Unyx's Send-off

 

A taxicab ambled down Campion Street. A green Volkswagen sped passed in the opposite direction, its windows burned in the brightness just before sunset. The cab's passenger, a redheaded coed, squinted from the glare. She sat in borrowed clothes rustled up from her stay at the state police station. The baggy sweatshirt and jeans reeked of cigarettes. At least she had underwear on again, even if they were voluminous granny-panties.

 

The cab rounded the bend of the cul de sac. "Hey," the redhead said, "that's my car! Aw, man, what happened to it?" The yellow SUV, windows smashed, roof rumpled, sat in front of the sorority house. She glanced around. Other than the SUV, the cul de sac looked abandoned. "Huh. No FedEx truck. Good sign."

 

"You talk to yourself a lot," the cabbie observed. "What they pick you up for? PI?"

 

"PN," she said, "public nudity." She tossed him a twenty and hopped out before the cabbie could comment further.

 

Dozens of skimpy Friday newspapers piled around the porch steps. "Weird." The redhead unlocked the front door, poked her head into the dark foyer and halloed. "Is it safe? I heard the message on my cell." She stepped inside, hunting for the hall light-switch. She looked down. "Oh, hello. Who're you?"

 

"Ursula's a good name," said a girl with a massive pair of pigtails, thick handlebars tufted with big black pompoms. She looked barely old enough to drive, tarted up in white cake makeup in and black lip and eyeliner.

 

"Art, or theater major?" the redhead asked, squinting at Ursula's outfit, black patent leather club gear.

 

"Post-grad," grinned Ursula, turning. "Women's Studies. C'mon!" She skipped out into the main hall.

 

Don't look at her ass. The redhead followed, frowning. "We're we going?" Don't look at her ass Ursula flounced up the main stairwell. Oh my God, just look at that ass. And what did she do, paint those pants on? "Um, little girl?"

 

Ursula froze. Her outfit seemed to ripple in the shadowy half-light. "Yeah?"

 

"What happened?"

 

Ursula shrugged, an uncanny, almost liquid rise and fall of her shoulders; another trick of the light, perhaps. "Good guys won," she said, and started back up the stairs. "Duh. Don't they always?"

 

The redhead ascended after her. "So where is everyone?"

 

"Done a bunk. Bugged out. Vamoosed." Ursula whistled through her teeth and zipped her hand through the air.

 

"Why?"

 

Ursula reached the top of the stair and spun about, lips pursed. "Because I asked them to." The redhead's stomach flip-flopped. Ursula shook her head, raised a finger as pale as her face. "Ah, ah! Asked them to. 'Asked.' Not sang." She strut down the hallway, boots clicking on the hardwood.

 

"How?" The redhead swallowed, then hurried to catch up. "How did you know about that?"

 

"We know all sorts of stuff," Ursula said, stopping at a closed door. "And here we are."

 

"But this is my bedroom," the redhead said.

 

"Really?" Ursula tipped her head. "Gosh." The door opened by itself. "After you, Madam Secretary."

 

A strawberry blonde squat on the vanity bench, FedEx cap twirled backward on her head, like a relief pitch waiting in a dugout. "Hi!"

 

Relieved to see a familiar face, the redhead rushed into the room. "What're you doing here?"

 

"I can't get enough of it," the strawberry blonde answered, plopping her chin into her palm, "but you're the last one, and that makes me sad. But Unyx said she was going to make it really special." She perked up, reaching to the vanity and clicking off the table lamp. The room gloomed. "And that makes me happy."

 

"Who?"

 

"Unyx." The strawberry blonde pointed to Ursula, who had slipped into the room as soon as the light when off, closing the door behind her. "You, know: snippy-snippy."

 

Ursula burst into giggles. "Not eunuchs. Unyx. U and Nyx."

 

Finally, something she understood. "Like the computer operating system thing," said the redhead.

 

Ursula gulped down a giggle. "Wait. The what?"

 

"UNIX, right?"

 

Ursula stared in the dark, then shook her fists around her head. "Ooh, dammit. They never told us! No wonder Yves and Dee kept smirking whenever we said it!"

 

"I'm lost again," the redhead groaned, flumping onto her bed.

 

"Nope." The strawberry blonde whipped off her cap and ruffled her hair. "You landed on target."

 

Ursula glided into the room. "We want to talk to you about Chapter Regulation 700: Citizenship, Morality, and Values."

 

Does she have rollerskates in those boots or something? "That's Reg 600."

 

The strawberry blonde shook her head. "She knows the real one."

 

"Regulation 700," Ursula said, coming to a stop at the foot of the bed. "No licky-licky."

 

"So that's what this is all about?" The redhead clucked and lay back with her hands behind her head. Another dyke bitchfest.

 

"That, and stopping the blood music," Ursula said, folding her arms. Twice.

 

The redhead sat up. "Holy shit, you can do that?" Ursula nodded. "Oh, thank God. It's been so strange lately. I feel so, I dunno, disconnected, like I'm…"

 

"On automatic pilot," Ursula suggested.

 

"Yeah? Please, make it go away? I'll do any—Oh." A chill stole over her. "No. No fucking way."

 

The strawberry blonde sighed, standing up. "Well, here's the thing. While you were gone, the rest of us took a vote. And it was unanimous." She crossed the room to stand beside Unyx, putting her left arm around her. "No more Reg 700." Unyx put her right arm around the strawberry blonde. Twice. "No more code red hazing."

 

"Doesn't matter," the redhead smirked. "You couldn't have had a unanimous vote. I know two sisters' who'd never—"

 

"Jo Echo says you eat pussy like a pro," Ursula interrupted, eyebrow arched. "And she really knows her stuff. As for your cute blonde friend? Well, she and her huge tits got here an hour ago. I didn't even have to ask. So it's unanimous, except for you, Madam Secretary."

 

The strawberry blonde peeled out of her top. "But, you know, Unyx, the Chapter Secretary has to approve or veto every vote."

 

"That's right," the redhead said, scooting to the head of the bed in a protective huddle. "And I'll never change my mind. Never."

 

"Oh, I don't know." Ursula raised an arm and reached out. It reached and reached, stretching nine, ten feet to the wall switch. "Something tells me that it's time," Ursula said, and light flooded the room.

 

At first, the redhead wanted to scream. And then, she didn't. And a few minutes later, she was screaming her silly head off.

 

 

The Big Flashback

 

Yves and Dee were arguing in the copse of ruined trees at the edge of the wide flowerbed. Eurydice followed the fleeing Raspberry with her eyes, burned nanomek to smooth her ears into perfect parabolas, and tuned in, homing on Dee's dark vibrato.

 

"The decision has already been made, hasn’t it, Yves?" he said.

 

Yves' grin was mirthless. "I know that tone, Dee. You're starting a rehearsed hissy fit." Dee tried to protest but Yves cut him off. "'Bitch-bitch-bitch, walk out the door.' That means your leaving."

 

Icy panic seized Eurydice. She shut down, terrified to move, ready to shatter.

 

A warm hand enfolded her shoulder, soft and soothing, creamy satin. "Keep listening, honey," CeeCee urged. "If they wanted to be out of earshot, they would have driven two counties away."

 

Eurydice drew a ragged breath, nodded, and swiveled her ears like a cat.

 

"…So it has to be me," Yves was saying.

 

"Agreed," Dee said, nodding gravely. "Black Cherry wants to live in a story? Fine. We're going to give her one."

 

Yves rubbed his chin. "What do you mean?"

 

"Black Cherry's holding all the cards," Dee said, "but she's not playing with a full deck."

 

"A little less hissy fit drama, please," Yves insisted, "time's wasting."

 

"Fine," Dee smirked, then ticked off each point with his fingers. "I head off—alone—to Easy House. I distract Cherry, make sure she can't use Unyx's hair. You guys catch up—still have my keys? Good. So I distract Cherry. The Easies go on automatic pilot." He dropped his hand. "Out of fingers. Anyway, Easies go on automatic pilot, Unyx cures the Frenzy."

 

"How?" Yves cheek twitched. "This is another answer I don't want to know, isn't it?"

 

"Yes," Dee replied, "it really is. So Unyx cures the Frenzy. Raspberry finds Unyx's hair and the nanomek. CeeCee eats anybody trying to get away. You do…what you got to do."

 

"And you rescue Galatea," Yves said, brow furrowed.

 

"No," Dee said, "that's Eurydice's job." He turned to the flowerbed. Eurydice contemplated her feet. "If she wants it," Dee finished. He turned away and Eurydice popped her head up, eyes wide.

 

"Two problems with that plan," Yves countered. "One, Eurydice doesn't know if she wants Galatea back."

 

"And two," Dee sighed, "Galatea probably doesn't want to come back. CeeCee said Cherry was lying. What else could it be? Cherry's setting me up like a serial villain." Dee shrugged. "But the Frenzy has got to be stopped, and Eurydice deserves the chance to make up her mind about Galatea. Oh." Dee raised his voice. "And I don't know how Unyx's precognition really works, but Cherry can hear through her ears, so I sure hope she hasn't been listening to any of this."

 

Eurydice, almost frozen with anticipation, managed, "Unyx, don't start listening five minutes ago."

 

"'Kay," said Unyx, Raspberry's head resting on her shoulder.

 

"No games, Dee," Yves dismissed. "Do you want Galatea back?"

 

"I want her to be happy," Dee said, "I want Eurydice to be happy." Dee relented. "Yes. God, Yves, I want them both to be happy." His Adam's Apple bobbing, he whispered, "I want them to be happy with me." Dee stood in teary silence.

 

Yves softened. "Dee?"

 

Every iota of nanomek in Eurydice's body latched onto her sensory web, and billions of Eurydices listened to Dee's breathing deepen and slow. Dee nodded, then spoke with such sudden conviction Eurydice nearly cried out. "This is how it has to happen. I won't second guess her or Galatea any more. Whatever Eurydice does will be the right thing." Dee dried his face with his palm. "No looking back."

 

"You sure?" Yves asked, but he was already adjusting his scabbard, tightening the knot in his belt.

 

"Yes," Dee answered, and, as if it were the easiest thing in the world, he added, "I trust her."

 

 

Eurydice and the Emerald Penseive

 

Galatea's brow crinkled. "I should be able to share memories just by touch," she murmured, and Eurydice knew she had said it before, "but I haven't figured out how to do it yet."

 

"That's 'cause you have no limits, no boundaries," Eurydice said. "I do." She waggled her fingers. "Take my hand."

 

Galatea stretched toward her. Their fingertips brushed. Motes of silver and green light scintillated within, growing brighter and brighter as their hands entwined. Eurydice stood on tiptoe. Their linked hands outshone the sunlamps in an expanding flare of light. The two green girls' lips met and they outshone the Sun.

---

 

 

Eurydice watched the SUV pull away, drive under the overpass, up the onramp on the far side, and accelerate down the highway and out of sight. The engine's protests faded as the distance between her and Dee grew. Someone padded across the road behind her, quiet as a ghost. Eurydice spent a few thousand nanomek—she had so much now it frightened her, and she took every excuse to burn some—and heightened her hearing. She recognized the approaching heartbeat immediately.

 

"Eurydice?" Yves asked.

 

She turned to him, starry-eyed from weeping, her lips trembling.

 

"He didn't look back," she said.

 

Yves nodded, looking grim, until Eurydice bowled into him, laughing, "He didn't look back!" She grabbed Yves by the collar and tugged him into a friendly kiss and ferocious hug. She beamed, so happy she thought she might crack open. "Oh, Yves, he didn't look back." She blinked away tears. "He loves me."

 

Yves scowled, and in a patient, little voice he said, "Of course he does," and Eurydice laughed so hard she started crying again. "You were eavesdropping, then, I take it?"

 

"Huh?"

 

Yves made quotation marks in the air with his fingers. "Sounded like you two were having a Hell of an argument," he said in a passable imitation of Eurydice's voice. "Heard every word, didn't you?"

 

Eurydice hiccupped and sniffled, "Oh, yeah. 'Course I did." And that set off more laughter and waterworks.

 

Unyx sped toward them, running out of the field and across the road, boots whacking against pavement. A pair of wings unfolded from her back. The wings spread wide as they took shape, black feathers iridescent in indigo and midnight blue.

 

Raspberry raced behind her. "What the fuck is going on?"

 

Yves reached into his pants' pocket and drew out a set of stubby keys. He tossed them high. Unyx kicked off, great wings beating the air, snatching the keys before soaring up and banking above the overpass.

 

"Wow," Eurydice breathed.

 

Raspberry skidded to a halt. "You guys. Seriously: what-the-fuckage." She glared upward. "We're just standing there and suddenly Unyx gets this 'I-left-the-porn-in-the-DVD-player' look on her face, does a runner." Unyx circled higher until she appeared no bigger than a crow. "Next thing I know," Raspberry said, watching Unyx wheel away, "I'm in an Evanescence music video."

 

"Unyx's gone to get Dee's car," Yves said, watching the sky.

 

"How do you know that?" Raspberry asked.

 

"Those were Dee's car keys," Yves answered.

 

Eurydice daubed her eyes. "When'd you get those, anyway?"

 

"I picked Dee up at a gay bar yesterday," Yves shrugged.

 

Eurydice boggled at him, watched him fight to keep the smile off his face, ready to punch him in the nose if he failed.

 

"Okay," Raspberry drawled, brows raised. "But how does Unyx know that? When did you tell her?"

 

"About ten minutes from now," Yves said. The purple and green girls stared at him.

 

CeeCee sauntered up, slow and steady but with the energy of an avalanche. "Is it time to save the world yet?"

 

 

Red and Blue

 

The drive to the Epsilon Zeta Sorority chapter house proved dull and anticlimactic. The steering wheel jerked and the yellow SUV juddered if Dee pushed it over fifty miles per hour. He considered abandoning the bent and beaten automobile and running barefoot all the way back to fraternity row. It shocked him to realize he had been barefoot since "quickening Eurydice," as Yves called it, back in Bee's apartment. He wiggled his toes on the gas pedal. The thought of putting something on his feet was unnerving, exposing.

 

"I'd feel naked," he told his reflection in the rearview mirror. "Even putting socks on would make me feel naked." He downshifted into third gear and the SUV stopped trembling. He filed the barefoot question in his mental Things to Figure Out Later folder. Damn, that folder's getting pretty big.

 

With the automatic gearshift stuck in third, it would take him over an hour to drive to Epsilon Zeta. Pulling over and running began to appeal. His nanomek had remade him inside out, after all. Surely indefatigability during marathon sex translated into running a real marathon? And what about super-speed? Did he have any?

 

Red and blue flashed in the rearview mirror. Dee ignored the strobe lights for the moment, pondering super-speed. "Dumb name," he said. "'Celerity'. That's better."

 

A siren squawked once. Dee sighed and pulled over, a police car riding his tail. What about celerity? he wondered. Do I have any? He put the SUV in park and kept his hands at ten and two o'clock on the steering wheel, waiting for the state trooper to run the SUV's tags, call in the stop, and mosey over. Even if I have celerity, what would happen if I used it? Dee had to experiment and learn the limits of his powers eventually, he decided, but now was not the time. If Yves were here, he'd say, "Go with what you know." There was too much at stake for experimentation now.

 

The state trooper moseyed up to the busted driver's side window, drawling smoother than John Wayne. "What happened to your car, son?" He held a pad of ticket forms in one hand. "Driver's license and registration, please."

 

"I can go about my business."

 

The state trooper tore off the top form and crumpled it before retreating, his gate still set to mosey as if nothing unusual had happened. "Move along."

 

Dee confessed to his reflection, "Alright, maybe a little experimentation," and spent the rest of his trip quantifying his abilities in Star Wars terms. By the time the SUV rattled down fraternity row, Dee had given up on any aspirations to Jedi knighthood. Tomoe's "kuzbu" aligns more with the other guys. "That's okay," he said aloud, turning onto Campion Street, "the Dark Side has cooler lightsabers anyway."

 

 

The Truth of Dee

 

Dee crossed the curving perimeter of the flowerbed. Goosebumps danced across his skin. Walking beside him, chin pressed to his chest, Yves startled and shot him an inquisitive glance. "Tomoe said something about 'world navels'," Dee said. "I haven't a damn clue what she meant. Sounds like a drink."

 

Raspberry, Unyx, and Eurydice loitered in a circle around the snoozing CeeCee. Eurydice smoothed her skirts. "Hey, Dee." Dee thought her smiled looked plastic. "Sounded like you two were having a Hell of an argument. What's up?"

 

"Macho bullshit," Yves spat.

 

Eurydice's brow crinkled in confusion. Raspberry slunk behind her and would not look Dee in the eye. Dee shook his head and turned to Unyx. "Yves says you can see the future. How does that work?"

 

"You explain it better than I do," Unyx answered.

 

"I did?" Dee scratched his head, parsing her reply. "I mean, I do? When?"

 

Unyx reached for Yves. "When Yves tells me Black Cherry raped him." Behind Eurydice, Raspberry drew in a sharp breath.

 

Yves pulled away. "I never told you she raped me. How did you know?"

 

Unyx blanched, her raccoon mask fading into her skin. "Oh my God." She gaped. "Black Cherry raped you?"

 

Yves spluttered and swore. Everyone started talking at once, but Dee's calm voice cut through the babbling. "Unyx perceives fourth dimensional space-time from a fifth dimensional perspective. She saw that, in the future, Yves would tell her about Cherry. But Yves still had to tell her, otherwise she wouldn’t have seen it in the first place, and create a paradox. So Unyx can know something before it happens, as long as it still happens to her for the first time at some point in the future. She still has to be surprised to prevent paradox, so she winds up living a kind of backwards time universe." Dee perked up. "Just like Doctor Manhattan." He noticed everyone had fallen quiet sometime during his little speech and was staring at him. "What?"

 

"That's exactly right," Unyx marveled. "Except we're limited to about ten minutes for some reason. But who's Doctor Manhattan?"

 

"Oh," Dee dismissed, "he's a comic book character. Alan Moore again."

 

Eurydice and Yves exchanged a look. "Dee," Eurydice said with exaggerated care, "how did you come up with the name Galatea?"

 

"That's what they call Power Girl in the cartoon," he said. He shrugged. "Seriously: What?"

 

"What about 'Pygmalion'?" Yves asked, both curious and cautious.

 

"I got his name off the Internet." Dee faltered. "Googling, uh, for Power Girl porn."

 

"And 'Eurydice'?" asked Eurydice.

 

"Ah!" Dee waggled a finger. "I know all about Eurydice and Orpheus. There was a Jim Henson special about them. Orpheus sings her out of a tree. The tree opens up, it's all sticky inside, and, uh, and." Dee mumbled something.

 

"It got you hard," Eurydice giggled and Dee nodded.

 

"Are you telling me," Yves demanded, "that you've had all these insights and leaps of intuition these past few days because you like comic book and cartoon porn?"

 

"And muppets," Unyx chimed in. "Hey, Ursula whacked off to soft core vampire sex." She stroked Dee's sagging shoulder. "We are Unyx; we sympathize."

 

 

The U Train

 

Dee woke to debauchery.

 

Tomoe stood in stunned silence on the sideline. He had dreamt of her as he first met her: a short slip of a girl with dark, merry eyes. Now those same eyes sparkled from a face almost level with his above a body from a boyhood wet dream, an airbrushed pin-up girl with olive skin tanned to chocolate perfection, eye-popping curves, and waves of raven hair flowing down to her ass.

 

Dee ambled up, still groggy from sleep, trying to make sense of the spectacle Tomoe was watching. "What'd I miss?" Tomoe opened her mouth, but just shook her head, spread her hands, and shut it again. Long shadows moved behind Dee. He turned around and bumped his chin atop a bust crammed so close into a coppery one-piece dress he could hear the fiery fabric squeal under the stress.

 

"There was a little purple one," came the voice from above the boobs, "and a big, minty one." Dee stepped back to better look the newcomer in the eyes, but old habits died hard and he found himself drawn to the sun's reflection glimmering off the skintight material hugging the huge globes right in front of him. The girl swung her arm out to point. Dee stared at the muscle gliding under her creamy skin instead.

 

"Then Unyx fucked the minty one so hard she came apart," the girl gabbled. "So now there's a yellow one—right there, see?" She pointed to CeeCee, lying flat on her back in a little pool of melted creamsicle, her face stamped into a blissed-out smile. "And a green one." Here the girl paused, licked her lips, and bent down to whisper to Dee, in hushed, almost reverent tones. Flower perfumed, honey-brown hair tickled his nose. "And the green one? She just keeps going, and going, and going…"

 

Dee swallowed. "Where's Raz? The purple one?"

 

Tomoe found her voice. "Up in the tree."

 

"I've been fucked by a train!" Raspberry hollered back, slung over a high branch in the one tree remaining upright. She pumped her fists. "Woo!"

 

"Hi, Dee," Eurydice sang down from the heart of a glistening black nest, a writhing web of clutching arms and questing snakes. "Unyx, put me down, Dee's awake…Wait." Eurydice twisted until she hung suspended by her ankles and wrists by ebony ropes. "Hey, Dee," Eurydice called. She bit her lip in concentration. A pleated, myrtle miniskirt unrolled over her thighs and a prim, tea green schoolgirl blouse skated up over her chest. "Wanna watch?"

 

Ursula, wearing a glossy raccoon eye-mask and nothing else, rose out of the obsidian mass, a porcelain pale mermaid bobbing up from an inky sea. Her mask crooked up in arch inquisition.

 

Dee contemplated Ursula's outie navel and Eurydice's cheeky, jade grin before turning back to Tomoe. "You were right," he deadpanned. "My life does suck."

 

 

Uh oh Viggo

 

The wake of her wings drags Dee across the velvet-rope boundary and into the piano club. Upon stumbling through the front door, Dee finds himself in a tiny kitchen, a cluttered twin of the kitchenette of Dee's own apartment. A tall steel mixing bowl keeps the refrigerator door wedged open, its compressor running nonstop. A few dozen empty boxes of cherry Jell-O are piled atop the kitchen table.

 

Black Cherry perches on the kitchen counter, feasting on the last scraps of Bernie's—Bee's—flesh she is willing to eat. Pheromones of fear befoul the meat. Cannibalizing Bee for his collagen was no picnic. "But I did it, Master," she says, slurping down wobbly bits of gristle.

 

Dee's revulsion overcomes the sleep paralysis swaddling him like wet cotton. "Why, Cherry? Damn it, why?"

 

"To be strong for you. Strong enough to fuck you. To beat you." She sucks the dregs of marrow from a cracked femur. "To please my Master whether he likes it or not."

 

After a few final, lingering licks, she bites the thigh bone in two, chokes down one half, and drops the other into the garbage disposal in the kitchen sink. She flips a wall switch and the disposal coughs to life. The femur dances and slowly descends into the disposal, as hidden, dull blades whack it into splinters. "I ate all that I could use," she shouts over the racket. She glances aside, "Well, almost all."

 

She holds up a mason jar with the remains of Bee's manhood. Dee struggles to reach out and throttle Black Cherry's throat, but his arms plough through air thicker than treacle, and the scarlet girl rebuffs them with an impatient wing. He can still speak, however, and opts to scream for a long while before words come out. "Why show me this?"

 

"No choice." Black Cherry shuts off the disposal. "Through the Gate of Ivory, I can't make any true visions or new memories. I have to work within what's inside you already—my memories from before you consumed my novilunium. Plus, it's fun!" She gazes up at him through her eyelashes. "You should see how adorably angry you look."

 

She hops off the counter, mason jar in hand. "Now then, where is…Ah." She plucks up the tin of nanomek in the other hand. "Hm." She contemplates the two containers. "I wonder if the old trick still works."

 

She plunks the mason jar back onto the counter. The gobbets of flesh inside roll and rebound off the sides of the glass. "I just need a little bit of offal." She fishes inside the mouth of the garbage disposal and comes away with a finger-scoopful of muck. She flicks a dollop of the stuff into the mason jar.

 

She tops the top off the tin and a blanket of dread steals over Dee. "My God, Cherry. Don't…"

 

She shushes him and gives the tin a short shake. "No talking during my flashbacks." A slight shower of soft powder drifts down into the jar.

 

"You didn't really do that," Dee says, aghast. "This is a nightmare, a false dream. You're…you're making this up."

 

"Could be," she twitters, locking the top of the mason jar in place. "I think I'll leave this for you, a guardian at the threshold of the underworld. I bet you'll completely forget about it until it's too late, just like in all the stories."

 

Dee presses his fists against his forehead. "Remember, remember. This is important. Forget everything else about this fucking nightmare but remember this."

 

Black Cherry laughs like she will fall apart. "I love loose ends, don't you?"

 

Dee lunges for her but he still moves in slow motion. Black Cherry just laughs again and skips out of the kitchenette into the living room. She skids to a halt. "That smell. I didn't notice it in the kitchen—Bee's fear was too thick—but now…" She turns back to Dee, eyes wide. "I know that smell, Master." She giggles. "It's another me, isn't it?" A frown clouds her face. She swallows her laughter. "No, wait." She tips her head toward the ceiling. "It's her."

 

Dee staggers after her. Black Cherry groans. Wing claws scourge her back, her chest, raising crisscrossed, weeping welts. "There are holes in my mind, Master." Beads of brandy bleed down her legs. "Glittering caverns filled with the shadow of memory. I am newborn but there are echoes of something older, far older." She hangs her head. Her bangs fall over her eyes and she sobs, "I'm so confused. I'm so alone."

 

Dee reaches for her shoulder. "Cherry."

 

Black Cherry glares up at the lime-stained ceiling, defiance shining through sanguine tears. "I should be alone." A wing claw stabs upward. "She should not be here. It's all wrong." She sniffles, hiccupping giggles. "You made a mess of things this time, Master. But I will fix them for us."

 

She strides to the living room window, wrenches it open, and scuttles out. Wing claws punch through aluminum siding for purchase. "Come along, Master. I mean for you to see this through."

 

The dream-world shifts around Dee. He drifts three stories up in the middle of the night air. Black Cherry suspends herself upside-down above an apartment window. She peeps through, her face illuminated by a jittering electric glow.

 

Dee's heart is in his throat. "Galatea?"

 

Black Cherry grips the windowsill with her hands, and pries the window open with one long claw. Inside, the sliding window lock rips free of the frame and clatters to the floor."If all your neighbors are this cute, Master," she remarks, "I won't have to eat many more of them." She swings to the side to let him see.

 

The living room behind the glass is not his own, but he recognizes its occupant readily enough. Dee breathes, "Oh, no.

 

"Viggo."

 

Evan Jelly On

 

Linoleum bathroom tiles and specks of caulking and tumble upward in zero g. Fixtures and walls melt into wisps of menthol. Black Cherry brushes the drifting detritus away with an flick of a wing. "There are two gates of Sleep," she recites, skimming a finger across the page of a fusty tome, "One said to be of horn, through true shades given gentle passage."

 

She licks the pad of her thumb and flips the page. Dee knows she reads from the Aeneid, although he cannot remember why he knows. Black Cherry grins at his confusion and holds the book out to him. Pages have been cut away to make room for a faded, four color comic book. "Classics Illustrated," she winks. "Is this how you BS'd your way through college?"

 

She returns to reading, "The other gleams with the whiteness of polished ivory." She pauses, raises a brow and harrumphs. "But through it the gods of the dead send false nightmares to the world above." The book snaps shut. "Bingo."

 

Dee and the scarlet girl stand before on a rain-slick city street before a front door cornered off by red velvet rope. A sign above the door proclaims Lux in pale neon. Black Cherry flits over the rope and cracks open the door. Piano music spills out into the night. She whirls about and sings, her face a mask of sly delight, her soprano sparking and pitch-perfect:

 

I've just read of Cleopatra

The glamorous empire shatt'rer,

Who to Caesar lost her heart as well as her head,

But that stingy old Rotarian

Gave her nothing but one Caesarian,

So she fell in love with Marc Antony instead.

To worship two men in turn may be sublime,

But, oh, it's Hell when you care for both at the same time.

 

 

She twitters and dips her head through the door, one leg raised behind her butt. "Not the sort of ivory I was expecting—where do you get this stuff?" She peeks back at Dee.

 

Dee's speech slurs, his mouth feeling full of peanut butter. "Innernet."

 

 

In Dreams I Slink with You

 

"Master." Black Cherry writhes on the linoleum bathroom floor. "I'm in you now." She swallows food coloring and stains herself green, absorbs her wings to provide her slender body some heft, but she has no real talent for mimicry. She resembles a garish and gloppy copy of Galatea.

 

She rises, sighing, "I'm in you." The coloring fades and the va-va-voom curves dwindle as rubied wings sprout from her back. "I've been in you for hours, now, remember?" She shuts her eyes and pops open her mouth, tipping forward. "You took my tongue, so that I might speak inside you." Her mouth lies hollow and empty. "You drank of my breast, so that I might touch your soul." She cups her coquette's breast, watching the last of the green tint fade from her flesh. She stands with the wings of a bat and a cardinal's colors. She winks an abyssal eye. "Not very romantic, but the magic was there, wouldn't you say?"

 

She looks right at you. "You're dreaming, Master."

 

She spreads her wings and pirouettes on the toe of her candy-apple red Mary Jane clog. "Finally!" Her wings ignore the dimensions of the crowded bathroom, as things often do in dreams, and fly wide. "I thought your green whore would never let you sleep." The buffeting air is redolent with sex, and the unmistakable scent of baking cookies. "I thought she knew better." She winks, shrugs, "Her loss," and wing claws longer than daggers and sharper than any swords slice through the air.

 

There is no pain, only a gentle chill as the claws pierce your skull and meet with a click somewhere behind your eyes. Black Cherry frowns in a moue. "Well, that didn't work." She pivots her chin, inspecting with her light-swallowing eyes. "Something's keeping me out. Is it you?" She smiles, a proud pet-owner. "Are you really that strong, to keep me out, even now, when I'm so close?" She holds up a length of black braided rope, tied up in white ribbon. "Even when I have this?"

 

The knowledge comes to you now fully-formed, as if you always knew, a dream back-story slotted into place. The rope is Ursula's hair. Over ten years worth of growth. Ten years worth of work: an hour in the morning, an hour in the evening with…

 

          [gates]

 

…combs of horn and ivory, every day, sitting at her…

 

          [altar]

 

…vanity, gazing into her own eyes reflected back out at her from a century-old…

 

          [ scrying]

 

…looking glass. She performed this…

 

          [ ritual]

 

…compulsive routine, twice a day, every day, for ten years. The subtlest knife could not cut the bond tying Ursula to her…

 

          [ talismanic]

 

…trademark braids, any more than losing a limb makes someone less of a person. Black Cherry holds Ursula's life and power in her hand.

 

"Caught up?" Black Cherry asks. "Good. Whatever the reason, I can't get into your microcosm—your mind. I'm stuck here, in your imagination." She takes in her surroundings with a knowing smirk, and you realize everything has changed as she muses, "What an odd place."

 

 

 

Jambalaya

 

Tomoe whistled through her teeth and returned Unyx's tail-tip to the flower bed. "C'mon, Jo." Tomoe stood, flipped her hair out of her face. "We gotta go." She blinked and added, "Me oh my oh."

 

Unyx yanked hard on her own braids. "What do you mean we can't cum? We're so horny we'd have a screaming orgasm if that girl in Starbucks just looked at us funny."

 

"Get used to it," Raspberry smirked.

 

"Orgasm burns nanomek," Key Lime said as if that explained everything.

 

"Big fucking deal," Unyx hissed, scraping her bottom lip with her teeth. "We've got plenty." She had never felt so ripe with novilunium.

 

Raspberry cackled and fell to her knees beside Unyx. "You ain't got squat." She wormed her way between Unyx and Key Lime, aiming for the cleft where Unyx's thighs melding into a single ophidian trunk. "Yet." She kissed Unyx's glistening, ebony labia into her mouth, and exhaled with exquisite tenderness.

 

Jo reached for Tomoe's proffered hand. A few feet away, Unyx gasped and rolled her eyes over white. Jo asked, "What's going on?" Then she stood for the first time since she had entered the flower bed. The hem of the coppery dress, which had first hung loose around her ankles, now draped below her knees. She reeled on her newly statuesque legs. "Whoa."

 

"'Whoa' later," Tomoe insisted, taking Jo by the arm. "We need to reach minimum safe distance. Like, right now." She paused. "But don't forget your fifteen dollar, okay?"

 

"Nyx is used to running on empty," Key Lime said as Raspberry's nether kiss lingered and Unyx whickered and babbled. "You have only begun," Key Lime said, stepping over Raspberry to bump noses with Unyx again. "To feel half of the way we feel." She palmed Unyx's alabaster cheeks. "All the time."

 

"Please," Unyx said. Raspberry's nether kiss went on and on, suffusing Unyx with that same quintessential-but-chained power, and those billion shining wires coiled into springs of sexual tension bordering on agony. "Please."

 

"Don't cum," whispered Key Lime, and filled Unyx's mouth with her breathy kiss.

 

While Dee Is Sleeping

 

"Lookin' good, Jo."

 

Jo Echo woke from her doze in the flowerbed. "Tomoe, right? Unyx said to call you Tomoe."

 

Tomoe smiled down at her, nodding. Rivers of black hair flowed over her shoulders, spilling down and piling atop Jo's chest. The exotic metallic fabric of Jo's coppery dress, stretched to its limits over what Jo resignedly considered her "newly huge boobs," conducted the tactile sensation of Tomoe's hair kissing across its surface perfectly, perhaps even amplified it. The newly huge boobs' newly monstrous nipples stiffened, tenting the material of the dress that Jo would find uproarious if she were watching it in a porn flick instead of feeling it on her own chest. The fiery tingle made her feel powerful yet haywire.

 

Jo still moped. "I'll never play volleyball again."

 

Unyx snoozed beside her, her ebony serpentine trunk trailing away through the flowers. She treated Jo to a radiant, close-eyed, sleepy smile. "Mm, look in a mirror before you quit the team for good, 'kay?"

 

Jo moved to brush Tomoe's hair away but found herself stroking it instead. Totally haywire. So why don't I hear any blood music? Jo heard herself murmur, "Where'd you come from?" Christ, did I just say a pick-up line?

 

"Here and there." Tomoe shrugged one shoulder. "But just now?" She raised one hand. Unyx's tail-tip was woven between her fingers and wagging like a puppy's. "I believe I was invited."

 

Unyx stretched, her mouth forming a little O in a yawn so adorable it made Jo’s mouth water. She smacked her lips and sat up, arms lazing over her ophidian thighs. “Hello, Tomoe. What are you grinning at?”

 

“Your face. I know that face.”

 

Unyx arched a brow and her liquid black latex raccoon mask flowed out to fill it.

 

"That’s a meliae-jism O-face." Tomoe’s teeth flashed. "SB gets it all the time." She turned back to Jo. "So I guess those are for me," she said, gazing down at Jo’s nipples pointing up at her face, "from you, not Black Cherry." She leaned down until her lips were inches away from Jo’s own. "How do you like them apples? Or should I say cantaloupes?"

 

Oh, God, maybe she’s right. I’m so confused. What do I do, what do I? Jo blurted, “I have fifteen dollars.” I solicit her like a hooker? Where the fuck did that come from?

 

Tomoe sat back, her smile unreadable. "Really?"

 

Jo blushed and stammered so it was Unyx who nodded and said, "Three five dollar, even."

 

"Well, now," Tomoe said, and glanced over to the tree where her purse still hung, "I just so happen to have a few things you might be interested—"

 

"Unyx," Raspberry interrupted, swaggering across the bed toward them, her face plastered with the smile of someone serenely satiated. "I think the phrase is: 'It's time.'"

 

"Dammit," Tomoe huffed. "What does a girl have to do to earn five dollar around here?"

 

Jo had not seen Raspberry up close before and was mesmerized by her beauty: skin of amethyst, lavender hair in gentle curls like thousands of orchid petals, a face of classic perfection—"Well, fuck," said the mouth in that face, glaring down at Jo and Tomoe, "did the Titty Fairy hand out extra cup sizes when I wasn't looking?"

 

Tomoe sat up and stuck out her chest. "Yep." Her boobs bobbled. "Jealous?"

 

"Nah." Raspberry knelt by Jo's side, opposite Unyx. "I love the feel of being held in one hand." Jo felt very crowded and her blush deepened. Without ceremony, Raspberry reached down, plucked up Jo's hand and plopped it right atop one ample, amethyst breast. "What do you think, solid girl?"

 

"I…I…" Jo fumbled but Raspberry encouraged her to squeeze, pressing her hand over Jo's. Gel-flesh dimpled and flowed, surface firm but substance softer than any living thing Jo had ever felt. "Wow."

 

"Ha!" Raspberry let her hand fall. Jo lingered, fingers questing, until Raspberry's nipple hardened into a glassy pebble, snapping Jo out of her fascination and back into embarrassment. "Eurydice's gunna like you," Raspberry said, and Jo could not tell if her tone was threatening or promising. "A lot."

 

"Where is the Titty Fairy anyway?" Unyx asked, twisting on her trunk. "The yang-bath's long gone."

 

"You mean Eurydice?" Raspberry asked.

 

"No. Dee." Unyx's raccoon mask flowed wide and she laughed in a fast, breathy voice. "Dee – the – Titty – Fiary – hee!"

 

Raspberry hooked her thumb behind her. "Green Man's taking a little nap. Well deserved, for once. The man said he'd spew a bucket of spunk, and, by God, he delivered." Jo felt a little flurry of panic when she followed Raspberry's pointing thumb to the other side of the flowerbed and glimpsed a strapping, Junoesque woman of green and gold swaying toward her. "I mean," Raspberry continued, as the green and gold woman drew near, "he totally crashed his yoghurt truck. I am absolutely stuffed."

 

Jo had lived in a house crammed with gaggles of girls for three years now, but even when she was a freshman and they slept two-to-a-bed, it had been routine. There had never been any real tension, no moments worthy of writing up in Penthouse Forum letter. But surrounded on all sides by women possessed of such confidence and sexuality so unearthly it would be comical, Jo felt ready to write a Forum special exposé. Jello girls, snake-women, and amazons. It should be downright laughable…but not when it's happening to me.

 

 

Key Lime Pie

 

Jade arms, inlaid with gold, proceeded down CeeCee's throat as Eurydice rose to her feet. CeeCee's wide neck bulged only a bit. The amber woman rumbled her pleasure. A pale mint green flush bloomed in her chest.

 

"How does it feel?" Dee asked when Eurydice's elbows melted into CeeCee's mouth.

 

Eurydice swayed, her eyes dreamy. "Wow." She stood with knees bent and pressed her ass back against CeeCee's crotch, grinding to some slow inner beat. "So gentle." Gold filigree twisted about her thighs. "Oh, Dee, it's like the slowest, softest orgasm you could ever imagine." CeeCee loomed over Eurydice and the green girl's upper arms dissolved between CeeCee's jaws. "Is this how you felt?" CeeCee wolfed down Eurydice's hair one blade at a time, and Eurydice had to fight giggling and gasping with each chomp. "When I ate you…Ah! I mean, tried to eat you?"

 

Raspberry's cock-ringing fingers started an idle stroking. "Can't help it," she muttered. "Jeebus, I love this dick."

 

Dee's heart hammered. "N-no," he answered Eurydice, "not like that."

 

"Like this?" Raspberry smirked, and enfolded Dee's dick with both hands.

 

Dee juddered as she jacked him. "Yeahitwasalotmorelikethat."

 

Eurydice started to admonish her: "Raz, be goo—Ooh, God." But CeeCee latched onto her head. Eurydice spun around, squashed her curves against CeeCee's marshmallowy substance, her face upturned for a fierce, moaning kiss. Dee heard Eurydice's muffled squeals of delight as she scissor-kicked off the ground, launching the last of herself into CeeCee's absorbing flesh. CeeCee staggered backward, stunned by a meal so eager to be eaten. The mint flush plumed her breasts and neck.

 

Raspberry wrenched her hands away a hairsbreadth before Dee reached the point of no return. "Nah," she said. Dee twinged with denied release. "From now on, you're cumming in our cunts or not at all, got it?"

 

Dee sat up, fascinated by the spectacle before him. The mint tint spread across CeeCee's body, transmogrifying all that it touched. Her spongy, matte cream-flesh jellified, developing a shimmering surface tension of milky green gel. Her belly flattened as internal fluxions redistributed the mass of her meal. Her waist tapered and legs lengthened. Her chest swelled, breasts riding higher and firmer as her shoulders climbed higher. She's ripening, Dee decided, as her hourglass figure ballooned up and out, growing ever taller and more pronounced. The two curviest girls on the planet decided that wasn’t enough. Her neck smoothed into an elegant pillar, her regal visage dimpled into a heart-shaped face with a cherubic leer. Loose curls of tea-green hair tumbled down her back. Her canary yellow gemstone eyes darkled into heliodor, the rarest green and golden beryl.

 

Dee gaped. "Holy shit."

 

"Why, hi," drawled Key Lime Pie.

 

 

Raz-Nasty

 

A fluttering tongue replaced Raspberry's teasing thumb as she screwed her mouth onto Dee's knob, her hand swiveling around his shaft. Her jaw was muscular, her teeth sharp. Dee felt the sweet sting of flowing precum grow stronger. Raspberry groaned in depraved delight. She pressed her ass atop the bridge of his nose and humped his chin, coating his face and neck with runny purple honey. She slobbered up his cock in earnest, her hand slick around its root.

 

Dee lanced his tongue into her sex. A muffled, guttural chuckle rose in her lavender throat. She gyrated in furious little circles, grinding her clit against his chin. Her lips latched around Dee's glands, her fist blurred around his shaft, pumping faster and sucking harder until Dee's orgasm crested and crashed through him.

 

Raspberry cackled as Dee came, her face split into a jack-o'-lantern grin. She aimed his prick at her gaping mouth and painted her tongue and lips with spurts of silver. Her thighs clenched and relaxed around his head, aftershocks of her own orgasm. She smeared his spunk around her lips with her fingers, ran her tongue over her teeth, and laughed with a mouth full of cum. "Ha! Now I can get started."

 

Dee's unbelieving outcry—"Wff?"—was swallowed by her pussy and his deflating dick vanished down her throat.

 

The Contest

 

"You heard me," Eurydice purred before treating herself to a mouthful of half-hard cock. "'Oo canth handle the dich. Wah'ch dis…" She deep throated Dee with a greedy hum.

 

Raspberry wrenched Dee's dick from Eurydice's mouth. "Dee," she said as Dee writhed and gasped. "Have you ever noticed Miss Cum-Chugger here has only one blowjob Technique?" Her lavender fingers wormed around his lime-lubed root.

 

"There's more than one?" Dee panted, dick responding Raspberry's administrations. Two fingers, he thought, she just using two fingers. Raspberry push and pinched. Exhausted, still in afterglow, Dee found himself growing hard. I think I'm in trouble.

 

"Thousands," Raspberry hissed, wrapping her hand around his reborn erection. She went cockeyed as her lids slid shut. "Jesus fuck that's solid." Her thumb stroked up and down his shaft, never touching the crown of his glans. "This is no dick, this is an honest-to-shit, solid fucking rock."

 

"Nothing tops the Bowling Ball Through Eight Feet of Gardenhose Technique," murmured Eurydice. Dee thought he heard an undercurrent of triumph in her petulance and knew he was in trouble.

 

Raspberry sighed, chewed her lip, and rolled her palm over the head of Dee's dick like she was polishing a doorknob. "I know limes've got the greatest cunts but nobody, nowhere has a mouth like mine."

 

Deep trouble.

 

Eurydice tipped her head, met Dee's anxious gaze. He had never seen a smile of more wicked mischief in his life. "Go through them all, Raz," she said, "I'm sure Dee'll tell us whose Technique is best."

 

Deep, deeeep trouble.

 

 

Chapter Six Preview

 

"…Well, Dee?" Eurydice was asking, punctuating each word with a surreptitious, molten kiss on the tip of his dick, sparking jolts of afterglow. His hips twitched, trying to turn aside out of instinct, but Eurydice clamped her thighs around his knees and held his legs fast in a professional wrestler's lock. "Is it time?"

 

Raspberry squished her nectarous sex onto his chest. Her ass slid over his nipples as she craned her neck to leer at him, her elfin ears wiggling in an expression both girlish and incredibly lewd. He could see Eurydice through Raspberry's lavender, translucent tummy. The green girl was gazing cross-eyed at his cock, coaxing his erection skyward with little kisses and burning exhalations.

 

He glanced up, his head pivoting in Tomoe's lap. Her face, framed in a massive mane of raven hair long enough to tickle Dee's nose, loomed high above huge honey brown breasts. She winked, gave his neck a little squeeze with her legs, and his head was trapped in a tree-trunk vice.

 

CeeCee stood beside her, contemplating a plucked sunflower, its dinner-plate sized head filled with thousands of sticky seeds. Her mouth yawned and she popped the entire flower in her mouth, seeds, petals, three-foot stalk and all. She munched, looked about as if searching for something else to eat until her eyes fell on Dee's crotch, and she mimed an expression of dawning, hungry discovery.

 

Eurydice gave a polite cough. "I said, 'Is it time?'"

 

Tomoe, CeeCee, and Raspberry stared at him. A gentle breeze stirred the flowers of the green bed. Dee gulped, "Um. Maybe?"

 

Dee felt Eurydice stiffen, then relax. "Raz," she commanded, "shut that man up," and sword-swallowed his cock.

 

"Yes, ma'am!" Raspberry saluted, slipped her slick ass up and over Dee's neck and chin, surmounted his nose, and sat on his face.

 

 

 

Nyx Fix

 

Ursula's inner eye buoyed into the sky. Her body sprawled on the road below. The last vestige of Nyx, a dome of jet black on otherwise faded asphalt, liquefied and flooded up Ursula's kicking legs. The lustrous coating gave Ursula's skin and angular profile the perfection of a masterwork sculpture of flawless black granite. "I wish I had taken off those stupid blue jeans," Ursula sighed. "I bet our legs look fantastic."

 

"Ursula…" The voice was mellow and warm. "Ursula…" It was fatherly and familiar. "Ursula! You will go to the Dagobah System." It was Alec Guinness.

 

Ursula's adrenal gland was stuck in the body flopping on the pavement far below her mind's eye, but she still felt an insurgent urge to jump out of her skin. "Wah!" Her point of view spun, taking in the road, the roof of the jeep, Eurydice on all fours and impaling herself onto Dee's cock, and the blazing, mid-morning sun. She was alone in the air. "Wait. Dagobah System?"

 

"Ha! Kidding, kidding," said Obi-Wan Kenobi's voice. "It's me, Galatea. I left a little bit of nanomek in your head—" Ursula spluttered and swore but the voice continued without interruption "—to give you a message in case the shit hit the fan. If you're hearing this, it means you've gone astral and I'm in trouble, so you need to—"

 

hello – hello – where – did – you – go – ah – there – you – are – hello – hey – um – getting – crowded – got – company?

 

The disembodied voice of Alec Guinness paused. "What the fuck was that?"

 

"You said were just recorded message," Ursula accused.

 

"I am," said the voice, growing edgy and strangely modulated, "but…" jesus – ha – it's – a – lime – ha – ha – get – in – the – cranium – ha – ha – ha! "…That's really freaking me out!" Galatea cried out her bewilderment in her usual fiery alto. "What's going on?"

 

Ursula wrapped herself in blanket of smug silence before speaking. "You're the uninvited guest, Galatea, not her, so you explain yourself first."

 

"Oh, all right," Galatea grumped. "But we talked about this already, remember?"

"I wasn't expecting any of this." Ursula's point of view righted. "I can handle the astral-body stuff better now, thanks to your coaching, but how the Hell are you out here with me?"

 

"Damn," said Galatea's voice. "I thought I'd explained this bit. You said it would be okay. And this message is running out of nanomek fast. Playing around in here costs a bundle." yes – Ursula – yes – so – strong – your – mind – is – so – strong – your – body – so – sweet – come – back – and – feel – me – fuck – you – please – sweet – strong – please! "I gotta be honest, Ursula," Galatea confessed. "You're new girlfriend's creeping me out. Anyway, I asked you to give me, a newbie me, a message from me, the old me, in case something bad happened to me, the whole-me. That message was me, a kinda mini-me. See?"

 

"Uh, yeah," Ursula said, her point of view bobbing in a cameraman's nod, "that's the part I didn't understand the first time, either. Sorry."

 

"When I mindfucked you," Galatea explained, exasperated, "I left a little message-web and a big wad of energy, a backup magic battery and a message in a bottle explaining how to use it. This message-web almost gone, now, you know. Just a few thoughts left."

 

Ursula mused, "A backup magic battery? A big wad in a bottle? But you said you recharge your magic by fucking Dee's brains out...Oh my God, you put Dee's sperm in my brain!"

 

ew – ew – ew – um – no – wait – hold – on – magic – battery?

 

"Don't be silly." It was Galatea's turn to be smug. "You don't put sperm in your brain, you put it in your—" found – it – found – it – lime – thank – you – found – it – just – enough – keep – me – going – keep – me – fucking… "Hey." Galatea grew faint. "That's not yours."

 

"Nyx, no," Ursula insisted. "The, uh, power level of that battery must be so small."

 

Galatea's furious screech echoed as if from miles away. "It's over nine thousand!"

 

"Okay." Ursula astral-shrugged. "Maybe more than a little. Still, Nyx, don't waste it fucking yourself to death." worth – it – worth – it – worth – it – to – thank – you – to – love – you… Ursula aspired into the air, stunned. "Nyx…"

 

"It's easy to for people like us to die for love, little sister." Galatea's wistful, distant voice crackled with static. "Ursula wants you to take the harder path."

 

don't – understand – don't – want – to – stop – want – to – thank – want – to – fuck – want – to – love… Ursula focused on the source of the whispery non-speech. While Galatea's astral message emanated from the surrounding air, Nyx's words flittered from somewhere deep within, from between the eyes and beside the heart. "Live for me, Nyx." will – try – will – live – will – love – live – love – oh – love…

 

Galatea's voice strained even as it broke apart. "It…yours…lit…sister. Ursula…tell…love him. Tell Dee…no matt…happens. I love…always." And Galatea was gone.

 

so – sad – so – strange – Dee – cute – kind – caring – but – too – solid – almost – stolid – yuck.

 

 

I Remember Eddie

 

The paperboy pelted down the narrow steps to the Epsilon Sorority House basement, satchel of soggy newspapers bouncing off his flat, newsprint-smudged ass. The pizza guy and Eddie followed close behind on the single-file stairway. The cable guy, his work-clothes little more than strips of cloth stuck to his sticky skin, hesitated at the top of the stair, set his jaw, turned and stood his ground.

 

Eddie poked his back into the wood-paneled stairway, his face a blotchy patchwork of lipstick, bites, bruises, and vaginal juices. "C'mon, man! We don't have time."

 

"You guys go on," the cable guy said, his voice flat. The hordes of horny E-Z sorority sisters searching for them in other parts of the house sounded muffled but were getting closer. "It's too late for me." He adjusted himself. "And I can buy you a couple of minutes."

 

Eddie squinted up. The cable guy stood rigid, but Eddie could not read his body-language just from looking at his butt. "What the Hell, man?"

 

"I have erectile dysfunction," the cable guy answered in that same flat tone.

 

The pizza guy and the paperboy crowded Eddie at the stairwell's bottom. "Could've fooled me," the pizza guy said as the paperboy looked up, puzzled.

 

The cable guy sagged. "No, it's true. It's just not something I talk about. Even got a prescription for it. Never thought I'd need it, but I put one in my wallet, just in case." The rampaging Easies were close enough to pick out individual voices. The cable guy called over the rising noise, "Remember when I fell back on stairs, when we were headed for the second floor?"

 

"Oh my God," Eddie whispered.

 

The paperboy shrugged. "What?"

 

"I took it," called the cable guy. He adjusted himself again and stepped into the upper hall. "So get going."

 

The paperboy shouted from the bottom of the stairwell. "Took one what?"

 

"Viagra," Eddie said, his face ashen. "He took a Viagra pill. His hard-on'll last another three hours, or until his heart stops, whichever comes—uh, happens—first."

 

The pizza guy blinked back tears. "I'll never forget you, man."

 

The paperboy choked back rage. "You selfish bastard."

 

Eddie ran back up the stairs, grabbed the stairwell door. The cable guy took a few more steps into the hallway. Somewhere down the upper hall, a girl cried, "There he is!" Eddie and the cable guy exchanged a knowing glance. "Look at that, he's still hard," gloated another girl, "and just standing there." The cable guy nodded.

 

Eddie slammed the door to the stairwell shut, trapping the cable guy in the upper hall. He battered the doorknob until it he heard the mechanism inside crack. He hobbled back down the stairway, cradling his throbbing fist, where the pizza guy and delivery boy looked on in horror under a single, bare light-bulb. "Keep moving," Eddie ordered.

 

"What are we looking for?" the paperboy asked, casting about. An unfinished cement corridor and assorted basement clutter stretched in either direction.

 

"Storm cellar door," Eddie answered. "A huge-ass building like this has got to have a storm shelter. Right?"

 

The pizza guy nodded his agreement, then glanced up. Something thumped against the door at the top of the stair. "Did they get the extinguisher again?" The thump developed a steady rhythm and the pizza guy paled. "Oh, shit. That's his ass. C'mon kid." He clapped the paperboy on the shoulder. "Let's not waste the time he bought us." He led the paperboy down the left-hand side.

 

Eddie picked his way over steamer trunks and boxes of bric-a-brac to the nearest doorway: laundry room. Frilly under-things hung everywhere, a panty-raid mother load. Eddie shuddered and moved on, the hallway growing darker as he moved away from the stairwell. "You guys find anything?"

 

"Storage closet," called the paperboy.

 

"World's largest collection of old Cosmo mags," said the pizza guy.

 

Eddie found the next door. He rattled the rusty knob. "Please, God," he muttered, testing the door with his shoulder, "don't tell me we got all this way and the storm cellar's locked."

 

The paperboy's voice drifted down the corridor. "What the fuck is that?"

 

Eddie spun. The paperboy and the pizza guy stood at an open door at the far end of the corridor. They were bathed in a pale green light. "What's going on?" Eddie asked, hustling over as fast as he could.

 

"Is it," the pizza guy wondered, staring into the door. "Is it even real?"

 

Oh, no, Eddie thought. He heard the flickering buzz of florescent lighting as he approached. Light shone from the doorway ahead, but something inside cast hundreds of scintillating motes of lime-colored light over every surface in the hallway, as a giant, green disco-ball hanging from the ceiling in the room beyond. Please, no. He reached his two companions as the paperboy took his first step into the room. Eddie peeked around him. One look was all he needed.

 

The paperboy started, "Maybe it's just a sta—" but Eddie yanked him back.

 

"It's not," Eddie hissed. "Don't touch it. Don't go near it. And whatever you do, don't point your dick at it."

 

"All right, all right." The paperboy massaged his shoulder, then narrowed his eyes at Eddie. "But you know something. Something you're not telling us."

 

Eddie blocked the doorway and the contents of the room beyond. "It doesn't matter. Either way, we've got to get out here, right?"

 

The pizza guy moved to the paperboy's side. "You've been here the longest, and I just realized I you never told us how you got here." He folded his arms, making them dance with flecks of viridian light. "So what's your story, Eddie?"

 

"I don't have a story," Eddie insisted. His eyes grew accustomed to the eldritch illumination. "I'm just Eddie. And trust me, I have no fucking idea what's—the storm door."

 

The pizza guy blinked. "Say what?"

 

"Behind you," Eddie said, pointing. Now that his vision had adjusted, he could see the short stairway leading to a canted metal door. "It's right there. Guys, we're getting out of here."

 

The pizza guy turned. "Holy shit. You're right. We made it!" He marched up the stairs.

 

"I'm still a virgin," the paperboy insisted.

 

Eddie rolled his eyes. "Only in the strictest sense."

 

"Yeah," the pizza guy said, pushing on the door, "you've done things today that'd make Bill Clinton blush. Or give you a medal." The door creaked and moaned as metal strained against cement. "Eddie, give me a hand with this."

 

Eddie hopped up the stairs. The pizza guy shoved one side of the storm door. A sliver of light zigzagged down the stairs as the heavy metal door shifted half an inch before falling back. "It was just held by a sliding bolt," the pizza guy laughed, "but it's heavy as Hell."

 

Eddie shouldered up against the other side of the door. He turned to the pizza guy. "On the count of three?"

 

"Sure," the pizza guy answered, "but we're, you know, buck naked."

 

"So?" said Eddie. He gave the pizza guy a celebratory punch on the shoulder. "We're outta here!"

 

The paperboy mounted the foot of the stair. "Hurry up, guys, that thing in there's giving me the creeps and, well, a boner."

 

"One," Eddie said, shifting his weight. He grinned like an idiot.

 

"Two." The pizza guy tested his handhold on the door.

 

Eddie breathed deep. "Three!" He pushed.

 

Both sides of the door flew open, hinges squealing and sparks flying. Eddie and the pizza guy belly-flopped onto the grass. Eddie squinted in the sudden flare of sunlight until a long shadow fell over him, coasting wide to cover a huge swath of the lawn, as if cast by an encroaching alien starship.

 

"Oh, hello, Eddie. You've made a friend, I see. That's good."

 

Eddie punched the ground. "No, no, no." He turned his head. "I was so close."

 

Red Mary Jane jelly clogs skipped through the grass, stopping inches away from his eyes. "Aw, I'm sorry, Eddie. Was your friend close, too?" Eddie looked up at a pair of luscious legs the color of a cherry creamsicle. "Don't you two worry. I'll help you finish."

 

Black Cherry swooped in. Eddie's stomach dropped. She flipped him over onto his back with one wing claw, pinned the pizza guy's arms to the ground with the other.

 

The pizza guy glared, murder in his eyes. "What did you do, Eddie?"

 

Black Cherry clucked, poking and prodding the pizza guy as if inspecting ripening fruit. A pair of long, black, braided hair extensions dangled from one of her hands.

 

The pizza guy hissed, "What. Did. You. Do?"

 

"Nothing." Eddie choked back tears. "I did nothing. I…I showed up for work."

 

"And I'm so glad you did, Eddie," Black Cherry said. She stood up, hands on hips, chest outthrust. "Because I'm starved."

 

"What the Hell's goin' on?" The paperboy tromped up the storm cellar stairs and into the sun before his eyes nearly popped out of his head. "Oh, fuck me."

 

Black Cherry tipped her head, the miniature pair of wings above her ears pricking up. "Okay!"

 

 

Ladies First

 

Yves applied pressure to the pommel, felt the resistance of SB's most tender flesh. SB's fingers trembled over his. She spread the petals of her sex with her other hand. "Yves," she breathed, and opened herself to him.

 

His heart slamming in his chest, Yves pushed down on the rubicund pommel. SB clawed his chest, kicked against the blanket. "Yves!" Her labia enfolded the pommel. Pungent nectar drizzled around the hilt, the blade towering above the both of them. She led him to angle the scimitar down.

 

"Deeper, Yves."

 

Balancing the weight of the scimitar delicately in his hands, he eased the hilt in. He realized he wasn't breathing. SB screamed his name and threw her arms around his neck. She curled and huddled beneath his chin. The sword slipped further into SB's core and Yves felt a subtle shiver and shift in the contours of the rose girl's body. She felt more sleek, angular, and hard against him. Between his fingers, the scimitar began to burn.

 

Even though Yves hovered only inches away, even though Yves watched agog as it happened, even though Yves' hands were wrapped around the scimitar as it coarsened and thickened, the exact moment of transition—the moment where Yves could say, before it was her sword, and now it was her cock—escaped him, or maybe never truly occurred. One minute Yves was fucking an Amazon with the hilt of her own sword, the next he was jacking off a dickgirl with the biggest prick on the planet.

 

The potential power locked in SB's scimitar was a flickering candle compared to the flamethrower of her cock. Yves adapted to her size quickly, using the hollows of his palms more than his fingers to tease and squeeze her shaft. SB convulsed and groaned with each stroke. "Yes. God. Yes. God! Ye—No. Wait. Wait!" Yves threw his hands in the air, dragging one last shuddery cry from SB.

 

"Jesus Christ," Yves growled, standing with fists clenched. "I want to make you cum." He gritted his teeth in a mirthless, horny leer. "Is that so much to ask?"

 

"I need you," SB said in an alto voice so deep it bordered on baritone. She rolled over onto her stomach, the pillar of her erection forcing her up on all fours. "I need you inside me." She scooted backward, pressed her ass against his groin until their balls touched. "And you know what they say, Yves." She threw him a shameless smile over her shoulder. "Ladies first."

 

 

Swordplay or Foreplay Preview

 

"Have it your way, then," SB growled and kicked Yves' left knee out from under him. Yves toppled backward. SB brought her blade whistling down at Yves' exposed neck.

 

Yves rode his collapse into a controlled tumble. SB's pink scimitar sank into the sodden earth. "You're quick," SB said, wresting the scimitar from the ground, whisking it high and behind her head. "Damn quick for someone who says he's not a superhero."

 

Yves sprang to his feet, pale sword ready in a two-handed grip. "Victory is not getting cut." He found his center and sought a Kamae, a kendo fencing ready stance. "That's not superheroic," he said, thinking, This is no kendo match and she isn't holding a shinai staff. "That's just smart." He tipped his blade up, and entered a textbook perfect Water Kamae, reciting, "If you've thought of cutting, it's too late to cut." Her grip is tight. She's not ready. Don't move until you see it. "You must have already cut when you think of cutting."

 

SB's fingers relaxed. The scimitar's haft slipping a hairsbreadth downward.

 

There. Yves angled his blade a few degrees, its tip pointed at SB's eyes. Now.

 

SB swung her scimitar down in a lethal, blurred arc. Yves was already moving, closing the distance to level the advantage of an overhead strike. The scimitar accelerated downward. He rotated his own sword. The scimitar rebounded and SB dropped back. Sport-drink red sweat beaded her bare breasts. Yves rotated back to his Water stance and waited. "Your banter is pretty pithy," SB snarled, this time bringing her blade low and back, "for someone who say's he's not a superhero."

 

Yeah, why the Hell am I bantering? "That's just my inner Dee talking," Yves said, and, feeling as uncertain as he sounded, he shifted his stance and lost his center.

 

"I know you're a superhero, Yves, and I know that you know. Want to know how I know?" The pink scimitar swept up and out. Anticipating a feint designed to push him further from center, Yves risked a sidestep—but SB swiveled her hips and double-feinted, her huge blade whirring faster than Yves thought possible. He walked right into an upswing about to crack open his chest like a book.

 

His thumb prickled. There was a screeching noise of glass grating against glass. Without thinking, Yves had leaned into the fatal swing. The scimitar grinded over the flat of his pale blade until the guards of both swords clicked together. Yves and SB stood nose-to-nose save for the swords locked together between them. "I know you're a superhero, Yves," SB said as she strained to break the lock and earn the riposte, "because despite all your training, all that muscle memory telling you to strike after each defense, you haven’t even tried to cut me yet." SB narrowed her eyes, her face slick with sport-drink sweat. "Only the good guys are dumb enough to do that."

 

Yves hissed, every ounce of his strength pouring into his effort to hold the lock. "That's not it." SB arched a brow and Yves conceded, "Alright, that's not just it."

 

The swords squealed in protest as their wielders forced them a fraction of an inch one way, and then the other. SB gritted her teeth. "What else, then?"

 

Yves began, "This is…" SB yanked the scimitar's guard away and Yves dredged up reserves of stamina he did not know he had to clamp the pale sword's guard down hard, locking the blades again. "This is so fucking hot," he gushed.

 

 

The Big Reveal

 

"Holy shit," said Yves when SB finally rocked backward. "The only times I've ever cum that fast and hard before, I've been by myself." SB tried to laugh but only gasped for air. Yves asked, "nanogasms?" SB nodded, eyes crossed, and Yves added, "You just gave me a massive macrogasm, SB. You deserve more than a little blood music." Yves sat up, bare chest filmed in sweat, and eyed the mammoth bulge in SB's dress. "Why aren't you naked?"

Yves reached out, one hand following the distending curve of SB's dress. SB's hard-on grew and throbbed, wider than Yves hand, beneath his touch. I only caught a glimpse of her at the store, he thought, taking the hem of SB's dress in both hands. SB bit her lip as Yves sat close, drawing her dress upward. I know she's huge, Dee said she was ginormous, but how big could she possibly—"Ow," Yves said, as the head of SB's dick bopped him on the nose.

 

Yves gawked at a candy-red cock-head, polished in maraschino-cherry precum and bigger than his fist, crowning three feet of rose-red shaft. It looked crystalline and fleshy at the same time. Veins like chiseled rose quartz somehow pulsed with life. SB worried her lip and searched his face with anxious eyes. Her childlike pout put Yves over the edge, and he laughed so hard he had to hold on to the sides of his head.

 

"No one," SB muttered, then shifted and raised her voice over Yves' delighted cackling. "No one has ever laughed at my dick before. Ever."

 

"Why not?" Yves wiped tears from his eyes. "It's amazing. You're amazing, SB. I mean, look at you. You've got the biggest penis on the planet and you're still insecure. If a three foot cock can't make a dickgirl feel confident, mortal men are doomed."

 

The Seduction of Yves III

 

SB scooted around to Yves's side and kissed him. This time, Yves returned the kiss and took her in his arms. The giving flesh of her lips and toned expanse of her back felt as firm as any man or woman's, but her silken touch, her summery smell, her salty-sweet taste were beyond exotic, almost unearthly. SB broke their kiss and Yves, breathless, rested his forehead against hers. "I think I understand Dee a bit better now," he said.

 

"So," SB said, sitting up and daubing oil on the tip of Yves' nose. "If I'm not seducing you…" She massaged the oil across the bridge of his nose and around the orbits of his eyes. "Then what am I doing?" She swabbed his temples and forehead and Yves breathed easy; he had never felt more clear-headed in his life.

 

Yves thought about it as SB rouged his cheeks. "You're anointing me."

 

SB grinned and glanced aside, as if remembering some private joke. "I'm a-knighting you."

 

"I thought you knighted someone with a sword."

 

SB's introspective grin turned downright wicked. "That comes later." She finished her handiwork on his face and sat back to admire it.

 

The oil tingled on Yves face as it dried. "Glass armor," he remembered. "You're armoring me. Outfitting me? No." He found the right word and it both thrilled and chilled him. "You're girding me."

 

SB leaped close, her third kiss hungrier than the last two combined. "Lie down, Yves," she said, voice low. "Lose the pants."

 

The Seduction of Yves II (Electric Boogaloo) Unproofed

 

Every bit of Yves ached, from his brain to his balls down through the balls of his feet. He wondered if any part of him, body or spirit, had escaped torture in the past twelve hours. He doubted it. "My arms are a little sore, yeah."

 

SB rolled her eyes, goosed Yves' cheek, and unlatched the jar lid. "Hold out your arm, then," she said, scooping a small dollop of jam onto one finger. The vibrant, almost angry red of the jam contrasted the soft rose hues of her translucent flesh.

 

Yves offered up his arm. SB placed the open jar beside them on the picnic blanket, gently rotated Yves' hand palm up, and smeared the red stuff on the pad of his thumb. It tingled. A droplet streaked down into the cup of his palm. Yves frowned.

 

"Your skin is warm enough to cook it into oil," SB said as more tingling syrup pooled in his hand. She held him by the wrist, and rubbed her thumb over the strawberry smear on his hand, working it into the skin, tracing the flexor tendon anchoring his thumb. Her gaze fixed on his hand, SB added, "You okay?"

 

"What do you mean?"

 

"The color." She gathered Yves' hand to her chest, smoothing the stuff over his palm with both her thumbs, then sliding her thumbs around and between his fingers. "Before it cooks into oil, it kinda looks like blood."

 

"You mean, do you remind me of Black Cherry?"

 

SB looked up from her ministrations, squeezing each of Yves' fingers in turn. "Well?"

 

"You're nothing like Black Cherry," Yves insisted. SB pressed the flat of his oiled hand against her cheek. Yves smiled, "You want details?"

 

SB dipped a finger into the jar and massaged more jam into Yves' wrist. "Just a couple."

 

"You'll have to give me a minute."

 

"Why?" SB slid her fingers up his forearm.

 

Yves sighed, eyes closed. "I just want to...feel this, for a while." The soothing tingle stretched from Yves' fingertips down to his elbow. The muscles of his hand and forearm were as butter, all tension gone. SB found a potent pressure-point and a clarifying calm stole over Yves. "Black Cherry's dark currents give her that horrible, arterial red look," Yves heard himself say. "Yours is the red of rosé wine. Black Cherry felt like clay, wet cement really. Raz and Eurydice felt like living, standing waves. You feel, well, real." He opened his eyes. SB paused, her hands encircling his upper arm. "With my eyes closed," Yves explained, "I can't tell that you’re meliae. Just someone who wears a summery cologne. Uh, I mean perfume."

 

SB stroked the length of Yves' oiled arm. Yves resisted the urge to purr. "I'm not built like other goo girls. I'm organized."

 

Yves eyed the crowded crotch of her dress. "That's apparent."

 

"Stop," SB breathed. She gave him a playful push, planting a strawberry-red stain over Yves' undershirt. "Or you will really start sounding just like Dee. I've got internal structures. Check this out." SB flexed her right arm. Her toned, oval muscles bulged. "This bicep is not just for show. Striated pectin. Go on, check it out."

 

Yves reached out, prodding cautiously at first, but growing bold when his fingers only dimpled SB's upper arm. "Wow. Do you work out?" Oh, Jesus, Yves thought, wincing, what am I, twelve?

 

"My nanomek do." SB rolled her shoulders, inhaled. Her round breasts jutted against her fiery dress, nipples erect and obvious and inches away from Yves' fondling fingers. "Wanna feel my pecs?"

 

I haven't been this close to second base with a girl since high school. Yves flustered and flushed. SB winked, nabbed his arm and slathered it with a healthy gob of tingly jam. "You sure are generous with that stuff," Yves said.

 

SB laughed. "I've cum into possession of a dumpster full of it." She swallowed a bark of laughter and oiled Yves' arm in a bashful silence before adding, "Thanks to you."

 

Pain and stress vanished under SB's touch. Yves allowed himself to purr. "Mrr. Just what is it, anyway?"

 

"Have you ever heard of woad, Yves?" SB asked, swirling her thumbs over his elbow.

 

"Only as the past tense of the Keanu Reeves verb, 'to whoa'," Yves joked. SB smirked but said nothing. "It's a dye, blue or something, right?"

 

"Or something, yeah," SB said. She leaned close to massage his upper arm. Yves felt her breath on his neck. "Anyway," SB began, "the ancient Britons painted themselves before a battle. They needed no other armor."

 

A memory clicked into place. "Like Braveheart," Yves said.

 

SB froze, then snorted, "Nothing like Braveheart." She went to work on his shoulder. "I'm talking aboriginal Albion, Yves. And it wasn't blue, either. Julius Caesar called it vitrum." She shook her head in reverie. "Julius. Now there's a guy who knew how to spend five denarii."

 

"Vitrum," Yves repeated. He knew his Latin roots from years of applied science. "Glass." He raised his free arm. The glaze of massage oil blazed in the sun. "Glass armor."

 

SB's eyes danced, her voice edgy with urgency. "Take off your shirt, Yves."

 

 

The Seduction of Yves

 

The rose-color Aston Martin supercar growled down an abandoned road, little more than a narrow strip of potholed hardpan dusted with gravel. The supercar's engine groused at being kept in such a low gear. Yves shot a sour look into the rearview mirror and the engine's grumbling grew self-conscious. "I want to go fast," the engine said. "Can't help it. Not when you're behind my wheel, driving me like that."

 

Yves maneuvered the supercar through a rusted-open, chain link fence. "Like what?"

 

"Like 'wow'," the engine chuckled, a strange bubbling sound. "Like I want to scream, 'Floor it! Floor it!'"

 

Yves shook his head, bemused. "You are every red-blooded American male's wet dream, SB."

 

The engine mumbled, "I seriously doubt every." The drove down the old gravel road in silence and second gear before the engine affected an overblown fake orgasm. "Ooh! Ah! Floor it! Floor it!"

 

Yves laughed hard enough to bring his headache pounding back to life. "I can't. If I did, we'd drive right into the reservoir." The road curled into a dead end behind a wide grassy bank. A fallen, weatherworn sign insisted upon no fishing without a county permit. "We're here. And you still haven't told me why you wanted to come in the first place."

 

"You need to relax." The supercar's engine noise dropped into a subsonic purr. The driver's seat thrummed against Yves' neck and the small of his back. Yves yawned, headache gone. "This place is pretty relaxing, isn't it?" the engine asked.

 

A thick wall of pine trees circled the bank. The reservoir stretched out ahead of them in a great, flat bowl. The early afternoon sun reflected of the dark water in flashing triangles. The grass grew wild and tall, cutting off sight of the road, completing the illusion. "It's amazing," Yves confessed. "A mountain loch in the middle of Middle America."

 

"Reminds me of a bend in the Durance River," the engine whispered, "a long time ago."

 

Yves left the stick in neutral and engaged the emergency brake. "So what do we do now?"

 

The engine cut out and the driver's side door popped open on its own accord. "We get the fuck out."

 

Yves hopped out and ambled down the sloping bank. He heard a metallic sigh behind him. He bent at the water's edge, hunting without success for a good skipping stone, hearing SB's swaggering walk rustle the grass behind him. When he stood up, a strong hand slipped around his shoulder, fingers firm and cool. A breeze carried the scent of wild strawberries and cotton candy. "How do you feel, Yves?"

 

Yves stretched. "Deliciously sleepy."

 

Those slim fingers pat him on the back. "C'mere, Yves."

 

SB wore her signature one piece dress. The bright sunlight painted her in fiery shades of red and gold. She knelt onto a wide tartan picnic blanket, patted the spot in front of her. "Come on down."

 

Yves tapped the blanket with a sneaker. "Is this you?" He hoped he sounded more curious than nervous.

 

"It's of me," SB explained, "but it's not me. I've locked it, it's just a thing." She smoothed out the blanket. "Well?"

 

Yves sat cross-legged before her, inspecting the tartan textile. "Soft."

 

"You'd be surprised the kinds of things you can make from sugary carbohydrates if you're working on the sub-molecular level." SB read Yves' expression and added, "Okay, maybe you in particular wouldn't." She shifted, her cheeks darkening to a true crimson. "What're you looking at?"

 

"You're eyes," Yves answered. "It was recently pointed out to me that I do not pay close attention to a woman's eyes."

 

"Dude." SB gestured at her lap, where her manhood folded between her knees like a bendy third leg. "Do I look like a woman?"

 

"Do appearances matter?" Yves asked in return, still scrutinizing SB's face. "I thought they were rock candy or some other sugar crystal. Your eyes, I mean. But they're not, are they? They're real diamond."

 

"So?"

 

Yves nodded. "'So' indeed. Diamond's just carbon, after all, less complicated than sugar in some ways." SB's wry smile set her eyes twinkling. Yves nodded again, downcast. "Yeah, I'm stalling. And I don't even know what's going to happen, and I'm stalling. Wow, listen to me…"

 

SB tipped her head. "Yves?"

 

"…I'm taking as much as Urusla…"

 

SB coughed politely. "Hey, Yves?"

 

"…No worse: Dee."

 

SB plucked Yves' head up by the chin. "Yves. You really, really need to unwind." She held up the mason jar of strawberry colored jam in her other hand. "How's about I give you a rub down?"

---

 

The Lamia Thing

 

Unyx's sex was candied gossamer against Jo's tongue. The onyx glossing Unyx's cleft thinned and cozened until her labia flowered black and her clitoral hood gleamed as a black pearl. Unyx tasted of sex and licorice with an undercurrent of sweet liquor so potent it cut through the red rhythm fogging Jo's mind. Jo pulled away from her feast. "Ouzo?"

 

"of – course – what – else? but – please." Unyx's tail, still entwined about Jo's leg, tugged, gentle but insistent. Her gloved hands urged Jo back down. "please – finish." Jo flittered her tongue over Unyx's clit, a bud of electric, black silk. "god – three – Ursula – Nyx – me – we – all – feel..." Unyx thrashed, pushed Jo prone onto the green bed, bundling Jo head-to-toe under her serpentine trunk.

 

Jo reveled. Muscular, python power surrounded her, quivering against her legs, her her arms, her everywhere. The taste of ouzo and sex flooded her mouth. The random spasms soon settled into a slow, steady pulsation, beginning with Unyx pressing her pussy into Jo's mouth. The pressure traveled down Jo's neck, over her breasts, tummy, thighs—pausing to prolong the tender squeeze over Jo's sex—and legs in undulating waves. Jo felt as if she would melt.

 

Then the tip of Unyx's tail glided between Jo's labia majora, moving to the same pulsing beat, and Jo felt as if she would fly. Jo stretched up, hugging as hard as she could. Her arms barely reached halfway around the sleek snake swaddling her. The thick tail-tip nudged and nuzzled but would not penetrate. A greedy, empty need yawned between her legs. Jo arched her neck, the back of her head crushing into the green bed, her chin burrowing into Unyx's sex. She screamed. She begged. "Fuck me. Oh, God, fuck m—" The tail-tip slid into her, in perfect time with the beat. "My-fucking-God!"

 

 

Dee Goes Ballastic

 

Dee rocked up onto his knees, scooping Eurydice in his arms, molding her body against his. Her surface tension was cool, her breath hot and citrus-sweet. "I love you," she said, riding him, "I love you. Cum in me now." She feasted on his neck.

 

Tomoe knelt behind Dee and embraced him. Her sturdy arms stretched over his, followed their path up Eurydice's back. Tomoe's long fingers splayed over his hands, their tips pressed into Eurydice's glistening gel-flesh. Tomoe moved closer still. Her thighs packed against his butt, her belly button smooched the small of his back. Her ripe tit mashed into his shoulders, swaddling his neck, even nudged Eurydice where she gnawed on Dee's collar bone. Green, jellied dreadlocks sprawled across Tomoe's breast. Dee was caught in a middle of a three-way clinch. "Cum in her, Green Man," Tomoe said, matching his momentum, twinning his rhythm into Eurydice. "I want to feel it."

 

Eurydice pulled away to look Dee in the eye. "Don't move," she whispered, "and let me fuck you." She hooked her legs under Dee's arms, locked her ankles around Tomoe's back. She tensed her legs, juddered upward, dragging her steaming sex up his shaft until the tip of his cock threatened to pop free. She pressed her forehead against Dee's, chewed her lip, whispered, "Let me fuck you." She squirmed back down, impaling herself with his dick. She gaped, gasping in little high pitched hiccups, grinding her clit against the root of his shaft before tensing, glissading back up. "Let me fuck you, let me make you cum." Dee groaned, but Eurydice covered his mouth in quick little kisses. "Shh." She kissed him. "Shh." She kissed him. "Cum in me now."

 

Tomoe reached down, cupped Eurydice's ass cheek in one hand, pawed at Dee's dick with the other. Eurydice slithered back down Dee's dick. Tomoe explored the gooey margin of Dee and Eurydice's merging. "I feel it," Tomoe said, fingers squishing. "So strong, both of you."

 

Eurydice shuddered back up him, coaxing a building, agony-sweet flow of precum from Dee's cock. Her lips scraped past his ear and kissed Tomoe's nipple unto her mouth. Tomoe leaned over Dee's shoulders, her purring a deep rumble in her throat. Her hand swirled around Dee's nectar-coated shaft, her grip firm and sure, in counterpoint to Eurydice's slow, shivery humping.

 

The head of Dee's cock smarted with rising pressure. He faltered, bucking, but Tomoe pressed even closer behind him and kept his cock buried deep inside Eurydice. The green girl pulled free of Tomoe's breast. She grazed her lips in circles over Dee's mouth. "Let it happen," she begged, panting and fevered and still humping, humping, humping. "Cum in me. Fill me. Green Man, Dee…You've made me…" Dee twitched, pressure searing inside him. "…You made me so…" Dee went rigid. Eurydice sobbed, "Happy."

 

She slammed her mouth over his and he came.

 

 

Jo Versus the Volcano

 

Jo rolled onto her back, panting. The early-afternoon Sun high in a cloudless sky reflected off the flowers and Jo's borrowed coppery dress, casting everything in the light of an overexposed film. The breezy air above the green bed was sultry and so laden with floral perfume Jo felt awash in the breath of Mother Nature herself. If Mother Nature was horn-dogging, that is, because the sumptuous, soupy warmth that stewed the air and lapped at her skin like some huge, invisible, feather-light tongue was feeling her up and eating her out.

 

["…Listen, Jo: Dee's focused his kuzbu…"]

 

A bass voice thundered—"What. Is. My. Fucking. Name!"—followed by exultant twin cries—"Green Man!"—and Jo suddenly knew that the ethereal, energetic presence urging her toward another orgasm was, somehow, male. Not Mother Nature, she thought, her eyes sliding shut, her lips parting, drawing in air as thick and spiced and intoxicating as hot mulled wine. The Green Man. She hitched her dress up above her hips, spread her legs and opened herself to the Sun.

 

["…but when we step into the crop circle, you'll feel it full-bore…"]

 

Jo saturated. She lost herself in the Sun' dazzling white-blue light, the overpowering aroma of blooming growth, and the firm pressure of satin petals on every side and inch of her skin. Flowers pressed whispery soft into her ears, stroked her hair, nestled in the hollow of her neck, buoyed up her arms, nudged her back and ribs. Her parted legs were swallowed up in thousands of delicate, cool petals. How are they all pushing toward me, into me? Are they moving? Her eyes flickered open as the revelation struck her. The flowers were not moving against my skin. My skin is moving against the flowers. I really am growing!

 

["… It's going to be a bit…"]

 

The dizzying torridity of the air pervaded her pussy, and Jo's last coherent though before the strongest orgasm of her life lashed through her was, Oh shit oh fuck oh God I was right Calgon's taken me away and is fucking me sensele—

 

["…intense…"]

 

Her orgasm plateau'd and overflowed her pulsing sex, wracking her body in spasm of release and relief. Jo no longer thought, only felt. No longer observed, only experienced. Flower stems piled up between her fingers as her arms grew, pulped under her feet as her legs lengthened, her heels furrowing little troughs into the green bed. As her orgasm rushed-and-gushed, her muscles burned-and-rebuilt, over and over, as if a few years of volleyball workouts flew by in a few seconds.

 

As Jo came down from the timeless cumming, a terrible tenderness built up in her breasts. The coppery dress that felt so flowing and silky moments before had become confining and as scratchy as the shaggiest, wool knit sweater. Jo shot her hands under her dress, shielding her raw nipples against the ragged material with her palms. Skin met skin. The cooling sweat in her palms soothed her tender flesh even as it spread beneath her fingers, pushing against her hand in a bizarre, reverse game of cop-a-feel. My tits are trying to get to second base with my hands. The very idea filled her with giggles, but they died in her throat as the gradual pressure against her hands went on and on for a long, worrying while before subsiding.

 

She snuck a peek at her new peaks. She looked like someone had shoved two metal mixing bowls under her dress. The coppery material strained but managed to cover her new assets. The tension in the material only served to make her look bustier. Only served…wait a minute. "Oh, no!" She thrust her arms skyward, ignoring the new power sinew beneath her skin, watching only how her breasts bulged around her arms. "No, no, no!" She straightened her arms until they were perpendicular with her supine body, wincing as her tits squashed up her forearms.

 

An undulating shadow fell over Jo. "what?"

 

Jo squinted up at Unyx. The obsidian goth girl stood in the Sun, her outline obscured by the harsh light. "My serve," Jo told her.

 

Unyx dipped her head to the left, bowed her body to the right in a single, serpentine movement. With the sun in her eyes, Jo could not make out details, but she saw something loop and ripple behind the obsidian goth girl. your – what?"

 

"My volleyball serve," Jo whined. She pumped her right arm back and forth, making her right breast smack into the left. "I had the best underhand serve in the state. Now I've got…tits."

 

Unyx slithered closer and out of the sun. Her eye-mask shrank into black contacts. The tip of her tail swung to and fro high behind her head, a hypnotic metronome. "At least you've got…legs."

 

 

The Totally Organic Experience

 

"Pfft." Tomoe broke through the wall of tall heliotropes, eating out an overripe sunflower head. Her eyes fell on Dee's heaving, sweat-oiled back, and the flower head slipped through her fingers. "I've got a bigger fish to fry."

 

"Now or never," Unyx said, giving Jo's hand a quick squeeze.

 

Jo's hand froze. "Sorry." She squeezed back. "You just feel so, I dunno…"

 

Unyx wiggled her fingers between Jo's. "Slinky?" Jo bit her lip, nodded violently, eyes shut tight. Unyx's liquid black eye-mask unrolled across her skin, coating her face from eyebrow to sharp cheekbone. "just – let – it – happen."

 

Hand in hand, Jo and Unyx crossed the border of tall grass onto the flowering green bed. Both girls startled stiff, then relaxed into little giggles. Unyx knew the sensation exactly. When Ursula was ten years old, her parents had thrown her a surprise birthday party. They had executed it flawlessly, with a feint party, a little weekend soiree with a few friends and modest presents, the sort of party Ursula always had. On her actual birthday, they took her to the community center for violin practice, and instead there was candy and friends and candy and cake and candy and presents and a magician and candy and a belly-dancer and candy. It was simple, pure delight. Ursula had never felt that way again, had forgotten what uncomplicated pleasure—cake and friends and dancing and candy, candy, candy—could feel like.

 

Unyx felt it now. She cast any thought of nostalgia aside, let go of Jo, and embraced the air. "candy – candy – candy."

 

"Cumming," Jo groaned, knees buckling, dropping into a crouch among dozens of apple-blossomed amaryllis, their wide, white petals pinked, their fragrance head-spinning sweet. "Cumming, cumming, cumming." Her hair softened, thickened, its knots untangling. Licks of hair the color of antique brass fell into her face and onto her shoulders in luscious waves. The bruises on her arms and legs disappeared. "This is a yang bath?" she gasped, lolling through the flowers. "Oh, God, I feel so good." Her coppery dress cinched up, revealing a downy bush of golden curls and nether lips pouting and dewed, perfumed with floral fragrance and Jo's own earthy essence. "But it's so…so goofy." She giggled again, pushing blushing flowers into her face. "Calgon's taken me away and plans to fuck me senseless."

 

"this – yang – special." Unyx's blood rushed as Champaign. The scar on her cheek faded into nothing. The gray cobwebbing her second skin vanished into varnished lacquer-black. "good – goofy – sexy – senseless – guiltless." The blood music of nanogasm coruscated as nanomek replicated by the hundreds in her heart, then by the thousands throughout her chest, and tens of thousands across her limbs. Almost a hundred thousand nanogasms sparkled inside her, each one producing its own tiny burning wire of coiled, pre-orgasmic tension. Unyx had never felt this horny in either of her lives. "this – yang – is – dee."

 

Jo hummed drunkenly into a bouquet of crocus flowers, then pushed herself up by the elbows, her eyes wide. She reminded Unyx of a befuddled kitten, ears pricked in curiosity. Jo glanced down at her chest, teased open the neck of her dress with a finger, and peeked inside. "I'm…growing."

 

Unyx's laugh was rich. "definitely – dee." The nanomek singing inside her found her stomach, read the binding, and turned cranked Unyx's blood music volume up to Eleven. "uh – oh."

---

 

Dee broke his endless kiss, his mouth wet with tart honey, lips numb with the tang of lime. His senses swam in citrus-and-sex. His knees settled further into the mattress of flowers and woven wild growth. He gripped Eurydice's ankles, held them aloft. Eurydice, flat on her back, pushed on the green bed with her hands. Her pelvis rocked forward and rolled up Dee's thighs, welcoming the new angle his cock explored inside her. Her pussy was molten but her surface tension stayed firm, cooled with honeyed perspiration. Dee ran a hand up a leg as firm and clear as green glass, mouthed the sole of her foot, drinking drops of nectar. Dee arced his other hand beneath her, cupping and caressing. Her ass felt like globes of pliant glass dripping with velvet sweat.

 

Eurydice mewled—Nn! Nn!—punctuating each quiet cry with a punch of a fist against the bed. "Too good. Nn! Too much." She yanked on her hair. "Mad, I'm going mad!"

 

Dee tipped her chin up. Silvery motes of light scintillated her deep, darkling emerald eyes. "I love you, Eurydice," he told her, his rhythm into her slow but as strong as ever. "You know the safeword." The words came easy to him. "You can do anything you want. I'll do anything you want." His prick felt primed with precum, with the I-can-do-this-all-night sensation that usually only lasted a few minutes but now truly felt it would last forever. "Anything you want. For as long as you want."

 

Eurydice whickered in orgasm. "All ways! Always."

 

A shadow fell over her. Behind him, Tomoe whispered, "Oh, hey." Dee felt long fingers dance over his back, urgent, and eager. "Green Man."

 

Dee sat back, pulling Eurydice along. He stayed locked inside her, a hook perfectly fit into an eye. Tomoe sat on her knees behind him. She towering a good head above him, the tips of her raven hair tickling his ass, her mocha-colored nipples level with the nape of Dee's neck. She chewed her plush bottom lip. "Please, I just…" Her hands pressed flat but trembling against his back. "I want to hold you. To feel it for myself, just this one time." She tilted to look down at Eurydice, and implored. "Please."

 

Dee turned to Eurydice. "Anything you want," he told the breathless green girl, and smirked. "I'll do anything you want because I am so going to fuck your fucking brains out." Dee snarled, gathering Eurydice up in his arms, propping her into a sitting position on his lap, before dropping one hand to the green bed and slinging the other across the small of her back. He pushed up with his hand and haunches and his cock rammed straight upward into the very heart of her. "Now: What. Is. My. Fucking. Name!"

 

Tomoe fell against his back just as Eurydice, cumming and yowling, collapsed on top of him. Tomoe and Eurydice shrieked together, "Green Man!"

 

 

The Tomoe Show

 

"Aren't we all." Unyx took Jo by the hand, felt the brunette thrill at her touch. "C'mon, let's get started." She urged Jo toward the green bed. She almost asked, What's your name, Jo?, but caught her self just in time. "What's your name?"

 

"Jo." Jo wavered on her feet. "What're you going to do?"

 

Unyx sighed. The sounds of the fallow field played around them: Tomoe's throaty laughter, Raspberry's shuddery growls, Dee's fucking Eurydice insensate. "You said you heard Black Cherry in your head," Unyx told Jo. "What did it sound like? A walkie-talkie?"

 

"No." Jo thought. "It was like singing. Music. Not beautiful, but irresistible. I was dancing, all the time, no matter what I was actually doing. It felt like a mad dance."

 

"Blood music," Unyx agreed.

 

On the green bed, Tomoe grabbed her breasts, kneading and tweaking her chocolate-dark nipples between her long fingers. She inhaled, deep from the diaphragm. Her nipples climbed erect, thick as thumbs. The flesh beneath her hands swelled, forcing her fingers apart. She collapsed into laughter again, her tits weighty enough now to slam together, which just made her laugh harder.

 

Unyx gulped. "Uh, what were we talkin' 'bout?"

 

Jo, mesmerized by Tomoe's mammary extravaganza, managed, "Music. I think."

 

Tomoe rolled onto her tummy, presenting Unyx and Jo with her pert ass, and squashed dozens of flowers beneath her breasts. Her laughter slowed but her breath quickened as she dragged her new flesh through the sea of soft petals beneath her. She reached between her legs, pressed the smooth heads of tulips and poppies against her inner thighs. She swallowed the last of her giggles, pulled down her panties, and pushed the silken but firm flowers into her vulva. She rocked on her knees, gasping and shuddery, grinding against flowers and fingers, giving Unyx and Jo front-row seats.

 

Unyx swam lightheaded, her sex aflutter and flood, her nanomek heating up with prickly need. Her Ursula half had never felt a nanomek powered sex drive before—little burning wires by the thousands—her Nyx half had never felt an estrogen powered sex drive before. Got to simmer down before we just leap in and bury our heads in that big, juicy ass and that glorious pussy oh God we can smell it from here… Unyx burned some of her last remaining nanomek to increase her olfactory input and wallow in the smell of flowers and sex but the brunette's funk hit her inner Martha Stewart like a combo brick wall/cold shower.

 

"So," Unyx said, wrinkling her button nose, "blood music. That's Black Cherry's nanomek—you called it 'nova-whatsis'—inside you. There's just enough for you to hear, but it’s not loud enough to pinpoint the source. We gotta turn up the volume inside you a little bit, but not too much, then we can go in and turn it off. Understand?" Tomoe drove herself to a silent orgasm before them, brawny legs locked rigid, "Understand, Jo?"

 

"Uh. Huh?" Tomoe slumped into the blossoms and Jo came out from under her spell. "Oh. Yeah. Turn off the music. Sure." She turned. "What the Hell is that?"

 

Unyx held up a page torn out from the Sudoku book, covered in cryptic scrawl. "It's a binding." She smirked. "We've got a few tucked away in case of emergencies."

 

"Binding? Binding what?"

 

"We are going to bind ourselves to ourselves."

 

"Us?"

 

"No. Us. M-me. Unyx." The obsidian Goth girl touched a thin but long scar on her cheek. "Ursula and Nyx were in a car accident. They were close—Ursula inside Nyx, Nyx inside Ursula—but not close enough. To survive the crash, they sang the blood music—together. And now, we are Unyx. But if we are going to stop Black Cherry's music…" Unyx's contacts of living ink seeped into her eyes then over her lids into a black eye-mask. "you – must – sing – blood – music – with – us."

 

"Whoa, now." Jo hopped away. "You seem nice, kinda cute and sexy…" She looked Unyx up and down. "Who am I kidding; you're the cutest little thing I have ever seen in my life and sexy as Hell—I can't decide what I'd rather do, eat you up or eat you out. But I've had enough nova-whatsis music. I don't want to be a slave to the rhythm anymore. There's got to be another way."

 

Unyx nodded, ripping the page in two. "yes – separate – bind – Nyx – Ursula – keep – Unyx – Jo – separate." Unyx tore the page into fourths, made a square paper sandwich, and popped it into her mouth.

 

 

 

 

Unyx Exposition

 

Raspberry fell onto her back in the tall grass, knees bent, pelvis pumping, hand twitching against her gushy sex. She spoke through gritted teeth. "We're we supposed to be fucking his brains out right now? All I wanna do, all I can think about is Dee on top of me." Her index finger fluttered atop her clitoral hood. "Dee inside me. Dee cumming in me. It's like I'm tuned into channel Dee-eee…" Her last word stretched into a whine. She clutched at her breast, teasing a nipple erect. "…'Eezus Christ! I don't have enough nanomek left to get off anymore!" She frigged herself sloppy. "It just itches itches itches and I can't cum—just one more orgasm and I'll come apart I know I will, I—Ah fuck I'm goin' bugfuck!"

 

CeeCee quivered at the green bed's threshold. The chaotic carpet of flowers zipped around the bed's periphery, inches from feet the color of fading cornsilk. She held up her hand, and after a moment's hesitation, eased it forward, wincing as she passed the imaginary boundary of the green bed. A flush rushed down her fingertips, sallow yellow revitalizing into sunny lemon. "Raz. Oh, Raz, feel it." Her arm undulated forward, filling up with churning, vivid cream. "It's blood music."

 

Raspberry could only grunt. "Nanomek? Spooge-free nanogasm? Bull-fucking-shit." She squirmed a dainty foot onto the green bed, pinky toe brushing the lips of a blue tulip. Her jellified leg flashed an opaque violet. Raspberry squealed in surprise, yanked her leg back. The dark purple stole up her leg in an undercurrent of swirling inner gel. "Yes! Fuck yes! I'm finally gunna get laid, I'm gunna get Dee. But first…" She sat up, tongue caught between her teeth, finger fucking herself something furious. "I'm gettin' off."

 

 

---

 

 

Unyx braced herself against the tree, her eye-mask narrowing into a horizontal slit. "something — wrong."

 

 

"Oh, hey!" Tomoe's voice almost made Unyx jump out of her skins. "There you are, little sisters. I thought I…um." Tomoe stepped up beside her. "That's…um." Tomoe's eyes followed Eurydice's feet as they traced little helpless circles above Dee's head in the center of the green bed. Dee hugged her legs higher, dragging the green girl's hips into the air. "That's a lot of…" Eurydice's ass bounced against Dee's haunches in wet, meaty slaps. Eurydice could only babble nonsense words and rip flowers out of the ground, roots growing and wriggling about her hands before she let them fall. Tomoe gulped, hands toying with the neck of her blouse. "Kuzbu. Yeah. Lots."

 

Unyx thought it through. "kuzbu — kudzu — Green Man?" She shook her head. "missing — something — what?"

 

"You can't see it?" Tomoe popped open the top button of her white blouse.

 

Unyx's eye mask shrank into contact lenses as she squinted. "We think we see something but we keep getting distracted by the…you know." She blushed, silver on milk-white cheeks. "The Easy girl we're going to start fucking in a few minutes. This space-time/second sight stuff is new to both of us. The whole 'knowing the future but still living in the moment' thing? It's kinda like getting stoned, but nothing's funny and there's no munchies." Her blush darkened into grey. "Not the food kind, anyway."

 

Tomoe rubbed the flat plane of her chest above her breasts, forcing her blouse to fall open in a slanted V. "You're thinking fourth-dimensionally. Go up one more." Unyx set her jaw, head bobbing and weaving as if trying to peer through a crowd. Then her jaw dropped and she wobbled on her feet, grabbing the tree to keep her balance. "There you go," Tomoe drawled.

 

"Yang. Dee's kuzbu." Unyx shook her head. "It's not sperm. Nanomek is pure yin and no yang. But nothing lives without both, so meliae need yang.

 

"Don't we all," Tomoe sighed, taking a step toward the green bed.

 

Dee hooked his thumbs under Eurydice's knees, squeezed her thighs, and bore down into her. Her crooked legs bent back far enough for her tits to rebound off her knees as the shadow of his thick cock disappeared farther into her shining, translucent core than ever before. "What's my name?"

 

Tomoe took another step forward, unbuttoned the second button of her blouse, murmuring, "Green Man," an instant before Eurydice screamed the same reply at the sky.

 

 

Goorgy

 

Eurydice loomed over the convulsing Raspberry. Green honey drizzled down Eurydice's chin onto the lavender girl's tummy. Raspberry's bellybutton ranneth over and a steaming emerald flood washed down the delta of her sex. She squealed, toes wriggling. She held up a trembling hand. "Wait, wait. Eurydice, wait!"

 

Eurydice frowned down. "What?"

 

Raspberry's eyes rolled back. A few wayward pollywogs found her, swam into her, fed her their memories. Raspberry's hand dropped down to her labia sleek with green and purple nectar. "I finally got Dee by the balls." She gulped. "Holy shit, they're ginormous and so full—Jesus, there's no way you could ever fuck all this cum out of him yourself, Eurydice. Share the wealth, ya greedy twat."

 

Eurydice boggled, unbelieving, before grinning a mouthful of knives. She swung about, locked her legs over Raspberry's head. "Oh, I show you a greedy twat alright." Eurydice's face hovered over Raspbery's cleft. Her breath burned hot enough to melt the orchid petals covering the lavender girl's mons into a slurry of raspberry wine. Eurydice's jellied dreadlocks wound tight around Raspberry's thighs. "But first I feel like making some soup." She mashed her face and sex down. Green and purple slithered together in a pneumatic 69.

 

"Well, that's one way to make a raspberry lime rickey," CeeCee said.

 

"So, Eurydice." Dee trotted over, skin glistening wet. "What did you wa–ha–huh?" Raspberry mewled, wrapped her arms around Eurydice's waist, tongue stabbing deep. "Uh, guys? Hey, guys?"

 

Eurydice threw her head back, gasping. Her teeth flashed with pomegranate nectar. "You made her cum first, bright boy. So fair's fair. And when I'm through with her." Eurydice spread Raspberry's sex between two fingers and kissed the lavender, clitoral hood into her mouth. "You're next."

 

"CeeCee," Dee said, stepping over to the kneeling amber woman so that his bare crotch was level with her face, his dick slowly engorging, making her cockeyed. "What's up?"

 

CeeCee's lips squirmed, her jaw trembled, as she shook her head, hissing. "You God damned, teasing motherfu—" She cut herself short, held up both hands, and the air wooshed out of her. She took a cleansing breath, then looked up at Dee, canary-yellow diamond eyes cool and sparkling. "Face it, honey. You've been upstaged. Topping those two tarts is going to take some teamwork. And nanomek."

 

"Dee. " Unyx paced, gray cobwebs fracturing the symmetry of her hard-candy carapace. "no – games – need – nanomek – you're – friends. " She wrung her hands. "you – Ursula – such – friends – such – trust – but –can't – we – can't. " Her eye-mask dwindled until only pitch black contacts remained. The cobwebs marbling her black second skin thickened and spread like a growing mould. "Dee," Ursula mumbled, tearing up, "what are we going to do?"

 

Dee brushed a tear away from Ursula's cheek, staining his thumb with ink. "I'll do what I've got to do." He looked down at his hands, then his crotch, and shrugged. "Got a bucket?"

 

CeeCee and Eurydice both cried, "What?" while Raspberry, smothered in limeade pussy, only managed a "Wff?"

 

Eurydice sat up. "Oh, no." Her juicy green ass pivoted over Raspberry's face, slicker than a quart of astroglide. Raspberry groaned in depraved delight, her arms falling limp as she just lay there, wallowing in the face-fucking. "No, way." Eurydice's gel-flesh tits and tummy separated from Raspberry's surface in a syrupy, slurping wave. She wore a thick, vertical candy stripe of raspberry frosting from her chin to her belly. "If you think we're going to just sit here," Eurydice muttered, rocking, "and watch you play with that glorious cock of Mine while you fill a fucking, mm, b–bucket, with all that, oh, God, all that c–cum…"

 

CeeCee's poker face broke into awe. She rolled up onto her feet, a fountain of creamy yellow sherbet. "You could really fill a bucket?"

 

Raspberry squeezed her head out from between the green girl's ass-cheeks. She wore an avocado facial mask of lime goo girl cum. "Shit on a stick, CeeCee," Raspberry burbled. "Wait till ya feel what that man's got to offer, we're gunna need a fucking bucket brigade."

 

"Shut up, you two," Eurydice demanded, rising, her eyes glowing, her head so wreathed in vapor her she seemed aflame in jade. "Dee, if you think you can tease us like that." She advanced on Dee, fuming. "In fact, if you keep teasing us just one more second, you've got another thing cumming." The sheaves of her quivering hair tickled his chin. "Got that?"

 

The sultry vapor enveloped him, its citris-and-sex aroma stronger than he ever remembered. "Um." Dee grew hard in seconds. "Uh-oh."

 

Eurydice bowed her head, eyes rolling down, her movements liquid and slow. "Alright. That's it." She stepped aside. "Girls, it's time."

 

Dee backpedaled, arms raised. "But…"

 

Raspberry rocketed upright, her borrowed overshirt saturated with psychedelic purple and green hues. "Sweeeet." She swaggered over and grabbed Dee's left elbow.

 

 

Dee protested. "I didn't…"

 

"I'll try anything once," CeeCee said, surging forward and grabbing Dee's right wrist. "Twice if I like it." She glanced down at his thick prick. "Three times to make sure."

 

"But it wasn't on purpose," Dee insisted. "It wasn't my fault."

 

"No," Eurydice said, stepping behind him, planting her hands on his back. "It was Mine. Now march. God, Dee, even your back is rock hard. This is gunna be the best fuck you've ever had."

 

The three girls pushed and pulled him forward. Ursula dropped back, inky contacts spilling out into the whites of her eyes, then spreading over her face in a raccoon's mask. "guys – wait – scared – Dee – looks – scared."

 

Eurydice relented, grinning in reverie. "It's bestest when he looks scared." The three meliae lead him off road. "And he's loving it. C'mon, Unyx. You don't want to miss this."

 

Unyx pussyfooted after them. "Eurydice – nanomek – need – so – much – but – how – what – are – you – doing? "

 

"What I do best," she said, pushing Dee past the copse of fallen trees and into the fallow field of wild grass beyond. "I'm going to fuck Dee." She stood on tiptoe to leer over Dee's shoulder at CeeCee and Raspberry. "We're going to fuck Dee." She glanced back, purring, "and then we're going to fuck the ever living shit out of you."

 

Meanwhile back at Easy House

 

The ivy-choked kitchen window of the Epsilon Zeta sorority house slivered the early afternoon sunlight. Lancets of light tracked over the checker-tiled floor. Shimmering ovals glanced off the brushed aluminum of the industrial-sized refrigerator. A sickle-smile spotlight warmed the residue of cheesecake pudding and raspberry Jell-O caked on the cock of the husky stock boy hogtied to the marble-topped kitchen cart. He shuffled his legs but his skewed smock got in the way, the underwear and workpants bunched around his knees restricted movement. The sugary gunk soaked into his pubic hair, trickled down his balls and greased his taint. He had never felt more befouled in his life.

 

So why the Hell was his dick pointing straight at the ceiling?

 

The swinging kitchen door bumped open. A cute girl in a tight, white spandex tee-shirt and pink hot pants stood in the frame. "Relax," the girl said, "she's not back yet. Something's happened to her."

 

None of the Easies had talked to him before except to relay messages. Messages from her. "What do you mean?"

 

The cute girl scuttled over. The stock boy cringed but the girl only stepped behind him, wrestling with the twine binding his hands to the kitchen cart. "What's your name, kid?"

 

None of the Easies had acted this alert before, either. A little hope bubbled up. "Eddie. What's going on?"

 

"We don't know," the girl explained, tried to unknot the twine without cutting into his wrists. "But she's real low on nova-whatsis. Whatever it is she uses to control us. Do you know what that is, Eddie?"

 

His eyes flicked to the closed tin of SRU thickener, sitting on the kitchen counter in a cluster of torn boxes of dessert mix. "Not exactly. So, are you guys okay? Free, whatever?"

 

"Not exactly," she echoed. "I still can't leave the house. I don't think any of us can. It feels like our feet get glued to the floor. And I can still hear her, sort of, like really loud music but from next door, you know? It's been like this for a while now."

 

"Really? Why hasn't anyone come in here, then? It's been hours. Aren't you guys hungry?"

 

The cute girl paused. "Starved." She went back to work, pulling one knot lose. "Listen, I'm real sorry no one's come to get you yet. But we got you now, Eddie."

 

Eddie got wary. "I heard the doorbell ring. Around 10:30? Were you free then? What was that about?"

 

The door bumped open again and another Easy marched in, licking her fingers. This one wore red leather pants and a black, tasseled jacket. Her thick mane of strawberry-blonde curls exploded out of a FedEx cap perched atop her head.

 

"Dunno," said the girl in the pink hot pants. A second knot came undone. "Must've been a wrong number." She leaned over to stage whisper at the other girl, the front of her tee shirt bussing the top of Eddie's head. "This is Eddie."

 

"O-kay," Eddie drawled. Something was up. Other than his dick. Oh, Jesus, his dick. "Um, would you mind pulling up my pants?" He blushed. "Or just moving the smock? Something?"

 

The girl in the FedEx hat popped a finger out of her mouth. "Now, why would we want to do that?" She sashayed over and sat on Eddie's knees. He could hear the scrunch of her leather pants. She wore no shirt under the jacket, just a racy, red, lacy bra. Tips of black felt gloves poked out from a jacket pocket. "What'cha got there, Eddie?" She twirled her slick finger around his pubic hair and slid a dollop of runny glop between her lips. "Well, phooey. Nothing but goo girl cum. We've eaten plenty of that. We're looking for something else."

 

Eddie tried to shy away, but with the Easy girl in the pink hot pants pushing her tits on his head and the girl in the FedEx hat squeezing his legs between her leather-wrapped thighs, there was no where to go. There's a certain freedom, Eddie decided, in being totally screwed. "I thought you said she didn't control you any more."

 

The girl in the pink hot pants sat behind him and untied the rest of the twine. "She doesn't." His arms fell to the floor, painfully numb. The girl's hands crept underneath his leaden arms. "She can't tell us what to do, not exactly, until she gets more nova-whatsis. So we've been talking. All of us. And as far as we know, there's just one source." Her fingers wrapped around his honey-basted cock and her lips pressed to his ear. "And that's you, Eddie."

 

The girl in the FedEx hat sitting on his knees reached into her jacket and pulled one red bra strap down her shoulder. "We like being free, Eddie." She grabbed one of his hands and brought it against her breast, encouraging his fingers to paw beneath the loose lingerie. Her flesh felt warm and silken. He hadn’t felt a girl up since high school. How could he resist? "Mm, although I don't think we're really free. We still share her instincts, impulses." She cupped his chin. "Appetites."

 

The hands around his goo girl lubricated dick began to pump, slow and lazy. Eddie felt the delicious sting of precum. "Well, whatever we are, we really…" Pump-up-and-squeeze "…really…" Pump-down-and-swirl "…like it."

 

Eddie came in spurts, not even fully erect. The precum sting just got sweeter and sweeter until his cock wept globs of cum. She held his dick, squeezing and kneading. The girl in the FedEx hat sat on his knees, grinning like the Chesire Cat, watching his cum ooze into the other girl's knuckles. She reached into her jacket pocket and snuck out the gloves. They slid onto her hands with a silky sigh.

 

His dick softened a bit. The girl in the pink hot pants stroked up and squeezed, making his whole body twitch. The girl in the FedEx hat reached down, and now there were four hands, two bare, two wrapped in cool black felt, kneading his cock into tingling over-stimulation. The gloved fingers were super-smooth when they glided up, felt like bristles against his cock when they wiggled down. The bare fingers were hot and slippy. In the shock of afterglow, his dick hardened like ironwood. "Wa—wait."

 

The two girls glanced at each other over Eddie's head. "Nah," they chorused, and returned to pumping. Eddie's jism and the glistening goo girl cum were worked into a froth by the action of the felt against his skin.

 

Eddie arched his back and kicked but the combined weight of the two girls was just too much after he'd been bound and bent over for hours. "Wait!" Each squeeze and curl of their fingers made him jolt and judder.

 

"We're tired of waiting, Eddie," the FedEx girl whined, sliming his dick with his own cum. "We want to be free. We need to be free. We need you to be bone dry."

 

"Besides," the cute girl in the pink hot pants whispered into his ear. Their pumping grew fervid and quick. The froth worked itself into the fabric of the gloves. The two girls fisted him, harder and faster. "Want to know what her last command was before she let us go?"

 

Eddie could only whimper, awful afterglow orgasm building.

 

The kitchen door flung open. A wild-eyed, half naked young man wearing nothing but a ragged, FedEx-logoed shirt fell into the room. Many slender hands shot out of the doorway behind him, grabbing up his ankles, calves, thighs and ass. He and Eddie's eyes met. He gurgled, "Run, run," before he was hauled back through the door and out of sight.

 

The girl in the FedEx hat giggled, scooted down, bent over, watching closely as she and the other Easy beat Eddie off to a searing second orgasm. Little pearls of cum splattered her chin. She waited until his cum ran clear and thin as water over her gloves. She and the other girl finally let go. Eddie felt a burn coil unwind in his abdomen.

 

Then the girl in the FedEx hat ran fingers gloved in froth-matted felt over her lips, cooed, "'Frenzy,' she said," and deep-throated him.

 

Unyx Straight

 

Ursula cast about. "They've got to be somewhere."

 

"Your glasses?" Yves asked.

 

Ursula turned in his arms. "Does it look like we need glasses?"

 

Yves still startled each time she—not "she," "they"—moved against him. Earlier that morning, standing together before Bee's apartment, he and Ursula had held hands. The hallway became a sauna and Ursula's hand had felt as warm, clammy, and shaky as his. But that was all before Ursula met Nyx. When he had clambered over the broken concrete beneath the overpass and reached down to help her up—"them," damn it, help "them" up—it was the first time he had he had touched Unyx.

 

Unyx's hand had felt cool and dry, fluid but not liquid and utterly frictionless. He had shook hands with a ghost. He had looked down at her face and saw his own image double reflected in eyes of polished obsidian. No irises, no whites, not even eyebrows, just shining black orbs in a shadow eye-mask in the shape of infinity (∞), a sideways figure eight. One loop of the eye-mask had arched up her milk-white forehead (oO). Yves realized this was Unyx's version of cocking her brow.

 

And then he had blurted, "Ben Franklin!"

 

Now Yves looked into Unyx's black-on-black eyes again. "No, you don't," he said. "Those glasses did look good on you, though. On Ursula."

 

Unyx softened and smiled. "Yeah, they did. We'll have to fix them, take out the lenses, and put in flat glass." The eye-mask dwindled and drained away, revealing Ursula's eyes, except the irises were not hazel or darkling emerald but shining ebony. "I have nanomek contacts now, Yves," Ursula said. "I can see gravity. I'm sorry, Yves, I know this must be freaking you out." She giggled and imitated his voice, "'Ben Franklin!' You still haven't explained that."

 

"Tell me what we're looking for, first," Yves said.

 

"My hair." She touched a pom-pom tufted end of one of her shorn, horizontal ponytails. "My braids. I can't find them anywhere. Not here, not now…" She stared of into the middle distance somewhere past Yves' left ear. "Not ten minutes into the past or future." She ghost-squeezed his shoulder. "We need to find my hair, Yves, or we're all royally fucked. Nyx cut as subtly as she could, but even meliae can’t cut sharp enough to sever such a strong sympathetic connection."

 

"Ten minutes where? Sharp enough to what? Wait, your hair?"

 

"No fair." She shook her head, whacking Yves with her ponytails. "Oops, sorry. I want my answer: Why 'Ben Franklin'?"

 

"Caloric theory," Yves said. Ursula looked blank. "Look, I may have taken English for Engineers in college, but I know my history of science. Ben Franklin thought that electricity was a fluid. Before modern atomic theory, all sorts of stuff was considered to be fluid: electricity, light, heat and cold, were all thought to be fluid but dry. You know: goo. I touched your hand, touched Nyx, and the first thing I thought of was Ben fucking Franklin and his fucking electric-heat goo." Something clicked in his head and his migraine returned with a vengence. "Oh, no, not Ben Franklin. Do not tell me Nyx fucked Ben Franklin in a past life or something. I can't take any more of that kind of crap."

 

 

Unyxian Legions

 

Ursula cast about. "They've got to be somewhere."

 

"Your glasses?" Yves asked.

 

Ursula turned in his arms.

 

Yves still startled each time she—Not "she," "they"—moved against him. Earlier that morning, standing together before Bee's apartment, he and Ursula had held hands. The hallway became a sauna and Ursula's hand had felt as warm, clammy, and shaky as his. But that was all before Nyx. When he had clambered over the broken concrete beneath the overpass and reached down to her—"them," damn it—it was the first time he had touched Ursula after Nyx. And he had blurted, "Ben Franklin!"

 

Now it was Unyx, not Ursula, who glared up at him. "Does it look like we need glasses?"

 

Unyx had looked up at him then, too, when he had reached down to help them stand, and taken their hand in his for the first time since he and Ursula stood together before Bee's apartment. He took Unyx's hand, and saw his own image double reflected in polished obsidian. No irises, no whites, just shining black orbs in a shadow eye-mask in the shape of infinity, ∞, a sideways figure eight. One loop of the eye-mask had arched up her milk-white forehead, and Yves had realized she was cocking one eyebrow at him. And he had blurted, "Ben Franklin!"

 

Now Yves looked down into his own image double reflected in Unyx's obsidian eyes. "They looked good on you. On Ursula."

 

Unyx softened and smiled. "Yeah, they did. We'll have to fix them, take out the lenses, and put in flat glass." The eye-mask dwindled and drained away, revealing Ursula's eyes, except the irises were not hazel or darkling emerald but shining ebony. "I have nanomek contacts now, Yves," Ursula said. "I can see gravity. I'm sorry, Yves, I know this must be freaking you out." She giggled and imitated his voice, "'Ben Franklin!' You still haven't explained that."

 

When he had first taken Unyx's hand, it felt cool and dry, fluid but not liquid and utterly frictionless. He had shook hands with a ghost. And, yes, he had blurted, "Ben Franklin!"

 

"Tell me what we're looking for, first," Yves said.

 

"My hair." She touched a pom-pom tufted end of one of her shorn, horizontal ponytails. "My braids. I can't find them anywhere. Not here, not now…" She stared of into the middle distance somewhere past Yves' left ear. "Not ten minutes into the past or future." She ghost-squeezed his shoulder. "We need to find my hair, Yves, or we're all royally fucked. Nyx cut as subtly as she could, but even meliae can’t cut as sharp as the Æsahættr."

 

"Ten minutes where? Sharp as the what? Wait, your hair?"

 

"No fair." She shook her head, whacking Yves with her ponytails. "Oops, sorry. I want my answer: Ben Franklin?"

 

"Caloric theory," Yves said. Ursula looked blank. "Look, I may have taken English for Engineers in college, but I know my history of science. Ben Franklin thought that electricity was a fluid. Before modern atomic theory, all sorts of stuff was considered to be fluid: electricity, light, heat and cold, were all thought to be fluid but dry. You know: goo. I touched your hand, touched Nyx, and the first thing I thought of was Ben fucking Franklin and his fucking electric-heat goo." Something clicked in his head and his migraine pricked the inside of his head again. "Oh, fuck no, not Ben Franklin."

 

 

The SB Story

 

The scarlet girl flew backward, impaled. She threw her wings around the little car, claws scourging the trunk.

 

Eurydice swore—"Whoa-shit!"—and dove away from the silver Jeep as Black Cherry crashed down. The Jeep's roll cage folded up like a sideways cardboard box. The little rose car disappeared in the vortex of crushing wings. Black Cherry's face contorted in some intense, silent emotion that Yves could not distinguish between exultation or exquisite pain.

 

Scarlet wings ruptured, fell away in splattering petals. SB ascended in the rain of crimson honey, muscles bunching beneath her tight dress, monstrous pink scimitar twirling a glorious arc in her arms. The hooked tip of the blade sped downward, shearing through the carriage of the Jeep. SB yanked back on her swing just as the scimitar's curved edge cleaved into Black Cherry's hair. Black Cherry twittered nonsense words, shut her eyes and chewed on her fingers.

 

SB, rose quartz skin and copper dress plastered in angry red cherry nectar, eyed Black Cherry twitch before grumbling, "Worse than Atlantis." SB hefted the scimitar out of Black Cherry's hair and the scarlet girl fell into a post-coital fit, head rocking and feet drubbing the pavement. Her pageboy bob now bore a perfect, midline part.

 

SB lanced the scimitar down into the asphalt, crossed her arms and propped herself against the sword's hilt. "Well, cousin," SB sighed, "I hate family dramas so I'm going to cut this short." She exchanged a quick glance with Eurydice, who nodded. "Your sister, for some reason, wants to present you with a choice. Do you think you could, just this once, get over yourself, move on, and maybe—Oh, I dunno—try for happiness instead of the usual boiling bunny bullshit?" Severed wings wriggled past her, as flat and wide as Persian carpets, crawling up to bind with Black Cherry's back. "Oh, ew. So much worse than Atlantis. Anyway, you can either cheer up, emo kid, or you and I can keep doing what we're doing now and you can cum yourself to death. Your choice."

 

Black Cherry gulped out, "Who were you?"

 

"Oh, you know, you and your sister fill them with honey." She plucked her scimitar out of the stone ground and slung it over her shoulders. "I bring the milk. I offer them my horn." Her diamond-white eyes flashed at Yves. He felt a guilty flutter in his stomach and heat in his face. "They gift it back," she finished and leveled the scimitar at Black Cherry's crotch. The scarlet girl crossed and uncrossed her legs beneath it. "So what's it going to be?" SB asked.

 

"Tiamat," Black Cherry spluttered. "Tiamat?" SB shrugged, moved aside, but kept her scimitar in striking range of Black Cherry's belly and sex. "Are you going to let her get away with this?"

 

"Oh. Sorry." Tomoe worried an unruly cuticle with her teeth. "There's nothing I can do. Can't interfere, remember?"

 

 

The Back Story

 

Black Cherry twittered, pointing at Eurydice but peering over her shoulder. "You made another one, Master?" She shook her head. "See how replaceable she is. Not like me. There's nothing like me. I'm nothing." Her bravado failed. "I'm alone." She glanced about, desperate and lost. "Be with me." Her gaze fell on Eurydice, darted to Yves and Raspberry, to CeeCee, then Ursula and Nyx, before circling back to Eurydice. "Become me. Name me."

 

Ursula rolled onto her side, reaching for the hem of Eurydice's fatigues. "Hurry. The binding won't last. She's strong." She smiled before slipping back into exhaustion. "Just like you."

 

Eurydice nodded, pulling away the glasses and the hood. Jellied dreadlocks tumbled free. Black Cherry tried to sneer. "So young, he made you so young this time. Just like I remember you." Black Cherry pressed her palm over her mouth. "I remember you? I do." This time, her hand trembled as she pointed. "I know you…"

 

"You know me of old," Eurydice finished for her. "Yes. Things echo. But echoes have never been enough. Not for you."

 

Black Cherry backpedaled, almost tripping herself up on crumbling cement. "I don't understand."

 

"Neither did I at first." Eurydice unzipped her hoodie, molding the pliant garment into a peculiar sash, leaving her left breast bare. "Now that I've seen you, though, everything's so clear. We've done this so many times, you and I." She stepped closer. "But things are different this time. Things can be different, if you let them." Black Cherry only stared wide eyed and silent. Eurydice pressed forward. "You don't have to be alone. Be with us. Become yourself." She held out her hand. "Adrasteia."

 

Black Cherry fumbled backward. "Ide," she gasped, and at first Yves thought she said, I Dee, or maybe, Idly. She bumped into a fallen slab and sat down hard. "It is you, Ide," she said.

 

Eurydice reached out to her, smiling. "Call me Eurydice."

 

"What the fuck is this shit?" Raspberry called out. Eurydice turned and shushed her but Raspberry just stared. "Jesus fuck, check out those tits."

 

Yves whispered, "Nursemaids."

 

"What?" Raspberry asked.

 

"They were sisters," Yves explained. ["...Hello, baby sister..."] "Nursemaids." Another piece clicked into place in the puzzle. ["...No one's ever gone lime first time before..."] "Black Cherry's always been the eldest before," Yves said. "But not this time. That's what's different." Eurydice smiled, opened her hands to Black Cherry again. "Dee made Galatea first."

 

"Wait. Nursemaids? Of what?" Raspberry narrowed her eyes at the ample curve of Eurydice's bare breast. "Buffalo?"

 

"Gods."

 

"Names," Black Cherry said. "Why do you have so many names?"

 

Eurydice's brown crinkled in confusion. "What do you mean?"

 

"Ide," Black Cherry said, and stood up. "Eurydice. Galatea." The little wings on her back flushed red. "Shamhat. Meliboea " Black Cherry advanced, her sneer returning. Eurydice dropped back. "Eglė. Marya." Two curved horns budded from the top of the scarlet girl's head, opening as embryonic wings.

 

"I'm clueless," Raspberry hissed.

 

From her muddle on the pavement, CeeCee said, "We know, honey. We know."

 

Eurydice zippered her hoodie. "Adrasteia, please. I used up so much nanomek just to put myself back together after the crash, just to talk to you. Listen to me, please."

 

Black Cherry tipped her head, as if listening to some distant voice. The wings on her back grew, gorged on blood red gel. "Zeus loved you best."

 

Eurydice shook her head. "You don't understand, Adrasteia."

 

"That's not my name," Black Cherry muttered. The numbers and symbols tattooed on her skin writhed and danced. "Zeus loved you best. Heracles loved you best. Perseus loved you best." The little wings on her head spread atremble. "Dee loves…They all loved you best!"

 

"No." Eurydice fell back against the Jeep. "You can't love what you don't trust. And, in the end, none of them trusted us. Ever. Because of you," Eurydice added, eyes brimming with tears and defiance, "Adrasteia."

 

Rapunzel

 

"Fine," Black Cherry sighed. She unreeled Urusla's braids until the goth girl dangled to the ground. The growing math-tattoo breached the scarlet surface of Black Cherry's wings. Tension gathered in her gel as she prepared a final swing. "Then die."

 

"Do it," Ursula mumbled, eyelids fluttering, eyes rolled back.

 

Nyx craned her neck. One gaunt arm raised, to thin to support a hand. The tapered tip curved into basalt, razor-sharp hook.

 

"If you say so," Black Cherry shrugged, the living tattoo encroaching the very tips of her wings. She rocked her arms back, dragging Ursula along the pavement.

 

Nyx brought her hooked arm down so quick it whistled. She hesitated at the last instant, hook trembling above Ursula's creamy throat.

 

Ursula grimaced. "Do it!"

 

Black Cherry poured power into her throw. Nyx turned her head, and, shuddering, slashed sideways. Black Cherry toppled backward. Ursula and Nyx skidded across the pavement.

 

Yves found his voice. "Oh, God, no."

 

"Did it work?" asked Dee from his hole in the pavement.

 

"Did what work?" Raspberry cried. "Ursula's dead!"

 

"Lookit," Yves whispered.

 

"You fucking asshole." Raspberry's tears burned little holes in Yves shirt. "You should have let me nuke the cunt. I don't care if…"

 

"For once in your fucking life would you just shut your stupid fucking mouth and lookit?" Yves hissed.

 

Raspberry purpled, then turned and lookited. Black Cherry sat up, perplexed. She held two long, thick black braids, one in each hand. They danced in the air, a total six feet worth of plaited ponytail, their ends shorn shear.

 

Ursula propped herself up, blinking sleepily. The remainders of her ponytails stuck out straight from either side of her head for a good half foot before puffing out into moppy tufts.

 

"Well, shit," Raspberry grumped, "She's cuter than ever now."

 

 

Unyx and BC Catfight

 

"Oh, come on," Yves said. Unyx sailed high into the air on billowing, membranous wings. "Everyone's a superhero but me."

 

Black Cherry hunched, hands curled into fists, glaring up at Unyx through her eyelashes. Unyx diped and dove, kite-tail braids whipping high and back. Scarlet arms thrust down and red wing claws snapped up, aiming for the tender flesh below Unyx's ribs. Crimson struck lacquered black.

 

Yves flinched in the agonized noise, worse than fingernails across a blackboard. Needle-sharp tips skittered over the Unyx's second skin. Black Cherry shrieked in shock and pain, threw her wings wide. Unyx bore down unhindered. Talons ripped a gash between Black Cherry's breasts. The scarlet girl's single shriek stretched long without a stop for breath.

 

Unyx's thick-soled go-go boots smacked into the pavement. She wrenched one arm back, drawing out an arc of sanguine gel. She punched out with the other and thwacked the torn page over Black Cherry's jagged wound. The scribbled equations and gridline charts were lost as red nectar seeped into the cheap paper and the page sucked down by the pumping of Black Cherry's red-and-black-swirled inner gel.

 

Unyx rocked her hips and hunkered. She sprung high and away, wings whomp-whomp-whomping and thrashing the air. Her braids flew before her face as she soared backward…

 

Black Cherry lashed out with both hands, seized the ends of Unyx's trailing braids and hauled. Unyx's neck jerked forward and down as her braids drew taught. The snarling scarlet girl smashed her fists into the pavement and Unyx slammed into the ground headfirst.

 

Unyx's thick choker collar liquesced, nictating into a shell over her face an instant before it collided with the ground. Black Cherry stepped over Unyx's twitching form, wings drift over the ground like falling leaves. She wound the obsidian goth's braids around both her fists. The slash in the scarlet girl's chest zippered shut and her snarl melted into a befuddled frown. Goosebumps dimpled Black Cherry's gel-flesh, making her shiver. "What's going on?"

 

The filigree of shadow, the skeins and spirals of Devil's Food pudding permeating her cherry gel, trembled and whirled just below Black Cherry's cardinal surface. Beneath the fading scar between her breasts, the threading black veins bent and twisted into angular shapes and loops before snapping into focus as numbers and symbols in a dozen languages, modern and ancient. Gibberish equations invaded her flesh like a mathematical virus. Tunneling worms of code crept up the curves of her breasts, encircled her dark nipples in even darker lines of sums and symbols before swarming outward. In moments her stomach and neck swam with a motile, growing tattoo inked by a demented algebra student. "What did you do to me?"

 

Unyx pawed the road but said nothing. Equations scrolled into Black Cherry's arms and legs. "I said…" The scarlet girl yanked on Unyx's braids, swung her up and over and back down hard, spraying chunks of asphalt into the air. Black wings wilted and folded up into lumps on her shoulders. "…What did you do to me?" Black Cherry finished her demand in a panicked, high pitched screech.

 

She hoisted Unyx up by the hair to look her eye to eye. The black candy shell around Unyx's face peeled away to reveal Ursula, pale and unconscious. The wings on Unyx's shoulders melted and molded into a second pair of reedy arms, thin neck and blank, egg-shaped head. Nyx emerged to confront her creator.

 

Nyx wrapped her arms around Ursula's neck in a fierce, desperate hug, conveying more affection, anger, and defiance in that single gesture than anyone could speak in thousands of words.

 

"Fine," Black Cherry sighed. She unreeled Urusla's braids until the goth girl dangled to the ground. The growing math-tattoo breached the scarlet surface of Black Cherry's wings. Tension gathered in her gel as she prepared a final swing. "Then die."

 

We Are Unyx

 

Wide, red, oval-rimmed glasses, lenses chipped into splinters and flakes, sat askew on the obsidian girl's pert little nose. Long, plaited pigtails framed a porcelain white, china doll face and arced down into the Jeep in ropey braids of licorice. Her liquid lips glossed in ebon paint, a burnished onyx choker ringed her ivory neck above a cashmere poncho. A narrow but deep laceration cut across a high, angular cheekbone. A single bead of jet black blood rolled down a cheek as pale as milk.

 

The obsidian goth and the scarlet girl beheld one another in frozen silence.

 

Wings of webby ink unfolded in sharp planes and dizzying geodesic formations from the obsidian goth's back. Wings holding her in place, she razored the poncho apart with a single slash of her clawed fingers. Strips of soft cloth fell away to reveal a sable second skin. A liquiform iridescence accentuated every curve of bone and swell of flesh.

 

Black Cherry was the first to blink and step back. "What are you?"

 

The obsidian goth whipped off her useless glasses. She closed her eyes, daubed two gloved fingers against them. A perfect mask of black mascara coated her eyelids. Her eyes flicked open, their whites filling with starless night.

 

"We—are—U—Nyx," she breathed, and took flight.

 

BC v Unyx Cliffhanger

 

Raspberry snorted, a guttural ch-hock noise bubbled in her throat. The purple stains on the overshirt wrapped around her welled and spread. Raspberry grew cold in Yves arms. He pinched her as hard as he could on the neck. She coughed and swallowed. Yves felt the soft, radiant warmth rekindle in her core and he relaxed his grip on her neck.

 

Something thunked behind the sideways Jeep. Black Cherry pivoted on her ripe bottom, scissor-kicking to sit up with legs folded. She prized her diminutive wings away from her hair and aimed them at the Jeep. Strings and filaments of gel drifted, lighter than air, in a hazy halo around her head.

 

"What did you do that for?" Raspberry wheezed at Yves.

 

"Don't you dare die for me or Dee," Yves told her.

 

A slim, lustrous black arm sprouted out of the passenger side window of the sideways Jeep. Its smooth, conical fingers and thumbs fluxing into raptorial claws before hooking down into the canvas top.

 

"Ah," Black Cherry sighed, "of course. Just in the nick of time, too, imagine that." A second arm followed the first, fist clenched. "Our little heroine." Black Cherry peered at the torn book page, covered in nonsensical, spiraling scrawls of formula scribbled in black fountain pen ink, but shrugged it off. "She's the one I came for, Master. She helped you get away. She needs to die for that." The clawed hand flexed as the obsidian girl hauled herself into view. "She needs to die today…Wait." Black Cherry bounded to her feet, her head wings perking up like the ears of a startled cat. "Who the fuck are you?"

 

 

Post Pylon Pre-Unyx

 

The structure fractured into ragged slabs as it fell and struck the ground. Deafened, Yves felt the sound pressure of the gradual collapse as a low, lingering thunderclap. Dee and Black Cherry disappeared in an acrid storm of grit and pulverized rock. Yves huddled on the pavement, drawing himself around Raspberry as best he could. When his hearing returned, he realized Raspberry had been soliloquizing at him, words harsh but smile warm.

 

"I'm made out of Jell-O, dumb-fuck. A little jiggle like this can't hurt me. Good thing I'm too scared to cum, though. All this hugging and sappy bullshit's got my cooze so creamy I’d frig away my last nanomek if I could. Black Cherry's right. I wanna stuff Dee's cock up my cunt so bad I get cross-eyed just thinking about it, but to tell you the truth, babe." The lavender girl shook her head. Concrete fines and dust nucleated in her hair, turning orchid petals into gray sandpaper. "You've made me a fag-hag. If you're looking for a beard, I'm your bitch. We could get a little apartment, you could do all your fudge-packing at home, and I'd felch all the jizz I'd ever need out of your ass."

 

"Alright, alright," Yves said, loosening his hold on the leering goo girl. "I can hear again. Now would you please shut your filthy fucking mouth. Where's CeeCee?"

 

Raspberry nodded to the left but CeeCee hulloed, "Over here, honey." CeeCee sprawled on the asphalt a few paces down the road, a heap of yellow cream domes, as if someone had carved a reclining Buddha out of the world's biggest butter pat and left it melting on the pavement. "I'm just going to lie here awhile, if you don't mind."

 

Yves asked her, "Are you okay?"

 

"No."

 

"Are you going to be okay?"

 

"I'm not sure. I've never had so little nanomek to keep me going before. Honey, what happened? What on Earth was Dee thinking?"

 

Yves surveyed the wreckage. He saw no sign of Dee. A crimson puddle spread out from under the rubble, too thick and too fast to be Dee's blood unless Dee's nanomek had changed him in ways Yves did not want to think about. "Same as you," he told CeeCee, "to buy time. Time for Eurydice to put herself back together." He turned to the Jeep tucked beside the onramp. "Time for Nyx and Ursula to…" He squinted but could glean no clues from the sideways vehicle. "…to do whatever the Hell it is they've been doing in there. Time for us to retreat." Yves heard a heavy thud. One of the largest broken slabs of concrete shivered, raising a cloud of fines. "Time for Dee to go mano y psicópata with Cherry."

 

Raspberry still dangled in Yves arms. "But you're not going anywhere, are you?"

 

Yves clucked his tongue, watching the puddle ripple and wax into a pool, incarnadine and shadow entwined. "Nope."

 

She turned and glared at the growing pool, her eyes hard as true amethyst. "Then neither am I."

 

"You couldn't drag me away with wild horses," CeeCee said, staring up at the sky before admitting, "You'd need a bucket."

 

The thudding stopped and the slab grated over the pavement, a stone sarcophagus groaning open. Pale fingers reached up from beneath, found purchase, tensed, and pushed. The slab progressed another few inches before the concrete beneath the fingers abraded into gravel. The fingers splayed and scrabbled but disappeared downward. Dee's muted swearing floated up. "Fucking physics!"

 

"Dee," Yves called out, amazed, relieved, but somehow, utterly unsurprised. "We're okay."

 

"Yves?" Dee's fingers appeared from beneath the slab again, their hunt for a handhold far more frantic. "Christ, Yves. How many times do I have to say, 'Get out of here' today before you actually get out of here?"

 

The ruby pool drew in on itself, doming in the middle. "I've got a few minutes," Yves lied. Dee's fingers danced around the bottom perimeter of the slab, where the crumbing concrete met the pavement. "Listen; are you squashed flat or something?"

 

"No, dammit, I'm harder than ferroconcrete, but ferro-fucking-concrete is harder than asphalt."

 

"You didn't lie down?" Yves asked.

 

"No, I didn't think of it! In comic books you don't have to worry about this kind of shit!"

 

"What the fuck are you two dickweeds talking about?" Raspberry demanded.

 

Yves stood up. His elbows and shoulders burned from carrying Raspberry but he ignored it. The ruby dome rose into a ball. We may have to run after all. "Our man of steel's been driven into the ground like a steel railroad spike. He's buried alive in the hardpan."

 

"Bedrock," Dee corrected, annoyed, from a Dee-sized hole in the road. "Granite."

 

"Who gives a shit?" Raspberry bounced in impatience. "Just punch your way out and kick psycho-twat's ass summore."

 

"I'm working on it," Dee said. Yves heard the crump of crumbling rock. "This isn't easy. I'm no Uma Thurman. How much time have I got, Yves?"

 

"Master." Black Cherry unfurled, a rose blooming wet with morning dew. Her wings drooped, glistening and unformed. Her movements were twitchy and insectile. "You hurt me, Master." She paced in a little circle then folded up over a broken slab. "You hurt me so much." She rolled onto her back, luxuriating in a post-coital daze. "So much."

 

Dee was silent for a moment. "Thanks a bunch, Yves." The sounds of an avalanche in miniature ro

 

Black Cherry glanced around. Her coy smile upended into a confused frown. "Master? Where are you?" Her head wings distended, but where still too gluey to separate from her pageboy haircut and just pulsed obscenely. She lazed over onto her tummy and skootched to the end of the slab, streaking the concrete in a florid swath of fluid. She peeped over the edge. "Master?" She giggled down. "Oh, there you are. My noviluninium is waning, Master. Are you ready for me now? Or do you want me to play Yves again. It's your choice, Master. Just as before." Her sly gaze flicked over to Yves before she spoke to the hole in the pavement again. "Is it time?"

 

Raspberry snorted, a guttural ch-hock noise bubbled in her throat. The purple stains on the overshirt wrapped around her welled and spread. Raspberry grew cold in Yves arms. He pinched her as hard as he could on the neck. She coughed and swallowed. Yves felt the soft, radiant warmth rekindle in her core and he relaxed his grip on her neck.

 

Something thunked behind the sideways Jeep. Black Cherry pivoted on her ripe bottom, scissor-kicking to sit up with legs folded. She prized her diminutive wings away from her hair and aimed them at the Jeep. Strings and filaments of gel drifted, lighter than air, in a hazy halo around her head.

 

"What you do that for?" Raspberry wheezed at Yves.

 

"Don't you dare die for me or Dee," Yves told her.

 

Raz Soliloquy

 

The structure fractured into ragged slabs as it fell and struck the ground. Yves, deafened, felt the sound pressure of the gradual collapse as a lingering thunderclap. Dee and Black Cherry disappeared in an acrid storm of grit and pulverized rock. Yves huddled on the pavement, drawing himself around Raspberry as best he could. When his hearing returned, he realized Raspberry had been soliloquizing at him, words harsh but smile warm.

 

"I'm made out of Jell-O, dumb-fuck. A little jiggle like this can't hurt me. Good thing I'm too scared to cum, though. All this hugging and sappy bullshit's got my cooze so creamy I’d frig away my last nanomek if I could. Black Cherry's right. I wanna stuff Dee's cock up my cunt so bad I get cross-eyed just thinking about it, but to tell you the truth, babe." The lavender girl shook her head. Concrete fines and dust nucleated in her hair, turning orchid petals into gray sandpaper. "You've made me a fag-hag. If you're looking for a beard, I'm your bitch. We could get a little apartment, you could do all your fudge-packing at home, and I could felch all the jizz I'd ever need out of your ass."

 

"Alright, alright," Yves said, relaxing his grip on the leering goo girl. "I can hear again. Now would you please shut your filthy fucking mouth."

 

Say Boom, Beeotch

 

Yves snapped awake, sitting up so fast Raspberry sloshed around on his lap. Dee whirled around. Come on, Dee, Yves thought. Keep it together, don't fuck this up. He watched Dee watch CeeCee struggle for control of her own mouth. If there was ever a time for one of your hallmark flashes of intuition, it's now. Yves realized he was holding his breath.

 

CeeCee spluttered and spasmed. "I didn't…she…"

 

Dee's open palm shot up. "That's enough, CeeCee. You're running out of nanomek and I need you to do something else."

 

"But she never—"

 

Dee's new voice crackled in the air. "Enough!" The yellow SUV's car alarm blared, hazard lights flashing. The three sorority sisters, a half-naked pile of tangled limps and lips, cried out in a lusty chorus. CeeCee quailed and fell silent.

 

Yves exhaled, slumping. Raspberry flopped over to peer up at him. Yves shook his head. Black Cherry can't know what Dee knows, he thought, but only whispered, "Later." If she decides CeeCee's spoiled her fun, it's all over. "After I get you out of here."

 

"CeeCee," Dee said, pointing to the moist three-way on the SUV's roof, "Can you control them? Through Black Cherry? You've got to get them out of here."

 

Nascent claws, little red nubs, hooked out from the crook of the raw scarlet wings stretching from CeeCee's back. The wings battered the air, powerful but uncoordinated, trying to fly independent of the other. CeeCee lurched, arms raised. The three coeds floundered their slippy way down to the ground. Only the brunette had retained her panties. The haggard, sticky silk underwear looked like she had worn it for three weeks straight. The three sorority sisters collected their clothes in silence and shambled down the road, extras from a Romero movie.

 

The embryonic claws grew long and sharp. One wing stabbed down, its claw piercing the pavement. The whorls of crimson and black sucked inward, gradually draining from CeeCee's turbulent surface, leaving behind a sallow yellow. Dee paced around her, keeping out of striking distance of the free wing, walking in a careful semi-circle until he stood with the purple-stained pylon directly behind him. "Aw, shit," Raspberry quavered as Dee backed up a step, then two. "We've gotta go right fucking now."

 

Yves hoisted the lavender girl in his arms and rose to one knee. His vision filed with silvered sparks of snow and fire. Oh God, he thought, listing against his leg, not an aura. Not now. He blinked but the colorless pyrotechnics persisted. At least that explains the way I've been feeling; I'm not cracking up. The world filled with silent television static. I'm pre-migraine.

 

The lavender girl stretched to plant a soothing kiss on his neck. "What are the eight forces that sustain creation, Yves? I forgot."

 

Yves set his jaw. "Movement," he said, and stood straight.

 

"And stillness," Raspberry said, nestled against his chest.

 

CeeCee's free wing flopped in a wide circle before slamming into the pavement. Licks of red and black whipped around the amber woman's surface before vanishing inward. Dee took another step backward.

 

"Extension," Yves called, striding forward.

 

"And contraction," Raspberry answered, hugging herself tight until she fit perfectly in his arms.

 

The red wings clawed at the pavement. CeeCee rocked forward to stay on her feet. Her black button eyes sunk into her head before she squeezed them shut. A red bolus rose up on her back between her wings. Dee stepped backward again. The pavement beneath his feet inclined to join the pylon behind him.

 

"Unification," Yves said, and broke into a run.

 

"And division," Raspberry whispered, gazing over his shoulder as the distance between them and the amber woman grew. "I love you, CeeCee. Run. Run."

 

CeeCee burst like a water balloon. Black Cherry fell away, fully formed and furious, sweating blood-nectar from every pore. CeeCee slithered over the pavement in honeyed waves. Black Cherry sprang to her feet, howling in rage, wings swooping in for the kill.

 

"Cherry…" Dee's voice reverberated and the scarlet girl staggered.

 

Yves cleared the mouth of the overpass. The mid-morning sun overwhelmed the fading aural sparks. "Solidity," he said, and turned about.

 

Dee stood with his back to the tall, ferroconcrete pylon. Black Cherry pivoted to face him. Sanguine honey dripped from her quivering wing claws, her arms, her pouting mouth and flush sex. "Master."

 

Dee raised his arms high, left hand curled around his right fist. He poured every ounce of his strength into a backswing. His fist smashed into the pylon, blasting off chunks of cement spiked with torn rebar. Yves ears rang in the roar. There was an instant of quiet.

 

"And fluidity," Raspberry said. CeeCee flowed away from the overpass in a golden gush.

 

A crack raced up the side of the pylon with a ripple of sharp noise, overlapping pistol shots. The pylon split along its length. A half-column of concrete ripped free of rebar and thumped down onto the road hard enough to bounce Yves off the ground and knock the silver Jeep an inch forward. The bridging highway above rocked on its foundations.

 

Black Cherry gazed upward, agape with delight, as the pylon began its slow topple toward her. Her lips curled in a lazy smile, heavy lidded eyes sliding shut. "Oh, Master."

 

"Splat," Dee said, and several hundred tons of concrete plyon crashed down upon them both.

 

 

Dee Knocks Heads

 

Yves risked a peek over Raspberry's head. CeeCee dined, poised and regal, on Black Cherry's dwindling gel. Black Cherry swooned but could not escape the amber woman's engulfing embrace. CeeCee pressed forward, swelling as she drew in more and more crimson gel-felsh, a plus-sized vampire gowned in a muumuu of many colors. Black Cherry evanesced in spewing plumes, shuddering orgiastic with every rupture from her core. CeeCee's gormandizing. His gorge rose at the thought. ["…my complements to the chef, Yves. That was choice…"] He turned aside.

 

His silver Jeep squat sideways a few yards away. The little truck looked like someone pulled a Thelma-and-Louise and drove it off a cliff. Yves squinted. Abstract green shapes, indistinct emerald cones and jade ellipsoids, rumbled and bumped against the plastic rear window. He saw no sign of Nyx or Ursula.

 

"Hey, Dee," he called, twisting. Raspberry settled in his lap. "Listen, Dee, Eurydice is having trouble putting herself back to…Dee, what the fuck are you doing?"

 

The yellow SUV sat in shadow under the overpass. Dee sprawled on its skewed roof, buried in co-eds. He edged an arm out from under the redhead's thighs. He nudged the blonde's chin away from his, uprooting her from his mouth. The blonde slavered, puckering like a fish out of water. Dee spread his fingers to hold her at bay. The blonde nursed wetly on his thumb. "Trying not to ejaculate. Failing. Got any ideas?"

 

"Stop fucking and start fighting. Knock their heads together or something." Yves said. Dee's expression curdled. "What? Why not? Oh, Christ, is this some 'great power, great responsibility,' comic book morality crap? Or just Dark Age chauvinism?"

 

["…Tomoe? SB…I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I wouldn't. I would never…"] "It's Silver Age." The chill in Dee's voice dropped below freezing. "Got any other ideas?"

 

Yves thought for a second, then turned to goo girl warming his lap. "Raz, you said something before. About Nyx saving us from being buried in zombie pussy, remember?" Raspberry nodded, eyes glued on CeeCee. "What happens to one of Black Cherry's skank-bots when she's distracted?"

 

"Automatic pilot," Raspberry answered, sounding robotic herself.

 

"Dee," Yves said. "They're on automatic pilot. Can you use that?"

 

The two girls feasting on Dee's dick settled into a relentless, counterpoint rhythm. The brunette humped his leg. The redhead straining to smother Dee with her ass again, but the blonde's grip on the redhead's ass held and kept it aloft. The blonde crooned and deep throated Dee's thumb. Dee twitched, sweating. "Got…one…chance…" he said, raising his free arm.

 

"You're loving this," Yves chided.

 

Dee wrapped his free hand around one of the blonde's wrists and slid it toward the center of the redhead's ass. The blonde did not protest or stop slobbering on Dee's other thumb. Her fingers slid into the redhead's ass-crack. Dee let go. The blonde stared blankly down at him but her fingers fondled the redhead's ass.

 

Dee muttered, "Bingo," and moved the blonde's other hand over the camel toe formed by the redhead's tight jeans' seam pressing into her vulva. The blonde absent-mindedly pressed two slender fingers against the seam, tracing little circles. The redhead stopped straining and started bucking her hips from side to side. She groaned, mouth full of cock.

 

"You've got to be kidding me," Yves said, watching Dee unbuckle the redhead's belt. "This is your plan?" Dee pulled down on the redhead's zipper. "I said they were on automatic pilot, not bi-curious." Dee unzipped the redhead's fly not halfway before the blonde grabbed the belt and hauled the redhead's pants down.

 

"Whoa," Yves said. The redhead wore no panties. Her bare ass bobbled free, shiny and wet with sweat and sex. "Wow, um…" The blonde squirmed her thumb over the redhead's clitoral hood and sank two fingers three-knuckle deep between her swollen labia. "That's, uh…" Dee hoisted his suckled thumb upward. The blonde followed, keeping her mouth locked, until the top of her head bumped against the redhead's butt. She spat out Dee's thumb like it were old gum, clawed the redhead's thighs and latched her lips on the redhead's pussy.

 

Yves gave up. "Good plan, Dee."

 

The blonde went tongue-spelunking. The redhead pulled of his cock to howl her pleasure. Dee propped himself up, lightning fast, pulled the brunette's face away from his balls, and very gently pressed the redhead's and brunette's heads together. The two girls gazed deep into each other's eyes for a moment, then soul-kissed with a manic ferocity, arms entwining in a desperate clinch.

 

"And that," Dee said, shaking his leg out from under the brunette. She took the opportunity to scoot close enough to the redhead to peel of her tee-shirt. Dee slipped off the roof feet-first, doing up his pants in the process. "Is how Deiter fucking Detwiler knocks heads," he finished as he touched down on the pavement.

 

He jogged over to CeeCee. The amber woman swallowed down the last of Black Cherry, noshing on a literal piece of ass like slice of watermelon. "CeeCee," Dee said, beaming, "you're amazing. How long can…" His face feel. "CeeCee?"

 

CeeCee swayed. Her gel-flesh churned with licks of red and black brume. "Not long, honey," she said. She glanced up, not at Dee but at Raspberry and added, "Master."

 

Raspberry spoke. "Back in the kitchen, you said you would never eat Black Cherry, only me." Her face was a child's and Yves thought she might cry. "Why not?" She sounded so plaintive Yves could not resist hugging her to him. "Why now?"

 

CeeCee's weary smile was stained the color of blood oranges and cinnamon. "Because it costs too much nanomek," she answered. Her canary-yellow eyes misted over. "And I knew I'd have to do it to save your fool life someday." Her misty eyes dimmed into a dull, abyssal black. When she spoke again, her voice as not entirely her own. "And I think I can only do it once."

 

 

More Overpass

A steady susurrus started behind up him as the sunny slush frothed down the Jeep's sideways roof and heaped onto the pavement. Raspberry's speedy recovery matched her quick temper, but Dee knew CeeCee and Eurydice needed more time to sort themselves out after such a rough jolt. He opted to stall, hoping like Hell that Ursula was unhurt. "X-ray vision?"

 

Her head-wings rolled into cute megaphones around her ears. "Sonar." She winked. "Echolocation off the metal behind you, of course, because you're so impenetrable, Master."

 

Her head-wings unfurled only a fraction before Dee spoke in his newfound voice. "Let them go, Cherry."

 

Cherry gaped. Head-wings twitched and wilted with melt. Sanguinary brandy brimmed her lips and slicked her sex as the pylons supporting the overhead arch of the highway amplified and took up her name. Cherry—Cherry—Cherry. She rocked with each echo, dropping to one knee, then the other, and then to all fours. The last echo played itself out, a long, low, bubbling roar, leonine and almost subsonic: Cherrrry. Black Cherry keened in reply, arms trembling, wings pearling with fat drops a ruby nectar. "Yes, Master, yes. Go." The underpass still purred with the final vestiges of Dee's echoed voice—rrr…rrry—and Black Cherry fell back on her haunches. Head bowed, she waved Raspberry away. "Go. Go!"

 

Raspberry dismounted from the Jeep, her elastic legs protracting down onto the road before returning to their usual sumptuous, classical perfection. Yves, face pinched in pain, rode the gentle descent in her arms. Raspberry eased by Black Cherry, twittering and pawing at the ground. "Go, go," the crimson girl whimpered. Dee's echo died. Black Cherry's hands curled into fists. "No." Dee charged, seized a bleeding wing. He planted his feet and started a vicious twist.

 

Black Cherry reared back and tore the captured wing off her shoulder with her own hands. The wing dissolved in a russet flood. The momentum of his planned attack knocked Dee off his feet. "Run, Raz!"

 

Black Cherry howled, "I told you I could handle it, Master!" She bitch-slapped the fleeing Raspberry across the back with the flat of her remaining wing.

 

Raspberry exploded into purple haze. Yves sailed, ragged-doll limbed, through the air. The was a strange sound, like the recording of smashing glass played backward and too fast, or a thousand harp strings rubbed with steel nails. Raspberry snapped into solidity parallel and inches below Yves. She threw her arms and legs around him a split second before they both hit the pavement.

 

Dee was already up on one knee but Black Cherry clipped him on the chin with an uppercut on her backswing and knock him flat on his back. "I should have known my minions would never be enough for you. Not like I am." Behind her, Raspberry and Yves streaked over the blacktop, trailing a lavender slime wake. "I'm glad I stopped with the latex gimp. Where is she, anyway? Hiding is not like her at all. Ah, well, she'll show up just in the nick of time, I suppose." Dee sat up, rattling his head. Black Cherry sighed. "Where was I? Oh, monologing, yes."

 

 

Black Cherry splayed her hands, crimson fluid rushing up her legs and humping her back with a burgeoning wing. Her once-nectarous surface smoothed into a polished rind of creamy carmine. "So there I was, with boxes and boxes of Jell-O, just oodles of collagen powder." Dee staggered to his feet. "I had to do something with it, but I'm not really the baking type." Dee charged, arms out, palms flat. He struck her in the abdomen, hands working in a peculiar rhythm. Nothing happened.

 

Black Cherry and Dee stared down at his hands, one on her tummy, the other sandwiched between her breasts. The geek and the crimson girl looked each other in the eye.

 

"So I ate it all," Black Cherry smirked, and punched Dee in the gut with the force of an eight ton wrecking ball.

 

Under the Overpass

 

The Jeep hit the pavement passenger-side down. The safety glass windshield fractured milky white on impact. Cracks and torn seams in the canvas top bubbled and wept golden Champaign froth. The carriage bled oil, radiator and hydraulic fluid. Dust settled in the quiet.

 

The driver's side door bulged outward then burst away in geyser of lavender unguent. The crest of the eruption resolved into the upper body of Raspberry herself, a bust carved from the richest amethyst. More gel peeled away to reveal Yves, slack, motionless, and cradled in Raspberry's willowy embrace. Yves groaned.

 

Raspberry startled at the sound. Yves rolled his head and winced. Raspberry's shoulders sagged and she hugged Yves close. "Shh. I gotcha, babe." Her limpid gaze fell upon Black Cherry. Raspberry purpled with rage. She hissed through gritted teeth. "I am gunna rip off your head and shit down your neck you jam-ragged clit-clot cunt."

 

The dainty batwings poking out from behind Black Cherry's ears flared. "I'll kill you where you stand…" The crimson girl froze in mid-snarl, blinking her confusion. "As soon as I figure out what you just said."

 

The windshield exploded outward. Nuggets of safety glass flew like birdshot and ricocheted off Black Cherry's creamy red, rubbery hide. Dee withdrew his fists. "Raz," he said, "enough banter. Get Yves out of here."

 

Raspberry's bare hips and legs coalesced and she pivoted to jump from the Jeep. Black Cherry sidled and stretched a wing wide to block her path. "That's my playmate," she said, petulant and spoiled and pointing at Yves with a wing claw. "Master gave him to me and I only got to play with him once."

 

Dee elbowed out of the Jeep and rose to his feet, uncut and unbruised. "Let her go, Cherry."

 

Black Cherry golf-clapped her hands. "Oh, Master: name me." She giggled and grabbed her knees, the glee dawning on her face in complete contrast with her words. "Name me like you named your stupid green whore. Name me and I will become she who eats worlds for you."

 

Something heavy clonked and settled in the back of the Jeep. Black Cherry craned her neck to see but Dee hustled in between, his back to the Jeep. "Let them all go, Cherry, and I will stay." He swung one arm behind his back, hand opening in closing in a pantomime yap yap yap.

 

Black Cherry clucked and dismissed the notion with a pshaw flick of the wrist. "You don't mean that, Master. You're going to stay anyway. Besides, I don't think Raspberry wants to leave. I had her made for you, you know." Dee pointed to the left with the hand hidden behind his back.

 

"Why haven't you fucked her yet? I would smell her on you if you had. She wants you to fuck her, Master." Black Cherry tipped her head, leading with her nose, breathing deep and nibbling her bottom lip. "She wants you so badly I can taste it from here." Dee pointed left again, looped his index finger around to the right before bringing his hand down flat. "She's so horny," Black Cherry continued, smirking, "She can't understand that you want her to feint to the left so you can flank me on the right while I'm monologing."

 

"Oh," drawled Raspberry behind him. "Now I get it."

 

Dee let his arm drop. "X-ray vision?"

 

Her head-wings rolled into cute megaphones around her ears. "Sonar." She winked. "Echolocation off the metal behind you, of course, because you're so impenetrable, Master."

 

Her head-wings unfurled only a fraction before Dee spoke in his newfound voice. "Let them go, Cherry."

 

Cherry gaped. Head-wings twitched and wilted with melt. Sanguinary brandy brimmed her lips and slicked her sex as the pylons and overhead arch of the highway amplified and took up her name. Cherry—Cherry—Cherry. She rocked with each echo, dropping to one knee, then the other, and then to all fours. The last echo played itself out, a long, low, bubbling roar, leonine and almost subsonic: Cherrry. Black Cherry keened in reply, arms trembling, wings pearling with fat drops a ruby nectar. "Yes, Master, yes. Go." The underpass still purred with the final vestiges of Dee's echoed voice—rrr…eee—and Black Cherry fell back on her haunches. Head bowed, she waved Raspberry away. "Go. Go!"

 

 

 

Book 5 Scrap-SPOILAGE

 

Black Cherry's leap from the overpass had been cliff-diver perfect. Centered and combat-ready, Yves had observed her descent with a calm, analytical appreciation for fine form. She had fanned her wings when she sailed out into the air. When her jump achieved its apex, she had curled downward, thrust fists forward, and snapped her wings inward. The crimson wings slapped together at supersonic speed. Black Cherry rode the thunderclap and power-dived at the Jeep. She had hammered the hood as a pile-driving pillar, a sculpture of a falling angel carved black-veined, red marble. The hood and engine block crumpled as the Jeep rebounded into the air, pivoting on the immobile fulcrum Black Cherry had become. Yves saw her sneer, her page boy hair cut flying wild, her abyssal gaze locked on Dee's face.

 

"…Master!" Her voice was triumphant, primal. Demoniac.

 

Dee turned away from her, his expression stony and stolid even as the Jeep's rear wheels rose higher than the front. He reached behind and above his head, bracing himself against the Jeep's roll-bar. The trunk of the Jeep soared higher. With Black Cherry stapling the hood to the road, the vehicles chassis squealed as it fought against the opposing forces trying to tear it in half.

 

Dee kicked his left foot into the driver's side foot well. Yves could not think as fast as a meliae but years of martial meditation had given him complete confidence, a swift intuition, and the ability to stay focused amidst madness. Even so, Yves' detachment threatened collapse into giddy panic when he realized what Dee was doing. Dee's not bracing his body against the Jeep's roll-cage. He's bracing the roll-cage against his body. The Jeep pivoted vertical. Yves' seat belt bit into his flesh.

 

The cords in Dee's neck flexed. His muscled forearms and shoulders bunched. Holy shit. The passenger compartment buckled but did not cave inward and crush Yves to death. It's really true. Some part of Yves must have been expecting to die at that instant, because he found himself very surprised to be alive.

 

Dee's a fucking superhero.

 

Black Cherry was forced backward as the Jeep hurtled upright. The vehicle's shadow overtook her. Her triumphal sneer faltered. Two tons of American truck know-how bore down upon her. Yves heard Raspberry's battle cry over the ruckus of tortured metal, plastic, and glass. "Say 'Splat,' bitch!"

 

Black Cherry set her jaw and swung her legs down, puncturing the pavement with her Mary Jane clogs. Her wings shot forward, around, and then behind the Jeep. Crimson claws pierce the undercarriage. Yves heard Ursula yelp and stamp. Black Cherry's sneer returned with a lazy roll of her head. Yves saw the tension gather within her gel.

 

Dee spoke. His words seemed to come from outside of time and transcended all other sounds, as if world had paused, eager to hear him speak. His voice bypassed Yves' ears, still half-stoppered with beeswax. It resounded in Yves' every bone, sang in his blood, rang clear as a tower bell in his brain. "Raz, to Yves. Now."

 

Two lavender arms shot in through the open driver's window like uncoiling springs. Cool finger entwined behind Yves neck. The bendy-straw arms cinched up slack and Raspberry's angelic face zoomed into view until her jellied button nose dimpled his cheek. Her eyes searched his as she mumbled a lightning quick, "Awfuckit," and kissed him hard and square on the lips. His mouth filled with the flavors of summer as more and more of Raspberry's jellied substance poured through the window and pressed its subtle, supple weight against him.

 

Yves had never been kissed in bullet time before. His heightened awareness let the kiss linger on (and on, and on), even though it must have lasted no more than a second or two. He could not fully process the experience, as his inner ear reported he was now suspended upside down.

 

The Jeep slung high over Black Cherry's head. She crowed in triumph as her arms and wings took on the full weight of the Jeep and all its occupants. I'll have to try this again, he vowed to himself as Raspberry broke the awkward kiss. If only the person kissing me back had a dick, I'm sure I could get it right. Outside, Black Cherry followed through, accelerating her pitch. If only I can survive the next few sec—

 

---

 

 

Black Cherry slung the Jeep with all her strength. The vehicle flipped end-over-end once, then twice, before colliding with a cement pylon. The impact reverberated through the road, fissured the blacktop, and brought down a shower of cement chips and dust from the highway above. The Jeep folded into a chevron-shape and dropped to the ground.

 

"…Splat," said she.

 

Thought Bubble Test

 

"Very funny." Dee frowned. There was something Galatea had said, when he stormed out on her. What was it?

 

"…you aren't changing…"

 

"Look at that," Tomoe said, "you can almost see him thinking."

 

"…What kind of name is Deiter Detwiler…"

 

"Still waters run deep," Ursula declared.

 

"…Maybe you just didn't know who you really were before now…."

 

"I've always hated that expression," Yves said.

 

"…Don't tell me. You never know when a secret identity might come in handy…"

 

"Yeah, me too," SB agreed. "Still waters don't run deep. Still waters don't run."

 

"…Fire can't burn me, iron can't break me…"

 

Yves and SB grinned like idiots at each other and chorused, "Or else they wouldn't be still."

 

"…Yves, you're a kung fu badass…"

 

"It's just an aphorism," Ursula murmured, soothing the thick rubber collar around her neck.

 

"…I'm a pharmaceutria. A sorceress. I'm a witch…"

 

"I can't see shit!" Raz bumbled out of an aisle, two jockstraps tied over her eyes.

 

"…Shut up and let Sherlock do his thing…"

 

"We're not perverts," Dee said under his breath, looking at all his friends in turn.

 

"…We didn't expect a...band, or league, or whatever it is you've put together…"

 

Eurydice crept up and took his hand. "What did you say?"

 

"…you aren't changing…"

 

"We're not perverts," Dee told her, kissed her, and told everyone. "We're superheroes."

 

"…you're just becoming more you…"

 

Eurydice asked, "There's a difference?"

 

So I'm gonna get to know these little demons, So I can know where they end and I begin. I'm gonna peel back that fine line, That divides me from my mind, If there's a way out of my skin.   —Gloria Deluxe, Outrun Your Demons

 

Updraft 01/10/07

 

Ursula upended her palm and the twenty dollar bill flittered down. Tomoe snagged it out of the air and rang up SALE on the cash register in a single swoop. "Done!"

 

Dee's smile twisted into a wince. "Oh shit." Tentacles unwound all around him but Eurydice still perched on his chest. "Who bought something?"

 

"Relax," Tomoe said. "It's just a dumb magic square book." She counted out Ursula's change. "One five dollar, two five dollar, three five dollar. Here you go. You want a bag?"

 

"No thanks." Ursula tucked the puzzle book under her poncho. She pulled her hands free but the square bulge under the cashmere coverall slid across her belly and settled near the curve of her hip. "We're set."

 

Eurydice bounced a bit on Dee's chest, tugging on the collar of his shirt. "Kudzu?"

 

Dee goosed her thigh. "Just a one more question, honey." Eurydice pouted and stood up, morphing her glimmering flesh back into the drab olive Unabomber guise but leaving Dee's muscle shirt tie-died green and reeking of citrus-and-sex.

 

Tomoe pried a lump of beeswax from her ear. "Better ask quick before she sits on your face to shut you up." She sighed. "That's what I'd do." She watched SB mutter and tug at the hem of her one-piece, stretching it tight over her tented prick. "I'd sit on something, anyway."

 

Dee sat up as Tomoe cleaned beeswax from her other ear. "Wait. I don't know how to control it yet."

 

"Sure you do," SB said, drawing the dress snug around her balls.

 

"I do?"

 

"You know you want it, right?" The copper-colored material popped up to let the base of her shaft peep out as soon as SB let go. "Dang it."

 

"Yes. I want to keep my kuzbu." Eurydice gasped and narrowed her eyes. Dee winked at her. "I'm a kudzu kind of guy."

 

"That's all there is to it," SB said.

 

Yves nodded. "Like ki. Once you find it, it's yours to control. It will come when you call."

 

Somewhere among the aisles, Raspberry barked out a single, raspy, "Ha!"

 

"Hey," Tomoe said to SB, "remember all that 'can't interfere' stuff I keep talking about?"

 

SB pursed her lips as if she knew what was coming. "Yeah."

 

"Well, you're doing it wrong."

 

"Why?" Dee rose. "Why can't you help?" Tomoe shrugged and opened her mouth but this time Dee knew exactly what was coming and cut her off. "And don't just say 'rules,' or 'I lost the manual,' or some other bullshit. Galatea tried to get us the Disney lovey-dovey ending and I fucked it up. I gave away the nanomek. Now there's this three hundred pound, chocolate cherry psycho-bitch running around, kidnapping my girlfriend, mindfucking skank-bots and killing and eating people in some elaborate scheme to take over the world just because she thinks I don't pay enough attention to her."

 

Eurydice reached for him, silent and starry eyed. Dee moved close and Eurydice gathered him into her arms, rubbing her cheek against his back. "Tomoe, you told me the point of the Disney ending was for the lonely guy to learn the true meaning of love. Well, unless the true meaning of love is either 'chicks dig confidence' or 'Fatal Attraction is real,' I don't feel like I've learned a damn thing." He spun in Eurydice's arms and kissed her soft and sweet. "I love Galatea and I love Eurydice. They are the same and they are different in a way I don't understand. But it doesn’t matter if I'll never understand, because the one thing I do know is much more important: right now, neither of them are happy. I made them happy, once, before I ruined everything. I want them to be happy again. So I've just got one question." Dee steeled himself, gave Eurydice a final squeeze, and bellied up to the counter to look Tomoe square in the eye.

 

"What the Hell is going on?" he said.

 

Tomoe bumped the cash register till closed. It pinged. "There are some thing's even I don't know, Deiter."

 

Yves rapped a knuckle hard on the countertop, a move Dee had seen before whenever Yves wanted everyone at work to know he was pissed off. "A true but useless statement. Dee's right, you don't lie. But you don't answer anyone's questions in the way they expect, either. Well, too bad. I know about the third ending already."

 

Relief washed over Dee. "You've figured it out," he said. "Took you long enough."

 

"Just the basics." Blood blotted the cotton gauze bandage on Yves' palm. He rummaged through the first aid kit and began to redress the wound. "And I figured it out a few hours ago, actually, when you were quickening Eurydice." He dropped the used gauze into the wax paper disposal bag that came folded inside the first aid kit. "Well, Tomoe?"

 

Tomoe gave him a curt nod. "What does 'sublime' mean, Dee?"

 

Dee did not hesitate. "Vaporize."

 

"Vaporize, right," Yves said, binding his palm in a fresh bandage. "That's what I first thought of, too." He smiled. "I guess we both took English for engineers. But that isn't the only meaning. Eurydice told me that most guys who made lime meliae sublime that way, right?" Eurydice nodded. "But every once in a while, someone sublimes the other way."

 

Ursula darkened the storage closet door. "In alchemy, 'to sublime' means 'to ennoble' or purify."

 

"Tomoe, you called nanomek 'techno-alchemical,'" Dee remembered. "So which 'sublime' did you mean?"

 

"Both." She shrugged, one shouldered. "How could I say for sure? No one's ever gone lime first time before. Even the most brazen had to work their way up from honey or vanilla—or chocolatl if you were an Aztec."

 

"That was all before artificial flavor packets and high fructose corn syrup," SB admitted, smiling. "There could be more lime guys out there than you or I ever imagined, T."

 

"I don't get it," Dee said. "What is there to purify? I'm a computer geek. I write porn. I've got almost every fetish there is to get on the Internet. I'm a pervert. I'm just…" Dee spread his arms. "…I'm just me."

 

Eurydice arched a brow. "And Mine."

 

"Very funny." Dee frowned. There was something Galatea had said, when he stormed out on her. What was it?

 

"…you aren't changing…"

 

"Look at that," Tomoe said, "you can almost see him thinking."

 

"…What kind of name is Deiter Detwiler…"

 

"Still waters run deep," Ursula declared.

 

"…Maybe you just didn't know who you really were before now…."

 

"I've always hated that expression," Yves said.

 

"…Don't tell me. You never know when a secret identity might come in handy…"

 

"Yeah, me too," SB agreed. "Still waters don't run deep. Still waters don't run."

 

"…Fire can't burn me, iron can't break me…"

 

Yves and SB grinned like idiots at each other and chorused, "Or else they wouldn't be still."

 

"…Yves, you're a kung fu badass…"

 

"It's just an aphorism," Ursula murmured, soothing the thick rubber collar around her neck.

 

"…I'm a pharmaceutria. A sorceress. I'm a witch…"

 

"I can't see shit!" Raz bumbled out of an aisle, two jockstraps tied over her eyes.

 

"…Shut up and let Sherlock do his thing…"

 

"We're not perverts," Dee said under his breath, looking at all his friends in turn.

 

"…We didn't expect a...band, or league, or whatever it is you've put together…"

 

Eurydice crept up and took his hand. "What did you say?"

 

"…you aren't changing…"

 

"We're not perverts," Dee told her, kissed her, and told everyone. "We're superheroes."

 

"…you're just becoming more you…."

 

Eurydice asked, "There's a difference?"

 

So I'm gonna get to know these little demons, So I can know where they end and I begin. I'm gonna peel back that fine line, That divides me from my mind, If there's a way out of my skin.   —Gloria Deluxe, Outrun Your Demons

 

Dee's Dorky Monologue

 

Ursula upended her palm and the twenty dollar bill flittered down. Tomoe snagged it out of the air and rang up SALE on the cash register in a single swoop. "Done!"

 

Dee's smile twisted into a wince. "Oh shit." Tentacles unwound all around him but Eurydice still perched on his chest. "Who bought something?"

 

"Relax," Tomoe said. "It's just a dumb magic square book." She counted out Ursula's change. "One five dollar, two five dollar, three five dollar. Here you go. You want a bag?"

 

"No thanks." Ursula tucked the puzzle book under her poncho. She pulled her hands free but the square bulge under the cashmere coverall slid across her belly and settled near the curve of her hip. "We're set."

 

Eurydice bounced a bit on Dee's chest, tugging on the collar of his shirt. "Kudzu?"

 

Dee goosed her thigh. "Just a one more question, honey." Eurydice pouted and stood up, morphing her glimmering flesh back into the drab olive Unabomber guise but leaving Dee's muscle shirt tie-died green and reeking of citrus-and-sex.

 

Tomoe pried a lump of beeswax from her ear. "Better ask quick before she sits on your face to shut you up." She sighed. "That's what I'd do." She watched SB mutter and tug at the hem of her one-piece, stretching it tight over her tented prick. "I'd sit on something, anyway."

 

Dee sat up as Tomoe cleaned beeswax from her other ear. "Wait. I don't know how to control it yet."

 

"Sure you do," SB said, drawing the dress snug over her balls.

 

"I do?"

 

"You know you want it, right?" The copper-colored material popped up to let the base of her shaft peep out as soon as SB let go. "Dang it."

 

"Yes. I want to keep my kuzbu." Eurydice gasped and narrowed her eyes. Dee winked at her. "I'm a kudzu kind of guy."

 

"That's all there is to it," SB said.

 

Yves nodded. "Like ki. Once you find it, it's yours to control. It will come when you call."

 

Somewhere among the aisles, Raspberry barked out a single, raspy, "Ha!"

 

"Hey," Tomoe said to SB, "Remember all that 'can't interfere' stuff I keep talking about?"

 

SB pursed her lips as if she knew what was coming. "Yeah."

 

"Well, you're doing it wrong."

 

"Why?" Dee rose. "Why can't you help?" Tomoe shrugged and opened her mouth but this time Dee knew exactly what was coming and cut her off. "And don't just say 'rules,' or 'I lost the manual,' or some other bullshit. Galatea tried to get us the Disney lovey-dovey ending and I fucked it up. I gave away the nanomek. Now there's this three hundred pound, chocolate cherry psycho-bitch running around, kidnapping my girlfriend, mindfucking skank-bots and killing and eating people, all part of some elaborate scheme to take over the world just because she thinks I don't pay enough attention to her." Eurydice reached for him, silent and starry eyed. Dee moved close and Eurydice gathered him into her arms, rubbing her cheek against his back. "Tomoe, you said the point of the Disney ending was for the lonely guy to learn the true meaning of love. Well, unless the true meaning of love is either 'chicks dig confidence' or 'Fatal Attraction is real,' I don't feel like I've learned a damn thing." He spun in Eurydice's arms and kissed her soft and sweet. "I love Galatea and I love Eurydice. They are the same and they are different in a way I don't understand, but it doesn’t matter if I ever understand, because one thing I know for sure is, right now, neither of them are happy. I want them to be happy. So I've just got one question." Dee steeled himself, gave Eurydice a final squeeze, and bellied up to the counter to look Tomoe square in the eye.

 

"What the Hell is going on?" he said.

 

 

SRU Dialog Scrap

Dee sat on SRU's checker-tiled floor, waiting for Eurydice's answer. She took his hand in both of hers and curled herself around it, snuggling to his lap. She rubbed his wrist with her thumbs and would not look up at the crowd staring at her. Dee asked her again, "It was my idea to eat the nanomek all along, wasn't it?"

 

Eurydice shifted in his lap. She spoke in the tones of a toddler. "Yeah."

 

Tomoe slumped against the cash register, making it ping and ring up a NO SALE. "Why. Why? Didn't you see how much kuzbu he had already?"

 

"Yeah," Eurydice repeated in that same aw-shucks kiddy voice.

 

"Kudzu? What?" Dee said.

 

"Kuzzz…buuu." Tomoe over-enunciated as if speaking slowly and carefully could act as a universal translator.

 

Ursula poked her head out of the closet. "Oh, so that's what it is. Good to know."

 

SB shook her head. "His yang was so out of whack and you just go ahead and give him more?"

 

"Wait, his yang was whacked? That makes no sense," Ursula said.

 

"Did she say 'yang' or 'wang'?" Dee asked Eurydice.

 

Eurydice giggled and nested further into his lap. "I love you."

 

Yves stormed into the middle of the mob. "Would everyone just…shut the fuck up for one second and let me think?"

 

"Woo!" A slippery slick Raspberry glissaded out of the maternity aisle, zooming across the tiled floor. "Gangway!" She zipped by on her back faster than an Olympic luge and smashed into a display athletic equipment and disappeared as the stacked boxes piled over her. "Fuck."

 

Yves waited for the last box to tumble to a standstill before continuing. "Okay, let me get this straight: Dee ate the nanomek of his own free will, but doesn't remember. Right?" He turned to Eurydice, who nodded. "Dee had lots of, uh, 'kuzbu,' which is probably some old word meaning mojo, or the Force, or maybe just Really Great Ass, right?" He turned to Ursula.

 

"Right. Actually," Ursula admitted, "that's a good translation. It kind of means all three."

 

Yves leveled a finger at SB. "And that all somehow relates to ancient Chinese philosophy, meaning the I-Ching is really about sex with goo girls."

 

SB shrugged. "Isn't everything?"

 

"So that's why women can't keep their hands off me?" Dee asked, blush rising as he realized how stupid that sounded to his even to own ears.

 

"No." Tomoe shoved the cash register's till closed. "That's your own damn fault."

 

"Look!" Raspberry stumbled out of the pile of equipment, adjusting a swatch of fabric over her left eye. "I'm a pirate."

 

CeeCee strolled out of the maternity aisle. "That's a jockstrap."

 

Raspberry advanced on CeeCee, brandishing athletic supporters in both hands. "Get aboard you fat buccaneer." CeeCee retreated into the maternity aisle but Raspberry followed. "You are a pirate," she promised.

 

Dee brushed a green dreadlock away from his ear. It darted under his chin to tickle the other one. "How do I stop it?"

 

"Do you want to stop it," SB asked, tapping a finger against her lips. "Or do you want to control it?"

 

Tomoe narrowed her eyes at SB. That was a clue, Dee realized as SB shrugged again. SB just gave me a clue. What did she mean? Isn't stopping it the same thing as controlling it? Only if you want to be able to turn it back on once I turn it off…Do I? "Oh my God, I do," Dee said aloud. "I do want to control it. Eurydice." He pulled away from her to look her in the eye. "Eurydice, I like it. I like my kudzu. Is that okay?"

 

Eurydice goggled at him before dissolving into giggles, a host of dreadlocks swarming in to tickle his ears. "Kudzu, kudzu, kudzu," she teased, her sap green hair crawling everywhere like vines.

 

"Huh," Tomoe said as Dee toppled backward onto the floor and Eurydice skooched up to sit on his chest and continue her tickle attack with hair and hands. "How about that. Kawai lime. Now there's a flavor I never thought of."

 

Ursula strut out of the closet. "I can't believe that's our Dee. I mean, he made his girlfriend mutli-orgasmic in public. What's happening to him?"

 

"He's getting tickled to death by creeper vines," Yves said. The blades of Eurydice's hair stretched longer and longer, hunting out ticklish spots, until some discovered the waist of his pants and dove beneath. "Make that molested by creeper vines," Yves added.

 

Eurydice leaned to breathe in Dee's ear even as her hair pulled, massaged, and pumped in his crotch behind her. "Kudzu, kudzu, kudzu."

 

Tomoe plucked at the buttons of her blouse then quickly turned away. "I got to stop watching before I develop a new fetish. Hey, wait a minute." She pointed to the bulge under Ursula's poncho. "What's that?"

 

"This? Oh, we found it on the floor." Ursula went fishing under her poncho and pulled out the fat Sudoku puzzle book. She held the ungainly thing in two jet-black, gloved hands. "We weren't going to steal it, or anything. It just looked interesting."

 

"Pfft, that old thing?" Tomoe waved her dismissal. "They used to make them much harder in the old days. The last magic squares were so easy I didn't even bother. I should just throw it out, but SB paid like twenty dollar for it on Amazon."

 

SB was engrossed in watching Dee's sweatpants stretch and and twist as more dreadlocks found their way between his legs. "Meh." She glanced down. "Ooh, dang, anyone got a tarp or something?"

 

Ursula plunked the thick book down next to the cash register. "I have a twenty in my pocket—oh." Her glove rippled and a twenty dollar bill unfurled in the palm of my hand. "I mean, I've got a twenty right here."

 

"It's used." Tomoe protested. "It's only got one section left. It's stupid." She sighed. "But you want it?" Her frown so inscrutable it was indistinguishable from a smile. "For you? Five dollar."

 

"Kudzu," cooed Eurydice as Dee's legs began to tremble. "Kudzu, kudzu, kud…zu." Dee gulped and groaned. Eurydice's caresses slowed but Dee still spasmed on each luxurious upstroke of the nest of living dreadlocks pumping at his crotch. "Yes, Dee, it's okay to like your kudzu. But this…" She tugged her head. Her tentacled hair took up slack. Dee barked and laughed and arched his pelvis high. "This is Mine."

 

Dee leered. "Always."

 

Demonic Fleshlight Technique Scrap

 

Nanogasms cascaded through the green girl's gel flesh. She felt as if a giant tongue were French kissing its way down her throat via the top of her head. The empty tubes of her hair, stubby petal-tentacles of a mutant sea anemone, filled into jellied dreadlocks. Cross-eyed, she flopped down onto Dee's stomach. Both he and the green girl grunted, "Oof!" The green girl, her head filling with gel the way rising dough fills a cake pan, found their worldless chorus inexplicably hilarious. Three glutinous giggles escape her lips: "Ah-hah, ah-hum, hm-mm."

 

The geek and the green girl panted in a huddle on the floor for a minute before the green girl made a realization and sat up in a huff. Dee propped himself up by the elbows, head wobbling. "Whuzzit?"

 

The green girl clutched her swollen tits and squeezed. They squeaked exactly like toy balloons. "My boobs are still empty. Aw, dammit it." She squirmed, rolling her rubbery breast flesh between her fingers and bouncing up and down on her butt like an impatient kindergartner during naptime. "I wanna make 'em bigger."

 

Dee fell back onto the floor. "Lord all-mighty," he sighed, draping the hand holding the tin of thickening agent over his eyes. "I think I'm in love."

 

The green girl gaped. Her mouth worked in silence. The shock at the concept of love gave way to the curious and new sensation of lush lips scraping over semi-solid teeth and a weighty tongue filling her mouth. Filling her mouth, what a splendid idea. She scooted back down toward Dee's beslimed crotch. "Now that I've got a head," she said, bending close enough to buffet Dee's deflated dick with her sultry breath, "maybe it's time for me to give a little."

 

Dee pulled the tin of his face, protesting. "W-wait a minute…" The green girl ignored his words and mashed her face over his cock. She tasted her own nectar, caked and cooling like batter on his shaft, but she spun her tongue three hundred and sixty degrees around his softened manhood a few times and hoovered it clean. Dee's distinct flavor permeated her, a cornucopia of earthy musk, cum, sweat, salt, and soap. Good, so good, he tastes so good—More, much more, taste him more. She squished her head over his crotch and her molten mouth engulfed his root, balls, and all, the stretchy, thick locks of her hair lashing around his thighs and ass. Say, she thought, he's got a cute butt, and the little echo replied, Shut up and eat it.

 

Dee kicked and scuffed the floor. "Stop it. Ah, Jesus. Stop!"

 

The green girl decoupled from his cock. The seal between her lips and his flesh burst with the smacking pop and gush of an uncorked bottle of shaken Champaign. "Wha'fuck?" Her vortex throat foamed and gurgled as she slurred, "You were just starting to get hard."

 

Dee whistled through gritted teeth. "Afterglow. I tried…I mean, I want…but I can't, I can't."

 

"Hey," the green girl cooed, mushing her hand around his cock in slow, sloppy circles, noting his legs and stomach spasm on each upstroke, "It's okay. It happens to everybody, right? We'll take it slow. After all, the Demonic Fifteen Point Fleshlight Palm Technique lasts forty-eight…"

 

"No." Dee's free hand snapped around her shoulder. "I want more, now. Don't you?"

 

The little echo in the back of the green girl's mind took the initiative: Ooh, I like the way he thinks. She stole a sly glance at her cleavage, hunching her shoulders until her breasts squeaked. More, now!. "Sure, but how? I mean, your mouth says 'Yes' but…" She squelched her fingers over his balls. "Your body says 'No no no please God no.' I mean, I feel your nuts trying to crawl back up into your pelvis."

 

Dee held the thickener aloft. "What about this?"

 

Uh oh. The green girl shrugged. "What about it?"

 

"It made you, didn't it?"

 

He made you. You made you. "I guess so."

 

Dee turned the tin, inspecting it from every angle. "What does it do?"

 

Anything you want, nothing you wish. She twirled a finger through his slick pubic hair. "Dunno."

 

"But it made your Jell-O thick, right?" The powder inside the tin skittered and scratched. "So maybe it will make my, um, you know…"

 

"Your dick hard?" the green girl finished, grinning. "Where'd you get an idea like that?"

 

Dee glared up at her, askance. "I write Internet porn." He said it as if it explained everything. "Well?" He let get of her hand and pried the lid of the tin loose with his fingernails.

 

"You're serious?" Many have tried. "I…I think it might be dangerous or something."

 

"I've seen this movie," Dee said. The lid clattered on the floor. "So let me skip to the end: 'Many have tried.' 'Tried and failed?' 'Tried and died.' Right?"

 

"I've seen this movie," Dee said. The lid clattered on the floor. "So let me skip to the end: 'Many have tried.' 'Tried and failed?' 'Tried and died.' Right?"

 

Many have tried and wished they'd died. "Kinda sorta almost." Dee struggled to sit up and keep the tin level. She let go of him and edged back. "You're really serious?" Maybe he can do it. Maybe he can beat it. Maybe he's the one. "I mean, are you sure?" She could not hide her rising excitement. The skirt cinched around her waist softened and ran like treacle. The kitchen swam with the aroma of citrus and sex. "You…you've got to be sure."

 

"For this?" He clicked the tin on the linoleum floor to stroke her cheek. "For you?" His hand came away sparkling with dots and spots of emerald. "I'm as sure as Hell. Hell, yes. Fuck, yes. For you, anything, always."

 

Dee seized the small tin. Please let him do it. He rubbed a pinch of the nanomek between his fingers. I really, really like this one and I've waited so long… Dee licked his dusty fingers, smacked his lips in thought, and smiled.

 

"You taste much better," he said, and tipped the tin into his mouth.

 

The green girl cascaded into nanogasm, hot gel rushing and gushing and breaking the mould.

 

 

 

Dee's Soliloquy, Take One

 

"I'm sorry." Tomoe dried her cheek with the palm of her hand. "I can't."

 

Dee blinked. "Um. Please?"

 

Standing close to Tomoe, Yves added, "We haven't told you what's been happening yet."

 

Tomoe gave Ursula the once-over, taking in the lustrous rubber collar with matching onyx gloves and hip-hugging go-go boots. Ursula blushed and busied herself with straightening out the closet. Tomoe nodded at CeeCee waddling into the maternity aisle, her surface whorled with hues of amber, amaretto, and port wine. "Considering how crowded it is in here, I'd say that the thickener's fallen into the wrong hands, as the cliché goes."

 

Eurydice sniffled and twisted in Dee's lap, settling with her back nestled into his chest, the tips of her spiky hair winding around his chin. "The worst possible hands."

 

SB limped out from behind the counter. "You know there's nothing T can do about that. She told Dee that whatever happened to the nanomek was on his hands, his karma, remember?"

 

"No, I don't remember." Eurydice reached up behind her, massaging Dee's neck. "But I do know you," she told SB. "I know you of old. How?"

 

"That was a long ago." SB shrugged. "Different time, different country…different flavors. Things echo."

 

"And she calls me cryptic." Tomoe muttered to Yves.

 

"I guess she learned from the best," Yves answered.

 

Tomoe swatted his shoulder. "Don't flirt with me unless you're to get into my pants."

 

Yves glanced down. "What's your size?"

 

"Oh, hardy-har-fucking har-har." She sounded as sardonic as ever but she wilted under Yves' icy regard, twiddling her thumbs and toyed with her hair. "Listen, Dee knows the deal." She noticed SB staring daggers at her and stage whispered, "What?"

 

Dee nodded. "I'm responsible for all of this. I done fucked up, I know it, and I plan to fix it. That's not what we're here for."

 

"Okay," Tomoe said. "I'm listening."

 

"Alright." Dee drew a ragged breath. "You probably know all this anyway but here goes. You told me that by buying the thickener I started a story that had one of two endings: the Disney happy ending and the Grimm cautionary one. Well, Galatea tried to give me—to get us—the Disney ending. I told her I trusted her, so she believed me and put me along the path. Turns out I didn't really trust after all." Dee squeezed Eurydice and kissed the top of her head. "If I did, I wouldn't have freaked out when I realized I'd eaten nanomek."

 

SB backpedaled away from Dee and Eurydice until she squashed her butt against the counter. "Whoa. You what?"

 

Dee turned Eurydice around in his lap. "Eurydice, I know you don't remember, and I know you don't want to remember, but we spent two whole days together that I don't remember, so hear me out." Eurydice shivered but said nothing. "When we had our fight, I accused you of force-feeding me the thickener. I accused you but I never let you answer." Dee held her hand in his. Eurydice stared down at it. "That's not what really happened, was it?" After a long pause, Eurydice shook her head. "I ate the nanomek myself, didn't I? It was my idea, wasn't it?"

 

Big Gulp

CeeCee espied Dee and Eurydice's blistering lip-lock while Raspberry accelerated her fevered, rhyming assault, a rapper demented by mescaline. "How it swells! How it dwells! On the future how it tells of the rapture that impels to the swinging to the ringing of the bells, bells, bells—help!"

 

CeeCee slammed her mouth over Raspberry's. Raspberry froze rigid as a mellow yellow tongue lolled between her trembling lips. "Mmf? Mmm…" The tongue filled the cavity of Raspberry's mouth like a blooming sunflower. Raspberry's surface tension melted and slicked. "Hm? Nn!" The molten cream poured down her throat, a sluggish, internal waterfall visible but hazy in Raspberry's translucent neck and chest. CeeCee reached through the orchid petals shrouding Raspberry's pubic mound, matted with damp. Raspberry's perplexed cries dissolved into eager pleas.

 

Raspberry raptured. Gouts of sugar-sherbet-satin suffused her pussy and boiled inward. Buttercream tendrils questing down from her throat collided with the lemon-yellow upsurge from her sex. CeeCee kissed harder and mushier, muffling Raspberry screaming orgasm. The lavender girl's core achieved critical meltdown as she came. She lost all cohesion, liquefying in moments, her face mask of bliss before CeeCee's ravening mouth inhaled Raspberry's one hundred and twenty gelatinous pounds as easy as a party girl slurping down a single Jell-O shot.

 

"I told you we go together well," CeeCee said, smoothing out the gentle swelling of her belly, now tinged in soft oranges, reds, and golds, a tummy full of sunsets. She pressed a chubby thumb and forefinger between her peach-stained lips and drew out the destructed bell's old copper clapper. She flourished the clapper at the crowd gathered by the counter. "Now that's what I call a real show-stopper." But Eurydice sobbed her tenth "I love you" and still held the room in thrall. CeeCee folder her arms under the jutting prow of her matronly bosom. "How do you like that. Upstaged by a freshly squeezed fruit."

 

Yves Meets SB

 

"Don't let her hurt him, Dee," Eurydice pled.

 

Dee hunkered in the Jeep's busted doorframe, ready to leap out at the two figures closing ranks in front of him. "I won't." Damn it,, he thought, none of this makes any sense. SB wound her scimitar back, a batter ready to swing for the bleachers. Dee coiled to jump. I can't think of any reason for SB to act this way…

 

"I've sparred with a Swiss Flambergé," Yves said, never breaking his stride as he stepped within striking distance, "a Zweihänder sword almost as tall as I am, even a stupid Klingon bat'leth." He did not stop until he and SB stood toe-to-toe and eye-to-eye. "But that…" Yves nodded at the crystal bladed scimitar glinting high above their heads and let the silence stretch, his observation incomplete. SB cocked one eyebrow. The sword dropped a fraction of an inch, and Yves said, "…is just gay."

 

Dee thought, Unless this is another test?

 

"And that," Yves finished, "is coming from a guy who voluntarily has sex with men." The scimitar's scintillating tip traced an eccentric oval in the air as SB's poker face cracked into perplexity. "I mean," Yves added, pointing, "look at that thing. It's got to be over a foot wide, and, what, four feet long? Something from a video game." He shook his head. "Not a real sword. What the Hell can you do with it? Run around screaming 'Hassan chop'?" SB glared in silent defiance, turned aside, and brought the sword down close, hugging the pommel between her breasts, like a toddler protecting her favored teddy bear from a bullying brother. "Fine," Yves shrugged, stepping back. "I'll show you." He held out his hand. "Give it here."

 

 

Unyx

 

Ursula scudded down toward the Jeep, laughing. "I thought all goo girls were into solid boys." Dee – too – hard – CeeCee – too – soft – Ursula – just – right! She drew close to her body, marveling at the full body corset effect of Nyx's mummifying embrace. It smoothed out even the slightest uneven line or asymmetrical curve, molding her flesh into its ideal shape—not a generic twiggy Hollywood starlet ideal, but an ideal Ursula shape. Her ebony coated braids were giant licorice sticks. Her legs twitched, her gummed lips curling in a rictus of carnal bliss. "Nyx, how am I breathing?" no – need – you – opened – yourself – to – me – and – let – me – flood – within – you – now – you – breathe – the – blood – music. "You mean you're oxygenating my blood?" bah – science – babble – no – mystery – no – romance – come – back – come – sing – the – blood – music – with – me! or – just – cum – that's – fine – too.

 

Ursula wafted close enough to see the stretchy black membrane covering her tongue and teeth. "I need to breathe to get back in, to inspirit my body." ah – yes – inspiration – yes – mystery – yes. The liquid shadow drained from Ursula's face in fingers of running fluid. Her mouth swallowed its contents down in a sensuous gulp. Ursula heard her own post-orgasmic laughter for the first time—a deep, slow, mind-blown chortling. "Damn," she said, watching her body luxuriate on the ground and feel itself up. "I never imagined myself like this." how?. "So…sexy. Hold on, that reminds me of something."

 

["…That was 'going at it'? But I was just walking…No, you're right, it was more than that. It really did feel like sex. Constant, nonstop sex…"]

 

The bodysuit peeled away from her head completely, forming a thick band below Ursula's chin, more choker necklace than turtleneck. "Oh, Nyx," Ursula sang, ethereal voice dripping with mischief. "In order for you to wear me, to use my body's motion to conserve your magic, you’re going to have to hold still, to not burn nanomek, and let me move you." know – that – sounds – strange – but – fun – so? "So, I did it with Galatea once, and she said it was a little…intense."

 

["…When you were wearing me, and I held still while you moved, I didn't burn any magic…But I could still feel you—taste you, touch you, smell you—and you pulled me and pushed me and stretched me and…and fucked me. There's no better word for it. You were touching every part of me. I had no core, no reserve, no backup, no body, just you, you, you, everywhere. I could feel your tits bounce and you pussy drip and your ass rock and your legs swing, and when you put me into your mouth…"]

 

A spiky shiver shot through the obsidian substance of the bodysuit. wait – what? constant – um – nonstop – sex? pull –and – pussy – and – tits – and – push – and – legs – and – stretch – and fuck – every – part?

 

Ursula bobbed back up a bit. "You can read my flashbacks? I mean, hear my memories?" when – they – make – your – heart – beat – this – fast – and – your – sex – get – this – wet? yes –but – but – constant – nonstop – sex?

 

Ursula could not wait to get back into her body so she could leer properly. She hovered, poised above her pouting mouth. "Oh, yeah."

 

but – but – for – how – um – long?

 

Ursula dipped down. "If I have any say in the matter…" Her body's lips parted. "…I am going to make it last…" She pushed her astral-presence close and an electric thrill shocked through her as she tasted her own lips "…the rest of our lives."

 

oh – God – oh – God – oh – my – God…

 

Ursula threw her head back, gasped, and became inspired.

 

 

Ursula & Nyx in 3D

 

Ursula's inner eye buoyed into the sky. Her body sprawled on the road below. The last vestige of Nyx, a dome of jet black on otherwise faded asphalt, liquefied and flooded up Ursula's kicking legs. The lustrous coating gave Ursula's skin and angular features the perfection of a masterwork sculpture, carved not from marble, but flawless black granite. "I wish I had taken off those stupid blue jeans," Ursula sighed. "I bet our legs look fantastic."

 

"Yeah." Galatea's unmistakable voice rang out from the very air. "Tobey McGuire, eat your fucking heart out."

 

Ursula's adrenal gland was stuck in the body flopping on the pavement far below her mind's eye, but Ursula still felt an insurgent urge to jump out of her skin. "Gah!" Her point of view spun, taking in the road, the roof of the jeep, Eurydice on all fours and impaling herself onto Dee's cock, and the blazing, mid-morning sun. She was alone in the air. "Galatea?"

 

"Were you expecting Obi-Wan Kenobi?"

 

"I wasn't expecting any of this." Ursula's point of view righted. "I can handle the astral-body stuff better now, thanks to your coaching, but how the Hell are you out here with me?"

 

"Funny," said Galatea's voice. "I thought I'd explained this bit."

 

hello – hello – where – did – you – go – ah – there – you – are – hello – hey – um – crowded – company?

 

Galatea gasped, "What the fuck?"

 

jesus – ha – it's – a – lime – ha – ha – get – in – the – cranium – ha – ha – ha!

 

"What's going on?" Galatea cried.

 

Ursula suspended herself in smug silence before speaking. "You're the unintended guest, Galatea, not her, so you explain yourself first."

 

"Oh, all right," Galatea grumped, "but I'm running out of nanomek fast. Projecting a thought in here costs a bundle."

 

…yes – Ursula – yes – so – strong – your – mind – is – so – strong – your – body – so – sweet – come – back – and – feel – me – fuck – you – please – sweet – strong – please!

 

"I gotta be honest, little sister," Galatea confessed. "You're creeping me out. Anyway, Ursula, I asked you to give me, a newbie me, a message from me, the old me, in case something bad happened to me, the whole-me. That message was me, a kinda mini-me. See?"

 

"Uh, yeah," Ursula said, her point of view bobbing in a cameraman's nod, "that's the part I didn't understand the last time, either."

 

"When I mindfucked you," Galatea translated, "I left a little mind-web and a packet of energy, a backup magic battery, in case the shit hit the fan. That mind-web is almost gone, now, you know. Just a few thoughts left. Is another Galatea going to show up soon?"

 

Ursula mused, "A backup magic battery? But you said you recharge your magic by fucking Dee's brains out—Oh my God, you put Dee's sperm in my brain!"

 

ew – ew – ew – um – no – wait – hold – on – magic – battery?

 

"Don't be silly." It was Galatea's turn to be smug. "You don't put sperm in your brain, you put it in your—"

 

found – it – found – it – lime – thank – you – found – it – just – enough – keep – me – going – keep – me – fucking…

 

"Hey." Galatea grew faint. "That's not yours."

 

"Nyx, no," Ursula insisted. "The power level of that battery must be so small."

 

Galatea's furious screech echoed as if from miles away. "It's over nine thousand!"

 

"Okay." Ursula astral-shrugged. "Maybe more than a little. But still, Nyx, don't waste it fucking yourself to death."

 

worth – it – worth – it – worth – it – to – thank – you – to – love – you…

 

Ursula aspired high into the air, stunned. "Nyx…"

 

"It's easy to for people like us to die for love, little sister." Galatea's wistful, distant voice crackled with empathic static. "Ursula wants you to take the harder path."

 

don't – understand – don't – want – to – stop – want – to – thank – want – to – fuck – want – to – love… Ursula focused on the source of the whispery non-speech. While Galatea's astral voice came from the surrounding air, Nyx's words flittered from somewhere deep within, from between the eyes and beside the heart. "Live for me, Nyx."

 

will – try – will – live – will – love – live – love – oh – love…

 

Galatea's voice strained even as it broke apart. "It…yours…lit…sister. Ursula…tell…love him. Tell Dee…no matt…happens. I love…always." And Galatea was gone.

 

so – sad – so – strange – Dee – cute – kind – caring – but – too – solid – almost – stolid – yuck.

 

Ursula & Nyx 2: Electric Boogaloo

 

A swash of black gushed out from beneath Ursula's belt to fill the narrow hollow of her belly. She pushed against the road, hips pumping the air, and coils of black lashed over the small of her back. She drifted down from the height of ambush orgasm into a muzzy mind and a world in soft focus. I came so hard it knocked my glasses off. The black bodysuit stretched to taste and tickle her ribs even as more swirled up from the pool, coursing under her knees to swirl between her thighs and the globes of her ass—but something was missing. What was it? Oh, yes. "Tighter."

 

Raspberry groaned, sat up on her knees, and drove gluey fingers into her pussy. She threw her head back—and did a double take at CeeCee, who was just standing there. "How can you not be whacking off right now?" Raspberry demanded. "Can't you fucking smell it?"

 

"Don't mistake composure for ease, honey," CeeCee said, "I'm hot enough to sit on a fireplug."

 

The slinky bodysuit slurped up Ursula's chest, swallowing one rib, sucking against the skin to fill every pore, and then moving onto the next. Ursula sighed and reached between her breasts to unhook her bra. "Won't be needing this for a while." The bra unsnapped and fell away.

 

Raspberry ground her fingers into her sex with a pulverizing ferocity, but she still had the presence of mind to grit her teeth and quip, "You didn't need it in the first place."

 

Nyx's molecule-thin pseudopodia slithered over Ursula's breasts. Ursula cried out when the bodysuit vacuumed against the tender flesh. Ursula's nipples hardened under the second skin, each crinkle made to stand out in sharp relief by the glistening coating. The familiar, burning wire stretched down from Ursula's chest to somewhere deep beneath her bellybutton. Nyx descended into her contracting pool until only her shoulders breached the surface, covering Ursula in a thickening shell of liquid night. Wanting to look Nyx in the face before that face disappeared, Ursula swiveled her hips in a effort to sit up. The whole bodysuit sloshed and the goth girl was lost in a raging surf of overstimulation from toes to clit to tummy to tits to neck to chin to lips-teeth-ear…

 

thank-you-named-me-you-saved-me-named-you-saved-me-thank-you-thank-you…

 

The voice was so quiet and small Ursula could barely distinguish it from the oceanic thrum of her heart in her stoppered ears. Ursula tried to speak, "Ny—" but the black fluid filled Ursula's mouth with the taste of licorice and anise and absinthe. …yes-me-Nyx-yes-name-life-thank-you-let-me-thank-you… Panic fluttered in Ursula's stomach as the bodysuit surged thick and fast over her face, sealing her lips and eyes. no-never-hurt-you-never-would-never-oh-let-me-thank-you-let-me-fuck-you…

 

Licorice ambrosia poured down her throat. Nyx's gel-flesh nuzzled Ursula's clit and vulva. The goth girl spread her legs in mute assent but could not hope to match the cavernous pit of need her sex had become. The swath of bodysuit covered Ursula's cleft concaved, throbbed deep into her core, and set her to flight.

 

Scraps for the Ursula & Nyx

 

Eurydice tugged off her sunglasses. "You named her." She turned. "Dee! Ursula named her."

 

Nyx shuddered and clawed at the blacktop. She disappeared up to her waist into the pool. "It's okay, Nyx," Ursula soothed, "I know this will work." She scooted backward over the pavement to avoid soaking her butt in the advancing, iridescent stain. "But let's start with my toes, alright?" Nyx's eyeless face fixed on Ursula's bare foot. Ursula wiggled her toes at her. "Lesson one: Ursula's toes." Thank you, Galatea, Ursula thought, for talking me through this first, for making sure I was ready. "Ursula's ass will be in lesson two, I promise." Her cheek still stung where Nyx had pinched her. She concentrated on the sensation and her sex ached. And, God, am I ready.

 

"This is so fucking hot," Raspberry gawked. The orchid petals of her hair dewed and stuck together in unkempt clumps. "I'm at a loss for words."

 

CeeCee swaggered back a few steps, giving Ursula a little more personal space. "Keep doing what your doing, honey," CeeCee told her. "Anything that shuts Raz's trap is fine by me."

 

Yves moved out of the way and Dee called over him through the Jeep. "So?"

 

"I thought only you could do that," Eurydice said.

 

Ursula dipped her foot down. "Here we go." The tip of her big toe kissed the surface of the ebon pool. "There. You feel cool and…and dry." She squished the stuff between her toes. "Fluid yet dry." She swallowed. "Slick but not sticky at all." She smiled, hoping she looked demure and in control despite the meltdown in her pants. "I like it." Like it? I love it. I want to jump in a God-damn wallow in it. The surface of the pool shook from Nyx's trembling, and Ursula knew she had to take it slow. "I like it a lot. Now…" And take charge. "…little girl: cover my foot." Black ink lapped over Ursula's toes and crept up her ankle in a slipper softer and smoother than silk. "Tighter." The slipper drew snug. "Tighter."

 

"So…hot," Raspberry droned.

 

"Shut…up," CeeCee drawled.

 

Dee shrugged. "What name?"

 

Droplets like green glass beads dripped from Eurydice's chin and rolled down tips of her bladed hair. "Huh?" The droplets sizzled when they hit the pavement. "Oh. Um. Nyx."

 

The slipper grew to swallow Ursula's calf. "Tighter, little girl, tighter." The slipper clamped down just below the knee, gripping hard on every pore, even between her toes, becoming a sleek, flawless, second skin. Ursula rolled up her pant leg and caressed the glassy surface of the obsidian stocking connecting her leg to the ebon pool. "Perfect." Oh, God, I'm actually purring. "Hold it right there for a minute." My underwear is sopping. Dee is oblivious, I bet Yves is suspicious, but the meliae are bloodhounds for sex. They must know exactly how I feel. Including Nyx. "Let me take my other boot off and then we can start lesson two." Ursula giggled as she squirmed her left foot free of its Doc Martin. "Getting into Ursula's pants."

 

"Good name," Dee said, "I don't see the problem. What's going on?"

 

A balled-up sock sailed over Eurydice's shoulder. "Uh. Y'know. Stuff."

 

Scrap for the start of Ursula's Big Moment

 

"SRU," Yves said as Dee nodded, "the place where everything started. How many men are supposed to show up to the Easies' party tonight, do you know?"

 

"About fifty eligible bachelors," CeeCee said. "Black Cherry plans to drain, kill, and consume them all."

 

Raspberry thought this over. "And probably not in that order," she said eventually, grinning.

 

"You see what I meant about spoon feeding her straight lines," CeeCee told Ursula.

 

"We're on a timetable, then." Yves hustled back into the Jeep driver's seat. "Let's get moving."

 

Ursula groaned at the prospect of another ascent into the Jeep. The two-door vehicle's high wheels and narrow access to the rear cabin were not designed with petite women in mind. She awkwardly swung up and hauled her butt high and vulnerable into the empty space that the Jeep's fallen passenger door once shielded—

 

A stinging tingle shot through one ass cheek and grounded itself in her clit. She stumble-hopped backward away from the car, chirping a staccato of swearwords: "What-shit-fuck-crap!" She almost tripped over her own clunky boots before she regained her balance, braids flopping. "Dammit, who pinched me?" And who knew exactly where to pinch me?

 

She whirled to face the assembled mob. Dee wore his inscrutable smile. Eurydice frowned at Raspberry as the lavender girl, unabashed, undressed Dee with her eyes. CeeCee was contemplating the sky but pointing an oozing finger at the obsidian girl. "You," Ursula said. The obsidian girl steepled her fingers against her neck. "Don't give me that 'C’est moi?' look," Ursula seethed, advancing.

 

"How do you know her 'C'est moi' look?" CeeCee asked as Ursula stormed past.

 

"How can she have a look when she doesn't have a face?" Raspberry wondered as Ursula drew nose-to-oval with the obsidian girl.

 

Ursula narrowed her eyes at the Ursula-mask reflected in the midnight gloss of the obsidian girl's head. "Well?"

 

The obsidian girl danced back, stood still a moment, and then gave a helpless shrug. She wriggled her fingers, hands level with her hips, in febrile, grabby flexions.

 

"Of course you think I have a great ass," Ursula sneered. "Everyone thinks I have a great ass. In fact, the next…" Ursula faltered and flushed. "The next person...the, the next…"

 

["…the next person who mentions my ass is going to wear it for a hat, I swear…"]

 

 

Stealth Scrap: Get in the Car!

 

The amber woman shifted in the front seat as Dee drew near. "Oh my, now that is emotion in motion."

 

Ursula strained to see. Dee steamrolled toward the Jeep, falling into his unstoppable, predatory march. Ursula felt a flutter deep within her. It was a visceral but not a truly sexual thrill, like riding the crest of a rollercoaster. She remembered feeling it once before, when Dee emerged with Eurydice in his arms, and small spark of it even earlier, when he had set up her computer.

 

"Can you get her to let go of me?" Dee asked the lavender girl. "I'm fine, really."

 

The obsidian girl, her geodesic wings compactly folded against her shoulders, stood on Dee's feet with her hands latched onto his back. I used to dance with my father just like that, Ursula remembered, and the recollection somehow shocked her.

 

The amber woman slipped sideways out of the car, legs oozing down and taking shape as she rolled. She moved by relaxing and letting her bulk fill the space of her destination. Like an amoeba, she simply grew in the direction she wanted to go, lending her an alien but mesmerizing, smooth grace. "Ask her yourself, honey," the amber woman told Dee. "Or better yet, say you're sorry. You were the one who took one look at her and jumped from a moving car."

 

"He thought he was protecting his friends from her," Eurydice said, padding on all fours around from behind Dee, a jade sphinx with Medusa's hairdo. "From you," she growled.

 

Eurydice's appearance woke the lavender girl out of her horny reverie. "Jesus Christ, it's a lime, get in the car!" The lavender girl vaulted over the Jeep's hood, one cheek of her perfect ass squeaking on the silver metal, planting herself between Eurydice and the amber woman, arms upraised like a traffic cop's. "Get the fuck back into the fucking car, CeeCee," she hissed to the amber girl before turning to Eurydice. "Look, limey, we didn't come here looking for a catfight."

 

Ursula pushed the passenger seat forward. She nodded to Yves and clambered out of the Jeep. Yves hopped out the driver's side door, putting the car in park but leaving the engine running.

 

"We figured you weren't gunning for a fight when little Miss midnighter here tried to save my life," Dee said, patting the obsidian girl on her featureless pate. She snuggled in even closer. "Now how do I get her off?" Eurydice flashed him a leonine glare and he mutterred, "Um, wow, that didn't come out right…"

 

"Quiet, you," Eurydice huffed. She pawed a hole Dee left in the pavement and turned back to the lavender girl. "So, whose side are you on then?"

 

"Ours," said the amber woman, CeeCee.

 

"Not hers," the lavender girl added sourly.

 

The obsidian girl snuggled.

 

"I'm confused," Ursula said, maneuvering around CeeCee, the amber woman with the curves of pin-up girl from the Forties but the girth of a professional football linebacker. The obsidian girl peeled her head away from Dee's chest and pivoted her shoulders in Ursula's direction. Ursula looked into the obsidian girl's blank face and saw only her own, convex reflection gazing back at her, as if the obsidian girl had put on an Ursula mask. "I'm confused," she repeated, unsettled. "'Her' who? I'm having pronoun trouble."

 

Yves answered her. "Cherry Cupcake." He worked his knife into a pouch below the armpit of his undershirt. "She made you?"

 

"Black Cherry made her," CeeCee said, gesturing to the obsidian girl.

 

The lavender girl reached back to wrap a protective arm around CeeCee. It sank into the rich batter of CeeCee's shoulders. "The psycho-twat had us made. Oops, shit, I'm stuck in you again."

 

"What can I say, honey," CeeCee cooed as the currents of velvet-soft flesh dragged the lavender girl closer and deeper into CeeCee's side, "we go together well."

 

The obsidian girl stepped down and away from Dee. She still wore Ursula's face but did not say a word. Not counting the wings, Ursula thought, she's no taller than me. Why is she staring at me? Wait, that's just my reflection, which means I'm the one starting at her. Oh, great, now I can see myself blushing.

 

Scraps for Scenes from a Crowded Jeep

 

The passenger-side door fell off.

 

"I'm getting you out of here," Yves said. The rear tire kicked against the fallen door as the Jeep pulled away.

 

"No you're not." Ursula fumbled her glasses back onto her face. "But, uh, we're getting out of this car. Right now."

 

Yves glanced into the rearview mirror. Ursula nodded her head toward the rear side window. A little gush of viscid, lavender fluid ran down from the roof like spilt shampoo. "Yeah, I guess we'd better." Yves pulled the Jeep over to the curb, wincing at how false his nonchalance sounded to his own ears.

 

A fount of creamy champagne poured over the lip of the Jeep's canvas top through the gaping hole left by the lost door. A confusion of golden hues—marigold, saffron, school-bus yellow—filled the passenger-side front seat. The air inside the car grew heady with the dizzying bouquet of caramel and melted creamsicle. The storm of melted sherbet made little sound, just a satiny susurrus as more and more of the lush stuff piled into the bucket seat, drew itself up, and filled itself out and then further out.

 

"You can't leave yet, honey" purred the plump amber girl, "I haven't even started to sing."

 

Stealth Scrap: Crowded Jeep Continued

 

Eurydice bounded onto the pavement with arms outstretched and her back arched high behind them. She brought her legs down with her knees bent the wrong way. Only wrong if you plan on being a biped, she thought, running with a sinewy, feline gate. Ahead of her, Dee skimmed the road as he tumbled, the asphalt rumpling beneath him like the surface of a lake under a skipping stone. Solid boy's giving the road a case of road-rash.

Despite Eurydice's cheeta speed, the obsidian girl's powerhouse wings won the race. For a few seconds Dee and the obsidian girl danced in a horizontal, martial ballet. Dee feinted even as he fell. The obsidian girl played the game just as well, counterfeinting with a scissor kick here, dancing psuedopodia there, and Dee disappeared down a funnel of enfolding wings. A host of clashing emotions welled up in Eurydice's jumbled mind-web: panic, fear, fear for Dee, fury--jealousy. This is jealousy, she realized, watching the obisidian girl coccoon Dee until the two of them rolled over the road like a giant, licorice jelly bean. Why am I jealous? She's trying to kill him! The black ovoid rocked as it slowed. Isn't she?

 

Eurydice slid to halt on all fours as the ovoid cracked open. Layers of liquid black wing peeled away and Dee struggled to his feet. He bucked and flexed, trying every goojitsu trick Eurydice knew, and then a few she did not know, to shake his opponent loose. The obsidian girl clung to him, head buried in his chest, her arms hooked under his in a desperate but chaste hug.

 

Dee flushed and floundered in the obsidian girl's embrace. "Gerroff me!"

 

Scraps for Chapter 11

 

The bronze bell above the glass door jangled and tolled. The door remained unmoved.

 

The rose girl watched the bell jounce about. "Someone's coming."

 

Tomoe did not look up from the fat Sudoku puzzle book. "Mm." Her pencil skittered and scratched across the open page.

The rose girl sighed and hopped off the countertop. As she padded barefoot up to the front door, a copper-colored, one piece dress sprouted out from her waist to cover her translucent, cut-crystal flesh. The bell jerked around like a jumping bean. She smoothed out the oblong lump between her legs, swung the door wide, and stood in the doorway. She surveyed the empty parking lot. "They're a long way off. An hour, maybe?" The bell continued to clatter above her head. "This damn thing won't shut up."

 

"Yeah, yeah." Tomoe flipped the page. She harrumphed at the next grid of math puzzles, chewed on the pencil, then shrugged and started to fill in the empty boxes. "Piece of cake."

 

"So?" The rose girl turned about face. "Who is it?"

 

"Whoever it is," Tomoe said, "they're going to have to wait."

 

"Why?"

 

Tomoe wagged her hand over the puzzle book. "I'm not finished yet." She made a fist and bonked herself lightly on the head. "Duh!"

 

The rose girl stepped back into the store. The bell rang louder for a moment as the door closed. She tiptoed over to the counter, the bell chattering in the background. "Why do you still keep secrets from me, lovey?" she asked, sifting Tomoe's shining black hair through fingers of polished rose quartz.

 

Still writing with one hand, Tomoe reached up with the other and pulled the rose girl's palm against her cheek. "SB, do you want to be my partner, my darling, my cheese burger?" Their eyes met. "Or my familiar, my slave?"

 

The rose girls smile was full of diamonds. "I want to be your cheese burger, T, whatever that means. Unless I can be your slave and still get on top, that'd be kind of hot."

 

Tomoe returned to her book. "Then let me have my secrets. That way you can get miffed at me, like you are now." She tilted forward, gathered a handful of the silk of the coppery dress, and squeezed it around the lump in the rose girl's crotch in long, unhurried strokes. "And I can make it up to you."

---

 

 

Scraps for Zombie Carwash

 

Yves threw the gearshift into reverse but pushed hard on the footbrake. "We’ve got a choice: leave at the first sign of trouble or at the last possible moment. Staying is not an option; we are not ready for a fight."

 

"Leave at the last possible moment," Dee said, "and try to learn as much as we can." He turned around. "Is that okay with you two?"

 

Eurydice nodded. Ursula said, "You can just leave Galatea?"

 

"No," Dee answered, "but if Yves' says we're not ready, I believe him. We've got no plan and little information. And the parking lot is full, which means I can't go in there without being buried in Easies…Eurydice, what are you smiling about?"

 

"I'm thinking of you fucking your way out of a mob of frenzy-sisters." She grinned daggers at him. "It's an interesting mental image. I bet you could do it." Eurydice sat up and pulled the sunglasses off her face. "Orpheus couldn't handle it, they tore him apart, but you'd get through, Dee…Ursula, you okay?"

 

Ursula groaned, clutching the sides of her head. "My worldview hurts."

 

"We've got company," Yves said, his hands worrying the steering wheel.

 

The three passengers followed his gaze. The heavy front door to the sorority house cracked open and a tall coed in ragged jean shorts and a white tee-shirt shuffled through. Her hair was a bird's nest of red tangles.

 

"That's the worst case of bed-head I've ever seen," Yves said as the newcomer stumbled down the porch steps. A brunette coed in the same outfit tottered out of the building behind her and Yves said, "Okay, second worst." A blonde carrying a plastic bucket followed, clumsily closing the door behind her. "Christ, it's a makeover emergency."

 

The trio bumbled around the yellow SUV. The blonde upended the bucket and a flurry of towels fell onto the driveway. The brunette pulled one end of a garden house from the shrubbery and blasted the SUV with a jet of water. Her aim was unsure and wild. She stood with the hose shooting water straight up into the air for good minute as her friends divvied up the towels. Water splashed down over everything.

 

Ursula kneeled in between the front seats of the Jeep, squinting. "Are they stoned?"

 

"I know them," Dee said, and as soon as he spoke the trio of coeds turned to face the jeep, their movements fluid and in perfect synchronization. The brunette kept the hose trained and firing into the sky. The trio were sopping wet in moments, their shirts slick and translucent. The redhead pulled a bottle out of her shorts and squirted its contents into the bucket.

 

"There's no fucking way they heard you from there," Yves hissed.

 

"They couldn't," Eurydice murmured, "but maybe someone else did."

 

"I'd vote for the blonde in a wet tee-shirt contest," Ursula said. "Just look at those. Damn, I can see her nipples from here…What?" She poked Dee in the shoulder. "C'mon, back me up on this."

 

"What the Hell is going on?" Dee asked her. The three coeds triangulated their attention to the front passenger seat of the Jeep.

 

"Not another word, Dee," Yves said.

 

The brunette brought the hose down into the bucket. The jet of water caught the redhead in the ear. Her hair flew wild. She did not flinch or move an inch.

 

Ursula swore. Dee opened his mouth but Yves punched him in the arm. "Shut up, Dee," Yves barked. "They're putting on a show to try and get you to…" Yves eyes watered. "Ow, Jesus, ow." Yves cradled his right hand in his left, massaging his knuckles gingerly. "It's like punching a brick wall."

 

"Marble," Ursula corrected. She poked Dee's shoulder again. "His skin gives." Dee turned and made a sour face at her but she ignored him, exploring the hollow of his shoulder instead, her fingers working under the narrow strap of the muscle shirt. "His skin gives a bit but the muscles underneath are marble." Dee grumbled and folded his arms. Ursula gasped as his muscled flex beneath her palm. "Stone sliding against stone," Ursula stuttered, voice hushed. "Polished granite or greased marble…"

 

Eurydice cleared her throat in the sudden, icicled silence.

 

Ursula withdrew into the back seat. "Look," she told Eurydice, "I'm gay but I'm not dead. I can see the attraction of that sort of thing but I don't want it." Dee grimaced and rooted around the Jeep's glove compartment. Ursula pointed out the window to the driveway where the coeds, their expressions cockeyed but otherwise blank, were busy soaping up their SUV and each other with sudsy towels. "I'm much more interested in the Night of the Living Coed Carwash going on out there."

 

 

Scraps for Jeep Scene Continued

 

Eurydice blanched a pale celadon. "You know what I'd have to do go in and, uh, get it, right?"

 

Dee's grin puckered into a smirk. "You've done it before, apparently."

 

"Whoa, whoa!" Ursula waggled her hands, pressing herself up against the window. "I'm not ready for Lesson Six."

 

Eurydice locked onto Yves' reflection in the rearview mirror. Yves read her silent, abject plea, nodded, and tapped Dee on the shoulder. "You know, Dee, you're acting awfully cruel for someone who says he isn't jealous."

 

Dee's smile vanished. "What?"

 

"I'll do it," Eurydice stammered, downcast, "if you want me too."

 

"You mean you don't want to?" Dee asked, reaching for her.

 

Ursula scooted forward and took his hand instead. "What do you want, Dee?"

 

"A show?" Yves suggested.

 

Dee shook his head. "No."

 

Ursula shrugged. "Revenge?"

 

"No, Jesus, what's with you guys?"

 

Eurydice caressed his arm, bare and cool in Yves' spare muscle shirt. "Then what do you want?"

 

"Damn it," Dee spat. He lurched back into the front seat. "Isn't it obvious? I want you to re-remember what happened, what happened between you and me." He sighed, quiet and sad. "So I can say I'm sorry. I guess that's pretty selfish."

 

Yves hauled the Jeep into gear. "No." He toggled the turn signal. "Wanting her to not remember would be selfish. Wanting her to remember your acting like an idiot just so you can make it up to her is so hopelessly romantic I think I vomited in my mouth a little."

 

Eurydice slid the sunglasses back on her face in silence.

 

Dee grumbled, "Thanks."

 

"Ignore him, Dee," Ursula said as the Jeep pulled away from the curb. "Besides, the nanomek stuff in me wouldn't help."

 

Eurydice sat up, the oversize sunglasses hiding any emotion. "Really?"

 

Dee turned around. "Why not?"

 

"Well," Ursula said, "Galatea didn't mention anything about a breakup or even a fight to me. She was just pissed off that you were having sex with her, somewhere else. It didn't make much sense to me then." She glanced at Eurydice, who was watching her with the expressionless cool of reflective lenses. "But it does now. Plus, from what Yves' told me, whatever happened between the two of you happened late last night, after Galatea's visit to my apartment. So I all have inside me is Galatea's memories…of me."

 

Yves made a hard right at the next light. Eurydice rode the Jeep's momentum and sidled over to Ursula, faster than a sidewinder. "Really?" she said again, drawling, one brow arching high above the rims of her sunglasses. Eurydice's breath was warm against Ursula's cheek. "Now that's interesting." Ursula blushed and squirmed away but Eurydice just inched closer. She finger-walked a jelled hand up Ursula's thigh and wondered, "Did you smell as good then as you do now? Like Dee, but, you know…" Eurydice dipped her head to coo into Ursula's ear, "…girly?"

 

Scraps for Chapter 10: Jeep Scene

 

Eurydice glanced up, agog, before creasing her brow. "Yeahbuhwha'?"

 

Ursula's mouth worked wordlessly as Dee leaned further into the back of the Jeep. She gawked back at him, transfixed and aghast.

 

Yves worked the clutch, speaking as fast as he could. "I have an idea let's circle the block once and say when was the last time you ate I'm starved and I think I saw a Waffle Shack around here somewhere—"

 

"I know," Dee said. He twisted sideways and engaged the emergency brake. His gaze did not leave Ursula's shocked face.

 

Yves flinched but relaxed when the brake handle did not snap off in Dee's hand. "You know…where the Waffle Shack is?"

 

Dee ignored him. "I know," he told Ursula again.

 

Ursula swallowed. "What?"

 

"How?" Yves asked.

 

Eurydice sized Ursula up, a petite moppet in a black poncho, distressed jeans, and Doc Martins. Plaited ponytails tied up with white-lace ribbons arced away from her head and into the foot well. "I fucked the loli-goth?"

 

"I'm twenty-two," Ursula murmured.

 

"How did you know?" Yves demanded, pushing the gearshift forward into park.

 

"Still," Eurydice said, eyeing Ursula up and down. "You're really not my type, no offense, but…" Ursula folded up one side of the poncho and held a bare, porcelain white forearm under Eurydice's nose. "Oh," Eurydice breathed, mouth watering.

 

Dee turned to Yves. "What color are Ursula's eyes?"

 

"Oh. Um." Eurydice's eye's crossed. She brought her mouth within an inch of Ursula's flesh. "Oh."

 

"Green," Yves said without looking.

 

"Darkling green," Dee agreed. "Emerald on black velvet."

 

Ursula blinked, pulling her arm back. Eurydice's lips smacked together over empty air. "But…" Ursula began.

 

"They're usually hazel," Dee finished. He broke the sun visor off the windshield, flipped its flap open to reveal an oblong mirror, and passed it back.

 

Ursula snatched the visor out of his hands, scrabbled the eyeglasses off her face, and glared at the mirror, eyes wide. "Holy shit."

 

Eurydice leveled a suspicious finger at Ursula. "She smells just like you, Dee. Except, you know, girly."

 

Yves shook his head. "You're paying for that mirror, Dee. How did you notice something like that when I didn't?"

 

"Give me some credit, Yves." Dee rolled his eyes and settled back into his seat. "It's an easy mistake to make, and I've got a thing for girls' eyes."

 

Eurydice grinned. "He does, you know," she sighed.

 

"Listen," Ursula said, her glasses slipping in her shaking fingers as she pushed the red frames over her face, "I didn't mean to tell you. I mean, I wanted to tell you, but telling you now would've been insanely stupid."

 

Yves nodded. "It was."

 

"Fuck you." Ursula flipped Yves off. "Dee, listen, maybe it was the divination trance. I've been concentrating on my memories of Galatea and they're pretty, uh, specific. Anyway, the words just popped out. I'm sorry."

 

"You have nanomek in you," Dee said, not turning around, "Galatea's nanomek."

 

"Dee, I'm really sorry."

 

"You don't understand. I'm not jealous at all. That's not the point. You have Galatea's nanomek inside you." He turned around again. "Eurydice?"

 

Eurydice squinted, looking deep into Ursula's eyes. "Yeah," Eurydice agreed, "she's been royally mindfucked, alright. It's amazing she isn't a zombie." Eurydice straightened Ursula's glasses. "You've got some serious firepower between your ears, sister."

 

Yves sat bolt upright. "Oh, crap, I get it now."

 

"That's not all she's got between her ears," Dee said, grinning like an idiot.

The goth and the green girl crinkled their brows in confusion and chorused, "What?"

 

Yves met Eurydice's gaze in the rearview mirror. "Dee wants you to re-assimilate with Ursula's nanomek, Eurydice."

 

Scraps for Chapter 10

 

A myrtle blush flashed up Eurydice's throat. Yves and Ursula recoiled from a sudden flare of heat. Eurydice fled behind Dee, yipping, "Sorry, sorry!" Yves could only see the daggered tips of her hair quivering over Dee's shoulder as she spoke. "I'm so sorry. Dee, I can't believe you named me in front of your friends!" Dee flinched under a splattered drubbing against his back. "You know how much that turns me on! So few men ever live long enough to name me, and the one that gets to name me twice turns out to be an idiot."

 

"I understand even less now," Ursula said, pressing her palm against her forehead.

 

"You’re not alone." Yves stepped as close as he could in the baking heat. "Dee, Ursula and I just risked our lives saving you and your girlfriend's asses, and I know it's not over yet—but I have no idea what happened in there." He stood on tiptoe to stare down at Eurydice, "Are you Galatea or not?"

 

"Hey," Dee started.

 

"Shut up," Ursula said, "and let Sherlock do his thing."

 

Eurydice propped her chin on Dee's back to glare up at Yves. "I am Galatea." Her brow crinkled. "And a few others, too. Dee brought me back from just a few nanomek…"

 

Ursula said, "What's—" but Yves muttered, "Powder, raw material for meliae magic, makes girls out of goo. Now shush."

 

Ursula bounced on her feet and babbled. "Oh! Material component, perhaps even the one true material component, the massa confusa. Does it only make female things?"

 

"Massa what?" Dee said, "Black Cherry called it novilunium."

 

"Novilunium, really? Why doesn't anyone tell me these things? Well, that connection actually makes a lot of sense in Jung's archetypology…" Ursula frowned. "Wait, who's Black Cherry?"

 

"Oh my God," Dee said, "you mean you don't know?"

 

Yves and Eurydice chorused, "Shut the fuck up!"

 

Yves blinked. Eurydice poked her head around Dee's arm and grinned like a madwoman at Yves. "They talk way too much, don't they? How do we get rid of them?"

 

Yves shook his head. "I'd shake your hand if it weren’t three hundred degrees."

 

"Yeah, you're right, time to cool off." She stepped out from Dee's shadow. "Dee, go hose yourself down and then bring me some ice. I don't need much—I'm so energy efficient I probably break the second law of thermodynamics—but only if you're not around getting me hot and bothered."

 

Dee's gave her a wry smile. "Yes, dear."

 

Eurydice slapped him on the rump when he turned about-face and marched back into Bee's smoldering apartment. "Ooh, I shouldna done that," she said, touching the tips of her fingers to her lips, trickles of green glaze running down her forehead. "I'll need more ice, solid boy!"

 

Ursula whistled. "Wow, I knew you'd got it bad, but not that bad."

 

"Have you seen that man's ass?" Yves asked.

 

"I wasn't looking," Ursula admitted.

 

Eurydice hooked her thumb at the apartment door. "Go check it out."

 

Ursula rolled her eyes. "Fine, I get it." She disappeared into the misty apartment. "Holy shit!"

 

Yves and Eurydice exchanged worried looks.

 

"Look at this mess!" Ursula cried.

 

Yves and Eurydice relaxed.

 

 

Scraps for Book 3 Interlude

 

Interlude: I'm the Girl You've Been Waiting For

 

The morning sun blazed high above the chapter house of Epsilon Zeta Sorority as a yellow SUV crept up the horseshoe driveway. The brunette driving the boxy car dragged up the emergency brake and plopped her head into the steering wheel. "We're here."

 

The blonde coed sprawled on the backseat did not budge. Her hair stuck out everywhere, a mess of tangles at strange angles. "What time is it?"

 

The brunette eyes roved over the dashboard. "A little after eight." She scraped a pasty lip with her teeth and made a hissy, kissy noise.

 

The blonde dunked her head into the foot well. "We were out all night. I can't believe we spent all night with those frat guys—"

 

The redhead in the passenger seat spun around. "Shut up. This is all your fault."

 

"All I did was ask if you guys thought that really cute guy had called yet," the blonde said from the foot well.

 

The redhead narrowed her eyes. "Don’t you dare start talking about him again."

 

"But he was sooo cute." The blonde peeked up at her friends in the front seat. "Remember how his hair kept falling into his eyes? Those little, whatdoyacall'em, ringlets? Ooh, and his eyes. Brown but, they like burned, you know? He looked at me and I felt so small."

 

The brunette clapped her hands over her ears and sang wordlessly, rocking her head against the steering wheel. The redhead just stared into space.

 

"And…" The blonde sat up, fists curled in her lap. "And, oh God, didn't you watch him walk? I though runway models knew how to walk but this guy moved like he owned the whole world."

 

"I will not get horny again." The brunette chanted it like mantra. "I will not get horny again."

 

The blonde rubbed the sweat beginning to trickle down her neck. "And when he spoke, it was like he owned me."

 

The redhead glared at the floor. "He only said one word. One fucking word."

 

The blonde cleared her throat, squirmed in her seat, and tried to imitate Dee's voice. "…'What'?"

 

"Deeper," sighed the brunette, throwing herself back into the driver's seat.

The blonde cleared her throat and tried again in a lower register. "…Wha—"

 

"Deeper," insisted the redhead. "Like way deeper."

 

The blonde closed her eyes and scissored her legs. "'What'?"

 

The brunette whispered, "Deeper." Her hand inched under the waistband of her black denims. "No!" She bolted up. "Not again!"

 

"I can't help it," the blonde whined, falling over and hiding her face. "I'm a slut."

 

"We are not sluts," the redhead said, emphasizing each word by stabbing a finger at the blonde.

 

"We're skanks," said the brunette.

 

"That's right," nodded the redhead. "No, wait."

 

"We're skanks." The brunette looked down at her white tee shirt. "My nipples are hard."

 

The blonde pushed her rump up into the air. "My panties are wet. Again."

 

The two girls turned to their redheaded friend. She bowed her head. "I had to throw my panties away."

 

"Well." The brunette jingled the car keys. "We're not going back to the frat, are we?"

 

The redhead said, "No."

 

The blonde pulled her self up. She gave both her friends a coy, unsure look. "We're not going to, uh—"

 

"No!" The redhead held up both hands and gave her friends their marching orders. "We are going to do the walk of shame. Together. Then we're going back to our rooms..." The blonde perked up "…Separately." The blonde's face fell. "And we're going to whack off. Then we'll take a quick nap, finally get out of these sticky clothes and go to class. It'll be like tonight never happened…We didn't tell those guys about tonight's party, did we?"

 

"Hell, no," the brunette said.

 

"Good. Walk of shame time." The redhead peered at the big, brick house with Ε-Ζ emblazoned on its whitewashed porch. "No one's up yet, looks like. Good. Weird, but good." She popped open the passenger door. "Let's go."

 

The three girls skulked through the front door into the foyer. The blonde ran over to the whiteboard next to the phone on the far wall. She scanned the magic marker scribble on the board. "No messages." She punched buttons on the phone's integrated answering machine until it beeped. "Aw, He didn't call."

 

"Shh!" The redhead waved a frantic hand up and down.

 

"Oh, stuff it," hissed the blonde. "No one's around." She minced through the main hall and into the central stairwell. "I'm going to go scratch this itch. Later, guys."

 

"Me too," said the brunette. She tiptoed into the main hall before turning back. "You coming?" she asked the redhead.

 

"In a minute." She cracked open a side door. "I'm going to the kitchen."

 

"What? Why?" The brunette giggled. "You're not serious."

 

The redhead sniffed. "Not everybody owns a vibrator. I've got to make do."

 

"Whatever," the brunette shrugged and dashed upstairs. "I'm going to need extra batteries."

 

Interlude Scraps Continued

 

The redhead slunk down the narrow corridor passed the basement stairwell. Now that her friends were gone, she could let her guard down. Without panties, the crotch of her jeans had harnessed her sex. The rigid seam rubbed her raw from her clit down over her slit and around into the crack in her ass. She chewed her bottom lip and whimpered as she walked. At the far end of the corridor the door to the kitchen set crooked on a swinging hinge. Florescent light flickered through the gap above the door into the dark hallway. The redhead held her breath and stood still. Her lungs began to ache but she heard a scuffle of feet and furniture from the kitchen and air wooshed out of her. Someone was in the kitchen. In a way, the prospect of getting caught came as a relief. She shook out her hair, rubbed away ruined mascara, squared her shoulders, and stormed through the kitchen doorway.

A husky boy in a jelly-stained grocer's smock sat on the floor, hands hogtied behind his back to the granite top kitchen cart. His eyes bugged at redhead. "Oh, Christ, not yet." He kicked at the floor and the cart rolled away from the redhead. The work pants and boxers wrapped around his ankles and the friction of his bare ass against the hardwood floor reduced his retreat to a comical butt-scoot. "I won't be able to get a boner again for another hour. I swear to God, lady."

The redhead stared for long moment before calmly turning to her left and pulling a carving knife from a wooden block on the counter. Only then did she allow her self to scream. "Who the fuck are you?"

The husky boy crossed his eyes watching the tip of the long knife quiver at him. Lavender lip prints smeared his face and gobs of grape-colored jelly matted his hair. "You're not one of them?"

"Who the fucking Hell are you, and..." The redhead pointed the knife downward. "And why the Hell is your dick covered in custard? Are you some sort of autoerotic, bondage, food freak? Oh, wait." She relaxed and dropped the knife on the counter. "Hazing is illegal, you know. So are panty raids." She glanced around. "Where are your pledge brothers?"

The kitchen cart bumped up against the stainless steel refrigerator. "You're not one of them." The boy shook his head. "Jesus, lady, you got to get out of here."

 

The redhead slumped against the counter on the opposite wall and recited in bored singsong, "Epsilon Zeta Sorority does not encourage and will not condone hazing. We have a zero tolerance policy. As chapter secretary, I am obliged to ask you for the names of any Ep-Zed sisters who have collaborated with your frat's hazing activities in any way."

 

"I don't know what the Hell you're on about lady." The kitchen cart bumped against the refrigerator again. "Stop talking Moon language and get the fuck out."

 

"I can't," the redhead sighed. "I have to call the provost's office with those names. And I, uh, want something from the fridge…Look, can you stop bumping against it like that?"

 

The cart and refrigerator door clunked against each other again. "What? I'm not—" The cart whacked into the boy's head. The color drained from his face. "Oh, God, no." The purple gel on his cheeks stood out like kiss-shaped bruises. He twisted his neck to gape at the refrigerator. "It can't be. The other two weren't ready this fast. It's too soon."

 

The refrigerator door slammed against the kitchen cart. The boy's ass squeaked over the floor as the cart dragged him to the side. He butt-scooted away from the refrigerator with surprising speed. "This one won't be like the others. This one's hers."

 

Interlude Scraps Continued 10/6/06

 

The redhead frowned at the fridge. "Is a pledge in there or something?"

 

The husky boy kicked her in the shins. "We've got to get out of here!"

 

The redhead stood transfixed as the steel door swung open. A dark nebula billowed out to fill the widening space, black ink bleeding into the air as if seeping into water. The living patch of night shone, glossy and faceted, in the harsh florescent lamplight. It unfolded in clusters of wedges and confusing shapes, an origami blossom of impossible complexity and size. The obsidian thing bloomed bigger than the industrial refrigerator behind it and the planes of its outer petals filled out in familiar shapes.

 

"Wings," the boy groaned. "Wings. I told you. This one's hers."

 

The epicenter of the geometric eruption swelled into a fat, shiny balloon. It burst and two legs shot out, skinny but shapely. They touched down on the floor on toeless feet, rounded and tiny like a child's ballet slippers. The collapsing balloon gathered into narrow but curving hips and a tight little behind. The black mass of the ass stretched into a flat tummy, budding breasts, slender shoulders, graceful arms, curiously long neck, and a head as shiny, bald, and faceless as an egg dipped into black latex paint.

 

The winged obsidian girl stood with arms akimbo and feet tapping. She was brume. She was sepulchral. She was midnight.

She was a size 2.

 

The redhead flailed her arm backward, feeling for the door. "Oh, fuck me."

 

"No," sighed the boy as the obsidian girl scampered over to his prone form. "It's going to be me." The obsidian tilted her head. The overhead lamp reflected in her eyeless, featureless face as two round pools of white light and she regarded him with an alien curiosity. The boy looked into her illusory gaze and shuddered. "Again."

 

The redhead inched backward. The obsidian girl bent forward. The boy squeezed his eyes shut and cringed. The obsidian girl held still for a long moment. Her arm drew a dismissive zigzag in the air and her smooth, conical fingers snap-snap-snapped in his flinching face as she stood up and turned away.

 

The redhead's shaky, searching fingers brushed across the door and she whipped around, threw all her weight into it—and cracked her head against it, rebounding when the door refused to budge.

 

She faltered around the kitchen, one hand cradling her smarting forehead. The obsidian girl leapt up the refrigerator and perched on top with wings furled, watching her with the patience of a stone gargoyle.

 

The kitchen door swung inward. The blonde and the brunette lurched in wearing nothing but their tight white tee-shirts and panties soaked sheer at the crotch. Red and black gel ringed their mouths, as if they had been feasting on chocolate covered jelly donuts. Between the brunette's legs came a muffled, buzzing noise.

 

"Aw, shit," the boy said as the two girls ambled toward the redhead, "she knows you're here now. Sorry, lady, I tried to tell you."

 

The two girls seized the redhead, one on each arm. "Wait," the redhead said, glancing back and forth between them, trying to catch their unfocused, glazed eyes. "Wait! What the Hell…Oh my God…"

 

Black Cherry boiled into the room, wings snapped taught behind her. "Guess again." She licked her smirking lips and a fat drop of sanguine honey dropped from the corner of her mouth and sizzled on the floor.

 

The redhead swooned but her two friends propped her up. Black Cherry stormed close. She traced the curve of the redhead's cheek with one wing-claw and tickled her nipples erect with the other until the girl was awake and squirming in her friends' unyielding arms. "Stop, stop."

 

Black Cherry sliced away the redhead's flimsy top with the tip of a finger. "I never stop." She turned to the brunette as she ran both claws down the redhead's exposed ribs. "So this is the other girl who met Master?"

 

The brunette's voice was hushed and distant. "…Yes."

 

The redhead barked with painful laughter. "Stop, stop!" She wrestled with her captors but they stood, unmoving and unblinking. "Help me, someone help me!"

 

The obsidian girl unfurled her wings and tapped a smooth, conical finger against the metal refrigerator.

 

Black Cherry glanced upward and startled. "So soon? Wonderful! I'm glad I used so much extra nanomek, then. That one's yours." She leveled a quivering claw at the hogtied boy. "But this one is mine. I need to taste her memories of master. Now then…" She went to work on the fly of the redhead's jeans.

 

The kitchen door swung open and the sisters of Epsilon Zeta trickled into the room. The redhead cried out, "Oh thank God—Help me! Call the cops! Do something? Why aren't you…Oh, no." A half-dozen coeds, their expressions blank and lips stained blood red, took places around the room. When another sorority sister bumped her way through the door, the redhead glimpsed the narrow corridor filled with to capacity with glassy-eyed girls. "No, no, no."

 

"I tried to tell you, lady," the boy said. "Look, I'm real sorry."

 

The redhead slumped and trembled in her captor's arms. She whispered at the floor, "Help me. Help me."

 

"There, there, no need to cry." Black Cherry plucked the redhead's chin up with a wing and unzipped the girl's jeans with her hands. "After all, you're not scared. I could smell it if you were. But I smell something else, instead. Now, open wide." Black Cherry yanked the redhead's jeans down and giggled. "Oh, I see that you have already. So all you need to do…" Black Cherry leaned close, her fingers pressed deep into the redhead's sex, her lips drizzling searing honey over the girl's ear. "…is let me in."

 

---

 

Scraps for the Shower Scene

 

The The freezing water shocked Dee's flesh. He yelped. His body seized up. He staggered in a sudden wash of fever. "What's happening?"

 

Whorls of vapor rose off the green girl entwining him. "Pluvia scaenae!" She rode him, savage and exultant, even as steam hissed from her mouth. "Aquae vitae!"

 

Dee hooked one arm around her waist, raising the other into the freezing spray. "Holy shit." Droplets sizzled against his skin when they struck, boiling away faster than fat on a griddle. The green girl glared, bit her lip, and bounced against him with the eager impatience of a Hell's Angel kick starting a stubborn motorcycle. Dee twisted about, his bewilderment overcoming the desire to fuck the frown of her face. "When did the shower curtain melt? How hot are we?"

 

"With you…" The green girl behind him blew superheated steam into his ear. "'Tis a pleasure to burn."

 

The young Galatea astride Dee's cock grabbed a fistful of his hair and arched impossibly back, breasts and wild mane bobbling. She kicked a leg to the slime-covered wall on the side and balanced herself against the far wall with her other arm. She breathed deep. An inrush of boiling vapor poured down her throat and the green girl grew.

 

Dee felt new pressure and weight push against his hip and spread around his waist in a constricting ring. The green girl's legs bore down upon him, building in strength and taking up new bulk. She locked her knees around his ass, hooked her heels against his shins, breathed deeper. The green girl's milky-green flesh turned opaque as it literally built up steam. The spikes of her hair grew thick and glossy, a forest of jelly dreadlocks. The hand maintaining her Kama Sutra balancing act now pressed against the ceiling. Her shimmering hair brushed against the far wall. Her breasts tipped back against her chin. A canary-eating grin vanished from sight behind her expansive cleavage. She giggled and the resulting body-quake took Dee's breath away.

---

 

Scraps for Galatea's Resurrection

 

 

["…You’re a computer nerd, Dee, work it out…"]

 

The solitary nanogasm burst against Dee's inner thigh and vanished faster than a top quark in a particle accelerator, a split-second lightning kiss barely strong enough to trigger a single nerve ending in Dee's skin. The surface of the green serum filling the tub remained placid and dead. Dee closed his eyes, trying to remember the first time Galatea told him about nanogasm.

 

["…One sperm makes one nanomek replication…"]

 

"Please, Galatea," Dee prayed, his voice ringing and amplified by the porcelain tub, "come back to me if you can." The thin lime liquid stuck to the skin and congealed as it cooled, but Dee was caught in reverie, listening to Galatea's technobabble pillow-talk in his head, and felt no urge to wipe it away.

 

["…One replication gives me one nanogasm and produces two more nanomek—at least two, more if you really get 'em turned on…"]

 

A cluster of nanogasms trilled against his thigh in a sudden, brief salvo before the brackish bathwater fell inert again. Dee smiled, his eyes still shut. "I bet you thought I was going to say, 'but only if you want to.' What did you call me? 'Sensitive and enlightened and stuff.' Well, add 'selfish' to that list. I don't want you back only if you want to come back. I just want you, period."

 

["…which combined with three more sperm gives me three more nanogasms and produces six more nanomek, which gives me nine more nanogasms and, well…"]

 

The next flurry of nanogasms arrived quicker and stronger than before, zipping over Dee's skin like dozens of marching, happy, electric ants. The ripple-tickle-tingle abated, petering out like the last few superheated kernels of popping corn, before surging in a cascade of strengthening waves that thrilled Dee down to the bone. His eyes flew open and he cried out in uncontrollable laughter. "Galatea!"

 

["…after a few minutes of that I'll be back in shape…"]

 

The green syrup between his legs fizzed and radiated warmth in a room-temperature-but-rising boil. "I love you, Galatea! I—Whoa."

 

["…and hot and horny as Hell. Literally…"]

 

Thousands of nanogasms ran rampant into Dee's crotch.

---

 

Scraps for Intro to Chapter 8

 

 

"…God damn, woman," Yves was crying out, "how do you always do that?"

 

The morning sun threw strange shadows in the doorway. Ursula shrugged, opened the door wide and stepped aside. "Come into my parlor."

 

"Very funny," Yves grumbled, crossing the threshold and barging into Ursula's living room. "Oh, wait," he said, glancing at the antique French settee and matching oaken end tables, "this really is a parlor." He tapped a thoughtful rhythm on a lace covered tabletop. "Doilies, even."

 

Ursula stood in front of a glass display case full of porcelain dolls. "I've never invited you to tea?"

 

Yves eyes watered from the patchouli incense and a lemony, astringent smell lingering in the air. "You have," he said, blinking. "I've always had to RSVP in the negative for…varying reasons."

 

Ursula waved a hand at the homey clutter of her living room. "You think all of this is affectation."

 

Yves pursed his lip and whistled through his teeth a bit. He espied a purple kitchen glove poking out of Ursula's sweatpants pocket. "You don't have a cat," he eventually said. He folded his arms, a gesture both defiant and protective. "Rooms like this are supposed to have cats in them."

 

Ursula smirked. "Black cats?"

 

"Maine coon cats," Yves countered. "One named Alabaster and the other Fusspot. This isn't a witch's parlor. It's my grandmother's."

 

Ursula laughed hard enough to snort through her nose. The tension in Yves' shoulders melted and he folded himself onto the settee. "Sorry," he sighed, "it's been a long night."

 

"Fuck the tea," Ursula said, her smile warm, "what about a hot toddy?"

 

"Only if it's a coffee toddy and not warm milk. I'd pass out."

 

"I'll grind some beans," Ursula said. Her bunny slippers scuffed the floor as she moved into the kitchenette. "Any roast preference?"

 

"Ursula, the only coffee I have in my apartment is made from instant crystals."

 

"That would be a 'no,' yes?"

 

"Yes," Yves called, peering into the kitchenette before settling into the settee, one arm draped over his forehead.

 

The coffee grinder grumbled and an undercurrent of freshly ground coffee added to the complex, reeking bouquet in the air. "Quit trying to smother it," Yves said. "I know already."

 

Ursula stopped puttering in the kitchen. "Know what?"

 

"You had sex with Galatea."

 

Ursula stumbled out of the kitchen, tripping over bunny-ears. "How did you—"

 

Yves sat up. "You've taken the day off…to clean. You're taking excuses to use every classic masking scent in the book. And your bed linens are hung out to dry in your kitchen. Either Galatea's gotten busy in your bed or you broke your hooka and got bongwater everywhere."

 

"What are you," Ursula said, "Sherlock Holmes?"

 

"No. Holmes was bi."

 

Ursula stared for a second before scuttling back into the kitchenette. "I'm going to use more brandy."

 

"Good idea."

---

 

Scraps for Ursula's Lesson # 5

 

Ursula flopped onto fluffy, green-stained quilt. "It's the story of my life," she groaned. "After years of searching and hoping and waiting, I finally experience my first supernatural encounter. The sex is amazing, but she turns out to be only bi-curious."

 

Galatea turned in the doorway, her frown pensive and sympathetic. "Oh, Ursula, I'm sorry. Are you angry? You don't sound angry."

 

"It's okay," Ursula said, rolling onto her back, her legs dangling so her toes dusted the floor. "I'm used to it by now. Almost. But it would never work out between us anyway."

 

"Why not?" Galatea's brow crinkled in confusion for a second before Ursula kicked a dollop of green icing right between her eyes.

 

"You’re a slob," Ursula gibed, giggling until Galatea licked her eyebrows clean with a forking pair tongues. "Damn, girl."

 

"I guess you won't be wanting lesson five then," Galatea said, her sibilant hissing long like a cartoon snake's.

 

"No need to be hasty," Ursula said, sitting up. "If the you out there fucking Dee is anything like the you in here fucking me, there's plenty of time."

 

Galatea harrumphed, "I need ice," and marched down the hallway.

 

"Just what are you doing here anyway?" Ursula hollered after her.

 

"I came for a catfight." The whirring clatter of the kitchen icemaker started up. "You know, like on those talk shows: 'Stay away from my man you slut!' That sorta thing."

 

"What? Why?"

 

"Made perfect sense when I was plastered. Hm, outta ice. Do you have any in the freezer?" Ursula heard the freezer door clunk open. "Holy shit, look at all this crap! What's in all the Tupperware?"

 

Ursula scrunched her nose. "Soup. I'm on a kind of soup kick lately. Last month was vegetable and bisque. I've moved onto fruit."

 

A plastic top popped. "What's the frozen purple stuff?" Galatea asked.

 

"Probably borsht." Ursula rubbed the bridge of her nose with the palm of her hand. "Could be plum coulis."

 

Something thunked onto a countertop. "Any ingredients from SRU in either?"

 

"No." Ursula massaged the sinus pressure points below her eyes for a moment before perking up. "Hey, wait a minute. How did you know the name of that Internet wholesaler?"

 

"Educated guess." Ursula heard something slap and slither. "Guh—Woo!"

 

"What are you doing to my borsht?"

 

"Mm. It's the plum. And you don't wanna know."

 

Ursula shook her head, then cradled it in her hands. "Ow. Galatea, I don't know if I'm up for lesson five. I think I'm getting a sinus headache."

 

"It's not a sinus headache," Galatea voice drifted over the sounds of Tupperware being resealed and restacked in the freezer. "Don't worry, though. It won't last long."

 

Ursula squeezed her temples. "But why did it start?" she demanded.

 

"Because lesson five is starting." Galatea glided into the room, her green, frosty gel-flesh sporting a purple patina like the skin of an avocado. "And I'm permeating your blood-brain barrier."

 

Ursula gawked. “What? Why?”

 

Galatea affected a professorial cough. “Ahem. Lesson five: the mindfuck.”

 

The pain ringing Ursula’s skull vanished into a heavy, beery buzz. She keeled to the left but propped herself up against an iron bedpost. “Oh, shit.”

 

Galatea swooped in to stand a few feet from the foot of the bed, her starlit eyes dancing over Ursula’s face. “So that’s what getting drunk is supposed to feel like? I think I’ll stick with the green stuff.”

 

The world wobbled worse when she shut her eyes so Ursula kept them peeled. She picked out her panicky reflection looking back at her from the vanity mirror on the other side of Galatea’s translucent, purple-green shoulder. “You can read my mind.”

 

Galatea squinted, focusing her gaze somewhere directly behind Ursula’s nose. “No, not really. Just hindbrain echoes. You didn’t swallow enough nanomek, enough magic, I guess. Thirsty?”

 

“No,” Ursula said with a sloppy shrug. Galatea arched an eyebrow. Ursula blinked and swallowed. “Yes,” she choked out, clasping her throat. “Christ, yes.”

 

Galatea smirked and pressed forward, pursing her gelid lips against Ursula’s right ear, her breasts brushing Ursula’s naked lap with a deliciously cool, powdery weight. “How thirsty?” she purred, the frozen floe of her breath skating down Ursula’s neck.

 

Ursula’s mouth worked but no words came out.

---

 

Scraps for Ursula's Lesson # 4

 

"Aw, okay." Sweet-tart Galatea scissored her legs around the bedpost, working the strands of gel stretching from her fingers as if playing a very complicated game of Cat's Cradle. "Your whole body changes after you cum, did you know that? Your skin gets even softer and smoother." She wiggled her fingers and green gel roiled across Ursula's rounded belly in tandem, pinching and pushing in waves. "Fuzzier and sleeker." She sucked a few candied strands into her mouth. "And the taste—"

 

Ursula heard a wordless screech of frustrated rage from the foot of the bed. The teeny twin of Galatea dangling from the left bedpost raked her spiky pixie-cut mane—Pixie stix, Ursula decided—until it looked like a nest of pine needles. "Shut up!" she cried. "Shut up, shut up, shut up! I can't take it any more!" Pixie-stix Galatea hooked her feet into a loop of chain and dove headfirst for Ursula's foot. "Lemme at her!"

 

Uncontrollable laughter racked Ursula's body as Pixie-stix Galatea dug doll-sized fingers into the sole of her foot for purchase while growling and gnawing on the goth girl's ticklish toes. The gel slathering her from neck to belly shimmered and fixed into an adamant candy coating, freezing Ursula in mid-convulsion. Molded to every millimeter of her musculature, her candy prison buoyed and supported her body in exquisite, comfortable immobility that somehow magnified every twing and twitch of her toes a hundredfold. Her laughter cycled up in a wolf-cub howling. Ursula kicked like a chorus girl, her leg pivoting past vertical—"Damn, girl," full-sized Galatea whistled, "you could kick a Rockette in the freakin' face."—but Pixie-stix Galatea stretched and followed, a rubber snake, her legs glued to the bedpost and her worrying mouth vacuum-sealed against Ursula's foot.

 

Ursula's leg hurtled downward and splattered Pixie-stix Galatea against the mattress, the force of the blow spreading the little green girl's malleable gel-flesh around Ursula's foot like a slipper. "Works for me," Pixie-stix Galatea muttered. She melted into a sheer, glossy stocking, one end knotted about the bedpost and the other swirling up over Ursula's buttery calf. The body glove holding her captive relaxed, allowing Ursula to sag, sway and catch her breath.

 

"Oh, no," said the fourth miniaturized Galatea, hunkering down into the loops of chain on the bottom-right bedpost. The jelly stocking that was once Pixie-stix Galatea glided up and over Ursula's left knee in smug silence. "There is no fucking way you're grabbing that ass without me." She squeezed herself into a dense ball the color of food additive Green Dye #3. Ursula's sensory overloaded, oxygen starved brain could only think of one thing, another youthful sugary favorite: Jaw-breakers.