A few days late for Halloween, and a long overdue edit pass (Sorry, Nikita!) later, but our submission is finally here!

Lost Souls' Day

It had been a long night, the rain poured down the window as I was about to close the office for the night.  I felt sore and tired all over, my knuckles raw from some anarchist mooks that thought they’d get the better of me on Lost Souls’ Day, and drenched from the rain that always seems to pound my spirits down on late nights like these.  My office must have smelled like the whiskey bottle I was interrogating, demanding to know why it mocked me for being full earlier, but now almost empty.  No good cop, bad cop routine, just drunk cop.

As the bottle made some very interesting points, the stuffy air in the room parted like Karma herself was scaring it away.  The cold air like a bucket of water from the barkeep in my younger days as I look up at the figure walking through the cigarette smoke.  Her hair was a like a blaze atop two emeralds.  Her legs seemed to go on for days, longer and more shapely than any a dame that’s come through here in longer than I care to remember. 

Now, any old private eye will tell you these things, nothing but metaphor and exaggeration, but I couldn’t make this up, swear on my mother’s grave.  Her hair moved like fire in the night, shifting colours in the nicotine haze.  She must have had work done, alchemical work, dangerous stuff.  This was the kind of woman who’d melt you like caramel over a hot stove and fold you into a million pieces for later.  The dame’s voice snapped me out of my daze, I felt sobriety hit me like a freight train.  I snapped up and did my best routine of the sober and responsible private eye.

“Is this Solvus, P.I.?  She asked, a hint of a tremble in her voice.  I nodded and motioned for her to sit in the chair in front of my desk.  “It is.  Now, what seems to be troubling you?”  I knew how this would play out, a cheating lover, no doubt about it.

“It’s just that...my sister, sh-she-”  The woman sobbed, her hair diminishing to a low simmering glow.  I pulled out the trusty box of tissues and my cigarette case, giving her a light.  “Take it easy, I’m the best there is, what happened?”

“She’s, fallen in with some horrible people I fear.  At first it was her and I were going to get matching hair, but she didn’t turn up at the Carl the Canny’s apothecary.  It was my last attempt to get a hold of her, she’s been roped in by the transformed society, I know it.  I want you to find her, and get her back to me and ma safely, she’s a sweet thing, please don’t let nobody hurt her.”  She handed me a picture.  The girl looked a sweet thing, alabaster white skin and a button nose and eyes that looked like they’d never seen a hard day in their life.  Certainly this girl didn’t harbour a transformation streak, did she?  Definitely not the rebellious sort, but I’ve been wrong before.

She’d come in at the worst possible day, Lost Souls’ Day.  I’m no superstitious fool, but you don’t mess with a day like today.  Avatars practically walking the streets in broad daylight, just looking for an excuse to transform people out celebrating those who lost themselves to the demons.  But, the way she’d been crying all over my desk, the sob story she gave me, I couldn’t refuse.

“I’ll do it.” I said, “just tell me who she’s been seen with.”

“I, I don’t know…oh, Cate...” She sobbed.  Great, now I’ve got a cold chase ahead of me, and a headache to go with it.

*****

I left the office under a stormy sky, already drenched to the bone and I hadn’t even hit the sidewalk yet.  I figured that I’d start with some of the alchemists in town, but they were always notoriously tight-lipped on their clients.  Good thing I had someone I could squeeze, and he seemed the type Cate would go for: cheap and quiet.  I’d run afoul of him a few times before, he’d been using some stolen dcum, and I should have taken it back from him, but I let him keep some on a favor.

I barged into the alchemist’s hazy ground-floor laboratory in Old Town, making it clear that he now had more pressing concerns than his latest mix.  The prematurely hunchbacked young man squealed as he saw me, hiding behind a large pressure-barrel with a dozen tubes flowing in and out of it. 

“I give, I give!  Just don’t get any on me when you take it!” He panicked.

I pulled him out from behind the barrel, bouncing around a couple of tubes which made him flinch in terror.  “And I won’t, Carl.  I’m cashing in that favor you owe me.  Now tell me if you’ve seen this girl.”

He mused over the photograph I thrust in his face, Cate’s confident smile the complete opposite of what Carl’s supposedly canny mug was wearing.

“Her sister was here, dame with the flaming red hair, your work I presume?”

He nodded, then pointed to the picture.  “She didn’t come here, but I’ve seen her, I swear.  Out past the old docks, she was there when I got this shipment of dcum.”

“When?”

“Couldn’t have been later than last week.”

“See her with anyone?  Any goony-lookin’ guys?”

“Can’t say for sure, but she was talking to a guy with a giant dick tail and tongue.  I didn’t stay long, I just got what I needed and left.”

“So, you stole this load too, Carl?”

He looked down hesitantly.

“Goddamn it Carl.  You’re lucky I don’t report you to the pigs.”  I left him on sitting on the floor as I mulled over what he’d been talking about.  Carl having stolen this load told me two things.  One, his reputation as a cut-rate alchemist had caught up with him, and he was broke, and two, if he was skulking around the docks when he saw Cate, that might be where her sister heard about these mooks she was hanging around with.  If I could find this cock-tailed mook, I might be able to find our girl.  There was a bar for transformees I’d been to before, the owner never missed a beat too, if she’d seen either of them, she’d know.

*****

The Serpent’s Hood was rowdy tonight, transformees really had a thing for Lost Souls’ Day.  I shouldered my way into the bar, warm moist air that smelled like an hours-long orgy hit my nostrils.  The place was packed, the lights low and the noise high as fleshy shapes crowded around watching people go in and out of the transformatorium in the corner, a man just stumbling out now as his arms melted away into giant prehensile dicks, his own cock lengthening to his head and opening at the tip like some kind of sandworm to reveal a vagina inside.  He erupted on the floor to cheers from the crowd, and profanity from the owner.  Something about health codes and having a room for this shit already.  I walked up to her and leaned on the bar, ordering a double whisky to keep my head on straight in the noise.  The woman’s medusa-like cock dreads seemingly followed me as I ordered, and she slithered over to me on her cock-tail that worked for legs and served me my drink.

“It’s been a while since we had you in here.”  She mused.  “Working a case?”

“You could say that.  More like trying to find a mutual friend of ours.” I described the cock-tailed guy and Cate as Carl told me.  “You seen either of ‘em?  Especially the girl.”

“Cate?  Yeah she’s been in here, she was looking for a job a month ago.  I told her that while I don’t mind that she’s unchanged, we have a clientele to cater to, and she had no work experience anyway.  The guy though, if he’s got the muscles that little shit Carl says he does, that’s Crag.  He’s bad news, one of Mercato’s boys.  Probably running their bootleg dcum show down on the docks.  If your girl’s been around him, best be getting a new girl, guy.”

“And you’ve seen him tonight?”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me if Mercato’s not having some kind of swanky party.  But where?  No idea.  You’re on your own, pal.”

I thanked her and paid for the drink, slipping her a rather generous tip.  She’d been after something more for a little while, getting me in that transformatorium of hers first of all, on account of my drunk ramblings asking her what it would feel like, but sober me wasn’t gonna take her up on it.  I put my hands in my pockets and pulled up my collar as I opened the door to the silent rainy streets, and bumped into a familiar face walking in.  The kind of familiar that feels like a punch in the gut.  I’d be a fool if I didn’t ask him what he knew though, he was after all the better detective, before I was let go.  Always had a better way with suspects, like he could read their mind for a plea deal, get the testimonial and the glory.

“Evening, Mac.  Didn’t expect to see you around here.”  He said.

I shrugged in the rain.  “I could say the same about you, Dermott.  Listen, I was wondering if you could help me with something, for old times’ sake.  I’ve been looking for a girl-”

“As always”

“As always my ass.  Listen, she’s in deep with Mercato, and her sister wants her out.  Any of your snitches know where he’s hiding out lately?”

Mac nodded and gave me directions to an old state house by the river.  “Listen, I’d not get testy with Mercato if I were you, Dermott.  You’re not with the force anymore, he’s not gonna be afraid of being a PI-killer as much as a cop-killer.”

*****

The rain had let up by the time I reached Mercato’s newest mansion.  The place was the kind of old, gated mansion originally built to keep the transformed and the unsatisfactory out, all brick and wrought-iron windows, with an impressive gate out front.  I could feel the thump from the band’s drums in your chest long before I cleared the back wall, landing on a goon and giving him an early bedtime with my foot.  I peered into a window to see the place was also packed.  No way I was gonna see Cate in the crowd.  Until it happened.

Cate got on the stage, and started dancing on the pole with a couple other girls.

At least, I thought she was Cate, her curly black hair and brilliant green eyes were the same, but the pink slit where her mouth and nose should be, and the third breast in her corset, those were new.  ‘Shit.’ I thought, ‘there goes any hope of getting an ‘untransformed bonus’’.  This must have been what she wanted back at the Serpent’s Hood, to work as a transformed performer, but why here?  Did she owe Mercato?  But with the way she moved her hips and three massive breasts, teasing the crowd with her mouth pussy as she slowly stripped off her clothing, she could have had a job anywhere.  I found myself fixated on her, she was gorgeous, still even after her cute nose and mouth were washed away for something more vulgar.  So fixated, that I didn’t hear the telltale footsteps of a mook behind me, or the click of the revolver’s hammer.

“Get up.” the voice said behind me.  “No need splattering your brains through the window.  It’ll upset the guests.”

I slowly stood and turned around, face to magnum barrel with the same cock-tailed Crag Carl described.  His tongue lolled out of its mouth quizzically at me as he motioned with it that we should move somewhere else.  I’m not one to argue with a .357 an inch from my teeth, I put my hands up and went with him. We went in through the service door, and up the stairs over the gracious ballroom, up to the dark balcony where Mercato himself sat.  The imposing bald man looked up at Crag in the same way that one looks at a spider above their bathtub.  “The fuck is this, Crag?  Can’t it wait?”  He moaned.

“Fraid not, this one’s put Ed in emergency.”
Mercato looked away, Cate was still dancing, and as I glanced back he caught me staring.  “Like the show?  She ain’t bad, new girl on the block.” He sighed, then waved a jeweled hand to Crag, who dragged me upstairs to Mercato’s office, the gun making sure I didn’t do anything cute.

Mercato showed up some time later, taking off his jacket and resting it on the leather chairs.  He was shorter than I remembered, rounder, but still the same egg-headed brute with the nasty scar on his cheek.  He cracked me on the cheek with a ring-studded hand and I saw stars as I fell to the ground, hauled up by Crag and thrown in a chair.  He cracked his knuckles and hit me again, just to make a point. 

“I don’t know where to start with you.  Snoops, they’re part of the life, I couldn’t care less if you caught a glimpse at one of my girls.  But a washed up ex-cop who put one of my men in the hospital?  Nah, that ain’t no snoop.  So what’re you here for?  Be quick about it, and I’ll make sure you’re only in there as long as he is.”  He snarled.

“I’m not here for you, just the girl, the dancer.” I said.  “Her sister’s looking.”

He snorted and waved a hand.  “No.  Her and I have a business arrangement.”

“And I’m sure her family can pay it out, everyone’s happy.”

“Uh-huh, no.  This ain’t no loan deal.  She owes me.  So unless you wanna get on that stage, you shut your mouth and lose your teeth.  Then I’m happy, that’s what matters.”

Before I could say anything, Crag was on me.  I kept up the tough guy act for a few more hits, thinking of something to do.  I started seeing stars, then I was thrown out of the chair, and went black for a moment.  I woke up with the gun in my face, Mercato’s bloody finger on the trigger.  As he cocked it, the door opened behind him, giving me a minute of relief.  He held the gun where it was as a man walked in.

“Boss, “ the new man said, I’ve got something you wanna see.”

Mercato and I looked over as Mac entered the room.  He dragged Cate in by her hair, her protesting with muffled whistles through her pussymouth. 

I saw red.  “You son of a bitch, Mac.  What the hell is this?”

He shrugged.  “Man’s gotta make a living, how do you think I made all those plea deals?  Anyway, no good turn gets left unpunished, so when you said you were looking for Cate here I tipped Crag off, and when I come to get my reward, well, look who I found trying to steal some serum…” He threw the girl into the room.

Mercato turned to her and kneeled down to her naked body.  “So, that’s it now?  You had a taste, then, even when I’m generous and let you off with a nice little deal, you think you can get away with more?  What a stupid girl.  Crag, get the boys we’re gonna have to-” 

He stopped.

He turned to me.

He bellowed out laughing. 

“Oh, now this is rich!  Oh Dermott, what was that you said about ‘everyone’s happy?’  Well, I’ve got my own take on that one.”  He snatched the bottle of serum from Mac, uncorked it, and poured it on Cate, her piercing green eyes wide with terror.  “She gets the serum she wants,” he said, as he emptied the bottle over her. 

She moaned and gasped with what little jaw muscles she had left.  Her breasts took on a deep red hue as they began to swell beyond the already large proportions they were, small red spots appearing over her toned skin that swelled up into more breasts, each one coming in like someone was inflating her skin from the inside.  Her eyes fluttered and she began to finger her mouth pussy, much to Mercato’s delight I could see, then her eyes went wide as the hand in each of her pussies began to recede away, sliding out as they were dragged back into her shoulders, leaving only a smooth piece of skin where they were.  She thrashed as her back began to raise off the ground, more breasts making their way forward in an uneven pattern, fully surrounding her torso with breastflesh.  Two lumps on her forehead began to take shape, forming into short, thick tentacles that flowed backwards over her beautiful, black hair.  They seemed to be under her control, as she bent them around to play with her face, tickling and suckling at the sensitive tips with her pussymouth.  There was a crunching sound at her hips as they seemed to push wide of their own volition, causing her to cry out as her still-human pussy was now exposed at all times.  There was no way she could conceal it now, or walk.  She would be on her back forever.  She panted out her mouth pussy as she orgasmed before us, on the floor.

“Hmmmm”, Mercato hummed as he watched the girl before him squirm in orgasm, trying desperately to rub her aching clits on something.  “Not really what I had in mind.  But…”  He motioned to Crag and the other thug as they grabbed my shoulders and dragged me between Cate’s stretched legs.  I could feel how hot she was on the back of my neck.  She tried to clasp her legs around me, to no avail.  Mercato returned with another vial.  “Good thing you wanted to find her.  Oh, you’ll never lose her.”  He poured the dcum on us.

There was a cool sensation as the fluid ran down my head and chest, down to my crotch and legs.  But the dcum seemed to have a mind of its own as it felt like the cold tingling sensation turned hot as it flowed into me, spreading out inside of us.  I could feel her heartbeat, the rushing breath as she started to pant, her breath matching my own.  My head drifted upwards as I felt her legs flow into my shoulders, my own legs buckling and shifting.  Her thighs were getting longer, and arching upwards over my face, I felt the pop as they bent in half, a new joint forming midway down the thigh.  My own arms swelling and lengthening, until they too popped and bent in half to match Cate’s.  I waited to feel the pop of new joints, but I realized I couldn’t hear anything, my head was halfway buried in Cate’s abdomen, only my face showing through.  I began to pant and moan as I felt something in the back of my throat, a moist wetness that had a familiar taste.  I couldn’t move my head, only my eyes as I felt the onset of an orgasm, but from my face.  The rhythmic pulsating from her seemed to extend to my groin as well as her torso, as I felt her breasts mashed into the ground, something swelling within them.  Inch by inch, my cock worked its way up my chest, and came to a rest by my chin.  Thunderously, my balls clenched, and I erupted all over my face, our whole body coming to a climax as I felt our fluid form seemingly harden into existence. 

Mercato clapped his hands as he looked us over.  “And I get someone who can’t tell nobody about this.”  He motioned to the goons, who dragged us up to our feet.  On our way out I got a glimpse of our new form in a wall mirror by the door, the fleshy mass a far cry from what we were.  At first, I didn’t see my face, but then I saw a pair of eyes on our front, my own blue eyes above Cate’s crotch, my face had sunken into her body, her pussy was my mouth, leaking fluids lazily onto the giant swollen cock under my face.  She looked like a tower of breasts fused atop a spiderlike body with six legs, my cock a solid mass under us extending the length from our back to front with a large pair of balls to match.  Hanging from my chest under our body were a cluster of enormous breasts, almost hanging to the ground, my cock between them.  Her torso was a tower of breasts, with fleshy tentacles extending from several of them where her nipples should be on her back, and two from each shoulder.  Her face was as surprised as mine, her head tentacles waving backwards over her hair.  Mercato laughed as both of our eyes widened in horror: “Like it?  Ah, right you’re speechless now, chalk it up to Avatars on Lost Souls’ Day.  No bodies, no evidence.  Get this freak out of my sight.”

*****

We were hauled out of his office and thrown into a van, still in shock as to what happened.  The doors closed and we were driven in total darkness until they were opened again, our captors disposing of us next to the docks and driving away.  I heard Cate moaning through her pussymouth, her torso twitsing and moving its tentacles experimentally as we lay in the mud.

Cate lurched forward, unable to move us.  She groaned and moaned, but she couldn’t seem to move anything below her waist.  I waved a leg in front of my face, one of her original ones.  It seemed I would control them now, forever under her as her new locomotion.  I struggled to stand us up on shaky spidery legs, her expanded ass resting heavily on my back as I lurched forward, Cate unsteadily wobbling and thrashing her tentacles about.  The new breasts on my torso cradled our massive, seemingly permanently hard cock in an eternal titfuck as it bounced against my chin folds.  We slowly made our way out of the dockyards on pointed feet, her moaning from the stimulation on our cock, the eternal teasing of its head brushing against our folds.  We had to stop a couple times as we orgasmed just from the stimulation of walking, leaving behind a thin trail of cum when we did.  We must have looked as lost as Lost Souls’ Day would have implied.

I tried to think of where to take us, where we would be safe.  Carl the Canny was out, the little worm was already in deep anyway.  I racked my brain about people I could trust, but was turning up short, a side effect of living the way I do.  Cate’s sister might be who she wanted to see the most, but a muffled gurgle was the best I could do as far as asking Cate where she lived.  Sad and tired, I shuffled to where I would be able to at least drown these feelings of having failed.

As I shuffled us to the door of the Serpent’s Hood, I moaned to Cate to open the door.  With a light brush of her new tentacles, we walked into the emptying bar in such a state I could only describe it as post-orgy.  The bartender looked at us in shock and confusion, but after a few moments, her eyes caught mine, and she realized what had happened.  Wordlessly, she took us into the back room.

We stayed there awhile, eventually finding ourselves useful as dishwashers or bussing.  Cate was not pleased with the situation, neither was I.  We couldn’t speak to each other, so everything was done by awkwardly pointing or touching, but eventually we fell into a rhythm.  Eventually, we fell into sync, and moved about as if one being, and with enough practice, Cate could work the bar if the regular employees couldn’t make it.  It was made a bit difficult by the fact that I couldn’t see above the bar, but a tentacle wrapped around our cock made it easy to steer me like a joystick.

Things had fallen into a doldrum, neither of us could return to our past lives, and we were given up as lost months ago.  Until one night, when we were tending bar, I felt Cate stiffen up atop me and let out a muffled, yet excited, yelp.  She lunged forward, nearly tipping me over as I was bashed against the keg, her tentacles wrapping fiercely around whoever was over the bar.  She tugged hard on my cock to steer me out from behind the taps and onto the floor, and that’s when I saw her.  Nothing could ever make me forget that flaming hair.  It was Cate’s sister, her face was somewhere between shock, horror, and sympathy.  Her embrace with Cate flooded me with emotions from her, warmth and love and relief that it was going to be okay.

Not all souls stay lost, I guess.