1 (edited by Flicker 2019-05-08 04:26)

Topic: Protective Custody (Series) - by teddy sloth

tags: lots of cock transformation (CTF), trans girl spider + human guy, post-CTF fun

Sources:
Protective Custody: http://cockify.me/stories_html/prot.php
An innocent human is almost abducted by a group of rogue spiders. Fortunately, a brave officer of the Arachnid Altercation Agency is there to protect him. More or less.

Disorderly Conduct: http://cockify.me/stories_html/docd.php
Sid and Skeila return; Skeila treats her new friend to an up-close look at the spiders' criminal justice system.

Lockdown: http://cockify.me/stories_html/lockdown.php
After spending some time on the surface, Sid and Skeila return to a Midway in turmoil. And meanwhile, back underground, a young woman gets into some trouble while taking care of company business at the bank.

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Protective Custody

The night is deep and still, and in a strange white building on a side street off of some downtown avenue, fronted with a Greek colonnade and smoked windows, there is someone waiting. Weak street light flows in through the flat, dark panes, throwing a dim and crooked rectangle all the way to the back of the building's lobby, where it lands on a single long, furry leg. It is hard to see who the leg belongs to; there is no light but what's coming in from outside, save a few bright dots from elevator buttons, thermostats, sleeping computers. That's how she likes it. She sees better that way.

The shadowy figure is enormous, making the rolling chair she's laconically leaning back in seem child-sized. She has two hands clasped behind her head—and the other four folded on her stomach. Chocolate-brown rings encircle all of her elbows and knees, but she is lighter everywhere else, the color of the beach during heavy rain. Not technically naked, she is not really clothed either, wearing only a single garment that consists of an olive drab sash running diagonally across her chest, making a lengthy detour around her breasts, and connecting to a belt of the same material at her hip. Metallic bars pinned to the sash catch and reflect what light there is, as do the curved white fangs poking out of either side of the creature's mouth. Eight black eyes like wet onyx stones look to the left, blink in unison, and look to the right.

This is Lieutenant Skeila of the Midway branch of the Arachnid Altercation Agency, and she is incredibly bored. She was hoping she'd get to work on a fun new case for the HAARP squad tonight. She'd even take walking the beat on Lower Forbes Street over this; it's always crowded with a loud bustle of spiders and humans alike at this time of night. But the AAA received an anonymous tip about a planned break-in at the Municipal Arachnohuman Relations Commission's surface office, so here she is. Sheesh. What would someone want to steal from the MARC? And shouldn't the human cops be doing this? Absolutely nothing's happened all night. Outside, a car drives past. Thirty minutes ago a human walked by on the sidewalk; behind the building's tinted windows Skeila was watching him. It's always fun to see 'em in their natural habitat, but up here she's not even allowed to go say hi. The spider sighs. Two more hours and she's off duty.

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Now travel south to the sleepy slopes across the river, to a four-story apartment building separated from the neighboring duplexes by dark old oaks and wooden fences covered in ivy. There is light in only one window, and it is the pallid flicker of a screen.

Passing through the window and into the room, where there is a laser printer humming away to the tune of 40 pages per minute, the heavy-duty kind of printer that should be in a corporate office instead of here under a psychedelic pink-and-blue poster for the Polish release of Don't Look Now. Around its base, where its wheels are well sunken in to the shag pile of the hideous orange-brown carpet, is an incredible jumble of clutter that continues throughout the room. Dead electronics, empty Bic lighters, tangled knots of cables, flattened pizza boxes, breadboards wired up with resistors and IC's and capacitors that look like lil' aspirins, with every chair piled with books and binders and every table and counter covered in papers turned from sheet white to periwinkle blue by the soft screen light.

The printer stops. On top of the stack in its tray is a title page:

The Sidwell-Greenstreet Report

Only seconds after the printing ceases a cell phone somewhere in this godawful mess lights up, a simple beat kicks in, and a high-voiced indie vocalist begins to plaintively croon: I'd like to know completely/What others so discreetly/Talk about when they leave me… There is the creak of a desk chair and uneven footsteps from the next room over. Then, loping into the room with the glow of unseen monitors behind him comes a rake-thin young man whose plain white T-shirt and pale white skin glow the same reflective blue as every sheet of paper in the room. He has a tangle of curly brown hair and sparks of stubble on his small chin, and even with the music to help it takes him most of the song to locate his phone; it isn't till Ade Blackburn sings Free of— that he turns over a sheaf of measurements of tectonic plate movements and discovers it. Nobody's calling, it's just a reminder: tonight, Sid has to make his rounds.

Most nights, Sidwell Greenstreet is here, dry-steaming his brain in (…what was this supposed to be again? Acapulco Gold? Panama Red? Michoacán Icepack? Aw, who knows, this far from California it's all the same) while he and his bank of computers crunch numbers for the Report. But tonight, just like he has to every Thursday, he must make his rounds, dropping off copies of the Report to his short but eye-catching list of subscribers, mostly local supercorporations and departmental names at City Hall. It is likely they all assume that Sidwell-Greenstreet LLC is a high-powered team of analysts, and not a single rogue statistician that puts the thing together while stoned off his face. Anything that catches his fancy goes in to the Report, but the reason he can live comfortably off the subscription proceeds is because of his interest in the movement of economic capital and his almost superhuman ability to discern patterns—where other people would see a page of numbers Sid can pick out a correlation in fifteen seconds and if you wait a little bit more he can give you a pretty good linear regression for it and the root mean squared error, too…

Sid separates out and staples the individual copies of the Report, ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk, punching down hard to get the staple all the way through each bundle. When the whole stack is done, he puts the copies into two fat manila envelopes and zips up the envelopes against his chest inside a heavy pea-green hoodie. He's nearly heading out the door when he does a sudden about-face—whoa, almost forgot, back in the other room, on the long plastic table he uses as a desk, are two fat joints he rolled for the walk. Sheesh. Forget his head, next.

Sid is also deeply flawed by his preternatural talent for pattern recognition. Truly great gifts tend to do that, after all. He is not quite so paranoid as Nash in his glory days, but he is always, always, on the lookout for patterns beyond mundane sets of data; he believes in invisible lines of power stretching like webs between the boardrooms of every one of those tall towers he will be delivering to tonight. Even though (and perhaps because) he refuses to deliver during normal working hours, eagle-eyed Sid sees recurring faces all across town. One time he'd seen the same executive at two buildings across town in the same night, and the second time the suited doppelganger (a guy whose name was Bunch, if the subscriber list can be trusted) greeted him with a gregarious "Hello again." Well, that was enough to send him huddling behind a pylon under the 376 overpass for an hour, too scared to move out of the shadows for fear that They would see him. He'd been recognized, caught in the web he thought he'd avoided so carefully, square in Their reticle and any movement, any at all, would only generate additional data points for Them…

Traversing Grandview Avenue on his way downtown in the face of a chilly night wind, the bundle of papers against his chest still warm from the printer, he takes in the dazzling wedge of cityscape between the forking rivers below him, and wonders where exactly in it the Report's newest subscriber is. He has their address, but they only signed up a few days ago and he's never delivered to the Municipal Advertising Ramifications Council before…

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

Sid's deliveries are presently all but complete. He has cut a line running west to east across downtown, dropping off copies of his neatly stapled Report in office entryways as he goes. One at the imposing state office building, one for the business writers at the Post-Gazette, a bundle with the night receptionist at the Gulf Tower for all the subscribers there, six copies to six separate people at City Hall, but at Mellon they only pay for one. And that's it, this week's deliveries all—oh, wait. Those MARC guys.

He finds their building nearby, on a still side street that could pass for an alley or driveway. He doesn't know what the Municipal Advertising Ramifications Council does—he doesn't ask his clients questions, it's bad form. Their building is pretty curious, though. The front is a sparkling white faux-Roman structure, pillars with the fancy carving (Doric? Corinthian?) and everything. But the windows are weirdly out of place, being those flat black one-way affairs you picture the Pentagon having. Around back, where Sid was instructed to drop off his report, there is a big creepy stone archway in the side of the building reaching up to the second story, beyond which is a ramp down into what could be a parking garage. Near the archway there's a small window and a rectangular metal slot built into the wall. The window emits soft yellow light from the little room inside; it's lit, but nobody's home. Sid slides the Report in the slot, and that's that. Another week's honest work complete.

And what better way to celebrate than to light up? Sid deftly removes one of his lovingly rolled joints from the inner pocket of his hoodie and a white Bic from the outer one. His practiced eye immediately recognized this little alley as a good place to smoke—hard to see the street from here. The opposite building is a tall red brick structure tiled with black windows full of drawn blinds, and the end of the alley is blocked off by an uninhabited construction site, wind whipping at black plastic wrapped around lumber and howling off into the empty night. The only worrisome thing is that archway. He takes an overlong drag while staring into it, hot smoke roughening the back of his throat. It's not just the featureless descent into darkness beyond it, but the construction of the arch itself. It's made of a tessellation of pointed triangular stones, with extra large ones protruding down into the entryway at 10 and 2 o'clock, making it look like a giant mouth with fangs.

Which is a weird thing for an arch to look like, right? He knows he's only freaking himself out here, and that if he stares at the stupid arch long enough he's going to set off the Fear, that special extension to one's natural paranoia often seen among marijuana habitués. Calm it down, Sid, bring it down a notch… He turns towards the street and exhales a white cloud, admiring it as it dissipates, taking longer than normal in the cool air to fade into the burnished darkness of the cloudy night sky, with the all city lights reflecting in the low ceiling. Orange sodium vapor lamps hum. Somewhere very far away a dog barks. A gentle breeze blows on his face, and Sid feels quite peaceful.

And then he hears maybe one or two running footsteps, staccato clacking suddenly coming up behind him—and nothing else, no jangle or rustle of clothing or anything—and before he can even jump let alone turn around something strong grabs him by a bony ankle and lifts up, so quickly that his face comes wincingly close to the pavement as he falls forward but doesn't quite connect. His joint flies out of his mouth and he swings like a pendulum from one leg, dazed.

Gravity has turned his hoodie inside out and pulled it down over his face. He can't see who or what is holding him, only a small circle of ground and one large, puzzling foot, covered in brown fur and ending in claw-like toes. He hears a voice: "What're you doing prowling around back here?" It is female, high pitched, maybe even a little squeaky. Even taking the local peculiarities into account, she has an unusual accent. She sounds suspicious of him. Is it bad to talk to hallucinations? Rational Sid has immediately decided that's what this is, he's somehow stumbled into laced weed or something (who does that, what kind of dealer would waste the money…) and he is tripping balls. The thing that has him shakes him. "Well?"

Hallucination or not, he'd better play along. "I'm only here to deliver some documents for the MARC," he answers. A moment later, when he is not put down, he elucidates further: "I… work for Sidwell-Greenstreet Consulting?"

He is still being held up, but hears the snap of his interrogator unclasping something, then the intermittent tap-tap-tap of a fingernail against a glass surface. "Uh, you got any ID?"

Sid points to his wallet, which has fallen onto the ground directly beneath him. He is lowered a bit as his captor squats, and he now sees a kind of hand, similar to the foot, covered in the same chestnut-brown hair and with sharp clawlike digits, as it reaches out to grab the wallet.

"Oh geez, Sidwell James Greenstreet. Right there on your driver's license. Guess that's you then," mumbles the voice in an embarrassed tone. Suddenly an indefinite, unseen number of hands turns him right-side up. He still can't see; the hood of his sweatshirt has flopped down over his face. The voice is now friendlier, talks quicker. "Sorry about goin' all papers-please on your lil' human butt, but we got a tip about someone trying to break into the MARC, and everyone's on edge 'cuz of those crazy Huntsmen fuckers, and I kinda thought topside humans work mostly during the day…" He is carefully set down standing on the ground, and his hood is daintily plucked off of his head. "Um, here's your wallet back."

"Hey, thanks," he says as he sees her for the first time, cool as the proverbial cucumber. Yes. Definitely a hallucination.

She is a gigantic spider creature. Two legs, and six arms arranged vertically on her torso; all of her covered in a pelt of sandy brown fur with darker rings around all her elbows and knees. She's got to be at least eight feet tall, even bending over with her lower two hands on her knees to hold his wallet out to him. Her eyes, the same warm black as the tips of her claws, are solid glossy ovals that come in multiple sizes, two large ones where you'd expect the eyes on any eight-foot tall woman's face to go and then a smaller pair next to them and four even smaller ones above those. She is giving Sid an inquisitive little smile with two curved fangs protruding out of it.

Sid has to admit she's not unattractive. He's always had a thing for tall chicks—and she's very, very tall. Even if the fangs and eyes are startling, she has a cute face. And then there's her chest and the spherically round breasts each bigger than his head and dazzlingly gravity-defiant. All of her arms are lithe and toned. All she's wearing is a thick, olive green belt and sash. But she looks powerful, like it would be trivial for her to knock Sid out with a single punch, and those fangs arescary, no matter how cute her smile is…

Oh, and though he's trying desperately not to stare, she has a penis. Hanging between her legs, accompanied by a pair of big round balls covered in the same fur as the rest of her. It's soft, definitely bigger than the average penis but not by much, and not out of place on her sizable frame. He can see it clearly; the strange belt-and-sash outfit she has on seems to be more ornamental than functional. There are gadgets clipped to her belt, and medals pinned to her sash, but the belt sits just above the base of her cock and the sash runs right between her breasts, leaving just about all of her body in view.

She reaches toward him. He tries not to flinch, and she brushes off his shoulders where his hoodie scraped the ground. Her claws seem to be surprisingly dexterous. "Uh, sorry about that, too," says the arachnid, pointing to the soggy remainder of Sid's extinguished joint in a puddle.

"Not a problem, I always carry a backup." He produces the other one from inside his sweatshirt, and casually twirls it around in his fingers when a bizarre impulse strikes him. He is, after all, hallucinating; why not have fun with it? He extends the joint to the spider, and says "Wanna smoke with me?"

She giggles delightedly, bending at the knees. "Well, we're not s'posed to on the surface, but…" She removes a phone-like device from her belt and taps it, checking the time. "I'm off duty, and how often d'ya get the chance to smoke with a cute lil' human?" She takes the joint. "My name's Skeila."

"Skeila." He repeats it out loud to himself, like she said it, skee-lah, only without the strange extra-fricative sk she was able to generate. "Hi, Skeila. I'm Sid."

"Nice t'meetcha, Sid." She sits down on the ground, leaning against the wall of the building. Even sitting she comes up to Sid's chest. "Light?" she says, leaning closer to him with the joint in her mouth. He sparks her up as she inhales, holding it between two claw-like fingers. She leans back and pats the ground, making a squeaking noise and motioning for Sid to join her.

In the face of no other side effects Sid is coming to the realization that he many not be hallucinating. There's no dissociation, or nausea, or anything but the usual pleasant buzz and an affably chatty spider creature. Plus, she's been puffing away and doesn't seem to be exhibiting any ill effects—though if she's a hallucination, then… well, anyway, what else can it be? Not sleep deprivation; Sid's been getting his usual beauty eleven in every day—7 A.M. to 6 P.M., almost enough to avoid the sun entirely.

When he talks to her, he's not quite sure where to look. She's so much bigger than him and their proximity is so great that he has to crane his neck up to see her face like he's in the first row at the movies. But if he looks directly to his right, at eye level, he ends up with a faceful of her giant breasts. Which he doesn't mind at all, but he doesn't want to be impolite. And it might be moreimpolite to look downwards, into her lap where her cock sedately rests, neither erect nor totally flaccid.

"So what's the MARC got you doing?" Skeila asks him.

"They subscribe to my report," Sid explains, passing the smoldering joint back to her. They are sitting quite close to each other; Sid can feel warmth from her body on his arms. "All I really do is take some numbers that are publicly available, and I make some charts and graphs out of it. Stuff like real estate values, groundwater contamination, how much electricity costs…"

"I bet it's for the water thing. They have guys watching that now, cause of the fracking…"

"Glad to hear someone gives a shit, but why does the Municipal Advertising Ramifications Council care?"

Invoking that name startles the spider. "Advertising Ramifications— Eight eyes each widen in surprise; a human wouldn't call them that unless… "You've never been underground, have you?"

"Uh… I take the T every now and then."

A smile creeps onto her face. "And you've never been to Midway either?" Sid shakes his head. "Never met a spider before?" Another shake. "But one assaults you, and you wanna smoke with her?" Sid nods with a shrug, and Skeila laughs. The sparkle of a halogen lamp shines in her bright white fangs and uniformly glossy black eyes; the reflection gives Sid the feeling her eyes are looking directly into his. Several seconds pass, neither human nor spider moving, each slightly stoned.

Skeila is the first to break symmetry. She closes her eyes and sits up, four furred brown arms wrapping around her knees as she rests her head against them. Two hands still extend out behind her for support. She sighs. "I am so not supposed to let topsiders see me. And there's this whole speech I have to give you, and a ticket to one of these human orientation nights at the Midway Welcome Center… oh, and a pamphlet, too." She waves a claw at the building. "I don't have any on me, but I'm sure there's a buttload in there." She snickers.

"What's so funny?" Sid asks.

"It's just a dumb PR thing the MARC does. They started it after someone made this video making fun of 'em, said the official welcome package was for a spider to bring you down there and fuck you," giggles the spider as she continues to explain, "an' then if you got the deluxe package you got to spend a week as—" she catches herself when she doesn't hear Sid laughing along. "Um. Well, it's funnier if you watch it. I don't wanna scare you away from actually visiting Midway. Uh, y'know, if you want."

"I still don't know what it is," he points out.

"A city! The most awesome city in the whole world. I think so, anyway."

"It must be pretty awesome, then. Where is it?"

The spider points downward with a single clawtip. "How about it? I'll show you. That's the way humans are s'posed to see it, with their own personal tour guide, not some dumb fake party sponsored by Heinz."

"I don't know…"

"Well, I can't make you come… but it's a really cool place, and you should see it. Do you know how many humans would have taken off when they saw me? Like, all of them. You deserve to see it." He doesn't say anything. "C'moooonnn," she playfully whines. "It's not like I'm gonna eat you. You'll be totally safe. Promise!"

Fuck it, he'll ride this one straight down the rabbit hole. "Alright, I'll come see Midway."

She squeaks delightedly and stands up. "Yes! You're gonna freak out when you see it for the first time. It's gonna be awesome." She reaches out a few arms to him, grasping his hand and effortlessly pulling him to his feet. Her claws are warm and padded on the inside. Holding his hand, she leads him forward through the toothed archway.

She takes him through a dim concrete plain forested by squat pillars and down a wide, spiraling ramp. They travel through subterranean corridors floored with linoleum where pipes sprout out of walls in bunches, run alongside you for a while, and snake back out of view. Long fluorescent tubes hang from the ceiling, filling the halls with warm white light. The doors he occasionally sees are the metal variety with the push-to-open bars and darkness behind their tall, narrow, crosshatched windows. Every now and then they come to an intersection or go down a few flights of cement steps.

Skeila, eagerly urging Sid to walk faster, plainly knows the way. She races down another staircase, waiting at the bottom for him to catch up. He's just thinking about how there's nobody else down here, human or otherwise, when they happen to turn a corner and come across a group of five other spiders.

Having accepted the reality of meeting his first spider, Sid fails to think much of them. They are a range of different heights and colors; one of them is wearing some kind of robe but the others are naked, exposing a variety of earth-toned tits and dicks. He is thoroughly determined not to look like some kind of tourist in front of these other spiders and is just gonna walk on past like this is everyday shit for him, maybe even give 'em a hey-what's-up nod, but then he notices that Skeila has stopped dead in her tracks and suddenly holds his hand very tightly. Uh oh.

He looks them over again. There's two girls—wait, three, the one in the hood's a woman, too. One of the girls is Sid's height, making her the shortest of the group. She has kind of a Halloween theme going on, being sweet potato orange all over with black eyes and black lips, twin white daggers poking out of them. She's carrying a huge plastic mug, the kind that comes with $1.49 refills at 7-11. (It's the Transcendental Gulp, only available in arachnid markets, a veritable reservoir with a handle holding 85 oz of your favorite pop.) Between her legs there is just orange fluff, but…

She's the only one of the group without a penis, with the possible exception of the spider wearing the robe. In fact, it is the girl next to her that has the biggest cock of the bunch—a taller spider, with mahogany fur frosted sunset orange at the tips, and eyes the color of winter storm clouds. She carries a canvas messenger bag over her shoulder. Her cock is as big around as a milk jug and it easily reaches her knees, soft. One of the guys, a steely blue spider with short hair, visible pectorals, and six well-defined arms, has a cock almost as big as hers even though he's taller by a foot—but the other male's is just average-sized, totally proportional to his body.

Each of them has intricate patterns dyed into their coats, kind of like tattoos, twisty loops of black vines running up the sides of their legs and thighs. And every one of them is staring at Sid, and not in a friendly way. Skeila has adopted the kind of tense, defensive stance used when you expect someone to sucker-punch you. Sid traces her line of sight directly to the group of other spiders, some of which have sprouted malicious smiles. He tries to quietly shuffle behind Skeila.

The robe wearer takes a few steps forward and slides her hood off. She is indeed a woman, older than the rest of them. There are flecks of gray coming off of her iridescent purple eyes and blending into the otherwise brown fur on her face. The lips that cushion her stubby little fangs are the same vibrant purple. Her breasts, though shapely under her red robe, are nowhere near as big as Skeila's—none of the other spider women's are. Perhaps Sid should stop thinking about her rack and about not getting eaten, or whatever the fuck spiders do to humans…

"Greetingsss, ssissster," she says in a raspy hiss. "And greetingsss to your delicious-looking human."

Well, that's great to hear. Sid considers offering a "Hi" but figures they've already passed beyond that stage of diplomacy. He feels Skeila put a claw on his back.

"What are you people doing here?" she says, suddenly stern and authoritarian.

The other spider puts her hands up, one covering her chest in a mock-wounded fashion. "We're only out for an innocent topside ssstroll. Though it is so nice to meet you and the cute little human."

Already Skeila is mentally performing the calculations she was trained to do in this situation, and they aren't going to add up in her favor. There are five of them. Three she could take, no problem, but five… In this closed environment her pepper spray would choke everyone, herself and Sid included, and her cheap taser is good exactly once. Doesn't look like they have weapons, but who knows what the stupid hissing one has under her robe. And then there's the civilian. If Sid wasn't here, she'd probably just go for it—taser the big guy, drop the other male and their boss before they can react, and then take out the orange chick and her friend, if they even want to fight at that point. But what about Sid? One of the girls could go for him while she's engaged with the others. And, if she fucks it up… she won't, but what if… then these creeps will have him. Fuck. This is all her fault. But… she's read about these spiders. She knows how they think, and as much as she might want to crack heads, maybe there's a better way…

Sid feels the claw on his back protectively move to his shoulder. "Stay away from the human."

"You know, sssister, Itkil here has always wanted a nice human boy. Haven't you, Itkil?"

The pumpkin-looking chick with the mug, the only one without a cock, says "Sure have! I bet he'd look great between my legs." Oddly enough, she speaks with a gratingly nasal Jersey accent. Sid dislikes her immediately. She shoots him a mean little grin and takes a sip of her drink, sloshing the ice inside around.

"Back the hell off," Skeila says, then pauses a moment and says firmly: "He's mine." The blunt declaration of ownership strikes Sid as worrisome.

"But sssissster, one should not be greedy. Will you not sssshare with sissster Itkil? We can all clearly see you already have a human." She points at Skeila's penis, which is closer in size to that of the second male spider rather than the giant tubesteaks the brown girl and blue guy have.

Skeila seems to have been put on the defensive by the explicit mention of her genitals. "It's mine," she says, sounding less confident now. "I mean, it's always been mine." The group's leader squeaks inquisitively—oh you don't say, please continue… "It's not a human. I was born with it, and you know that." says Skeila angrily. She sounds humiliated, and Sid feels awful for her. It explains some incongruities (the broad shoulders, the narrow hips, the geometrically spherical breasts) but he realizes ought to do something comforting or reassuring—squeeze her claw, maybe, but they aren't holding hands anymore and he doesn't want to draw attention to himself by talking…

"Well then, sssissster," the other spider snickers, eliciting a scowl from Skeila, "I suppose that would explain it. But," she says loftily, "I think we musssst see you demonssstrate your claim to this human for us."

Pumpkin spider interjects. "But Episkopos, I—"

"Itkil, the founding principle of the Huntsmen is to preserve the sacred bond between a spider and their human in these sacrilegious modern times. If this human belongs to her, then we shall simply have to let them be. Unlessss—" and here is where the malicious, mysterious leader turns to Skeila with a gleam in her garnet eyes, as Itkil grumpily crosses her arms into three pairs, "—the human does not belong to her after all?"

Skeila has been holding Sid close to her side for the latter part of this exchange; presently he feels her muscles shift as she swallows hard, and then says "Get on the ground," in the clear, level voice that seems to have replaced that casual drawl he was starting to like. When he hesitates, she speaks again, firmly, leaving little room for disobeyal: "Do it." Then, quieter: "Trust me." Tall order for paranoid Sid, who believes in the existence of trust like the blind believe in color…

Skeila's hands on his shoulders gently press him down to all fours as she kneels behind him. He can feel a blunt point pressing against his ass. Oh. She's gonna fuck him, he realizes. Now all that ownership talk makes sense. She bends down over him, using her knees and the hands she places next to his to support herself. He can feel her breasts press into his back and even, through the fabric of his hoodie, the dual points of two hardening nipples. She is very, very warm. He feels the smooth surface of a fang slide past his ear; she makes a sound like she's about to say something, but stops. Her middle pair of arms embraces him, and he suddenly feels the hands from the lower arms grasping at his crotch, apparently trying to unclasp his fly. He's not sure if Skeila's having difficulty manipulating the button—it is small compared to her claws—or if it's just nerves.

"Just rip his clothes off!" yells the steely blue spider from the hunting party. The matron in the robe gives him a brief reproving look but says nothing.

"Uh, I can get that," Sid offers nervously.

"I got it, I got it," Skeila says testily, and finally manages to pop his fly open. She pulls his jeans down, and her claw brushes against the erection in his boxers. He's as surprised as Skeila is to find it there. They catch each others' eyes and Sid feels his cheeks flush. "I'd be lyin' if I said I didn't want to do this," she confesses with a quiet whisper in his ear. "Sorry about the audience though," she pointedly says in a louder voice, shooting a dirty look at the group's hissing leader.

"On with it, ssissster. We do have other businessss."

Skeila pulls back from Sid a bit. Over his shoulder, he watchers her retrieve something out of a pouch on her belt. It looks like a ketchup packet, but she tears it open and squeezes out onto her hard penis—apparently lube is part of her standard utility kit. Sid cranes his head up a bit, and gets a good look at Skeila's cock as she rubs the slippery liquid all over it, seeing it become hard for the first time, black and brilliantly shiny from the lubricant. He's not sure what it would measure in inches, nine, maybe ten, but it's plenty sizable enough to make him concerned about the fit. Skeila sees him watching. "Well? Whatcha think?" she asks.

"I think you're hot."

Skeila beams, yanks down his boxer shorts, and throws herself down over him again, pressing her body against the arch of his back. He feels the slick hardness of her cock slide between the cheeks of his exposed ass. She brings her face next to his; on the round surface of her glossy black eyes he can see not only his own distorted reflection, but an unmistakable warmth behind it…

They kiss intensely. Skeila's fangs press against the outside of his lips while Skeila forcefully snakes her tongue into his mouth; he's happy to let her do so for fear of cutting his own tongue open on her teeth. Despite her observers, Skeila looks happy when they break the kiss, wearing a wide grin that is simultaneously playful and predatorial.

"Enough with the mushy crap," mutters spurned Itkil.

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Skeila seems to take her cue—she holds Sid tighter while he, on all fours, feels the blunt tip of her cock poking his asshole. Getting fucked is going to be an entirely new sensation for him, and he doesn't expect to like it. He feels Skeila push into him a little and he feels strong discomfort as muscles he rarely has occasion to think about resist her entry. She pauses, and Sid thinks okay, she must be in now—but no, sorry Sid, that's just her getting situated. When she fits her whole bulbous cockhead inside, Sid knows it for sure; he can't help letting out a high-pitched little yelp that makes some of the watching spiders chuckle. Ow. Ow. Skeila stops and asks "Y'okay?" He exhales and nods wordlessly, so she slowly inches in a little further. Sid tenses and arches his back, trying to concentrate on the firm tits smashed against him. She sighs happily against his head and continues, slowly, to enter.

"This is gonna get a little weird," she tells him.

Through clenched teeth: "This has already been a pretty weird night for me."

She now has her cock all the way up his ass, or at least to the maximum point that he can physically accommodate. Sid feels something wrap around his own erect penis—one of Skeila's claws; the padded inner surface feels nice against his cock. She strokes him slowly as she begins to move in and out. Sid finds it surprisingly… okay. Sure, it hurts like hell. He was expecting that. Gonna be sore tomorrow, oh yes. But there's a pleasurable element to it too, beyond the disarming pain and slow-building burn, one that becomes stronger the more Skeila fucks him.

"Let's get this offa you," Skeila pants. Rearing herself up a bit, she deftly pulls his hoodie and undershirt over his head with her two upper claws, him lifting each hand in turn to free his arms. His naked back feels frigid until the spider lays down over him again and the welcome warmth returns. Now he can clearly feel the tips of her nipples on the outside edges of his shoulderblades. His whole back is tickled by the blanket of her soft, short fur. Claws drag along his chest and shoulders as she picks up the pace of her fucking, until soon her hips are slamming into his ass and shaking his whole body with every thrust, a single squeaky pant coming from the spider on each impact. He realizing he's taking her full length and feels somewhat proud, though he's not ready to cop to enjoying it. Maybe if those freaky other spiders weren't watching them so closely. Sure, Sid feels like someone's watching him under normal circumstances, but he can see them all leering whenever he looks up. But Skeila's enthusiasm certainly seems undimmed. The claws on his shoulders pull him back with every thrust, adding just a little bit more oomph to the powerful collisions of hip and butt. Soon, Sid can't even feel the pain anymore—in fact, all he can feel down there one undifferentiated hot wave of pleasure, peaking when Skeila's cock is deepest in him.

He looks behind him and sees Skeila clearly enjoying herself, exertion visible on her arachnid face, tips of the longer hair-fur on top of her head weighed down by tiny droplets of sweat forming like dew on grass, looking down intently at the connection between them. He wants to see it too. Lifting his head up, he sees the small of his own back, and blackness spreading up it like wine through a paper towel.

"Oh shit—" A claw's soft inside clamps over his mouth.

"Uh, yeah! Oh, shit! You like that!" Skeila yells, trying to sound dominant and in control. His eyes are huge with panic. Something like ohmygodwhathfugyoudointome escapes from between a crevice between the fingers covering his mouth. She puts her mouth to his ear so only he can hear and whispers "Play along!"

He reflexively tries to pull away from her, not that scrawny Sid could ever hope to extricate himself out from under the massive arachnid, but finds that he cannot even pull away from her hips, not any more than he could pull his arm out of its socket. He's stuck. They're connected somehow. Skeila's still making grinding motions, and it still feels—well, it still feels really good down there, but there doesn't seem to be any actual fucking going on any more. When Sid calms down and Skeila can no longer feel his mouth churn frantically beneath the soft pad of her claw, she unmuzzles him. "What—what—"

"Don't worry, you're gonna be fine…" Skeila resituates herself, hefting Sid along with relative ease, so that she is now sitting on the floor with an arm out behind her, knees spread apart and Sid in the V of the valley between them, held up a little by her arms, so that his head falls into the crevice between her breasts. "Let's take these off too," she murmurs, removing his shoes and pulling off his pants entirely. His heart races when he sees how far the dark color has spread along his body, from below his navel to his upper thighs. He is getting smoother somehow; the hockey-stick ridges where you can see skinny Sid's hipbones jutting out are eroding away. "This'll help…" Skeila takes his legs and positions him with his feet up under his butt, still grinding away, still feeling amazing.

"Help what?" he whispers.

She looks momentarily guilty. "I'm… making you my cock." It's almost a question, the way she says it, like she's asking if he's gonna be mad, but the sentence doesn't even make sense. At least not immediately. When he connects the shiny black surface spreading up him and the color of Skeila's penis, the dots connect in his head. She is actually somehow joining him to herself.

Sid's terrified, natch, but he's also fascinated. He doesn't even understand how it's biologically possible. Some structures in the body might be roughly isomorphic; he figures the momentarily dizzying sensation he had in his gut might be his digestive tract rewiring itself to be a, well, a reproductive tract. Shit, he's gonna be a reproductive organ, in a minute… But other parts aren't so close—based on the way his inner thighs have connected with the back of his calves, he's pretty sure that his legs, which are slowly getting rounder and shorter, are becoming testicles. Nuts aren't anything like legs, but he can't really see his knees or his feet anymore…

His bellybutton vanishes in front of his eyes. There is a spreading change moving up his torso like a slow wave, his body becoming rounder, his formerly oblate cross-section becoming circular. Down at the base, he is now quite firmly affixed to her; his ass is entirely gone and his back connects immediately with her body in a single graceful sweep.

"I'm not sure if I want to be a cock."

"Well… too bad! You're my cock." Sid sees some of the observing spiders nod approvingly, and although that line didn't quite sound as forced as the last, he tries to reassure himself that this is all some kind of act between the two of them. His stomach lurches. Breathing becomes not more difficult, but stranger somehow—wait, is he even still breathing? He can't tell. There's a rapid pounding sensation, but maybe that's only the racing heart rate and the adrenaline. It feels like his legs are sagging on the floor. He tries to wiggle them and gets nothing.

Skeila leans back and grips him at his waist—or base—and strokes, hard back-massage rubbing that blissfully relaxes his lumbar muscles into total nonexistence. It feels great. She nibbles gently on his ear, and though the transformation hasn't gotten that far yet, that feels pretty good too… He dares to look down and confirms that yes, though they're still slightly lumpy where his knees were, his legs are turning into balls, big round ones, with some patches of Skeila's fur even sprouting here and there. And he realizes that just as those are forming, his own balls are vanishing and his still-hard penis is shrinking, the only thing down there that was unequivocally his anymore, sliding backwards and vanishing like a crumbling tower.

Skeila grabs his head, making him look at her instead. And just like that, she starts making out with him again, really frenzied now, yet he doesn't get so much as nicked by all those scary teeth. And meanwhile those hands of hers feel so good down there all going crazy on his skin like that; he doesn't protest when she holds his arms at his side, and he isn't surprised when he is immediately unable to unstick them from his body (can he still call it his?)

Feeling his neck tensing, Sid breaks the kiss. A strand of viscous liquid momentarily hangs between them. There is a sharp taste in the back of his throat. Realizing he may soon lose the ability, he looks down at himself, almost fully transformed from the chest down, a sturdy shaft with that long cushiony muscle running up the middle of his underside and a crumpled band of foreskin starting to form below his shoulders. He looks up at Skeila again, and this time he's the one that goes for the kiss. His tongue accidentally scrapes against a tooth—it's nearly as sharp as it looks. Skeila rewards his enthusiasm with a series of long, hard strokes, squeezing hard with four hands. Each one pumps fuzzy feelings of electric pins and needles up his body, rising a little higher each time, up to his shoulders, his neck, his chin…

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It's difficult for him to move his neck at all now. He realizes he must be getting shorter, or smaller—as Skeila strokes him his face periodically bumps into the inner surface of one or the other of Skeila's breasts, his cheek brushing her soft fur and flesh. He uses a remaining burst of muscular effort to grab a mouthful of tit the next time he swings past, and Skeila, getting the picture, makes it easier for him by leaning in and holding him at the base to rub him on her breast—rub her own cock on her breast, Sid thinks. He feels the pebble of her nipple go rolling past his body, briefly bending in each direction as he goes back and forth. Then she slaps his tubelike body against her tits, fur cushioning the sound of the impact.

Now he can only look straight up. He can't move his arms at all—he's fairly sure he no longer has arms. He can feel with complete clarity the location of every one of Skeila's claws as they rub their way across his skin, realizing from the way they move about his that his body is now totally cylindrical. He tries to say something but only produces a gasp. Bitter saltiness wells in his throat; some splashes out of a mouth he can no longer completely close.

He is looking up, backwards, into Skeila's face. It is enormous to him; her body occupies his whole field of vision. In the black mirror of her eyes he can see himself reflected dimly, a veiny stalk shooting up from between furry legs that curve hyperbolically away from the center point in each round lens—him. He is stiff and tense, his neck filling out to the same diameter as his body, his head puffing up like rising dough, flaring out at the bottom where the ridge of the glans is forming…

He watches it all happen to his reflection. Next his nose is gone completely, and now his head looks more like a cock's than a person's. For the moment there are still reminders other than his darting eyes, but the arcs of his ears are sinking away, the edges of his mouth have already pressed together vertically into a closed slit that connects with the pointed upward sweep that formed where his chin had been. His eyes are the last to go. They are not really sinking—they only look like it because the puffy cock flesh around them is rising to cover them up. Before they are gone completely, they blink, and simply do not open again. The surface of the cock rushes in to fill the two indentations and in a second more it is complete; Sid's body is now an erect shaft and his head a dark, swollen glans.

He can still see—and yet he has no control over his body. The image lurches forward as Skeila lunges at him, her face jumping into full view as she kisses him, her tongue darting down his piss slit. She pumps her hands up and down his stout length faster, and for a second Sid sees her mouth open before him like a looming cave as she takes him in, deadly-sharp pearl-white stalactites seeming to miss him by mere millimeters, but then there is darkness as her lips clamp down around his shoulders—no, no shoulders anymore, that's just where his head ends—and there is only the incredible feeling of her tongue, every tastebud's surface apparent to him at his new depth of sensation, sliding wetly over his upper surface while the most sensitive part of his underside rubs along the roof of her mouth.

Skeila removes him from her mouth with a wet pop. Four claws become invisible blurs along his surface. "Oh, fuck, Sid!" He feels, building at his base and as a growing sensation running from balls to head, in the way that lightning is said to trace its route from the ground up in the microseconds before the return strike, what he knows to be their approaching orgasm.

And then eeeeeeeek sharp cold all over her shoulder and breast running down to her crotch; Skeila shrieks and stops masturbating. The spider with the huge mug has poured its contents all over Skeila—it turns out to be raspberry iced tea. A sugary river soaks into her fur and carries pebbly little chips of ice into her lap.

"Itkil!" reproaches the group's hooded leader.

The short orange spider girl with the upturned and dripping mug is pointing and laughing; there are a few low chuckles coming from some of the other spiders in her party.

"Mossst undignified, Itkil. I ssssuppose you do not want our next prey after all—Brother Lassssck may have that privilege instead." Sullen Itkil goes hrrmph while the blue spider with the huge penis, by way of congratulations, does three simultaneous knuckle daps with the other male.

Until the rude interruption, Skeila had forgotten all about the Huntsmen. Their leader saunters up to where she sits on the floor, with an erection quickly numbing to flaccidity by the buildup of ice at its base. "I recant my previous sssskepticism. That human clearly belongs to you, though I ssssuspect he did not yet know it." She leans down close to Skeila. "And whatever they tell you the rules are, sssissster, you don't have to change him back. He's yours now."

The matron stands and snaps her fingers, calling her crew to attention, and without a further word they head off down the corridor. Itkil bumps Skeila's shoulder on the way out. The staccato clacking of their feet recedes into the distance and Skeila lies back down in the puddle of tea, too exhausted to move. She spreads her legs so her balls are no longer covered in an avalanche of pop fountain ice.

She wants to go after them—the civilian wildcard is no longer in play, plus she got a good look at them and saw no weapons, so she's pretty sure she could take them all in a fair fight—but it's no use. The change is that exhausting. It'll be a minute before she can even stand. She can't even call it in—no reception here in the interstitial layer between the surface and Midway. For a little bit the only noise is the buzzing of fluorescent lamps and the spider's ragged breathing, but that gradually quiets down. Then Skeila tentatively asks her penis: "Sid? You okay?"

No response. She props herself up on her elbows. "Sid?" Silence. "C'mon, at least talk to me…" Nothing. She droops back to the floor with an irritated sigh—then, remembering something, sits back up. "Um, just so you know, if you think like you're talking, even though you're not actuallytalking, I can hear it. Just in case you're not really giving me the silent treatment." She looks at her cock expectantly.

—like this? Whoa, goes Sid's scratchy mumble in her head.

"You seriously woulda never thought to try that?"

Didn't know telepathy was part of being a penis.

"It's not telepathy, it's… I don't know, nerves and shit." She scoots out of the puddle and lies back down on the cool linoleum, six arms spread-eagled. "Are you, like, completely pissed at me?"

Uh… what that woman said… you're going to change me back, right? I'm not going to be stuck this way forever?

"'Course I'm gonna change you back."

I guess I'm not completely pissed at you, then. Not completely.

"Awesome. I totally saved your ass from those crazy fuckers, you know."

Who were they?

"The Huntsmen. Total nutjobs. Aren't they freaky? Didja hear the fake-ass hiss their head bitch uses? There aren't very many of them, but they're like… I don't know. Kind of a cult, or a weird militia group. They think humans are supposed to be cocks. Like, it's your purpose. Your only purpose."

That's pretty fucked.

"Totally. There's plenty of other stuff humans are good at." Sid doesn't respond. "C'mon, I'm kidding."

Ha ha. How about you change me back now?

"What, right now?" Skeila asks in the same tone of voice she might have used if Sid had casually asked her to eat a bicycle.

Yeah, that would be nice…

"Sid, I can't change you back now! I just changed you! As fast as I could! I can barely frikkin' walk!"

What? What the hell? Why can't you change me back?

"'Cause that's just how it works." Skeila hesitantly rises on one shaky leg, and stands with a couple arms on the wall to steady herself. Pooled tea goes flowing down her body, much of it running straight down the length of her new penis. Sid experiences the bizarre sensation of the stream of liquid tracing the veins on his new phallic body and running off the rounded tip of his head in a single stream, bisecting his field of vision, falling towards splashdown on the floor. The thought occurs to him that he could be in for similar experiences if he is going to be stuck like this much longer… "Takes a lotta effort to change a human, 'specially that fast, and we can only do it, like, once a day in either direction. At best."

So you can't change me back until—

"Tomorrow. Probably. I need to get some fuckin' sleep."

Will you change me back tomorrow? Promise?

"Yes, I promise." Though he can't see her face, she sounds like she's rolling her eyes.

What… what am I gonna do till then?

The spider takes a few uneasy steps and lets go of the wall. "You're gonna be a cock."

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2

Re: Protective Custody (Series) - by teddy sloth

As Skeila walks, Sid sways gently against opposite thighs in turn. The rhythmic motion is comforting, and since now he feels like he has been awake for days, being just as susceptible to the change's exhausting side effects as his host, he would nod off completely if it wasn't for the occasional bursts of vertiginous tingling from Skeila bouncing her balls up and down as she descends another flight of stairs. They come to a place Skeila tells him is a Tube station; to Sid it looks like a cross between a subway and a bus depot. At the turnstile where spiders and humans alike are presenting tickets to a young spider in a meter-maid hat, Skeila instead flashes her a badge and sails through without waiting for official approval.

There are big cylindrical train cars waiting there for passengers to board on steel tracks that vanish into matching black tunnels at opposite ends of the long room. Inside there are hard plastic benches running around the walls; Skeila sits on one and immediately begins to tap at her phone. Sid, propped up on Skeila's crossed leg, looks around the compartment. He's not sure how, but he can see perfectly well in the direction he's pointing. There are two other spiders inside; one is a male wearing these two suspender-type things that don't actually hold anything up, absorbed in using a phone of his own. And on the bench opposite Skeila, there's a girl spider wearing nothing at all, short and banana-yellow with blueberry eyes, and Sid catches her eyeing him up. Skeila's engrossed in her phone, so why shouldn't she stare? He feels individual hairs on Skeila's leg move alongside his body. Is—is he stiffening up?

A tone sounds, the automatic doors of the compartment glide shut, and all of the spiders shift in their seats as they accelerate. The silver pellet hurtles through snaking tunnels in the earth, quiet and smooth. Sid can feel the unwavering stare of the girl across from them; she seems to smile slightly as Sid, who cannot help himself, begins to visibly engorge… But then Skeila's phone call connects, and there is her voice to distract him:

"Five Huntsmen. Ten minutes ago they were around sublevel 7, under City Hall." Skeila is trying to be quiet, but the uniform and the dire matters implied by her low, mumbled tone have attracted the attention of Sid's admirer, who is now trying to lip-read Skeila instead of ogle her. "There was a human topsider with me… No, I did… Jeez, I'll explain in a minute, first get a call out to someone on the surface…" The yellow spider does her best to overhear Skeila summarizing her night to the voice on the other end of the line, though she turns away when Skeila gives her a nasty look.

"Yes, understood." Skeila taps the phone and reattaches it to her belt. "Shit. Debriefing meeting when the captain gets in at ten AM." She sighs; it comes out as a worn-out squeak. "Just enough time for a shower and a couple hours of sleep."

Oh, uh, that sucks.

"Yeah." She slouches far down into her seat and raises four claws to rub her eyes. "It does."

You'll change me back before that, right?

"Uh… sorry, Sid, but there's no way I can do that and be able to face the captain. I probably wouldn't even make it in to HQ."

Skeila, what the fuck? You said you would change me back tomorrow! You promised!

"Okay, number one, for me it wouldn't even be tomorrow until like, six P.M. if I didn't have to get up for this stupid debriefing. So I'll still be completely tired. And even if I wake up at ten in the morning and I can change you back, then I'd have to go to a big meeting where I'm probably gonna get yelled at when I feel like shit and look like it too." About there is where she's going to call him an inconsiderate asshole, but she stops. She's not going to get into an argument with her penis on the Tube—it's not that spiders don't talk to their cocks, it's that she doesn't want to make a scene.

I don't want to be stuck like this forever!

Is he serious? Does he, for real, think that she's just as bad as the Huntsmen, when she just saved him from having to ride around between some crazy bitch's thighs until the human politicos finally talk the AAA into going full Waco on those nutjobs? It makes her mad enough that she wants to tell him well-too-fuckin'-bad, I listened to that dumb hissy bitch and now I'm never gonna change you back, so there. Or maybe instead she'll tell him to go fuck himself, who'd want you for a cock anyway you ungrateful little shit… She bites her lower lip and is trying hard not to tear up. If she lets herself go all crybaby over this, she's really gonna be pissed. The hormones do give you mood swings, you know. And, well, she always loves it when she can walk around without being immediately pegged as a sexual incongruity. To spiders it's only harmlessly interesting, but she hates how obvious it is that her cock is just that, her own cock, an obvious difference between her and all the women who either have big phallified humans or nothing so visible down there. Some part of her is going to enjoy blending in no matter how reluctant her cock is—and will be disappointed when it's time to release him.

Skeila?

For a few seconds the darkness outside the tube's windows gradually brightens and then suddenly falls away. Skeila doesn't feel like talking to Sid right now, but she still wants him to see this. The spider stands up so that her hips are at window level, and beyond the fat, ghostly acorn of his own reflected head, Sid can see the city of Midway.

He feels like a gnat in the hangar of a jetliner. There are other Tube cars out there, the twin railings they hang under nearly invisible in the disorientingly vast cavern they are now in, many yards away through patches of murky cave fog that roll by like clouds under an airplane wing. Some cars match pace and some zip past in the opposite direction, faint silhouettes in their brightly lit windows visible for a moment. Beneath them are buildings and figures moving around in the dark gridlines between them. The buildings grow larger and taller as they move towards the crowded point where all of the cars are rushing towards or away from, the center of the city where there are skyscrapers so large that they touch the ceiling of the cavern itself—and not just anyskyscrapers, it only takes Sid a moment to realize. He recognizes the characteristic appearance of almost every significant building in the business district aboveground, some of which he was at only hours ago, and he realizes that they don't merely touch the ceiling, they come down out of it…

The track dips and now they glide along at the level of some of the taller buildings, making a smooth turn around one large block of apartments where an old-fashioned clothesline extends to its neighbor across the street, strung high enough for the strange garments hanging from it to rustle as the Tube passes overhead. The tracks come down out of the air and converge like rigid telephone lines towards the paved tarmac behind a blocky building, and a muddled voice sounding through unseen speakers asks all passengers to please prepare for arrival at Lower Wood Street Station.

When they get out onto the street, where the sleek grey faces of buildings stretch far above them towards the dim ceiling ribbed with rafters as wide as buses, Sid realizes the scope of this whole thing. The sidewalks bustle with as much activity as any downtown street on a Friday night, crowded with hundreds and hundreds of spiders. Practically all Sid can see down at dick level as Skeila navigates the crowd is a forest of spidery arms and legs (and arms, and arms, and arms…) There are humans here too, but in a decided minority, walking down the sidewalks alone, with spiders, or with members of their own species. And present in equal number—if not greater—are the other humans, the ostentatiously large cocks maybe one in a dozen spiders has hanging between their thighs or throbbingly hard. Oh yes, there are plenty of them walking around with erections and not the least bit of embarrassment. A graphite-colored male with yellow eyes and a massive hard-on leading his way forward gives Sid a glance when he and Skeila pass each other. A periwinkle blue girl Skeila impatiently passes is giggling to a friend while her azure dick sticks up between her tits. Perhaps it is because they have just passed a spider couple sitting on a bench who each have erections of their own, but only the girl's is human, the black length reaching to her tits as her boyfriend strokes it with three claws, hugging her close with his other set of arms while he leans down to nibble at her neck. A fine way to wait for the bus.

There's something that's giving Sid deja vu, and he doesn't know what—all of the spiders in their many colorful combinations are new to him, as is having his whole surface stimulated by everything that touches him, each hair on Skeila's leg, even to some extent the air moving over him as she strides forward. His instinct for pattern recognition kicks in when the crowd dissipates somewhat and he can see across the street to a building he thinks he recognizes as an aboveground art gallery he was in once. Not only does it look identical, at first glance, but the streets around it are also identical. Only then does he realize that the layout of the major streets is the same—those skyscraper pillars coming out of the ceiling must nail down the geometry of their city, at least partially. Their Liberty Avenue intersects Sixth at the same angle our Liberty intersects Sixth and so forth, creating the same small triangular plot where they meet—and there is the same wedge-shaped building with tall windows subdivided into many small panes, which freaks Sid out a little. But it turns out not to be the Wood Street Galleries; the street-level windows in this version are now open staircases down into a dim environment glowing with purple light and thumping softly in heavily muted beats. A spider wearing a six-armed flannel jacket pastes a flyer over several others already stuck to a sandwich board outside. As they pass by, Sid reads:

THE DRONERY
open thurs-sat 3 AM 9 AM
cover $5, humans get in free
this saturday: saint alaika

Other buildings seem to be hewn directly from the rock. Some entire blocks look like they were cut out of the same monolithic cliff. They arrive at Skeila's apartment building, in a cluster sculpted to look like New York brownstones. Each has the same striated bands, a blotchy stripe of light and dark grey running directly from one building onto its neighbor like a strip of granite bacon. By the time they arrive they still have not spoken to each other. Not spending any energy on talking is fine with Skeila; right now she just wants to crawl into her web and squeeze in as much sleep as she can.

There is another spider inside, in the small kitchen separated from the living room by a tall counter. Except for a stark dusting of flour covering her forearms like snow on asphalt, she is totally black. Black fur, black eyes, and a long black cock that bounces as she bobs her head, wiggles her hips, and uses three whisks at once to stir a mixing bowl big enough to serve punch, all in time with the high-powered Nordic speed metal assault squealing out of some tinny speakers.

"Ketta? Ketta, can you turn that down?"

"Huh?" She turns off the music. "Making brownies, they'll be ready—hi there!" The other spider squeaks in surprise when she sees Skeila's new cock. "I see someone had a busy day at work…"

"Shit, you don't even know. Can you please keep it down? I really, really need to sleep…"

In a room upstairs, she flicks on a light switch and sighs. "Well, this is my lair." It is small and cool, with stone walls the color of the inside of a jacket. Piles of clothing litter the floor, the top of a dresser holds hairbrushes clogged with sandy hair, and there is an unaligned collection of posters taped to the wall. Sid recognizes the blue-white-red bullseyes and the iconic photograph of Simonon smashing his bass, but there are posters of spiders too—even one of what appears to be a spider with windswept inky fur sharing a stage with a much younger Morrissey. This cluttered room could belong to any young woman with a passion for classic UK acts, except for the only unexpected feature—and really, why shouldn't he have expected it—which is the gigantic web slung over a third of the bedroom hammock-style between opposite walls. Uncountable silvery threads connect in a chaotic network that obviously has some structure, and yet Sid grinds a mental gear as he encounters a pattern he cannot quite identify. On this marvelous structure are pillows and a blanket, which Skeila shoves out of the way as she sits to wriggle her uniform off. The uniform joins one of the piles on the floor, and the spider drags a claw through fur sticky with dried tea. Shower time.

There is hot water immediately when she turns the faucet. Sid's vision blurs as it flows over him and steam fills the small bathroom connected to Skeila's bedroom. She stands there letting herself be drenched for a little while. Her palm-tree hair flattens against her head, covering most of her closed eyes, as she looks up into the spray. She begins the tedious process of lathering up with a small blue and white bottle of liquid soap in the corner that generates immense mounds of frothy white suds in her fur. It's infused with a bracing amount of peppermint; the whole shower smells like candycanes and when the lather reaches Sid it tingles up and down his length and freezes his balls. It's like she's teabagging a snowdrift.

She washes her arms with one half of each pair doing the other. She soaps up her breasts, dripping a little bit of soap on each in turn and working them each with a claw, really kneadingthem… is she deliberately putting on a show? The way she's arching her back, two elbows pointed at the ceiling as she stretches her upper arms, feeling herself up with the others… If she is, it's working on Sid. He is no longer merely half-erect but has grown to a full hard-on. The stream of water running down Skeila's stomach bifurcates around his rigid base and flows down his balls to a wet point of fur. Now it's his turn to get clean; a slippery flurry of soft clawpads slide over his entire length from base to tip, creating halos of pleasure as each of her digits slide over his slippery head. She rubs him thoroughly, and when she is finished there are clusters of white bubbles dripping down him, her slick and hard black shaft.

He stays erect for the rest of her shower, and has not grown one bit softer even by the time Skeila has toweled herself off and stands in front of her mirror, lit by parallel lines of spherical white bulbs, drying herself off with a towel and a pair of blowdryers. She holds him to one side, then the other, as she dries between her legs. After she shuts off the loud, whirring blowdryers, the only sound in the bathroom is the soft rustle created by three of her hairbrushes impatiently combing tangles out of her fur.

"So are you really worried I'm never gonna change you back?"

Sid thinks about when Skeila had changed him, about how possessive, how predatorial her expression was. All those arms holding him in place. He could never have fought her off even if he'd tried. Sid thinks about the Huntsmen and their leader, that spider woman with the purple eyes, and what she told Skeila: You don't have to change him back. He's yours now. And the surprised look on Skeila's face, like no one had ever really suggested the idea to her before… And yet, he realizes to his own surprise that the spider has managed to slip past years of accretionary paranoia in a matter of hours. Maybe it's some psychological reaction to being her dick (Cockholm Syndrome, we'll call it) or maybe, just maybe, a miracle has occurred and Sid, even if it's just this once, has learned to trust…

Nah. Sorry about freaking out on you like that.

"'Salright. I'm sorry about all this. It'll be over soon, and who knows, maybe it won't even be the worst thing that ever happened to you…"

It won't be. I mean, I got to see Midway. And I got to meet you.

She smiles and then winces as she brushes through a particularly tough knot. When she bends down to brush out her ankles and calves, he pokes directly into the underside of her breast. She laughs. "Better settle down, boy…" When she switches to the other leg she leans much further over, and it does nothing to alleviate his hardness problem when Sid's sensitive head presses directly into the spider's breast for a moment before his whole body slips into the crevasse between her tits, her chest moving against him as she carefully combs through her fur…

Naked and mostly dry, she hops up into her web, which sways a little. She reaches over to turn off her lamp and the room is thrown into darkness so total even Skeila cannot see in it. For ten minutes, maybe twenty, she restlessly shifts positions. On her back, when hard Sid tents her blankets. On her side, with him jutting out perpendicular to her legs, bumping into some of her elbows as she curls up. She rolls onto her stomach for a little bit and he sticks out towards the floor between strands of the web. Presently she's on her back again, and all Sid can feel is the sensation of her silk blankets against what cognitive habit is making him think of as his face—but the blanket is not rubbing against brow or nose or chin, the feeling is of the overstimulating touch of the fabric against the contour of his sensitive head, adhering slightly to the moisture gathering in his one opening…

"Sid…" squeaks Skeila in a whisper. "Are you asleep?"

Nope.

"Me either." There is a short silence in the darkness. "Um… a lot of time, before I go to sleep, I jerk off…" She punctuates this with an inquisitive squeak to make the implied question obvious. He can already feel the soft inner padding of her thumb and finger touching him at his base; could he ever dream of refusing?

Okay… but you have to turn on the light.

Fur rustles hurriedly in the dark. As Skeila stretches out towards her lamp, her breast brushes up against Sid and electrifies his whole right side. Once the light is on and she's curled back up on her web looking at him, she's practically all he can see. The spider that was merely big before he was shrunken down and rendered stiffly immobile now seems impossibly titanic. Bows of light like planetary rings sparkle in her smooth black eyes and he can see—again—himself in them, each reflection coming back at a slightly different angle like dressing room mirrors. It is not a muted image of his own familiar face that he sees, but a thick cock-head.

"You do make a really good looking cock, you know."

He's oddly pleased with the compliment, though he cannot tell what makes him an attractive specimen even with a view of his new phallic form from every side.

Well, you make a really good looking spider chick.

Wordsworth he ain't, but it makes her smile, a happy, devious little narrow-eyed smile that might be accompanied by blushing, if you could ever tell on a spider. Sid, ticking up and down with every one of her quickening heartbeats, could not be harder than he is already.

"How about we finish what that orange bitch interrupted?" When she grabs a hold of him and squeezes it's like being held in the grip of a giant. His puffy head throbs outward, his stream of thought momentarily disrupted by a surge of pleasure. She squeaks breathily and beyond her breasts, huge round hills in his field of vision, he sees her mouth open slightly to display her sharp white horseshoe of upper teeth.

It occurs to her how enthusiastically he went for her breasts during the change. She rubs him into them, dimpling their round surface, pressing him into her nipple and making circles on it with his tip. She sticks him between her tits and mashes them together; they are big enough to cover even her huge new cock. She slides them up and down her cock, titfucking herself. Then, with Sid still trapped, she snakes her tongue out and gently flicks it over his bulbous head. She slowly rubs Sid's lower shaft while she keeps him in place, layering kisses all over the tip of her penis before slipping her tongue into the slit and beginning a passionate makeout session with her own dick, swirling her tongue in circles while giving him long, dramatic strokes with some wrist movement on the down stroke.

It would be easy for Skeila to forget about her partner; masturbation is a very solitary act even when one's genitals are technically someone else. And unlike most spider girls, Skeila is the full-time owner and operator of a penis, so she's well accustomed to getting the job done with 15 minutes of uninspired up-and-down pumping. But she's going for the theatrics here because she wants, badly, to blow Sid's mind. Sure, he'll almost certainly still make her change him back tomorrow. And odds are good he'll scurry right back up to the surface and she will, sadly, never see him again. (Thoughts intrude here, as dark fantasies do in private times, about really keeping him, no matter what he says. He'd learn to love it. But this idea nearly sends her over the edge, so she tries to push it back down.) She wants to make sure that even once he's walking around on two legs again up in the harsh sunlight, that he never forgets the best orgasm he ever had was when he was a part of her.

When he begins leaking at his tip, she opens wide and sticks as much of him as she can into her mouth, which is only most of the head. Again he passes between her intimidating teeth, but he is not even nicked, and in a second her lips seal around him and he is left in humid, heated darkness. Her tongue slides up his underside and back down over a wide area of contact as inexorably, as heavily, as a wet mattress being dragged over you. Things proceed this way for some time, accompanied by lewd slurping sounds as Skeila noisily sucks on as much of her penis as she can, swallowing the copious volume of precome Sid leaks into her mouth, and all this while continuing to stroke his bottom portion and squeeze him between her tits.

Even though Sid is mentally present, he's completely blissed-out and not thinking much at all—which for Sid is an uncommon feat. His over-analytical mind carefully collates every incoming stimuli, connecting dots that may or may not actually be there. But as a penis, every sensation is wonderful and needs no analysis. For the time, being he has succumbed to the instincts of his new form. He is her cock, and as long as the nerves on every inch of his rigid body are buzzing like this, he's perfectly happy to be her cock. Sid has mentally given himself over, and is awaiting the slow build of the sensation he was seconds away from experiencing hours ago, his first orgasm as a penis.

Skeila can feel his thick head throbbing in her mouth; she knows that time is not far off. A few quick strokes would finish things off right now, but why not prolong it, make it that much better… The cyclonic whirl of her tongue around his head stops and she darts into his slit once more, swishing her tongue back and forth inside his "mouth" as her lips protect him from her teeth. Then she breaks the phallic kiss, removing him from her mouth with a pop as loud as a champagne cork going off.

"You ready to come all over the place… you big, fat cock?" Skeila moans to her penis. It is hard to hold back; her words are grunted through clenched teeth. "You're the biggest, hardest cock I've ever had, you know that? You wanna come on my boobs? I can tell you like 'em, but I already showered…" She licks a long path up his underside then starts to pump with all hands. "Maybe tomorrow, if you want, we could do this again… so you can—you can—come all over me—aah!"

http://cockify.me/stories_html/img/prot_med3.png

It is that image that does it for them both; Skeila yowls as she begins to shoot a thick stream she just barely manages to aim away from herself and towards the wall. She moans continuously as several volleys of ropey come splat against the stone in dripping white blooms. That's gonna be a bitch to clean up tomorrow, but she's not too worried about it right now, panting and gasping in her web as she squeezes the last few drops out of Sid and the speed of her strokes dwindles and stops completely.

Eight impossibly tired eyes slowly close. Shit. The light's still on. An arm stretches out to turn off the lamp, and in the welcome darkness Skeila splays herself out, comfortably suspended in her network of silk. The spider lays there in hazy contentment while nothing in particular goes through her mind, spending a few motionless minutes in the afterglow. As she curls on her side, pulling the blanket over her, she asks Sid in a sleepy mumble: "Aren'tcha glad you let me jerk off?"

Yeah. Though I still want you to change me back. When you get around to it, I mean.

For a moment she considers teasing him by telling him that was so nice that now she's having second thoughts, she really will keep him after all… But she only gives her shaft an affectionate squeeze. In no time at all the very tired spider falls asleep, and so does her penis. Tomorrow will be busy.

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

Midway's dim artificial sun is rising. Ethereal lights slowly appear between the steel beams overhead, a grid of St. Elmo's fire coming online as a dimmer switch somewhere in this city gradually opens and these halogen domes warm up, programmed to deliver exactly one-third as much light as the city above receives. Topside, some humans with work to be done are beginning to stir, but here there are only a handful of spiders trudging up the steep street in this ritzy underground neighborhood, passing under the overhang of a wooden mansion's bay window up on the fourth floor, a glass bubble skeletoned with mahogany and iron.

Inside, there is a pale human in a deep red bathrobe, all blood and pomegranate, sitting at table calmly reading the Post-Gazette. Every human that lives and works in Midway ends up paler for it, but we can see from his shock of white hair, the heavy square rims of his glasses delineated in stark gray on his wax-white face and the red-irised eyes they frame, that he is not merely insufficiently tan. He finishes a page and slowly refolds the newspaper while glancing out the window at the pedestrians below.

Quiet kitchen sounds come from nearby. Cupboards closing, a faucet running, dishware clattering on a silver tray. A spider busies herself at the marble counters. She is all monochrome, soft gray coat of fur and eyes like polished charcoal. Her stark black and white maid's uniform is tiny on her, the skirt barely covering her hips and not bothering to try with her tits. With geometric exactitude, she carefully arranges the contents of the tray: a bowl containing dry Raisin Bran, a gleaming clean spoon on top of a napkin folded lengthwise, and a glass containing 12 ounces of pulpless OJ. Then, when she is satisfied each item is in its proper place, she leans over the tray. Clutching a bared breast with two claws, she begins to squeeze, kneading down towards the bowl, and soon a single white drop splashes onto a cornflake—then another and another, and then every motion of the spider's claws produces a teaspoon-sized squirt. She does not have to milk herself for long, or even switch to the other breast, before there is plenty to accompany the Raisin Bran. Pleased with herself, she carries the tray over to his table at the window and sets it down in front of him. He rewards her with a nod and a thin-lipped smile.

She flits about in the adjacent room, tidying what needs to be tidied and re-tidying what doesn't. She goes on a dusting spree with four genuine ostrich feather dusters, bestirring no dust whatsoever but looking good in the process, kicking up one foot and standing en pointe to reach the top of a high bookshelf, higher than the Doctor would ever be able to reach. She arches her back a little to show off her butt, just a bit, in case he's watching. There's work to be done elsewhere in the house. She's got to run the sweeper in the foyer; his business friends tracked in all kinds of dirt. There's the load of his shirts that need washed and ironed, and she's got to make the bed, which is in quite a state after he had her tied up all last night. But that can all wait until later. She likes to be near him while he is at home, especially since he's been spending so much time at work alone recently. Usually whenever he has appointments he will have her drive him around Midway, but lately he's been spending long nights by himself, leaving poor Skenge to mope around the mansion, glumly standing in the bay window watching the spiders and their own humans traverse the street below, thinking about her neat and perfect little white Doctor. So she stays, trying not to hover conspicuously, but ready in case he needs something. Perhaps he will want more milk. Or maybe he would like to fuck her, in which case she definitely wants to be available.

The phone rings as the Doctor is crunching his way through his morning fiber. Skenge glides noiselessly over to answer it, and soon glides back in with a claw over the phone's mouthpiece. "It's Mr. Bunch, sir. Would you like me to tell him you're unavailable?" He shakes his head and extends a porcelain hand for the phone.

"Bunch? How did things work out last night?" She is very proud that the Doctor conducts these conversations while she's still in the room. She knows that he knows that she would defend anything she overhears, much like the Doctor himself, with her life. "What kind of problem?" Whatever is being said causes him to cock a thin white eyebrow and shrug to nobody before replying. "Hah. At least we know where he is, hmm? I'll have someone sit in on the Agency's debriefing and we'll find out exactly what happened."

The phone beeps when he hangs up. She is already waiting behind him to take it.

"Skenge? Please go bring the car around front. I'll need you to drive me to the MARC building."

"Certainly, Doctor."

© 2012 teddy sloth

illustrations by fortune fox

3

Re: Protective Custody (Series) - by teddy sloth

Disorderly Conduct

There's only one human here in this crowded conference room, and he doesn't look pleased. In fact, Anthony Waterproof's fixed expression of towering boredom and exasperation is almost Zen. The stocky young man with straw-blond hair and a plain white button-down shirt rolled up at the sleeves is a junior bureaucrat at the Municipal Arachnohuman Relations Commission (MARC), here today to find out what exactly the spiders have gone and done this time—and, god willing, keep the ensuing shitstorm entirely underground.

Anthony is zoning out in a spider-sized rolling chair much too big for him on one end of a vast U-shaped table. There's a spider girl seated across from him, killing time by weaving cat's-cradles in thin silvery silk, pulling more lengths of long continuous thread out of her mouth as the pattern grows more elaborate around the pointed digits of her six clawlike hands. And next to her four spiders crowd around someone's tablet, watching human porn. The moans and grunts are just a little louder than the hip-hop the spider next to them is playing on a blocky old boombox. Nobody else seems to mind the din, although two seats down from Anthony a snowy white spider raises her voice to be heard as she yaks into her phone about the human she met last weekend, who is currently the flaccid asphalt-black cock flopping up from under her tiny skirt, draped inert over her crossed ivory thighs. And through this all, the burly rust-red spider next to Anthony somehow sleeps peacefully. His three pairs of claws are folded on top of the olive-drab sash that runs across his chest and connects to a belt. The outfit is the official uniform of the Arachnid Altercation Agency, and a brace of glittering medals is pinned to Captain Klatz's sash. A paper airplane crinkles into his forehead, making him stir in his sleep. His eight orange eyes open briefly, enough to notice Anthony before he settles back in.

"Hey, it's Waterproof. How's my favorite—uh, what do you do, again?"

"Junior Executive Liaison second-class to the Arachnid Altercation Agency," says the human. "It's on my card, which I'm certain you have. Listen, Klatz, what exactly has the Agency done now? When I got in this morning, our director immediately sent me here and told me to prepare for damage control."

"Aw, don't worry about it, kiddo. Someone changed a topsider is all."

"How many is that this month? Four? The sequestering protocols are there for a reason, Klatz! And what about the agent, hmm? Inappropriate human-targeted sexual behavior by an officer on duty? I certainly hope the Agency is planning on taking disciplinary action." Some of the spiders listening snicker; the one with the boombox turns it down for Anthony's tirade. Klatz deigns to open one eye, bright as a burning coal. "And I really hope nobody at the Federated Association of Human Retailers & Tradesmen hears about this. Or worse, the Gazette--Below. They'll run scare stories that'll keep every human away for years. Then what'll you do? The MARC is trying to present Midway as friendly and approachable! We don't need people worrying about the cops turning them into cocks!"

Klatz looks around in the ensuing silence, then booms "Alright, who invited the human?" Big laughs all around, after which the room reverts to noisy chatter.

"Very funny. Well, let me ask you, if this isn't such a big deal, then why is the mayor here?" Anthony Waterproof glances toward the shadowy black spider with the cane at the back of the room, sitting at the center of the table. "I'm sure he understands what will happen if the topside dollars stop coming in. I realize the concept is anathema to spiders, but you have got to have somediscipline here—"

Klatz waves a claw dismissively. "Nah, Arachnypoundcake's here cause of the Huntsmen."

The human's eyes bug out. "The Huntsmen are involved? What do those insane cultists have to do with any of this?! I thought you said it was one of yours!"

Klatz is about to explain when the door opens and another spider enters. Anthony Waterproof sits up in surprise—he recognizes her.

Tall even for her kind, the brown--furred female freezes like an eight--eyed deer in headlights when she sees the size of her waiting audience. She is the muted color of a wet beach, except for the deeper coffee rings around her elbows and knees, and is wearing the same uniform as Captain Klatz, though hers has fewer decorations pinned to the olive green sash and belt. The garment does nothing to cover her breasts or the long penis, black as her eyes, that dangles down to her knees. She nervously closes the door behind her.

"Skeila?!" Anthony's voice cracks a little as he shouts, and he turns red when the assembled spiders all turn to look at him.

Hey Tony! mouths the spider as she awkwardly shuffles through the silent room, broad shoulders hunched defensively inwards. She gives him a tiny little hip-height wave with one claw, self-consciously unsure of what to do with the rest. She stands at the front of the room and waits, shifting her weight from one leg to the other, switching between staring at the floor and a spot on the wall above everyone's heads.

Waterproof slouches, dumbfounded. He's known Lieutenant Skeila for years; she was a year ahead of him at State Underground, before she got boobs or a habit of punching out anyone who referred to her using male pronouns. She could be rowdy at times, sure, but he'd never expect thiskind of behavior from her. Not from the same Skeila that protected him, back when he was a continually terrified freshman, from Zacts, the cocky pre-law student on their floor that always seemed to be appearing nearby with an erection and a suggestive gleam in his eight eyes. Zacts teased him about running to the RA, but even he—like the rest of their floor—was intimidated by Skeila.

"Lieutenant Skeila," says the black spider at the back of the room. His voice is pure gravel, a freshly blasted quarry, all gray jaggedness and limestone. "I don't think anyone here has the complete story about what happened last night. Fill us in from the top, huh?"

Skeila gulps and prepares to address Mayor Arachnypoundcake, drawing herself up to her nearly nine foot height. When she opens her mouth, nothing comes out. It takes a couple false starts before she can begin, in a shaky voice, to speak: "Y—yes, sir. Um, last night, I was assigned to guard the topside MARC office downtown, cause we got this tip about someone planning to break in..." She recaps her night, stumbling and losing her train of thought here and there, starting with when she jumped the shady-looking human in a big baggy hoodie—and it turned out he was there on perfectly legitimate business; his name was Sidwell Greenstreet, and he was delivering his self-published financial zine. He was some kind of statistical savant—and pretty cute, too. Best of all, even though he was a topsider and had never seen a spider before, Sid was easygoing enough not to run away from her. Nope, he was downright sociable, offered to smoke up with her. They talked for a while, and eventually Skeila invited him to see the city underneath the one he knew. "...I mean, I always wanted to do outreach, right? Like the MARC always says?" She's appealing to Anthony, who seems thoroughly unimpressed, folding his arms while the other spiders chuckle. ("She's a model officer!" guffaws Klatz.)

She continues the story. Sid, with some trepidation, agreed to come. But while she was leading him through the underground corridors connecting human basements and Midway, they met five spiders with black twisted-ivy patterns running up the fur on their left side—the Huntsmen's distinctive dye jobs. There were five of them. Two males, one blue and one brown, both strong athletic types. There was a quiet, intense-looking woman with gray eyes and brown fur, frosted orange at the tips. She carried a messenger bag and had a huge penis—some poor unfortunate human they must have caught earlier. There was the short orange girl that was going to be the one to take Sid for herself. And then there was the one who seemed to be the leader, an older female with these deep purple eyes who hissed when she spoke.

"Oh," Captain Klatz chimes in, "we know that one. Her name's Margreta—first time she ever showed up was Ingolstadt, Germany, in '85, as some kind of doomsday priestess. Talked a hundred-odd Alp spiders into raiding the city for humans on New Years' Eve. Anywhere else, would've been pretty hard to keep quiet, but they know what they're doing over there. She popped up a few times since in all kinds of kooky clubs. She was with the Octocrusians in Geneva in '89, the Phallo--Synarchist Order in Antwerp in '93, then the O.T.O.H in London in '99. After that, she must have hopped the pond at some point. We know she runs the Huntsmen here in Midway—shit, she probably started the whole damn thing herself. It'd explain where they get all their hippy-dippy-majick stuff from. What'd they want from you, Skeila?"

"Sid. They were going to take him. I couldn't fight them all off, but I know it's their rule that they won't take another spider's human... so I told them Sid was mine. I promised I'd keep him safe, and I didn't know what else to do. They, uh... they told me to prove it. So I did." Skeila punctuates herself with a nervous little hip-thrust that makes limp Sid jiggle as he hangs between her legs. Awkward silence follows.

"They wanted him? Specifically him, do you think?" asks Anthony Waterproof. "Mr. Greenstreet publishes a newsletter with information that could be of interest to any number of organizations; we subscribe to it at the MARC. Perhaps the Huntsmen think he knows something of interest to them? Or perhaps they simply planned on holding him for ransom."

"I don't know if I buy that," says Klatz, "but they were awful close to the surface. Never seen 'em in the interstitials before. Anything else Margreta told you, Skeila?

"I still remember what the last thing she said to me was. She told me... She told me that I didn't have to change him back. He's mine now. That was what she said, exactly."

"Huh." From the back, Arachnypoundcake speaks up, thoughtfully tapping the handle of his cane on a fang. "So... are you gonna change him back?"

"Mister Mayor!" says Waterproof, scandalized.

"Hey, just askin'." Dark laughter from everyone except Skeila and the human. "Anyway, Lieutenant, I'm pretty sure nobody's looking to jam you up here... but I think there may have been a discipline-related question raised by the MARC delegation?"

Horrified, Waterproof rapidly shakes his head.

"Great. One moment." With his thin black cane, he points across the table to Captain Klatz, who (after looking left and right, sincerely hoping the mayor wants someone else) scurries over. They confer in whispers for the longest minute of Skeila's life. Finally, Klatz hurries back to his seat and Arachnypoundcake speaks. "So. Two things. First, this Sid Greenstreet guy? I want you to be his bodyguard. Maybe our man from the MARC's just being paranoid, but if the Huntsmen do want him, I don't want 'em to have him. Dig? Take whatever steps you feel are necessary."

Skeila takes a few moments to process the good news. "—absolutely, Mr. Mayor. I promise I won't let him out of my sight. He'll be 100% safe."

"I expect it. Second thing: you're off HAARP squad for a while."

"S--sir?" squeaks stricken Skeila.

"You're now on a special detail we set up to investigate the Huntsmen. Metro PD's running a secret unit too, but the topsiders'll never find anything. Klatz'll fill you in later."

For a moment she looks like she's going to say something, but she doesn't, only stands there looking crushed. Not even Skeila is going to argue with the mayor. Klatz says, apologetically: "Lieutenant, they got a written statement from you, right? Alright, good. You've had a rough night, take your next shift off and get some sleep, okay? Dismissed."

She slumps out of the room, eyes fixed on the floor. Anthony is the first to leave when the meeting is adjourned shortly thereafter. He hurries around the Arachnid Altercation Agency headquarters looking for his friend, and eventually finds her at her desk in the HAARP office, head down in a pile of her arms.

"Skeila? Are... you alright?" She doesn't respond. "That was an incredible story. Thank goodness you're safe. And you're on that special investigative detail? That's quite an opportunity."

The spider looks up and moans. Moisture is welling in the corners of her eight shiny eyes. "Bullshit! Tony, this sucks so much! How can I do anything to track down the Huntsmen? I'm a HAARPie, not a detective."

"Don't be ridiculous. You're a thoroughly competent policewoman."

"My butt I am."

"You're better than you give yourself credit for. Listen, you booked the Whitaker case, right? He's up on the docket in Human Affairs court today. Tickets are probably sold out by now, but I'm sure we can get you in. Perhaps it would cheer you up?" Anthony allows himself a small smile. "The counsel personally assures me it's going to be a very assiduous prosecution."

"Yeah, maybe," she sniffles. "I don't understand why the mayor made me Sid's bodyguard, too. Do you really think the Huntsmen were out to get him in particular?"

"Well, that would really fall within the purview of your organization, wouldn't it? It just strikes me as unusual. I don't believe we've ever seen the Huntsmen attack someone above Midway before. If they become active aboveground—if they snatch a topsider, heaven forbid—it'll be more than just the MARC that'll want something done about them. You can bet the city will take notice. In any case, regarding Mr. Greenstreet, if you're to be his bodyguard, perhaps it would be prudent to keep him where he's at for a little while?"

Skeila snorts. "Don't even bother. I promised him I'd change him back as soon as I could. He insists. Was just on my way to go do that now, in fact."

"Ah. Well, if that's the plan, you might want to get on it... court opens at three, so that gives you a couple hours to recuperate." The spider nods and sighs glumly. Anthony knows his friend is upset, but he's never been a very emotive person. His best attempt at consoling her is a wavering "there, there" and a stiff--armed pat on the shoulder.

"Thanks, Tony. I'll see you later."

So it's back out into the underground streets of Midway for tired, tired Skeila. Her apartment underneath the North Shore is not a long walk from the AAA's headquarters downtown, but she wouldn't mind if the mostly-uphill trudge was longer—she isn't looking forward to what she has to do when she gets back.

They traverse the mineral canyons of Midway's narrow streets. High buildings surround them, built out of stone that flows smoothly up from the ground in one piece; there are entire blocks all hewn from the same titanic rock. Above their edges, clustered towards downtown, rectangular vertical shafts come down from the ceiling. Some are the huge dark shapes of skyscrapers, continuations of the same buildings that can be seen in the topside city skyline but punch down through the ground, unbeknownst to most of their inhabitants, straight through to Midway. Some are small and transparent little pillars of glass with elevator cars inside, slowly ascending or descending like dust in a sunbeam, carrying tiny silhouettes of crates and eight-armed figures.

It's as bright as it ever gets in Midway. The city's lights, giant halogen domes suspended among the girders far overhead, deliver only a fraction of what aboveground sensors detect, but it must be a sunny day up there. At 3 AM Lower Forbes Avenue is always packed shoulder-to-shoulder with spiders spilling off of the sidewalk and onto the narrow carless streets, a thousand different colors of fur and glossy eyes glowing under streetlights, but now most of Midway's population is asleep and the street is now only sparsely populated. A spider on a boxy electric scooter goes buzzing down the road. Another stands near a food cart, chewing a hot dog and looking up, without too much interest, at a pair of spiders on an apartment balcony where a daffodil female with a hard two-foot cock gleefully crams it into the other one's face, a bright white girl, green-eyed and dickless. She's kneeling in front of her friend, doing her best to keep up but having trouble—light gagging floats down to Skeila and Sid as they walk by underneath.

Sid, taking this in, begins to stiffen. He can see and hear just fine hanging down there. When he awoke along with Skeila to the sound of her alarm he was hard as a rock, but she didn't pay much attention to him as she scrambled to get ready for her debriefing. He didn't have a problem staying soft during the debriefing either; even if you don't have to say anything, public speaking is almost as bad when you're the speaker's cock and they aren't wearing real clothes. He feels like it would be somehow improper to get hard out here in public—even thought they wait for a crosswalk light to change next to two spiders who play with each other's cocks, thoroughly unembarrassed, before the red hand changes to an eight-armed figure. And shortly thereafter, they pass a female spider on a bench next to her human friend, a late-twenties brunette enthusiastically probing between the spider's spread legs. Two of the spider's claws tap out a message on a cell phone, while the rest caress the human encouragingly.

"Are you sure I can't talk you into just hanging out for little while? Lay low, stay nice and safe down there? We can jerk off when we get back, take a lil' nap..."

I'd rather stick to the original plan.

"Just asking, cause you're getting pretty chubby down there..."

Sid can speak—to her alone. He only needs to concentrate and think as if he were speaking and his scratchy voice sounds in Skeila's head, though to every bystander he's still just her silent penis. Swollen now so that he is nearly horizontal, he leads the way, bobbing out in front with nothing below him for support except his own internal rigidity. It isn't strenuous for him; his body has no muscles to fatigue, his hardness is all hydraulic. Every passing spider gives him a sidelong glance or an open stare as they pass by, some paying more attention to Skeila's tits, others focusing on him. The attention does nothing to deflate him, nor does the feeling of her thigh fur rubbing him on one side, then the other, with each of her steps, making him long for contact higher up where he's so much more sensitive... He's got to think about something else. A desperate change of subject ensues.

Hey, so, that one spider back in there—that was your mayor?

"Yeah, Sid. Arachnypoundcake's the mayor. He's been the mayor since before I hatched, and he just personally kicked me off my squad."

Maybe it won't be so bad. I mean, the special detail—they want these Huntsmen fucks caught, right? So maybe it'll turn out to be a prestigious case. Feather in your cap, you know?

"It's not even that, it's that I'm not gonna be able to do anything on a case like this. I'm strictly HAARP squad."

Okay—what is that, anyway?

"The Human Attitude Adjustment and Re-education Project is a joint effort by spider and human municipal organizations such as the Commission on Human Relations, Midway Circus Court, and of course, the Arachnid Altercation Agency," she recites with a little bit of pride. "The project's goal is to rehabilitate humans with destructive patterns of behavior, so that they can lead fulfilling, creative lives either among spiders in Midway or with their fellow humans topside."

Did you read that off a brochure?

"Once we get this over with, I'm taking you down to the courthouse. You'll see what we do. They're trying some of our cases today; one of them's even a guy I caught."

Skeila's apartment is in the middle of a narrow row of tall brownstones all cut from a single piece of rock. A gray streak in the stone swoops across the whole row, passing through her front door. She enters and proceeds directly upstairs to her bedroom, where one wall is covered in a misaligned set of British rock posters and a colossal web is stretched across two others, a gently curving envelope like silk ship's rigging. Skeila lets herself sink backwards onto her web and the strands push back a little, bouncing her up and down. She stares blankly at the wall; Daltrey, Strummer, and Morrissey all stare back. "This isn't gonna be fun, you know," she tells her penis.

...does it hurt?

"It doesn't feel as good as the other way, but it doesn't hurt. The shitty part's after. It makes you feel like you've got a hangover and the flu all at once. Both of us. And just so you know, it feels wayworse when you don't wait long enough between changes. Most of the time you should wait at least 48 hours. I think we've had like, what, twelve? But I promised you. You ready?"

A sensible person might immediately call this off and consent to another day or two of a perfectly agreeable existence as a spider dick, but this is Sidwell Greenstreet, whose paranoiac core is whispering to him the awful, insidious question: what if she's bluffing? She is so tired that he can feel it, connected as they are. Only the fear of being stuck like this outweighs his natural lassitude, that and stubbornness—he's bitched enough that his pride would be wounded if he backed down now. (Plus, he might have to admit, to himself if not the spider, that maybe he doesn't really mind being like this...) So when Skeila asks again—"You ready?"—he tells her to go ahead. She shuts her eyes and begins.

It starts with a gurgle from his linear inner core as it convolutes back into its familiar shape, one single tube re-segmenting into throat, esophagus, stomach... Sunken dimples appear on the side of Skeila's cock head which blink open into small brown eyes. The edges of her urethra articulate into wiggling lips. A sharp nose forms out of the phallus's tip. Bit by bit, his face reasserts itself.

His arms manifest as sore spots on his round side that grow into angled bumps; every muscle that pops back into Sid's being brings a new cramp with it. His bellybutton reappears on his front side, and on his back a line of cervical bumps appears like rising islands. His arms, still a little too smooth, pull away from his body. The phallic stoutness is going away, thick shaft reverting to skinny Sid's bony chest. As his neck and shoulders reappear, a snarl of curly brown hair grows quickly over his head. Patellar lumps appear on the front of Skeila's huge balls; a moment later his feet and legs kick free. The last point of connection between his body and the spider's is where his ass is fused to her hips, a connection that narrows and narrows until finally it is only Skeila's natural cock—which slides out of Sid, leaving him sitting between her legs, once again entirely his own man, totally naked and totally detached.

He has a split second to enjoy it before the wave of nausea hits. He falls backwards into the spider, who puts a couple weak arms around the human and collapses into her web. They lie there recovering from the unchange. It is even more exhausting than going in the original direction, and Sid's guts are whirling. His skin hurts and is tender all over. He wants a drink of water to settle his stomach but he can hardly move. He can only hear his heartbeat and buzzing. He wasn't expecting this; he figured he'd just bounce right up out of her lap with a headache. He'd actually been dreading the inevitable awkwardness as they learned how to behave around one another, but biology has pre-empted all of that—here he is hanging on to her, trying to stop shivering, pressing his face into her chest so hard that his sharp nose is buried entirely in her fur. Her six arms enclose his back like a blanket; the tiny gaps between them where her coat does not cover him are cold and clammy in the exposed air. She's squeezing him like a stuffed animal. He can feel the massive creature's muscles twitching all around him, and a few times a minute she makes a pained, pathetic whimper that reminds him what a jerk he is. But the withdrawal phase does not last long; soon they aren't in pain, just sore. He nestles in a little closer, she holds him a little tighter, and together they drift through hazy twilight half-sleep.

A couple hours later, one of them stirs enough to wake the other. Skeila is still holding Sid tightly; the first thing he sees is her eyes blinking open, the eight black marbles regarding him sleepily. The spider makes a low, pleased purr at waking up with a human in her arms. While they were sleeping, his head came to rest on her breasts—he tries to burrow into his pillow a little more, feeling a nipple rub against his ear, then a split second later Skeila's hot and hard penis against his thigh. He doesn't move away from it, and realizes to his own surprise that his own morning wood is straining against the spider's stomach. He'd be content to stay there in the soft, warm embrace of the spider. But suddenly she moves with a start, her arms tensing all around him, when she catches sight of the clock.

"Oh, shit! I told Tony we were going to meet him at the courthouse! It's already 3:30, we're gonna miss the first case!" The spider hesitates for a second before releasing Sid, then springs out of her web and hunts around her messy room for her uniform.

"Courthouse?" Last night, Skeila had thoughtfully carried his clothes home for him. He finds them on the floor where she left them, T-shirt, jeans, thick rumpled hoodie. He quickly dresses and pulls the baggy sweatshirt over his head, then tries to scratch a taco sauce stain off of the sleeve. "Shouldn't I be wearing something fancier if we're going to a courthouse?"

"You're fine. C'mon, we gotta go!"

And so Sid is quickly hauled back out into Midway. They pass megalithic stone buildings, granite plazas with grinning spider statues, and mossy fenced-in parks with deep green vegetation. All along the way are spiders conducting their business. Two of them pause to watch an anchorspider on TV saying the Huntsmen have claimed responsibility for a missing human. They show her picture; the young woman's ginger hair is tied back with a red bandanna. There is a group who has set up some kind of complicated board game involving cards, dice, fake money, and a map of Europe on a street corner; they need one more player, and they ask every passerby if they want to play the Carpathian Underground Empire. There are some spiders carrying signs, protesting something called Wallace Shale. One of them pauses chanting to coolly place a blunt the size of a hoagie between his fangs and take a heroic drag; he promptly collapses into an uncontrollable coughing fit, to the delight of his friends. And of course, everywhere there are spiders engaged in sexual acts ranging from idle heavy petting to full-on penetration.

http://cockify.me/stories_html/img/docd_1280_pngout.png

Not that Sid has much of a chance to take any of this in. He can barely keep up with Skeila, who tows him along with his hand firmly held in her claw. He has to nearly jog to keep up with the spider and her long legs. The only thing he really notices is the way all the passing spiders look at him, male and female alike with open stares of—desire? Hunger? At a crosswalk, a female looks him up and down with her lemony yellow eyes, then gives Skeila an approving nod.

Midway Circus Court is a classical building bristling with gables and towers that are at angles not quite straight. They enter through a wide courtyard, enclosed on three sides by high stone walls with dozens of arched windows, none at the same height. In its center is a fountain with a statue of a spider woman who has wild, unruly fur and a blindfold around her head. In one claw she holds an old-fashioned scale, one side of which contains a gray dodecahedron, and the other side a glittering golden apple. The apple appears heavier—but the spider has a clawtip on that side of the scale, and she's peeking out from under her blindfold...

They enter under an arch of white stone, into a marble lobby where switchbacking velvet rope mazes are set up to feed lines of boisterous spiders through metal detectors. They stay together in line, but have to go through separate detectors; she hesitates before releasing his hand. The spider in front of Sid is having his bottle of Knob Creek confiscated by the guard, a black-furred girl wearing a beige version of Skeila's uniform. "C'mon, no glass containers, pour it into something plastic. Hey, li'l guy—you have a ticket?" she asks Sid when he steps up to the detector.

"Uh... I'm with her?" he says, pointing to Skeila.

The guard riffles through papers on a clipboard. "Oh, okay. The prosecutor said Lieutenant Skeila was bringing her human to his show today. Go ahead, they're in courtroom four. Better hurry up, Judge Carnation's already started."

Skeila is already waiting impatiently on the other side of the checkpoint, not having taken her eyes off him since she let go of his hand. She grabs ahold of him again and tows him down the corridor. "Hurry up already!" She hauls him down the hallway and pushes open a huge pair of carved wooden doors.

This is some bizarre combination of courtroom, theater, and leftover set from a German Expressionist film. It has box seats and an orchestra pit. The judge's bench is a tall geometric impossibility, and like all the other furniture it has no right angles and its stark shadows appear to be painted on. Here on the ground level there are rows of crowded seats that gradate stadium-style down towards the bar, but there are upper galleries too, packed with spiders eager to see the proceedings, leaning over the balconies waving and dangling arms. The entire room is filled with loud conversational chittering from the restless crowd. Skeila and Sid find a clear spot in the standing area at the back of the room, next to a spider woman who has her human up on her shoulders so he can see better. Skeila offers to pick Sid up too but he politely declines, so she settles for putting two arms around him and pulling him a little closer.

They have missed not just the first case but the second as well; the crowd's now settling down for number three. The young man up on the stand is a wiry tough-guy type wearing a green mechanic's jacket. He glowers, arms crossed, at the wild crowd with big, worried eyes. Light reflects off of his buzzcut scalp and large, shiny forehead—he's trying not to show fear, but sweating is involuntary. A few hours ago he was taking a smoke break in the boiler room underneath his chop shop, and then these huge spider people came out of nowhere, tied him up with string they pulled out of their mouths, and brought him here, wherever this is. He's holding together pretty well, considering.

Entering from stage right—strutting, really, with his six claws behind his back and his chest puffed out—comes a navy blue spider, inky as a pen, with eyes the color of the ocean at night. He's wearing color-coordinated French cuffs with shining gold cufflinks on each of his wrists, but no shirt or pants. He clucks his tongue at the guy on the stand, leans in uncomfortably close, leers at him with a slowly widening smile, fangs at last inducing the human defendant to yell "What!? Like, what am I doing here? What are you things, what do you want from me?"

Satisfied, the spider turns away to face the audience. "Terrence Hoonsblock, ladies and gentlemen. Hey, do you want me to call you Terrence or Terry?"

"Fuck your ugly bug--ass mother."

The prosecutor chuckles. "We picked this charmer up three hours ago on a drug charge."

"Hey! I already told your guys that tied me up, that wasn't mine!"

The slick spider swivels in place to face the defendant. "Oh we know, Terry. We know."

"What is it to you, anyway? This part of the war on drugs or some shit, scare people with a bunch of spider costumes? I'm minding my own business, maybe I'm trying to smoke a bowl and maybe I'm not, and then all of a sudden I get tied up in a web? You can't do that! There's, like, an amendment!"

"See, Terry, your mistake was going in the basement. That's our turf. Anywhere 'below street level' is, according to the Allegheny Arachnohuman Accord, which your Mayor Lawrence signed back in '49. Once you're underground, you're all ours, buddy."

Terrence Hoonsblock, freaked out by the spider's shark-like grin, raises his hands in pleading defense. "I told you, man, that stuff wasn't even mine! It's my roommate's!"

His interrogator jabs an accusative claw towards him. "Ladies and gentlemen, a plain and simple admission of voluntary herb rustling! But as if that wasn't enough, we've got video evidence!" He gestures towards a large flat panel screen on the wall of the courtroom.

The lights dim, the crowd hushes, and the screen starts to play grainy grayscale footage of Terry himself. He's shown tiptoeing into the dimness of a midday bedroom with the blinds drawn, sneaky-Peteing across a minefield of detritus he takes obvious care not to disturb. Gingerly, he opens a dresser drawer, shoves aside some socks, and bingo—pulls out a glass jar. Zoom in as Terry unscrews the lid. One expects an escaping moth and a wheezing cough. There are only a few small zigzagging twigs inside, which have two or three pea-sized dots of smokable substance still attached. He plucks a nugget from a dry stem, replaces the lid and the jar, and rapidly removes himself from the room with his stolen goods in a tight fist in his pocket.

The lights come back on, accompanied by a chorus of disapproving boos and hisses from the crowd. Terry looks out at the scowling spiders, screwing up his face in confusion. "Are you shitting me? I'm gonna get eaten cause I pinched Mikey's stash?"

"The prisoner who now stands before you was caught red handed," shouts the prosecutor, "committing unrepentant weed treason! Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I implore you, in your deliberations, to remember how hard it is for our human friends to obtain any of the stuff at all. How can we not punish such a man? Someone who would betray his friend so callously? Your honor, esteemed spiders of the jury—the best thing for human society, and for Terrence himself, is to make sure he is rehabilitated." He nods to the judge. "The prosecution rests, your honor."

The presiding judge, who has remained silent until now, nods kindly at the prosecutor from atop his bizarrely shaped bench. He's an older spider with a salt-and-pepper coat; he's not wearing a black gown, but he does have a white wig. "Alrighty," says Judge Carnation. "Jury, what's the—"

"Hey!" interrupts Terry. "Don't I get to defend myself?"

"The evidence before the court is incontrovertible, my human friend. Jury, the verdict?"

Over in the jury box, two rows of eleven spiders all immediately shout "GUILTY!" in enthusiastic unison, prompting rock-concert cheers from the galleries—you can clap pretty loud with three pairs of claws.

Instead of a gavel, Judge Carnation has a claw hammer with a red handle. He bangs it on the bench a few times without calling for order; he appears to be doing it just to add to the noise. "Terrence Hoonsblock, I hereby sentence you to one week of penile rehabilitation!" He takes out a thin deck of cards, riffle-shuffles it and chops it, makes the cards fly in an arc above his head then in a criss-crossing X between two pairs of claws, then finally draws a single card. "Who's got the Empress?"

"Me!" An excited spider in the third seat of the front row of the jury box immediately holds up her matching card. She is all shades of blue, from her sky-azure body out to her glittering sapphire clawtips, with everywhere in between a range of deep, supersaturated ultramarines that would shame Yves Klein. Her eyes are the color of swimming pools lit by moonlight; they sparkle at Terry as she sashays towards him. She is wearing nothing but six black spiked bracelets, one per wrist. She stands over him, taller by a foot and a half, and inspects him like a present she gets to unwrap. "What's up?" she says, extending a claw. "I'm Slisdra." Her voice is friendly but raspy; she crackles like static.

"Uh, hey," mumbles Terry. He takes the offered claw and awkwardly tries to figure out the best way to shake it. Slisdra does not release his hand, but instead places it in the fur directly between her legs. "Here. Play with this for a while." Wide-eyed Terry was obviously not expecting that, but he at least finds the anatomy familiar, putting his fingers to work probing around down there and doing something right—eight eyelids flutter down and she positively coos. He starts a gentle rubbing that he attempts to keep up even as the spider begins to remove his clothes. He seems unsure about this, even though every spider in the room is mostly naked themselves. The other humans in the audience are the only ones here wearing much at all—the unattached ones, anyway.

Terry reluctantly takes his hand away from the spider's snatch for a moment so that she can get his shirt off over his arm, but his other hand dives right between her legs to replace it. Slisdra appreciates the enthusiasm, as does the crowd, which responds with a rising ooooh! and a wolf-whistle or two. She leans back and lets him wriggle his fingers around inside her for a while, but then removes his hand and hops over to a conveniently placed divan nearby. It's a backless black leather piece as uneven and askew as everything else here. She rolls onto it and splays her legs open, presenting herself to Terry. He kicks off his shoes and steps forward, undoing his own pants without trying to trip over them, cock hard and leading the way.

He doesn't seem to consider whether it's wise to screw an arachnoid creature much bigger than himself as he lines up and prepares for entry—nor would he have guessed this morning that his hand would be knuckles deep in a spider-girl's pussy either, but hey, here he is, and he's never been a guy to shy away from life's adventures or a girl who so obviously wants it, no matter how many eyes she's got. Without any prelude he begins pounding her savagely, Slisdra bites her lower lip, her fangs protruding out over it, and props herself up with a few arms.

What Terry thinks of as his signature move involves pulling out completely and immediately going back in, only a little bit, and pulling out completely again—essentially a series of micro-thrusts, a move that he's found is usually well received by the ladies; lot of stimulation towards the front, you see. But when he goes to execute it, he—well, he can't move back, not any more than if he'd licked a frozen streetlight. He's stuck inside her. And this doesn't worry her at all. No, she appears quite pleased, showcasing her many sharp teeth in a pretty and devious smile...

"What the shit?!"

He jerks backwards like he just found out he was fucking a beehive, but only succeeds in pulling Slisdra back a little as mass from his body, hips, bellybutton, abdominal muscles, all flows into her and vanishes like leaves floating down a stream. He goes off-balance, standing on his tiptoes and then—as his legs shrink into his ass and he is no longer able to reach the ground at all—he falls forward, onto her chest and into her furry blue arms.

Terry struggles and the crowd cheers Slisdra on as she wrestles him into submission, face to face. She gets him under control by pinning his arms behind his back, the spikes on her bracelets digging into him. He stops resisting with his upper body, but his legs continue to kick ineffectually, wriggling little things joining two growing round masses on his backside.

"What are you doing to me?"

"Stealing from your friend was a dick move, so now you get to be one."

"Huh?" Poor guy still doesn't get it; his mouth hangs agog as she places three pointed digits on the back of his head, steering him down to her chest while she curves her back to stuff a furry mouthful of her tit into his approaching mouth. He sucks nervously, failing to notice that where he connects at his waist a patch of shiny coral pink is spreading into his skin as languidly as blood in a pool, eliminating distinctions on his body as it emanates from hers.

Terry must feel something, though—he takes his mouth off Slisdra's chest to look down, but she grabs him and leans in to scrape at the inner curve of his neck with her fangs, leaving him unable to see anything but blue. The pinkness continues to rise from his waist, morphing his body as it travels upwards, wiping out the coarse details of his skin. His sinewy back is being replaced by something round and robust. He manages to slip a hand free from the spider's constrictive embrace and runs it over his smooth lower body, then the blue fur growing rapidly over the two huge testicles between Slisdra's legs that used to be his legs.

She strains, making a grimace that coincides with Terry's entire body jerking up wards. She does it again, waits a few seconds, then again... every time he jerks, he rotates a few degrees away from her and the indistinct pink line separating his skin from hers creeps another few inches towards his head, obliterating his own shape as it rises and replaces him with a glossy shaft, raised ridges as thick as his finger growing in rootlike patterns up his surface—veins...

Terry seems to lose, if not his fear, then at least his will to physically resist. He lets his arms hang passively, and as if sensing his capitulation, Slisdra presses them to his sides, where they stick to and quickly merge with his body. He's distinctly phallic now, extremities smoothing over, one big long spear jutting out from between the spider's legs.

He's trying to move his body again. Slisdra releases him and, though he's clearly straining to do it, he can only produce some vague side-to-side wiggling. "This is completely unreal. It can't be happening. I'm seriously going to be a cock."

"My cock. For a week. Unless you don't want to go back.''

"Why would I want to be a penis?"

"Lots of humans do. Just look out there!" She points him at the audience, turning so he can take in the fully assembled crowd; many of the spiders jump up, holding huge and presumably human dicks, waggling, stroking, or otherwise gesturing with them. "Doesn't this feel good to you?" She grabs him at his pink waist, kneading upwards with four claws. He groans, almost drools but catches himself and swallows a mouthful of liquid. "You're going to feel like this all the time. You won't want to go back." She sticks a clawtip inside his mouth and plays with his lip. He's twisted around all the way around to her front, facing away from her. His eyes roll back, trying to see her, but he can no longer move his head.

"Bitch, I'm so going to want to go back," he says.

"Uh huh."

"I'm gonna," he says through clenched teeth, defiant to the last even if there's nothing he can actually do to stop the nearly finished transformation. He dribbles a bit down his rigidly stiff body as his mouth opens and shifts into a lipless slit. His nose fades away. A ridge rises to separate his thick neck from his head, and his wan facial structure quickly bloats outwards. His panicked eyes dart around until he squeezes them shut with the effort of trying to resist, and they do not re-open.

At last, Terrence has completely become Slisdra's cock. Her fur droops with moisture from the exertion. With the new huge swath of pink jutting out from between her sweat-slick hips, she looks kind of like a bit-into blue raspberry Blow Pop. With the transformation finished, she grabs onto her huge new human penis with all six claws and furiously jacks herself. Her knees bend. She wobbles and cums into the air, squirting an aerial lariat of jizz nearly to the courtroom's bar. The spider huffs, puffs, and pants, then falls backward against the bench, Terry dangling motionless between her legs.

WHACK. WHACK. Judge Carnation smacks his hammer, and the crowd erupts into applause. A bailiff arrives to hand Slisdra a towel and help her to her feet, guiding her offstage to riotous cheering. She gives the audience a weak wave as an actual curtain, satiny purple, is drawn in front of the bar. Lights come on in the galleries along with the dull roar of a few hundred horny spiders' conversations.

Back behind the cheap seats, Sid's still processing the spectacle. There are innumerable possible questions about the various intricacies of the arachnid legal system here—like, for example, whether the defendant has any real chance of walking out on his own two legs—but what Sid chooses to ask Skeila is this: "So, if you've gotta bang a human to change 'em, what would have happened if that guy couldn't, you know, perform? With everyone watching him and all?" The spider and her piggyback--riding human next to them overhear and look over with amused smiles at the obvious newbie.

Skeila explains: "You don't have to have sex, it's just more fun. All you really need is skin-to-skin contact." Sid gives her a funny look. "Okay, last night I had to. The Huntsmen never would have believed us if I hadn't. I mean, if you're my human, 'course I'm gonna stick it in you, right?"

"Sure. Eminently rational."

There's a little bit of awkward silence between the two, but then the curtain swoops open again, revealing two new cast members, human women sitting at opposite tables. Most Human Affairs cases are charged by the Midway DA (District Arachnid), but every so often you get a human pressing charges on a fellow two-eyes. Such is the next case on the docket, Lagardenia v. Cardigan.

The defendant, Melissa Cardigan, is a trembling willowy girl with a waterfall of straight brown hair bordering her face. She's never seen a spider in her life before today, when she was hauled screeching from her own bedroom. In fact, if she wasn't so scared she'd be completely mortified by the fact that she's still wearing her faded purple sweatpants and pajama top, through which her dotted nipples can be seen—it's cold in this courtroom. She shivers, hugs herself, and rubs her hands up and down her smooth arms to try and keep warm.

The plaintiff, Beatrix Hackpot Lagardenia—Bee for short—sits at the opposite table, tiny blue purse on the floor beside her because it kept sliding off the table's slanted surface. She's a blonde pixie in a shoulder--baring purple top, plus jeans tight enough to have been sprayed on. Her metallic yellow hair is cut short and sharp above her collarbones, and her subdued pink lips, pierced with two thin rings, curve up in a smug, assured smirk. Every time she blinks, her long dark eyelashes wave like the feelers of huge, slow butterflies over her big blue eyes.

Bee calmly examines her lavender fingernails. Unlike her terrified roommate, she's been sneaking trips to Midway since she was a teenager. The girls have been best frenemies since grade school, a real love/hate Kinski/Herzog kind of relationship, and at least as good at producing drama. Over the years, Bee has stolen around six hundred dollars, two boyfriends, and one car from Melissa. Why they thought they could handle living with each other is anyone's guess, but Bee, taking things too far as usual, has elevated their latest dispute to Midway Circus Court via a cunning technicality worthy of the HAARP squad themselves: their half-basement apartment is below street level, and thus within the spiders' jurisdiction.

"Counsel, what's the charge on Miss Cardigan?" asks Judge Carnation.

The prosecuting spider glances at a yellow pad. "Grossly negligent failure to operate an automated dish--washing apparatus, your honor."

"That—that isn't a crime!" says Melissa. "I don't even know what that means!"

"It means you never run the dishwasher when it's your turn! And you always cook stuff and leave the plates in the sink forever!" shouts Bee.

"Oh my god, this is about the dishes? No! No no no! I always wash stuff when I use it!"

"Oh, yeah, I'm so fucking sure. Like our sink hasn't been completely full for a week!"

"Bee, you bitch! Those are your dishes!"

"Nuh-uh!"

This devolves into an unintelligible screeching match. "Ladies," says the lawyer, but they continue screaming over him. "Ladies." A little louder. No response. So he screams as loud as hecan, which finally gets both girls to quiet down and stare at him. "AAAAAAAA—alright. Sheesh. Anyway, ladies, no need to argue, we can resolve this with evidence." He points to the big screen, which lights up once again with another grainy video.

It's a kitchen in a shabby apartment somewhere topside—we can tell by the rapid oscillations between sunlight and darkness that this is time--lapse footage. Objects on the counter jump around, moved by ghostly human silhouettes that only appear for split seconds. But the court has slowed the tape for the relevant parts: we see Melissa, several times in fact, as she opens up the dishwasher to put things away. In a few moments we see her again, and the cabinets blink open and shut as she puts away the dishes. Bee, on the other hand, is shown flashing in and out to continually contribute to a growing pile of pans, dishes, and glasses in the sink. By the end of the video the precarious arrangement of plates actually extends well past the edge of the sink due to some creative stacking on her part. At one point, when she's preparing to reheat some takeout, the camera lingers on a shapeless blob of noodles from her pad thai that accidentally falls onto the counter. Bee shrugs visibly and leaves it there, and over the course of the next two time--lapsed days it crumples into a dessicated noodle--booger. Gasps fill the courtroom. They've seen enough.

"I told you those were your dishes!"

"Uh." Bee is sheepishly quiet. "I guess I forgot..."

Judge Carnation clucks his tongue. "Sounds like we got a false accusation on our claws, counsel."

"It does indeed, your honor."

"A most serious matter!" The judge smacks a button underneath his bench and a sign behind him lights up, reading REVERSAL OF FORTUNE. "Beatrix Hackpot Lagardenia, you are hereby held in contempt of court and sentenced to two weeks of penile rehabilitation!" Bang goes the gavel, the crowd goes wild, and blonde bewildered Bee is hauled to her feet and led before the bench. Once more, the judge riffles his cards from claw to claw then draws. He announces: "The World!"

The last spider in the second row of the jury box calmly rises, holding up the matching card. The slender ash-gray male politely navigates out from behind the backs of his colleagues in front and steps towards Bee with immaculate posture and a sly smile that shows only his two long, sharp fangs. His amused eyes shine a dark crimson, like rubies buried in a coal seam. On each of his six wrists is a white shirt cuff, handsomely embroidered and fastened with gold cufflinks. He's not wearing a shirt to go with them or anything else at all, completely unembarrassed to show off his erect penis, a respectable foot-long pole of polished black granite.

He glides behind Bee and lightly places a dark claw on one of her shoulders, handing her an embossed business card with another, "Lanek. Midway Freight Transport Board. Delighted to meet you," says the spider in a slick baritone. "I understand you've been an unruly young lady, Bee."

"Mmm hmm. Are you gonna show me how to be a good girl?"

"Decidedly not."

Lanek holds Bee by her slender neck and then, with another claw, traces a slow vertical line down her chest, dragging it between her breasts and over her stomach. Her top ruptures down the line, tits spilling out of the split shirt like the pillowy insides of a baked potato. Her bra stays on for a second before realizing it has been cut right though the middle and falls apart, putting her breasts in full view of the court, nipples only a shade pinker than her creamy skin. She gasps, feigning embarrassment, putting a small hand over her mouth while simultaneously arching her back to more effectively display herself.

"Well then, what are you gonna do to me, mister spider?"

"You heard the judge, you've got to be punished." Standing close behind her, the slim, dark spider takes her by the shoulders and hips, while one of his remaining claws investigates the cleavage between her breasts and another pops up between her legs. "For two weeks, you are going to be my cock."

"I don't know, mister spider, that—ah!" Bee practically convulses. Lanek has found a good spot. "—that's a long time, and it sounds pretty scary..."

"Nonsense. You'll have plenty of playmates. I have several friends I'd like to introduce you to, spiders who'll know exactly how to handle a headstrong young woman like yourself."

Bee grinds her butt back against the spider as he rubs a clawtip on her clit in slow circles, then gently probes inside. "Can't wait to meet 'em—ooh, shit..."

"My, what language. But I suppose you won't be doing much talking over the next two weeks..."

Bent over so low that her chest is almost parallel to the floor, Bee eagerly backs up into Lanek's crotch, one of his claws on her tailbone to guide her, filling herself up with his hard cock. Scattered applause from the crowd. His arms hold her up like suspension bridge cables as he screws her, each of the big arachnoid's thrusts squeezing a moan out of the human. She bites her lower lip, wriggles, contorts her back, and exhorts the spider to give it to her harder—which he does for a little bit, pounding her so hard her whole body shakes.

But then, Lanek pauses. Still holding Bee by her shoulders, he squats down and picks her up by her ankles, bringing them up to touch her buttocks. He fucks her like this for a while, holding her totally off the ground, then with his cock still inside her, hoists her up so she is nearly vertical and continues. She's no longer having to put much effort into it at all; the spider's energetically bouncing her on his cock using his six arms, and she's holding on for the ride as she gets slammed up and down like a toy.

But soon something odd happens. Her cheeks are puffing up. She looks almost swollen. Her face seems to be losing its expressivity; that furtive and feminine arch in her brow, the ironic twist at the corner of her lips, all the subtle muscles sublimate away as her head puffs out—and transforms into frank and uniform cockflesh. Her delicate swan neck turns stiff and thick, and splashes of Bee's blue blood pulse under the skin, running up new veins between her clavicle and chin. The sharp edge of her porcelain jawline smooths as it shifts and grows behind her ears. Her face, mushrooming outwards, entirely engulfs her small nose. Her pink lemonade lips thin and then vanish entirely as her mouth expands into a surprised O, and then into a vertical slit that nearly reaches her split chin. The whole time, her lip piercing stays in, coming to rest in the side of what is now an unambiguous urethra.

Her head is almost completely phallic, but she still retains her eyes and those dark mothy lashes. Aside from her tits, which are expanding and sagging just a little, the rest of her body remains unchanged. She touches her piercing and runs her hand over the ridge of her phallic, spongy head. When she speaks, liquid sputters out of what used to be her mouth. "Oh my god, my face..."

"—is gorgeous," says Lanek. He teases her piss slit with a clawtip; she shudders and slowly blinks her eyes, waving those long frond-lashes of hers. With her eyes shut, her head looks just like a glans. Lanek slows down but continues to fuck her as less dramatic changes gradually happen at the other end of her body. The soles of her feet have melted into Lanek's hips, and her folded-up legs are vanishing into her increasingly tubelike body. Her lavender nails turn transparent and her digits web together; her hands, and then her whole arms sink into her torso as her willowy frame becomes rounder, bulkier, her elegant spine's arc straightened out. The nubbiny nipples on her growing breasts have disappeared completely as they continue sliding slowly down her chest. Bee straightens, jutting from Lanek's hips like a ship's figurehead as she becomes cylindrical.

Her eyes flutter closed when Lanek strokes her long body; some wet gasps bubble up from her linear mouth. As she no longer has arms, just some bumpy and fading shoulders, there's nothing impeding his claws from sliding up and down the sides of her penile body. Darkness the color of Lanek's original penis creeps up from what was her waist. Her tits run down her chest like drops of water, picking up volume as they go, stretching further and further away from her body, and once they finally come to rest at her base a coating of Lanek's fur grows over them. Her erect body twitches and jerks in the spider's grasp, spitting up mouthfuls of liquid that spill down her underside. Bee's eyes, the only thing left distinguishing her from an ordinary organ, open and dart around as she tries to see herself, but the now totally erect cock--girl can only look straight up.

Lanek moves faster, much faster, and Bee's eyes widen—then clench shut. She seems to be holding out. Her head puffs out a little more. One splash of precum erupts from her mouth—then another—and then one continuous spurt of jizz Bee cannot stop. There are long aftershocks; Bee pumps out cum like an overpressurized hose. When the spider's orgasm is finally over and Bee is flaccid and dripping, she has shrunk down to a slightly more manageable size and her eyes have vanished, leaving only a featureless black cock.

WHACK. WHACK. WHACK, goes Judge Carnation's hammer. Sustained applause for Lanek as he accepts the complimentary towel from the bailiff and daubs off the damp end of his new dick—vivacious Bee, who was lithe and lovely only a few minutes ago but is now stout and sessile, hanging between the spider's legs. Drained, the spider steps over to where Melissa Cardigan sits at the defense's table. He hands his business card to the shaking young woman, who accepts it wordlessly. "If you'd like to visit Bee any time in the next two weeks, we'd both be delighted," he tells her.

The curtain is drawn again for the next intermission. A spider wanders the audience with a keg strapped to his back, selling beer by the plastic cup. Sid has another question for Skeila. "I didn't change like that, right? I'm pretty sure my face was last."

4

Re: Protective Custody (Series) - by teddy sloth

"Right. It's different for every spider. When I change humans, they always go balls--first. What you actually look like as a cock, that depends on the human. You're pretty long and straight..."

The beer spider approaches, and Sid holds up a fiver. "You want one?" he asks Skeila.

"Sure, but you don't have to pay." Skeila taps a badge on her sash that looks like two opposite arrows converging, and they both receive free cups of Yuengling, generously poured.

The curtain opens on the bailiff dragging the next defendant out of the wings, a young man who is trying desperately to squirm out of his six--armed grip. Stiff blond hair indicates that until recently the human probably had a careful coiffure that has been mussed by his unsuccessful struggles. The sleeves on his sweater have rolled up, exposing sinewy arms that flex as he tries to push away, his athletic frame being perhaps sufficient for rugby or polo but wholly inadequate at fending off an adult male spider.

The bailiff unceremoniously dumps him onto to the witness stand and stares at him for a moment until he's satisfied the human isn't going run off. Instead, seething quietly, he angrily scans his audience—hushed and eager to see his next move—and grips the stand.

"I want to see a lawyer!"

The human's name is Wembley Whitaker, and he has not fully recovered from having his rights so thoroughly violated. The pre-law student didn't seen that unmarked door open up behind him in the basement of the Barco Building, nor did he react quickly enough when a certain tall brown spider reached out of it and grabbed him, giggling while she spirited him away down lightless vertical shafts and thrumming pipe-lined corridors, holding the kicking and screaming human under her left arms all the way to Midway. When he caught on that this was supposed to be some kind of legal system, or at least a mockery of one, he began demanding to call his lawyer, then any lawyer, then for his leering, fanged captors to at least do something other than grin and snicker. But instead he was brought here to this nightmare courthouse, where he's been waiting his turn backstage, watching these monsters turn four people into their penises, to frenzied applause. And now he's next, probably no matter what he does, but he's got to at least try...

"I said I demand legal counsel!" The prosecuting spider calmly saunters past him. "I know my rights. If I'm under arrest, I have the right to see a lawyer. And I don't have to say anything. And you should've read me my rights, too, and nobody did that. You're all guilty of kidnapping and false imprisonment! I'm not answering any questions until I get a lawyer!"

The prosecutor turns and interrupts him: "So hey, do you like dudes?"

Wembley's speech sputters out as he reroutes a few trains of thought. "N--no! I'm not gay!"

"Well, that ain't really what I asked, I just asked if you like dudes. Even just one. A little?"

"Absolutely not."

"Alright. I'm just asking, cause—in my personal experience—when you pick on someone thismuch, it's a pretty good bet you've got a serious crush."

The prosecutor goes straight to the tape, and it's a clip show: this time the video is a sequence of short cuts, none longer than a minute, of Wembley and friends in various places. The friends are a rotating crowd of young white men with many receding chins and retrousse noses among them, but aside from Wembley there's one other guy consistently in every clip, and in every clip Wembley is being completely horrible to him:

Wembley, passing by with two cups of beer, chucks him on the shoulder (spilling some on him) and says, "What's the matter, Lee? You look sad. Is it because you're queer? I'd be sad too if I had to take it in the ass."

Snowy and miserable, a bundled--up and bunched--together group of hats, scarves, and puffy coats kick slush all the way down Ellsworth Avenue as they walk past a white brick building on a winter day. One muffled jacket-wearer says to another, "Hey, isn't that a gay bar? Don't you wanna go in there?" and shoves him into the wall.

The two of them silently waiting outside a classroom, watching an obese bald man three times their age and as short as he is wide struggle to propel himself wheezing down the corridor. When he's gone: "So would you wanna fuck that guy, or would you want him to fuck you?"

Curtains drawn to keep the sun out of a room full of hung-over bodies. Lee, curled up on the floor with a throw pillow and no blanket, is one of them. Wembley comes tiptoeing in among the empty bottles and sludge-filled Solo cups, leans down very very close to sleeping Lee, and screams in his ear, loud enough to wake the entire room, "FAGGOT!" (Lee groans and rolls over to the sound of cackling laughter, revealing a crude Sharpie cock on his cheek.)

Hot dogs at a Pirates game. Lee takes a bite and Wembley cracks up before he can even speak.

Mercifully, the prosecutor stops the video. Wembley gulps, shrinking down in seat under the heavy glares of a courtroom full of spiders. He can read the writing on the wall. If he had any hope of walking away from this, it's gone now. To a spider, the whole gay/straight distinction is a more conversationally interesting variant of whether you're right or left handed. If your preferences line up they'll be that much more likely to try and talk you into being their cock (or vice-versa, some spiders like the challenge of a conversion). They regard the whole thing as being pretty fluid anyway; the hang-ups humans have about sexuality are, well, regrettably demonstrative of a certain flaw in the species mentality. The sort of overt hostility just demonstrated does not fly down here. All the prosecutor has to do is nod to the jury box for them to shout—a few cupping claws around their mouths—"GUILTY!" The crowd roars approval. Someone in the upper gallery encourages the judge to "go and shit on him".

"Mr. Whitaker, I believe you are deserving of the full penalty of law! You are sentenced to penile rehabilitation for three months!" Judge Carnation bangs his red-handled hammer on the bench and leans far down to the cowering human, fanning out his cards to offer him the choice. Wembley is about to select one from the middle of the spread, then changes his mind and takes one from the end instead.

"It—it says Judgement."

The judge smiles indulgently. Of course it does. Whether the old spider's nimble claws are dealing off the bottom of the deck or forcing a card on an unsuspecting mark, he's a matchmaker at heart, and his defendants always get the right jurist. The chosen one is a big and broad--shouldered male spider, third from last in the back row of the jury box. Holding up the matching card, he stands and politely waits for his peers to scoot out of the way. Muscle ripples under his fur, which is a bright, speckled, sawdusty tan; his coarse coat looks like the rough edge of cut lumber. His eyes and claws are shiny, polished black—the same color as his cast-iron cock, which sticks out over a foot in front of him as he steps clack-clack-clack towards trembling Wembley, who recoils as he approaches but cannot take his eyes off the spider's erection.

"N--no fair! The last two at least got straight matchups!"

The amused spider folds his brawny arms, the lowermost pair positioned just above where his cock meets his body at an acute angle and sinks under his sandy fur like a metal pole stuck into dry grass. Wembley's still staring at it. "That's it, bro. Get a good look. You want to see it up close? 'Course you do," he says, yanking Wembley down from the stand. "Whoa, careful now," as he nearly trips; the spider catches him but the human still stumbles face-first into the spider's crotch. "Shit, you really want to get to work, huh?" Wembley's protests are muffled by spider-cock as this musclebound arachnid jock grabs the back of his head with the same kind of grip a human would use to palm a baseball and grinds his face against the hair of his lower abs and his steel-hard length.

While vigorously rubbing the Wembley all over his groin, he looks around, up into the curtains like he's trying to find the studio cameras, scans the audience, and booms "What's up? My name's Akeix!" He gets a few hoots and a couple whistles, nothing much louder than Wembley's dick-stifled cries for help. "Imma make this human my cock!" he shouts. That gets a better response, cheering, clapping, but the crowd doesn't really pop off until he raises a claw in the air, fist-pumps, and bucks his hips forward, shoving his dick down Wembley's throat with a wet gagging choke. His watering eyes, converging on the huge weiner going into his mouth, become slightly crossed.

Akeix extracts his dick from Wembley's mouth and he wheezes for air. The playful spider smacks the human around with his cock, whap whap whap clubbing him in the face with it. He hauls the human up on his feet and rips the clothes right off of him, claws shredding his wool sweater and slacks, exposing his lightly fuzzed chest, argyle power sox, and black briefs tented out so far the elastic can barely hold on. The spider chuckles and tugs at the underwear; Wembley groans and tries to shrink backwards into the spider arms, but he just rips off the underwear too, leaving the human naked and fully erect before the court.

Akeix grabs Wembley by the butt and pulls him in close, chest to chest, rubbing their penises into each other. "Nice. I'm bigger, though." He grinds up and down on him, eliciting a shamed little moan from the red-faced human. "About to be a lot bigger." He moans again when the spider teases the underside of his twitching cock with the curved edge of a claw.

"I'm not—I'm not gay," says meek Wembley.

"Just want to make things fun for you," says Akeix. "If you wanna get right into it, cool with me." The spider only needs two arms to hoist Wembley up over his head and spin him around in a half twist, aiming the human's taut butt down at his ready dick. The human's trepidation is palpable; Akeix just waits, savoring it—and then he brings him down, right onto his penis, spearing him at once with only the spit from the brief blowjob as lubrication. The grunts Wembley produces as inch after inch of the spider's thick dick slide into his ass delight the crowd.

Akeix, still supporting Wembley, pries his legs open like a wishbone to fully display the penetration to the audience, who all clap agreeably. Thankfully for him, the spider doesn't manage to get all of his dick inside him, but once he has a good six or seven inches lodged in his ass, begins to rhythmically move him up and down, supporting him with an arm hooked underneath both his knees and two claws on his waist to guide him.

The spider looks like he's holding something in—all of his eyes are closed, his two fangs are digging into his lower lip—and then suddenly Akeix gasps and change shoots up Wembley's body like billowing squid ink. His taut, symmetric abs and long smooth back muscles scramble into a knobbly stiffness. His legs shrink and bloat. His arms zip into his body like they're being wound up on a reel inside him. His head snaps backwards and locks in place. It looks like he's trying to move—his eyes flick from side to side as his face strains in one direction—but all he accomplishes is some gentle lateral waving.

Akeix huffs, then grips Wembley around his waist with two claws. His newly cylindrical body is roughly uniform in diameter from his thickened neck to his base, where he's merged with the spider. He squeezes upwards, all the way to where the human's shoulders were, then lets go and returns to the bottom, like Wembley is a giant toothpaste tube he's trying to extract the last bit from. "No, stop—I don't want to be a penis!" He coughs up a mouthful of precum, and his face turns redder. "Please!"

Akeix is too busy jacking off to respond. He looks fascinated by the morphing human between his legs. Wembley's hair is receding and thinning on the sides, but Akeix ruffles his claws through it, accelerating the dispersal. Soon his blunted head is entirely bald. "You look better without it," says the spider. He's right; Wembley's careful part was starting to look weird on top of a body that's becoming more and more phallic.

Wembley's cheeks puff out, and he quickly closes his mouth but liquid dribbles out of the corners of his mouth. He is trying, mightily, to hold back. He squeezes his eyes shut, his face reddens with the strain. But he is only able to restrain himself for seconds. He lets go, face relaxing like he's exhaling a deep breath, but instead of air a jet of white cum is ejected from between his narrowing lips. Akeix bellows, and as Wembley's closed eyes seal over, his reddened head further deepens to purple. The human's voice gasps along to the first and second squirts, but by the third his mouth has reformed into a piss slit and the only accompanying sounds are the spider's low grunts and each volley of cum sequentially slapping into the floor. By the fifth squirt the flow is no more than a dribble and Wembley's face is no more than a cock head.

The bailiff hands a towel to panting Akeix. While supporting himself against the jagged black witness stand, he dries off the end of his huge new penis. No more struggling from silent, immobile Wembley. He slaps him against the palm of one of his claws a few times in the same manner someone would use to threaten someone with a pipe, producing a satisfying, meaty thwack. "Don't worry, your honor. Lotta guys he's gonna get to know. Guarantee you, by summer he'll be a much nicer human."

"Glad to hear it," says Judge Carnation. He pounds his hammer on the bench, making earsplitting cracks. "Ladies and gentlemen! That concludes this session of Midway Circus Court! Those of you who have been granted custody of a human, please see the clerk to make your end-of-sentence appointment. To the other honorable members of the jury, on behalf of this court and the venerable City of Midway, thank you for your service—and better luck next time! Court is adjourned!" The curtain is drawn as Carnation whacks his hammer some more and the officers of the court file out. Down in the orchestra pits, the hidden band plays a soft tune, consisting of a strong clarinet and a lilting chorus.

The audience flows hectically towards the exit; Skeila's arms encircle Sid as she steers him through the crowd, towards the wooden doors, progressing a few slow steps at a time. He notices her cock is rock hard and she's hardly the only one; nearly all of the spiders here who are equipped with penises—human or not—have hard-ons. Her boner keeps poking into his back as they navigate their way out. On the courthouse's wide front steps, the crowd thins out, having room to expand. Down by the fountain, there's a spider and a human who wave when they see Skeila. The spider Sid recognizes immediately—it's the prosecutor, the navy blue male with the periwinkle shirt cuffs around his wrists. It takes a moment longer for Sid to remember the human—the last time he saw him, he was a penis. He's Skeila's friend from this morning, the stocky blond accountant--looking guy at her debriefing.

"Skeila!" says the lawyer. "That's your human? Nice! How is he? Worth fighting Huntsmen for?" The human rolls his eyes pointedly at the spider, who responds by draping an arm on him and smooching the top of his head.

"Hello again Skeila; Mr. Greenstreet. I was just telling Zacts that I thought he did an adept job prosecuting today's cases."

Skeila does the introductions: "Sid, these are two friends of mine. Uh, you met Anthony, and this is his boyfriend Zacts, Assistant Distant Arachnid."

Anthony Waterproof nods. Zacts reaches out for a handshake. The spider is tall, even a little spindly, but not (now that he's here where Sid can see them side-by-side) as tall as Skeila. His coat is the color of a suit jacket, and his eyes shine like wet ink. He shakes Sid's hand with a firm claw-grip, fancy cuffs still on his wrists, and flashes a practiced but nonetheless charismatic smile at Sid. "Nice to meet you, Sid. Enjoy the show?"

"Uh, hey man. It was... pretty wild."

"Aw, thanks, but it was pretty quiet. It's not a really good one unless someone in the audience changes a human. That last one was pretty good, though—props to Skeila!"

"Don't mean to brag or nothin'," she says, elbowing Sid, "but I caught that one solo..."

"You're safe with this one here, Sid. Just don't step out of line around her, heh. So hey? What are you cats doing for dinner? Join me and Tony for pierogi?"

"Oh god, Zacts, I can't," says Skeila. "I've had like six hours of sleep in two days. Another time, promise."

"It's just as well," says Anthony Waterproof. "I was thinking of heading back in to the office. I have some reports I'd love to get filed."

"You guys are as fun as chipping a fang, you know that?"

Back at Skeila's, her roommate Ketta seems to have gone out. Flour-covered bowls and spoons caked in dried batter litter the kitchen table. Upstairs in Skeila's room, Sid has a seat on her web while she goes through the same routine he witnessed from between her legs last night, decoupling her cuffs, taser, phone, and keys from her belt and tossing them on an uneven walnut dresser.

"So... I can take the couch downstairs."

"You will be in here with me." The spider casually pulls her AAA uniform off over her head and tosses the belt and sash onto a pile with the others, loose loops tangled all over her floor. "I meant it when I said I wasn't letting you out of my sight. I'm sure nobody's coming for you, but when the mayor gives you a job, you can't screw it up. Hope you don't need to go topside for a little bit."

"Uh, actually, I kinda do. I gotta put together next week's issue of the Report. If you've got copy shops down here, I guess I really just need my laptop, but it's up at my apartment."

"Ugh. Alright, we'll work something out..." The naked spider yawns and stretches, her upper pair of arms reaching to the ceiling, making the imposing creature nearly twelve feet high. She flexes the other four arms behind her back, claws clasped together, becoming a quantum superposition of yoga poses. She arches herself, showing off her sizable chest and a mouthful of gently curving white daggers that snap together in perfect interlock when she finishes her yawn.

Easygoing Sid doesn't put up a fight about staying in her room, but it turns out she really doesmean she's not letting him out of her sight. She expects to be right there in the bathroom while he's trying to take a pre-bedtime leak. This is a problem. Sid's severely pee--shy bladder will rupture long before his neurotic subconscious lets him urinate with someone else in earshot, let alone standing right there behind him, casually inspecting her claws and wondering what the holdup is. Eventually, after Sid points out the extreme unlikelihood of Huntsmen coming out of the toilet to get him, and an exasperated Skeila throws up her arms and says "I don't see what the big deal is! You can watch me pee all you want, I don't care!" they settle on having her wait out in her bedroom with the door open. It still takes him nearly a minute to turn on the waterworks.

He climbs unsteadily onto the spider's web, pausing and hanging on to the thin strands as they sway under him, then inching forward. Then Skeila hops on and makes him roll towards the depression her body creates; the indented web reminds him of those wireframe diagrams of gravity wells.

She reaches over to turn off the light. Darkness falls, and a huge furry mass immediately envelops him. Strong arms encircle his chest, holding him like overtightened seatbelts. He is forced to curl inwards as Skeila spoons him. She rests her head near his shoulder, and he can feel her warm breath over his ear when she squeaks, somewhat dejectedly, "You sleep in clothes? Really?" Two light tugs at his underwear from a claw sneaking its way up from under the web. "You're lucky I'm so tired." He's wearing his boxers and T-shirt; Skeila, of course, is wearing nothing at all. He can feel her half-hard cock against his leg.

"I usually sleep in a lighter shirt, but since this is the only one I have..." It's true that Sid always does sleep in shorts and a shirt, but he's also thinking, with a little guilt, about what Skeila said earlier: all you really need is skin-to-skin contact... presumably between his butt and her hips, and right now those faded plaid Fruit of the Looms are the only thing between them. It's silly of him, he knows... she'd ask first, right?

"Freakin' humans. I guess I should be glad you took your shoes off. Alright, tomorrow we'll go topside and pick up your computer, and your clothes, and whatever other junk you think you need..."

"You can't just, like, guard me at my place?"

"Your city," punctuating the "your" with a claw jabbed into his side, "doesn't allow spiders to stay topside more than 24 hours. Totally honor--system right now, but the MARC wants to make it so everyone who goes topside has to get a permit first and the city'll keep track of their curfew... It's so dumb." She sighs, and her expanding chest constricts Sid, already tightly held in at least four arms, a little bit more. His bare legs are tangled up in her thighs, his feet only just reaching to her knees. He feels her soft, warm fur all over, breasts pressed into his back, arms holding him tight against her chest, her cock expanding slowly. "Are you suuuure I can't talk you out of those clothes? You're gonna be way too hot with me laying all over you. And then you'll have to take them off, and that'll wake me up."

"Maybe you could only lay half on top of me? Or next to me?"

"I'm your bodyguard. Closer I am, the better I can protect you. Don't want anyone to grab you while we're sleeping. "

He isn't sure whether the spider's just making excuses for her total invasion of his personal space, the arms crisscrossing his chest and the claw tucked between his thighs, or if she really does have a certain latent paranoia of her own. If so, it couldn't hurt to indulge a fellow--sufferer. "Fine. I like to be warm when I sleep, anyway."

"And speaking as your bodyguard, it'd be a lot easier to guard your body if it was part of my body..." Sid grunts. Negatory. "Can't blame me for thinking tactically. Don't worry, I'm gonna make sure nobody can get you, even if you don't wanna be my cock..."

Skeila clicks on a radio next to her web and scans the dial; most of the stations barely sound different than static. Unlike most spiders, she prefers rock to ambient music, though she'll admit it's sometimes nice to fall asleep to. She stops on some velvet--voiced spider DJ, interviewing a woman speaking in a dark monotone.



DJ: And it's not just the album that's got Midway talking—I hear you played a set at Blurred Vision last weekend that got a lot of notice?

MUSICIAN: I played two tracks from the new album. People seemed to like it.

DJ: No doubt, but I was talking more about how you did the set wearing a full Huntsman dye job...

MUSICIAN: It's a free country, isn't it? I can wear what I like.

DJ: Sure, sure, but the MARC has already criticized your album for "exacerbating spider-human tensions".

MUSICIAN: I think that's a compliment, coming from them.

DJ: Alright, so how do you feel about humans? What about that big guy you've got down there—or girl? What's their story?

MUSICIAN: His story is that he's my cock. That's the only part of the story that matters.

DJ: And I presume he's happy where he's at?

MUSICIAN: Nowhere else he'd rather be.

DJ: Well, there you go then. Alaika and her dick, the ideal couple. We're going to play a track from her new album—again, the album is "Where They Belong" by Saint Alaika, available now on iTunes or at your favorite underground record store...



It is impossible to tell whether it is night or day, but it feels sickeningly early. Rolling thunder. Somewhere above the smoke there is probably a stormy sky, but that could just be explosions in the distance. You can peer out your basement window through the iron bars (anachronistically enough, the wall is rough natural stone) and see Heinz Field behind the juddering forest of white--clad legs, scuffed with soot, blazing in firelight orange. A column of smoke as wide as the gridiron is rising from the center of the stadium, obscured by the seats, sparkling with flashes of reflected light from below, but the structure itself is not on fire; something's going on inside. Thousands of people in white uniforms march in and out, talking lowly in words you can't quite put together. Across the street, the Science Center burns. You can stay in here until you starve if you keep quiet about it; they are ardently incurious, they will not so much as glance in your tiny foot--level window. The door is open for you but the exit goes up to the street. There is no other way but up. Where else would you go? There is no way to go down and certainly no one to help you. And when you dofinally leave it is not so much an act of courage as your unwillingness to face a lonely death. You cannot help breaking into a run, but they recognize instantly that you are not one of them, and they are on you...

Trying to kick them off, restrained by something huge, furry and strong, Sid jerks awake not into his broken-in mattress but some kind of unfamiliar hammock. He frantically tries to shove the enormous thing away before remembering—shit, that's Skeila. After years of having a habitual before--bed puff, whenever he tries to sleep on the natch he invariably gets these vivid dreams that are so exhaustively lifelike it's hardly worth sleeping at all, and stoned or not, he always has nightmares when he tries to sleep overheated.

He tries to be still but it is too late; the regular breathing by his ear is disrupted and the spider's many arms begin to move. "...Sid?" A sleepy squeak. "What's th' matter?"

"Uh, nothing. I'm fine."

But now Skeila has been roused to full alert and won't be dissuaded. "Your heart is pounding! What is it?"

"Bad dream's all."

"Okay, you're drenched in sweat. C'mon, lose the clothes." She's right. Perspiration has matted his hair to his clammy forehead. All over him his hot, damp clothes are stuck to his body, especially the part of his shirt between his back and Skeila's chest. She lets him go so that he can sit up and peel them off. As soon as he does, the evaporating sweat chills him and he is happy to lie back down and return to the spider's warm embrace. "Told you so. See, our body temperature is a couple degrees higher than yours, so we're all the blanket you need. Totally scientific."

Instead of returning to the big--spoon little--spoon configuration, Sid opts to face Skeila, nestling his head into the space between her chin and breast. She holds him tightly. One of her claws combs through his tangled hair, and she makes low, burbling squeaks that sound somehow reassuring. It's all quite comfortable, and he's perfectly ready to fall back asleep, until he registers the sensation of an obstinate spider dick prodding into his stomach.

Maybe he tensed up or something. She seems to have realized that he noticed her erection. "Hey, you woke me up," she says, feeling a responsibility to heave some words into the suddenly awkward silence. "Oughta make you take care of it..." not seriously expecting him to do anything; worrying, in fact, in the ensuing silence that she's pissed him off, but then a few human fingertips gingerly explore the underside of her penis. She can't help twitching right into his palm. His hand closes around her shaft, holds it there for a beat, and then strokes it up and down.

In the darkness of Skeila's cavelike bedroom, Sid can't see a thing, but he can feel a whirl of claws on his back, running through his hair, and one hunting for, and finding, his own hard penis. One claws helps him rub her cock. Another grabs his other hand, repositions it onto her breast, and encourages him to give it a healthy squeeze, his long and slender fingers unable to fully grasp the spider's gigantic tits. He leans towards the breast he's not gripping, ready to fit as much as he can in his mouth, but she has other ideas. She draws him in closer, nuzzling against his face, hot breath from her open mouth and the gentle prick of a fang on his cheek. She's going to kiss him, and he can't help thinking of all those sharp teeth, waiting in the darkness for his tongue to slide in the wrong direction, just once, and be sliced to ribbons... She locks her mouth over his in a crushing kiss, darting her tongue under his, then on top of it, then swirling around it... She leads the kiss, obviating the need for him to venture into that perilous cavern, for now.

They rub each others' hard-ons, faster and faster. When Sid takes his hand off her penis to put his arms around her shoulders, she roughly grinds against him, smearing liquid from her cock onto him and brushing it all over his body with her fur. He pulls back, breaking the kiss, and she slows for a moment, posed over him in the dark with her arms caging him in. She breathes in fast, shallow pants. He is partly glad that the darkness is there to protect him from seeing what he knows hovers an inch or two above him: the spider's face, her mouth with its miles of teeth hanging open, eight smooth black eyes all focusing on him—she sees just fine in the darkness, and he knows she's looking at him with the same expression he's seen spiders looking at humans with, in varying degrees, all day long—hunger...

"Y--you should let me move," he says. His voice quavers a little, sounding more scared than seductive, but he has his hand on her cock to reassure her he's not going to run away.

Skeila remains still. A ragged breath rattles up from her throat, over her teeth, and into his face. Then—arms lift, freeing him.

He holds onto her cock like a mountain climber hanging on to a steel spike as he shifts position, and it's about as hard, to the point where he can pull himself closer in with it without causing her any apparent discomfort, or even changing its angle to her groin. He scuttles over her furry body with his feet and knees hanging off the edge of her stomach, toes catching in her web's thin intersections. He can't get a good sense of his orientation, but he's trying to end up 180 degrees from where he began, and by using her cock as a guide he manages to get there, the heavy, hard pole just a few inches away from his face.

He gives it a good, long lick. She gasps, like air out of a pinched balloon. He runs his tongue up her shaft until it runs into a raised ridge and his nose bumps into her softer, pliable glans. He opens his mouth, as wide as he can, and lowers it slowly over her penis, its surface creeping over her tongue. Immediately, he tries to suck off more than he can chew—when her huge, plump cock head makes contact with the back of his mouth he immediately gags and pulls his head up. After taking a second to swallow his spit he goes back down, more cautiously now, only admitting into his mouth what he thinks he can handle, closing his lips around the shaft a good half-inch below the head. He bobs his head in tiny, timid movements while swabbing the end of her dick with his tongue.

While Sid gets down to work, his own hard cock floats in space. He hears the slow opening of wet lips and low, hissing breathing and realizes he's about to start sixty-nining. He's worried about Lil' Sid going into that dangerous mouthful of knives, though he doesn't dare risk making any sudden movements. Heat descends around his cock. He tries to move nothing below his hips, fearful of ending up with a perforated penis, but Skeila deftly engulfs him right down to his pelvis with no trouble, and all he feels is her soft mouth and playful tongue. Not one scratch.

Sid's never given a blowjob before, but to his surprise, it's not too bad. Skeila doesn't smell like any human scent; up close, the spider's body smells light and grassy, like wind blowing through a forest. Her skin tastes like faint green tea. He knows he's doing an inexpert job, but judging from the drops of odd-tasting fluid that seep out of the slit, commingling with his spit to slicken the pole all the way down to the base, he can't be doing too bad of a job. He removes his mouth to lick her balls, big furry baseballs he bumps his cheek into in the dark, not expecting their size. The bramble of hair around them is coarser than on the rest of Skeila's body. He tongues one and fondles the other, making the spider stop and burble happily.

She dives right back onto his dick. Owing to the difference in size between them she has to bend inward to get at it, in addition to pulling on his ankles and pushing on his ass at the same time. She manages to get most of it in her mouth without too much strain, applying rhythmic suction and letting her long tongue circle around it like a spiral slide. He's going to cum soon, and when he tries to mumble a warning around his mouthful of hard spider dick, her only response is to redouble her efforts. He can only hold back for a few seconds before releasing his load into her mouth.

Skeila lasciviously slurps and swallows. Then, the spider sucks in a breath, holds it, her cock flexes, and it begins to flood Sid's mouth. Spider semen has a strange taste—it's not unpleasant and actually kind of sweet, like salted banana puree. His mouth is already dangerously full after the first rush of cum; when her dick pulses again and emits another cup, his only alternative to drowning between Skeila's legs is to break his lip--lock on her cock. Sputtering, he opens his mouth, releasing a cascade of liquid around her pole. She exhales in an explosive squeal. He tries to keep the action going with his hand; she squirts two more times, lower powered emissions that splat onto his hands and dribble down her thighs and through her web, landing on the floor. By the time her penis softens it's a sticky mess, like the fur around it and Sid's arm up to his elbows.

Skeila lies back, breathing deeply. It takes her a few moments to muster the effort to speak: "You gonna lay back down? I'm gonna pass out in like, 30 seconds."

"Uh. I'm a little messy."

"Fuck it, here." She wipes him off with a lower arm, sopping up the goo with her hair. "Gotta shower tomorrow anyway. Now c'mere." She tugs him into spooning position, arms encircling him and locking into place, holding his shoulders tight against her warm chest. Bending her knees, she curls into him. "Comfy?"

"Very."

"Cool." She wiggles her hips. "Sleep tight."

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

In Midway's central business district there's an office with gray-blue carpet, low cubicle walls, and a few potted ferns to add a little greenery to the concrete space. It's after hours, with a few humans in half-cubicles inside, plus the occasional spider stumbling through, stooping to go through doors and banging elbows aplenty on the frames, this whole place not quite being built for them... Anthony Waterproof sits in one of the supervisory cubicles, which are elevated six inches and positioned to allow him to face the shared desk of his three subordinates, Junior Trainee Liaisons on loan from Underground State. Fairly thorough workers, but they aren't in right now, so he permits himself two minutes of leisure to lean back in his chair and think about Zacts.

Anthony will pick up a pizza on the way home and they will eat it on the sofa together; he will have three slices and Zacts will eat the rest while they watch public television. They will have good, unimaginative sex and go to bed around 11:30. This is what they do on Friday nights. This is what they have done every Friday night for three years. Saturday night, they will go do whatever Zacts feels like—see a play, hang out at a sex club (every spider club is a sex club), or ride down Apostrophe Falls in a shipping container. But compromise is the key to a good relationship, and Friday is Anthony's night for pleasant, boring, comfortable routine.

Anthony's reverie is interrupted by footsteps approaching from beyond his cubicle walls. The only other person who'd be at MARC this late—other than Anthony himself—is his boss. Sure enough, a moment later the Doctor appears in his doorway.

It is almost hard to look at him, with his hair shining under the fluorescent lights like clean snow in the sun. Beige jacket, chalk tie, bone cufflinks, nothing on him darker than a paper bag except for heavy gray frames that square off red eyes. His assistant, a spider woman he's rarely seen without, follows close behind in a form--hugging black leather valet outfit, darker than her polished stone eyes or and subtly striped gray fur. Between them, the only color they have is found in his sanguine eyes.

"Good afternoon, Anthony. How are you doing, hmm?"

"Oh, good afternoon, Dr. Schlangenkraft. I'm well."

"That's great. Did you have a chance to look into that matter with the Arachnid Altercation Agency—an officer changing a surface citizen, again?"

"I was just composing an e-mail about that, actually. Nothing like the last few incidents. The human's name is Sidwell Greenstreet—and this is actually a funny coincidence, he's apparently some kind of freelance statistician that publishes a report our analysts subscribe to. He ran into some of the Huntsmen and the officer actually did it to save him. Told them he was hers; actually rather clever, I thought. He's already back on two legs and under the protection of the AAA, so no harm done. I can personally vouch for the officer in question, too. I've known her for years."

The Doctor cocks a thin white eyebrow. "Oh?"

That could have been a mistake, don't want to seem partial... "And, er, you'll be happy to know that the case was taken pretty seriously. Relatively speaking, anyway. Arachnypoundcake himself sat in on the meeting."

"Really? Well, that is good news. Sounds like everything worked out for the best, hmm? But, if you can get in touch with the officer or Mr. Greenstreet himself, I'd really like the opportunity to speak with him."

"Oh—uh, regarding what?"

"Give him a neighborly Midway welcome, show him a friendly human face who can perhaps help him understand his surroundings. Let him know the spiders aren't quite as crazy as they seem, hmm?" He chuckles, thin lips forming a wry smile. His assistant stands silently behind him; pleasant, blank expression; arms behind her back in three neat pairs.

"Great idea. I'll ask Lieutenant Skeila, I'm sure she'd be happy to come around with him."

"Perfect. Alright, Waterproof, as you were. Keep up the good work, hmm?"

© 2013 teddy sloth

5

Re: Protective Custody (Series) - by teddy sloth

Lockdown

http://cockify.me/stories_html/img/lockdown_cover.jpg

Four packs of hot dogs—will it be enough? He really considers going back for more. He's never seen anyone eat like her; last night she demolished three orders of sesame chicken plus a quart of fried rice, so you can understand his caution here. These all-beef franks he's toting aren't (only) for him, they're for his, er, his bodyguard, is what he'd call her. And he only bought one pack of buns, but he's got a hunch she prefers meat.

He crosses the narrow side streets slowly, thick baggy hoodie flapping against his skinny frame in the wind this late night, unkempt curls of brown hair flying around his eyes, plastic bags all aflutter. She'd told him to stay home, yes, but she'd also eaten everything edible in his apartment except for some chili powder and what could be scraped out of an empty peanut butter jar. They have to stay in town one more night, since tomorrow he's responsible for delivering almost fifty copies of the exclusive Sidwell-Greenstreet Report to almost fifty of the city's highest-paying corporations and government offices. He's also responsible for writing it. (And it isn't nearly done.) His name is Sidwell Greenstreet, but he usually just goes by Sid.

See, Sid didn't want delivery Chinese three nights in a row, and his bodyguard mentioned that once they got back underground she really wanted to go get hot dogs. She probably won't even notice he'd been gone. After she'd fallen asleep on his bed and he hadn't, taking great care not to wake her up, he cautiously wriggled out of her arms—not easy, since she has six—and took a walk down to the GetGo. It's a beautiful night, and he enjoyed the stroll; doubly so because of the joint he smoked on the way. He felt like he should savor it, because he's not sure how long he'll be spending below ground. Note to self: remember to ask her what the herb situation is down there…

Back at his apartment on the first floor of a four-story building, there are no lights on in the windows. Slowly, he unlocks the door and enters the dark room. Skeila must still be asleep. He softly shuts the door behind him and locks it. Takes stealthy steps down the hallway. He can probably creep right back into bed with her. Heh. He was worried there for a sec—

Something very strong grabs his legs and lifts up so fast that he doesn't have time to hit the ground before he's been flipped fully upside down. The hot dogs thunk down to the floor; the plastic bag slushes down around them. His hoodie turns inside out and covers his face as he dangles.

"Hey, this is familiar."

"Shut up, asshole. Where the fuck were you?" A simmering voice no less fearsome for its high pitch and squeaky timbre. Uh oh. She's pissed.

"Didn't you see my note? I just went down to the store. I was only gone, like, 20 minutes. I didn't know you had me on lockdown." Nervous laughter which she does not return.

"Yeah, I saw your fucking note, okay? That's not the point! The point is I told you not to go anywhere!"

"Skeila, I didn't have any food left! This is a nice neighborhood. C'mon, you're being crazy."

"Crazy?" Okay, now she's pissed. "If something happens to you out there, you think I can just run around knocking on doors? Sayin' hi ma'am, I'm a giant spider, and have you seen this skinny little shit? I'm not allowed to let humans see me up here! We'd both be so totally screwed!"

"Okay, okay! I'm sorry! Can you let me down?"

She lowers him enough to keep him from busting his head open before unceremoniously allowing him to fall over on his ass, which he does, then ends up flat on his back looking up at her. Geez, she's even wearing her Arachnid Altercation Agency uniform—a thick utility belt connected to a green sash decorated with her lieutenant's stripe and a handful of medals, the ensemble doing nothing to provide anything like the human idea of "modesty". Her three pairs of arms are placed akimbo up and down her hips. She steps forward, hooked claws clacking on the hardwood floor, and plants her feet on either side of his head, bestriding him like the Colossus. Directly above him, looming at the apex of her legs, hangs her black granite cock.

"The Mayor himself told me to keep you safe, Sid. Remember? You were there? Not like you could run away from me at the time. Look, I doubt the Huntsmen actually care about you. And I super-doubt they'd ever come up topside. But I mean, what about something else? What if you get hit by a bus? What if some other human decides he wants your money and stabs you with a knife? Even if you don't give a shit about yourself, do you know how much trouble I'd be in? Did you think about that for even a second? My job is to protect you from that one-in-a-jillion chance." She bends down and picks him up one-clawed by his sweatshirt like a cat picking up a kitten, lifting him up off the ground so he can look directly into her eight eyes. "I am not fucking up a job the Mayor gave me."

Her eyes bore into him; they're like stones dipped into ink. She snarls, baring two big fangs along with the rest of her arsenal of teeth, a mouthful of sharp, interlocking white daggers. He can feel her hot breath on his face. She drops him, and instead of looking into her eyes he's suddenly looking into her substantial breasts, covered like the rest of her in fine brown fur. She steps forward, backing him into the wall. He tries to look up at her, but he can't quite meet her icy scowl. Another step forward, and her tits are pressing into his face, and—is that her cock jabbing into his stomach?

"I can make it so you can't run off again real easy, y'know." Oh, he knows; it's only been a week since he spent the most bizarre sixteen hours of his life so far. For a brief interval, he was the spider's penis.

She leans into him, notices a grocery bag—"the fuck did you even buy, anyway?"

"H-hot dogs," he says, muffled by mouthfuls of her intruding chest. "You said you missed them, and I felt bad cause I didn't have any…" She doesn't say anything for a long time, but Sid can feel her chest expand and fall as she sighs deeply. Is that a good sign? He doesn't dare look up. "Uh… want me to cook some?"

She moves backwards to give him breathing room and levels a severe stare at him, each pair of her arms crossed. "If you wanna make it up to me, you gotta do better than that." Whether she does it on purpose or whether it just happens he doesn't know, but at that moment, below her belt, her hard cock twitches upward like an eager dog straining at its leash.

Sid obligingly sinks to his knees as Skeila approaches, cock pointing forward. He watches it come nearer with his lips barely parted, until she stops just when the dark, fat tip is underneath his nose. He opens wide to accept the thick end into his mouth and she pushes forward, anchoring him with a claw on the back of his neck. His mouth fills with the head, and a little beyond it his lips manage to enclose a few inches of her shaft.

He bobs his head, into and then away from her crotch, but doesn't go any further down than he has, barely able to suppress a gag when her cock reaches his throat. The fluid leaking onto the back of his tongue drowns out the muted taste of her skin. He withdraws the massive organ to give himself a literal breather and keeps jacking her off while he regains his breath, his long fingers just able to encircle her organ by half a thumbnail. The glossy black head, shiny as a wet road, reflects broken bands of streetlight coming in around the blinds. His spit drying on her penis amplifies her natural scent in a bizarrely irresistible way—just like the pre-cum dripping into his mouth is like nothing found in a human penis, tasting sweet and faintly like bananas, the spider's body smells like grass and trees and now, like wet rocks and heavy rain… Impatient claws apply pressure, urging him to continue, and soon she is stuffing his mouth again. Those claws press harder, and he is forced down, audibly gagging as Skeila slowly shoves more than half her cock into his face—it's an awful lot for a novice like Sid, but he handles it like a champ, making quiet choking sounds but holding his position as his eyes flood with water he feels would really be better used in his mouth right now. Finally she allows him to retract. He slides the cock out of his mouth and kneels there panting, with her wet dick smearing his cheek. She ponders the scene.

"Mmm… not good enough. You left me."

Skeila manhandles him towards the couch, making a chittering noise somewhere between a giggle and a growl. She sweeps a pile of books and laundry off the couch to make room for her to sprawl out in; even so, it's only wide enough for three sitting humans, wholly inadequate to contain the reclining spider's many limbs. She picks Sid up by his armpits and sets him down on her legs. He feels the smooth, solid curve of her nails against his hipbones, and rushes to open his fly and wriggle out of his jeans before she tears through them. With her many arms, she swiftly disrobes him, and she tosses his clothes over her shoulder, leaving him sitting on top of her somewhat disjointed and very naked.

He's as hard as she is, though not as big. She collects their cocks together, sensitive undersides rubbing within her grip. He caresses a breast, long fingers unable to grasp more than half of it, Skeila's tits each being bigger than his head. His hands slide around to her back, traveling with the grain of her fur. He reaches lower, hoping for her ass, but she's so much bigger than the human that he's got to lean in, all the way up against her, just to get close—and he still only manages to reach her lower back.

All of a sudden two things happen concurrently: claws seize his wrists like padded handcuffs, and more claws grab his own ass, squeezing the meager padding on his skinny frame hard enough to pop a water balloon. An unexpected poke at his asshole impels him to flinch into her.

"Where 'zactly do you think you're going with those hands?" umm err I—"This is 'sposed to be punishment, human." She's manacled his thin wrists together behind her back with a single claw and pulled him forward as far as possible, leaving his chin flat against her and him looking up into her face at a neck-bendingly uncomfortable angle, while his butt remains scooted much further down. Eight images of Sid trying not to look scared, in various sizes and angles, vanish momentarily when Skeila blinks. He is embarrassed at his uncontrollable heart pounding out hummingbird beats against the spider's chest. Or maybe he should play it up instead. In his limited time among the spiders, he's picked up on the way they react to human fear. She's practically drooling.

"Are you gonna… change me?"

The spider's face blossoms into a delirious open grin, flashing dual rows of pretty, gleaming white shark-teeth sharp enough to disfigure. (The night they got here, when she blew him on his bed, she was, well, adorable. Framing her face with her arms, winking half her eyes, and he didn't feel a scratch the whole time she enthusiastically slurped away, but at present he can only think about how narrowly he avoided castration.) Her eyes have become huge and wild, and he feels like if he makes any sudden movements he's in danger of tripping a prey response that'll leave him with his head bitten clean off.

"It'd keep you from runnin' away again…" She speaks quietly in a throaty voice, with an undisguised note of hope squeaking in. "You want me to?"

Why's she staring at him like that? Wait—she's asking? …do it. Tell her to do it. "I… don't think…" Just tell her. Tell her. "Not yet."

A little bit of the excitement in her eyes goes away. She doesn't seem quite as ready to devour him, not anymore. "…Fine. You still need punished, hope you know." The clawtip in his butt he'd forgotten about for the briefest moment drives forward. "You are gettin' fucked."

Skeila rises, dumping Sid onto his back. Her lowermost arms pull his legs open, while she holds her cock at its base and repeatedly slaps it against his ass. Simultaneously, she's fumbling with her Agency belt, trying to open one of the side pouches without looking. She extracts a little packet that turns out to contain lube and squeezes it out onto her hard cock; grabbing Sid's hand, she orders him to work it in. The slippery skin slides around in his grip. It feels huge in his hands and looks even bigger, and even though it has before he doesn't think it's ever going to fit. Some lube drips off the end; she catches it and smears it around his ass.

Skeila lowers herself over him, using most of her arms to support herself in her precarious position across most of the couch, but reserving one to curl around his back. She lines herself up, and he can feel the blunt end of her cock pressing inwards. The spider's breath is hot against his cheek. A soft clawpad traces the distance from his clavicle to the opposite side of his chest, stopping to playfully tweak his nipple, jolting his eyes open—he didn't realize he'd closed them—and suddenly, there she is, huge and up close, eight eyes waiting to lock on to his own. And when they do, she pushes forwards.

Sid can't help crying out; Skeila's not being nearly as gentle as she was last time. The spider produces a satisfied growl that trails off into a throaty hiss as she slides inside; she mercifully pauses when she's painfully inserted at least half her length, straightening up to look down on him from between his legs. She makes some pleased, chittering spider-sounds and begins to fuck him. Her many arms both support her and cage him in. He bites his lip and turns his head to the left to find his forehead pressing against a furry, tensed arm. With each thrust, her tits smack into his face, and when she holds herself in on a deep stroke he's briefly smothered.

Soon it starts to feel good, real good, worryingly good. The only other time in his life Sid got fucked it culminated in him becoming Skeila's cock, so he can't really be sure if what he feels now is the normal thing or if it's the prodrome to being a penis. Is his tingly skin wrinkling up below the waist? Does it feel so good when she strokes him because she's jacking herself off? In a moment, will he see blackness spread up into him as he connects to her hips? It's impossible to single out any one sensation as Skeila's furry body bucks against him, pounding him into the couch and stretching his ass. He closes his eyes, remembering what it was like to be stiff and immobile between her legs, what it will be like again to grow to full length, at home or in a crowd, touched off by—his arousal or hers? it wasn't easy to tell, sometimes—

Skeila curls up around him, pounding him fast and hard. She hisses into his ear, "I'm, I'm gonna cum—" In an explosion of squeaks and gasping, she does. He can feel it, and that makes him cum too, all over his own chest.

The spider lowers herself. Her body is hot and enveloping; her fur is damp from exertion in places, and becomes damp in others from the sweat on his chest. She breathes slow and deep, making a low, satisfied chittering that trails off into silence. She slips out of him. They're separate. He doesn't need to wiggle his toes to know each one is still there.

They are sitting down now to a feast of wieners. After witnessing the spider's incredible appetite over the last few days, he's elected to go ahead and boil all four packs of hot dogs, and Skeila does not disappoint: by the time Sid has carefully drawn a thin line of mustard down the middle of his dog, Skeila has eaten her first three, no buns. With both of them awash in good hormones from sex and food, apologies begin to flow.

"Can't believe you got hot dogs. Sorry 'bout yelling at you earlier," she says between mouthfuls. "It's just, I get grumpy when I'm hungry, you know…"

"It's fine. Really, it is. And I'm sorry I left, that was dumb. Uh… thanks for not changing me, I guess…"

She shrugs a few shoulders. "I know you don't want me to. Yet."

He shrugs back and says nothing. He doesn't realize they just had makeup sex until she's helping him load the dishwasher.

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

"Oh my god, beds suck. How do you sleep on these things? My back's gotta be one giant knot by now. I'm making you a web next time we're up here…"

"Uh huh…" mumbles Sid. He's constructed his own kind of web here in his bedroom, in the form of an incomprehensible collection of sticky notes, printouts, and clippings, taped to his wall, his bed, and most other flat surfaces. They are sitting together on his bed, Skeila up against the headboard and Sid up against Skeila, nestled between her spread legs. His trusty laptop is in his lap, and the white glow it emits is the only light in the room. His needle fingers fly across the keyboard, except when he needs to take a moment to cogitate—then he uses Skeila's thigh as an armrest, and puts his chin in his hand Thinker-style.

The spider yawns and stretches. She rolls her eyes and stares at the ceiling, at the walls, over Sid's shoulder at the flowing columns of meaningless numbers. She winds some of his loose, curly hair around a pointy digit and lets it spring free. She drums her nails on his smooth belly. She sighs dramatically. He just keeps typing.

Skeila looks over what's left of the joint they'd been passing back and forth and decides against trying to suck out the dregs. "Ooh, remind me when we're in Midway to take you to the Psychedelicatessen. That stuff's not really my thing, but I think you'll like it. Hee hee. I'm not even used to weed. It always makes me so talky. Don't you think?"

"Uh huh…"

"Are we gonna listen to this music all night? It sounds like robots fucking."

"Uh huh…"

"How many times are you gonna resize that graph? A million?"

"Uh huh…"

"Wanna be my cock?"

"Uh, nope."

"Can't blame me for tryin'," she says, letting her arms hang limply.

"I gotta finish this. The Report's supposed to be there every Friday morning, so if you still want to leave before sunrise…"

"I know, I knowiknowiknow, but I'm so bored! I never thought I'd say that topside!"

"Normally I don't have to do things at the last minute, but someone's been distracting me the whole time we've been here."

"You know you like it."

"You make it awful hard for a guy to do math, is all I'm saying. I already had to dip into my B-roll here. I mean, I put in a two-page spread on unusually high chicken prices. I'm out of page-filler, and if I don't get this done they'll have my ass…"

"Well, I don't know who They are, but that's my ass now. They can't have it." She demonstrates ownership by giving her possession a firm squeeze, making Sid jump. "At least explain some of this stuff to me." Sid bites his lip, estimating the enormity of this task. "Geez, I'm not stupid."

"No, it's not that, it's just—well, let me start at the beginning. This is kind of a running series, side-project type of thing. You ever hear of Wallace Shale?"

When Skeila doesn't respond, Sid has to twist his neck around to see her expression of combined disgust and disbelief. "Have I heard of Wallace Shale? Yeah, of course."

"Uh, well, I've been doing a bunch of stuff on the fracking wells around here. Subscriptions to the Report have more than doubled since I started."

"What kinda stuff you print? How many spiders they've killed?"

"…killed?"

"Yeah, killed. Fracking's all about breaking up rocks underground to let that gas out, right? Well, that caves in our tunnels… and if that doesn't kill anyone, that shit they pump into the ground will. They're s'posed to get everyone out beforehand, but it's not like everyone down there has an address and a phone number. Good luck even finding all the deep spiders, and if you do, try tellin' em you want them all to move so you humans can suck poison out of the ground. Guarantee you won't ever make it back to the surface."

"Wow. I had no idea. I'm sorry."

Skeila shrugs. "Whatever. What's your math 'zine thing have to do with it?"

"That shit they pump into the ground—that's called fracking fluid. They drill the hole, then they pump it full of high-pressure fluid, and that cracks up rocks underground so gas can flow through it. Basically. That fluid's really nasty stuff, though."

"Oh, we know. There's spiders that didn't even drown in it, they just got some on 'em and got really, really sick."

"Yeah, you see that happen to workers every now and then in the news. The companies got a law passed so they don't have to tell anyone what's in the fluid—" Skeila interrupts with a derisive snort, and Sid continues: "I mean, there's certain really bad stuff they aren't allowed to use, I think…"

"How's anyone even know if they're using it, if they're allowed to just keep it a secret?"

"Uh…"

"Fuckin' humans."

"Well, that's kind of what this is about. See, I'm trying to figure out what blend of fluid they're using at all the wells. You can get an idea based on the proppant—er, that's fine particulate matter, sand, ceramic, stuff like that. Of course, even to figure that out, you've got to watch the shipping, and that's not easy. I figure two wells operated by the same company, with the same kind of proppant coming from the same place are gonna use something similar; start looking at the EPA's groundwater reports for the area and you can begin to make some educated guesses… It's all hypothesizing though, I mean there's a cluster of wells out near Centralia run by Wallace Shale Co. itself, and I can't get anything on them…" Sid continues, stupefying the spider with a procession of charts, invoices, and cross-references that leave her marveling at the human ability to detach from the messy processes of destruction and death.

"Alright, alright, alright. Just try n' hurry it up, cause the sooner you're done, sooner we can get to Midway. And… can we listen to something else? Whatever this is, it's awful."

"I know it sounds like noise, but it's actually really complex—aw, never mind," says Sid, opening iTunes. "You like British stuff, right? We'll compromise. The Orb? The KLF?"

They end up listening to most of the KLF's back catalog, repeating Chill Out two or three times. (Apparently it's something of a spider classic, and Cauty and Drummond are revered as "true Erisians"—you ever hear about any other humans that literally burned a million pounds?) Skeila is thus prevented from being bored completely to death, and Sid only has to put up with some intermittent groping. More than put up with it, by the time he sends the final copy to his Laserjet he finds himself grinding back against her in response to the claw inside his pajamas, but quickly realizes that's liable to cause further delays, and they've only got two or three hours before it starts getting light outside…

Time to go. A beat-up backpack left over from his CMU days is the only luggage Sid has, and he presently wanders his jumbled room looking for things to pack. His laptop is first in, and after it he crams a few days' worth of T-shirts and boxers inside, figuring jeans last until you spill something. Toothbrush, deodorant. What else?

"How long you think we'll be down there?"

Skeila shrugs with her lowermost arms, without eye contact, like she's irritated to have it brought up. "The Mayor wants to make sure you're safe from those Huntsmen, so I guess till they catch 'em." She sits up on the bed and stretches the last few hours of inactivity out of her limbs with a variety of exercises, pulling her arms behind her back, flexing them above her head, but nothing as awe-inspiring as when she simply stretches her arms out as far as they will go, back arched, touching the ceiling. She fills the room.

She finds her Arachnid Altercation Agency uniform on the floor, steps into the belt and tightens it above her hips, then pulls the sash over her head. She pats the pouches on her belt to make sure everything's still there and she's ready to go, and soon she's bouncing impatiently by the door as Sid paces his clutter, realizing how little of it he really needs.

"I can't freakin' wait to sleep in my own web again. And take a shower, too. I feel so grody. Are you ready yet? It's gonna take us at least a half hour to get to the tunnels, and then we gotta go hand these things out…"

"I… yeah, I guess I'm ready." Sid turns out the lights and wonders how long it will be until he turns them on again, then they step out into the night.

Skeila stays in the shadows as they walk hand-in-claw, carefully steering Sid away from the pools of streetlight collecting on the steep sidewalks. Tonight it's chilly enough to make Sid glad his bodyguard is so big and furry; they walk so closely that he's kept toasty on one side. The walk is tense; Sid understands there's some unnamed danger in being seen. The spider has a knack for discerning threats. Before even spotting a pedestrian or seeing headlights turn onto their road, she will vanish from his side, his hand holding for a moment a chitinous finger, then nothing, trailing out into air. He continues alone, propelled by inertia. If he comes to an intersection he won't know which way to go. Low-grade panic sets in after a minute of unaccompanied travel—is she… gone? Was this all just some kind of trip, some four-day arachnohallucinatory bender he's just now coming down from, alone, on the empty sidewalk of some late-night side street? But before the fear can really sink its teeth in, his fingertips fit into the padded palm of a claw taking his hand as silently as it left. Even after the third time the threat of being seen necessitates Skeila's absconsion, Sid feels exposed under the dim night sky reflecting the city like a spotlight, hoping that there are still eight spider eyes back there watching him (and nothing else…)

They make it to the nearest entrance to the underground, an unmarked door in a featureless building at the top of Secane Ave, near those smokestacks everyone knows aren't really smokestacks, but ventilation shafts for the tunnels cutting through Mount Washington. But how few of the thousands of drivers that pass through them every day know what else gets ventilated? Alright, Tannhauser, time to go back under this mountain…

Past a chain link fence, through a steel door, down a flight of cement stairs, and now they are in the interstitials—the labyrinth of access tunnels between the surface and Midway. There are beige walls with grey electrical boxes and long yards of conduit and piping; a low unified thrum from whatever subterranean machinery is unseen behind the periodic push-bar doors; clanking boilers, whirring HVAC systems, and somewhere around the Double Tree, a bank of washing machines. The watery rush of cars above sharpens into nearby engines when they pass a parking garage. Buzzing from fluorescent lights shining their supercool harshness—irritatingly bright for Skeila, and for most spiders, but when they renovated a few years back the MARC made a lot of noise about the tunnels being "welcoming" for the humans, and now it all looks like a hospital.

There's something unsettling Skeila, though she hasn't said anything out loud. They've been dropping off the Report at all the different companies that pay Sid for a weekly copy. Downtown, every human building with a basement connects to the interstitials, sometimes with just an unobtrusive door and a mail slot, sometimes with an opulent lobby. She's led Sid around to each of his subscribers, taking about two hours to get the whole stack distributed, and in that whole time they haven't seen another spider once. It could be a coincidence, maybe. There's been a few humans—nurses and doctors in single-color scrubs heading to their shifts at Mercy, technicians from Allegheny Power inspecting circuits, and assorted topsiders who know about the underground using it to cut across the geography of the city, none of who pay any particular attention to her. But no other spiders.

"That went way quicker than usual," Sid tells her.

"Glad I could help. If you're lookin' for a way to thank me…" she says, cupping her crotch.

"What, right here?" asks nervous Sid. He looks over his shoulder at the group of scrub-clad nurses they just passed.

"I'm only teasing," she reassures him. Not that she'd have turned down blowies in the tunnels, no ma'am. "Hey, take it easy. You're not scared, are you?"

"It's just that… we were around here when we ran into those spiders from the Huntsmen or whatever, right?"

"Yeah, we're going to the same Tube station we took last time. But listen, the interstitials are totally safe. Huntsmen attacking people up here has never happened before. That's why everyone was freaking out about it. You don't even see them in Midway, really. Most of them are deep spiders, and—th' fuck?" Skeila is pulling on a door that should be open, first with one arm, then with three, but it doesn't budge. And there should be lights on inside too, but it's dark. She cups her claws around the window and peers in—rows of unfilled seats in front of a black canyon where the Tube train normally waits. What the hell is going on tonight? "I guess this station's closed. Uh, let's try the Gateway Center one. It's not far."

"Sure," shrugs Sid, and follows along. "So most spiders don't come up here either? Haven't seen any others." Ugh, course he's gonna notice the pattern, that's like his whole thing… at least he's happily unaware of how friggin' weird it is for a Tube station to be shut down. The Tube neverstops.

"Well… sun's comin' up, so everyone going topside's probably there already. Though it's usually busier than this." He nods and yawns. "Tired?"

"Mmm-hm." She's been holding his bony lil' hand as they walked for a while now; he takes a few steps forward while leaning on her. "I wouldn't mind getting in to that web of yours about now."

"If you'd let me change you, you wouldn't even have to walk the rest of the way…" He laughs it off. "Beg all you want. I'm just too tired to change you now. You'll have to wait till tomorrow."

They make it to the interchange under the Gateway Center buildings. Here, dozens of tunnels connect in an open space three stories high—there's escalators, little trees, a fountain, a bank of currently closed fast food kiosks on the second floor. There's always spiders here, but not today. And of course, when Skeila pulls on the door to the Tube station, first with one arm, then with three, it doesn't budge. "Something's wrong here," she says, trying to see in the dark window by cupping her claws around her face. "This place is never closed." She folds her arms in consternated silence.

Sid searches for a suggestion. "Huh. Uh, well… should we go back to my apartment?"

"Sun's gotta be up by now. I'd get seen."

"Huh." The human shuffles around, unable to come up with any further ideas. She'd be happy that he didn't suggest that he should go back up to his apartment, but she can't stop worrying about whatever's behind the deserted tunnels and the Tube shutdown. Smart thing to do, probably, would be to camp out here till the Tube comes back online—gotta happen sometime, right? Someone who knows what the fuck's going on might show up, at least. But sleeping on that tiny, flat human bed for two nights has killed her back and she really wanted to sleep in her own web tonight. Plus every minute they spend up here is another minute who knows what the fuck might happen to them—Huntsmen in the tunnels, a Tube shutdown, what next? And—well, she was really looking forward to getting Sid into her web, too…

"Alright. If the Tube's not running anywhere, let's try and hitch a ride down on the freight elevators."

"Sure." He's so easygoing. Ready for just about anything other than letting her change him… "Far from here?"

"Not too far. They're under your football stadium."

"Weird place for freight elevators."

"Nah, that's where they always put 'em. Good place to hide. Already have loading docks, trucks always coming in, plenty of space off-limits to the public. You remember when they blew up the old stadium—hadda be like, ten years ago? It was cause it only had two elevators."

"Holy shit, seriously? That was huge. I remember the dust cloud over downtown until noon, and how they shot fireworks off even though it was morning."

"Yeah, now we've got ten. Midway's the biggest underground city on this side of the continent, you know. We had actual shortages cause we couldn't get stuff down quick enough. I remember when they built the new ones, they made huge webs where the shafts were going, straight up to the ceiling. Workers would climb up all the way to the top to put stuff in place. You could see them from everywhere."

"So they ship food and stuff down there on giant elevators?"

"Well, only fragile stuff. Anything that won't break just gets packed up and sent down Apostrophe Falls. It's pretty cool—remind me to show you the boxes landing."

They continue on down hallways that go on as far as city blocks, the tunnels under the rivers where there are no basements to connect to, and there's just a long beige stretch whose other end is somewhere further than you can see, past the fluorescent white point the straight edges of linoleum tiles and light tubes converge towards. They finally reach the freight elevator station, and while Skeila is ready by this point to kick down the door, it is thankfully unlocked.

Normally, teams of spiders and humans would be working together around the clock, loading the super-wide elevators with pallets of groceries, microwaves, electric scooters, flat-screen televisions, refrigerators, high grade audio equipment, and other human-manufactured delights. (Every half hour there's a cab filled up entirely with boxes sealed with that familiar "Amazon Underground" packing tape.) But today there's no activity, just one human with his feet up at the front desk, surfing Youtube on the receptionist's computer. He seems surprised when Sid and Skeila come in, and pauses the cat video. "Morning, officer."

"Hey… why are you guys shut down?"

"Cause Midway's not taking any cargo today. Figured it was a holiday or something. I thought Maladay was coming up soon, right?"

"What about the Tube? All the Tube stations are closed."

He shrugs. "Dunno. I live up there, in Ross Township."

"Okayokay whatever. We need sent down to Midway."

"Uh… well, we got an e-mail from the Municipal Arachnohuman Relations Commission that said the elevators weren't supposed to run at all. I'm just here cause someone has to unlock the doors for the trucks."

"I don't give a shit what the MARC says. Turn one of 'em on."

"I'm, uh… not supposed to…"

Little pissant. She leans over the desk above the now-cowering human at what you might call a threatening angle, crossing her middle arms and holding the upper ones akimbo. She's got the cop's gift for intimidation, aided here by both parties' natural instincts: the predatory urges spiders feel towards humans, and those primitive monkey fears of fangs, claws, venom, teeth—teeth that Skeila's being sure to display as fully as possible as she growls "Are you fucking kidding me? D'ya see this badge?" Tapping here on the pointy golden starfish-thing on her sash… "Means I'm with the Arachnid Altercation Agency. Turn an elevator on."

"H-hey, look, listen," says the cowering clerk. "I'm only doing my job here—"

"Your job?" That's not an excuse that'll hold water with any spider. "You listen, human! I need to get home and I'm gonna punch a new fuckin' hole in you if you don't send me there!"

"Jesus, alright!" thunk—the human's backed his chair into the wall. "Get in bay five. Shit, lady…"

"Hmph. Thanks," she grunts, mollified a little by being called "lady", unladylike as she may be at the moment. Threatening impalement might've been a squinch excessive. But really—the MARC? The fuck are they doing now?

During the yelling, Sid awkwardly sidestepped away to look at the posters. They're the same ones that are at all the major transit points between Midway and the surface, about all the stuff you're not supposed to do topside. She particularly hates the one he's looking at now—it's the one with the giant boot about to crush a cartoon spider. It's the way it's standing there, pathetically raising all of its arms to try and protect itself in the shadow of the boot, and all around it is this ring of faceless human silhouettes, pointing. DON'T LET THE HUMANS KNOW! says the top in huge red letters. FOR THEIR SAFETY—AND YOURS—OBEY THE SEQUESTERING PROTOCOLS! Stupid thing looks like they painted it during the Cold War, and there's a jillion copies in every Tube station.

"Ugh, fucking come on already." She picks him up without giving him the chance to turn around and slings him over her shoulder.

The elevator is empty, save for a few wooden pallets stacked in the corner. Skeila sets Sid down next to the wall opposite the door, then leans against it herself and stretches out, ever so ready to go home. Spending time topside is fun as hell (especially when you've got a human, even if they won't let you change them, yet) but it's aggravating, too, having to stay cooped up inside. It'll be so nice to get back to the relaxingly chaotic environment of Midway, to sleep in her own web again, instead of on a flat freakin' slab… She hears the elevator doors whisper shut. To sleep in her own web, curled up around her skinny little human… all worn out from being fucked…

She opens her eyes, and there he is—staring at her tits, totally spaced out. The elevator begins to sink, the freight office slowly ascends out of view beyond the clear glass door, and he finally notices her smirking at him. He sheepishly looks down before realizing that leaves him looking directly at her cock. Aw, he's blushing. Adorable.

"See somethin' you like?"

"…Yeah, I do." She chitters approval at his confidence and sidles closer, slipping some arms behind him, but Sid tenses up. "Here? In the elevator?"

"Sure, why not?"

He considers for a moment and, to Skeila's great surprise, his skinny fingers wrap around her hardening cock. He laughs nervously. "Guess it's no big deal for spiders, huh?"

"Ooo, I think maybe I'm rubbin' off on you."

"I'm the one rubbing you off here…"

She bends down to kiss him. It's nice, but when they're both standing like this she has to stoop to do it. That makes her cock tricky for him to reach, which is no good at all for the handjob. Yet another advantage of webs. She settles for a few quick tongue-smooches before straightening up and smushing his face firmly into her boobs.

"Better close up?"

"Mmmf hmm," agrees Sid.

She holds him tight against her body, buried ear-deep in her breasts and wrapped up in her arms, with only enough space to keep jacking her off. She's enjoying the intimate little handjob, when suddenly, new light breaks into the compartment, and Midway scrolls into view all around them as the clear elevator lowers itself into the city.

They are level for a moment with the giant steel beams, themselves tall as buildings, holding up the very ceiling of this titanic underground space. They form a uniform lattice that stretches far off into the cave fog, and from them hangs an equally invariant pattern of the huge halogen floodlights that provide Midway with its simulated daylight. (They're big, but Skeila never knew they were thatbig. Geez, what if one fell down?) Obstructing their view of the city, like tree trunks in a forest, are the towers that interrupt the girder grid to poke right out of the ceiling, stretching down all the way to their real first floor in Midway.

Sid, detecting the change in lighting, slows his stroking, extracts himself from deep in her breasts, registers his expansive surroundings—then squirms away in terror.

Sigh. She lets him wriggle free. "The hell's your problem?" already knowing it's some ridiculous human hangup.

"The—the whole city can see us!"

Skeila rolls her eyes. "Now the whole city can see me get blue balls instead. That's way better." Humans. He's lucky she's not so tired, or she'd make him assume the position right up against the wall and then she'd really give them a show. "We're all the way up here and you don't wanna fuck? Seriously, I'd be more embarrassed about not getting me off." He walks off, nervously scanning the vista, so she comes up behind him, covers him in arms and makes sure her erection presses into his back. Even wiggles it a few times.

"See? Down there, they're looking at us! I told you they can see us!"

"So what? You think they're gonna put us on the news? 'Terrible Handjob On City Freight Elevator'. That'll be the headline."

"Hey," he says, a little wounded. "You liked it."

"Moldweorp will interview me, and she'll be like, 'Lieutenant, what made the handjob the worst one in the whole history of Midway?' Well, it's cause it was so awesome at first, but it turned out he was just teasing me… But it's alright, all part of the job, they'll probably give me a medal for Extreme Sexual Frustration, maybe two… geez, c'mon. I'm only teasing you."

"I'm starting to get kind of freaked out about everyone watching us."

Sure enough, in one of the towers, forty or fifty feet out and a few stories below them, there are some spiders gathering at a window to watch them pass. Okay, it might be a little unnerving if you're the self-conscious type like Sid is. Up here you're kind of the center of attention. In fact…

Normally, all of the city's freight elevators are running, clear cabs slowly floating up and down the glowing shafts like dust motes in sunbeams. But out of the six under PNC and the four over at the Heinz Depot, theirs is the only one running. And usually there's a dozen Tube cars whizzing through Midway's interior sky like giant tin fireflies, but today? None. Just her and Sid up here above the city, more and more spiders stopping to look as they descend. They're clearly some kind of attraction. Sid looks up at her, having gone past worried and into terrified. What happened down there?

"I've never felt more like I was being watched," he says.

"Hey," she says, tapping him on the forehead. "Relax. Remember what I said?" She looks straight down into his eyes. "I promised I'd keep you safe."

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

6

Re: Protective Custody (Series) - by teddy sloth

TWENTY FIVE HOURS EARLIER.

The first thing anyone sees when they walk into Melmon Bank is a giant dollar bill etched into a marble slab thirty feet across and taller than any spider. You have to walk around it to get into the bank proper. Humans coming here usually stop and stare for a minute; the immediately eye-catching thing is that instead of Washington in the center oval you've got a sweaty, bulldog-jowled Richard Nixon staring insanely at something out of frame, like he just saw hippies holding a sit-in. Further inspection of the light tracery on the dark stone reveals more peculiarities. The leafy boughs in the corners are twisting suckered tentacles. Below Nixon, in the stout serif'd typeface that normally reads ONE DOLLAR the legend reads YOUR ONLY GOD.

Walk around the carving and the space suddenly opens up; Melmon Bank is a rotunda and all the action happens along the circumference, which is divided into roughly a dozen sections. Each section belongs to one of the human banks, and each one has a row of tellers behind glass and a winding queue of customers. This being the only place in Midway where the banks can operate, the lines regularly overflow their rope mazes. The banks are all itching to further open up the market, but it took protracted argument just to get the spiders to agree to the Melmon Charter of 1956, which officially restricts them to one and one branch only, right here, the building shared among them—spider thinking being that it's safer to keep 'em all in one place. The banks have several other responsibilities: for one, they have to hang a tapestry over their section, "handsomely Fringed and festoon'd in Embroiderie depicting thy Corporate Logoe," according to the Charter, which Mayor Pixcreel insisted on writing in his version of olde English. They have to abide the close proximity of their competitors; security guards, separately hired by each company, are there not just for the protection of the capital but to keep espionage to a minimum. And once a week they all have to put up with a preacher from the Fifth Church of Our Lady of Discord ceremonially flipping a card table and cracking a whip at customers until they run away.

A professionally neat young woman has been studying the altered dollar in the entranceway for a few minutes now, as incoming and outgoing customers fork around her. Mousy and pretty, with a tiny nose and long, straight brown hair tied into a sensible ponytail, she wears a green blouse under a crisp gray blazer that matches her skirt and the messenger bag resting on her slim hips. It's Delenda Cartwright's first time in Melmon Bank; she's only been in Midway for two weeks now and everywhere she goes she gets distracted by these bits of local culture, which are always the most interesting when they're forced to abut capitalism in some way. The spiders sure do lay it on thick. Of course, she's heeding her boss's strident warnings to stay well detached from the locals themselves, in every sense of the word.

Delenda heads for the line forming underneath PNC's tapestry and waits patiently. Most of the other customers are human too, spiders not having much use for banking services. Some AAA officers in their green sashes patrol the area, though all of the private guards are humans. In the center of the bank, amid modernist benches and squared-off topiaries, one female spider sits and licks an ice cream cone while her male friend kneels between her legs and licks her. All of the humans, including Delenda, pretend not to notice, but the spider girl for some reason notices her. "You look uptight. Wanna borrow him for a minute?" she asks, indicating her friend, who looks up from between her legs with eight puppy-dog eyes. "He's real good at this!" Delenda blushes and avoids eye contact.

They'd sent her to a special class for all of their underground-bound employees. Before even mentioning anything with six arms, it started off with a three-day crash course in Chicago school economics that was perhaps intended as an inoculation. When they finally got around to mentioning the giant spider people that had been living among us for all of history, and some of her fellow execs-in-training called bullshit, they dispelled disbelief by introducing one to the class, right there. He had to crouch under the doorframe when coming in, and he was a light, wintry gray all over, with pale green eyes. His name was Sezzed, or something like that, and the braver students got to go up and shake his claw, though Delenda stayed back. She thought maybe he was looking at her for a moment, but then realized she couldn't tell. Someone asked him why he was wearing pants and no shirt. "I didn't want to wear the pants either, but they said you guys would freak out—I don't know how you put up with these things."

Naturally that made the students curious about spider culture. The next session, which Sezzed was not present for, began with a brief description of the spiders' unsophisticated society, with its opposition to order and structure and resultant technological stagnation. They were warned that the spiders still lived in a kind of communal fashion—"we've been trying for decades to get them to see how efficient free markets can help," said the lecturer gravely, "but their insectoid brains probably predispose them towards primitive, collectivist societies—one might say hives. Before humanity built the underground cities for them, they were limited to living in rudimentary tunnels and warrens. In fact, it's thanks to local steel production that Midway was the first major underground settlement in North America. But I digress. There is one thing every human who may be exposed to spiders must be aware of, one thing even more dangerous than socialism, and that is the Change…"

Delenda's turn arrives, and her teller turns out to be a spider—a black one, with green eyes the color of a pool table. He has a crisp little bow tie and one of those visors worn by hard-nosed accountants and poker players. When she approaches his window, he does not even make a cursory attempt to disguise checking her out. "Nice shoes," he says.

"Gee, thanks."

He radiates a toothy smile and neatly folds two pairs of claws on his desk. "What can I help you with today?"

"Hi, my company has a safe deposit box here, and I need to get some things from it."

"No problem. Name?"

"Delenda E. Cartwright," she says, passing the spider her driver's license.

"Nice to meet you, Delenda—my name's Kalak, by the way—but I'm gonna need the company name, too."

"Uh… Wallace Shale."

He pauses for a split second, his cockeyed look belying the dramatic shift in mood Delenda has learned to expect when namedropping her employer. It reliably causes friendly spider exuberance to curdle into some mixture of pity, dejection, and disgust, but on the plus side there's no surer way to deflect flirtatious arachnids she doesn't want to deal with.

"C'mon back." The spider curtly buzzes her through a door into PNC's designated space. Not far inside is the vault, lined with boxes. "You got a key, right? You're looking for number six sixty six." Delenda is confused when she follows the numbering all the way to the end of the vault's inner edge and finds out that the boxes stop at 500, and over on the other side they start again at one. She looks back at the teller and he only gives her an exaggerated shrug. No help there. When she gets into the sixties, though, she stops—someone's used a label maker to attach another six to #66. From behind her, the teller laughs. She unlocks the box and directs an unamused glare his way. "Uh oh, weoffended her. Hey, do you have any idea what your company is doing down here, let alone up there?"

"I'm only a personal assistant."

"So, no, you don't. Right? Cause it'd just break my heart to know a pretty human like you knows about all that stuff and works there anyway. We like to pretend the only really evil humans are the old fat guys in suits."

"Look. I don't know what particular thing you have a problem with, but I promise you I had nothing to do with it. I don't decide anything."

"What's that got to do with it?" The teller sighs. It's never just the suits. The spiders have known about coal and oil and gas for centuries. Compressed black deathstuff, seeping poison, hidden suffocation lying in the earth to punish those who dig too deeply. The collective spider instinct is to fear them. What scant organized scientific research spider society has ever been able to conduct has largely been directed towards the avoidance of such deposits. Yet nobody was surprised, many years ago, when the humans decided to direct most of their incredible world-altering machinery (that of it which they could spare from killing each other) towards digging the goddamn stuff out of the ground. Deep down every spider assumes that humans, no matter how individually lovable, harbor an instinctual drive to destroy the world.

"Listen," says Delenda.

"I'm listening," he says, but Delenda doesn't actually have a defense prepared, so she only stands there with her arms crossed. And then suddenly—KERBLAAAAAAMMM.

The explosion, originating from somewhere near the main area of the bank, is so loud Delenda can feel it in her chest. The floor shakes. "Holy shit, says the teller, running out of the vault, and Delenda follows him. "Holy shit," he says again when they get outside. Chunks of stone litter the floor and the corporate tapestries are singed at the edges. There is a huge hole blown into the side of the building, almost the full height of the wall, beyond which some Midway side street is visible. A tank rolls in through the hole, treads rumbling over the rubble, yes a real WW2-style tank, which presently judders to a halt just inside the building. There is a muffled metal clanking, and the bank becomes remarkably quiet before the tank's hatch cover swings up as it is thrown open from inside.

"Move! They're gonna get away!" screeches a nasal New Jersey accent from inside the tank, and then a chubby orange spider girl squeezes herself out of the hatch, rolling over the side when a comrade pushes up from underneath her. Her bright fur is pumpkin-colored, her eyes and claws are solid black, and she is wearing nothing but a Stahlhelm strapped below her chin. Delenda's heart sinks—now that her lower half is visible, so is her leg and the twisting maze of creeping ivy running up it, a marking indicating her status as one of the spiders Delenda was repeatedly warned to stay away from at any cost—the Huntsmen.

"Like you could even catch one," says the spider coming up from below—this one's a guy, black eyes and dark brown fur with black edges, like charred wood. The intricate tribal patterns snaking up his left leg are done in white, for better contrast with his body. "Hell, they already ran away," he says, in no particular hurry. "—'cept for that one there. Mine." He is pointing, of course, at Delenda, who now sees that all the other humans have scattered and only a few spiders have been too curious or frightened to run. (Two AAA officers look poised to do something, but another spider from the tank fires a quick burp of warning shots from an automatic rifle, halting their advance.) He steps towards her, openly appraising her body, and smiles a malicious little smile of approval, to Delenda's utter horror.

"Lasck, you jerk! I want a cock!" whines the orange spider in the helmet.

"Then go run one down, fatty. Episkopos promised the next one to me," says the spider approaching Delenda, without taking his huge, dark eyes off of her. He's got a long, blocky face and a high forehead; the fur on his head is swept up and backwards into a quiff made of individual hair-spines. "And I'm taking her."

"Yo!" The bank teller interrupts, voice cracking. "Wait! You guys won't take another spider's human, right? It's part of your code! So… fuck off! That one's mine!"

Lasck grumbles, but stands still. The orange female says "That's bullshit! Seriously, how many times are we gonna let a good cock get away cause of that dumb rule?" Both of them, and all the other Huntsmen in the bank, look back towards the tank—there's now another spider standing there. A woman, in red and purple robes and a hood that covers most of her face. She smiles peacefully, fangs out. Her robes are an intricate manifold of scarlet silks, yet they only cover half her body, leaving her three tan left arms exposed, though thanks to careful folding her vestments do cover the space between her legs. They wait for her direction.

"It issss true," she begins, "that we must always resssspect the bond between our people and their humanssss. But—you will forgive me—I musssst quessssstion your bond. Why are you allowing your penis to walk around on her own? It isssss… most incautious. It demonstrates a…. disssssrespect for the sacred bond. Tell me, isssss this really your human?"

"Yeah," says Lasck. "How do we know you've even met her before? If she's yours, what's her name?"

Now all eyes turn to the teller. His first second of hesitation is enough to answer their question, but the Huntsmen don't give him the easy out, they just stand there grinning until he's forced to guess. "Uh… Desiree?"

"Desiree? Desiree? Do I look like a stripper?!" shrieks Delenda. "You saw my ID! It's Delenda!"

"Oh man, that's right." The teller snaps a claw. "Knew it was D-something."

Lasck laughs. "You're both wrong. If she was really yours the right answer would have been 'my cock'."

The teller shrugs apologetically. Delenda sighs; not like she remembered his name, either… But she's got one more trick up her sleeve; it's a long shot, but doesn't she have to try? "You don't want me! I… I work for Wallace Shale! People will come looking for me!"

Oops. If there was some magic phrase that could have gotten her out of this, that certainly wasn't it. Nobody among the few remaining spider spectators looks impressed. Even the two AAA officers share a sidelong glance, and the teller sucks a breath in through his teeth. The Huntsmen all turn and stare, seething, until the chubby orange one screeches "Get that cunt, Lasck!"

Is there any sense in trying to run? As Lasck reaches for her, oozing grim judgment, she isn't sure her legs would even obey her if she tried. She finds her mouth and tongue certainly won't, as she screams but only gets an escaping whisper of unshaped air. He's big, so much bigger than her. He seizes her without urgency, around her waist, her wrist, and her neck. There is no hope for clemency in his unbreakable grip.

"One moment, Lasssck." It's their robed leader, approaching one of the bank's surveillance cameras. She removes her hood, revealing dazzling clear purple eyes and a lightly lined face, looking about as old as spiders can—which could put her anywhere from 40 on up. She angles a camera towards her and begins to speak.

"Sssspiders of Midway—you poor, ssssoft things. You have lived among the humans for sssso long you are forgetting your true nature. Ssssome of you believe it is possible to love a human with the ssssame love you have for your fellow sssspiders. Humans! Those fragmented vessssels, those poisoners and murderers! They have one purpose, and that is to complete ussss. Do you not sssseee what they do when left unchecked? They kill and desssstroy! To leave them to roam and yet claim to be connected—this is an utter inverssssion of your true insssstincts, your real Will."

"You cannot ssssee the truth because you live in these pleassssure caves the humans have built for you. But the underground cities are zoos. For what other reason would the humans sssspend such vast amounts of their precious money? Make no mistake, brothers and ssssisters, you are being domesticated. But we will remind you of the true order of things. We will sssshow the humans, and those of you that choose to live as their pets, what their purpose truly is."

"There issss nothing more ssssacred than the connection between a sssspider and their human. We, the Hunters of Nuit, have dedicated ourselves to reasssserting the primacy of this bond. It issss the natural order. The Perfect and the Perfect are one Perfect, and not two; sssso it is written. Hear me, denizens of Midway! No longer will we honor your imaginary connections. No matter what falsities they have taught you, a human that is not a part of one of ussss is an unclaimed human—and an unclaimed human issss fair game for taking."

She aims the camera at Delenda and the spider holding her. "Brother Lassssck, I have already delayed you too long. Please—demonsssstrate." He doesn't need told again: his claws rip through her clothes at once and shred her Aspirational Young Businesswoman getup. She stands all but naked in the chilly bank, then Lasck tears off her panties too, and the only sound is snapping elastic and her tiny whimper. All eyes, including whatever ones watch from beyond the CCTV, are focused on her.

The monstrous thing presses his body against her. She can't do anything other than turn her head to the side, eyes squeezed shut so she won't see any of this—it can't be happening, any of it, it won't end up for her like this, she has so many plans, Director, Vice President, Senior Vice President, if not at Wallace Shale than somewhere else, but either way she's destined for boardrooms and corner offices, not for being permanently installed in the crotch of a huge, hairy spider monster. This kind of thing doesn't happen to people like her, she's an executive-to-be, not some kind of degenerate freak who'd be okay with being nothing but an organ, unable to do anything other than—than get hard and spurt cum… His chest presses into the side of her face, bristly fur hot and scratchy against her cheek; his scent is like the faded ghost of cologne in a root cellar.

Lasck's claws launch an uninvited investigation of her body. He touches an ear, traces an eyebrow, brushes aside her hair to investigate the curious curve of her smooth neck. This whole time he's growling quietly, a two-stroke engine of a rumble from far down in his throat. "You're scared. All humans are scared, at first. But they never want to go back." There's a claw between her legs now. "Not once they feel what it's like to be a cock. What they're supposed to be. Humans never want to go back once they find out how good it is."

Doesn't that make it all the more terrifying?

They taught her about the Change in class too, with a VHS tape halfway between middle-school sex ed and Cronenberg. Someone had asked, "—is it dangerous?" Oh yes, said the lecturer. We believe it can change how you think. Something in it that causes anti-establishment thinking. But even worse is that you are at the mercy of a spider, an irrational, chaotic creature. Remember that you are helpless. Fully incapacitated. Utterly immobile. They can turn you into part of them and decide, on a whim, to never change you back…

So this is where Delenda goes while the spider violates her, back to her company-sponsored initiation into the underground… She doesn't hear him command her to spread her legs, so he picks her up and positions her as effortlessly as a doll, with an arm for each limp limb and two to stabilize her. He holds her out in front, running a claw up her cream-white back, along her bumpy spine and over sharp shoulder blades, pulls the ponytail holder out of her hair, leaving that glossy brown curtain free to slide off her shoulder and into her face. (Later she will remember these last minutes in her body and realize that she was already being held as though she had taken on her new, permanent role. Soon, his arms will not need to support her; her own internal rigidity will be all that she needs…) She squeals when Lasck puts his cock in her, but that's just automatic, something her body does. She's still back at the corporate lecture hall learning Their tips n' tricks for dealing with the spiders: don't wear suggestive clothing (as he pulls her back against him, all the way inside) and definitely don't get into any political arguments (as he pulls her away again).

"Hurry up, Lasck! You even start yet?" The fat orange spider, with her grating voice and oily Jersey accent, somehow manages to be the thing to snap Delenda back to the present, in time to hear him grunt his reply: "Jusssst did." Delenda knows the only thing they can be talking about, of course, but still looks back to confirm it, low so as not to see his face, and yes, it's happening; she's being Changed.

The balls of her heels have connected to her buttocks, and her thighs and lower legs are melting together. From beneath the spider's bristly fur, deep burgundy brownness spreads in blotches across her hips. Her toned legs lose their definition, becoming shorter and rounder. She looks expectantly at her arms, at her chest, to see if there are signs there, too, but nothing—yet. (She knows that it happens differently for every spider. What you look like after it's all over—when you're a penis—depends on you. But the spider determines how you change. The first change she ever saw, in a droneclub on her first night in Midway—the girl was there one moment, then her face was a giant cockhead the next. Her head changed first, and faster than her body, so for a brief minute she was a giant pole with tits—but soon she lost those too, and for the rest of the night Delenda couldn't help casting glances at the spider's long cock and thinking about the young woman it really was…)

Heat envelops her hips as a ring of Lasck's dark skin creeps up her body. She's being consumed rather than morphed, like a toothless snake is trying to swallow her. It moves so fast that reflexively she brings a hand down to her waist to try and stop it, but that's a mistake—instead her hand gets trapped under the encroaching ridge. She tries to pull it back, but it's stuck in there good. She screeches and does the same thing with the other hand before she can stop herself, and now both of them are stuck in there up to the wrists and then past them, forearms feeling the squeeze as she's sucked deeper in.

http://cockify.me/stories_html/img/lockdown1.jpg

Delenda flails around without the support of her arms and tries to straighten up. She tries to kick her legs too, but only gets a small, distant response from them, like they've both gone to sleep and she's trying to kick through a very viscous gel. She sees why when Lasck, in order to get better control of her, sits down on the bank floor—her legs are now big round fuzz-covered balls, with only a few lumps, smoothing out before her very eyes, to suggest they were ever anything else. Where her hips once were is now the round ridge separating the furry ballsack from taut brown flesh, her body and simultaneously his.

She's found her voice again—can't stop screaming, in fact, which certainly isn't helping anything, although it makes Lasck laugh. She's pulling and pulling, trying to get her arms out of the shrinkwrap spiderskin tube sucking her in, but the more she pulls the faster she seems to be stuck. It's up past her belly-button now. A moment ago she could feel resistance in her wrists, tugging on her knuckles—but now she can't feel them at all behind the tingly, homogenizing warmth inside this sheath. The sensations of her lower body are not absent but altered; when the spider obscenely fondles his new testicles, Delenda feels it not as rubbing on her leg but on her balls, even though she's never had balls before and they currently occupy the same position in sensory space that her legs used to…

The cockskin cocoon is nearly at her tits. Inside, some unimaginable metamorphosis is happening; the outline of her fingers has softened away entirely and her lower arms have turned into soft, puffy tubes. She still struggles, but it's more symbolic than anything now, and she quiets down to moans alternated with ragged gasps for air. Once it reaches a little past her waist, the terror subsides—that's her adrenal gland going away. (One more fun fact from her training.) The intellectual, entirely rational fear of spending the rest of her life as a penis is still there, of course, but now it's the spider's hormones coursing through her and not her own, clouding her mind not with primal terror but an uncomfortable miasma of lust which, she feels, is wholly inappropriate to the situation. She does not want to be turned on. But her sexuality has been taken, pussy nowhere among the crinkly scrotal folds where it was a minute ago. (Not like she was using it anyway. Hm? Intrusive thoughts here, coming if not from her own unwillingly horny mind, then—something more sinister—are they sneaking across nerves from him to her, via newly forming bridges linking the spider's brain with whatever she's becoming?)

She admits to herself that it's physically pleasurable. She can even feel a sensation building, like an army on the far side of a distant hill, that resembles an orgasm. But it's a long way off, and meanwhile she still fears the rising Change consuming her body, ready now to claim her shoulders. Her breasts, never notable to begin with, have already gone under and flattened out. She can't move her arms at all. They are now only prominent veins running up and down her tubular sides. It's only seconds away, but she dreads the sheath rising above her neck, closing her in, cutting off the light. Will she still be able to breathe, will she not need to? What will it do to her—to her mind?

The same scared thoughts chase each other around Delenda's brain a dozen times in the space of a few seconds, but Lasck interrupts: he grabs her phallic body at its base and pulls upwards, squeezing out one low, long groan, and for a moment, every thought in her head. She's never been touched like that before, never had that kind of sensation—but she's never been a cock before. How can she resist something that feels so good? She can feel a strange compressing force on her shoulders, rounding them out painlessly. Like a cresting wave, the unfamiliar skin has wrinkled and bunched at its upper edge, forming a ruffle of foreskin, and it begins to tickle her chin. She stretches her neck out to get away, like someone caught in quicksand trying to keep their head above the fatal line a little longer, stay connected to the daylight even though no help is coming and there's that irresistible pull tugging her down, down…

Suddenly, the skin lurches upwards. Delenda is cut off mid-scream as it seals around her head, leaving only a small tuft of her hair poking out the top like unshucked corn. Her mouth left open in surprise, her fine nose, her light brow and wide eyes all leave a topography of bumps and dips in the veiny surface of the spider skin covering her head, but in seconds they all smooth into nothing, leaving the familiar shape of the tip of a penis. The light brown hair still poking out of the end falls away.

http://cockify.me/stories_html/img/lockdown2.jpg

Lasck rolls the foreskin of his new cock back, confirming for the camera that there is no visual trace of Delenda left—her pretty face is now only a plump, dark glans. The reveal seems to push him over the edge into violent orgasm, hunching over and bellowing as he masturbates Delenda's new body so fast that his claws blur, the penis that was a young woman spasming upwards as it blasts jizz all over the scattered corporate signage littering the ground. Lasck even turns to ensure he spreads the wealth to as many of the banks as possible before he slumps to the ground. The CCTV will show him with a satisfied, faraway smile, big chest heaving as he catches his breath.

There's no rest for the wicked, unless you've got friends. Lasck may be too weak to walk, but two of his compatriots team-lift him by his arms. The orange spider walks around scattering pellets too small to be seen onscreen, which explode with tiny white flashes and fill the room with impenetrable black smoke. There is the sound of another explosion, but this one is different in character than the tank shell, tighter and more focused… When the smoke clears, the Huntsmen will all be gone, leaving their tank behind and a seemingly bottomless sinkhole in the middle of Melmon Bank's polished stone floor.

That's all the viewers of UDKA-TV will ever see played on the news, and when the Arachnid Altercation Agency reinforcements arrive in a few minutes, they will be dismayed to find the hole leads directly to the tunnels underneath Midway, a maze twistier than even the interstitials, parts of which were used for, and had not been touched since, the initial construction of Midway. Of course there are connections to the deep tunnels. How can you stop a spider from simply digging upwards, any more than you could stop a person from walking through a field? The perfunctory search will be called off after a few hours.

But here and now, the Huntsmen are racing through depths dark and unknown, not sure if they are being chased or how close their pursuers may be. Somehow, the Episkopos is out in front. Lasck is being carried on someone's back, allowing him to see the chubby spider struggle to keep up at the rear of the pack. This is deeply amusing to him. "Attagirl, Itkil. You can use the exercise."

"Fuck (huff) you (puff) Lasck," she says with great effort.

They hustle through the detritus of a lost era, some of this stuff obviously untouched for decades. Overturned school desks, freon-leaking fridges in mint green, baroque streetlights, wrecked movie projectors and their tattered film reels, long sections of wrought iron fence… As they travel, the tunnels grow less finished, giving way to black canvas walls and unadorned wooden supports. It's a little like being backstage at a theater, huge set pieces all around, and the combined energy of a massive collective not far away, just on the other side of a thin barrier…

Their red-robed leader raises a claw. "I think… we may resssst now, children." They all stop and find a place to sit on the floor, except for two that stand watch on opposite sides of the small group, staring down the dark hallways as if challenging them to produce something capable of taking them on. Lasck leans against a clump of ripped-up sandbags, letting flaccid Delenda flop to the floor, leftover drips from her tip wiping out years of accumulated dust in circular spatters. His neat quiff has been demolished from the harried trip, spiny hairs sticking every which way. Itkil takes a seat next to him and, without asking permission, plays with his new penis, twirling and rubbing it in a fashion more inquisitive than sensual. Lasck doesn't appreciate this, but he's too tired to object.

Delenda hasn't gone anywhere. For a minute there, things got a little strange for her, especially when she was cumming. She had never felt, or imagined, anything like it, and any objections, any thoughts at all she had were temporarily obliterated by the orgasm that wracked her entire form. The ensuing afterglow was deliciously peaceful, carefree as laughing gas even as the spiders scrambled down these dark tunnels, away from the life she'd known, possibly forever, and her unable to do a single thing about it. She is reminded that she has no conscious control over her phallic body when her useless, invisible attempts to evade the orange spider's claw don't move her flaccid self a millimeter. Itkil's clumsy rubbing doesn't feel good at all; not only is Delenda totally spent, but she finds Itkil personally repugnant.

"You want me to suck her?" (Oh god, please don't, thinks Delenda.)

Thankfully Lasck shares her sentiment. "Naw. Let go. You're just mashing her. And she thinks you're gross, anyway." (How did he know that?!)

"Fine," huffs Itkil, releasing Delenda. "She don't know what she's missin'."

"Don't worry," says Lasck, addressing his own penis. "We can do way better than her. We'll find you someone you'll really like… you want a boy or a girl? You pick."

It is a sudden reminder that Delenda's new role is that of a copulatory organ, and it's not going to be all handjobs and jacking off. She gets these images of herself in her new body being aimed twatwards at some spider chick with her legs spread open, begging for Lasck to rail her. Previously Delenda wouldn't have even ranked herself as bi-curious, but there's now some kind of strange attraction at the thought, though she can't be sure whether it's hers or the spider's. But when she thinks (or has the thought come from him?) of being stuffed into the forbidden asshole of a spider male, just as strong and built as Lasck, and being the central point of their dirty connection… she begins to stir.

"Mmm. You want a boy. Alright."

If she still had a face, she'd be blushing.

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

If you're walking through Limestone Heights tonight, in that enclave of moneyed humans where the financiers and a few of their spider consorts dwell in mansions and glass condos, you may see a particular human, thin and paper white, pace impatiently through the second-floor picture window of a particular Gothic Revival mansion—dark wood, wrought iron window frames, and soaring finials on the parapets that reach out to Midway's stone ceiling (though Schlangenkraft Manor was, of course, constructed no earlier than the forties, when a handful of human tycoons decided it might not be so terrible to have a vacation home among the hedonistic, savage spiders…)

The Doctor paces his sitting room, as he's been doing for most of the past 25 hours. He's got a kind of command center set up here, where the expansive window bathes the room in Midway's artificial light and lets him look out over the city. TV's tuned in to the news, laptop charging on the couch, phone waiting to receive a call. He's barely slept, so his already red eyes are bloodshot terrors, and there's a scatter of angel-fine stubble on his clenched jawline, catching the light on his marble skin like quartz dust. His thin brows have settled into furrows of simmering anger. The normally fastidious Doctor has even skipped his morning shower, surprising Skenge. ("But sir, I could come in and get you if someone does call…" "Yes, you'd like that, hmm? I think not.")

The Doctor is aware, peripherally, that Skenge is upset, possibly even scared. He has been shorter with her than usual. It gives him no pleasure, but his maid's feelings are not currently at the forefront of his mind. She is in the adjoining kitchen, cooking, even though he has given her no indication that he wishes to eat. She knows better than to press him, but she has been hovering nearby all day, as she so often does whenever he is visibly frustrated. Her concern for him is endearing, but aggravating. After he declined dinner tonight, she asked him to fuck her, even bringing him an assortment of whips herself in the hopes that he could be coaxed into taking out some frustration on her… Skenge, for heaven's sake, can you cease thinking with your vagina for an hour? Do you understand the importance of these matters?

Firstly, there was Margreta's band of terrorists overplaying their hand. How the devil did they manage to get a tank down here? It was understood there'd be some kidnappings. It's their group's whole modus operandi, after all, and it creates a healthy sense of fear besides. But it's going to take a month to repair Melmon Bank. Naturally, PNC, BoA, Chase, and the rest aren't pleased with losing their only inroads into Midway, and they've certainly been letting him know it.

Yes, other than the wanton destruction of capital, the Huntsmen's little show was perfect, really. He's been encouraging Margreta to play up the religious angle, and it paid off beautifully. There's no hotter item in today's Fear Market than fundamentalist terrorists of any creed. Margreta's monologue has been playing nearly nonstop on UDKA-TV. He wrote a press release for the MARC advising Midway's humans that their safety could not be guaranteed here (as if it ever could be anywhere). If only fear was more effective on spiders; all he could wheedle out of Mayor Arachnypoundcake, despite hyperbolic warnings of kidnappings and threats of sanctions, was a reluctantly given three day lockdown.

But that was still a small victory. His real problem is that Sidwell Greenstreet was out of hand. Somewhere on the surface, after his minder from the Arachnid Altercation Agency decided to take him on a little jaunt up there without any kind of prior authorization—not that the AAA would care about that in the first place, or about the 24-hour rule. And he was now stranded there—thanks, maddeningly, to the Doctor's own machinations. He could have Arachnypoundcake end the lockdown at the cost of an immense amount of credibility, not to mention pride. No, he'd just have to hope Greenstreet showed up after the blockade ended, even if that did scuttle his hopes that a way could be found to make it permanent…

How did Greenstreet end up in the custody of this spider, anyway? That wasn't the plan. This Lieutenant Skeila could be a problem. She was chosen so carefully to match his psychosexual profile. The Doctor was pleased when he pulled Greenstreet's internet history and discovered a predilection for transsexuals, not uncommon at all among the spiders—and so he could delve into specifics. Deeper analysis of the young man's tastes revealed, perhaps, a subconscious yearning to be dominated, controlled… The MARC keeps better personnel files on the AAA than the AAA does, so it was a simple matter to find in their number a young trans spider with a reputation for rough treatment of humans—a HAARPie, even. Perfect. But she was supposed to be bait, only bait…

The Doctor silently ruminates over his problems, staring out into the subterranean skyline. And then—one of the freight elevators lights up, the almost invisible glass pillar turning without warning into a bright column of rectangular light. The Doctor's eye twitches. Rage is beyond him; a kind of cold, focused wrath is as close as he ever gets. But oh, is he there now. Three days—a mere three days—was all he could wring out of that old bastard, and the bug kept his promise for barely a full day. He can't decide whether this is an intentional slight or just the result of arachnid stupidities, but either way, Arachnypoundcake would pay, oh yes—

"Skenge? Fetch my binoculars. They're in the bureau in the study, top-right drawer, in a leather case towards the front." He turns, throwing a burning red-eyed glare her way. "Now, please."

The spider rushes off, resembling for the instant a blurry black-and-white photo. She's as colorless as her master, all soft greys and whites in a shiny black maid's outfit. (Skenge knows better than to hesitate, but it is precisely the lack of anger in his voice that frightens her now. The Doctor lets his guard down around her, around her and nobody else does he display irritation, frustration, sometimes even worry, voice slipping now and then into that West Virginian twang she finds so cute. But now his voice is as flat and affectless as she has ever heard it, as unemotional as when he addresses his employees at the MARC…) In seconds she's back with the binoculars; she waits patiently by his shoulder for further instruction as he locates and focuses in on where the clear glass shaft meets the stone ceiling. They wait in silence—and slowly an freight cab lowers into view.

He zooms in. A spider and a human molesting each other, briefly. The human pulls away. The spider, curiously enough, is an Arachnid Altercation Agent, green sash and all. Seeing it from the back, the Doctor is momentarily confused: it has sizable breasts but an oddly male build; broad shoulders, muscular arms, no hips to speak of… and when it turns around, there's an erection there, not nearly large enough to have been a person. Oh—of course. A grin splits the Doctor's pale lips, thin as a hairline fracture in ivory.

There is Order in this universe. He does not even need to look at the human; he is as sure as he has ever been about anything. But he does, just to see the face he has only seen in grainy security cam footage and Facebook pictures years out of date, and there he is—Sidwell Greenstreet. The Doctor's grin breaks into raucous, open-mouthed laughter, totally uncontrolled, head tilted back, face to the ceiling.

Skenge stares in horror. She's never seen the Doctor act like this. Oh, he's not humorless, he allows himself a chuckle here, mild laughter there, but never anything this unseemly. She knows better than to question him, but… "S-sir? …what's so funny?"

"Oh, Skenge," he says, removing his heavy glasses and wiping tears from his eyes. "Everything's so perfect."

This does nothing to assuage Skenge, but she stays quiet as the Doctor returns binoculars to red eyes to watch the rest of the little drama play out. Sidwell looks agitated about something. Seems to be… avoiding Lt. Skeila, actually, who follows him around the elevator. Hmm. Now the spider is holding him from behind, and she's saying something… no telling what. (Skenge, take a memo to Mr. Waterproof, tell him to have audio recorders installed in all freight elevators…) She touches his forehead, and—oh dear.

They're kissing. Hmm.

This could be problematic; at best the spider would be a distraction. But if they're stuck on each other, it'll simply have to be a matter of finding the right crowbar, that's all. The Doctor has the zeal of a man in the service of a higher power. Who knows how many promising young minds have been lost to the productive world, down here among the spiders, and Sidwell Greenstreet is what you'd call the at-risk type. Well. He won't be losing Greenstreet. He needs him.