Bubblegum 5 Book Zero

Written by VagabondEye :: [Tuesday, 03 April 2012 17:07] Last updated by :: [Monday, 06 August 2012 11:21]

Bubblegum 5, Book 0 (Prelude)

First Contact

They came like they did on those old cheesy sci-fi movies, so much so that for a while the news media thought it was a hoax or a publicity stunt. It was an actual flying saucer that perched on the white house lawn like a giant errant silver Frisbee. The Secret Service agents were the only ones not laughing.

Bomb squad robots went out first. The sniffing dogs and their handlers followed nervously an hour later, long after the President and his staff was safely airborne undisclosed states away.

The thing wasn't setting off any sensors but nobody was of mind to take any chances. The few witnesses said it had just appeared over the lawn and silently settled on its stubby tripod feet. Nobody seemed to know where it came from or how it got there, and nobody was willing to admit the obvious.

It sat motionless for days while the world wondered. It was seemingly cast out of some hitherto unknown alloy of aluminum or copper, seamlessly and highly polished to mirror sheen. The army declared a no fly zone around the capitol and concerned off traffic from the mall until the situation could be resolved. The object was completely transparent to radar or x-rays, as if it were formed out of air, and transparent to ultrasound as if it were formed out of water. No discernible mechanism could be sensed within it, as if it were a perfect solid.

It defied all attempts to pierce it with a seemingly inexhaustible surface tension. It was like trying to saw through thick tapioca, smoothing itself out almost instantly one the dulled and overheated blade was withdrawn. Cutting torches fared no better, like trying to burn a hole through the ocean. Explosives merely bounced, barely ripping the objects gelatinous surface.

Nor could the object be moved to more convenient forum. Bulldozers merely gouged the lawn against it and the biggest crane in the army's arsenal splintered trying to move the object.

Slowly, as the days wore on resistance to the obvious faded away. This was no mere publicity stunt or terrorist act, at least not one of earthly origins. A tent city was forming on the mall of interested parties: news media, scientists, communications experts, demonstrators, security, and diplomats from a handful of nations, each at carefully prioritized distances from the object itself. Even in saying nothing within days it had monopolized the news and media channels worldwide. Late night comedians dubbed it "Saucy" and the name stuck. Wars continued around the world, but the public's interest ceased to care. All eyes were on Saucy. What was it? Did somebody drop it in passing and of so, why exactly there? How did they know where to drop it?

Have they been listening? Were they listening now? Was it listening now? What was it waiting for? What is it going to do when it finally does do whatever it is that he does? Wait..."he"? Does it even have a gender or is that just our idea?

Nobody knew. But that didn't stop anybody from explaining it. The only thing everybody knew, like the foreboding thought of one’s own morality, buried deep in the back of one’s mind and never talked about, was that Saucy was proof at last that we were somehow not alone.

It was two weeks and a Thursday when it happened. Saucy opened its mouth and silently lowered its passenger on its tongue to the now mud-tracked lawn.

A flock of shutter clicks took flight into the awestruck silence hovering over the gathered throng. Nearby soldiers shouldered their rifles and nervously looked on, having instinctively drawn weapons despite all agreed upon protocols and orders.

She was dressed and veiled like a diplomat in full regalia straight out of Star Wars: crimson red flowing robes trimmed with gold. She looked like a bright red rose standing in the muddied lawn before them. Even under heavy robes she was very obviously humanoid and female. As she approached the throng of silenced onlookers pressing in to see her at the fence it became apparent that beyond the depths of her curves she was not an especially imposing specimen, probably 5'8", likely the top bit of that in heels and hood.

She walked with all the poise and sultry grace of a fashion model that had been forced to catwalk through a muddy pumpkin patch in high heels. The spectacle of her struggling through the mud was disarmingly comical. Nervous glances skirted down the crowd, nobody daring to giggle as she pulled herself up to her dignified speaking poise within clear speaking earshot of the fence.

"Hello," she said in a disappointingly flat American accent. "Thank you all for your patience." Her voice was remarkably unremarkable. Was this a publicity stunt after all? What was she about to sell them, the latest in velvet drapery?

"May I speak?"

There was a long nervous pause. Finally somebody called out from the back "Who are you?"

"Thank you." She bowed slightly before continuing. "I am Mallah, Duchess of the new planet Gomorrah 6. I have come to offer anyone from Earth full citizenship on my planet."

That stunned all present to disbelief. "What's the deal lady?" The crowd erupted in a cacophony of indignant questions, offhand dismissals and snide remarks.

A gunshot rang out and shocked them all silent. Staff Sergeant Moss holstered his sidearm and stepped into the gaping silence. "Would you kindly come with me please?" He gestured to the open back gate of a waiting armored personnel carrier.

Mallah nodded and began awkwardly following him to the side of the lawn. The gathered crowd cried out angrily as Moss offered Mallah his hand and helped her over the low hedge. They snapped their shutters in frustration as the carrier gate clamped shut, but the old cast iron fence held them back firm.

The carrier was around the corner and spirited out of sight doubtlessly down some Secret Service tunnel before anybody noticed that Saucy was shrinking. Within a minute what had once overshadowed the entire lawn looked more like a Lunar Lander; a mere 12-foot sphere still perched on is stubby metallic tripod. Fears of a hoax dug in, took root and spread across the Internet as the remaining press watched the army corps finally load the thing unceremoniously on a flatbed, tarp it, and haul it away.

The President landed. Within days the looming election roared vapidly into the news vacuum left by the embarrassment that was Saucy and its ill-prepared spokeswoman. The White House lawn was rerolled out with a fresh carpet of flawless bluegrass.

Of Broken Toys

Mallah approached the city on foot, at night, walking unsteadily, breathing heavily in something among anger, anguish, and determination. She was much younger then, and far from Earth.

The city nestled in the reeds and rocks against the low foothills in the moonlight, one eye open, as yet unaware of what approached, yet always half expecting something.

The night before her father had stood, hand on her shoulder as they had surveyed the smoking ruins of another small settlement. She had played with her brothers and sisters among the rocks and trees in the secreted mountain retreat. They had made a game of racing one another rolling larger and larger boulders up the steep hill behind the chateau as their powers began to mature. Mallah had skipped off the estate, seeking an even larger single piece of granite when the attack came.

It was a cowardly act, a radio-barometric bomb, fired from an unmarked blockade runner hiding among the asteroid field half an orbit away. It lit the estate with a shower of sparkling isotopes like a galaxy of pixie dust that hung in the air for a split second, long enough for the children to reach out in wonderment. Her mother recognized the weapon and screamed for them to run, but it was far too late for mere sound.

The detonation charge flashed the atmosphere solid for a nanosecond.

Mallah dropped her prize boulder in astonishment, her heart sensing the flash of death in her family long before the brilliant flash of light blanked out the small planet’s horizons. She turned in time to see the entire estate fall away as blackened dust into a mile-wide crater in the gentle breeze. The primary shock wave rolled out from the edge of it like a river of horses galloping in slow motion over what ground remained solid.

Her mother dropped to her knees in the midst of it, the still recognizable bodies of her brood dropped from where ground had been. The children’s invulnerability not yet fully set their organs had been pulverized in the blast. They hung in the air in the eternal quarter second after the blast, bleeding into the blackened air from every orifice and pore.

Her mother erupted out of the ashen fog and launched herself angrily into space. Mallah just dropped to her knees and let the wave of sorrow and loss wash over her as the turbulent fingers and hooves of the primary shock wave brushed through her hair. More than the two fistfuls of siblings she’d just lost, an entire village worth of her childhood playmates.

Her siblings were near strangers to her beyond their names. It was her playmates in attendance, friends she’d known since her infancy, the few who’d ever treated her as a person, knew her first name, and were not afraid to call her by it.

A large part of her personality slipped into that ashen fog that afternoon. Her mother had reduced the distant blockade runner, a star ship the size of an apartment building, to shrapnel a parsec away like a firefly flaring out before the shock wave echoed off the valley’s far ridge.

Her father had arrived a minute later and stood by Mallah’s side as she wept, silently, grimly surveying the senseless carnage, his firm hand on her smooth shoulder. Minutes began to ooze imperceptibly, like stain glass oozing down its framing over centuries.

The cold night between now and then had seen Mallah’s powers flare. The shock had loosed her super speed years early. That had started an unfortunate cascade, accelerating her aging overnight, unhinging power after power, wracking her body with pangs, spasms, and flashes of senses she’d hitherto only dreamed about. Her mother sat with her, holding her, quieting her, speaking words and instructions to Mallah in a single evening that her grandmother had spoken to her mother a millennium ago over years of her coming of age.

Her father stood watch by the door of the makeshift bunker that night, holding conference with his court of Knights and Ladies, all of them also Mallah’s siblings from prior broods. They looked on, curiously throughout the night, murmuring amongst them, but did not interfere.   The prospect of yet another sibling was concerning as the Kingdom had only two remaining feral star systems.   With those bestowed, the next generation must take from among them, conquer their birthright from an adjacent kingdom, or strike out on their own further into the outer rim.

A blue-white dawn crested over the rim of the crater where the bunker had been.

Mallah finally had some tenuous yet growing hold on herself. She’d lived 10 years through the night, with only her mother and father at speed to keep her company through the fits of fire, ice, and lightning that had gripped her for seemingly months at a time. Her sanity had ebbed and waned, reality seemed to collapse and expand upon her as her senses throbbed outward to embrace first grains of sand to the entire star system and back again. She’d spent months naming to herself all the asteroids in the system, carefully piecing them together in her mind in a gigantic puzzle, first as its most probable giant oblong planet...then rearranged as a long-eared rabbit…then--she desperately looked around for something more sane to occupy the time.

She’d settled into the form her body would remain in for all practical purposes forever. Fits of her time dilation still came between lapses of her concentration, but she had stopped maturing as she rapidly aged. Gone was the lanky girl who’d been carefully blended into a growing village of normal or at most enhanced humans for her entire childhood, isolated from her parents and siblings, always in fear of being found and summarily executed before her prime.

It was fairly common knowledge that the only way to kill an immortal is in its infancy, before its true powers took hold. Considering their rabbit-like birthrates, hunting immortal children was a common, endorsed, even encouraged sport among the immortal nobility, even practiced by the half-breeds and mortal humans as a necessary form of population control in self defense.

While single broods tended towards double digit birthrates, Imperial Law dictated only one of any brood may live. Should more than one survive to puberty they would be required to duel to the death in the last days where such an outcome would be possible. Children were typically separated from each other and their parents, spirited away to the outer colonies to be raised by loyal servants, incognito among the throngs of the mortals they were indistinguishable from. House rivalries were often fought for generations, one trying to snuff out the progeny of another. Even with the limited survival rates, what to do with the ever-increasing population of immortals was another matter entirely...

They should not have been together. Even though it was their birthday it was unsafe for them to have gathered. Apart, alone, scattered...they were much harder targets to discern. Together as they were, even all precautions had been taken, was just suicide. Mallah would forever blame her father for suggesting the gathering. It would be years before it occurred to her that only the inevitable had been served and she had been spared the final elimination.

Her father had other ideas about inevitability. They had found evidence of a rival clan among the wreckage of the blockade runner, an upstart youth among them determined to carve his own territory out of theirs had masterminded the mass assassination. Honor was ever demanding and rarely sensible.

Honor found her still reeling in her new disturbingly voluptuous body approaching a small princedom with still raw thunderous rumblings of power echoing over her bones and a nauseating brew of confusion and revenge on her heart.

A rifle shot rang out across the brush.

A flock of birds scrambled into the air around her, one falling dead at her feet.

A young man stood from behind a rock and seemed confused to see her.

Hotel California

The government took Mallah very seriously, stopping just short of admitting to itself why. Within a day she was spirited whole in secret to entirely the opposite coast, and checked in under guard to the seemingly decrepit lodge at Moffet field. Decoy military transports were flown to Area 51, and White Sands missile range.

Moss was assigned to escort her and oversee the deliberately inauspicious affair. "Thank you," she had said to him upon entering the carrier. "They will be ready in time.". Neither of them said another word until she was shown into the modesty musty lodge.

"May I bring you something else to wear?" He asked her offhand, eyeing the trail of by now dried dirt flaking off the hem of her robe as she entered the room.

"That will be all, thank you, and dismissed." The wrong woman answered from behind him. "Senior Adjunct Danka French, State Department," the woman introduced herself abruptly to the room. "I will be processing this matter from here." At that Danka took position at the room’s desk, faced Mallah across it and dropped an armload of paperwork accusingly between them with a loud smack on the old metal desk.

Moss let himself quietly out of the room as Danka cocked a loaded tape recorder at Mallah.

"So, Mallah is it?"

"Duchess Mallah, but I'm rarely one for ceremony."

Incredulous stare: "Duchess of what again?"

"Gomorrah 6." Mallah shrugged. "I just finished it, but in time no doubt it will become a first ring planet."

"You do know I am recording this."

"Am I not speaking clearly?"

"Who are you working for? Who set you up in that...thing?"

"I am the twelfth-born daughter of His Majesty Vintae, and Her Majesty Bynowan. My Duchy is to serve house Kataian. The Ahmut' Mar was my entitlement upon completion of the trials."

Side glancing looks at a loss at the three poorly hidden cameras in the room..."Ok, Ms. ‘Princess of the Universe’,” Danka managed a two-handed air quote without dropping her recorder. “Here's how things are working out for you down here on Earth so far: trespassing on restricted federal property, falsely causing a level-one security incident, misuse of said federal property for some deeply delusional sense of global self aggrandizement, and vandalism for good measure. Can you plead to any of that? Please say 'insanity'. And take off that ridiculous Red Riding hood, the convention is over."

"Duchess," Mallah enunciated unmoved. "It is not a title I was born with, it is one I earned. I arrived. I politely waited until whomever wished to greet me had gathered. I learned your language. I asked their permission before introducing myself. I said nothing untruthful or untoward. I left all those in attendance alive. I extended my most polite invitation to all present and listening remotely to the off-world adventure of their mortal lives. I accepted your hospitality here while everyone considers my offer. I have committed no crime or offense. Yet you continue to poke and prod both my Ahmut 'Mar and I most rudely. While I am far more forgiving than she is, I choose not to share my face with you or your cohorts in White Castle Washington."

"This interview is over." She rose from behind the desk. "We will crack that Ostrich egg open and have our look inside with or without you." She dropped a fresh orange prisoner jumpsuit at Mallah’s feet. "You will be detained here for further psychiatric evaluation or until such time as you decide to share with us which smart-ass punk country or organization put you in that birthday cake for us to hatch put on our lawn for all to see. Oh, and we'll get this outfit cleaned and pressed for you until our little tea party is over."

"The interview is indeed over." The sickening sound of snapping bones punctuated her sincerity as Mallah caught Danka’s wrist reaching for Mallah’s veil. "And please send a representative with more respectful manners next time."

Moments later Sergeant Moss glanced in timidly through the Danka-sized hole in the hotel’s cinderblock wall. Most of Danka’s body lay crumpled against the old admin building across the quad, what parts hadn't skidded off along the way. "Oh...my..."

"Goddess." Mallah finished, absently one-fingering Sergeant Moss’s gaping mouth closed as she stepped over the exploded remains of the wall.

Deep in a Pentagon basement a conference room full of analysts and military brass sat in stunned silence. "Sir, we may have an...anomaly…"

Back at Moffet Mallah strolled out on the Lodge’s front patio and seemed to chuckle to herself as she patted Moss gently on the head. "Do not fear, kind sir. General Anderson is starting to hear my message."

"Shit!" Someone in said conference room dove for the cable feed in a panic. “We’ve been hacked!”--and pulled the plug.

“This is White Castle, actual.” A gristled general spoke into an antiquated phone in the dim of the emergency lighting. “Peacock is weapons hot. Move it to the reservation if you need more elbow room.”

Mallah watched in dismay as truckloads of soldiers arrived around the hotel’s quad, guns drawn and shouting orders about “down”, and “hands”, and “now”. She leaned over and whispered in Moss’s ear. “Reservations: dinner for two, two nights from now. Nevada I presume?”

“I’m going to need you to come with me.” Moss was reaching for his sidearm, hands shaking.

“It’s not about what you need.” She sighed. “Not yet.”

And she vanished in a blinding thunderclap.

“White Castle, this is Zookeeper at Hotel.” A soldier spoke on his headset as another helped him to his feet. He had to pause a moment to catch his breath and let the nausea and the ringing in his ears fade. His entire platoon was still helping each other stand up. All visible windows had been blown out. Some of his men had been blown back 15 feet. “We have possible casualties. Peacock has checked out. Do you have her?”

General Anderson hung up the phone in silence....and kicked it across the room.

Uprising

Mallah's head was throbbing, but not with pain, with power. She'd just barely learned where all her levers were. Focusing along an axis that felt "forward" allowed her to speed and slow the passage of time in the world around her. Concentrating along an axis perpendicular to that allowed her to slip out of gravity's grip and fly unaided in directions she had only begun to learn to control, or to grip gravity itself between her legs at first, but with practice in the core of her chest and become immovably braced to any spot she chose, grounded, flying or ...otherwise?

Squinting in anger now spit raging beams of heat from her eyes that would grow like a fire once lit until she forcibly wrestled them to off. Blinking while her eyes were streaming heat actually stung a bit and left her blinded in sparkling stars for a minute on all frequencies. She saw rainbow halos around everything now, especially the living. Squinting allowed her to shift her visible bandwidth up and down the spectrum to see in color far into the infra-red and radio frequencies.

The usual flexing of her muscles now seemed entirely unleashed as they would throb hot and begin to expand as she reached what her prepubescent limits were. Overall her body felt impractically solid and unwieldy, too many strings pulling the puppet of her in conflicting directions at once, altogether too easily tangled. Standing still felt like balancing a ball on her nose while wearing roller skates and riding a unicycle on a tightrope.

And then there was the ravaging puberty itself had done to her body. It had carved rivers and mountains into her flesh and bone. Her balance was completely off, a top-heavy hammer toss every time she turned to face, and a drunken tether ball game at every tentative step. Her breasts were just two unbroken mares bucking at her chest with every tiny move. They would swell and kick out of any attempt to bridle them with clothing. They snorted spewing streams of boiling hot milk into her own hands when she tried to cup them and mule kicked fencepost-sized bolts of lightning-like pleasure that shattered into a thousand prickling pangs of hunger up and down her spine that her crotch hungrily drank up and swelled with.

Her vagina felt like two man-o-war jellyfish trying to mate head-first deep in her crotch, their tentacles splayed out through the muscles and sinew of her entire body. Their affections for each other sent tingling sparks and spasms through her frame as their heads rubbed hungrily over one another. They interfered with her muscle control, needling the fibers of her muscles to twitch and flex, then hungrily sucking the pleasure of such raw power down to spark off across the writhing gap between them.

She'd been racked helpless by it all for over an hour the night before, muscles, breasts, time dilation, all locked at full throttle, feeding back across her newfound libido, her vagina arcing a white star's worth of plasma, barely contained inside her. The first two years of her time she let herself drink it in, enthralled by her new powers, all her senses blinded white by the aurora of their sugary taste.

Then the panic set in, unable to stop, so engorged in her own muscle and breast mass that she was completely paralyzed. The pleasure had become a star within her, inextinguishable, irresistible, and searing white-hot with electricity to the touch. The first several times she tried to calm it were barely perceptible, barely a ripple in the stretched-out and pressing surface of her raging libidinous sensory star. Her mother had warned her of this: orgasmic lock, of gods trapped within themselves by their own pleasures and powers conspiring against those who would dare overindulge. It was one of the few "deaths" that yet remained to an immortal. It was a right of worthy youth to master it, and an honorable and merciful "death" to the love worn ancient.

She was too young to be set adrift, petrified of her own lusts. She took hold of her pleasures and squeezed back with all her might. That only made things much, much worse as the star sputtered, compressed and reignited in a much hotter, much more electric blue. Arcs of lighting began shedding off her skin like bubbles knocked off at the bottom of a pool.

She had unlocked her mother's lightning powers within her. Every god and goddess was born with the same base powers: immortality, invulnerability, time dilation, absurdly gratuitous strength and so on. Yet gods alone had the power to impregnate goddesses, and mortal females. Gods alone could seed other immortals, or in union with mortals: spawn the enhanced, half-breeds that could have any one of a bewilderingly diverse array of powers denied to the gods themselves. The power to throw or control lightning, water, fire, ice, small measures of super strength, invulnerability, speed, polymorphism, bodily growth or shrinking... The few children spawned of gods invariably were born with one or more "enhancements", those that were not stillborn, and whose mothers survived the act or the pregnancy at all. Such were precious few. Goddesses could only give birth to more immortals, as they were immensely impregnable to any and all mortals and their mortal diseases. Goddesses could, however, ingest a male mortal's enhancement through his seed, and metabolize it for her. While a god grew in power over time though amassing armies of his enhanced mortal offspring, goddesses grew in power unto themselves through seeking out and engorging select among her rival's said enhanced followings.

Mallah's mother was middle-aged, only around 1,000 years old. Mallah had 11 other brothers and sisters, survivors from former broods. Along the way Mallah's mother was known to have lightning and a stunted form of animal polymorphism powers, and probably a few more only she knew of. None of Mallah's 4 sisters had ever inherited anything unusual...that they would admit to. But lightning is a difficult ability to keep to one's self, and an especially aggressive power to wrestle with in an orgasmic lock. If Mallah ever clawed her way back to consciousness, she would immediately be marked for jealous abuse from her siblings, but hopefully a bit of reverent fear from her rivals.

Hope was something Mallah had run out of. As ludicrously wonderful as this was, orgasmic lock was a pitiful life for an immortal. At least she could half think now. She'd freed her mind from the carnal grip of the orgasm...partly. Wrestling with it only made it worse, only fed it nuclear fuel. What she needed was peace, calm...flowing water, like a river.

She began to give up in small, controlled attempts, to invite the orgasm deeper into her fingertips and toes. Slowly, streams of it took the bait and began wispfully drifting outward. She released her grip on her fingers and toes, let them drift away as the trickle of starlight tingling grew to small streams, drifting off from each finger.

It took an immense, sustained effort from Mallah to maintain the flow outward. Hours drifted by, her orgasm still raging inside her, seemingly ignoring the threads of it she was unraveling. It was days before the blue tint perceptibly began to fade away from the bloated rage of it all. Weeks passed before the size of her orgasm began to spin uneasily, off-balance within her. It was full months before Mallah could begin to lazily bend her arms, legs and back, carefully absent lest she flex anything back to orgasm again. Altogether it was a full year of Mallah's time that she had to remain disciplined, focused, determined on relaxing before the star faded below critical burn.

Mallah lived through four years of immortal orgasm while the universe drifted by a single hour. Thankfully it was the last hour of the night, as dawn began to break over the planetoid's thin horizon.

Her orgasm still fluttered and sparked giggling within her, those two man-o-war jellyfish in her crotch ever the more amorous of each other, giggling to each other of the life-and-death power they held over her, begging, teasing, and tempting for another go. But she kept them strictly quiet, stopping from time to time to relax, and let the tips of their tentacles drift severed into the void, whenever she felt them building too much strength between them. Even so, they were a constant utility-line-sized orgasm she would have to live with for the remainder of her immortal life. The prospect was at once delicious...and already wearisome to her. She had to practice opening the streams of her fingers and toes a little more, for example, to dissipate the pleasure her breasts felt rubbing up into her father's robe as he wrapped her naked form up in it in the sunrise. Somehow that helped keep those hell-bent breasts of hers hitched and un-engorged...for the moment.

Awash

The Laundromat was positively arctic. Leonard pulled his sweatshirt down around his waist and lugged his dirty laundry in black trash bags.

Shove it all in 6 machines, plug’m full’a quarters indiscriminately, and plop on the rickety bench with a shiver and an iPad to stay warm by.

The cheap storefront door squeaked open half way through the rinse cycle, but he didn’t hear it over the machinery. He did however get a good look at her red-robed hips as she swung by. That’s awfully fancy for a trailer park coin-op, gold trim?

His eyes chanced a climb up her hem...and lost his breath at the altitude half way out her chest...

Her summits turned about to face him under that cloud of red crushed velvet. The tiny gold threads seemed to tumble down her like snow drifting down a sheer granite cliff in the sunset.

Something was said, like the distant cry of a lonely eagle over barren alpine valleys.

Her hands brushed across his stubble like a cat marking him from the shoulder, then loosened the knot on her sash slowly, until it fell like said eagle with buckshot poisoning to the dirty linoleum square floor in a heap. Mounds of her flesh fell from her robe like glaciers calving uphill, rolling, undulating, billowing...

The curves of her muscular body seemed to explode up from the floor like a geyser erupting into the drifting clouds of her breasts as she slipped entirely from the robe. She leaned over like a rushing river of flesh, opened the lid on one of Leonard’s washing machines and shoved her robe in hand-over-hand like disposing a deer carcass in a roadside ditch.

Her toes walked up his tightening pant leg under the cover of those moons of hers rising beneath his nose. Somehow her leg slipped up his chest like a thickening python, curling her knee over his shoulder as her breasts tightened around his cheeks. She popped his sweatshirt off with one deft twitch of her leg. A blink later Tony heard the slow straining rip of the seams as she pulled his sweatshirt slowly, like sweat dripping slowly over salty skin, inside out down over her whale-sized breasts. It barely fit half way over.

She dislodged his baseball cap from the low end of her cleavage and flipped it on her head. With a flip of his hood over her head and a tug on the strings she kicked him over backwards, shattering the bench flat, turned on her bare heel, and swung patiently out the unhinged door like a parade of porch swings on sweltering lemonade-less bayou night.

Lights were flickering back on in a windowless conference room deep in a concrete building somewhere in Washington D.C. “I want Peacock found, gentlemen.” General Anderson was feared in administrative circles when he had that distant, calculating look in his eye. “See what those Over Watch boys can do. And get me P785 telemetry. If she’s that fast she must be leaving a trail on IR. Please tell me Ostrich has cracked.”

“No sir.” An aid looked up from his telephone. “And Overwatch is going to need an ID to ping.”

Anderson snorted. “Tell them we’re looking for a 5’4” porn star in a lawn-stained bathrobe.” The room rung hollow with fear. Doubtless the first to laugh would wake up in Nome, Alaska.

Anderson grabbed his hat angrily and stormed out of the room. “If only we had her face.”

Warcry

Mallah stood in the surrounds of her rival clan's outpost, staring down this poor rabbit hunter of a mortal boy, all she wanted was to do inflict some vengeful, sky-splitting goddess sex on others. She could still barely stand her mind still inexperienced at all her newfound reigns. Keeping her toes on the ground without shattering the rocks was a trick she needed more practice at.

She licked her lips at him. She found the mix of lust and fear his stunned expression returned wispfully delicious. She stood before him in all her new found curvature in mere dabs of war paint: The black-white-blue stripes her mother had struck across her left thigh, a coded fair warning of Mallah's lightning powers, and the gold diamond/lightning bolt emblem of her father's house he had ceremoniously thumbed in loose drizzle of hot metal across her newly rolling chest. With her hair drifting in the breeze and her breasts settled and at the ready before her, she was indeed too much for mortal senses.

The boy wore an alarm badge, but like so many first-time parachutists, fell to his knees painfully stiff in the middle, limp everywhere else--brain in too much shock to pull the cord.

She walked stiffly, clumsily up to him, leaving her libido to guess in steaming wet anticipation as to which whimsy in her arsenal she would choose first. She took his terrified body by the alarm badge and snapped his face, mouth agape, straight onto her left out-thrust nipple. The high-pitched scream of the alarm shocked him momentarily to consciousness. In a surprised fit he bit down as hard as he could on what might as well have been the bronze nozzle of a jawbreaker-sized fire hose. Her breast bucked gleefully at the sensation. She'd braced her nipple stiffly invulnerable, yet it was still so sensitive she could count the air molecules befalling upon it.

She let it buck. She'd braced against the coming recoil. It reverberated off her ribcage and launched through her flesh like a cannon. The spurt of her milk she lactated blew his face off like the rubber of a water balloon peeling off its contents in ultra-slow motion. The steaming hot spray knocked his skull through the back side of his head flesh and sent it bouncing across the grassy field behind him where it finally shattered against a low stone fence. The boy's decapitated body fell limp at her feet like a deflated balloon. Moments later the cannon clap of it all returned echoed off the outpost's concrete walls.

She could see the few thousand or so mortals scrambling to their defenses behind the walls. She watched patiently as they readied their machinery for war, barked orders at one another and steeled them against whatever desperate acts lay ahead. She saw the bomb lab, radioactive isotopes still drifting in the wind like ash from its assembly pits. Deep inside the stockade she saw the regent, an immortal like herself, seated upon a makeshift throne, reposed on an elbow, staring back at her with a growing evil grin on his face.

She nodded a challenge to him through the 600 yards of entrenchments and scurrying mortals. She was feeling invincible, but practical. Her issue was with him, not his thrall. He smirked and shook his head back at her.

The honor-less coward, he would send his own to die needlessly?

Then it occurred to her: he was going to make her do his dirty work. He never intended for his unwitting mortals to live to begin with. They were witnesses to his treachery.

Egregiously large caliber cannon erupted off the forward wall in her general direction in a blackened smoke vomit of depleted metal castoff from the factory.

So be it. Let those bear witness of her power to their god...and the dead.

Mallah took three, slow, deliberate steps forward from the boy's carcass before the shelling arrived in earnest, screaming like a flock of obese eagles.

A Stranger at the Gate

The little drop-in air conditioner whirred for all its might to keep the one-room guard shack cool against the unrelenting blaze of the Arizona desert sun. Gerald mostly sat and fumbled through his accounting homework, papers spread haphazardly over the small wooden desk. His Air Force career hadn’t taken him far into the blue yonder, but he wasn’t getting blown out of the sky too often either. Plenty of his administrative wing compatriots suffered through worse meaningless jobs. At least he wasn’t mopping anything. He had the time to pursue training for his next career, and he made good use of it.

Gate 12 never received heavy traffic: the daily catering and supplies delivery for the base, and the occasional seriously lost tourist. It was a missile testing range so he’d get to see the latest prototype cruise missile or UAV drone trucked in…or so he’d imagine. He never really saw much. All those trucks were always buttoned up, unmarked, and came with impeccable paperwork. He could see oncoming traffic 10 miles away across the desert, kicking up dust for his 15 minutes of warning to wrap up whatever problem he was working on, dust off, check the clip in his sidearm, and stand at attention before anyone ever drew close. All the real work took place two mesas to the West. He was too far away to hear anything and explosions were really only impressive at that distance at night.

“Hello.” He thought he heard a girl’s voice over the drone of the air conditioner, muffled through the window. He looked up and squinted down the long straight shot of the road. The road shimmered back at him blankly.

“Uh…over here.” She tapped firmly on the dusty glass on the gate side of the shack. She wore a grey hoodie sweatshirt pulled close around the brim of her Sharks baseball cap, a red satin bikini, and nothing else. She was also soaking wet and visibly steaming in the afternoon sun.

Gerald could hear Admiral Akbar’s “It’s a trap!” echoing through his memory as he glanced around for her car. She must be a decoy for some bank robbery or heist movie. They’re probably hiding behind the rocks with sniper rifles. She had some impressive guns of her own under that sweatshirt…she was definitely the sort of thing you don’t see at checkpoints like his outside a Hollywood action flick. Something was terribly wrong.

He approached the window cautiously, eyes still darting around to the rocks, hand unsnapping his holster. “Can I help you?”

“It’s just me silly.” She giggled bouncily. “I’m just here to pick up a friend.” She nodded beyond the gate.

Definitely not right. Even if one of the officers had hired a prostitute, there had to be a car somewhere. Walking the road to Tucson in this heat would be fatal.

“What’s your friend’s name?” Gerald didn’t even have a “list”. Gate 12 wasn’t that kind of guest-services affair.

“G’zalt Mar.” She shrugged. “Big…shmoo-looking thing.”

She must be suffering from heatstroke. “Where’s your car?” Gerald squinted down the road again.

“Uh…should I go get one?” She scratched her nose absently. “I’ve never needed one before.”

“I can call a tow truck if you like.”

“Seriously.” She put her hands on her hips and cocked her head in disbelief. “I don’t have a car, and I don’t need a tow truck. I just wanted to check in.”

“Check in?” Gerald’s grip on reality started looking for something else to hang on to. “I’ve water in here if you need. I can call you a cab back to Tucson, be here in an hour.”

“That’s very polite of you.” She sighed again. “But I don’t need water, I actually iced up a bit over the Sierras. And I certainly don’t need a cab.” She huffed. “Why do I bother? I’m here to pick up my friend. I was just being polite and checking in at the gate.” She hopped the cyclone fence like a gazelle, bit of a tuck as she cleared the barbed wire 12 feet in the air. “Never mind.” She pocketed her hands in her sweatshirt as she stood in a pout. “Forget I said any—“

“HALT!” Gerald was as quick to draw as she was to jump. “You are trespassing on United States Property.” Couldn’t believe he was drawing a bead on this girl’s nearly bare back. He kicked the gate release and it started swinging open. How the hell did she do that? “Back away slowly or I will shoot.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Gerald was nauseatingly deep into the Twilight Zone here. He just needed a minute to think, to get a grip on the plot in this episode. There had to be an easy way out, something obvious to the viewing audience he was supposed to do to resolve this…to live to see tomorrow…Two things for sure: she had no car, and she probably did just walk here, or jump, or teleport, or whatever. There likely wasn’t a sniper crew in the rocks, she didn’t seem to need one. This episode was about just her…He should probably just shoot her, deal with it later. She set foot on the wrong side of his fence. He was authorized…

The shot rang out.

He could see her sweatshirt rumple through the smoke and flash down the sights of his pistol. He’d just shot a girl in the back. He was sure of it.

She didn’t fall over. She didn’t even move. She just sighed and thought about it for a moment.

…or was she just giving him time to think about it?

Time’s up. She was right inside his personal space, his gun arm resting on her shoulder. “Look, I’m not here to hurt anybody. I’m just here to pick up a friend.” Wow she had some implants. “If you’d like to play toys too that’s fine, but there’s the phone. Order something in my size.”

She knocked him on the elbow, snatched his pistol from midair, broke it apart and kept the magazine as the rest of it fell to the dust like a bucket of bolts. She bit the end off of it like a candy bar

defiantly and started chewing as she turned on her heel and started walking away, shaking her head. “And something in chocolate. I hear that’s good.”

“What the hell man?” Secretary Saunders leafed through the thick manila folder marked “eyes only”. “So she’s for real?” Saunders stared incredulously across his desk at a rather dower General Anderson.

“A real threat to national security if that’s what you’re asking.” General Anderson just stared back intently. “She’s tapped our most secure lines, smuggled in an unknown quantity and type of I.E.D.’s already wounded 35 marines with whatever small arms she has concealed on her person, and god only knows what that bomb she brought is capable of.”

“It was sitting on the White House lawn for 16 days, General, and did nothing.”

“Except cause world-wide panic. Who knows what their motivations are?”

“So you arrested her and hauled it off to where, White Sands?”

“Area 786. It needed isolation and containment.” “What do you expect us to do with it next? Warehouse it with the Arc? What if the two of them started talking?”

“She tapped my command room. Goodness knows what other national information assets she has acc—“ General Anderson raised an eyebrow.

“I was joking, General.” Saunders leaned back in his chair. “We only now have the technology to see shadows of other worlds. Her technology managed to travel to one. We might as well be talking on soup cans to her.”

There was a moment of silence. “So you believe the con.”

“I’m a rational man, General. Let’s consider a truth table shall we? She’s a con or she’s a real alien. We believe her or we don’t. If she’s real and we don’t believe her we risk starting an interplanetary war we’ll likely not win. If she’s a con and we believe her we’ll spawn a whole industry of investigations and humiliating shows on the History Channel. It will be a real boost to the economy.”

“But if she’s a con and we don’t believe her, she and her bomb rot in government custody.”

“At tremendous taxpayer expense for yet another blacklined item in the budget. Those are getting increasingly hard to defend.”

“So what if she’s the real deal? What, we roll out the red carpet?” The general scowled. “It gets muddy from there. We just can’t presume her intentions.”

“She told us her intentions on live TV.”

“You’ll need another truth table for that, Mr. Secretary.”

“Yes, but that’s where the real adventure begins.”

“You believe her already.”

“I’m willing to try.”

“I’m not willing to risk American lives on it.”

Just then the door burst open. “General—“ The captain stopped at the sight of Saunders in the room.

“At ease, soldier.” The general waived him in. “Saunders has a need to know.”

“Very good sir.” The captain entered and closed the door behind him. “Overwatch found Peacock. A gate guard at Area 768 called in her description. She’s vectoring on Ostrich at the Reservation.”

“It took you a 19 billion dollar communications data mining facility to come up with that?”

“Boots on the ground, Mr. Secretary. She’s out of civilian clutter. Scramble the oversight, full lockdown at the Reservation.”

“Belay that order, Captain.” The secretary interjected.

“Mr. Secretary.” The general rolled his eyes. “She just walked willingly onto a weapons testing range. I have full authority for live fire exercises on that parcel.”

“ Soupcans, General.” The secretary stood up and spoke into his telephone. “Yes, Dremit. I want a priority fight to Arizona. I want to meet her there. Never mind who. Just get me the flight. I’m walking out of my office in 2 minutes. There’d best be a car to a plane waiting.”

“It was a pleasure knowing you, Mr. Secretary.”

“Why, aren’t you coming?”

Hammer

The shells hit Mallah like so much Gatorade, their solid masses of heavy metallic ions twisted and distorted off her flesh under the impact into ragged-edged pizza-box-sized 3500 lb shards of shrapnel. Her body did unto them what artillery normally does unto flesh targets.

She walked on unfazed, sizing up the stockade’s defenses as volley after volley belched off the wall cannons into the sky to rain down upon her in sheets.

Once inside their mortar range she stood at the large lead gate for a while and let them pour a house-sized cauldron of burning white phosphorus and thermite down upon her, reveling in the sensation as the ooze of it buried her whole, burning the flagstone she stood on down to glass. It burned white hot for 15 long minutes. The mortals manning the walls started to point and cautiously celebrate. Surely she’d been burned to vapor.

But she’d been drawing the heat inward, letting it loose the chords of her muscles, warm her bones to supple, swell her breasts to boiling. As the last embers flared to ash, leaving her roasted carcass encased in a still red-hot slag-iron shell she gave her muscles one mighty flex. The shell broke apart and spat shrapnel in all directions. The shockwave of her flex cracked the plaster off the wall for 50 feet in both directions. Screams of agony could be heard from the walls above from foolish onlookers who’s heads were now splayed open by ragged chunks of iron slag as she relaxed her suddenly expanded frame.

The leaden gates were 4 feet thick and easily 50 tons a piece. They had sagged to scalding-hot curtains of molten metal at the radiant heat of the prior poured attack. She drew back and inhaled. All the smoke and dust from the artillery all around stood up and took notice of her, racing over the walls into her nostrils for over a minute. There were more screams and panicked shouting from within the walls as the air pressure thinned too vaporous to breathe. She paused for a moment, chest not even half inflated, her diaphragm begging for permission to inhale the atmosphere completely off the planetoid. And then she blew. The gates sat back on their granite hinges in the blackened Smokey maelstrom spewing out from her lips. She turned her whistle higher and the rush turned to a high-pitched ear-splitting screech as the vapor from her lips accelerated and super cooled. The leaden doors warbled as she blew around them like so much Jell-O beneath a leaf blower. They quickly cooled, hardened in grotesque splattered shapes, and iced over. Just for fun she turned her head and blew down the stockade wall. Her breath was a frost jet of icy destruction that tore granite blocks loose from their rebar in its path and iced over an acre in all directions up the wall and out into the field of stones. She caught an onlooker popping his head out from the battlements behind her half way down the stockade and she quickly blew him a kiss that sent him frozen and flying back off the wall to shatter on the flagstones within. She blew one final smoke ring, heart-shaped at the iced-over doors.

A quick stomp of her feet momentarily sent the entire landscape two feet into the air. Everything fell back heavily, roughly into place, but the heavy brick and rebar wall looked a shambles, and all the icicles broke like a chandelier off the walls and doors and fell as knee-deep ice shards all around her. No-one inside remained on their feet.

She plunged a hand deep into the lead of each door and lifted. They were like uprooting leaden sequoias, snapping and popping as the melted roots of them lifted from the stone beneath, groaning as the immense weight of them lifted off their titanic hinges. She probably could have lifted one of them if she’d really strained in her pre-pubescent body, but her new body handled them like lifting two bars of soap. She gave them a tug upwards and they split through their heavy timber top beams with a deafening timber crunch. A fling of her wrists and the whole of them hurtled through the air, a deftly-aimed lead meteorite straight at the throne room ahead.

She saw him smirk as the gates stampeded tumbling through the ceiling and walls of the place. He batted the whole leaden avalanche aside with the flick of his spare wrist, never rising from his slouched one-elbowed repose as the north side of his stockade crumbled to toothpicks beneath the weight of the settling gates.

Arrogant bastard and she did all his dirty work.

She strode in through the crater where the front gates had been. Four ballista in the courtyard fired bolos of cannon balls strung together in starship-grade high tensile alloy. She let them. The cables swung around her with enough force to gouge stone and locked in place, their anchors firmly tangled in one another. Again they fired, and again teams of thrall frantically reloading and drawing back their catches. This would have indeed sliced her like ham was she but one night younger, but they felt like mere rubber bands to her now, hardly worth troubling herself with.

She gave her vagina a rub grinding it together with her hips, sparking off her libido. With concentration she was able to divert the tentacles of sparking orgasm from the rest of her body and focus them on her breasts. Her breasts began engorging with the pleasure, lactating so hot it came out in white steam and mist. At first the cords held her, squishing her breasts out any uncovered crack. They only reared against this newfound fence and let loose a bucking mule kick of expansion and pleasure that they burst outward, snapping all the cords around her chest like so much spider web. Her breasts jutted out enormously engorged, nipples fully erect and lactating like twin fire hoses as she walked forward.

She’d braced for the backlash of orgasmic pleasure, reflecting it off her spine and sending it back out her fingertips where it had erupted in a sparking nova in all directions. Every thrall in the courtyard laid sputtering, twitching, bleeding out the orifices and sparking, their nervous systems completely blown out by the bio-electric shockwave of orgasm. And she hadn’t even touched them.

Now she had a problem. The lord of the manner had been moved by her display…to erection. His grin and his member continued to grow as he stared back at her power laid bare in her bare engorged flesh. She was here for revenge, not for mating. If he were so dishonorable as to try it would be his irresistible force against her immovable object, and her object was of mind to be moving. She was too young to brood, and by far too virgin. This was not the fight she came for.

A woman dropped in front of her, in full game black paint and hood, red, orange, yellow in stripes across her right thigh, the mark of fire mage. So he was going to sacrifice an enhanced thrall too, and by the looks of her in good breeding order. This was just becoming sick.

The blacked-out fire mage took a bracing stance before Mallah, and self-immolated. Flames rushed over her body and drew in air as she drew back and threw a jet of pure incandescence straight at Mallah’s face and held it there with all her might.

Mallah’s hair blew back and she could not inhale, for all the atmosphere was ignited around her face. Her eyes began to burn dry as if she’d blinked into her own heat beam vision. She couldn’t get her own heat vision to ignite as there was insufficient fuel remaining in the air. She could still smash the little woman to a fine red mist with any part of her body using the least bit of strength, but for a mortal the girl was putting up a smart and determined fight. It would be such a wasteful shame. Mallah felt the tips of her eyebrows begin to singe before she picked a bemusing reply.

It was a gamble, and an overly dangerous thing to do considering the situation, but Mallah gripped the sides of her own breasts as far out as she could reach and pressed them inward at the girl. The courtyard exploded in a rush of steam at first and both combatants pressed on. But with a few rubs and pinches of her own breasts Mallah had them workhorse-sized and galloping gleefully at speed. Rivers of boiling hot milk poured into the poor fire mage, completely dousing her and sending her sputtering and flailing back up the stairs through the stockade door and into her master’s throne room broken, nearly drowned, and floating limp on a backwash wave of milk and ash, but still alive.

The Pantry

It was a long walk, but Mallah needed the practice. Knees, toes, hips, shift, repeat--bounce. Knees, toes, hips, shift, repeat--bounce. There didn’t seem to be much she could do about the bounce. Things were just so different now in her new body. She wondered how long it would take before she really mastered it all. She was still in the awkward mechanical stage, far from the fluid grace of her mothers and sisters. It didn’t help that the universe was so fragile. She left footprints everywhere: mud, grass, stone, concrete, and this concrete-hard dried, cracked dirt out in the desert. It was really hard not to. She was just too strong and too invulnerable.

She tried playing with her arms along the way, writhing them in waves, trying to look fluid. She was just getting the hang of it when she noticed she’d been walking smoothly for the last half mile. That was the key to it: stop trying. Like trying to carry a full cup of tea across a room, things just went better the less she focused on them. She was just thinking too hard.

Quite satisfied with herself she tried a few Monty-Python-style silly walks before diving into the sky to finish the rest of her walk the quick way. She thought about running, but doubtlessly the sweatshirt couldn’t take the ground brush. It was already starting to gather spines from nearby jumping cactus.

The facility she approached left much to be desired as a fortress, from a medieval sensibility. There were no walls, no cannon, and no archers. Just a few trailers spread about the top of a dirt valley against a mesa, a helicopter hangar, and a freight-sized door in the side of the mesa. She landed about a kilometer out and began walking in again. She could see the flight crews scrambling to prepare their vehicles for flight. They continued their work, but they all kept one eye on her as she hiked past in as sensuous a walk as she could manage. It was a far sight easier than it was in heels. She just stayed up on her toes, half floating the whole time and her feet seemed to work themselves out.

There was one man waiting for her, watching her approach, half grinning, dressed in a white shirt, black tie, and sunglasses. He had a clipboard for her when she arrived.

“Sign here please.”

She looked over the paper incredulously on the board in the blazing sunlight. It was a receipt of “1 unknown” from the U.S. Federal Government. “Seriously?” She asked.

“Have my orders, Ma’am.”

“And follow them anyway?”

“Military intelligence, ma’am.”

“Indeed.” Her eyes blazed through the page and the clipboard in a roadside flare-sized flash of heat and light. She blew out the flames and handed the board back to him still smoking. She’d burnt the diamond-bolt insignia of her house through the page and the board.

“Whoah.” He took a step back. “Just following orders, ma’am.”

“Are you going to get the door or shall I?” She nodded toward the freight door.

“Yes ma’am.” He spoke in call signs into his Walkie-Talkie and the huge 60 by 80 foot hangar door clanged open and began to roll back. A wave of cold mineshaft air swept over the approach. “You can just call it out from here if you like.”

“She’s more a turtle than a bird.” She shrugged and started walking toward the open door. “She can’t actually fly.” She peered over the guardrail at the edge of the open blackness below. Girders and work lights lined the sinkhole. It was the size of a skyscraper, perhaps an acre across and 600 feet of cool damp air deep. The big ivory ball sat lifeless in an electrified cage at the bottom under lights and scrutiny. “You shouldn’t treat animals like this. Had I known I would not have let you take her.”

“Uh…” The man escorted her to a rail elevator car and started the climb down. “We were under the impression it…she was a machine.”

“Oh soupcans.” She climbed up on the railings. “You people will have to learn some manners.” And she jumped off backwards before he could catch her.

She landed prideful like a feather 500 feet later. The environmental-suit-clad staff were already busy unplugging equipment and clearing the way.

“She doesn’t like high voltage.” Mallah said with a scowl. “Makes her tummy sore.” Mallah clapped her hands. The thunderclap from it knocked through the cavern like a bomb, tossing aside all manner of equipment and personnel, sending it all slamming in a heap against the stone cavern walls. The object perked up and buzzed to life at the sight of her. Its complexion fizzled from ivory to its former copper sheen and it seemed to bounce like a puppy on its tripod.

“Come.” She outstretched her now naked arm.

The object leaped at her like a snake, deforming and wrapping itself around her body like an anaconda. It seemed to eat her alive for a moment as the lab staff slowly tried to pick themselves out of the debris. A minute of gleeful undulation later the creature snugged up to her body forming a skin-tight catsuit, obscuring her face, her hair, everything but her overabundance of bodily curves in a blank metallic sheen. It started making a low humming sound as her legs lifted off the floor and folded into a lotus position. The humming grew louder and started throbbing lowly, like a funk organ administering CPR as she floated gently up the shaft in lotus position. At the top of the shaft she stopped, and hovered, lowly humming metallically to herself.

And waited.

Piston

Mallah half walked, half was dragged by her own bouncing breasts up the broken stairs still lactating cutting torrents of milk that scoured away the walls of brick and metal on both sides of the ruin as she ascended. A river of milk flowed back into the courtyard still steaming hot, blackened with lead, ash, and bubbling with debris.

“Yet one thing undone, little one.” He eyed her from just over the crest of his head as he gestured down his two-and-a-half-foot long, 9-inch-diameter shaft. It was smaller than her fathers, a bit anemic by immortal standards, but would still make a mortal’s colon bleed at just the thought of it.

Her loins hungered for it at the sight of him, red hot and oozing down her inseam. Her breasts chomped at the bit, nipples standing ever more erect, skin pressed ever tighter around and around her enormous chest. But above all she must not do the one thing she so longed to do.

She brought herself back from lust with anger. “You killed my brood in cold blood. You have no honor.” Killing him would be just as much pleasure as fucking him…perhaps… she hoped. Bit of both along the way? No, she couldn’t. Immortals were absolutely fertile to one another. There was no way to please herself with him without leaving the encounter pregnant. From the look in his eyes that was his intention as well.

Too slow. She felt the pain of her highmyn ripped apart in one jolting tear. By the time the red flame of pain hit her brain her hinged pelvis had already been wrenched apart by the girth of his shaft

like harpooning a viper down the gullet with a fencepost. He was in her like a epileptic jackhammer pounding out her womb with a turbulent billowing mushroom of super fast blows in wild frenzied angles. She felt her inner organs throb and ache as his penis bruised and battered them. Her body jolted when he hit something more solid like her spine or ribs. A volcanic eruption of boiling hot sperm blew out her already over-stretched womb and gushed by the steaming bucket full at the recoil of his every stroke. Already he was pounding her so fast and hard the rumble of it shook the landscape like the roar of a giant locomotive.

Rocks, grass, and dirt poured by her hands as he plowed a furrow with her through the stockade wall, down the valley and square into the rocky hillside beyond splitting dirt, tree roots, and bedrock with her along the way. It all felt like a warm shower on her back compared to the screaming jet roto-tiller of thrust she endured up her crotch.

Landscape was useless to grip and the shock of it all sent her back arching in pain as she let out a stone-shattering scream. That only angled her womb away from her ribs and his shaft sank deeper, pounding her breasts into her face from her painfully overstretched stomach. She gripped her fists and flexed every muscle with all her might, but the expanding power of her orgasm simply wasn’t there. Her vagina had been rubbed raw and beaten flat. Only pain flared from her crotch. What little resistance she could muster only made the pain worse in her vagina as she gripped his driving shaft harder. That only made him moan and squeeze her flamingly engorged nipples harder.

She inhaled and tried to brace her chest against the pounding but he was just too strong. He had beaten her to orgasm and was pulling further ahead in his pleasure-driven engorging. She could feel his shaft widening, lengthening as it drove into her, tearing her pelvis further and further apart.

In a panic for her life she flexed everything else as hard as she still could. The raging blur of his thrusting slowed to a measured slide as her time dilation leaped into synch with his. His body began to crash into hers like a car direct into a k-rail as her grip on inertia solidified. Her brain caught up with the chaos of signals from all her individual organs. She could feel all the bruises on her liver, spleen, intestines, and it only made her bite down harder on her focus. She could feel her fallopian tubes overstretched with his magma-hot sperm, her ovaries soaked and hard pressed with his seed. He had grown hulkishly huge in his mad pleasure, both of body and penis. He had pressed his face between her breasts and was using her huge nipples as handlebars in thrusting her onto his ever-expanding penis, intent on splitting her like a log with it.

She let out a yell so feral it surprised her as she balled up all her anger and pain and swung down on his head with a double-fisted overhand haymaker. She felt the impact of it ripple through both of them as their bodies pressed harder together. He was invulnerable, and immovable. She’d only managed to ripple his flesh. Yet the shockwave of the impact visibly erupted into the atmosphere in a slowly expanding sphere of destruction, shocking the air to steam and pulverizing stone as it tumbled drunkenly away. Four seconds from now observers would see it reduce the low foothills they were plunged into to shrapnel and gouge a state-sized gash into the planetoid. But that was a lifetime from now at their dilated speed.

She couldn’t move him, so she’d have to move herself. She squatted her legs up at his next recoil and braced her feet against his massive legs. His penis was nearly four feet long now so by the time he’d pulled the basketball-sized head of it back to her vagina and readied his next plunge she had room to straighten her knees and lock her legs against his.

It was useless. He was just too engorged with power. Her knees crumpled at his thrust and he pile-drove his shaft deep inside her, only stopping when he pressed her stomach against his own face buried between her breasts. She needed to engorge or she would be helpless against him. He had used his one advantage against her: the male’s ability to reach orgasm at an instant. It had allowed him to overpower her long before she could mount a reply.

And that gave her an idea…and a flicker of hope.

Tumbleweed

Secretary Saunders approached from the helipad at dusk, straightening his tie. He was handed a charred clipboard and shown the way. She was an eerie sight floating over the maw of darkness in the open hangar door. She hadn’t moved in hours.

“Soupcans, general.” Saunders walked up the path from the helipad, straightening his tie. “I see she got my invitation. How long has she been waiting here?”

Someone handed Saunders a charred clipboard. “Five hours, Mr. Secretary.”

“Hello?” Sanders approached her. She was an eerie sight suspended in lotus position over the abyss in the open hangar door.

General Anderson said nothing, having long ago assumed his silent stare at her on the walk up, thinking, and calculating.

Nothing happened.

“This some kind of a joke?” Saunders wandered up to the railing, leaned over, and snapped his fingers in her face. “Wires or something?”

The edge gave way, lodging his foot under the railing anchor as the sandstone splintered into the gaping sinkhole. The railing buckled and unpinned three sections in both directions and began falling in.

She caught the railing with her foot, leaving him dangling face first over the edge, tie fluttering in the trail of sandstone dust into the darkness.

“Wires?” She asked. “You would not be here over wires, Secretary Saunders.”

“Indeed…” Saunders let the general pull him back to solid ground. “Quite a show, Ms. Mallah, is it?” It took him a few tries to half dust himself off.

“Duchess Mallah.” She said, unfolding herself and walking down to hover an inch over the edge before them. Her voice was somewhat muffled behind the blank metallic mask she wore. “You will have to forgive me. That was my fault. I did not mean to destabilize the facility, or overshoot your arrival.”

“Yes, well…I’m just glad you agreed to meet with me.” Saunders gestured to the administrative trailer. “Someplace less…sink hole perhaps?”

“If you would be more comfortable.” She began walking toward the trailer. She had an overtly aggressive figure. She walked with a stride that only begged to be stared upon. She very much dominated her skin-tight outfit. “I would like to discuss arrangements with you.”

“Arrangements?”

“Yes. Earth is now a stock planet in my Duchy. It needs to be reorganized to operate as such.”

“Uh…stock planet?”

“Yes. Apologies. Half a galactic rotation ago the galaxy was sterilized and reseeded with humans and a mulch of compatible biosphere by the Prime Exponential. Earth has only gone unclaimed because it is so far out from the core worlds. My house has only recently expanded to this cluster and I have been given this system for my duchy.”

“Your duchy.” Saunders repeated.

“Yes. Gamorah needs a populace. While Earth is the only stock planet in my system, I’m sure we can seed more secondary breeder colonies as we go along.”

“Stock planet.”

“Yes, I will be taking volunteers from the population. You have quite a dysfunctional global economy. It will be decades before harvesting takes more than your cast-offs here.”

“Harvesting.”

“Yes. I will be taking your citizens to populate and maintain Gamorah. I will do the best I can to help them all build profitable and productive lives, but it would be smothering of me to make any promises along those lines.”

“So…we’re repopulating another planet?”

“Yes, of course. We can’t hold the games here on a stock planet. It’s simply much too fragile. I built Gammorah with a diamond core, a chunk of that planet over there.” She pointed at Jupiter, just coming out in the evening haze. “It’s much sturdier, won’t be going all to bits at the end of every round.”

“Games?”

“Alright look, humans…mortals…your quaint idea that ‘all men are created equal’ really only works in isolation, when it’s just you and yours squabbling over what food there is on this dirt clod. But it’s really not true. All are not created equal. Some are enhanced, and a few, me included, are immortal, gods and goddesses if you like. If you would return to your Greek roots you can once again understand both democracy, and divinity, one in each hand, entirely unequal but compatible systems. ”

“So you’re not just an off world alien, but a goddess as well.”

“Yes, of course.” She leaned casually against nothing. “Why would anyone send a commoner across star systems? It’s just not worth the effort. Look, all I’m asking is for you to go on about your business, divide into whatever countries you like down here, vote, war, trade, whatever. But you’re going to have to stay out of my way. What people wish to come with me you can’t stand in their way, or mine. I will leave you alone if you leave me alone. Otherwise a lot of useful people are going to get hurt. I want you to have a police, and military forces. You need that to keep order down here among yourselves. You will really save me a whole lot of trouble in doing so. But just keep it to yourselves, ok?”

Saunders pulled out his wallet, produced a dollar bill, and handed it to General Anderson. “I think we’re done here.”

“Agreed.” General Anderson nodded and turned to Mallah. “Look Missy. Nobody, not the Germans, not the Russians, not the Chinese, and not some space princess from Alpha Centari are going

to be enslaving United States citizens. We fought many wars to maintain our freedom and we’ve no intention of rolling over now.”

“Alpha Centari’s actually my brother’s dukedom.”

“Irregardless. Take your offer and shove it to high heaven.”

She giggled, rising to her toes. “And what would you do? You cannot fight a goddess. No mortal can. I haven’t even given you any enhancements yet. Even if you had a team you’d be slaughtered the moment the game began.”

“Sorry for wasting your time, Mr. Secretary. I will take it from here.” Anderson straightened his coat and turned on his heel to escort the secretary back to the awaiting Blackhawk. “Sergeant, take this woman into custody.”

“Waste of more than time, General.” She shook her head at the sight of them leaving. “Many will die for nothing because of your foolish stubbornness. And in the end I will only have to break you.”

“Such is war.” The general spoke again into his walkie talkie. “This is White Castle actual. Weapons hot gentlemen. Peacock is not to leave the reservation. Burger King has com.”

“Your way right away, Sir.” The radio crackled back. “Zookeeper advance, cavity creeps clear holding pattern to approach.”

She turned to the sergeant. He put up his hands and stepped back in fear. “Second tank division Ma’am. I know a splatterin’ comin’ when I see one. Don’t want nooo part of dis.”

She put her hand on his shoulder reassuringly. “Mother said there would be sensible men like you, Sergeant, and to look after them with kindness.” She glared over her shoulder at the ascending Blackhawk. “And Father warned me about the rest: a foolish and stubborn breed that must see before they can believe.”

“Shhh…” The Sergeant struggled a bit as her suit melted over him. “With kindness.” She quieted him as it enveloped his body in pouring liquid metal.

“Terrible waste of manpower and equipment.” The general sighed as he watched a division of ground troops close weapons drawn from all corners of the facility.

“Hope you didn’t go overboard with this, General.” The secretary settled in for the quick noisy ride back to Tuscon. “She’s just one girl, even if she did bring a tank.”

“Hope she did.” The general pointed down out the helicopter door. “Nothing a Marine division can’t handle. We’ll all be back in barracks for dinner.” Just then they overflew a wing of three A-10 warthogs on low approach.

“Cavity creeps?”

“I’m told they put holes in teeth.”

“You are all just big kids with toys, aren’t you.”

“Mr. Secretary, we invented the redneck. Aliens aren’t the only ones with breeding programs in mind.”

Ricocheted

She closed her eyes and imagined he was her deceased childhood playmate Ralando. He was a servant in the family that raised her, but to help the family blend into the city’s throngs of mortals they had always been allowed to play together as siblings. He was two years older than her and an enhanced human. He could turn his skin metallic at will and become a low-grade of invulnerable. They’d secretly shared his puberty together in dark corners of the family’s storehouse growing up. In hindsight doubtlessly her birth parents knew and didn’t care. She was infertile before puberty even if she was vulnerable. Ralando’s member had never grown much past a foot, but it was strong enough to withstand her childish grip, both of her hands and her vagina. She was always able to pleasure him, regardless of how hard he became. She was the one girl in town who safely could. At first he was able to pleasure her as well, but the thrill of their secret experiments soon faded. He never could really break through her highmyn and she grew tired of the game. She’d always wished he’d been able to grow bigger, stronger…but he’d been killed last night in the bombing. His pitiful metallic skin couldn’t save him from the shockwave.

She visualized Ralando’s face between her finally goddess-sized breasts, gripping, pressing, licking, sucking, kissing, like he told her he always wanted to but she was just too small. She imagined his penis had finally grown big enough, hard enough, strong enough to do…to be THIS. She melted into the next thrust like butter, her body flowing over and down and down and down the tremendous girth and depth of the anaconda-like penis, willingly stretching out to accommodate—

The raw and aching man-o-war in her vagina struck like match heads as she drew them purposefully down his trunk. They blazed to life in a fury of fire the flavor of which she’d never experienced. Instead of electric pangs of pleasure they sent searing hot fire and blood rush down their tentacles, reviving and engorging and expanding her muscles and sinew in a wave that reached her fingertips in a flash.

“YES!” She screamed supersonically as her ankles gripped his shaft on his recoil and thrust it forcibly into her vagina with a force equaling his. “AGAIN!” Her breasts throbbed to life, her nipples expanding through his steel grip.

The game had changed. It was no longer rape the princess. Now she was an equal participant in a game of chicken. This was now sex to the death between immortals. To win one just had to drive the other into orgasmic lock without being caught themselves. He knew it too. His early entry into orgasm trying to secure an early win in the rape-the-princess game now put him at a serious disadvantage. The throbbing in his enormous penis was already starting to white-out his senses in a growing glow around his crotch. His toes were already caught in an uncontrollable spasm and his fingers were starting to twitch.

But he was the elder, more experienced. He pulled back and angled into her with a backward pitch, seeking her g-spot on the front of her vagina, while forcing her lower lips from a circular to a more julienned bite on his shaft, expanding her even further and tighter open while reducing her grip on him.

But she already had a plan. She was busy giving into the Ralando of her dreams. She gleefully guided his enormous shaft to rub over her most sensitive—the sensation exploded like a nova from her crotch. Her flesh immediately bloomed like a bomb had gone off inside her out to her paralyzing massive bulk. The enormous burst of strength caught his shaft in a vice grip, immobilizing them together. His struggles amounted to a faint twitching, his invulnerable penis caught painfully in a nearly immovable vagina. The gushing lava flow of his sperm began backing up, squeezed shut at the shaft.

She wasn’t there yet. She flew past his time dilation rate and became a blur of twitching and thrusting. She quickly slid down to the base of his shaft, fully engulfing him in her flesh. As she hit bottom the blazing nova within her reignited in electric blue once again, scorching her spine and brain with millions of volts of pure pleasure.

He was sure he’d won. She could feel him trying to work his way free, slowly and with immense effort pressing against her impossibly hard nipples to remove himself from her doomed boulder of flesh.

And then she opened her grip, and with one massive thrust of will, shoved the whole ball of lightning from her vagina straight down and into the length of his shaft. While she was unable to pierce his invulnerable skin, unable to break his invulnerable bones…her lightning powers were the perfect bridge between her nervous system and his. It was like giving birth to a ball of thunderclap and shoving it straight down the shaft of a telephone pole.

His body immediately exploded in muscle and veins. His eyes flashed open, lightning pouring out of them, transfixed in an expression of indigestible ecstasy. His penis thundered out to a full two foot diameter and 8 foot long shaft. The resulting nova shattered the planetoid like a quasar erupting from within it. The exploding geyser of sperm shot her like a bullet cracking through the back side of the planetoid. The recoil from it caught his grip unawares as he erupted in a fountain of streaming sperm into space in the opposite direction. The planetoid cracked in half and drifted apart along their battle line in a sickening thud.

She deflated herself like a balloon, the orgasm in her fizzled out down to her normal mortal pilot-light proportions once again. Enough sperm spewed from her stomach to fill a small pond, and took flight in all directions, forming a dissipating mist of white all around her as she floated in space.

She saw him rocketing, spiraling like a pinwheel, spraying sperm in all directions as he drifted into deep space, his face locked in an agonizing expression of ecstasy, sparks skittering across the bulbous expanse of his naked and grossly engorged body.

She was very pregnant. As she felt around inside herself she could actually feel the dozen or so ripe, fertilized eggs within her on each side waiting to slide down her fallopian tubes and settle in. In a fit of anger she clenched down upon them. To her surprise they splattered like microscopic grapes and oozed mitochondria like blood.

Then she giggled in realization. Immortal sperm and egg had to have ripped the invulnerability off one another to conceive. It had to be that way or nothing could grow. It took an immortal child a dozen years to begin to set its invulnerability again, and that’s why they were vulnerable as children. Even immortally impregnated it was an act of will to carry a brood to term without accidentally crushing them to death.

She would have to ask her mother why she kept that secret from her all this time. Perhaps it was a secret to be kept only among immortal women of breeding age.

I spy

“That ain't right.” Mike scrolled around the image on the screen. “Is that meteorite damage?” There was clearly a growing nebula where Jupiter should have been in the Hubble image. “Show me the calibration.”

“Calibration's fine. The mirror sweep is clean. Sensor pings are nominal.” Jim brought up three non-descript star fields on the opposite terminal. “I ran it again to be sure. No mirror or sensor damage.”

“What about attitude telemetry?”

“Star trackers and gyros are in phase. We're dead in specs for guidance.”

“Call operations and ask for more windows. Run the frame again, and the Jovian ephemeris.”

“I’m already on it.”

“Tell them we found their little problem.”

A Gathering in the Void

Her entire clan stood floating in space Moon’s orbit away. Her eleven siblings hung in array around her mother and father. The pantheon of their neighboring house hung in the air opposite them, completing the small circle of onlookers as Mallah ascended from the debris. Her opponent’s seven siblings and their mother and father looked on grimly.

“This matter is concluded.” Her father’s continence was visibly drained. Mallah’s mother held him in devoted embrace, but it was plain to see he was leaning on her. Mallah’s siblings’ expressions toward Mallah were as cold as their rivals’.

The opposing king shed a single tear.

“Imperial law is clear.” Mallah’s father continued with a sigh as he addressed his counterpart. “I am sorry my friend, but the child has won rights to all her rival’s inheritance.”

“Imperial law is not clear. Her rival had no inheritance.” The Fist clan king cast a sideways glance down the line of his offspring. “His sister spared him death at their brood’s trial. He was without birthright.”

“Sparing the boy was madness and sacrilege before the Emperor.” Mallah’s father drew himself up to his full stature. “It does not change that Mallah has won his birthright in fair trial combat.”

“Fair trial combat law is for broodlings. Both combatants were of age and fully immortal.”

“My daughter was not of age, the shock of your son’s dishonorable act aged her before her time.”

“Dishonor was returned sending her to trial against her elder, were she truly still broodling. Her brood has been avenged. The matter is closed.”

“Hold council.” A trio of red-clad and veiled immortals descended from a newly arrived vessel. “All matters between clans are Arbitrator jurisdiction.”

“You summoned arbitration?” Mallah’s father growled at the opposing king.

“Return to your senses, my old friend.” The other king held up his hands. “Brood trials have not been fought among immortal offspring since before the living memory of Empire. None expected either child to win. Resolving the matter by arbitration seemed the prudent course towards the preservation of peace between our two houses.”

“Your cunning may be your undoing.” Mallah’s father sneered.

“Arbitration rules in favor of the broodling Mallah.” The woman among the trio spoke for the three of them. “Her victory over the outcast boy awards her the birthright of his brood be added to her own. The living inheritor of said birthright is to be part and parcel of the exchange, sentenced in perpetual subservience to Mallah for failure to execute the totality of her rival brood.”

The girl screamed carnally with rage and flew at—

Her father’s arm caught her by the slowly expanding chest. “House of Fist will abide by arbitration. Hail Prime, hail Empire.”

“Hail Prime.” Mallah’s father nodded through narrowing eyes. “Hail Empire.”

The Fist king scowled at his daughter and escorted her across to face Mallah. “My daughter has proved herself compassionate and honorable, and irreverent of Imperial law. May you prove a wiser mistress.” And turning to his daughter: “May you regain your honor in service.”

His daughter stared Mallah down in fury, a purple fire flaring in her eyes. “My name is Xi. I spared the brother you destroyed out of love. You will never have the same out of me.” She flared her breasts and practically hissed like a rearing cobra at Mallah.

“Silence you incestuous—“ Her father ground his teeth, turning from her face into the triad. “Hail Empire.”

“Hail Empire, wise king.” The three floated back to their awaiting starship. Minutes later that seemed like hours they were underway and gone.

“You brought this upon yourself, my friend.” Mallah’s father sighed. “I was content to close the matter.”

“The matter is closed, old friend.” The other king took his queen by the arm. “In the ledger of Empire.” His family left with him to their awaiting starship, leaving their unfortunate daughter behind.

Mallah took her hand and wiped the thick white, still steaming goo of sperm off her chest. She took a glopping handful of it and smeared it slowly across the equally impressive beam of Xi’s furiously heaving breasts. “This was not my intention. Neither of us wanted to destroy him. I will treat you as my sister.”

Xi spat on Mallah’s breast. “Spare me your charity.”

Slingshot

“Twins?” General Anderson struggled to explain why the woman he just ordered splattered across a remote weapons testing range had just greeted them as they boarded their chartered government Learjet in Tucson. Then again she had yet to reveal her face. This could very easily be a whole Vegas kick line troupe of them for all anybody could prove. “Is this some kind of cult?”

“If you like I suppose.” Mallah stood in her red robe, slid over to the adjoining seat and sat down, having never left her seat. “Better?” She patted the seats on either side of either of her and invited the Secretary and the General to their seats.

“Are you seeing this?” Secretary had just boarded and stood staring behind the general.

“And neither did you.” Anderson called out to the jet way. “Captain, arrest this...these women.”

“Gentlemen,” the hatch closed inexplicably as Mallah rose, shifted over, and sat down back into herself. “I've already seen yours.” She walked up to them and posed her entire 5'4” stature for them to closely inspect. She barely came up to the shoulder on both of them. “Time I showed you mine.”

With that ribbons of her red robe began to unfurl, spread out across the cabin, and sink into the cracks, the vents, up the walls.   Within moments the cabin was draped in gold-trimmed red velvet.

Anderson went for his sidearm.

“Seatbelts, gentlemen,” they were grabbed from behind, lifted, turned and carried softly to their seats by the inexplicably prehensile ribbons of fabric. “We wouldn't want you getting hurt.”

“What is this?” The secretary tried to stand but was caught by the chest and strapped to his seat. Out the window he could see the red ribbons entwine the wing.

“It is exactly what it looks like.” Mallah took a wrapped grip on handfuls of her robe caught in the floor. The whole plane snapped and popped as it lifted gently off the ground. “Don't you know an alien abduction when you see one?”

“What do you people wa--” Up to that point Anderson's brain had kept up with the rationalizations. They were just some kind of cult. They gassed the airport staff. They had a Chinook and were carrying off the airpl--

Gravity hit them like a bowling ball to the gut. The ground rapidly pulled away from view like a wave recoiling from the shore. A Chinook would have stalled out about 70,000 feet ago. The plane's oxygen masks dropped out. The ribbons had the two men masked in moments.

“I want you to breathe.” Mallah wrapped her wrists in another loop of fabric. The sky turned black as the plane's structure snapped and popped with the strain. She leaned to the left as the horizon banked sickeningly and then lurched. “And enjoy the--”

Benediction

“So…now what, oh exalted mistress?” Xi rolled her eyes at Mallah as they floated in space over the wispy wreckage.

“A word with my daughter.” Mallah’s father drew near, relieved. Mallah’s head was rapidly clearing from the throbbing. She was busy wiping the mess off her naked body before it iced over too badly in the cold vacuum of space. Her father sighed and continued to speak. “I am sorry to have put you through that, daughter. But the law demanded you be put to trial by combat.”

“Did I pass?”

“With flying…” He turned up his nose at the trail of whitish mist she’d left on her return from the cataclysm. “…yes. You have exceeded all expectations. You shall no longer be known as Princess Mallah, but La--” He paused and gave Xi a contemplative look, followed by a nod from his wife. “Duchess Mallah. Lady Xi, as Mallah’s charge you are now part of our house and shall fly our banner at the games.”

“Lovely, Gramps. When’s tea.” Xi twirled a finger through her hair…obviously contemplating twirling a finger through Mallah’s hair…or nose…perhaps an eyeball.

“Mallah as victor in your brood trial you are hereby granted your inheritance.” He pulled a glowing jawbreaker-like affair from his sleeve and put it gingerly in Mallah’s hands. “And the house out world sector 3 and all the worlds it contains upon which to build your duchy.” He pointed at a trio of loosely associated stars in the distance.

“And of course, you have earned your own T’zart Mal, and your starting rank and privileges in the games.” Her mother brought her a quivering piece of the spaceship they’d arrived in. With some encouragement the young animal did take to Mallah’s hand when she offered, but turned up its nose at the prospect of slithering further up her still sticky arm. “May you serve in the rotations with dignity.”

“Um…yeah.” Mallah now rolled her eyes, drowning in the irony of her mother’s counter-circumstantial blessing. “More of THAT does sound like fun.” She half meant it. She just wasn’t sure which half yet.

“Come.” Mallah’s father gestured to their ship. “Time enough for fawning. The next round of games is upon us and the Citadel is still a shambles.” He turned to Mallah. “Take a round to settle and straighten your affairs. Your admirers shall see you on the pitch soon enough.”

The two young goddesses watched as their siblings drifted into the starship and waited for the whole creature to blink out of the sector with a leaning flash.

Gomorrah

A gentle breeze sent goose bumps over Anderson's skin. The sun was warm on his face and the moist air smelled of fresh cut bluegrass.   His arms felt heavy and leaden as he weakly raised a hand to the sun and blinked his eyes open. Faint wisps of pink clouds drifted in a pale blue dawn sky. Wind rustled in the long grass between his fingers and over his suit. Birds chirped in chorus somewhere in the distance.

Dead.

It was a struggle to sit up on an elbow. He felt...heavy. The vista before him was spectacular. He was perched on a high rocky bluff overlooking a glistening bay full of towering rocky islands. Flocks of birds drifted on the winds around the islands toes perhaps 500 feet below.

He scooted himself back from the edge and found a rock to lean against while he caught his breath. Not what he'd imagined, but probably a lot better than he deserved. His head swam with hyperventilation as he couldn't manage better than one gasp behind his breath. He sat and just focused on breathing for what seemed like minutes.

Branches of a weeping willow drifted across his head in the high ocean breeze.   After a while he was able to grab onto a handful and pull himself to his feet. He felt...old, tired, but strangely unburdened. He still wore his dress uniform, albeit mud-caked like his PT outfit.

A rabbit hopped up to sniff his pant cuff in the grass. Poor thing, somebody had died its fur bright orange with tiger stripes. Was that...barbeque he smelled?

“So who are you really?” He asked the wind. “Chinese, North Korean, Iranian?”

“Why is it 'none and above' so hard for you to accept, William?” She strode forward on his right. “Even here?” Her veil was down. She looked positively Victorian in her long velvet sleeves, hood trailing in the wind behind her. She couldn't be more than 20, long straight red hair, freckles, green, distant eyes staring out over the horizon.

“Here?” He chuckled. “Drugged out on the couch in some sleeper cell's Tucson safe house?” He gave the rabbit a casual kick off his pant leg. It hissed, bit him in the shin, and scampered off. Real pain happened in his shin, like a scorpion sting, flaring red and slowly smoldering up his leg. “Damn.” He sat down in a heap on the rock he'd found, holding his leg.

“The brightly colored ones are probably poisonous you know.” She knelt beside him, her warm hair smelling of orange and lavender as she took his leg in her hand and palmed the wound. “It’s always that way everywhere.” The pain in his leg withdrew as she seemed to pull it in her hand like a tangled knot of thread from his shin.

“William Anderson.” His face turned grim. “Brigadier General Select. U.S. Army--”

“Shhh.” Her finger closed his lips. “I already know everything you could possibly tell me. This is not an interrogation.” She cinched up a torn strip of his slacks on the wound. “Not even a probing. Can you stand?”

He just sat blankly, chest heaving. “Where is the Secretary?”

“I had to put him back.” She shrugged as she stood. “His bones were too fragile. I left him at a farmhouse in Montana.” She flipped her hood back on. “He'll recover soon enough.” She turned to look him over. “You're in remarkably good shape for your age.”

“My age?”

“I have to anthologize. I'm not the best judge of...gravity...acceleration forces, that sort of thing.” Her feet drifted to the top of the grass. She did a somersault in midair, but slowly, as if she were swimming. “Much below what you'd consider...'industrial', I can't really feel it. The gravity here, for example: they tell me it’s about 1.2 of your G's. You're going to be sore, and it’s going to take a few weeks, but you should be able to adjust.”

“Adjust?” Anderson lifted his hands. They was just...fatigued...drugged, that was all. “My office will call a manhunt by dawn.”

“Yeah well...” She drifted to her knees and knelt beside him, taking his hands in hers. “That was about two days ago.” She nodded to the sun. “And on the other side of that.”

“When I wake up I'll see to it you all are sent to Leavenworth.”

She chuckled. “You should be over your planet lag in a few weeks as well.”

“Planet lag?”

She shrugged, took him by the chin and turned his head left. “Fine. You can call it jet lag.” The remains of the Learjet were pitched against the rock bluff like a broken snowshoe in the mudroom. Its wings had been ripped off and the skin of it was well charred.   “But don't spread it around too much. People will start expecting first class transportation.”

“You're not where you think you are, William.” She stood and motioned a small work crew of Chinese laborers. “This is my new pitch.” The workers took him under the shoulder and legs and picked him up billet-style off the stone. “I call it Gomorrah.” They turned, carried him over the hill. “You can call it Jupiter if you like.”   A small village stood in a clearing in the jungle, bamboo huts on stilts, grass thatch, home fires burning.   “It had the perfect core...well maybe a bit heavy, but it will suffice.”

“This is my recovery camp for now. We're really just starting so facilities are...primitive for now, but functional. This is Sasha.” Mallah introduced a young raven-haired Chinese woman who bowed respectfully. “You are her charge until you're on your feet again. Just be warned she's enhanced, and probably poisonous.”

“Enhanced?” Anderson's eyes went straight to Sasha's ample chest.

Sasha's index finger and 3-inch metallic claw met him there with a wag. “And happily mated, thank you.” She pointed to one of the grass huts and said something in Chinese. The litter team turned and carried him off where she'd pointed.

“Heel, Sasha.” Mallah teased. “Not groceries. I want him standing, not cubed or broiled.”

“He'll be cubed soon enough.” Sasha hissed. “He's just stock, like the rest.”

“Yes, but this one's well trained, and just as stubborn as you.” Mallah watched them hoist the general up to the porch in a makeshift crane. “They may fear you, but they will follow him.”

“I never wanted a following.”

“I wasn't offering.” Mallah ran her fingers through Sasha's long silken hair. “How is Smoke doing?”

Sasha shrugged her off. “She is safe, well fed, and none of your concern.”

“Sorry, I meant no offense.” Mallah fluttered around Sasha like a pixie. “Weren't you the one telling me I should care more?”

“Hmph.” Sasha snorted black smoke. “More practice...” She struck out her huge black wings and coiled her tail behind her. “...mistress.” And she leaped into the sky and flapped out over the thick jungle.

Ripples in Time

“Affairs.” Xi shook her head in detached disgust. “Ever jumped one of those?” She pointed to the blobby creature sniffing around Mallah’s knuckles.

“I did actually just ascend yesterday.” Mallah shrugged. “How could I possibly?”

“Well then what a coincidence.” Xi drew close like a snake. “I’ve just been told to serve you today.” She ran her fingers across Mallah’s back and picked up a finger-full of “frosting”. “I say it would serve you proper to leave you here with it to sort that out between you.” Her red choker slithered down her arm and lapped her finger clean before oozing like blood over her body. “Those are my worlds over there.” She pointed as her own creature enveloped her and began spreading out an impressive set of wings. “If you’ll excuse me I must set things in order for the round. Stop by if you need—“

And she was gone.

Mallah floated staring into the void, slowly icing over. “I can’t say I blame her.”

The little creature bounced and tugged on her hand like a puppy towards the star.

“I could use to clean up.” She agreed. “Do you come with a name?”

The creature seemed to deflate disappointingly at the thought as she flew off absently towards the star to warm up.

“I’m sure you’ll name yourself in time.” She gave it a rub between what she imagined were ears. It turned copper and glowed warmly from within. “Can you keep track of this for me?” She handed it the other more solidly sphere-shaped glowing mystery. “It will be a while before I should use it.”

The creature greedily swallowed the ball and shrunk back suspiciously.

“Can you wait here for a second?” She gently deposited it on the edge of a drifting asteroid. It stuck to the rock, and craned its neck to see where she was off to as she dove around to the other side. She cocked her arms back and spun as hard as she could…which was a lot harder than she thought it would be. The universe blurred around her for a second before she could get a braking grip on it. It stopped spinning quite a bit later than she did. When she regained her balance all the slime had been flung off her. It coated the little asteroid and slowly drifted off in a sparkling ring into deeper space.

“That better?” She drifted around to collect her friend from the dry side of the rock. It jumped joyfully up her arm and began running over her bare skin like purple ink. “My, you are frisk—“

The creature splashed over her breasts, ran icy cold down her spine and flaming hot up her inseam. It was like being plunged into Jell-O all-ends first as she instinctively held her—well that was silly. She hadn’t drawn a breath in 20 minutes. When she’d opened her eyes the universe was tinted purple through a thick membrane of the transparent creature. When she lifted her hand to inspect them they were covered in a glossy white skin about as thick as damp on her.

“—ky.” She could see what it was looking at as various stars tinted in bright colors as its focus bounced around the local cluster like a pinball. She could feel it bouncing and tugging her, like an excited puppy with a leash in its mouth. It was trying to pry her vagina open with all its cute little might.

“Seriously?” Come to think of it she’d never actually seen her mother jump one of these things, or never been allowed to. She’d never seen her father jump either. They were always off in their own chambers of the creature when the family traveled together, and she was too young then to have much for penetrating vision. Considering the order of the day it made sense though. If she and the creature were to work together to jump across star systems, there was only one part between them capable of generating that kind of reality-bending power. Immortals with all their time dilation and flight abilities still came up short of the light barrier. These creatures obviously lacked the power on their own. “If you think you can take it.” She let herself relax. Things immortals never tell you when you’re growing up…

The creature was in her, not like the boy god had been, more like the business end of a hot tub, pressing but softly. She was so surprised at first she almost choked it. The whole creature turned cold and blue at her startled response until she relaxed again. It certainly was pliant. She probably could have crushed granite to sand just then, yet the creature came back to life when she unclenched.

“Sorry.” She turned towards a star Xi had pointed to, determined to follow close on her servant’s heels. “So how do we do this?”

The creature seemed to plug into her spine. Images of her life flashed past as it sorted through them, seeking what it needed. A moment later it held the sensation she’d felt when she’d imagined XYZ’s face on the boy god, the sensation she’d felt when she’d truly opened herself to her carnal lusts.

The star lit again, gently, deep in her hips. The creature seemed to envelop the two man-o-war heads snuggling together within her. As she let herself slip deeper and deeper into it she could see the mirror image of herself, floating in the distant star system she wanted to be in. The mirror image came closer, like floating to the surface limp and face first to the surface of a still pond…until she kissed.

Where she had been faded into the ripples her lips sent into the mirrored surface. She was facing backwards, the star gently fading away in her crotch…56 parsecs from where she’d started.

“You tell anybody about him and I don’t care what you are.” She warned her pet sternly. “I will burn you to ash.” It slithered out of her in hurried obedience.

The Glass House

“First person to say 'end times' gets reassigned to arctic monitoring station duty.” Sam had all he could do to keep the conference room in their seats at points, and at other points in the report all he could do to get them to comment out of their stunned silence. “I'm not asking what it means. I'm asking what our action plan needs to be, if anything.” He'd walked into the directorship position 5 years ago expecting to inspire and lead NASA out of its 40-year slump.   Manning the watch during the end times wasn't one of his career goals.   Crap. He was thinking it too.   Nice vacation to the arctic was sounding like a better and better idea.

“Several of our theories will need re-examining.”

“Granted, James, but what do you need for that?”

“I’d need every facility on the planet for 40 years.”

“I can't fund that, but we shouldn't have to. Call a conference, cleared personnel only. Scratch that—academic personnel, everyone in the book. This thing will be on CNN soon enough. See what who and where we can get started with this data. We have to stay ahead of this.”

“We need a probe. SOHO's gone dark. We have no assets in solar opposition.”

“That we can do, Mike, see what's on the pads now and what we can repurpose. Mike, see what's out there and still talking.   We should have something we can get turned around and looking.”

“The Chinese may have something.”

“Good, call them, and ESA, but don't let them lead out on mission re-planning without us.”

“Sir, I have the department of Energy on the line...wants to hear a flare forecasting.”

“Anybody?”

“Sir, an entire hemisphere of the sun seems to have aged forward on the order of 10 billion years redder in one rotation. We'd be talking out our asses if we gave them any kind of forecast from here forward. We don't even know how the two halves are holding together at this point other than sheer gravity and dumb luck.”

“And we've confirmed Jupiter was torn completely apart 3 nights earlier. We have all remaining assets tracking remaining planets, but whatever is going on I doubt there's anything we can do about it.”

“This is Edwards,” The voice over the telephone connection sounded enwisened yet beleaguered. “We were hoping you boys could explain why our deep cavern lab lit up like a Christmas tree last week. We've got sixteen new exotic particles and recorded a gravity wave last night that damn near blew out the sensor.”

“Gentlemen.” Sam held his head in his hands. “We're being knocked back into the stone age here.   Somebody want to run out and reboot Stonehenge?”

The room returned to stunned silence while it digested the obvious Biblical conclusions.

“That's actually not a bad idea.” Mallah's burgundy robes stood out like a rose in a parking lot of gray suits as she leaned back on the front desk.

Sam looked up from the table and up her back side. He rolled his eyes. “Very funny. Take off the hood Christie.”

“Uh...” Christie raised her hand from the third row of the crowded auditorium. She was the only woman in the directorate remotely close to being able to fill out that robe.

“It’s called a world seed.” Mallah continued. “Time dilation on that scale does unfortunately have local side effects. The star will be fine. Its heavier elements will redistribute globally in another million years or so. It will have a nasty wobble for a while I'm afraid, like what you call a 'binary' star. On the whole it really only gained roughly 3 billion years.”

“Who--”

“And your planet Jupiter...well, you weren't using that anyway were you? Pitches are necessarily diamond-cored, and that was the nearest one. Unfortunately the remaining material will never condense. It will evaporate to another thin ring around the star. There was nobody there anyway. We can move Saturn up a bit if you want.”

“Move...Saturn?” Sam's mind hadn't had a “comic book” gear since grade school.

“Yes. I suppose I take requests.” Mallah shrugged. “Will there be anything else?” She looked around the stunned room and sighed. “And no, this is not the place to 'show us your rack'. I'm an alien immortal, not a porn star on a geek prank.” She stood off the desk. “And no, taking the hood off wouldn't help that case. Suffice to say I look quite stock. The whole galaxy is actually seeded with humans and where I'm from is no exception. So get over yourselves.   You've seen what my people can do. Are you ready to believe yet, or do you want to see more?” She drifted off the platform and hovered three feet in the air.

Stunned silence hung with her.

“Skootch.” A blink later and Sam found himself standing in the aisle. When he looked up Mallah had taken his chair at the front table. “We can do panel if you want. No I can't read your minds. But honestly you're all rather plain thinkers. I'll give you five minutes, all the nerd I can stand. No question too dumb. Come on people. There's no press here, just us. Yes, you...Christie is it?”

“Why?”

Mallah paused. “I said dumb questions.” She shook her head. “Sorry, I'm used to dealing with your military.”

Nobody laughed.

“Look. I'm really trying to be different. I'm not like the others. I'm only taking volunteers, I'm staying out of your affairs, and I'm really trying not to kill anybody here.”

“Taking for what?”

“Is she--” Mallah looked down at her oversized breasts showing even through her heavy robes. “--the only one who's going to talk here?” She shook her head in disgust. “Fine.”

A blink later was like hitting Christie in the face with a bucket of ice water. There was a 20 degree temperature difference between the conference room and the evening air on the building's roof.

Temple

A rather large planet glistened in the blue-greenish fire of the oddly copper star. The planet was thickly clouded, but she could see cities of gold and bronze gilded into its mountainous crags and spires. That had to be Xi’s world.

“Determined to be useful, I see.” She giggled at the creature that had sheeted over as a skin-tight golden cat suit as she launched herself toward the planet. It had even managed her house emblem across her chest.

Xi caught her out of nowhere by the ankle in passing. “Whoa whoa whoa, you can’t just barge down there wearing THAT.”

“No Imperial cover?” Mallah turned to protest, “I don’t understand.”

“Your clan standard, for starters,” Xi pointed as Mallah swelled her chest in defiance. “Your father never taught you? Out-clan Immortals are not allowed outside the games.”

“I meant no intrusion.”

“You really did just ascend yesterday, didn’t you?” Xi palmed Mallah’s chest. The creature Xi was wearing sparked words with the creature Mallah was wearing. A chilling moment later Mallah’s outfit had submitted to a loose, muslin affair, mostly bare down the front, beaded chains down the back, and heavily jeweled around the trim. “We’ll start you off with that.”

Mallah gave herself a turn. “Whatever are you planning with this?” She had to squint into the ultra violet to see through the thickly embroidered veil.

“Not startling the fauna.” Xi’s own outfit shifted from the red latex war eagle number to something more befitting a harem, her old Fist-clan emblem embroidered in gold into what little there was of her top. “Their appetites for tranquilizers are approaching certain limits.”

Mallah gave Xi’s figure an admiring look, followed by a puzzled expression.

“Fine fine, whatever,” Xi set off towards the planet. “Can we discuss this someplace more civil?”

“Lead on, my Lady.”

“Call me that again and I’ll knock you back to daddy.”

Mallah’s senses were met with a flood of conversations and smells as soon as they approached the upper atmosphere. This was no mere stockade outpost of an exiled god boy. This was a thickly populated pitch world. Oceans were clear and clean, the biosphere was lushly green and thick with fauna of all descriptions. Sharply jagged islands were everywhere, like the remains of some colossal stain glass window in the rain. Clearly this was not a feral home world.

Mallah could see its colossal diamond core beneath a thick layer of granite crust. The faint acrid taste of a recent world seed still hung in the stratosphere. Cities clung in still strategic crags in the cliffs and nestled deep among the underwater valleys in the crust like newly spawned grout mold. Architecture was still quite unadorned, it all looked hastily and uncaringly built, like the mere façade of civilization it was.

It took her senses a moment to expand to take it all in, to start streaming it all into the now seemingly insatiable cisterns of her memory. The rush of it all took Mallah’s breath aw—well that was still a silly mortal notion. She hadn’t drawn a breath in hours. She imagined herself surfing through the great wave of sensations, balancing on one event, one smell, one sound at a time, jumping from one to another until her awareness spiraled back to her present location and time, letting the remainder stream into her memory, an ocean of memories awaiting later need. There were so many different languages being spoken, so many—chemicals…

“Like it?” Xi grinned as they burned into the lower atmosphere a bit too fast. “We’ve only had one round here so far.” She pointed to a smoking grand-canyon-sized gash slowly filling with ocean to the East. The depths of the string of craters sparkled with the rough-cut diamond core. State-sized tables of granite stood upended, their thin frosting of dirt and forest oozing off them, their upper reaches misting as it all dissipated into the vacuum of low orbit. Massive chunks of broken granite slowly tumbled in loose orbit over the haze. “I was going to put that back together today, but you know, family business comes first. Perhaps later tonight you can be a dear and help me patch that up. “

Mallah held her tongue. She could see whole cities near the edge still struggling at once to move to higher ground and brace their thin defense walls against the continuing tsunamis. Within moments that was all below the horizon as a glistening mountaintop palisade rushed to meet them.

Mallah pulled up short and alighted toes-first on the polished marble of the highest courtyard. Xi blazed in like a mortar, stretching cat-like into a low crouch as the heavy thud of the shockwave she’d been trailing knocked the dust off the surrounding stone pillars. “You’ll have to excuse the mess,” she flipped her hair back as she stood. “I haven’t taught them to clean up yet.”

The courtyard was strewn with naked couples in tangled copulating positions. The evening air hung heavy with human sweat, pheromones, candle wax, and musty perfumes. The sound of moaning, groaning, and breathless gasping echoed off the temple’s rough-hewn granite walls, intermixed with the sounds of cracking whips and distant tribal drums beating out a drunken stroke and counter stroke. The whole affair seemed a slave orgy loosed from the rowing decks of an ancient galleon.

Now Mallah was breathing again. She couldn’t help but fall in pace with the undulation of the gathered humanity. She found herself swaying absently, the hunger of her vagina raking her spine, throbbing in her toes. She could feel the inhuman power in the room. Fire flared in one corner. A tornado spun angrily over another writhing couple. The man on her right came with an ear-splitting howl, his claws sparked off the shimmering metallic skin of his grinning partner. These weren’t human. A great many of the gathered throng was enhanced, dozens of them, perhaps hundreds across the mountain top.

“Don’t even think about it.” Xi gestured all around as she tossed an entranced woman off a particularly large man and straddled him hard enough to make him gasp. She clapped her hands painfully loud and called out in a voice that echoed down the mountain. “Bring the throne!”

Mallah’s breasts were swelling with want. The creature she wore struggled to expand around them and hold them from view, but the touch, the grip of it only made her clench her teeth, barely holding the reigns of her two bucking mares.

Satan, and other Cosigners

“Holy!” Christie instinctively grabbed onto Mallah's arms as they alighted on the asphalt roof. Mallah was like trying to grab a lamp post: steel hard and unmoving. “Shit, sorry!” Christie pulled back and tried to catch her balance.

Mallah caught Christy by the blouse and nearly tore it off. “It’s ok. That trick only works short distances. I didn't take you anywhere.” She let go and stepped back, crossing her arms. “Look, I'm not here to scare anybody either. I'm just sort of—moving in next door, so to speak.”

“Moving in?”

“Yeah, this system and that one over there,” Mallah pointed over her shoulder to Alpha Centari, “are stock systems in my family. As next born they fell to me. And those over there, but that's another story.”

“So you're going to what, take over?”

“Look, I know a lot of immortals do and have.” Mallah starred off into the stars. “It’s a fair question. I'm really trying not to.   I don't want to be like that.”

“Why not just stay away?” Christy asked. “And what's with the grays? Are they some kind of advanced scout for you?”

“Grays?” Mallah shrugged. “I don't understand.”

“You know the ones with the big heads, small bodies, and big eyes?”

“You'll have to show me later. That doesn't ring any bells. It could be anything.”

“Wait a second, what gives you the right anyway?” Christie stepped back. “Disintegrate me if you must, but do you have an army somewhere, or a mother ship? Obviously--” Christie took a good look at Mallah in her red robed outfit. “Take off the veil.”

“That's not a good idea.”

“Why not?”

Mallah raised an eyebrow. “Do you really want an answer?”

“You're not...like a demon or something horrific under there are you?”“It’s best to let people think so.”

“I thought you were trying not to scare people.”

“Fair enough, but if you really want to know, perhaps you could help me with something.”

“I try not to watch this kind of B-movie.”

“What?”

“I'm sorry. I'm just falling out of the moment. This—you...all just seem too...unreal.”

“Hmm,” Mallah nodded. “Do you trust me?”

“Do I trust you for what? Not being a hoax?”

“It’s something like that.”

“Sure.” Christie folded her arms now. Nobody real has boobs that big anyway. “Do your worst.”

“Well...” Mallah choked. “I'll spare you that, but how about this instead?” She let her sleeve drain down her arm. A moment later a small piece of her creature had detached and sat sniffing the air in her palm. “Spend a while with...”

“Slime?”

“Please. She has feelings.” Mallah withdrew her pet. “And you can't have her if that's how you feel.”

“I'm sorry, it just looks like--”

“It looks like whatever I wish it to.”

“That's...” Christie watched as Mallah's sleeve re-grew from her cloak. She couldn't help but stare at how cut Mallah's bare arm was. “...handy. Does it--she have a name?”

“On this planet? 'Saucy'.”

“You're kidding.   That?”

“Seemed appropriate at the time.” Mallah shrugged. “Want to try it on?”

“What?”

Mallah shrugged. “I am growing the need for an ambassador of sorts. There are no enhanced here yet. It could work for a time.”

“What's an enhanced?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“You keep asking me that.”

“I'm not here to force anything on you. Knowing things of Empire for stock humans is akin to learning of atomic power. You're as likely to extinguish yourselves with one as the other.”

“Are you atomic powered?”

“In part, in a way, yes I am.”

“I want to know.” Christie took a deep breath and steeled herself. “Or I wouldn't be an engineer.”

“I've heard this may--” The creature was on her like ice water. Christy fell backwards, flailing for the surface as it completely enveloped her.   Then the burning began.   It felt like it sank a needle into every pore and orifice she had all at once. She felt Mallah's iron grip catch her by the wrist before she fell off the roof. She could also feel the creature soak into her tissue like a burning dye, all the way to her bones. “--sting a bit.”

Throne

Eight beast-sized men brought in the throne, four on each side of its base. It was easily six thousand pounds of solid gold and jewels, hoisted on four tree-trunk-sized iron rails. They set it down

with a heavy CLANK, bowed, and reverently backed away. It was a throne alright, but mounted square in the center of its seat was a five-foot tall phallus roughly hewn of jagged and dulled diamond.

Xi rode her man like a bull. “Handle THAT and you can share my harem.” She glared eyes rolled back at Mallah. “You break it and you’ll sleep alone.”

By this point Mallah was just anxious to get anything big and firm between her legs. Her man-o-war were twitching in anticipation as they drenched themselves and engorged to uncomfortably cramped positions. She leapt into the air, spread her legs flat out and…realized the magnitude of the challenge. Just as she was realizing how little control she really had of this, the cool diamond surface sizzled and steamed at the boiling hot juices of her vagina as it sank into her like a cold fist into warm bowels.

STOP! Mallah gasped with embarrassment, never quite sure if she’d spoken the word aloud. She could still feel it echo through her limbs as she tensed up, and caught herself like a fallen teacup, her vagina quivering like a guilty thief in a spotlight.

She’d never managed THAT before. The phallus was only a foot into her; already she could feel it bent near its fragile breaking point like a wine glass shoved uncaringly in her. The whole room looked on, chanting “SLOOP! SLOOP! SLOOP!”, whatever that meant, even as they pumped each other like calking guns. She ripped herself away from the moment, catching her breath in a torrent that sent howling winds through the temple’s corridors and blew out all the torches on the mountain. Everyone there wanted her to succeed. They all wanted to fuck her brains out, or dye trying. She could see it in their carnal eyes, the way they looked at her like starving coyote greet an overfed heifer, all except Xi. She alone looked on with cold azure calculating eyes and a fang-laden Cheshire grin. She alone knew the challenge was next to impossible for Mallah. She was just looking for an excuse to rid herself of the brat. Being a proven threat to another immortal’s harem was excuse enough under Empire, and Mallah was fractions of a millimeter from handing it to Xi in a thousand glistering pieces.

It’s just a rock, Mallah told herself. It’s just a dull, delicate, soap-bubble of a rock, nothing to get excited about, just a stick to clean the lint out of the bottom of her…uterus. Mallah forced herself to think unflattering things of the phallus throne. Just a big metal chair with a ….really big…lump. She could feel herself limbering up. Just a quick slide to the bottom of the pool, touch the bottom, then release to the surface and win this little game.

She could feel her pelvis unclench, and the knobby, jagged edges of the phallus start to slide deeper into her—They’re just here having a slumber party on a hill in the dark. Somebody’s going to tell a really dumb ghost story. It felt like a train clicking and clacking like mad, slowly, noisily rolling over a hundred different gaps in the track in the middle of the night. And find their pajamas. Bobby doubtlessly stole them again. Car after car, clack after clack. Ugh, what a big dinner, I shouldn’t have eaten that last 12 courses, I feel so…bloated, like I’m going to explode. Edge after knob after edge, she closed her eyes, but she could still see it pushing out her stomach in front of her face in her mind’s eye.

Toes, toes are great things to have. Why only ten and not twelve? I’m a goddess shouldn’t I have more toes?

And her cheeks felt the cold metal cup of the throne’s seat. That’s it. That’s the bottom of the pool. Now just relax and float to the surface again. Mother would be so proud of me. I touched the bottom of the pool. She’s probably waiting with a cookie. Just drift. Your body will find the surface. Don’t think about breathing, just relax. It was much easier on the recoil: wetter, smoother, quieter, warmer. The train’s leaving for the summer villa on a warm spring day. Chug, chug, chug. Watch as the cars round the hill out of sight…

“SLOOP! SLOOP! SLOOP!” The chanting erupted into panting and carnal yelling as Mallah’s vagina closed wetly above the foot-wide expanse of the top of the still-intact phallus. Mallah opened her eyes nose-to-nose with Xi.

Tag

“What...did you--?” Christie gasped as the pain turned pink and subsided.

“Nothing, it bonds with mortals like that. You're quite permeable to it.”

It had chemically burned a patch through Christie’s blouse where it had jumped her, but otherwise left her appearance unscathed. Her skin however...was turning slowly milky white. It felt burning hot within her.

“You wanted to know.” Mallah drew close and spoke softly into Christie's ear. “There is no return from this. It will do as you wish, but over time it is going to re-sequence your DNA. Every mortal has within their code pieces of the Prime. The creature will seek them out, and reassemble them within you. It will find your particular enhancement and leave you with it.”

“Leave me--?”   Christie's eyes squinted, dilated slit, then in a star pattern as she slowly took her glasses off.

“Yes.” Mallah lifted her arm and Christie's moved with it. The creature was obviously Mallah's pet. “After you've been of use to me, the creature is mine.   But you can keep whatever enhancement it finds within you. In the mean time perhaps you can explain the situation to them.”

“Wait—I don't understand. Explain what situation to whom?”

“Them.” Mallah indicated the fire drill of bewildered NASA scientists slowly congregating on the lawn. “I tire of tests...and nominate you.”

“What?”

“Have faith. Together you can do much of what I can...well....some. It can't actually fly as an immortal and whatnot. It will be enough.”

“Fly?”

“Like this.” And Mallah leapt into the stratosphere. The roof collapsed at her departure like a bomb had struck.   Christie could see Mallah salute from low orbit the moment she blinked across the sky like a scratch across the sky and disappeared. About then Christie landed on her back in the crumpled remains of the roof.

She rolled out of the debris as easily as rolling out of bed in the morning, complete with an outfit that looked slept-in, far worse actually. Her blouse hung open in tatters and her skirt had been torn half off.

“Christie?” Sam looked on himself covered in dust, bits of insulation, and bleeding from lacerations through his comb-over. “Are you alright?”

“I...I guess so.”

“Please sit. We've already called an ambulance.”

“I...I feel fine actually.” She turned her hands over. Waves of chromatic energy smoldered just beneath her skin. She felt increasingly light on her feet.

“God, Christy.” Sam looked on puzzled. “What did she do to you?”

“I don't know.” She strode easily down the debris pile to Sam. “I feel fine, I guess.”

“You look....radioactive.”

“I probably am.” Christie sighed. “I should probably...”

Neither of them really had an answer to that.

“Call a hazmat team.”

“How do you even--”

“Call 911, again. I don't know. Let me make a few phone calls, I have some contacts at Virginia Tech.”

Beast of Famine

Xi and Mallah stared intently at one another for a long moment. Mallah mustered her most innocent hand-in-the-cookie-jar look. Xi’s eyes slowly stoked to flaming purple. “Even so, kiddo,” Xi snorted. “Best not be breaking any of my toys.” She turned on her heel and fwapped Mallah across the face with Xi’s mane of heavy black hair. “SWITCH!” The mass of inhumanity groaned, howled, and panted as they rolled off one another and all groped and pawed to new partners. An enormous feral man clenched Mallah’s ankle from below. Her other foot stopped an inch from punting his head instinctively into orbit. Xi paused from her own statuesque morsel and glared at Mallah for a moment.

Mallah let herself inhale the moment once more. She let the whole writhing, sweating, throbbing roomful of it back into her lungs, her ears, and her blood. She had just been offered a queen’s dowry of enhanced mortals to bond and smelly or not she knew the unheard-of value of the honor. She wasn’t going to let her girlish sensibilities stunt her growth as a goddess. She mustered up her most sensual moan and forced herself back into a hunger befitting the occasion.

Mallah’s vagina chomped once hungrily as she ripped what little outfit clung to her chest off and let her stallions buck and kick in the wind. “Here kitty kitty.” The big cat licked her toes, reared back purring, and pounced her like a whole defensive line, burying her in his mountain of fuzzy muscle.

Mallah let him bowl her over and mount her, his paws kneading her breasts were probably strong enough to knead boxcars, but his immense strength could barely move her softest flesh. His fangs chomped ferociously at her ever engorging nipples until she giggled gleefully and they sprung forth in a spray of milk.

“Play nice now.” Xi cautioned as she rode her own seemingly granite-fleshed partner like a merry-go-round pole.

Mallah’s would-be-rapist monster paused and looked up puzzled at Xi.

“I was talking to her, silly.” Xi plunged her man’s head deep into her cleavage and watched his hands start flailing around, suffocating. “Kill her kitty!”

At that the big cat man unsheathed his metallic claws, roared like a locomotive, and broke into frenzy on Mallah’s bare flesh, ripping, snarling, thrusting, and pounding. A battleship would be missing its stern, but Mallah just giggled at his efforts and opened her vagina wide to his desperately thrusting two-foot-long penis, then glomped down on him like onto a milkshake straw.

He yelped with pain and then pleasure as Mallah remembered her own strength and unclenched. After the events of the day the big cat’s member was just a party favor to her as she twirled him in and among the folds of her flesh like twirling a pencil among one’s fingers. It wasn’t long before he began casting his warm, moist seed all over inside her, and soon after that he was spent, limp, and purring in her cleavage, his rubbed-raw penis still stiff inside her.

It took Mallah a few experimental writhes and an awkward twist to spread his sperm around inside her. She wanted to give the best chance of—

It felt like a warm glow inside her, as the engorged walls of her uterus soaked up his sperm, and her immune system went to work, breaking everything apart, searching for the enhanced fragments within his seed. She couldn’t wait. She rolled over with glee, gently but excitedly sliding the big cat man off and setting him aside. “CHANGE!”

Xi gave her the evil eye for a moment…before shrugging off her own partner. “Hungry?” “YES!” Mallah heaved. “MORE!” She pumped her fist to the sky and shot off a blinding flash of lighting into the stratosphere.

“Easy there, tigress,” Xi giggled. “There is plenty to be had.” Eyeing the still flashing clouds overhead, “And I expect you to share.”

“Of course,” Mallah flicked a lightning bolt from her finger to Xi’s outstretched nipple. The sparks of it sank immediately into Xi’s breast and came out an eye-rolling moan later. Xi raised an eyebrow as Mallah strode confidently nude to her next partner, an 8-foot-tall minotaur with steel for skin and a hissing hot locomotive protruding from his loins. Xi and Mallah stared each other down through the next 40 partners, each spurring the other on to wilder, nastier, more carnal acts as they fucked their way across the courtyard full of enhanced to each other’s by then hugely muscled arms.

Xi took Mallah and leapt together into the sky and deep into the frigid blackness of space. The evening continued with severe tongue wrestling, fondling, punching, kicking, biting, scratching, fisting, footing, breaking asteroids over one another, trying to incinerate one another’s genitalia, giggling, and generally carrying on like schoolgirls do at slumber parties. Somewhere along the line the time dilation began.

And Mallah began to change. At first it was the velveteen fur she could extrude and retract with the flexing of all her muscles. Then without warning her fingertips tingled white and 3-inch metallic claws unsheathed. She was marveling at that for a moment when Xi crept up and pounced her with a wide sandy tongue slow and gritty up the fur of Mallah’s lower two pairs of breasts. Mallah shuddered with the surprising sensation of her suddenly huge six-pack of breasts, her arms flailing to regain her balance. She found it quickly, never having felt so nimble. A moment later she was gleefully bent over them all and licking her own vagina.

A moment after that her body stiffened up, her muscles expanded, and her skin turned metallic. Two-foot-long steer horns curled out of her temples and her toes melded together and formed hoofs. It took her a minute to move, her joints grinding as if they were rusty or somehow turned to stone.

A moment later her flesh returned, and ignited in a blazing hot blue flame.

And then another change, and another.

It felt like the center of her was being harpooned with new axes to slide along in new directions, all askew to her flying and flexing abilities.

And another, and another.

Before long she felt like a pin cushion, like someone had dumped a box of knitting needles into the basket of her body, all a jumbled. She was a pointy forest of different directions to flex in, to transform into, to become, to extrude, to…

She curled into a fetal position, trying to find the center of herself again. Her body pulsed and boiled in one form then another, like a pinball falling through a Plink-O board among all the new powers she’d metastasized. It took a moment but stillness finally came.

“You ok?” Xi hovered over her, glowing wings of fire spread out into space behind her.

“Just…” Mallah cautioned a loose hand before her face. With the tiniest of warbling off her center it lit in green flame…then sparked with lightning….then turned invisible….and returned with claws. “…Give me a moment.” She shook off the claws and her hand returned to familiar.

“You should take it slow.” Xi sighed, folding her wings away as her skin turned mirror-smooth. “You gobbled up a lot of new powers tonight.”

“Yeah,” Mallah let her limbs drift open. “I guess I got carried away.” She arched her back and stretched cat-like and six enormous breasted before Xi. “Thanks though. I really do appreciate it.”

“Thanks for not breaking too many of them.” Xi brought out six arms and drifted for a moment towards Mallah with an evil grin before she thought better of it. “Take a breather for a bit. I can clean up that hole. Come back when you’re hungry again.”

“There’s more?” Mallah curled up again, finding her own eagle’s wings to spread out with.

“Much more,” Xi’s skin scaled over as she spread glistening dragon’s wings and a long, thick snake-like tail, “when you’re ready.”

“How do you—“

“I can help with that.”

Rat

Christie's legs dangled aimlessly over the examination table ledge. At least they'd given her the dignity of her own sweats. She didn't always like the way the students looked at her and the hospital gown would have aggravated the situation.

The blood draw didn't work of course. The creature seemed to gather itself beneath wherever they tried to stab her. When it did so it was quite inscrutable. Nobody was particularly surprised, least of all Christie. After being cleared by Geiger counter from the nuclear medicine department she'd been remanded to civil engineering where she proceeded to void warranties on a handful of stress and strain lab stations designed to crush concrete or pull rebar apart. They never reached a definitive answer as to her hardness or ductile strength other than “immeasurable”. She actually left a hand print in the case-hardened steel tip of one of the machines, and that set off a whole new series of tests.

They couldn't come up with a sample she couldn't crush one-handed. Concrete shattered, metal deformed like clay. She could lift most the small machinery stations in the lab with little effort. The concrete truck in the courtyard gave her pause, but she managed to roll it onto its side. She was breathing heavily from it though.   Inspired she strode into the lobby with her contingent of by now decidedly over-stimulated graduate students. She could see their erections growing increasingly squalid as the day wore on, despite their clothing, but she didn't want to mention anything about it, much less the smell. She could hear and smell everything within a mile it seemed, as disturbing as most of it was.   She tried not to think about it, instead just for kicks she squared off against one of the main pillars in the lobby, spread her legs in full view of the gathering crowd, bear-hugged the stout edifice, and gave herself a stretch.

The decorative metal sheath crushed like a can in her arms, down to the true concrete and steel load-bearing core. She could feel her body swell at the challenge. She could see the row of structural rivets bend and deform as she pressed ever harder against the weight of the two stories above. She heard a bolt pop and gave way as cracks ran around the circumference of the lobby.

With a choked back gasp she suddenly released and fell on her ass, cracking through the floor tiles and the three-foot-thick concrete slab foundation beneath.

The crowd gathered around anxiously as she gasped at once for breath, and not to breathe at the same time. The zipper on her sweat shirt began to pull apart as her partially engorged body now fit her sweat suit about as well as a 24-pound turkey in a plastic grocery-store bag.   She could feel her handles inside her about to give way.

“Back!” She choked. “Show's...ov--”

She rolled dizzy to her feet, tossed aside a grad student. She'd rolled through the lobby doors before she knew she'd taken a step. She watched as in a dream as the steel-framed doors careened across the courtyard like playing cards in the wind. Everyone in the courtyard had stopped, frozen, staring at she grabbed her crotch and winced. Her breasts exploded from her sweatshirt, tearing the zipper off one side as they bobbed in the breeze like seals on stage for a treat. She grabbed as much of her top as she could, only tearing the matter worse as she coiled and just jumped as hard as she could.

She rolled over mid-flight, trying to ball as much of her as she could as she flew like a cannonball over the town, unsure of what she was holding back.   Her back broke through several old oak trees before she came to a thudding stop against a bedrock knoll. She felt numb to the outside world, but ablaze to whatever the creature was doing up her crotch. It was driving her out of her mind.   A moment later she was straddled over the broken stump of an oak tree she'd smashed through earlier, legs splintering the hardwood, roots snapping for an acre in all directions as she rode it like a bronco. Her vagina frothed with mud and sawdust. Her spine popped and sparkled like a fireworks display within her. It was by far the most spectacular orgasm she'd ever experienced.   Her breasts beat the ground like stomping bulls, her muscles ablaze and engorged out to ridiculous proportions. Four tree stumps reduced to splinter-strewn craters later and she felt no signs of slowing down.

She had heard the nearby residents call the police describing explosions, earthquakes...heard the sirens approaching. Just one more stump.   Just one more tree, if she hurried and she could be gone—

Disciple

Mallah spent the next two months adrift in that asteroid belt, slowly learning to find, and use her new powers. They were mortal enhancements really, metastasized through intercourse with enhanced humans. The enhanced she took them from were mortal, and therefore their enhancements only functioned at mortal levels. Mallah and Xi’s copies of them however functioned with the full force of their immortality. The cat man for example, in his form could likely make a squeak toy of a main battle tank, but was a mere tickle to Mallah. Mallah on the other hand, when she slipped into her feline form felt stronger, lither, like she could have snapped Xi’s wayward brother in two and made a light snack of him. Indeed Xi, when she came to check on Mallah’s progress had to shift herself to a steely form to avoid being slashed asunder when Mallah first took a pounce to her.

Xi stopped by daily, as the only other being currently in the system that could, considering Mallah in her impatience insisted on practicing in vastly accelerated fast-forward. Xi was at times Mallah’s sparring partner, teacher, coach, and lover. It didn’t take long for Xi to realize how hopelessly unpracticed Mallah was with all her new powers, let alone her old. She soon ceased worrying about Mallah being able to defeat Xi. Mallah was just so hopelessly far behind that point. She couldn’t help but pity the child and help.

Another two months and Mallah began learning to use all her new powers in combination. Xi stopped short mid tussle the first time Mallah unleashed her first truly flaming lightning bolt.

“I think you’re done.” Xi stood back.

“Did you see that?” Mallah gasped at her still smoking hands. She’d been trying to stay limber, easing up her fire axis to maintain control, when she’d felt it bend over and touch off her lighting power axis within her.

“Yes, and I’m no longer helping you.” Xi sighed.

“Can you do that?” Mallah’s eyes were wide with the possibilities. She could feel all her control axes start to bend and waver together within her, like a giant sparking sea anemone.

“Yes.” Xi fired off her own flaming lightning bolt just for show. “And I think you’ve had enough.”

“Have I?” Mallah rolled around in her core, wafting everything together in one huge—

Xi skipped off the world’s ice cap ass-first in a world-crunching blink.

“STOP IT!” Xi shouted so psionicly that every being on the planet below froze, mouth agape, brains locked.

The star system was a mere point of light when Mallah came to her senses from that last hit. Her enormous left breast ached and trailed milk in a sputtering trail where she’d been knocked from. A welt on tit the size and shape of Xi’s fist quickly healed as she regained her bearings.

Arrest

She felt Mallah's foot on her sternum like a battering ram knocked her flat on her ass. She felt the topsoil beneath her recoil like a huge down pillow, and the recoil of bedrock like a box spring. Not all the cars in the neighborhood landed on their tires. East Coast building codes were silent on earthquake preparedness. Housing prices fell 60% for a half mile in all directions as every standing structure sustained severe foundation damage.

Mallah peered over Christie's massive twitching breasts. “Having fun?”

Christie couldn't even begin to lift Mallah's foot off her chest. Her foot just pressed Christie further into the mud the more she tried to roll out from under it.

“If I'd wanted to frighten you all into caves lick cockroaches I wouldn't need your services.” Mallah blinked unphased, and entirely engorged. “You need to learn to relax.”

“I....can't.” Christie tried to squirm Mallah's foot...lower.

“Ut--” Mallah pinned her firm with a twitch of her toes. “Release.”

“I CAN'T!”

“I wasn't talking to you.”

Christie felt the creature drain out of her. It burned going out like whiskey burned going in. It curled itself back around Mallah's arm as she stepped off Christie's emaciated form. “I am sorry. I asked too much.”

“Please...” Christie felt an empty hunger implode within her like she'd never felt before. “I...I—won't...” She groveled at Mallah's leg, clutching at her muddened robe.

“No.” Mallah knelt to eye level with Christie. “I am sorry.   You let it control you like that, I can't leave you alone with it.”

“I...I won't. I don't even have to be around th--” Her fingers gripped her breasts longingly.

“No.” Mallah licked the creature on her arm for taste. She smiled slyly at Christie's shaking face. “Only this.” She turned Christie's hands over and pressed her thumb into Christie's palm. Razor sharp claws extruded from beneath Christie's nails.   “Could be one of any number of forms. Feline, dragon, something new....only time will tell.”

Christie blinked at Mallah with her cross-slit eyes. “Wh—what did you do to me?”

Mallah hoisted Christie from the mud. “Nothing that wasn't already in you. Something with a tail I hope. They have their uses.”

“Oh...my...”

“Goddess.”

“I'm going to be a FREAK!” Christie screamed as she sat down naked in the mud, her hands shaking as she sheathed and unsheathed her needle-sharp claws.

“Enhanced.” Mallah shrugged. “You will not be alone for long. Many more will--”

“What am I supposed to do with these? Go back to work?”

“Yes.” Mallah crossed her arms. “Our bargain still stands. You are still my ambassador.”

“They're going to cut me apart.”

“Any test can be passed or failed.” Mallah surveyed the wreckage.   “You know how to fail.”

“How--” Christie looked up, tears streaking through the mud on her face. “How do I...pass?”

“Cut them apart first.” Mallah looked down on her coldly. “You are enhanced, not mutated. Mutations are further breakdowns of the Prime code within you. Mutations lead to disease, deformations, pain, usually death. The Prime code within you has been gathered and reassembled. You are a step closer to Prime. When your form fully sets there will be none among stock that can stop you. They will only cut you apart if you let them. Do you understand now?”

Christie just sat in the mud flexing her grip. Her eyes went wide as a new row of metallic spikes flexed from her forearm to her elbow. Metallic scales ran the out seam of her forearm, glistening in the evening twilight.

Mallah nodded approvingly. “Do you understand?”

Christie nodded, blinking her eyes back to single slit.

“Good.” Mallah nodded to the approaching police cars. “Now help them understand.”

And Mallah was gone.

Sanctioned

Crap.

And…OWWWW….

She’d been knocked clean out of her creature, and a solid parsec away. How long was she out? On the bright side she could feel her vagina spinning down, sparking and flaming from what was probably going to be fatal orgasms lock from using that much power, that many powers…at once.

It couldn’t have been more than a minute.

It would take a week to fly back, best sub-light speed.

She spread her best eagle wings and shoved off. She had to at least go back and pick up her creature so she could properly leave again. She’d been a total brat. And flying back wasn’t getting her anywhere. The stars didn’t seem to budge at all.

She pressed on harder, until she could at least see the blue shift in the star ahead of her, and then remembered to slide down the time dilation.

She’d have a lot of time to think on the way. It would take her a week to fly there.

The planet below made a whole lap around the star before she’d manage to return. Twenty laps actually as Mallah was a poor judge of time dilation with such little reference. Xi met her in orbit.

“I’m sorry.”

It took a second to figure out who’d said it. And a second longer to realize they both had.

“You were going nova on me.” Xi sighed. “I had to do something. I’m sorry I hit you that hard.”

“I deserved it.” Mallah shrank back. “I was being a brat. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“Feel better?” Xi looked her over cautiously.

“Yeah, I guess. Can you forgive me?”

“Only if you promise to never do that again…at least not in my system.”

“Yeah, I should probably be getting along to my own.”

“You’re probably looking for this.” Xi held out the little tope creature. It sniffed her over once then jumped joyfully all over Mallah and kissed her profusely like an octopus in heat. “She’s been waiting a long time for you.”

“Aw.” Mallah gave the little creature a squeeze between her breasts. “Thanks for looking out for her.”

“No trouble.” Xi shrugged. “She was a great help around the place, when she wasn’t moping after you, we kept her busy.”

“Love what you’ve done with the place.” Mallah could see the planet’s cities had blossomed in her absence. Huge swaths of freshly overturned continent scarred most of the planet, but where cities were left untouched they flourished….and…

“Wow. All the enhanced…” Mallah could see them flying around the cities and skipping across the countryside in packs. “Where—how did…”

“Can you keep a secret?” Xi grinned.

“No.”

“Well then you can’t have any.”

“I won’t tell, promise. We’re family, remember?”

“Tsk,” Xi flexed her muscles to preposterous proportions and back again. “Just remember I still hit harder.”

“K.” Mallah and her creature slinked back meekly.

Xi pointed to her chest. “You left me some of my brother.” She gestured to the planet. “It was enough to impregnate every mortal female I had. A lot of them didn’t survive, but it was worth it.”

“You—how many?”

“A hundred and twenty thousand give or take some splatter. They don’t all get along well.”

Mallah just stood agape, hopelessly trying to count them all from orbit. Were they bottles no problem, but people kept moving around, intermixing? “That’s totally cheating.”

“Only if they find out,” Xi shrugged. “I’ve moved my games to that one.” She pointed at the next star over. “Nobody Empire’s come by here since. There’s a good feral planet there so I get plenty of good organic stock to fake up the holes. I only cart a handful of my enhanced primes over every now and then, mostly female, thin the herd.”

“That’s…” Mallah’s stomach growled with the possibilities.

“Going to cost me?” Xi grinned. “I figured it would…sister.” Xi nodded to the planet below. “But I’ll always hit harder than you.”

Mallah paused, her stomach hollow with the moral implications of what Xi’d done, and the realization that it would probably reflect on her own honor once Empire found out. A lower part of her felt hollow in close proximity to so many young empowered mortal males, with so many new powers to…

Mallah was still too young. Her powers were immense, but nobility was as yet not really among them. She took Xi by the skull, planted a long, slow, wet, feline wide and sandy-tongued kiss on Xi, before diving gleefully planet ward like a hungry cheerleader to the boy’s showers.

Loosed

Spotlights swept the remains of the park from the first cruiser on scene. “Dispatch we have an apparent explosion at Windsor Park between 364 and 367 uh....” He looked around for signs “Mulberry Street. We need the bomb squad down here and an ambulance.”

Christie retracted what she could and stood up, covering herself with her hands. She felt like a tigress stalking a gladiator as she strode up the crater to the squad car. That was....different.

“Miss?” The police officer pulled his flashlight as she game in view. “Are you alright? What happened?” He reached back in the car for his jacket.

“Meteor.” She rolled her eyes and loosed a hand to run a nail up the hood of the cruiser.   A thin bead of metal curled up under her finger.

“I'm going to need you to step away from the car and come around to the back please.” He held up his jacket for her in the gloom.

“Whatever for, officer?” Did she really say that? She had a desk job, a 1-bedroom apartment, and a library card nearly worn through for goodness sake. What was she doing?

“Because there's a camera recording forward of the dash.”

“Thanks for the tip.” Christy took his jacket by the collar and...Shoved it down to his waist as she took him by the tie and pulled him into the dirtiest kiss she'd ever rolled around anybody's tongue.

He pulled away gasping for breath and wiping the dirt off his mouth. “Please ma'am.” He stepped around behind the driver-side door and opened it between them. “You're obviously overmedicated.”   He pulled the handcuffs from his belt. “I'm going to ask you to put your hands on the hood now please.

“I’m definitely overmedicated.” She dropped to a scorpion stance, unsheathed the spines on her right arm and plunged them easily into the car door. She palmed the quarter panel with her left hand and flung the door flying into the park like a Frisbee. “I thought so.” She stood to admire the distance.

“Down on the” The Taser prongs barely pricked her skin, but it was enough. “GROUND NOW!”

There was a definite involuntary flop of her left side...once.

Then a twitch.

She seemed to taste the spark of it inside her...rolling it around her shoulders, down her arm... She could feel metallic scales folding over her muscles, passing the charge from the next to the next as she flexed them together.

The officer's eyes went wide when she gripped his face with it. His whole body lurched into convulsions for a long moment while she watched. Finally his finger flopped off the trigger and his body went limp.

“Oh god.” She jumped back. “Are you ok? I'm sorry, I don't usually--”

He was still breathing erratically, and not much else. Sobbing?

Crap.

“I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry...” She waved off her claws, took up his jacket and ran off down the street. She could hear other police cars closing in.

He was just sitting up when they arrived. “Holy crap, Stevens! What happened to your cruiser? Bear?”

Officer Stevens just looked up at them wide-eyed, head slowly shaking.

Needing Frenzy

 

Mallah alighted on a mountaintop, wrapped her red cloak around her in the howling wind, pulled her hood tight and had a feel around. 20 years of scarring had changed the planet. The acrid smell of the world seed was gone from the air, replaced by a more wooden, metallic burning smell.   The natives were different as well. The enhanced among them were everywhere now, scarcely a stock mortal anywhere alive.

Empirical law dictated no more than 1% of a world population should be enhanced. Not that anybody in the pantheon was concerned about an uprising, but more and the stock population never lasted long. Among the beneficial effects of the games were actually in keeping a world's enhanced population within acceptable limits. The problem was one of biodiversity. Enhancements were always dominant traits. The offspring of the enhanced stood very good odds of inheriting their parent's genetic enhancement. But that left no room for any new recessive traits to emerge from the boiling froth of the stock gene pool. A world with no remaining stock humans could never again spawn a uniquely new trait. Stock humans were therefore valued quite highly by the Empire as fertile soil for growing more power for them.

Young male gods often became excited and let their seed fly loose. Because their sperm possessed a fair degree of their flight, speed, stamina, and strength, a single ejaculating god could impregnate every fertile mortal female on an entire planet within minutes. Because their offspring were invariably enhanced such an act effectively doomed a planet's stock human population to their last generation. While these events produced an explosion of enhancements it ended the possibility of further new mutations ever arising within the population. This is effectively what Xi had done with the unintended “gift” of her brother's seed. Every youth on the planet in the height of puberty was enhanced.

She had taken hundreds already that night, following the penumbra of twilight around the planet, raping young enhanced boys, sometimes gangs of them at a time, engorging herself on their powers, leaving a wide swath of injured, crippled, or dead in her wake when they failed to please. She'd lost track of what all her new powers were, there were so many. The mob throng of them all racing the length of her spine, poking at the nervous beasts on her chest and in her crotch, was intoxicating.

Mallah strode down the faint mountaintop path in the rocks and snow to a heavy stone fortress with an unmoving grip on the raw granite mountain. She could hear the occupants deep inside meeting in a dark hall, deliberating on how they would greet her.   There was a psionic among them. He'd felt her arrival from a continent away. They were in a bit of a panic to learn she'd landed in their back yard.

She gave them time, enjoying the bitter howl of the wind as she floated down the path, toes inches over the rocks. There were four of them at the fort, young, enhanced, apparently living in exile, fornicating amongst themselves. The two young girls were already pregnant. They were of little concern to Mallah anyway. She was after the psionic boy.   She'd seen what Xi could do with it and was rightfully a touch green as she knocked lightly on the gate.

Cornered

Christie snuck in the back door at work the next day. A hot shower had done her nerves good, and her complexion bad. All the dirt and mud came off and slowly clogged her drain. The scales, the claws, and the guilty conscious wouldn't wash off.   She'd found an old sweater her forearm spines could slip through without doing much damage. Sandals and jeans were the best she could do as the claws under her toenails tore through three pairs of nylons before she got the point, and there was no way she was going bare-legged with an obvious row of flesh-colored scales over her kneecaps that she couldn't retract. Her darkest sunglasses and an extra t-shirt in her purse completed her outfit.

Nobody had seen her enter the building, because they were all waiting in her office.

Sam and the dean of engineering from the university were wringing their hands over notebooks full of test results when she entered. They both looked her up and down in a long awkward silence.

“I...I can explain.   I'm not like that anymore. It’s...gone.”

“We're listening.” Sam sat back hard in her chair.

She shook her head nervously pondering where to begin. “I...I'm probably not bulletproof anymore. Mallah took it back.”

“Mallah?” Sam rolled his eyes. “That magic show at the all-hands?”

“Yeah.” Christie sat back on a hip and crossed her arms defiantly. “She's legit, Sam. She is as legit as those test results on me yesterday.”

“She’s a real live alien princess?” The dean dropped the notebook he was thumbing through.

“Yes.” Christie shrugged. “Well...alien at least.”

“And she...” Dean Saunders pointed to the stack of nervously hand-written notes. “Did this to you?”

“Yes.”   Christie dropped her purse in the corner and flopped on her visitor's chair in frustration. “For a day.”

“Why would she do that?” Sam looked her over like a father inspecting his daughter's wardrobe on a Friday night. “Did she say?”

“She...said she wanted somebody else to Guinea-pig for her.” Her eyes darted towards the dean...and landed on the floor at his feet. “Can you blame her?”“By all reports you had quite a day.” The dean leaned back and crossed his arms nervously.

“I'm not a stripper.” Christie pouted. “I have a Ph. D in astrodynamics. I'm not that kind of girl.”

“Easy.” Saunders held up his hands. “Let’s just stop there. I'm not here to get sued.   You did enough damage to the lab budget as it is.”

“Did I?” Christie chuckled. “Um....I mean sorry about that. It was easy to get carried away. Over-medicated it seems.”

“So what happened,” Sam rubbed his chin, eyes in distant contemplation, “Between when you destroyed the courtyard and now?”

“She took it all back.” Christie sunk limp into the chair. “Said she didn't want people to be scared, just convinced, I think.”

“Well I'm a believer.” Saunders sat on his hands. “And I wasn't even there.”

“Think she has the technology to explain...” Sam caught Christie's eye and held it, watching. “...what we've been seeing lately?”

“Yes.” Christie's hand reached to scratch her nose...then lingered rubbing her sternum. It was still sore. “Sam, when she caught me--”

“Caught you?”

“Yes, after I...jumped from the courtyard.” Christie's eyes wandered the floor, trying to be discrete about licking her teeth. Her incisors seemed longer than usual. “There was nothing I could do. She hardly gave me anything compared to what she has. She's probably nuke proof.”

“And she took all that away...”

“As easily as she gave it to me, Sam. I’m really nothing to her.”

“How are we not supposed to be frightened?”

“She said she took it because she thought I would kill people.”

“She was probably right.”

“Probably.” Christie sighed.

“I'm so sorry.” Sam shook his head. “I can't imagine what it must have been like to--”

“NO!” Christy shouted. “...I mean no.   You have no idea, Sam. I'm not like that anymore. From the look of things I never will be again.”

“Well that's good to hear.” The Secretary swung the door shut with his cane from behind it where he'd been sitting all along. He winced as he shifted weight back into the corner chair. “Gentlemen, I believe I will take this from here.”

“Sam!” Christie was on her feet so fast she drafted papers from the table behind her onto the floor. “Who the hell is he?”

“Christie, his office called as soon as we'd made arrangements at the university. I had no choice.”

“Thanks heaps, Lando.” She could hear the boots of the marines closing in around her office on queue. “You're the lock-me-up, cut me into pieces kind, aren't you?”

“Now now, Ms.” The secretary raised his cane in defense. “This is a matter of national security. I have the President's full--”

Refuse, Resist

“Leave us alone!” A girl hissed through a gun port and slammed it shut.

Expendable, Mallah put her finger to the gate and flicked it.

A finger-sized chip of wood flaked off, and nothing.

Curious, Mallah put her palm to the door and gave it a shove.

The whole gate buckled inward, and recoiled back into position. “You really don't want me to actually hit it now do you?”

“Go ahead!” The girl shouted through the door. “Kill us all! There's nothing for you here!”

Mallah was a bit taken aback. “Really now?” The force field was obviously a mere curiosity to Mallah, and all present knew it. But what Mallah suddenly realized is the force field was probably about as durable as the fortress. Enough force to break it would probably pulverize the establishment and kill everyone inside. That wasn't the welcoming she was expecting.

What defied her grasp just made her....hungrier.

“Oh come now.” She landed hands on her hips in the snow. “It'll be fun. I won't even kill anybody.”

“That's all you ever think about, isn't it. FUN.” The girl spat behind the heavy wooden gate.

“Well?” Mallah dilated time for a few minutes and had a fly around the fortress. Every door was shut, every window shuttered. The whole place shimmered in the far ultra violet. The force field enclosed the whole building, even the floors like a thick jam. She could see one of the women in the main hall in a trance on the long table, holding it all together. The boy with the psionics knelt beside her, holding her shoulders, staring intently apparently through the walls at where Mallah was standing. A moment later she settled back in her footprints in the snow before the gate with a sigh. “Yeah?”

“We're just playthings to you aren't we.” Mallah could see the girl manning the gate extrude black reptilian wings from her back as she spoke. “Another toy box to break?” Her voice became gravely. “Shut up! She's going to kill us all anyway.” She hissed over her increasingly black scaled shoulder, whipping her spiked tail around. “Don't you get it? I won't let her have you.”

The fortress was like glass in near gamma spectrum to Mallah's eyes. She could only guess what the boy had thought to the ware dragon girl at the door, but by the look they exchanged they seemed resolved in opposite directions.   Another boy stood in the hall motionless, and in stone form, waiting, eyes closed, concentrating on his stance.   Mallah did not concern herself with him. She'd already ingested his particular power.

“I could just wait here.” Mallah offered. “How long does she keep this thing up for?” She placed her right hand gently in contact with the force field. She cupped herself with her left hand and let the electric buck of pleasure flow around her shoulders, down her arm, and into the field.

The girl on the table screamed and arched her back, mouth agape, eyes rolled skyward.   The whole field pulsed visibly pink. It disassembled the whole fortress, flagstone by flagstone, and levitated it all in exploded view.   The ground all around became charged pink.   Snow lifted off and fell in thick clumps into the sky. Loose rocks trembled all around and the lighter ones began drifting skyward. The whole field thickened and enveloped Mallah like gelatinous quicksand.

The girl on the inside stepped back in time. She drew a nearby broadsword and a mirror-polished arm shield from the wall behind her. “Shake it off, Cali!” She called over her shoulder, eyes never leaving Mallah. “You're going to kill us first!”

“I—can't.” Cali panted sprawled out and squirming in heaving fits on the table as the field shifted colors and heaved to and fro with her body.

“Talok!”The boy palmed Cali's chest and held her to the table, his long pony tail unraveling with the charge as he palmed it out of her body. Cali collapsed on the table as he wrestled with the small ball of sputtering energy. An erection later he managed to deflect it in a dissipating pulse across the hall.

“NO!” The dragon girl leapt back to the hall, sword and shield up. The fortress fell around them like a dump truck of debris on one's grave. The pink field dissipated into the frigid mountain air.

Mallah watched as the dragoness leapt deftly like a sidewinder through the falling debris and curled herself around the other two under the downpour. The stone boy seemed oblivious to the whole implosion until it was long over. He turned agonizingly slow, took two forced steps to the center of the hall, and bear-hug-lifted the hall's main spar timber off his friends while Mallah looked patiently.

“You done?” Mallah leaned one-shouldered on the stone boy. She nodded as she eyed the splintering in the main spar where the dragoness had palmed it.   The girl was obviously quite strong for a mortal in her dragon form.

“Oh god...dess.” Cali sat up choking. “You have GOT to try th--”

“No!” The dragoness stood and took a defiant stance with her sword and shield before Mallah. “You can't have him!” She brought the heavy blade down in a leaping chop at Mallah's neck. Her sword snapped at the hilt, blade flying off behind Mallah's shoulders as the girl stumbled hissing at the floor. “We are mated!” Sparks flew off the floor as the girl's claws rose through flagstone like steel through flint—to glance brilliantly across Malah's abdomen.   Mallah's creature wasn't fast enough and scuttled bleeding and whimpering from the slashing to the small of Mallah's back as the girl rained slashes, sparks and tears down harmlessly across the slowly expanding width of Mallah's bare chest. “You cannot have him!” She whimpered, claws slipping down Mallah's thighs as the girl fell at her feet in tears.

Bite

“Well the president can kiss my ass.” Christie stepped into the corner with the secretary.

“Christie! I'm sure he's not going to--”

“Yes he is, Sam. I can smell it on him.” She jammed the door shut with her left foot, trying to be discrete about digging her claws into the floor. “Listen good, because I'm only going to say this once.” She looked around the room, to be sure of all their close attention. “I am...not like that anymore. She took that all away from me.”

“Granted Miss...er...”

“Doctor Halloway.” Christie continued. “And I'm going to keep that title, because I'm going to keep working here, day in, and day out. Then go home to my apartment and sleep in my own bed. If Mallah should have something more she wants me to say to you I'll call. Until then buzz the hell off.”

“I can't let that--”

“Then allow me to make it happen.” She took his cane from him by force. “I may not be invulnerable anymore. I'm not like that. But I am like this.” She unsheathed the spines on her right forearm, and ran his cane down them, splitting it roughly in two down the length. “And if you come here to take me away you best fucking bring the marines.” She tossed him the remains of his cane. “Like this one.” She plunged her fist through the door and pulled a surprised marine back through the splintering door before tossing him skidding 60 feet down the hallway with the flick of her wrist. His partner drew a sidearm at Christie through the suddenly open door. She had it in her right hand faster than anybody could blink, his tie in her left, spines slowly flexing off her elbow towards his nose while he watched. A pop later and he went skidding down the hall after his partner.

“Better yet bring a tank.” She flexed, spines bristling up her arms and down her back. “I could probably do a tank today.” Christie one-hand lifted the secretary out of his seat by his collar.

“Geez” She chuckled at the sight of him. “Somebody beat me to beating you.” She took off her sunglasses with her tongue and blinked at him with her dual slit eyes, leaned in close and whispered in his ear loud enough for all to hear. “Were I you, I'd get my nose out of her business and pray she don't come looking for you again.”

She set him gently on his feet outside her door. “Now go on, git.”

The other two men in the room jumped back nearly a foot when she turned back to them. The dean's trousers slowly darkened down his leg.

“Sam...” Christie sheathed her spines and claws and found her gentlest voice. “Sam, are you there? Don't have a heart attack on me now...”

“Y-yes?”

She put her hand gently on her shoulders. “You're in my chair, Sam. I have work to do.”

The two men scrambled to disembark her office, comically so.

“Sam?” Her monotone voice stopped him in his tracks.“Yes?”

“I don't blame you a bit for that guy. But loose his number.”

It was 10 minutes after they'd left before her pulse felt right again. She was just going to get up and find a broom, but Mallah hung in the air in the broken doorway.

“What.” Christie threw her arms up at the wreckage where her office had been. “Come back to nuke my life again?”

Surrender

“How about now?” Mallah rolled her eyes as she tugged the ball of growing excitement from her breasts, down her arms, and into a glowing ball of sparking sputter. “Chin up now, plenty of fun for everybody.” She flicked a sizable spark into the dragon girl.

The girl winced and clutched her crotch angrily as her claws visibly lengthened. “Oh g-” She clenched her fangs but could only hold out for a moment before her body convulsed violently, back arching, wings snapping out to her full 25 foot wingspan, sweeping the stone boy off his feet and tossing him crashing heavily into the remains of a wall 20 feet away. “Can't—have...” Her tail writhed like a spraying hose for a moment before curling up and plunging deep into her own crotch. She started to spit at Mallah but the orgasm lurched her into a full spray of her incendiary breath.

“That's a good girl.” Mallah wiped the flaming bile off her breast slowly, sensually as she shifted her form feline. “Even if I kill him, you have his seed.” She let her other four breasts out like a gladiator letting out the chain on a morning star while the opposition and the crowd looked on. “Now then...” She stepped over the writhing dragoness with her own clawed feet. “Where were we?”

“You going to be a good boy...” Mallah held up the ball of electric orgasm in her hand. “Or...”

“No...” The dragoness whispered as her claws ran in passing harmlessly down Mallah's softening thighs.

Talok stared coldly into Mallah's eyes, unmoving. “It’s ok, Sasha.” He rose and stepped willingly forward. “I see what she needs.” Eyes locked, he took Mallah's hand and plunged it into his chest. His body and his expression twitched. What erection he had rose through his pants as his determined expression.

“My my,” Mallah's eyes flared golden as she spread her legs wide before him, paws on her hips. Her skin flared sparkling in bronze scales as huge bronze wings erupted from her back. “Think taking a dragon means you can take a goddess?” Her body writhed, breasts undulating and straining within her scaly armored skin, mockingly rearing like a snake. “Think you’ll scream her name while fucking me?” Her own spiked tail fractured the mountain to its root with one punctual slap. “I say the reverse, mortal.”She flexed a whole cobra’s hood worth of lats, triceps, and biceps and paused with a thought. “Sorry.”She shrunk in a thunderclap back to her black-furred feline form. “I can’t say ‘I told you so’ if you’re dead, now can I?”

He stared at her blankly.

She giggled at his silly determination. “My powers are so far beyond your comprehension.”She struck up her original pose and tossed her long black hair over her shoulder and thrust her soft, bouncy chests up to his face.“Mortal.”

“There are things yet beyond yours.” He took her middle pair of breasts and squeezed with all his might. His face plunged open tongued into the fur of her upper cleavage. He was quite the throwback of a physical specimen.   She'd worn underwear tighter than him. She cocked her head sideways, doubting if he were enhanced at all.

“Then show me...” A gentle leap later and she had him straddled and pinned to the heavy wooden table. “...If you can.” She peered over her slowly expanding chest to see him draw a deep breath and close his eyes as she completely smothered him in her flesh. Two snowflake gentle rolls of her pelvis and he was expended into her. She had to unhinge her pelvis, open the gaping maw of her vagina to the frigid mountain air and roll off him tail-up to roll any of his meager seed far enough in her to do any good.

“And now I'm going to break you all for the embarrassment of fucking someone as mortal as him.” She stood and decomposed herself back to her base human shape. “How dare you try to trick a goddess--”

Talok's nearly dead expression smiled knowingly. And then his powers hit her. Talok was barely a psionic at all.   His true enhancement was empathic.

The Date

“I just wanted to say well done.” She alighted gently on the splinters of the door.

“He'll be back with that tank you know.” Christie shook her head distantly. “I was a telemetry analyst until you landed. Make pretty pictures with reams and reams of raw data. I was good at it too.   Tomorrow, they're coming for me with tanks.   Anything else I can do for you, Princess?”

“Duchess.” Mallah shrugged, taking in the office. “And this mess is why the law says I can never show my face and my powers together on a stock world.”

“So what happens now?” Christie sighed. “Would you show me if I invited you over for a pedicure? Is it some kind of sick Mexican wrestling thing? Just can't show your face in the ring?”

Mallah put a finger to her veil in thought. “Yes, I'd love to, not exactly, and about like that...in that order.

“Well alright, but only if you show me how to do tanks.”

“They're not that bad.   Just depends on your personal style.”

“Oh great. I'm in a bad kung-fu movie now.”

“Hm.   That actually sounds like fun.”

“You're being a total dork alien now.”

“I could kill you a thousand ways for that.”

“You would have by now.”

“That’s probably true.”

“Probably?”

“And this is Leonard. I promised him a tank to play with.”

“Charming.   Is he housebroken?”

“That depends.   Whose house needs breaking?”

Swansong

Mallah's heart sunk through her colon as Sasha's desperation hooked it and dragged it under with her tears. Fear radiating from the still hardened stone boy seeped into her joints like a fog, hardening, locking her immobile as her own stone, and then metal upon stone powers instinctively surfaced. Mallah sank like a rock, helpless, into the morass of the children's angst.

“...what she needed.” Talok gasped from the table, still unable to move.

Mallah perched in a ball on the cracked flagstone floor, weeping uncontrollably.

Days later Mallah drifted up, broken from the planet’s surface. Xi met her in high orbit, puzzled. “You been time shifting again?”

Mallah looked up. “Not really. Why?”

“You look…centuries older.” Xi zipped around her like a butterfly. “Full?”

“Yeah,” Mallah sighed. “There has to be another way.”

“What?” Xi rifled through Mallah’s memories like so many bad vacation photos. “Oooh, ”she winced. “That’s a bad draw. We’re immortal. You’ll shake it off.”

“I…”

“Need some time alone?”

“Yeah.”

“Call me.” Xi shrugged. “Sourpuss,” and slapped Mallah playfully on the ass.

“Hey!” Mallah brushed her off. “Duchess, remember?”

Xi rolled her eyes.

“Never mind,” Mallah let herself sink into hyperspace.

She sat on her knees amid the gravy-thick flow of methane on the sandblasted-smooth surface deep within a frigid gas giant, center of her given star system. She just felt like…singing.

So she did.

It happened to be Jupiter.

Couldn’t tell you the song, and neither could she. It just felt…right.

Grounded

“So...you want to roll a tank unit into a NASA research office?” General Fitch thumbed through the “eyes-only” manilla folder absently.

“Yes.” Secretary Saunders leaned forward on his desk. “Seems like the prudent thing to do.”

“Mr. Secretary,” Fitch tossed the inch-thick pile of documents and photos back across the desk. “With all due respect, I cannot comply with your request. As any first-year recruit knows, a frontal assault is only warranted in situations where you have a clear tactical superiority. Until the whereabouts or remains of the 419th and their air support wing are located I would say we are operating with questionable if any advantage.”

“General,”

“We're tracking the comings and goings of what appears to be a lone pedestrian with global early warning satellites designed to track Soviet ICBMs. They're clocking her at...” He thumbed through the stack for the number and carried the two...”She'd probably extinct a lot of us dinosaurs if she misjudged the landing. The effectiveness of our armed forces is questionable at best against that level of technology. I refuse to waste any more of our hard assets on misrepresenting our hospitality to such a being.”

“So no...tanks?”

“In my professional opinion, as a soldier, I recommend you gather your obviously considerable diplomatic aptitude and find a way to negotiate our way onto her good side and stay there. Failing that if she proves of hostile intent I will, in the execution of my sworn duties in defense of this country, personally review our arsenal with her, for all the good it will do. Until then prudence suggests a diplomatic solution.”

A Long Walk in the Countryside

Christie awoke with a stretch and a yawn. Her legs were sore as if she'd been hurdling uphill all night. The sheets were a tatter of ribbons tossed with bits of foam insulation from the mattress, meadow grass, dirt, and damp. Her hair felt heavy and cold as if she'd just stepped from the shower. A finch chirped from her foot and fluttered off as she rolled ov--

Crap.

“Mmmm....what time is it?” Leonard rolled over beside her.

“What the hell!” Christie jumped to her feet, grasping what she could to cover her filth-smeared nakedness. They were in a small canyon behind an framed-in and unfinished suburban home development. Christie just stood for a moment, surveying the scene, agape in the sunrise's warmth. Four of the house frames were reduced to toothpicks. Deep scars around the hillside and broken trees in the surrounding forest made it look like a monster truck and a bulldozer had attempted ballet.

“That was,” Leonard flopped over on his back in the weeds. “Awesome!”

“Well I did promise him a tank.” Mallah strode down the hillside with a pink box of probably donuts in what were obviously Christie's jean shorts, one of Christie's best work shirts widely unbuttoned and barely covering any of her porn-star-sized breasts, a nipple actually hooked in a button hole.

“You BITCH!” Christie screamed loud enough to jar a nearby flock of finches aloft. She sat down in a heap, head in her hands. “I just wanted to go home and get some sleep.”

Mallah looked perplexed. “I didn't stop you.” She pointed down the freshly laid street.

“Oh...” Christie could see her apartment from here, down the hill, two miles in the distance. “...crap.” Thick smoke billowed high into the spring sky from it, and several other craters and wrecked buildings along the way up the hill. Flashing fire truck and police lights dotted the streets in patches. “What the hell am I supposed to do now?”

“Breakfast for starters.” Mallah opened the box and offered a litter of donuts.

“Oh rock on!” Leonard sat up, pawed a baseball-mitt-sized handful and started popping them like popcorn.

Christie threw up her hands in frustration. “I'm not your freaking poodle! I have a life...had a life before all...” She flexed like a pincushion inhaling, “this.”

“Seriously,<amouph>” Leonard swallowed between bear claws. “You should eat. Our metabolism's <umph> crazy high.”

Christie screamed in frustration like an eagle, raked her talons into him, hoisted all of his bear-like-bulk bloodily by the ribcage, dead lifted him over her head and tossed him like a wrecking ball through one of the few remaining upright home frames.

Mallah giggled. “You are really cute you know.”

Christie stepped back, breaking her claws against Mallah's skin felt a lot like breaking a nail too far back. “Fuck.” She waved out her hands and sucked air for a few seconds until her claws grew back. The pain quickly cleared her head.

“But not immortal.” Mallah offered the remains of the donuts box. “We're almost here. Come on.” Mallah nodded up the hill.

“We go again?” Leonard stood up from the splinters as from a pile of coats, with a forearm-sized erection, otherwise seemingly unharmed.

“Not right now, Leo.” Mallah waved him over. “Come on, over here boy.”

“I'm not your poodle.” Christie pouted over a donut as she trudged up the hill. “And if you ever come at me with a collar again I will kill...” Her eyes wandered the floor. “Him...and everyone else you invited to watch.”

“I'll just enhance another one.” Mallah shrugged as she one-hand parted an old-growth oak like a really noisy and poppy, snappy, deeply rooted curtain. “Meanwhile consider yourself in the doghouse with me.”

The entire next canyon over was one sprawling opulent estate. The manor house was as big as the office building Christie worked in. The front lawn was a set of stripes shy of a soccer field. The gardens were dense and immaculately pruned. The detached garage was an obviously converted stable with 10 ridiculous cars, if the spats Bugatti in the cobblestone driveway were any indication. The fountain out front was swimming-pool-sized, its granddaddy likely in the rear.

“Uh....you live here?” Christie watched Mallah prop up the broken oak tree behind them as a police cruiser drifted cautiously up the road.

“No, you do.”

“Sweet!” Leonard bound down the side yard like a puppy and flopped with a flourish in the fountain.

“Honestly, where'd you pick him up, the pound?”

“He does his own laundry.” Mallah flexed casually, her body-builder-dwarfing muscles ripping loudly through Christie's best white blouse like so much wet toilet paper. “He could come in handy.” She wiped off the tatters and offered them back to Christie.

Christie rolled her eyes and stomped down the path to the guest house. “Whatever. Who'd you abduct for this place anyway?”

“No one. It is entirely vacant.”

“So...” Christie paused at the front door. “You have the key?”
            “Key?” Mallah drifted into the air. “You you're enhanced. You need to stop thinking like that.”

“You need to stop showing off.” Christie splintered the lock off the heavy oak door like cracking a walnut. “There's something to wear around here I take it...” She rolled her eyes at Mallah. “Something you haven't destroyed...yet?”

            The estate alarm started blaring and a pack of four Dobermans skittered into the foyer.

            “Unoccupied?” Christie unsheathed as the lead dog jumped her.

Stewed

          Anderson felt old. Getting out of the bamboo and denim cot was an exercise in futility. Everything still felt like he was shackled to the ground, but he was able to shuffle to the door. The air was hot, sweaty, and heavy, obviously someplace tropical. Cuba perhaps? Whatever cocktail of drugs they'd kept him on distorted colors as the long unkempt grasses and trees waived in blues, greens, reds, all the bright colors one might expect of a coral reef.

            He'd never been to a modern mental institution before but he imagined this is what the experience would be like: A prison without doors, inmates controlled chemically rather than with physical barriers because it had proven more economical and reliable, especially as the inmates became chemically dependent on their sedatives.

            He'd be damned if he remained long enough to become an addict. The encampment was rather modest, probably some modestly-funded independent rebel group, barely a block long worth of forest clearing, a 20-foot-tall bamboo wall enclosing bits of the forest he could see from the porch. He watched as the other inhabitants of the encampment went about their laundry, cooking, and cleaning. They were obviously the guards, well-armed, and—Marines.

            He recognized the insignia patches. These were some of the men he'd sent to eliminate—Mallah. One of them saw him in the doorway and stood to shuffle to the hut. He must also be sedated. But if they were prisoners, why weren't they disarmed?

            It took perhaps two minutes for the Sergeant to poke his head up the ladder to peer over the porch. “General, you are up, Sir.” A slow, laborious salute followed.

            “Sergeant, report.” He'd meant a bark, but all Anderson could muster was a faint sigh.

            “Sir, Sergeant Roberts. Sixty five accounted for on arrival twenty five days ago, full kit.” He looked over his shoulder for a brief headcount. “There are ten of us remaining. They are relocating us as soon as we are able to walk.”

            “Who is relocating us?”
            “That...woman, thing,” Roberts pulled himself onto the porch and sat heavily. “She's not human sir.”

            The porch creaked and moaned with a new arrival. “This is no place for humans, gentlemen.” Sasha folded her leathery black wings behind her as she stood from her perch. “You will be enhanced soon as well.” She slunk across the deck obviously unencumbered and leaned against the rail, her long black scaled tail sliding over Robert's shoulders like a python. “As soon as you are upright.” She looked like the devil in all black scales, slung in a cold steel chain mail bikini more for privacy than protection. The press of the tropical sun painted her scales in orange tiger stripes, her green eyes sparkling like emeralds deep in her scaled face. She settled on a hip and sized Anderson up like a side of beef for dinner. “So, the mighty general Anderson awakes?”

            Anderson gave Sasha a few hard squints, blinks, and a disinterested snort.

            “You will wish you were drugged, general,” Sasha grinned a snide fang in his direction, “before this is all over.” She stretched her 20-foot wing below Roberts and pulled him to face her by the tail. “I see the good Sergeant is walking well...” She gave his scruffy beard a lick for taste, cocking her head as she considered him closely.

            “Sergeant William Roberts, US Marine Corps, Serial Number--”

            “Save it for the games, dear.” She shushed him with a three-inch claw gently to his nose. “You will need your strength,” nodding at his feeble attempt to loosen her tail's grip on his hips with his hands, “and your training.”

            “There are conventions against drugging prisoners of war,” Anderson snarled, “and for fair and humane treatment.”
            Sasha sighed and put the sergeant down gently. “It is bad enough that you are men and here. You don't even know what you are fighting, and I assure you she is a much more terrible thing than I could ever be.” She drew close to Anderson, drew his sidearm and slid it into his hands. “We are just playthings to the gods here.” She drew the business end of Anderson's sidearm to her cleavage and squeezed his hand around the trigger.

            Anderson was too fatigued to jump back, or resist. He didn't even remember hearing the shot fire, just the shell casing spinning off and the sleeve recoiling as if in slow motion. The round hit her like so much dried dirt clod on concrete as her eyes remained transfixed on his.

            “I am but the handmaid.” Sasha shook her head, disappointed, as her cool; scaly-smooth hand bent the barrel sideways in Anderson's hand. “And you are not here to hunt rabbits.” Shrapnel and black gunshot residue shook off her chest as she shrugged and turned to grab Roberts by the belt. “I am told you were a rude, obstinate, and altogether disagreeable person to her in your first life.” Sasha sighed heavily as her gaze grew distant. “She will call it a ‘kind repurposing’...more honorable to die in battle I suppose.” She stepped to the edge of the high porch. “Be glorious and of some help to us, or meek and deny her the pleasure, General.” She spread her wings like an awning across the porch. “We are beyond saving from her now. Those dreams are lost.”

            She leapt into the air, a black kite on a blazing summer's day, with Sergeant Roberts firmly by the belt, a moment later gone over the gently swaying tree line.

            The weight of Anderson's still smoking sidearm dragged him to his knees against the door frame. He just sat and watched her go.

Alpha

            Dogs never progress beyond a 2-year-old's comprehension of their own death. She'd meant to discourage them, not...

            And Mallah had floated there the whole time and done nothing.   Just...watched.

            “Sorry about that.” Mallah patted Christie on the blood-soaked head as she drifted by.

            “What the hell?” Christie and the remaining three dogs just sat limp in the bloody carnage of the first dog, shaking terrified.

            “The pack is yours now.” Mallah hung toes on the floor, taking in the expanse of the house. “I think that counts for dominance.”

            The unmistakable shklack-clak of a shotgun chambering a shell echoed through the foyer. The umbrella stand beside Christie exploded in buckshot. A fat balding man stood at the mezzanine rail, second barrel at the ready in his bathrobe and slippers. “Get the fuck out of my house.”

            “Shit!” Christie jumped to her feet, instinctively unsheathed.

            “Frank!” A third woman half Frank's age screamed from the edge of the upper hallway.

            “Call the police, Jen” Frank's voice was calm, probably ex-military, Christie wondered.

            “Frank, is it?” Mallah gripped the banister and swung herself over like a mostly naked cat.

            “That's it. Sic!” Frank fired at Mallah and didn't miss. The dogs looked up at their master, back to Christie, and just whimpered.

            “What the hell? I said Sic!” Frank was just chambering when he froze at the sight of Mallah standing in the cloud of gun smoke. He knew he didn't miss. “C—Call the police, Jen...?” And he stumbled backwards over his bathrobe.

            Jen just screamed.

            Mallah pounced Frank like the panther-like creature she'd become, shaking the searing hot lead shot from her still expanding breasts over Frank. Frank screamed like a girl and struggled back, desperately shaking the shot off his skin.

            “Mallah!” Christie was on the mezzanine in a single bound, grabbed Mallah the arm and tried futility to pull the big kitty off Frank. “What the hell are you doing?”

            Mallah gave Frank a wet sandy lick up the side of his neck, and stretched her body up and over him, letting each of her six pairs of breasts roll like furry bowling balls over his face. “Well I was going to rape him to death. But if you want him too I suppose we could enhance him first. He might survive us both,” she hissed, “and her too.” She extended a claw towards Jen.

            “Wh—why?” Christie's eyes were wide with shock.

            Mallah just purred, flipped Frank over on his face and began kneading his flesh with her padded paws, lightly scratching through his hair with her claws. “Oh please. Think he got this entire place treating people with kindness and love?” She twitched a cat ear at Jen. “She's his secretary, one of many. He's a bank president. He lies, cheats, steals for a living. Millions here are homeless so he can live in all...this. He totally has me coming.”

            “You can't just....kill people for that.”

            Mallah gave Christie the most wickedly sultry fang-laden grin. “Actually I do have other plans for Frank...and all the other bullies nobody else seems to be doing anything about.” She sat Frank up and pinched his cheeks together. “Frank here just volunteered for the games.” She had Frank's shotgun in her surprisingly prehensile tail, slipped between her legs, business end up. “But don't worry.” She writhed before them as she sank onto the barrel. Her eyes shrugged a wink as she pulled the trigger. “It’s exactly like it sounds.” She bent the shotgun's barrels nearly around back on the butt as she pulled them smoking, dripping from her vagina and clanged it searing hot on the marble floor. “He's going to love it there.” She pulled him close by the skull and spoke eye-to-eye. “I'll even enhance him, just for fun.”

            A blink and a whirl of gun smoke, sweat, and fear Mallah and Frank were gone.

            Jen and Christie were left staring at one another. Jen slunk a foot down the hallway...and then took off sprinting. She broke through the bedroom door but Christie was already waiting in the room.

            Jen ran blind chest into Christie's palm, and got sent flung onto the rather elaborate bed. The dogs made it to the door as Jen was grasping for the phone.

            Christie's tail made shrapnel out of the phone and the nightstand. “SIT!”
            Everybody else in the room sat instantly and cowered in fear.

            “Let's just everybody calm down, ok?” Christy took a deep breath and sheathed everything. “Last thing we need today is a squad of dead cops.”

            “Hey!” Leonard called up the stairs. “They got anything to eat?”

            “I am however, going to kill that one,” she shook her head at the three sympathetic dogs, “as soon as I figure out how.”

Fire by Baptism

            Sasha dumped Anderson like a sack of potatoes in a forest stream and flapped away. The water was ice cold on a hot day, woke Anderson completely up. The buoyancy was such a great relief after the heaviness of the camp.   But when he surfaced and gasped for a breath the forest colors were all still bright rainbow. He wasn't really awake yet.

            “So it’s come down to you.” Mallah was there with him in the dream. She sat sprawled out on a mossy rock in a sling bikini, trailing her toes in the water. “All this time you've been so stubbornly delusional.” She rolled over and considered him from an elbow, her enormous breasts splaying out over the rocks. “But about you, I'm afraid. I'm not sure I can even help you.”

            Anderson paddled backwards to the opposite bank. “I don't need your help; I don't want your help. Release my troops and I back to the United Sta--”

            “There is no going back, General.” Mallah blew a tuft of her hair from her face. “Not for you, or any of the enhanced.” She rolled over and stared into the sky. Her breasts seemed to want to float off were they loose of the sling she wore. “I am the only way back, and I'm not taking any garbage like you back to Earth.”

            “Earth?”

            “Yes. Earth, General.” She pointed to the sun. “You cannot see it from here. I put Gomorrah in an opposing orbit. It will always be behind your Sun.” She rolled back over to stare him down. “You still think this is all a drug-induced hallucination, don't you.”

            He just glanced about, looking for his best exit.

            “Do you even have a first name, General Anderson?” She paused to remember. “I have not heard it spoken since I arrived on Earth.”

            He just stared at her blankly.

            “You can tell me,” she giggled, “it’s part of 'name, rank and serial number', after all, isn't it?”

            “Sheldon.”

            “Pleased to meet you, General Sheldon Anderson.” She sat up and folded her legs. “See, we can get along nicely, first name basis.”

            He gave more blank stares.

            “You're not my prisoner, Sheldon.” She rolled her eyes. “That would imply we'd been at war, and there was someplace for you to return home to.” She sighed. “You cannot fight me or any of my kind, Sheldon. You can however be of some use.”

            “My only objective is escape.”

            “Soldier to the end?” She nodded. “I am allowing you to live as my pet, Sheldon. But I do have use for that soldier's attitude. It’s so hard to instill.” She unwound a ribbon from her arm. “I think it’s time we lived up to those pharmaceutical expectations of yours.”

            The ribbon from her arm moved on its own, skipping across the stream like a rock, and hit him square between the eyes. It sank in, felt like the whole stream of it furled into his skull. It hurt like a stone, burned like ice as it bled down his face, slithered around his spine. The world blinked negative. He choked and bent backwards as the threads of the thing she'd injected him with seemed to pull on his spine and limbs like an angry puppeteer. It dunked him repeatedly in the cold stream, fur draining out of his skin as the water fell off him each time. His hands and feet clenched and stiffened. Every muscle in his body burned like fire. The pain was like an all-over bee sting. He could hear and feel his bones cracking and resetting as the ribbons of the thing twisted over and through his flesh, wringing the pink out of him.

            He tried to scream but all that came out was a chest-rattling roar that echoed around the stream and cracked the rock Mallah was sitting on like a hammer. The world sunk away a foot from him as he finally stood.

            “Better?” She recalled it from his flesh like some kind of pet snake. It was over as fast as it begun.

Rag Doll

            “What--” Anderson's voice had sunk an octave into the gravel. “What have you done?”

            She giggled softy, petting her...snake thing before it slithered back around her arm. “Nothing you didn't bring with you.” She stood and took the sight of him in from one shoulder. “It breaks apart your D.N.A, finds a better solution to your puzzle, the picture you were supposed to be.” She nodded in approval as she slinked across the surface of the stream.   “I have to say I like this one, Sheldon. I can't say that I have it yet.” She barely came up to his chest now, her eyes blinking sapphire blue, hungrily up at him.

            He looked down at all four of his clawed hands. He was huge, furry, four-armed, and some sort of ware tiger. The heaviness was gone, he felt light as a feather, spry as a 4-year-old kitten. His whiskers itched at the approach of her. She smelled like electricity. Her breasts...

            “No!” He leapt from the stream, drifting over a tree limb backwards, his naked body trailing a wave of water from his fur. He leapt off into the forest, hitting the ground on all six, and ran.  

            ...well he stumbled. It was like he'd never ran before, top heavy and out of balance. It took him perhaps a mile of bashing through trees and the forest undergrowth to find his upright stance again. It was all so dreamlike. He felt no pain at the rake and scratch of the forest as he ran through it. He barely felt his weight, except when it all coiled behind him before each pouncing leap. The forest had gone dark, entirely the negative colors as before. He could smell color somehow, pleasant here, acrid there, warm around the animals that stopped and stared startled as he passed.   And he could really jump; twenty, thirty feet were as three to him. His claws dug into trees, dirt, rocks, anything to maintain his grip at any odd angle he needed.

            He wasn't even winded when perhaps 10 miles of forest later he slid down a rock embankment and found what he was looking for: someplace quiet and secluded. Trees covered the glade from the air and it backed up to a narrow stone cliff, overgrown with tree roots.

            He sat down and sighed heavily. His suddenly youthful erection at the thought of her was just starting to subside. Naked, monstrous, he couldn't let her...he couldn't let himself do that to...to...He'd always seen her as a child somehow. Despite her endowments, he'd somehow known she was all of twelve, a prankster child in a woman's body. He'd never seen her on carnal terms...until she'd somehow unlocked seemingly everything primal in him and all his dinosaur ancestors. Still, he knew...he couldn't...do what his loins still throbbed at the thought of doing to her.

            “After all that,” Mallah alighted on a high tree branch. “That's what scares you about me?” She broke out in shimmering black fur as she landed silently on the ground before him, “that I might give myself to you?” Two steps toward him and her frame had blossomed to her fully panther-like form, six-breasted, lithe, and shimmering inky.

            He scrambled backwards into the rocky alcove, but his suddenly two-foot-long erection told no lies. “No, I'm not--”

            “Not what?” She unbuckled a heavy leather collar inexplicably from her own neck and approached him like a snake to a cornered rabbit. “A lover?” He tried to stop her from collaring her but her diminutive frame was a gross understatement of her physical strength. There was nothing he could do as she cinched it up on him and buckled it. “Slave then,” she giggled and winked her flaming azure eyes. “You can tell them I raped you.” She had his hips pinned between her knees as her tongue washed over his face. “Some of them resisted too,” her vagina was exactly the warm ice cream store his penis hungered for, “at first.” She was like diving into a pool of warm tapioca.

            All hands on Mallah and it still was not enough. She pumped him like a hand car, rolling breasts, sandy tongues, and sweat everywhere. He took tufts of her loose furry skin in his fangs but could do no better than make her purr and hiss for more. His claws left no deeper mark on her back, her ass, even pulling her tail was like pulling the ripcord on a lawn mower, it just made her growl and chomp at him with renewed vigor.

            She was tightening up on him, squeezing harder and harder with each thrust. Finally that palm-sized ass of hers in his hands and the rolling-pins of her vagina were too much for him. He let it all out with a roar that split nearby stones and trees and filled her like a pastry bag with steaming hot seed. A wave of electricity passed through his body and sent him into momentary convulsions before all his joints went loose.

            She sucked air and he could feel her lips licking him clean like slurping the mustard off a corn dog as she withdrew. “Was that so bad now, kitty?” She doubled over as if to dry heave and stopped, a sly grin creeping across her furry face. The black drained off her fur like wet watercolor.

            “Now please me.” She rolled him on top of her with one hand as orange and black tiger stripes bled down her flanks. She caught him by the wrists on both sides...and then caught him by the other wrists with her inexplicably new pair of arms. She nearly pulled all four of his shoulders out of socket plunging his face and chest through her six writhing breasts, and that was only the beginning.

            For the next hour she abused him like a teddy bear in a pillow orgy. She rode him through tree trunks, plowed furrows of him through dirt, roots, and stone, and splashed him like a rubber ducky through countless forest streams, scattering birds and animals off in all directions everywhere she pounced with him. His four hands kneaded her breasts best he could but all they did was grow firmer, more erect, even expand as her chest rose and fell. He pumped her like a well, heavy and slow, but it was getting too tight. She'd tightened on him so hard he couldn't move. Her movements ground his penis like hamburger. He felt like a brick on a rubber band stuck in her like that as she leapt around with him. Her claws hurt like rusty saw blades across his back, chest and arms.  

            Finally she came, and let out a roar like a bomb. The shock wave flattened trees for a mile in all directions. He fell limp to the bedrock in a heap on his knees when she finally released him from her crotch. Blood and mud drained down his body from the barbarian's lashing she'd given him as streams trickled into the crater she'd roared into the landscape. His head rang and throbbed, his ears and skull fractured like the bedrock he lie on.

            “Mmmh. Good kitty.” She stretched out cat-like, tail flicking in the air, “Aw. Have a boo-boo?” She giggled at the wrecked sight of him, shrugged, and began admiring her new tigress coat. “I'm not a bad goddess, Sheldon.” She made puppetry of shaking all of her hands in polite succession. “I do reward for good behavior...” She crouched down on all fours, her nose to his, the steam of her whisper condensing on his whiskers. “...if you had ever behaved.”

            All his desires to escape came rushing back with the pain.

            “I didn't want to frighten you, or anyone else on Earth.” She rose like a cobra. “Mass pandemonium isn't what I'm after there.” He watched in horror as her tiger fur scaled over in razor sharp metal dragon scales. “But a girl's gotta have a place where she can...” Her dragon wings and tail unfurled across the football field-sized crater as she grew inexplicably in size and bulk.

            “UNWIND.” The word shook the earth. The rake of her leap into the air, the backwash from her jetliner-sized wings, and the snap of her giant mace-like tail went off like a carpet bombing all around him. The air turned to choking dirt and the ground turned to air beneath him as the whole hillside was tossed like a salad.

            Long moments of tumbling later everything was black. He bled into the dirt and debris all around him; only his upper left hand could move and feel air.   Anderson sobbed quietly in his tomb, resigned to his bizarre alien death.

            A moment later somebody tugged on his hand. “Is that you, General?”

            Stevens?

            “Easy now,” He could hear Sasha's rasp over the sound of digging. “We want all his pieces.”

            Minutes later the small squad of marines had dug him out.   They had all been...changed.   Several of them were different, even unnatural skin colors like blue or gold. One of them looked positively metallic. Stevens himself seemed telekinetic as he never touched the General in lifting his blood-dripping carcass from the dirt. Another marine went to work lifting the dirt clods and grass from Anderson's open scars, somehow without touching him.

            Sasha was there, arms folded, apparently supervising the dig. “Nicely done boys.” She knelt down to Anderson's face as he winced under their rather bizarre yet effective care. “Still dreaming?”

Paparazzi

            “Can I help you, officer?” Mallah in her red velvet robe, veil down, strode up the crushed marble driveway to the estate's gatehouse. Christie, Leonard, and two dogs filled out the procession. Christie's hair was still wet from showering dog blood off and she wore one of Jen's robes.

            “We are responding to an alarm at this residence.” Officer Bradley stood at the driveway intercom. “Dispatch reported the phone line was down.” The wrought iron gate was closed and locked. Two squad cars blocked the driveway from the road. The S.W.A.T. Team van was quickly unloading behind them. Officers had guns drawn and had taken up positions behind their cars. “I am going to need to see your identification.”

            Mallah stood within reach of the gate and took a hip. “While I do appreciate your prompt and prepared response today, you may go. Your services are no longer needed.”

            “We can wait to hear that from a Mr. Diamon.” Bradley read the name from the mailbox. “While we are waiting we will need to see your id.”

            “This'll be fun.” Christie sat on a nearby stump and folded her arms to watch. The two dogs followed and sat at her feet.

            Mallah giggled. “Frank no longer lives here. If you're looking for the owner, that would be me.”

            “Driver's license?” Bradley held up his hands. “Or we can run fingerprints back at the station.” Bradley held up a finger while he listened intently to the garble from dispatch over his walkie talkie. “Ten Four, Dispatch.” A moment later he had punched in the gate code and the gate began to swing open.

            The dogs perked up and began to growl. Christie hushed them.

            “There's nothing in your protocol about walking away, is there.” Mallah sighed as the gate swung past her.

            “Just need to confirm an all clear, Ma'am.” Bradley pulled a pair of handcuffs from his belt and stepped across the gate line. “If you could turn around slowly please and place your hands on your head. We can have this sorted out and all be on our way.”

            “You are so dead.” Christie just shook her head and scratched a dog behind the ears.

            “Now now.” Mallah turned around and put her hands over her hood. “Let's be hospitable to our guests.”

            Bradley stepped forward and slapped a cuff around Mallah's wrist. “You have the right to remain...” He couldn't pull her hand down behind her back. “Hands behind your back please.”

            “Oh, but you said...” Mallah crossed her hands behind her back. “Better?”

            “Yes, thank you.” Bradley cuffed her other wrist. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney one will be provided for you. Do you understand?”

            “I am sorry,” Mallah broke the handcuff chain like a paperclip and turned around to face a not entirely surprised Officer Bradley. “But I really don't have time for this today.” She broke the cuffs off her wrist like snapping off rubber bands and handed the remaining debris back to him. “Can we do this another time?”

            “So dead.” Christie spoke more to the dog than anyone.

            “Well then down on the ground please.” Bradley stepped aside. His partner was standing behind him, Taser at the ready, and fired.

            The prongs caught in Mallah's robe at her left breast. One tick later and her robe squeaked, ticked, and dove for cover as an armband, leaving Mallah naked before them.

            “So very very dead.” Christie just sighed.

            Bradley raised an eyebrow. His partner just looked at him, finger full-down on the trigger as Mallah unaffected held the leads in her right hand.

            “She doesn't like high voltages.” Mallah sighed. “You probably don't either.”

            The scene snapped white in a searing hot flash.   Bradley blinked on his ass against the gate house, his face stung sun burnt, the smell of burning flesh in his nose. He could see a wave of sparks and arcing electricity dissipating in a ripple across the lawn. He saw the dogs running scared back towards the house, but couldn't hear anything but the painful ringing in his ears. A bit of nauseating head-turning later and he saw Mallah 20 feet away standing where she'd been, white dusty flashes of gunfire flashing off her chest. His partner's armless carcass lay charred and smoking against the front quarter panel of their cruiser, nearly all the flesh braised from his bones. The cruiser's tire was melted behind him and the facing half of the car looked like it'd been torched. The ground between it and Mallah looked like used charcoal.

            Mallah was walking towards Bradley, in a silent hail of gunfire. Her outfit slowly reformed around her as she walked, her veil, and then her skin-tight red velvet jumpsuit. The zinging and popping stopped as she leaned to pick him up by the scruff of his bullet-proof vest. She calmly carried him outside the gate and stood him on his feet, dusted him off. She shook his finger at him, made the eye-to-eye sign, and turned on her heel and strode back into the estate.

            S.W.A.T. Team grabbed him as soon as he was clear, and hauled the remains of his partner back to cover around the car. While they did that Mallah closed the gate by hand and tied a bow with the bars in the middle while they watched. They'd given up firing upon her.

            “Well there went the neighborhood.” Christie was rummaging through the refrigerator for something to feed the dogs when Mallah returned to the house. “I suppose we'll be moving on now.”

            “I did not mean to kill him.” Mallah sighed. “It was an accident.”

            “Struck point-blank by lightning while tasering somebody?” Christie sniffed over two-day-old leftover steak. “Nice touch. I'm sure that'll go down as an act of god...” She rolled her eyes at Mallah, “...ess.”

            “He hurt saucy.” Mallah flew over the kitchen island like a dolphin and peered over the refrigerator door. “They'll take me seriously now.”

            “Yeah.” Christie closed the door with a plate full of leftover steaks. “With nukes.”

Locker Room

            “Sir,” Sergeant Roberts saluted at the crude hut's entrance. “The troops are ready for inspection.”

            Anderson looked up from pondering his paws. “Thank you, Sergeant.”

            The sun shown in blotches through the thick impressionist trees.   Two dozen marines stood at attention, some taller than others, some furry, some scaled, some still managing a human appearance, though none of them were really human anymore. Anderson approached, a full head taller than any of them, both sets of arms folded behind his back. “AteenSHUN!”

            They all stood as upright as they could. Most of them succeeded.

            “Soldiers, I am proud of each and every one of you for remaining constant to your duties despite cruel and unusual circumstances.” He began looking them over. “You were each America's finest before you were all brought here and experimented upon against our wills. They can deform our bodies, manipulate our minds, but they cannot take away our commissions as Marines.”

            “Hoo-ah!”

            “Gentlemen, it is our sworn duty as prisoners to escape. And until such an opportunity presents itself: to survive.”

            “Hoo-ah!”

            “Over the past month negotiations have broken down with our fellow Chinese prisoners two islands to the East. It is clear they have raided our supplies of food, fuel, and weapons; and left us without sufficient resources to survive. Gentlemen, tonight we return the favor.”

            “Hoo-ah!”

            “Wait wait wait, ok, hold it.” Mallah descended from the sky in her red cloak. “Boys, I appreciate the sentiment, but if you're going to start that sort of thing there are rules that must be followed.” She unshouldered a moving-box-sized container.

            “Ah. Our hostess.” Anderson puffed himself up. “I presume you know of the situation among the rations and supplies. The Chinese have taken our supplies. We will require more to survive here.”

            “Yes yes yes.” Mallah waved him off. “General, I'm not your shopping assistant. My trips to Earth are for my own purposes, not to be fetching you groceries. I brought you enough last week.”

            “The Chinese camp has taken them from us and are hoarding our supplies.”

            She landed on a hip and rolled her eyes. “General, they're not hoarding. You asked for food and fuel. They asked for a ship. I gave everybody what they asked for.” She patted him on the head with a giggle. “You can't ask for more wishes, but they figured out how to make their own.”

            “The Geneva convention stipulates prisoners shall be provided with--”

            “You're a long way from Geneva, Sheldon, and I've yet to stop by.” She kicked over her package. “You are the white team.” The box contained two dozen white gi's. “The Chinese are the black team.” She shrugged. “The colors will rotate between rounds, but all players must always be in uniform.”

            “This is a game to you?”

            “War is in the nature of people.” Mallah drew nose-to-nose with Anderson, her toes floating 4 feet in the air. “Would you rather you and I fight a real one? I can tell you how it would begin. It would be over too soon to have an end.”

            “Food is real enough to us.”

            “Then for your part you had best be fighting for real, General.” She began tossing out the gi's to his men. “Black team always moves first, is allowed to fight dirty and use lethal force.   White team is expected fight fair, honorably, and to preserve life wherever possible. Those are the rules, gentlemen. If they don't seem fair just remember you will be in black for the next round. Revenge is simply a matter of living to see it.”

            She tossed a gi at Anderson. It globed onto him like a squid and completely engulfed him.   A moment later it has squeezed on him like spandex, covering everything.   He could still see, hear, smell, and breathe, but he couldn't pull it off. The rest of his troupe was experiencing similar sticky situations with the uniforms.

            “Oh, and the   leg bands colors adjust if you have any additional abilities. “ Mallah tapped the three stripes forming on Anderson's thigh. “This for example: white, black, black. He has sonic abilities.   You'll learn the rest of the colors soon enough.”

            “You can't treat us like this!” Anderson stood to protest.

            “I'm strictly hands-off this round, General.” Her own uniform embraced her in scarlet red. Her leg bands constantly shifted colors like liquid rainbows on an oil slick. “Red is adjudicator, what you might call a referee, mostly for keeping the white team honest as black is never fouled. I'm not allowed to play on a side unless the other team has an immortal and another immortal volunteers to adjudicate. Its the black team that will be 'treating you' this round, General. Best worry about them first.”  

            “Who adjudicates the adjudicator?” Anderson scowled.

            “Not a mortal concern.”

            “This is worse than the Nazi's.” Anderson sat down, cross-legged. “I refuse to play.”

            “If I've heard your history correctly, the Nazi's poisoned then incinerated their prisoners.” She alighted on a tree stump thoughtfully.   “Honestly, I have already gained each of your unique enhancements as my own. Outside the games I have no further practical use for any of you.” Mallah's eyes flared orange and the whole clearing warmed like an oven on the facing side of everything. “I can just incinerate you all now and find a new set of enhanced that will play.” Beams tore from her eyes and burned a rather large tree behind them in half from trunk to top. With a sigh she shook it off, sucked in the flames and the whole clearing chilled to near frostbite. “But wouldn't that be wasteful?”

            “Do it.” Anderson crossed his arms.   He glanced over his shoulder at his troops. They all gave him the nod. “We are soldiers of the United States. We would rather die than be made your play things.”

            Mallah giggled. “How little you understand your own political system.   Oh, I know...” Mallah stood to her full 5'4” height on the stump and struck a pose. “Since this is the inaugural round on Gomorrah, I the adjudicator decree to the losers go...replacement soldiers chosen as I see fit.   But I will see that their families live long and well-provided-for lives back on Earth. But to the victors I will bring your wives here, and enhance them for you, so you can be together. And to the victorious yet un-mated, I will bring the woman of your choice from Earth. If you can't decide I will find the best I can for you, one of your super models perhaps? And to the non-combatants not only martyrdom, but I will also eject your families from Earth. Three rounds, gentlemen, then you can retire to civil service here. We do have a civilization to build, after all. How does that sound?”

            “Like blackmail.” Anderson pouted. “I still refuse.”

            “Incineration and substitution then.” Mallah threw up her hands. “Anybody else?”

            “I'll play.” Roberts stepped forward.

            “I'm in too.”

            Anderson slapped them a scowl over his shoulder.

            “What? Robert's wife is hot! I want to see her enhanced too!”

            Mallah nodded and grinned slyly. “Hedonism for the win. Anyone else?”

            All the marines hands went up.

            “Excelent, soldiers.” Mallah nodded approvingly. “Win or loose I shall see that you are all richly rewarded.   As for the General, for his past and continuing rudeness to me....” She stared him down, her eyes glowing amber...

            “Soldiers! “ Anderson stood and faced them. “White team, fall in!”
            They all stood at attention as Mallah drifted over Anderson's shoulder and whispered in his ear. “Someone once tried to defeat me with the power of emotion.”

            “Simon, Roberts, and Wilkenson.” Anderson barked orders enthusiastically, the details of a mission plan forming in his head. “I understand the three of you can fly. You will leave at sunset to the East island and establish reconnaissance positions.”

            “It worked for a time.” Mallah continued.   “But a goddess cannot be defeated.”

            “Smith, Hoffman, and Martin, you will remain ashore and garrison the remaining supplies. “

            “I learned to use his power as he never had.”

            “Green, Puttnam and I will swim and follow the recon team .”

            “As I do with every power I take.” Her four tiger-striped arms embraced him from behind like a slithering python. He could feel her six furry breasts swelling firmly against his back as her arms began to tighten and swell with muscle and sinew beneath her soft silken pelt.

            “Once the center island is clear we will send the air support team back to ferry Carlson and Oraf to forward positions.”

            “I learned to control my emotions, and anyone else's I choose to.”

            “We will camp on the center island tomorrow daylight, radio silence.”

            “Your
men are my guests here, as you would have been. To them I leave free will.”

            “And keep an eye out for that ship she mentioned. Night operations only, return to base if spotted.”

            “As you can see, I can break your stubbornness like a twig.”

            “Florence, Gregerson, I need you two on flanking reconnaissance. Move to the north and south islands tonight.”

            “You, Sasha, Christie, all my slaves.   I made you hunger to fuck me . I made you stop. I can spin you all like a top.”

            “Night two of operations we repeat. Fliers in at dusk for recon. Swimmers follow.”

            “You will play the games, General, until I tell you to stop. You will thank me for the honor. This is my planet. My will happens here, nothing else.”

            “White team, are we clear on our mission?” Anderson could barely breath her hold on him was so tight.

            Mallah licked him wide and sandy up his spine across his skull. “And when you return victorious, I will bring them all mates, but you will receive none, but your mistress. While they writhe through the night with theirs, you will lie with me, until you are broken and I am pleased.”

            “Hoo-ah!”

            “And then you will watch as I let them all take me, again and again, until they, you, and their mates are all broken, and I am pleased.”

            “Thank you, Mistress.” A tear shed down Anderson's fur as she released her embrace.

            “I am pleased. Let the games begin.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Categories SWM Library