leave-me-the-fuck-alone glare. Halley-11 having fought other sapients to the death is unfazed. “Better,” she says, a slight quirk to her scarred lips.
“I think I have some idea what you’re going through,” she says with surprising gentleness. I regard her battered, harsh face with its patina of scars; study the place where her amputated head meets her white prosthetic body. “I remember laying in a bed just like this when I first had my arm ripped off, staring at the stump of what was left. I was marked, broken, disfigured. I never wanted to get up and face the world. I could feel the dark place calling, knew how easy it would be to just let go and wallow in it.” She takes a deep controlled breath, appearing to find strength from it despite her lack of lungs. “But I picked myself up, Halley. I found the thing I wanted and kept moving. I remade myself. I became a Champion.”
“I’m proud of myself and what I’ve done, but there’s been a price. As my body was broken in the crucible of the Arena, as I was whittled down to just my head and my mind and my will... there were times I almost broke.” The Destroyer looks at me with a confessional intensity, “I do miss my body. My protesthetic is incredible, a super perfect replacement, but it’s not me, not like my flesh and blood body was. There are times I look in the mirror and see only what I’ve lost.” She shakes her head, “But I keep going, keep my eye on the prize, keep fighting. You have to fight. Have to.”
She smiles at me, “This is a tough break, Rookie, I’m not going to lie to you, but I know you have the steel to get through this. We’ve already been through so much. This is all... just one more thing.”
I blink my eyes. My ultimate badass clone just made herself vulnerable for me, which I can tell is no small thing. I know I should be grateful, and on one level I’m touched, but I’m mostly just annoyed. What gives her the right to come here and lecture me for being sad? She chose this! Did it to herself! She could have stopped when she got her arm chopped off, had Clem replace it, found a gentler line of work. Instead she *decided* to become an inhumane cyborg murder freak. My hands ball into fists and I’m taking deep, angry breaths that make my facial vulva flex. I didn’t choose this! I don’t want a cunt face! Fuck you head-girl!
I raise my fist and flip her off.
“Whatever,” The Detroyer says, “Figure it out. I didn’t kick the shit out of a bunch of cultists so you could waste your life away in a cowgirl’s bedroom.”
***
I am staring at the ceiling again, which I’ve decided has lost it’s charm. Fucking ceiling.
I hear a knock on the door and Bluebell clops into the room. Why can’t she just leave me alone? I turn and glare at her, my face vulva flaring as blood rushes to my face.
The large Blue cowgirl is brandishing a flat screened device that looks like an iPad. “This one thought you might like to communicate.”
No, I want you to fuck off and leave me alone! She blinks her big black eyes at me and her nostrils dilate, smelling the anger I’m putting out.
The alien cowgirl falters, licks her lips with her wide tongue, presses on. “This one had HAL-E send her your English Earthling lexicon and this one uploaded it to this simple interface device. This way you and this one might converse and better address your needs.” Bluebell steps carefully forward and places the tablet on my lap. I look down at the screen, which displays a jaunty ‘Hello 
’ in borderline comic sans and I feel enraged! I don’t want to type out my thoughts! I want to fucking talk! I want my voice back and my face back! Not some stupid app for fucking children! I cunt-growl and chuck the tablet at the wall as hard as I can. Fuck!
Bluebell moos in alarmed surprise and takes a step back before annoyance flashes across her usually placid face. She claws at the ground with her hooves and almost lowers her short horns at me, but instead she snorts, turns, and stomps out of the room, her hooves cracking loudly on the steel floor. The doorway seals shut behind her.
...and I realize that I’m an enormous cunt.
Fuck, she was just trying to help! And is letting me sleep in her bed while she plays nursemaid to me. I am such an ungrateful piece of shit...
The least I could have done is typed ‘thank you’.
***
I wake up in bed and find that my two and half pussies are furiously horny.
I’d been having a sex dream. The details are fuzzy, but I remember sitting in a movie theatre and watching Marlene Dietrich in her iconic top hat and tuxedo, an early bisexual fixation. Dietrich was slowly applying lipstick, shot as if from the perspective of a mirror. She was taking her time with it, dragging it out, making it sexy. As she coated and recoated and recoated her lips with makeup her mouth swelled and changed, flowering into vulva and becoming vertical. Became a pussy face just like mine. Sitting in the theatre, I watched with rapt attention, scarfing popcorn, which had felt somehow sexual. On the screen Dietrich realized what had happened and started to finger her face, eyes lidded in pleasure. She gasped and closed her eyes, fingers furiously stroking and penetrating her new cunt, and as she approached what promised to be a shattering orgasm...
... I woke up in a puddle of my own pussy juices, three points of hot arousal pulsing, orifices begging to be filled.
Jesus Fucking Christ I’m horny! Vaginal drool flows from my face and my pillow is damp against my cheek, fragrant with cunt. My thighs are wet and slick, and my ass feels damp too. I grunt-moan and the feeling that causes in my face makes me wetly gasp.
I start to reach for my cunts and then stop myself.
I hate this feeling! This sick need! I want to get off so badly, but this isn’t me! This is the Sleeping God and His fucking perversion! I refuse to give in to this hunger, succumb to my changes!
I roll onto my back and clutch the sheets with clawed hands, take deep breaths, try to ignore how good even breathing feels.
***
I hear a heavy knock on the bedroom door and look up to see Steadfast Freya boldly enter, effortlessly carrying three large bags in her four muscular arms. “Hail 24th! How fare you in thine recovery?”
I sit up in bed and lift my blanket to hide my face pussy. What is Freya doing here? Does she know that I fucked Hank? My heart hammers in my chest. Is she angry? Furious? Is she here to yell at me? Beat me? Jesus, even if this doesn’t prove violent it’s going to be soooo awkward.
“I know that you have fornicated with Hank,” Freya says, taking a characteristically direct approach, “He confessed his misdeeds when news reached us of your misadventure. I judged it unlikely that you would be returning to us, and decided that you might yearn for your belongings.” She brandishes the three large bags as if they weighed nothing, which is probably depressingly close to the truth. I really have so little.
I blink my eyes, Freya doesn’t sound mad and this seems more like a kindness than an eviction. I must look confused because Freya says, “Of course I am not mad at you, 24th. I do not stake sole claim to Hank’s sex life. I do not believe in monogamy, neither for myself nor my lovers.” The Nordic woman sets my bags down in a corner of the room and then sits on the bed, making the mattress dip under her weight. “You came to Hank in a moment of weakness and need, and like a cur he took advantage of that. It was dishonorable of him, but your actions are above reproach. Mostly.” Freya sighs, “I mightily love Hank, but he can be such a weak man. I fear he feels he has something to prove and acts the scoundrel to validate his masculinity. It only makes him seem small. But love is steadfast and must tolerate weakness and nurture growth.” Freya looks at me with her clear blue eyes, her generous mouth in a serious line, “I just wish his weakness did not hurt my friend.”
The huge woman leans forward and crushes me into a four armed hug, squishing me and my bustier chest against her four large breasts. “I am sorry, I regret I was not there for you Halley.”
I’m shocked and sit up, letting the blanket fall away exposing my tits and cunty face. Freya looks startled for a moment, then intrigued. She smiles at me, “The next time you are in crisis, seek out me. And the next time you need a lover...” Freya grabs me firmly by the shoulders and head and pulls me into a hard kiss, her lips exploring my face cunt. “Find me instead of Hank.”
The tall woman stands and leaves the room, her short tunic dress showing off the backs of her muscular legs. My face drools and tingles and aches for more.
***
I know I can’t stay in bed forever.
Sooner or later I’ll have to face up to my... face. I’ll have to figure out how to eat real food and drink through my face pussy. I’ll need to learn what taking a shit with a clit in my ass feels like. I’ll have to figure out a new way to communicate now that I’m mute. I’ll probably have to get an awful synthetic voice like Sister Teuthida or maybe learn sign language like those Robed people. I’ll even have to brave the world again, learn to live with people staring at my disfigurement. Maybe I could start wearing a veil or something? I wonder if the Robed accept applications. I sigh, it’s going to suck so fucking much. But what choice do I have? If stay here too much longer I might just die of boredom.
Besides, Bluebell has to be tired of this asshole patient and is probably just about ready to kick me out. Frankly, I’m astonished it hasn’t happened yet.
What can I do though? Where can I go? I’m certainly not going to move back in with Hank, not after all that. Which ha ha also means I’m unemployed. Although a pussy-faced mute waitress probably isn’t on brand for the Hideaway anyway. I’m sure Clem would take me in, but that’s a whole tangle of unresolved feelings that I don’t need right now. Plus the whole catgirl sexpet clone roommate thing. Too many pussies there already. So what’s left? Where can I live? What job can I even do now? Maybe I’m going to end up in one of those awful Breakyards.
The one place on Flotsam I’m probably welcome is The Circle of The Sleeping God. Given how much they obviously pamper their current roster of Halleys, I’m sure they’d be overjoyed to have me. I could be a favourite, one of the popular special people. And my weird sex face? Well, everyone in the cult is a sex mutant freak, so I’d fit right in. And Hell, with Teuthida around, I wouldn’t even be the woman with the weirdest mouth. I could avoid being a disfigured outsider, just go with the flow, buy into the cultist lifestyle, be a Very Important Pussy-face...
Who the fuck am I kidding? There is absolutely no fucking way I’m ever going back to that place! The Sleeping God is a fucking monster and I hope he rots in his prison for eternity! Fucking fake deity asshole!
Which means I’ll have to deal with the reality of my situation.
I sigh and lay back in bed. Just not quite yet.
***
I wake up to find a baseball sized silver sphere floating in the bedroom.
“Good you’re awake” HAL-E’s disembodied voice says. I sit up, not bothering to disguise my pussy face. What’s the point when the city’s surveillance system comes for a visit?
“Uh, hi,” HAL-E says awkwardly as her hologram appears in the room. “I was wondering if this is a good time to talk?”
As good a time as any. I giving her a get on with it hand waggle.
She imitates blowing out a breath, “I wanted to start by saying I’m sorry. I promised to look out for you, and I totally dropped the ball; I never should have let you leave the city with those cultist fuckers. I’m a horrible digital guardian angel,” she looks at me, regret contorting her projected features. “The truth is, I lost track of you. I felt like devoting an entire shard of myself to closely monitor you would be deeply creepy, and since your Keyband was at Hank’s the whole time, I thought you were safe there... if maybe making a sex mistake.” She shakes her head, “By the time I realized anything was amiss, you’d already left the city and were long gone. It was straightforward to review the surveillance data and determine who you left with and when, but by the time I recruited Halley-11 and affected a rescue mission, well, the damage had already been done.” The hologram makes a sad little smile, “I’m sorry I failed you.”
It’s not your fault I’m a dumbass who voluntarily went with a bunch of freaky cultists to a second location. I’m grateful help came when it did, otherwise who knows how much more of me would be cunt right now. All of which I want to tell her, but I can’t unless she speaks glugh. Fuck this being mute thing! I can’t even offer an encouraging smile! And so I stare at her dumbly, hoping she somehow gets the message from my eyes alone.
HAL-E must have seen something in the windows to my soul because she startles. “Oh right! That reminds me! I was thinking about your situation and how frustrating it must be not to speak. And I think I’ve come up with a solution. Would you like it?”
I nod my head vigorously. Fuck yes I would!
The hologram smiles and the little silver drone floats closer and sprouts a blister which coalesces into a golf ball sized sphere. The new sphere drifts over to me lazily, like a soap bubble on the wind, until it touches my neck and flows around it, becoming a seamless silver metal choker. I reach up and touch it, feel warm pliable metal fused to my skin. “What?” I say aloud.
I gasp, both audibly and physically. “Did I just? I did! Oh my god!” I can fucking talk! And it sounds like it’s coming from my still very much a pussy mouth. Fuck yeah!
HAL-E beams at me, “It’s a holographic sound projector, the same technology that let’s me sound like I’m talking from my hologram...” HAL-E’s voice suddenly jumps across the room and affects being muffled “Or from over here in this confounded suitcase!” She grins “I modelled it on our voice and set it up to generate sounds that seem to originate from your mouth, so you should just be able to speak normally again.”
Tears sting my eyes. I can talk again! I have my voice back! “Thank you! You have no idea how much this means to me!”
The hologram blushes and smiles, “It’s nothing, the least I can do....”
“Fuck that! This is amazing!”
Maybe I’m not so completely ruined after all.
***
I hear a knock on the bedroom door and Bluebell clops in carrying a new nutrient infuser armband. Time for my next meal. “Breakfast time already?” I ask.
Bluebell moos in surprise, almost drops the armband to the floor. “You can speak!?”
“Yep!” I say happily. I point out the band of silver metal around my neck. “A gift from HAL-E.”
“That is a most exciting development!” Bluebell says, a wide smile breaking out on her bovinified alien face. “This one is so pleased for you!”
“I’m pretty stoked too,” I say. “....and now that I have my voice back, Bluebell, I just wanted to say thank you for everything. You’ve been so kind and patient with me, you’ve given me a place to live and taken care of me, and I’ve been such a miserable cunt... I’m sorry, Bluebell.”
Bluebell shakes her big head slowly, “Trauma seldom brings out the best in sapients, and healing is a gradual process. This one is glad she could help.” The cowgirl lays her large hand upon my shoulder, squeezes gently. “You are welcome to stay here as long as you might need.”
Tears tickle my eyes, “Thank you. But I really need to get out of this bed....”
“And bathe,” Bluebell says playfully, “Even for a human you stink.”
I laugh, my prosthetic voice perfectly imitating my giggle while my face vulva tingle pleasantly as blood rushes to them. “But maybe not just quite yet...”
***
Re: Flotsam
Flotsam Chapter 19: https://indigocarminefiction.blogspot.c … er-19.html
Flotsam
Chapter 19: Facing
I really need to get out of this room.
I am once again, still, in Bluebell’s bed with its Holstein-print blankets. I know I can’t stay here forever, that I need to get on with my pussy-faced life, but there are still so many things to figure out. I can live here with Bluebell, at least for a while, but I still have to figure out some sort of job. I’ve been way too big a mooch. I need to figure out something to wear over my face. I need some sort of meal plan and to buy like, a space blender. Most of all, I need to figure out how to stomach going out in public again. Problems problems problems...
And distracting me from relaunching my life is the least urgent and somehow the most pressing of my issues: I am so fucking horny!
“Jesus Christ! Enough already!”
My traitor body ignores me, three pulsing points of sensitive heat refusing to quiet. I wipe my chin, arm coming off shiny with my special drool. The entire room smells like cunt, like sex. I shift in bed trying to get comfortable, aware of the pressure of my thighs pressing against my altered cunt, the caress of sheets rubbing against the hard, sensitive nipples on my enlarged breasts. I moan, a sound somehow sexier in my prosthetic voice. Fuck I want to come so badly!
Instead I clench my fists and take a deep, sexually stimulating breath. I don’t want to give in to my body, my weird transformed body. To submit to my desires and Jill-off would be a betrayal to myself, right? A surrender to whatever fucked up Dream the Sleeping God envisioned for me. Or would it? For better or worse this cunt-faced curvaceous body is my body and these desires are my desires. My body might be different, but ultimately it’s still inescapably me. The only person I’m punishing by denying myself an orgasm is myself. Maybe I should just go for it?
At least then I could clear my mind for a bit...
I work my jaw as if I were going to bite my lower lip, instead feeling my facial labia move and press against each other. I groan, allowing my hands to experimentally cup my expanded breasts, feeling their weight, touching my hard nipples, gasping at the shocking sensitivity of them. Ahhh my body feels so good. “Fuck it.”
I let my left hand trail down the smooth, flat expanse of my belly, feeling my guts grow tight with expectation. Hesitantly I rub my hand over the soft skin of my now permanently hairless mound, split my fingers, let them slide so that they are nestled in the groove between my widened thighs and vulva, like a frame for my vagina. I shiver, just the thought of those fingers so close to my cunt, the anticipation of it, is making me dizzy. I groan as blood courses to my cunt, and I can feel the heat of it in my fingers, smell its fragrance fill the room. I grab my right tit, pull it aside, and look down at my crotch, watch as my clit swells and swells and swells, a bright pink knuckle pulsing with my heartbeat. I want to lick my lips, but I can’t. I feel my facial cunt swell too, become just as hot, its clit as hard. I leave my left hand cupping my swollen cunt and hesitantly bring my right hand down, stop, almost but not quite touching. I moan, feeling the clit in my ass swell too, a third burning point of urgency. Vaginal fluids drool down my chin, drip onto my tits. Gently I touch my clit and gasp! Jerk my hand back! I feel like I’ve been shocked! My clit is so sensitive! “Holy fuck!”
Bracing myself and panting through the airways behind my ears, I reach down and touch my clit again. I squirm at the raw sensation of it. “Yesssssss...” I keep my hand on my clit and slowly start to stroke it, groaning at the painfully pleasurable feeling. I try to clench what is left of my jaw, only managing to grind my face-cunt together, adding to the too-strong sensation. Fuck this is so good! I freeze my right hand, keeping it pressed against the pulsing, urgent knob of my clit, and let my left hand finally touch my labia, surprised by how thick and wide and hot and wet they are. My pussy is huge! I slide my fingers along my swollen cleft and shiver, turning my head and arching my back. “Ffffffffuuuuckkk....” I part my lips, let two fingers slide inside myself, just a little, feel the soaking heat of myself. I push in further, with three, no four fingers, and stretch myself open. I make a hook with the fingers inside me, point them skyward, drag them over the hard internal ridge of my clitoris, pushing the glans of it against my other hand. I gasp and writhe, squeeze my thick, soft thighs against my hands, hold myself in place as a wave of pleasure washes over me. “Fucking Jesus!” It’s too much! It’s too sensitive, too hungry! I’m almost weeping!
But I need this, I need to come, and I know there is no stopping now.
I prop myself up, halfway sitting, and take the deepest, steadiest breath I can, blow it out slowly, feel cunt-drool dribble off my chin. I start to stroke my clit again, back and forth, trying to find a rhythm. I pull my other hand out of myself, and let it glide along my opening, fingertips just barely dipping in. I tilt my head back and pant, try to immerse myself in the raw electric wire sensitivity of my cunt, the building pressure of an approaching orgasm. “Ohhhhhhh....” The feelings just build and build, beyond anything I’ve felt before, an en masse mass, an ocean of sensation and physical hunger. I start to lose myself, untether from the room, fall into a trance of pleasure. My hands keep moving automatically, playing the familiar rhythm on a spectacular new instrument. Distantly I hear myself moan and curse and the wet rasp of breath exploding out of my pussy mouth. The noisy squelch of my fingers pushing into my cunt. Ahhhhh fuck I am so close! Ah! Oh my god! Oh fuck! Fuckkkkkk....
“Ahhhhhhhhhhh!’ A nova explodes behind my eyes, a white perfect moment of bliss. I scream in a spray of pussy-drool and arch my back like I’ve been electrocuted. Oh fuck yes!
I flop back bonelessly, wet hands still on my cunt. Oh my god that was incredible! Fuck!
But it’s not enough, I’m still so fucking horny! My face pussy pulses and drips, demands it’s own attention.
I’m panting, my facial labia flexing with my breath. I lift shaking, tingling fingers to my face and stop. Do I really want to do this? Am I ready?
I try to take a deep, calming, therapeutic breath and it has the exact opposite effect. “Ffffffuuuckk...”
I run a finger along my face, starting at my clit ‘nose’ and down the wet, slick cleft of my vagina ‘mouth’. I shiver, oh Jesus it’s just as sensitive! I push two fingers inside my mouth-cunt, and reach with my other hand to rub my face-clit. My eyes roll back and I arch my spine, knees bent, as I finger fuck my face. My prosthetic voices moans and whines as incredible feelings of pleasure radiate from such an alien part of my body. It’s too fucking weird, but I don’t want to, can’t even, stop myself.
And yet...
I want more. Need more. I want to stuff my face, feel it filled, stretched. Penetrated. “Fuck....”
I wish I had a dildo... Does Bluebell have sextoys? Would she share? Where would I even get a dildo? Could I print one? I moan. No! I need it right now!
“HAL-E...” I gasp.
“You rang?” my own voice sings out as HAL-E’s svelte hologram manifests in the room. She looks bemused and I would be mad if I wasn’t so fucking horny. “Finally trying out the new equipment?”
“Dildo!”
“Ohhhh, I was wondering why you invoked me. Yeah just a second.” I feel a tingle in the weird Grey alien metal band that is fused to my neck and see a pea sized sphere of quicksilver float away from it, expanding and elongating, lovingly molding itself into an organic looking silver penis. I look at it and feel something like hunger in my mouth-cunt, a sudden flush of pussy juice saliva. The cock lands in my hands; it’s warm and soft and feels surprisingly lifelike. HAL-E gives me a big wink and a weirdly proud smile. “Have fun. I’ll sever my connections to it and leave you to your fun.”
I look at the cock and back at HAL-E. She tilts her head, smiles uncertainly. I don’t know why I’m saying this but... “Stay. Please.” I swallow, making my face-cunt spasm. “Fuck me.”
HAL-E the hologram blinks out of sight and the silver cock in my hand twitches, floats free. “Brace yourself,” HAL-E tells me, voice suddenly husky. I sit up in bed, put pillows behind my head, steady myself on my elbows. HAL-E’s cock executes a loop and I watch it aim itself at my face; it would be threatening if I didn’t want it so bad. I’m panting and drooling, watching the flying cock slowly, so slowly float toward my face, my cunt. I almost go cross-eyed watching, until I feel the cock press against my mouth-cunt, hot and assertive. The cock propels itself forward, slow but relentless, and I feel my ‘mouth’ stretch and part, yield to the cock as it pushes itself inside me. I close my eyes and gasp, “Oh fuck yesssss.....” the cock bottoms out with it’s silver balls resting on my chin. I feel it all inside me, a hot thick cylinder of penis that stretches my mouth and fills me all the way back into my throat. Breath hisses through my hidden nostrils, and a small panicked part of me thinks I must be choking or about to gag. Instead it’s the best feeling of my life, a glorious stretching that sends waves of pleasure through my body. HAL-E’s cock starts to pull itself out of me now, and I feel my cunt-mouth pull at it greedily, instinctively sucking it back in. With a final, vulva parting tug, the cock is free, hanging just past my pussy lips, almost touching. “Ohhhhhhhh.....”
“Do you like it?” HAL-E asks, voice thick. “Do you want more?”
Instead of answering I lunge my face forward, try to impale myself on its length. HAL-E grunts as I manage to snag her glans in my lips and then grunts again as she thrusts the cock into my face. I gasp and see stars. “Yes! Fuck me!” HAL-E doesn’t waste time, pistonning the cock in my face smoothly but slowly, gradually fucking me. And oh my Jesus Fucking Christ it feels amazing. “More!” I plead, “ahhh-Faster!” She obliges, cock thrusting faster, pushing into my mouth-cunt with more force. “Ffffffuuck!” The silver cock slams into me again and again, the force pushing me back against the pillows, making my head knock against the headboard. And oh god I feel it coming, a great monstrous swelling, like my mind is a balloon filling and stretching and about to... “Ohhhhhhh Ffffffuuucckkk! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”
I orgasm, tsunamis of pleasure bursting in unfamiliar nerves in my face. My cunt spasms, grips the cock in my face, tries to inhale it. Distantly I hear HAL-E grunt like a dude, feel the silver drone cock in my mouth twitch and dance, feel something hot and wet and metallic flood my cunt-mouth. And then the world goes away for a few moments, and I am awash in a bubble of pleasure, delirious and satisfied. And oh my god I needed that so much!
But.
But still it isn’t enough.
I come back to myself and feel that my body wants, needs more. The pleasant tingling glow of my face-cunt is downed out by the blaring hunger of my original pussy and the clitoris in my ass. I almost giggle, my other cunts are jealous! “I need more.”
“Oh?” HAL-E says, a thrill in her voice. Her silver cock drone floats in the air, erect.
“All of me,” I gasp, “Fuck all of me...”
“Your wish is my command-line.”
I roll onto my hands and knees, conscious of the heavy weight of my hanging breasts, the trickle of quicksilver fluid seeping out of mouth-cunt, evaporating before it hits the bedspread. I’m panting and still so ready to be filled. The hovering silver cock seems to fluctuate and HAL-E moans as it splits itself into three identical metallic cocks. I look at them hungrily, feel myself drool from several places. The cocks break formation, begin to orbit me, reprofiling as they fly: one cock growing improbably long and thick, another sprouting bumps and ridges, and the last becoming a short vibrating hourglass. It’s like a conveyor display of sexy treats. “Yesss..” I gasp, making a web of cunt-drool spill off my chin.
The squadron of cock drones veer into position around me. I glance back over my wide, round ass and see the huge cock, almost the size of my arm aimed at my sopping original cunt while the small buzzing buttplug jockies for access to my ass. I look forward and see the cock with the complex, bumpy topography holding position for another run at my face-cunt. Oh this is going to be fucking awesome! “You ready?” HAL-E asks.
“Fuck. Yes.”
The enormous cock behind me pushes against my hot, wet cunt; parts me and slowly penetrates me, filling me inch after inch after inch. “Ahhh-hhhhh.” It’s so big! Longer and wider than anything I’ve every had inside me before. I feel like I’ve been gloriously impaled, stretched like a tight fitting glove around HAL-E’s huge silver cock. “Ffffffffuckkk.” HAL-E doesn’t pull out, leaves me bisected and gasping. I open my eyes just in time to see the knobby cock float forward, push itself into my facial cunt. I hiss through my nostrils, making my hair blow. Pleasure radiates through my face as I feel the cock stuff my mouth-cunt, experience every knob, bump, and ridge of the penis with the sensitive walls of my vagina-mouth. I’m moaning, impaled from both ends, juices trickling out of my mouth and cunt. And then I feel something prod my butthole, squeeze itself into the tight little aperture of my anus and start to vibrate. I shriek! It feels like fireworks are going off in my ass! I make a kind of mewling noise. I’m being triple penetrated by silver flying cocks like the focal point of a weird alien porno and I’m loving it! It feels unbelievable! I wonder if I can lay here like this forever, just filled to incredible feverish bursting...
And then the cocks start to move.
It starts slowly at first, steady partial withdrawals and smooth thrusts forward. I moan as my mouth-cunt sucks on the whorls and ridges of the slow moving cock inside. I could succumb to this forever but it seems HAL-E is impatient, insistant, and the rhythm of the cocks quickly speeds up. I moan and gasp and pant, awash with pleasure as the tempo and force increases. HAL-E projects her own pleasure, her moans and grunts filling the room. Oh fuck this is good! The enormous cock in my original snatch slams into me harder and faster, rocks me on my knees, threatens to knock me over, forces me onto the cock in my mouth, makes my big tits sway. I squeal in pleasure, fight to keep myself upright, to thrust back against it. The cock-plug in my ass buzzes faster and slowly starts to expand, stretching my anus in new and amazing ways. The sensations build and build, wash over me, subsume me. I’m once again in a trance of pleasure, but somehow still aware of two Halley’s screaming and panting in stereo, the wet sounds of fucking, the almost combative jostling of bodies, and the staccato of pleasure as three cocks ream me at once. My two and a half cunts are an orchestra of sex and I’m the Symphony of ecstacy! “OhyesohyesohfuckohfuckohFUCK...” I am buiding to a crescendo, a single explosive peak... and then I hear myself scream! My every muscle snaps taught as my entire body orgasms at once. Deep inside myself I feel three cocks spasm and come, filling me with their quicksilver semen.
I collapse, exhausted and relaxed for the first time in weeks.
Time oozes past.
My arms and legs are numb, my fingers tingle, and all my cunts ache in the best possible way. I blink my eyes, pull sex damp hair from my face and see HAL-E standing there smiling. Not the demure, modest HAL-E with her svelte angelic hologram body, but a prono version, taller with huge gravity defying breasts and erect nipples, wide hips, and hovering at her crotch as if were connected to her, the largest silver penis, still semi-erect.
“Hi,” I say, blushing a little, trying to roll into a more artful position than collapsed akimbo.
“Hi yourself.” A smile plays at her lips and pixels dance artfully across her face. She walks over, her holographic sex body making a show of it, and sits on the edge of my borrowed bed. Well, simulates it at least, since she’s still intangible. She looks at me sidelong, bites her lip a little, pruriently surveying her handiwork with maybe a little concern thrown into the mix.
“That was really...” fucking mindblowing. “....nice.” I say, while wiping pussy-slime and dissolving silver cum from my face. I blush, cheeks glowing and face-cunt puffing up a little as blood rushes to my face. “I really needed that. Thank you.”
HAL-E grins, “I’m glad!” She frowns thoughtfully, “Y’know...” The silver cock detaches itself from her holographic crotch and floats in the air. I hope she isn’t expecting another round, although some part of me prays she is. Instead of flying into attack position the silver penis drone melts into itself, condenses back down into a marble of silver metal. The marble starts to rotate and reshapes itself into a featureless silver ring which drifts over and lands in the palm of my hand.
“What’s this?”
“A cockring!” HAL-E giggles, ‘Well not literally, but it’ll turn back into a penis when you want it to. Just let me know next time you want to play.”
I slip the silver cockring onto my finger, inspect it. “A ring, a voice, multiple orgasms... you really know how to spoil a girl.”
“It’s how I get the them to put out,” HAL-E grins. She simulates running her fingers through her artfully tussled and blown out porno hairdo. “So what’s next?”
“I get out of this fucking bedroom.”
***
Bluebell moos is in surprise as I slink into her small kitchen area.
Bluebell is sitting at her dining room table, poking at a floating holographic workscreen while a milking machine empties her four large breasts and udder with a rhythmic chugging noise. The small plastic table bears a platter of small cakes and a tall glass of sweet tea filling the room with the inviting aroma of real, actual food. Light streams in through the windows overlooking the tiny rear garden, highlighting the Blue cowgirl. Recognition crosses Bluebell’s large dark eyes and a huge smile blossoms on her bovinified alien face. “You are on the ground floor!”
I grip the hem of my t-shirt dress in its unfitted mode, hold it down over my wide hips and ass, fidget uncertainly “Yeah, I figure it’s finally time.”
Bluebell laughs, “Fantastic! This one is overjoyed!”
I blush, “Thanks...”
Bluebell’s nostrils flare, “Why do you reek of sex?”
***
Re: Flotsam
Y'know, I'd still think that Bluebell would still understand the concept of masturbation. Or is she just not familiar with it enough for her to immediately think of it?
Re: Flotsam
I originally assumed this Halley would be the last Halley there ever was. She was going to meet the past Halleys and see how they became what they are, and it was going to give her a path to maintain her original self in this future that changed everyone else. But she’s already changed too much to be that Halley anymore. There is going to be another Halley, and that Halley is going to look at this one as just another altered freak, and it is going to fucking BREAK this Halley.
Re: Flotsam
minstrelofmoria wrote:
I originally assumed this Halley would be the last Halley there ever was. She was going to meet the past Halleys and see how they became what they are, and it was going to give her a path to maintain her original self in this future that changed everyone else. But she’s already changed too much to be that Halley anymore. There is going to be another Halley, and that Halley is going to look at this one as just another altered freak, and it is going to fucking BREAK this Halley.
...Huh you’re probably right. Ouch.
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