Intergalactic headbanging made easy...

Vicki searched quickly for the bush she'd left her backpack under and found it. "I've got to find out how to shut off these pheromones," she thought. "I can't keep turning people into zombies." She glanced at Dan'l.

Dan'l stood back, looking around as if just waking up from some peculiarly vivid dream. He noticed Vicki looking at him and grinned a goofy little grin.

"Lovesick zombies," sighed Vicki. She pulled the bag out from under the bush and extracted a couple of comic books. "I'm pretty sure I can sort of magic up clothes, too. Besides costumes," she muttered.

"Comic books?" said Dan looking confused. Well, as if he were aware of being confused. Before he'd looked as if he were confused but didn't know it.

"Aliens," said Vicki, turning a hand over. "What are you going to do?"

Dan seemed to think about that for a bit. "Customers," he said. "You've got alien customers?"

"Something like that," she agreed.

Dan shook his head, looking around. What the heck had happened to him, he wondered. He felt as if he'd just woke up from a three-day bender but he didn't have the headache or nausea that would involve, just the feeling of being disconnected from reality.

He glanced at Vicki, absorbed in reading a comic book of all things. Wait? The comic book seemed to be about a character that looked amazingly like her. Dan blinked several times but the impossibly well-built blonde on the cover of the magazine looked amazingly like the real but almost impossibly well-built blonde reading it.

"I've been breathing too many lacquer fumes, haven't I?" he said aloud.

Vicki glanced at him and laughed. "Probably not. It's just me, I'm apparently intoxicating."

Dan stared at her, aware of a -- scent. Enticing, invigorating, irresistible and highly erotic, and yes, it was coming from her.

"Don't look at me like that," she complained. "I'm trying to figure out how to turn it off!"

# # #

Neener Neener, officer of the Galactic Constabulary spent some time trying to re-establish communication with his ASS. "Actually," he whined, "I love Dirt music, it's so gritty." But his ASS wasn't listening and did not reply.

Neener stared into a viewer which seemed at the moment to be showing three young Dirtian mammals singing about a bug from Wug. He hadn't known that Dirtians were even aware of the planet Wug.

"What a fudging load this assignment has turned out to be," sighed Neener. "I can't imagine how I'm going to collate this into official records." Resigned to waiting for his ASS to return to its duties running the jumpship, Neener withdrew some blue stuff from his stash under his carapace. He took a small kick, then a slightly larger one. He needed cheering up.

He didn't sigh, Galactic Constables of Neener Neener's race do not sigh because they are not so equipped. He did make a noise rather like a popcorn kernel that is about to pop though.

He had a good supply of blue stuff but resolved not to waste it. His nerves settled by two kicks, he put the baggie back under his carapace.

His attention turned to the music coming through the jumpship's environmental console. He reached over with a chilicerate feeler and dialed the sound up a notch. The beat made him want to jump around and the melody tingled all through his cepahalothorax. He didn't understand any Dirtian languages but even the voice of the performer seemed more alive in this recording than all of his galactic goombahs back home.

What kind of instrument did these Dirtians have that made such pretty violence? He turned the sound up to max and reposed at his pilot station, twitching and groobulating to the rhythm.

# # #

Not having the advantage of a handy manual in the form of a comic book, Carlotta had to manage her powers by luck and instinct. She did collect another half dozen surfers and other assorted beach types to help dig her feet and lower legs out of the sand by just standing there looking massively pulchritudinous, like a 22-foot tall statue by Botticelli -- Venus with Hodaddies.

"There's something coming through the water," she said in her curiously high-pitched voice. What she saw looked like a computer generated image effect from some television commercial for a magical cleaning product. It would have to be a cable channel or something from Europe because the woman riding the multi-colored waterspout had no clothes on. "Just like me," thought Carlotta.

"Hey!" she called to the blonde atop the whirling, twirling mass of air and water coming onto the beach. "Spin Dizzy! Over here!"

"I see you," Dizzy called back. "I'd have to be blind not to see a 50-foot woman with a 30-foot chest," she said more quietly, over estimating Carlotta's height and attractions by more than double. Not that anyone at all could hear her with the roar of spinning air, water, and now, sand, surrounding her. "Now, how do I stop this crazy thing?"

The surfers spotted her, too, and were thrilled.

"Dudes!" called Porky, their de facto leader. "We got bodacious babes on shore and in the surf!" Then they all had to scatter as Dizzy steered her unconventional hovercraft into their midst.

The sand this kicked up stung Carlotta's skin, especially the tender area around her nipples. Clasping her arms around her chest, she turned her back on Dizzy's advance, struggling a bit as she pulled her feet free of the sand at last. "Owie, owie!" she ouched in her babydoll voice.

"Wait!" cried Dizzy to the giant girl trying to climb up the sandy slope from the beach toward the scrubby sagebrush. "You must be involved in all of this weirdness, do you know a dolphin named Squeet?"

# # #

Two, then three, fire fighting trucks arrived to battle the blazes that Willi had set with her fiery scream. Water and foam poured from long hoses and projecting nozzles atop the trucks onto the burning buildings.

Seeing the jetting liquids had a peculiar effect on Willi. She moaned in excitement. Most of the firefighters were men and her gaze focused on the burly fire captain from the first truck on the scene. She rather thought she would like to meet him.

A fantasy unfolded in her mental cinema where she started blazes and her firefighter hero put them all out with his gigantic -- nozzle. She blushed, her fair skin turning the same shade as her strawberry blonde hair. As the realization of what she was thinking sank in on her, she turned to run away.

"I'm naked, I'm a girl, I can start fires and I've got a yen for men?" she said aloud. "This can't be happening!"

She ran across the asphalt parking lot towards an unburnt block of buildings without looking back, unaware that a set of delicately-shaped but fiercely flaming footprints followed her.

# # #

"Who first?" Princess Unicorna asked her ASS.

'VICKI IS CLOSEST," suggested the intelligence in her rear end.

A mental map appeared in the Princess's awareness. Not a fuzzy, vague, shifting, dreamy simulacrum but a sharp, clear, focussed image like a military-grade heads-up display. "She's in Mile Square Park," said the Princess. At the intersection with PCH, she turned left, signaling with her hand. Other drivers got out of her way but mostly into each others. Brakes squealed and horns blared.

"Good thing I had a green arrow," she murmured. She kept her own spirally-twisted horn pointed up the highway toward Fountain Valley and Huntington Beach, ignoring the crunching sounds behind her, picking up speed as she ran.

"ASS," she said, glancing down at her bouncing chest. "Can we conjure up some clothing?" People in oncoming lanes were waving and pointing at her. She waved back, distracted.

"WHAT DID YOU HAVE IN MIND?"

"I dunno," Princess muttered. "Just something, the harmonics up here are getting intense."

"HARMONICS? I COULD USE YOUR HORN TO PROJECT ANY SORT OF ACOUSTIC FIELD YOU MIGHT LIKE," said her ASS.

"That's not what I meant," she complained. "I need, I need...."

"YOU REQUIRE?"

"I need a bra! Dammit!"

She felt something and glanced down again. She seemed to be wearing the top half of a chainmail bikini, every link gilded and glittering in the sun. About her waist, a belt supported sword-shaped alternating golden and platinum plates connected with leather and chainmail into a half-kilt that covered the front of her hips and thighs halfway to her knees.

In her left hand, she held a crossbow and on her back and at her left hip, she knew she had quivers of bolts of various kinds, each kind in a separate compartment. On her right hip, a real sword hung in a gem-encrusted scabbard. A similarly bejeweled tiara encircled her forehead with her horn integrated into the design. She looked over her shoulder to see that a construction similar to her half-kilt circled the base of her tail and protected her rear elevation from hostile missiles and prurient vision.

"It's good to be a princess, I guess. I'm like Wonder Woman, Green Arrow and Comet the Super Horse all rolled into one," she muttered.

"THE FIRES STARTED BY YOUR COMPANION ARE BEING EXTINGUISHED BY LOCAL SAFETY CREWS," commented her ASS.

"Good," said Unicorna.

"SHE CAN START MORE FIRES. SHE WILL. MORE THAN THEY CAN OVERCOME, PROBABLY."

"I've got to gather the others," said the girl who used to be Lance Bollard.

"AFFIRMATIVE. YOU CANNOT HANDLE THE SITUATION ALONE, EITHER."

After she crossed the river, Princess Unicorna took a hard right onto Euclid Avenue.

# # #

"I love it when a plan comes together," said Gooma.

Twirt kimmeled, changing the music to the distortion-heavy version of "Eve of Destruction" by Public Enemy. "It's the Prom of Destruction," the alien stridulated.

If they had heads, the two bogtasses would have been banging them.