Stellar Sprinkles by the Velvet Ranamorph

Sunrise meant a cool grey light filled the little industrial park where Vicki lay sleeping propped up against the wall of one of the little warehouses. A few people had already arrived, self-employed types who had to get the jump on things to make the most of their advantages as small, nimble companies in a land of corporate giants.

Dan'l Broome--yes, his parents had spelled it that way--always opened his shop at 5:30 a.m. when he had orders to fill. He made and repaired custom guitars, banjos, mandolins and ukeleles and even during a recession he kept busy. A lot of country artists, many classicists, some jazz musicians and a few rock and rollers wouldn't step on a stage anywhere without their favorite Dan'l Broome hanging around their necks.

He pulled his sixteen-year-old Toyota pick-up truck into his designated parking space, climbed out with a cup of Starbuck's blackest coffee and took a moment to enjoy the sounds, sights and smells of the early morning. It didn't much matter what time of year it was, there always seemed to be a fog, haze or mist on the city as the sun came up. Perhaps it was the nearby Pacific Ocean that lent the urban landscape a blanket of sleepy grey.

On some mornings, a dew as heavy as a shower dripped and ran off of roofs and walls and lay on patches of ground that had not yet been paved over. Wildflowers grew in the oddest places, watered by the dew in a land where it almost never actually rained. Tiny animals nibbled on the wildflowers and each other in the misty twilight. A heady smell accompanied the dawn, partly natural exuberance of plants and creatures awakening to greet the day, partly residues of previous human efforts, warmed by the as yet unseen sun.

It felt magical to a man who lived by the sorcery he worked on wood and metal. He had no doubt that the musical instruments he made were alive so it did not seem odd to him that a parking lot and a row of warehouses took on some of the characteristics of fairyland when the grey light filtered through the morning mists.

He stood at his door a moment, just savoring the morning and his coffee. He didn't look like someone who did the kind of delicate work building guitars required. At six-four and 230 pounds, with dark red-brown hair, a ginger beard with black streaks in it and thick muscular forearms, Dan'l Broome looked more like a cowboy from an old western or the hero from the cover of a romance novel. Except for the beard, that is, which may have been why he grew it.

Sighing again at the beauty of the morning, he stepped into his workspace. The little shop was twenty-foot wide and sixty-feet long, one of ten in the building. The front fifteen feet, on the other end from the big roll-up door, contained an office, a bathroom and a kitchenette. The real work was done in the back. Various power tools took up a lot of room, including bandsaws, drills, lathes and a thing that looked like the second cousin of an old-fashioned mangle. But the most important tools were the hand planes, chisels, saws and paint brushes hanging each in a defined space on the walls.

Dan loved his work and right at the moment, he had a lot to do, a special project for Lorie Sweet, the country music star, building seven identical guitars. After using all seven in her act, Lorie would keep one, give one back to him and the rest would be auctioned off for charity. He'd given her a special price on that, $40,000. Considering time and materials, that left him the profit he normally made from only one of the special custom-built, semi-acoustic guitars.

She had wanted to give each guitar an individual name after the days of the week but Dan had told her that you can't name a guitar until you've heard its sound and that he would choose a name after he finished each one and played it for a while. Because, even though he would try to make them all the same, each guitar would have its own sound. He intended to choose their names after famous female singers. He'd finished four of them so far and hand named them: Patsy, versatile and clear; LaVern, vibrant and exotic; Peggy, fire and ice; and Judy, difficult but rewarding. Each had its own character of sound and he'd fallen in love with everyone of them. It would hurt to give them up.

But then, it always hurt to give up his guitars, his children.

He took out his keys after less than a minute and opened the small side door, stepped inside and released the latch on the big roll-up. A touch of a switch and an electric motor whined as it lifted the big cargo door out of the way. Broome worked with a lot of solvents and having plenty of ventilation was important.

When the motor went silent, he became aware of another noise. It sounded like a woman or a child saying, "Eek, eek, eek!" over and over again.

# # #

Vicki woke up when he closed the door of his truck. Where am I? she thought, opening her eyes. Raw wood dampened by dew lay all around her on three sides with a cool metal wall against her back. Had she been sleeping outside?

She heard Dan'l Broome's footsteps and smelled the coffee he carried but even when she turned her head toward the sound, she did not see him. Shipping pallets, she remembered. She'd picked a spot where stacks of wooden pallets concealed her from view.

But why did she feel so heavy? The night before.... She remembered an incredible feeling of lightness and strength, as if she could do or be almost anything she could think of. Now, she felt weighed down, mundane, mortal. Had she lost her powers? Used them up?

She blinked. The world did not change colors and when she squinted it did not change aspect.

She reached up to feel of the top of her head. Mounds of hair but no ridiculous bunny ears. She finally looked down at herself. She suppressed a gasp. She still had her breasts but she hadn't been imagining it last night, they had shrunk. Before they had been enormous, possibly bigger than her head, almost cartoony like some of the women in the comic books Old Vic had read.

Now they had shrunk to more human proportion, large but realistic, she supposed. How could she tell? She put a hand out and lifted one, tentatively, a little mesmerized by the sensation. It certainly seemed heavier and she could feel it pull at her chest when she let go.

Something else occurred to her. She could clearly see her nipples -- she wasn't wearing her costume. She looked down again. She didn't seem to be wearing anything at all. Why hadn't she noticed that earlier? It seemed important.

"I'm naked!" she whispered.

A sudden loud noise, like a gigantic mixmaster trying to make a frappe of ten-penny nails, startled her. She tried to stand up, but her ass seemed to weigh a hundred pounds all by itself. She stumbled against a pile of pallets and got splinters in her hand, her thigh and the end of her big toe.

"Ow! Ow! Ow!" She hopped on one foot but that made her boobies bounce painfully.

Then she saw the spiders.

# # #

Dan'l Broome came around the corner of the warehouse to investigate the squeals and shrieks and stopped, astonished at what he saw. A tall naked girl with a Las Vegas build and Dallas hair seemed trapped inside a palisade of wooden pallets, hopping around and squeaking while she stared at her feet.

"Shoo! Eek! Why do you keep coming back? I'm not a big juicy bug!" she said.

Dan blinked. The girl hopped again, her boobies bouncing every time she moved, golden hair shining even in the gray light of the morning. The way the pallets were stacked, she had only about a five-by-eight-foot area to maneuver in and she acted as if something were chasing her.

"Hello," said Dan, amused and mystified.

She looked up and spotted him peering at her through the wall of wood. Her mouth fell open and her eyes got very wide--eyes that were such a deep shade of blue as to look purple or violet. Her arms went across her breasts and she made more squeaking noises.

Dan grinned. She's adorable, he thought.

"Sp-piders!" She managed to stammer out a few intelligible syllables.

"Well, I'll have to get you out of there, won't I?" said Dan. He lifted half a stack of pallets out of the way, then the other half and one more smaller stack to open a path to her. He offered a hand and led her out of the wooden maze, wondering at the softness of her touch, the smoothness of her skin, the cloud of blonde hair and the big bright purple eyes.

"Wow," he said.

"Wow,"" she repeated, looking up at him as if....as if he were the hero on the cover of a romance novel.

"Here you go," he said, leading her quickly into his shop. "I think I have a smock you can wear."

"Smock," she said, still staring at him.

"What happened?" he asked, taking down a painting smock he used to protect his clothes from its hook on the wall. "How did you get out there, uh..." he didn't want to mention her nakedness. "Like that," he finished. He handed the paint and varnish-stained garment to her.

She struggled into it with a little of his help; it would have gone more than twice around her slender body. She kept staring at him which made it hard for him to think of what to do next.

"I've got a splinter in my toe," she said, standing on one foot to show him which one.

He laughed. "I get splinters all the time, let me get the tweezers."

"I've got one in my hand, too," she said. "And I think, another one here." She touched a thigh. "They itch."

"I bet they do," he said, already thinking of tweezing one of those shapely thighs. He stared around him, looking for where he kept the first aid box. It was, of course, on the wall in the spot reserved for it but he kept not seeing it for turning back to look at her.

"My name is Vicki. Vicki Starr," she said in her breathy, almost squeaky voice. "What's yours?"

Dan turned away for a moment and rubbed a knuckle against his forehead. "Uh, it's -uh- Dan. Dan'l Broome."

She giggled.

He found the first aid kit and turned back toward her. They both smiled.

# # #

"Has he left yet?" asked Twirt. "The space cop, I mean."

"No," said Gooma. "He's looking around with his scan-a-hoosis. Looking for someone using dark energy, probably."

"Isn't, isn't that what the jumpship runs on?"

"Yes, that's why the A.S.S. has shut down all unnecessary power uses and we're running on normal energy reserves."

"Pruck me," said Twirt. "How can we groobulate without our Velvet Ranamorph?"

"WE HAVE TWICE EIGHT EIGHTS OF OCTICYCLOS OF RECORDED EARTHER MUSIC," said the A.S.S. "SHALL I PLAY STELLAR SPRINKLES AGAIN?"

"Oh, do, vinchiest A.S.S of all A.S.S.es, do!"

Gooma reticulated his oral cicatrices in a grin. "That const-hip-able will get tired and leave soon enough."

"Too bad we had to turn off most of Star Bunny's accessories," said Twirt. "But we got thrubim and who could ask for anything more."

"She's still got the ones that run on real space energies, they should be enough to keep her out of trouble."

"Driz me," said Twirt.