Henry hated Toons. He was an adult when they first invaded our reality (Or did we invade theirs? The debate raged on), and as a respected professor of Math, and a serious man all around, their inherently chaotic nature meant their very existence was nothing less than actually insulting to him. So much so that not even fond childhood memories of watching Tom & Jerry and The Jetsons could overcome his contempt.

So he chose to avoid them whenever he could, which made it all the more disturbing to Henry when he noticed he’d accidentally wandered into his city’s ToonTown one day. His mind had been elsewhere, thinking of some equation or other, and he only noticed where he was when he almost bumped into a…weasel?

“S’cuse me, mister!” it said as it hurried around him, dressed in a mailman’s uniform. “Just like a Toon,” he thought. “Always in a hurry, head in the clouds! And ugly to boot!”

And here came another such example – strolling up to Henry was a red, male bovine, puffing away on an oversized cigar. He took no notice of the smaller Toons around him: if they didn’t move away in time, his huge beer belly, pressing up against his wife beater to the point it looked like it was about to rip, would simply knock them off of the sidewalk, sometimes even into oncoming traffic (not that they were ever in any danger, as Toons are famously unkillable).

His gargantuan gut was far from his being his only striking feature: there was also the enormous bulge outlined through his blue jeans, something the more equally-sized female Toons he was now passing on the street all seemed to be (loudly) commenting on.

“I’d like a piece of dat!” yelled one Toon, an exaggerated parody of a human woman. Any follow-up she may have planned was cut off by her suddenly being bashed over the head by a massive hammer, itself wielded by another would-be female mate, a clown with big eyes and even an even bigger chest. Her rival now dazed (with cartoon birds circling her head, of course), she took the opportunity to shoot her shot.

“Slut can’t even handle an ol’ mallet ta tha head!” she cried. “You need ta come home with me, hunk!”

Despite this attention from the opposite sex, though, he had his sights firmly set on Henry. On top of that, and scarier still, was the look in the bull’s eyes: it was one of pure hatred and malice, an expression Henry had seen on many a student’s face after a particularly difficult test.

The cow finally reached him, and Henry could now take in his full size: he was enormous: at least 7 feet tall and probably 5 feet wide at his broadest. Henry may have considered himself the antithesis of a Toon, but the scale of the cow made him gulp in such an exaggerated way that it would not have been out of place on a television screen on Saturday Morning.

“And just what I needed ta see taday – annuda muddafuckin’ human, thinkin’ he can just barge his way into our town!” he said angrily, glaring down at Henry.

A crowd was beginning to form, and shouts of “Hell yes!” and “you tell him!” could be heard from the gathering audience

“Now see here, sir!” Henry began to explain, before being cut off by the ranting bull.

“On da day my own fuckin’ wife left me, no less! Sure, I fucked her sista, but you should see da ASS on dat broad. And dem tits too! Dat heifer needed a good fuckin’ milkin’, and her faggot husband wasn’t givin’ it ta her, dat’s fer damn sure!”

Henry wondered what any of this had to do with him, but before he could ask, the Toon cut him again.

“But she’ll come crawlin’ back ta me, da stupid bitch! She’s nuttin’ widout me! But just in case…”

Now there was a mischievous look in the cow’s eyes, as he used his thick tongue to move the half-finished cigar toward the front of his mouth.

“Hold still, buttercup,” he said, before blowing an absolutely absurd amount of smoke straight into Henry’s face.

But somehow, physics never quite operating correctly in ToonTown, the cloud expanded to cover Henry’s entire body. And when it cleared, it revealed that Henry had been transformed into…a pink female cartoon cow!

She was in every way the bull’s opposite-sex counterpart: tall, wide, and with a huge, round belly. Her rear and bust were outrageously big as well, which suffice to say, did not go unnoticed by Bill (he never did manage to introduce himself, but that was his name). His clothes had changed as well: gone were the tweed jacket (replaced by a tied plaid shirt that didn’t even cover her nipples), khaki pants (replaced by daisy dukes that were being swallowed by her ass crack), and suede shoes (replaced by cowboy boots).

“Holy Toledo!” Henry yelled, his eyes popping out of their sockets, his pupils transformed turned into pink hearts, and his actual heart now beating so fiercely it was almost bursting out of his chest. “You make my wife and her sista’ look like fuckin’ dime-store whores!”

All of this would have horrified Henry before, but Henry was…no more. If we could read his…er, her mind, we would find only the presence of Barbara, 2D heifer, born and raised in ToonTown. And as for any math skills, forget about it. She couldn’t add 2+2 if she tried! But what she did know was that she liked what she saw in Bill: his long horns, handsome face, bulging stomach, throbbing biceps, and, most of all…

“Why don’t ya really show me how much ya fuckin’ love me, ya big stud,” she said, as she approached Bill and cupped his huge testicles through his pants.

“Dat’s it,” Bill roared, and in one sudden motion, he ripped all of Barbara’s clothes off, revealing her in all of her naked glory. Then he did the same to himself, finally freeing his huge erection, itself already leaking a profuse amount of precum. Not wanting to waste a single second, Bill threw their clothes into the air, past the clouds, past a passing airplane, and into the grinning Sun that shone above them, disintegrating them instantly.

As the crowd grew even larger around them, the two bovines began to have sex (ironically) doggy-style, right there on the sidewalk. Even the traffic on the street had come to a complete stop, to better witness the spectacle! And what a sight it was! The force of the two huge bodies colliding with one another was actually causing cracks to appear on the sidewalk!

“Give me dat big fuckin’ dick!” cried Bertha, yelling so her lover could still hear her over the roars and cheering of the crowd. “Take me as ya’ new wife! Put some goddamn babies in me!”

And Bill certainly was giving it all he could, even grabbing her by her long, blonde hair to better give his thrusts a little more oomph (though he continued to puff away on his cigar all the while). But he could somehow sense she needed a little something extra to really push her over the edge. Luckily for him, they were in ToonTown, where opportunities for the extraordinary are never in short supply!

Down the street from this public indecency, a wolf (in classic burglar’s apparel: a black and white striped shirt, black pants, black cap, and domino mask) had just robbed a bank, and was now absconding with the loot (in a brown bag with a $ symbol on it, naturally). Pursued by two pigs – literally, pigs – he maneuvered his way through the crowd. Then, leaping over the rutting couple, he left his pursuers, unable to jump nearly that high (being pigs), in the dust.

The pig-cop in the lead managed to make his way around the new lovers safely, but his partner, still lagging behind, was not so lucky.

Bill, with a mad expression on his face, grabbed the second cop with just one of his enormous hands. “Come here, ya fuckin’ mug!”

Still pounding away, his tremendous, hairy belly pressed up against his wife’s huge ass, he began to mold and reshape the pig into a living dildo (ToonTown physics at it again)! He then pressed the newly fashioned sex toy against his lover’s anus, and, well, that seemed to do the trick!

Bertha and Bill came simultaneously, causing them both to let out a “Mooooo” so loud that it shattered nearby store windows and car windshields. Not only that, the orgasm caused Bertha’s asshole to spasm, sucking in the pig-cop-dildo!

The two lovers collapsed, and the crowd, being Toons and therefore in constant need of entertainment, began to disperse. Spooning on the cracked sidewalk, cum leaking out of her new vagina, Bertha admired the wedding ring that had spontaneously appeared on her finger when Bill filled her with his seed (one had appeared on Bill’s ring finger as well, at that same moment, but he wasn’t as enamored with it, not being a dame and all).

“Whaddaya say we take dis show home?” Bill growled after a few minutes had passed, his mind having finally cleared enough for him to think.

Bertha turned and gave her husband a deep, passionate kiss. Floating hearts danced above their heads as their wide tongues wrestled with one another.

“Ya sure ya can keep yer mutts off me until then?” she said with a wink.

Spoiler: he could not.

...

Epilogue
Bill and Bertha remained happily married in the years to come, eventually having 10 little Toon-cow babies. Bill’s wife did try to reconcile with him, but he was uninterested, as Bertha was both fatter and more beautiful than she was or ever would be. Plus, though Bertha had no memory of it, believing she had always been a Toon, Bill knew that he was the one who had “made” her, and that made Bertha “his” in a way that made all other potential partners mere afterthoughts.

Nobody ever came looking for Henry, or even cared that he had gone missing, as he was unloved and unwanted as a human. Too bad, so sad, what a shame. And all of the students in his classes were given automatic As due to the disappearance of their teacher.

And the pig-cop did not emerge out of Bertha’s ass, ever. She never had trouble on the toilet either, leading her to believe that he had been simply absorbed into her somehow. They say Toons are unkillable, but her husband may have just inadvertently proved that maxim wrong. Not that he or Bertha really cared. The police officer’s family and friends did, however, and would hold a vigil every year at the spot where he had been grabbed by Bill, forever sealing his fate.

But why did Bill have transformation powers in the first place? Do all Toons have that ability? Or is Bill just a wizard of some kind? And if there are Toon police, why wasn’t he arrested for murder, or for, you know, egregious public indecency?

Eh, forget it, kid – it’s ToonTown.

Diego and Pablo were grateful to have finally made it to the hot springs. Too used to the warmer climate of their tropical home country, their bodies were ill-suited to the average temperatures of a place this far north. In fact, neither had felt properly warm all vacation long, not since they first got off the plane a week ago, only adding insult to injury after such a long flight. Not even cranking the heat in their shared hotel room seemed to fully eliminate the chill that had seemed to settle into their bones.

Nothing had worked, that is, until now, and not even the awkwardness of being in the nude could outweigh the pleasure the scalding hot water brought both of them. The spring was so warm in fact, that it had generated a thick mist that hovered above the pool’s surface, making it impossible for the friends to know if they were actually alone or not.

Wait, on second thought, they definitely weren’t alone. Somewhere in the mist ahead, they could hear a man and a woman grunting in unison: the unmistakable sounds of sex.

Diego and Pablo didn’t say anything to each other. They didn’t need to. They had been friends for so long that they could practically read each other’s minds at times, and this was certainly one of those moments. After all, the hot spring forbade all body coverings, and so there was a good chance they were about to see some titties. Sure, there was a strong probability a dick and set of balls were in the offering as well, but….titties! The two friends were so sex-starved, their respective break-ups with their long-term girlfriends being what prompted this trip in the first place, that they were willing to risk seeing some male genitals if it meant also seeing female ones.

It wasn’t long before they found them: a large, fat man, having sex with a small, thin woman probably 15 years his junior. They were in a position not often seen outside of the worlds of pornography – they were having sex standing up, the man holding his lover’s petite-yet-plump ass in his massive, wrinkled hands, as he thrust his absurdly thick penis into her. She was facing upwards towards the grey late-afternoon sky, her eyes closed, and her small but firm breasts jiggling slightly with each push into her. A few minutes passed, and the woman screamed in ecstasy, while her lover roared, his hairy balls clenching as he emptied them fully inside her.

Then she climbed down off of him, giggling, and back into the water. The man did something strange, then: he kissed her on her forehead, like a grandfather might his granddaughter. Unlike the sexual performance they had just partaken in, there was little passion in it.

In return, she got on her tip-toes, and kissed him on one of his full cheeks. Then she turned, legs still shaking, and walked past Diego and Pablo, not daring to make eye contact. For their part, they shamelessly turned to get one last look at her bare hindquarters. Then the mist swallowed her up, and she was gone.

“Did you enjoy the show, lads?” the man asked, in a heavy accent. “My name’s Olaf, by the way.”

Diego and Pablo turned and introduced themselves, but then an uncomfortable silence quickly followed. Willing to say anything to end the awkwardness, Diego finally blurted out: “So she was your….”

Olaf interjected, shaking his head. “Nah, she was just a girl I met here, only a couple of minutes ago.”

This was shocking to the two friends. That girl was hot. Like, really hot. On the other hand, Olaf, though tall, and sporting a cock and testicles that would make a horse jealous, would definitely be considered medically “obese”, if his humungous belly was any indication. How could he have scored with someone like that, especially considering how much younger than him she clearly was?

“Yea, nice girl,” he continued, “but not exactly, wife material, if you know what I mean.”

Actually, they really didn’t. Either of them would have gladly laid claim to her. After all, she was way better looking than any woman either of them had ever hooked up with, even compared to their aforementioned exes. Or up against the slut that Diego and Pablo had had that ill-advised threesome with, the discovery of which being what shifted said girlfriends into the “ex” category to begin with.

Fortunately, Olaf was keen to explain their differences in perspective.

Olaf sighed. “No, she was way too skinny. Too short, too. No, what I need is a big woman. I want a wife that stands 6 feet tall, with long, blonde hair. And her breasts need to be big, huge even, with faint, pink areolas as wide as dinner plates. A round, soft belly. Absurdly wide hips. A 50-inch ass. And thighs so thick that I would need two hands to fully circumvent them. A real baby-making factory, you know?” He paused for a moment. “You wouldn’t have happened to have seen anyone like that around, would you?”

Diego and Pablo shook their heads.

“Are you sure about that?” Olaf asked. He moved closer to them, and both friends were suddenly struck by the feeling that they were in danger. Their bodies told them to run, but they found themselves, inexplicably, unable to move. Their cocks shriveled in fear, while their gonads tried to rise back up into their bodies.

Olaf smiled, raised his arms, and placed one hand on the sides of each of their heads. Then he smashed them together.

….

As David watched his wife, Tiffany, cover her nipples with her hands, he couldn’t help but wonder if this was all a big mistake. He had convinced her to come to the hot springs, telling her they couldn’t come to this country on their honeymoon and then skip one of its biggest attractions, after all, but she was clearly embarrassed to be publicly in the nude.

Not that he wasn’t, evidently, as he was now fighting the urge to similarly shield his own modesty with one of his hands. He knew he had to resist, though, or else he’d confirm Tiffany’s shame, and with that would come even more anger, all directed at him, deserved or not. Well, he thought, at least all of this fog offered some privacy…

Suddenly, David noticed Tiffany was missing. He didn’t panic, as it was easy to assume she had just simply wandered deeper into the pool, probably to find some refuge in the mist. He began to wade forward, eager to find her, though he’d likely have to start the “apology shuffle” once he did. Sex later that night, unfortunately, could safely be ruled out at this point. And they were on such a roll too!

David thought he knew his wife well enough to say that she wasn’t a voyeur, but that didn’t change the fact when he finally stumbled upon her, she was staring, transfixed, at another couple, obviously middle-aged, having sex right there in the middle of the hot spring. Yes, he had heard this happened there on occasion, but he didn’t think they’d actually see it!

But to be fair to gawking Tiffany, though, this was an extraordinary pair: if he had to guess, combined, they probably weighed more than 500 pounds!

The woman, in front and slightly bent over, had breasts so large, and that hung so profusely, they were actually touching the surface of the water. And that wasn’t the only part of her that was, either. The lower part of her substantial stomach too, was partially submerged in the pool as well, creating small waves and ripples as it shook.

The man, behind, furiously slamming his body into her’s, one hand on either of her massive ass cheeks, was her gender-bent mirror image: he too was tall, fair-skinned, muscular, and had a gargantuan belly of his own. With each forward push of his hips, his swollen, furry testicles burst out from under the water, and tapped against the underside of his penis.

David found himself, like his wife, similarly hypnotized by the soft, jiggling forms of the lovers, a spell that was only broken when they finally reached climax simultaneously. They screamed so loudly that David cringed, fearing that the noise would summon more witnesses. For some reason, unknown even to him, David felt that this was something that he and Tiffany were privileged to see, and therefore was not eager to share it with anyone else

The woman turned to face her lover, and they began to kiss as passionately as a new, young couple might, their tongues wrestling one another as if in competition. David wondered if he and Tiffany would still have that fire when they were their age. He desperately hoped so.
“You were right. That cleared my headache right up!” said the fat woman, her accent marking her squarely as local. Cum was dripping out of her vagina, in large globs, down her thick legs and into the boiling soup.

“Always does,” replied the man, smugly. He slapped her left ass cheek with his right hand. Half a minute passed before it finally stopped moving.

Then the older couple walked past the newlyweds, hand in hand. As he passed David, the large man gave him a wink, as if they were in on some joke together. Then they halted before the gloom, kissed one final time, and entered the enveloping wall of steam. It swallowed them instantly, and they were out of view. David somehow knew they wouldn’t see them again, even on their way out of the hot spring. Actually, he doubted anyone would see them ever again.

He looked back to his wife, eager to discuss what they had both just seen. Tiffany, however, much to his surprise, had uncovered her breasts. Her nipples were hard, despite the warmth of the pool.

She arched an eyebrow. “Give you any ideas?” she asked.

He had a few.

The flames flickered in Sid’s dull eyes, as he listened to the harsh, dying screams of the stray cat. This alley never wanted for them, fortunately, and he had plied the old tomcat with a can of old tuna he had found in a nearby dumpster, his usual method. Then he threw it in a rusted metal garbage can, doused it with gasoline, and set it alight with one of his matches.

It brought little satisfaction: this was, after all, his third kill of the night. He had started with insects as a child, as so many psychopaths do, before graduating to small lizards, then birds, then various rodents, and now, finally, cats. The thrill had clearly all but gone, however, so it was clear to him he’d be moving on to dogs soon enough. Luckily for him, there were plenty of strays in this city. Of course, after dogs, the next step was obvious, and the final line would be crossed. Not that this scared him, mind you. He was actually looking forward to it. In fact, he even had some targets already in mind…

The flames finally began to die down, and the smell of the burnt, dead animal wafted toward him. Sid breathed in deeply, and sighed. This time of year always seemed to bring out the worst in him. Sure, he was always bad, but he never hunted quite as frequently as he did around Christmas time. A psychologist or social worker, if Sid bothered to see one, would probably deduce that, having come from an unhappy, broken family, Sid naturally resented a holiday that emphasized togetherness and love, and thus the 18-year-old acted out even more so than usual.

An even better psychologist, however, might be able to see even beyond that: that Sid really wanted the whole world to burn too, and his ritualistic animal murders were the expression of his true desires, just on a smaller scale.

Above him, from somewhere on the neighboring rooftops, Sid heard the ringing of bells. This being the holiday season, he paid little mind to it. People were constantly ringing fucking bells this time of year, when they weren’t singing, shopping, or stuffing their fat faces with even more fattening food than usual.

But then he heard something else, something, much more alarming: footsteps. Sid turned and looked down the darkened alley. What if it was a cop? Now this thought actually struck him with fear. Sid was too old for juvie now. If he got arrested, he’d be doing real, hard time. He wasn’t going to let that happen, though. He’d run if he had to. And if he couldn’t run fast enough, there was always the handy switchblade in his pocket…

“It turns out I might just be skipping dogs after all,” he thought with dark amusement.

A figure emerged from the darkness, and, to Sid’s relief it wasn’t a cop: it was an old, fat man, dressed as Santa Claus, and smoking a cigar. But even a Scrooge like Sid had to admit: he looked perfect, like he had just stepped off the label of a Coke bottle, or out of one of those corny Christmas movies.

Still, Sid had no love for the Big Man, nor was he keen to have anyone snooping around the scene of one of his hunts. He would scare him off, even using the switchblade if he had to.

“You get lost on the way to the mall, fat boy?” Sid yelled.

The man took a drag from the stogie, removed it from his mouth, and blew a thick cloud of smoke into the cold night air. Sid wasn’t sure if it was just his eyes playing tricks on him, but the smoke actually seemed to form the shape of a snowman, before it dissipated.
“So that’s what you do for fun, kid?” the man asked, nodding toward the trash can.

“Fuck,” Sid thought. He knew. How long had the creep been lurking in the shadows, watching? Or maybe he had been looking down from the rooftops? That would explain the bells he had heard, after all.

In any case, Sid was now even more resolved to get rid of the interloper, no matter what it took. He took the switchblade out of his pocket, pressing the button to set the knife into place. He held it up, and it glinted the under the light of the full December moon.
“Why don’t you go home to Mrs. Claus?” Sid said.

The Santa dropped the cigar, and stamped it out with the heel of his foot. “Well, you see, that’s exactly the problem.” He began to walk towards Sid, seemingly totally unafraid of the weapon he wielded.

Sid waved the blade at him. “Listen, man, I’m not afraid to use this!”

The Santa laughed. “Oh, I know. You’ve used it plenty, haven’t you? Let’s see: 30 various rodents, 14 reptiles, 20 birds, and 10 cats. And God knows how many bugs. But let me tell you something, that won’t work on me.” He slapped his prodigious stomach. “Unbreakable skin, you see!”

Sid lunged, and pressed the knife against the Santa’s chest. But, somehow, impossibly, it didn’t even pierce the fabric.

“Oh yeah, the suit’s impenetrable too, Sid,” he said with a wink.

Now Sid was really scared. This was impossible! He had used that same knife, just like the Santa said, on countless animals before. He had even used it effectively in a few street fights before, too. It should have had no problem cutting through the simple red fabric.
And, even more alarmingly, how did he know Sid’s name?

Panicking, Sid dropped the knife, turned, and ran down the alley. He hadn’t checked out this end of it beforehand, and was praying it would open up on the street, and not be blocked by, say, a fence with barbed wire atop it.

Instead, he found an obstacle of an entirely different sort: a large, red sleigh, and before it, nine reindeer. You know their names: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen, and Rudolph.

Rudolph, red nose glowing, and at his rightful place at the front of the pack, huffed angrily, ducked his head, and pressed his ornate antlers forward. The message was clear: you aren’t getting out this way, bitch.

Sid turned to see that Santa had followed him.

“Look, I’ll do you the courtesy of explaining the whole thing to you, not that you’ll remember any of it in the end,” he said. “See, the thing is, Santa is immortal, but Mrs. Claus is not. You can imagine how many I’ve gone through in 2000 years then, right?”

Not responding, Sid turned again towards the reindeer, prompting Rudolph to bark and stomp one of his legs. He still wasn’t getting through.

Santa continued. “So, when one of my Mrs. Clauses sadly passes away of natural causes, I have to go out and find a new one. And sure, I could just find some big old broad who wants to live the high life in their golden years, but what’s the fun in that? Especially, when I can make one just as easily!”

Now he produced a wide, intricately -detailed gold ring from the pocket of his jacket, and held it up to show Sid.

“I’ll let you in a little secret: sure, Santa’s mostly nice. The way it works is, me and the elves will provide good little boys and girls with one or two presents that their parents, for some reason, can’t remember buying themselves. Naturally, they’ll assume they just forgot they bought it, or that the other parent got it and never told them beforehand. It’s always something small and old-school, though, like a rocking horse or a wooden sword. We stick to the classics, right? We’re not building fucking Xboxes up there!”

He continued. “But there’s nothing that says Santa can ONLY be good, you know? I mean, who is, right? It’s Ying and Yang and all that shit, although that is a different religion, I admit. So I allow myself a little outlet: whenever a Mrs. Claus dies, I go out and make a new one: from a sadistic little fuck like you!”

There was an awkward pause, as if something was supposed to have been triggered by what he had just said.

“I knew you two weren’t ready for prime time,” he shouted.

At that, two elves jumped out of the sleigh: green-skinned, and, in full Santa’s Workshop regalia.

“Sorry about that, boss!” yelled Pip, the bigger of the two. “We were sleeping!’

“We’re not used to this time zone, you know?” added Kip, his companion.

Santa rolled his eyes, and tossed the ring to Pip, while Kip grabbed Sid’s arms. Despite his miniature stature, Sid found him surprisingly strong, too strong to break free from.

Pip examined the ring. “I think we’ve all really missed a feminine presence in the North Pole, boss.”

“And Mrs. Claus’ pies!” said Kip, as he restrained the struggling Sid. “Will her’s taste the same?”

“No, they never do,” replied Santa, wistfully. “Now let’s get on with it, Christmas is in 3 days! And Santa can’t focus if his balls are full!”
Obeying his master, Pip shoved the ring onto Sid’s ring finger.

“Why do you keep referring to me as a girl?” Sid asked, as his finger plumped up and expanded to fill out the ring that had just been about 2 sizes too big for him.

Kip loosened his grip, allowing Sid use of his arms again. He immediately tried to remove the ring, but it was firmly stuck on his chubby digit. And to his horror, he noticed that not only had his fingernail grown outward, but there was red nail polish on it as well. Well, that explained why they kept referring to Sid as female, apparently.

“NOOOOOO!” he screamed, but it was too late. The rest of his fingers followed, each growing until they resembled small sausages. Then the nails grew outward in turn, that same red nail polish appearing atop them all.

The rest of his body was next, each and every part becoming bigger and softer. His stomach got it the worst, bulging outward until he couldn’t even see the ratty, beat-up sneakers on his feet anymore. It was so prodigious, actually, that it actually hung below his wife beater. Sid instinctually grabbed it, feeling the sheer mass of it with his hands. It was fucking heavy.

Santa, for his part, simply watched, and licked his lips hungrily.

As he felt his hips painfully start to widen, Sid knew that he was starting to feminize as well. Santa’s raging erection, outlined under his pants, only confirmed it.

He felt his ass grow, to the point his stained jeans began to rip from the strain of it, while, his now-flabby chest swelled, and morphed into a pair of G-sized breasts. This was followed by his nipples and areola, which turned even pinker, until they were almost the same color as his new boobs.

The final changes happened almost simultaneously: Sid’s hair grew out until it reached the top of his shelf-life ass, then turned gray. At the same time, his penis and testes retracted inward, becoming a plump vagina, and his face morphed into that of a beautiful, albeit old, woman.

When his eyes turned from brown to a striking ocean blue, the transformation was complete: Sid was no more. In his place was Barbara Claus, who, as far as she knew, had always been female.

Santa stepped forward, removing his coat, and handing it to his wife.

“Jeez, Barb, you’ll catch your death dressed like that! What are you doing out here anyway?” he asked her.

For a moment Barbara looked confused, as if she didn’t know where she was or what she was doing. Then the moment passed, and she shook her head. She placed her husband’s coat over her shoulders.

“Oh, you know me. Sometimes I get homesick, and I ask the reindeer to take him down here to remember what my life used to be like, before I became Mrs. Claus!” she replied.

She leaned forward and gave Santa a long, deep, passionate kiss. Never one to miss an opportunity, he began grabbing her 50-inch ass cheeks with each hand. Kip and Pip gave each other a knowing look.

When their kiss finally ended, husband and wife began walking hand in hand to the sleigh, followed dutifully by the elves.
“Y’know, when I was a little girl, I used to say that, when I grew up, I’d marry Santa Claus!” said Barbara. “I’m sure I wasn’t the only one, but how for many others did it come true?”

“Oh, you’d be surprised,” replied Santa.

Barbara wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but she didn’t let it bother her. He was an immortal being, of course, and so was far wiser than Barbara could ever imagine, wife or not. She was sure it made sense, at least to him, and that’s all that mattered.

The couple got into the sleigh, along with the elves, and the reindeer lifted off into the air. Christmas was just three days away, and there wasn’t a moment to spare.

…

Well, maybe that wasn’t entirely true, because Santa and Barbara did little else until the Big Night but have sex. Barbara couldn’t even remember the last time her husband had exhibited such virile energy. Not since their honeymoon, at least, and that was 42 years ago!
The elves, slaving away all the while, grumbled about Unionization.

And when Barbara waved goodbye to Santa on Christmas Eve, his sleigh packed with presents for the good Christian children of the world, she finally settled on a reason to explain her husband’s voracious sexual appetite of the past few days: he had simply been excited for the holiday, of course. After all, he was Santa Claus himself!

But if we asked Santa, he would have offered a different explanation. Sid had been 18 years old. Now she was 60. From experience, he knew he wouldn’t have more than 20 years with this Mrs. Claus.

He had to enjoy her while he could

…

It was now July 2023, and, as predicted, Barbara had sadly passed on from natural causes. Santa would take his time to mourn her, as he did all of his Mrs. Clauses, and Barbara especially. She had been a loving and supportive wife, and kind to not only the reindeer and elves, but all of the animals of the North Pole.

However, Santa couldn’t help but let his mind wander and begin thinking about what his choices were with regard to the next Mrs. Santa Claus. This being the brave new 21st century, he had decided to change things up a bit. For the past 2000-odd years, all of his wives had been white. Now, he had resolved to branch out a little and pick a Latina. It’s not like Central and South America wanted for naughty boys, especially with those awful cartels around!

In fact, Santa decided he would have TWO Hispanic Mrs. Clauses! He was the Goddamn Santa Claus, after all! Why shouldn’t he have two wives? Sure, forging a second ring would be a huge pain in the ass, but it would be well worth it in the end!

It may have only been July, but it looked like Christmas was coming early this year – for Santa himself!

Oh, do I have a tale to tell you….

The final day of my life, at least as I had known it up until that point, was a Sunday, which now
seems appropriate, if not a bit ironic.

The previous Friday, after work had been completed for the day, a group of us had set out, in a
caravan of sorts, directly from our city office, to the massive, modern beach house that we had
collectively chipped in to rent for the first weekend of the summer.

What followed that night, and into the following Saturday, was a non-stop marathon of drinking,
drug use, and wanton hook-ups of the heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual kind. Yes, we were
(mostly) all too old to be partaking in this sort of thing, but at the same time, our ages, and the
all-too-predictable feelings of insecurity that had come with them, were probably in part fueling much
of this debauchery to begin with. In some way, maybe we hoped it would help us at least feel
young again, even if literally turning back the clock was still beyond the reach of even us professional,
urban, Master-of the Universe-types.

Then it was Sunday. I had always hated Sunday, from when I was a child. I loathed school, and so
every Sunday was spent dreading the sure-to-be agonizing week to come. As an adult, the object of
my foreboding had simply shifted to work, which I had grown to hate almost as much as I had hated
school. But there was something else at play too, and I had never been able to put my finger on it until
that fateful day in question.

But we’ll get to that later.

That final morning, a group of five of us had gone out to a spot further down the beach for a
picnic, while the rest of our colleagues were still back at the house, recovering from the night(s) before.
Our group consisted of myself; Tim, our boss and CEO; Katie, the head of marketing; Alice, the head of
HR; Jeff, a senior software engineer; and Bill, a project manager (whatever that means).

In truth, it wasn’t really a picnic, as no food had actually been brought along with us, by
anybody. Instead, everybody just kept on drinking, though it was mostly wine, which seemed more
appropriate for the setting than the beer and liquor that had deliberately been left back at the beach
house. Some cocaine made an appearance as well, probably the last of it, and provided by Bill, who had
decided to bring it despite the danger of the ever-present wind forever scattering it among the
surrounding almost-white sand.

I wasn’t partaking. Truthfully, I had reached my limit back on Friday night, but had kept on going
the previous day. Implicit peer pressure was perhaps to blame, the same that had likely caused me to
agree to this whole excursion in the first place. Understandably, I wasn’t entirely excited about spending
the entire weekend away with my coworkers, but I knew it was an important part of staying in the good
graces of the in-crowd at the company, especially once I learned the CEO was going as well. His presence
was why I had tagged along on this “picnic” too, despite being more tempted to hang back at the beach
house and rot with everybody else.

But now, I was really tapped out, and not just physically, but socially as well. As a result, I found
myself zoning out while the mini-party continued around me unabated, thankfully in no way deterred

by my lack of participation. Tim was currently holding court, as he was want to do in really any setting,
while the rest of them pretended to be as enraptured by the sound of his voice as he himself was.

It was then, in this moment of inner quiet, having nothing else to occupy my mind with, and
thus finding myself simply observing the natural world around us, that I was finally able to understand
what had truly bothered me about this particular day of the week for all of my life. That is, besides the
obvious dread I had always felt about the immediate, though always ultimately banal, future.

The sea was a bright, Caribbean blue, and the sky above it was just as vibrant, and literally
cloudless. The sand that surrounded us was free of any detritus and debris, and was so pure of color it
almost reflected the sunlight back at us. Even the heat wasn’t so bad: despite the lack of cloud cover, it
couldn’t have been more than 75 degrees. And yet, there seemed to be something downright sinister
at the edges of what, by all accounts, was a perfect, painting-esque scene. Not just sinister, actually: but
evil, actively malevolent. Hateful, as strange as it is to say.

Just as the promise of another week of tortuous school or work had hung above the nominally
relaxing and fun activities of the previous Sundays in my life, without fail serving to stain and spoil them,
I sensed that something even worse was lurking about us now, in the background of the very fabric of
reality.

But whatever this “thing” was, it was just out of the reach of my perception, it seemed. Between
the grains of sand, or behind the reeds that surrounded us, I almost thought I could see it, whatever “it”
was. But then the light would shift in some subtle way, and I would lose sight of it again.

My anxiety began to rise. This wasn’t a beach, I was now convinced. This was a spider’s web, or
the bioluminescent light hanging off a female angler fish (I remembered reading an article in a men’s
magazine about that). A trap, in other words, and we were the prey. We just perceived it as a
beach, as that was the closest approximation our feeble human minds could make to what it really was.

I wanted to run. I wanted to scream. But how could I explain myself to these people? My boss
was among those present. How would it look if I started to freak out now, without even being able to
articulate why? I’d be a pariah. I’d lose my job. I might even be blacklisted from the industry. I wouldn’t
be able to afford to rent my very expensive apartment in the city anymore. Everything would be ruined.
A lifetime of sacrifices would be wiped out, in an instant of panic and irrationality.

Amidst my terror, I first spotted them. At this point, they were just four lumbering forms,
coming from the direction of the beach house. At first, I assumed they were some stragglers from our
group who had managed to overcome their hangovers and decided to join us after all. But
something seemed off about their shape, and the way they were walking. As they got closer, I realized
something else: they were too big. Not too big to have been any of my coworkers, I mean: they were too
big to be human.

Now another hypothesis formed: I was still feeling the effects of the drugs I had taken
over the previous two days. Hell, I wouldn’t have been able to confidently say what I had consumed, and
even in what specific quantities. Pill, powders, tabs – it all blended together into a multi-color haze. This
could all very easily just be those same drugs still percolating in my system, and causing some residual
effects. At the time, this idea actually offered me some comfort: yes, it was just the drug abuse that was
to blame! Nothing more!

Fortunately, there was a simple way to test this theory.

“Is anybody else seeing this?” I said aloud to the rest of the group.

I had to ask multiple times before I had everyone’s attention, and this was followed by a
frustrating amount of pointing to get them all actually looking at the four ever-encroaching
silhouettes I was referring to.

“Are they in costumes?” asked Tim.

This triggered a flurry of conversation that resulted in, what seemed to be, a likely
explanation: some of our friends had rented and smuggled animal mascot costumes with them on the
trip, which they had now adorned themselves with as some sort of … prank? If it was a prank, nobody
could agree on what the joke was supposed to be. But that’s what this had to all be, right? What else
could be going on here? An alien invasion? Alice and Tim actually chuckled a bit, albeit nervously,
pretending like they not only “got” the elusive point of all this, but actually found it amusing.

As the quartet approached, the idea that these were human beings in costumes seemed more
and more unlikely. Yes, they were humanoid animals: a pink elephant, a blue bear, a yellow tiger, and a
green chimpanzee. But they looked like cartoons.

That aspect of their appearance is hard to really describe. But, yes, they looked like cartoons,
that had somehow been ripped from some old, cheesy children’s TV show and placed into our reality.
But how that jelled with the very real environment around them …like I said, it’s difficult to explain. I
couldn’t even look at them for more than a few seconds at a time, actually, before I started to feel light-
headed, and would have to look away. Alice and Katie complained of headaches, and Jeff even warned
he might throw up.

Still, we remained fixed to the spot as the…things approached, out of a potent mix of terror and
curiosity. I think we were still hoping against hope that this would all still be revealed to be a big farce.

A few feet away from us, they stopped. If there was any doubt these were people in costumes,
it was gone now: they were blinking, and their wide, exposed chests rose and fell with their breathing.
More concerning was the unmistakable expression they each wore on their faces: they were hungrily
leering at us. The lion actually lipped his lips.

Tim, bravely, approached the elephant, which, like its friends, was several feet taller (and wider)
than any of us. To this day, I still don’t know what Tim was thinking. He was our boss, so maybe he
thought it was his responsibility to get to the bottom of this quickly escalating situation, despite how
insane and beyond any norm it obviously was. He had saved the company several times in his short
tenure already, from scandals financial and sexual both, so perhaps he thought he could protect us here
as well.

But before he could say anything, the purple elephant sucked him into his trunk with an
exaggerated slurping sound. His outline quickly moved through the elephant’s trunk, then down his
throat, and finally settled into its enormous, round belly, from which sprouted an outie belly button the
size of a basketball.

The elephant then let out a deafening belch, and gave its stomach a satisfied pat.

“Hey, didn’t we eat enough of dese stiffs back at da house? Da last one just stopped kickin’ a
few minutes ago, fa’ Pete’s sake!” the chimp said to the elephant. By their deep, gruff voices, it was
obvious they were males.

Next to me, Katie gasped. Her husband had stayed back at the beach house. I suppose she still
loved him, even if she had spent most of the previous day being gang-banged by the entire Product
Department. Then again, her husband was part of the Product department, so maybe everything was
still copasetic.

It strikes me now, now that I’m far past the immediate danger and horror of that day,
and thus able to more calmly assess, how darkly ironic it is that these people, with all their collective
education history, family pedigrees, social capital, and wealth, ultimately ended up as nothing but basic
sustenance for our tormentors. They served no greater function for them as a potato chip would for one
of us, for example. That was the ultimate culmination of their lives, lives that many others would have
literally killed for (and probably had)!

But I digress. Sorry, my mind wanders a bit more now than it used to. And it’s not like I have to
eat any more anyway…

I tried to move. We all tried to move. To run far, far away, even if it meant abandoning our
fearless leader to be broken down by stomach acid. But when we looked down, we found that all
our feet had sunken into the sand, and now could not be extricated, no matter how much we all
struggled (and struggle, we did).

I leaned down to better investigate. Had we somehow been sitting on top of quicksand this
entire time (that was only active now, for some reason)? The grains immediately around my ankles
looked different. Was it a different shade of beige? I got even closer. My stomach dropped. The sand
that had enveloped my feet looked like it had been drawn into the beach itself.

It was cartoon sand.

How could this be happening?

“Aw, stop ya belly-achin’ and get to woik, ya bum!” said the elephant to the chimp. He burped
again, even more loudly this second time. This was followed by a long, loud fart, that made them all
laugh.

“Oh, dis asshole’s gonna give me some indigestion, I can feel it now!” he complained.

The chimp approached Katie, who had begun to scream and cry hysterically. The trauma of the
past few minutes had broken something inside her mentally, along, no about, with the terror of what
was still to come.

“Hey toots, hope this is as good for me as it for youse!”

He placed one huge hand on Kate’s head, and roughly pressed her into the sand. With the
other, he effortlessly ripped off her designer panties and skirt, and tossed them carelessly aside into the
sand. Then, he lowered his own polka-dotted, size-XXL shorts, revealing a gigantic, human-like green
penis, that had already begun leaking yellow-tinged pre-cum in savage anticipation.

We stared in horror as the chimp began to assault Katie. But, with each thrust, Katie began to
change too. Her feet started to melt into the chimp’s enormous testicles, while her arms shrank
and receded into her torso. At the same time, her head was changing shape as well, becoming more and
more like the glans of the same penis that was still inside her (and no doubt causing profound internal
damages). She was also beginning to turn green. It was a light green at first, before darkening to match
the skin tone of her rapist.

“Help me!” she screamed, before white cartoon cum began leaking from her mouth, and any
further speech became impossible. But what could we do? Our feet were still stuck, and even if they
weren’t, it was obvious the creatures could easily overpower any of us. All we could was watch. Our cell
phones didn’t even have any service here (we had all checked at one point or another during the course
of the picnic, and again when we had first spotted these monsters walking towards us).

Her hair fell out and was blown away by the wind towards the direction of the sea. Her clothes
became the thick, black public hair of the chimpanzee. Her eyes closed for a final time and her eyelids
fused with the rest of her increasingly smooth face. Before long, Katie was no more. She had merged
with the chimp’s already-absurdly-large penis and balls, making them, somehow, even bigger.

The chimp began to stoke his new penis, and let out a satisfied roar as he ejaculated what
seemed to be a gallon of cum all over Jeff, who had been the one unlucky enough to be standing closest
to Katie before her demise.

He tried to wipe it off of him, but then began to scream as his skin sizzled and popped. He was
burning.

The chimp’s semen was causing him to melt.

The animals laughed again.

“Damn, dat shit is potent!” the lion exclaimed. The chimp and bear high-fived each other.

He didn’t suffer long, thankfully. A few seconds later, and all that remained of Jeff,
who I had just seen having a threesome with two of our hottest female coworkers the night before (who
potentially had been eaten by the chimp himself, what a coincidence that would be), was a
bloody, slimly mess, mixed in with the semen that had just been some part of Katie, all resting atop of
the patch of cartoon sand that had previously held him helplessly in place.

The chimp tried to put his shorts back on, but found they could not contain his newly-enhanced
genitals. He let out a short, dark laugh.

“I can’t even get my fuckin’ pants back on, dis ding is so fuckin’ big! Oh, well, I know da ol’ lady
back home will love it anyway! I can’t wait ta’ give her da monsta’ fuckin’ of her life when we get back!”

He turned to look at the blue bear.

“Speakin’ a’ which, isn’t dat why youse came along on dis here lil’ expedition in da foist place?”

The bear grunted affirmatively, and began to approach Bill and Alice.

Everyone knew Bill and Alice didn’t like one another. Alice was the head of HR, and that made
her the natural enemy of the often offensive Bill, who enjoyed using inappropriate humor as a way to
“liven up” his day-to-day back at the office. This had all seemed to come to a head two nights ago,
when, both completely naked, they had begun to argue over the last of the ecstasy pills (and who would
get to imbibe them).

Alice had ended up winning that particular fight, and Bill had retaliated by hooking up with the
young HR rep that Alice had just hired the previous winter (and had taken a particular shine to,
relishing in having assumed the role of her “mentor”). He then loudly bragged about his conquest to
Alice, and showed her a video of the two fucking in one of the beach house’s bathrooms as proof.

Now, Bill and Tim were close, so Alice wouldn’t be able to do anything to him. But her new
hire? She’d be out by Labor Day. All it would take was finding the right excuse, which an HR rep as
seasoned as Alice would have no trouble crafting.

That is, she would have been out of a job if she weren’t already being digested in the stomach of
one of these obese mutants.

So I guess it was all a moot point now anyway.

Alice reached out her hand and grasped Bill’s. Admittedly, I had never been found of either of
them: Bill, with his obnoxious crassness, and Alice, the smug, false confidant, who we all knew was really
just looking out for the company at the end of the day, and not really for any of us. But this gesture,
which Bill eagerly reciprocated, actually made me soften towards both of them a little, even though I
knew this would likely be their final moments.

But then again, I knew these were mine as well.

The bear looked down at their entangled, trembling hands.

“I sees youse bot’ are eaga’ to get started, den? Dat’s good, because my fuckin’ balls are full!”

He placed one humongous blue paw on the side of each of their heads, and then smashed them
together with a thud. Alice and Bill yelped in pain, but this was quickly followed by a more prolonged,
painful yowling. They had tried to move their heads away from each other, but had found themselves
unable to do so. This was because their heads were merging. Their hands too had fused into a single ball
of flesh, which along with their conjoined skulls, was now serving to bring the rest of their bodies closer
together, despite their desperate struggle to prevent that from happening.

First, their shoulders met and became one, followed by the rest of their arms, their torsos, and
both sets of legs. The pained screaming, once distinctly male and female, now synced and briefly
became androgynous-sounding, before turning female again, though wholly different than Katie’s
previous high, shrill voice, that had once struck so much fear in us back in the office.

Their twisted clothes began to morph into pink fur, as the conjoined form began growing
upwardly and outwardly at the same time. Katie had been narrow hipped, and only had modestly-
sized boobs. Whatever she was becoming a part of, however, was almost hyper-sexualized in contrast:
not only did it sport two absurdly round, ample breasts, but its hips were wider than the two people
that had previously made it up standing side by side.

At this point, the screaming stopped, and the new head began to take shape. I wasn’t surprised
to see that it was the perfect counterpart to its creator, the blue bear. Katie and Jeff had been fused and
combined to make a pink bear, a female companion for the blue. The skin of the creature finally stopped
swirling and shifting, and the fully-formed pink bear now stood where Katie and Jeff, the halves that
had made up her whole, once had just moments before.

She batted her eyes suggestively at the blue bear, the long, exaggerated eyelashes almost
generating a breeze through their movement alone, and approached him slowly, but confidently. Once
she was close enough, she began to stroke his penis through his striped shorts, causing it to
become erect. In response, the blue bear began greedily kneading her globe-sized, furry ass cheeks with
his paws.

“How’s it goin’, hot stuff?” she asked the blue bear in a seductive voice.

“Oh, you are fuckin’ poifect!” the blue bear responded.

“Oh, shut up and show me how much ya love me, ya big fuckin’ lug!”

They began to make out, then, their thick tongues joining and wrestling like two boa constrictors locked in a fierce battle over the same prospective meal.

The yellow lion rolled his eyes, cracked his knuckles, and began to walk towards me.

It was my turn.

“Never mind dem, sunshine,” he growled at me.

My mind was racing, trying to guess what he had in mind for me. Would he simply consume me,
like the elephant had Tim? Unlikely, since they had just eaten, and the lion wasn’t as big as the elephant,
and thus probably wasn’t hungry yet.

That seemed reasonable.

The lion reached out towards me with his right paw. I was to be transformed, then. But into
what? Would I be fused into the lion’s body, like Katie and the chimp? Or would he make me into his
mate, like the blue bear had done to Jeff and Alice (They were now rutting wildly, if the noises coming
from that direction were any indication, though I dared not take my eyes off the lion to confirm)?

Maybe he’d turn me into an article of clothing, or some sort of tool or weapon? The possibilities
were endless and terrifying, and, worst of all, I was helpless to prevent any of them.

But then, in those final few seconds before the lion’s hand reached me, an idea popped into my
head. A gambit, really. A mad gambit, that I had no reason to believe would have any effect whatsoever
on what was about to happen.

But, if nothing else, I had always been strong-willed. I had always managed to persevere through
those dreaded school and work weeks after their painful Sunday prologue had finally passed. I had even
managed to rise in the ranks in an industry, and with people, that I really didn’t care for on any level. So,
maybe – possibly - I could leverage that same force of will to withstand the assault this awful thing was
about to inflict upon me.

No – to withstand it wouldn’t be enough. If the transformation failed, it stood to reason they’d
just eat me, or fuck me to death, or something even worse. I had to direct it, to somehow favor me in
such a way that I could escape them and survive.

The yellow hand was getting closer. I put my own hands up to block it, but he easily swatted
them away. I didn’t think that would really work anyway, but I hoped a physical act would help reinforce
the mental ones that would follow. I screamed – not in pain, or terror, but in anger. As the paw finally
reached the side of my face, I bit one of the wide fingers. It had no effect – the creature’s hide and fur
were far too thick to inflict even the smallest amount of damage upon it.

The lion chuckled.

“Heh, dis one’s a foighta’, ain’t he? I like dat!”

The chimp was too busy stroking his engorged penis again to respond while the elephant slept
on his back, snoring loudly. The bears were somehow still going at it, by the sound of it.

Pain shot through my body. It was happening, whatever “it” was.

That meant it was now or never.

I flooded my mind with sounds and images both. At first, I thought of my family and friends, but
quickly stopped. That wasn’t right. That wasn’t enough. I didn’t need to resist this forceful mutation, I
needed to appropriate it.

I shifted tactics. I replaced the sentimental with the powerful. Memories of triumphs both
professional and personal. This grade, that resultant diploma. This promotion, that resultant speech.

  Outside the confines of my mind, I could feel my body shifting, and not in the way I had hoped.

Don’t ask me to explain, but it was obvious I needed something stronger.

  I redirected my thoughts again: now I considered people and things outside of my immediate
experience that I associated with “power”. A sports car, driving 120 miles per hour down a deserted
desert road. A fighter jet breaking the sound barrier. An aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific
Ocean, waves breaking against its mighty hull. A tank, firing at the unseen enemy beyond the horizon.

Soldiers. Firefighters. Police Officers. Professional athletes. Olympians. The Mayor. The
Governor. The President of the United States. The Great Men of History. A nuclear bomb, exploding. A
superhero with a red cape, flying and weaving between skyscrapers.

I was grasping for anything that could prove useful.

The Sun, but not as I could see it now, coldly and indifferently illuminating this horrible
spectacle. No, I pictured it close up, in space. Serene despite the countless explosions that dotted it’s
surface. Safe from anything short of a black hole.

The Sun. Sunday. It was Sunday, wasn’t it?

“What da fuck?” I could hear the lion say.

It was working. My body was still shifting, but differently than before.

Again, don’t ask me to explain.

The lion removed his paw from the side of my face. I opened my eyes (I didn’t realize I had ever
shut them in the first place). The lion stared at his paw, obviously confused that whatever he had
intended to happen with it, hadn’t.

I looked at my own hands. They were still recognizably human in shape, but my skin… I
searched for the words. A term from my childhood, back when I still had the time to waste on video
games, now came to mind: low-poly. As in, low-polygonal. Meaning, computer-generated, but at a
primitive, unsophisticated level.

So, I had still ended up as a cartoon. But a very different one than what I was supposed to have
become, I could guess.

Now the lion was looking at me, his mouth hanging agape in dumb disbelief.

“What da fuck?” he repeated again, louder this time.

This finally got the attention of the chimp, who stopped abusing himself to finally pay attention
to what was happening around him. The elephant, too, was beginning to stir from his brief nap due to all
the commotion.

The bears, conversely, were still having sex.

I continued to stare are my hands. My transformation hadn’t stopped. My skin was changing,
becoming more detailed and textured. Whereas before they had looked like those of a character from a
90’s video game, they next began to look like they were from an animated movie from the early 00’s,
like the one about that funny green ogre.

My skin changed yet again, and now appeared to be of the same quality as the CGI in that weird
movie about the blue aliens that I had seen with my ex-wife, that everyone had made such
a big fuss about at the time.

I reached the final stage. My hands now looked identical to how they had before the lion
ever touched me.

Photo-realistic CGI.

The elephant was now sitting up, blinking rapidly to get the sleep out of his eyes.

“Uh, did you mean ta’ do dat?” he asked the lion, stupidly.

“What do ya think, ya fuckin’ putz?” he replied angrily, without ever taking his eyes off me.

The bears roared and screamed in pleasure as they reached orgasm simultaneously.

Despite my outward appearance, I could sense that there was something else under this human-
like shell. It felt like electricity was coursing through my body. Pure, rippling power.

My transformation now occurred in reverse: my skin lost fidelity as each layer stripped itself
away, before revealing the core of what I had become: a being of pure energy.

“How did ya fuck dis up so badly?” asked the chimp to the lion.

“Babe, I’m scared!” The pink bear, that had once been Alice and Jeff, was now standing and
huddled close to the blue, her hand placed upon his broad chest. He had one paw placed on the small of
her back, resting just above her nub-like tale, which was wagging furiously in fear.

“You betta do somethin’, dumbass!” the blue bear shouted to the lion.

The lion began to approach me again, though the look of devious intent he had had before was
gone, replaced instead with nervous trepidation.

I had no intention of letting him ever touch me again.

I directed my energy outwards, towards the lion. In an instant, he was completely annihilated,
as if he never existed at all.

But then again, he shouldn’t have.

The elephant was trying to roll over onto his front. He never had the chance. With a mere
thought and a reflex, I erased him from existence, too.

The blue bear charged me, bearing his teeth and claws, and growling angrily, obviously eager to
protect his new lover.

But I was the monster now. I took them both out in the same blast.

I looked back over at the chimpanzee, who was now trying to awkwardly run away. His
gargantuan penis and balls, however, were proving to be quite the impediment: he stumbled and
tripped, finally falling back onto the sand.

I smoothly floated over to where he lay. So this is what flying felt like, I thought. Pretty cool.

“Now-now let’s be reasonable!” he stammered.

“Can you turn her back?” I replied. I looked down at the sickly-green genitals that had once
been Katie.

“S-s-stricly speaking, n-no,” the ape managed to say.

I raised my hand. I supposed even at the time that my energy could be directed from anywhere
on my “body,” but I wanted him to feel properly threatened.

“Hey, I’ll do youse one betta’!” he pleaded. “You must really hate us, right? Well, lookie here!”

A few feet away from us, a portal appeared. Through it, I could glimpse the edge of their
“home”: a parallel, two-dimensional universe, awash in neon color. I could even hear loud, discordant
music flowing through.

If I had eyebrows in that more abstract form, I would have raised them at him.

“I thought you said you had a wife?” I asked.

My voice sounded mostly the same, I noticed, but seemed to have a few layers “underneath” it,
if that makes any sense, that lent it an air of authority, power, and etherealness that no human could
ever aspire to.

“Well, yeah! A couple a’ kids too! But fuck dat slut! I know she fucked my brudda! Hell, da kids
probably ain’t even really mine! Come ta’ think of it, dey don’t even look like me! Listen, let me live, and
I promise I won’t cause no trouble here! I won’t even rape nobody or noth-“

I made the chimpanzee stop talking, permanently.

Before I entered the portal, I glided back over to the patches of cartoon sand that had held us all
in place previously. With my newfound senses, I could focus my vision to view them on a near-
microscopic level.

This allowed me to see that they were “alive” in a fashion, and each had an individual face. And
voice too, annoyingly.

“Ya think ya so tough, don’t ya?!?!”

“C’mon, give us ya best shot, ya bum!!”

“We ain’t afraid of youse!!!”

A thousand squeaky voices, shouting variations of the same challenges and jeers.

I destroyed them too, along with the pile of cum that had once been Katie and Jeff.

I also evaporated Katie’s discarded clothes, and the remnants of our ill-fated picnic. If you didn’t
know better, you wouldn’t think anything had happened here at all. Nearly an entire office, including a
Titan of Industry, Tim, will have appeared to have been swallowed up by the Earth itself. Christ, what
would people think? Many of these people had children. They’d be left to wonder what happened to
their parents for the rest of their lives, perhaps. For once I thought of myself as lucky to not have any
family left of my own, beyond some cousins I hadn’t seen in 15 years. Them, and an ex-wife that hated
me enough that she’d probably be happy to hear of my disappearance.

Podcasts, documentaries, maybe even a TV series or film … an entire cottage industry could
sprout up around what happened here, and none of it would even come close to the truth…

I couldn’t think about any of this now, though. With no more loose ends to take care of on the
beach, I hovered back over to the portal, and went through it.

One small step for man…

…

You may not believe me, but my intentions weren’t at all genocidal at first.

Okay, I realize how that sounds.

But really, my purpose in visiting their world was just to assess just how big of a threat
they posed to the rest of mankind. Obviously, the individuals I had already encountered couldn’t have
been allowed to live. However, I reasoned, it may have just been the case that, like with the human
species, the lion, elephant, chimp, and bear were the rare deviants of their society, while the rest were
(largely) decent folk.

Once on the other side, I disguised myself as a fat cartoon rat, like the inbred brother of Chuck
E. Cheese. I could probably make myself look like anything I wanted to now, and I intended to return to
my human form once I was done there. I still considered myself a human male, all things considered.

But we’ll get to that later.

…

I was wrong. The lion, chimp, elephant, and bear weren’t rare on the “other” side at all. They
were, in fact, all too typical of their kind.

The other dimension, for lack of a better descriptor, was cartoon hell.

I inspected every inch of it, so I know I’m not mistaken. I didn’t just “miss” the good areas. There
were no tree-lined streets with single-family homes and white picket fences in their world. All I found
was a vast, slum-like metropolis, where the red-tinged, polluted skies prevented their sun from ever
really shining through. This was an urban, Day-Glo nightmare, an eternal orgy of sex and violence.

 Oh, the things I saw in that place….

I saw anthropomorphic baby “toons” (their term for themselves) come out of the womb, age-
up to adulthood in a matter of seconds, kill their fathers with an “Acme”-branded ax (that they
somehow pulled from behind their back), and begin to have sex with their own willing mothers.

I saw monster toons 10-stories high crack skyscrapers in two, before shaking out their
inhabitants into their open, cavernous mouths. Crowds would form whenever this happened, and
they’d cheer on the destruction. It wasn’t uncommon for an orgy to spontaneously break out, either,
in the rapture of the moment. It also wasn’t uncommon for the monster toons to then squat over the
frenzied crowd, and bury them in a pile of fresh excrement.

I saw bigger toons use smaller toons as living clothing and sex toys. I saw vast tar pits in the
bowls of the city where toons would encase their enemies (and sometimes even their friends) up to
their shoulders, and leave them there immobile for eternity.

Sight after horrible sight, but the worst were the cages. Because in these cages were human
beings. Adults and children.

Have you ever wondered where missing persons go? The kind where the victims
seemingly just disappeared into thin air? Well, apparently many of them had ended up here, where
toons could purchase and use them for whatever sadistic ends they desired.

I learned from observation that “slaver” toons would regularly make excursions into our world
to capture particularly isolated humans (like say, campers in remote locations). Then they’d
bring them here for auction.

I surmised that the bear, chimp, elephant, and lion were four such overseers, and were looking
to enjoy a trip into our world under their bosses’ noses. Just for fun, I suppose: their demented idea of a
“Boy’s Trip” (it does not escape me that one could argue it with a funhouse mirror counterpart to our
own degenerate excursion).

I decided to start there. I destroyed it all. Every living building, every brown, dead blade of grass,
every molecule of false air. Every last toon, big and small. Even their sun, moon, and stars (which were
all “alive” too, of course) could not withstand my onslaught.

When I was done, all that was left was myself and the huddled humans that had been taken there against their will, including those I had found still alive and in one piece scattered across the toon
world, “serving” in various obscene roles.

Everything else was a featureless white void.

What were they standing on (I could hover now)? What were they breathing (I no longer needed
to breathe)? The wonders never ceased.

In any event, I led them back through the portal.

We had no more business left there.

...

I was back on the beach, along with the hundreds of captives I had saved. They watched in awe
as my body rendered itself back to its highest level of fidelity. But my old, casual clothes somehow didn’t
seem appropriate anymore, so I materialized stylish white robes for myself instead of the simple polo
and board shorts I had had on when all this began.

When I was done, I again considered the people I had rescued. To my shock, none had left,
despite their newfound freedom, and the terror that I, understandably, might still have inspired in them,
despite being their emancipator.

But I understood: they were looking for me to guide them. To lead them. I had saved them from
one world, only to release them back into another that now felt just as alien. They were my “flock”
now, I realized, and I was responsible for them.

This made me laugh, albeit internally. I had always wanted to be in this position, had dreamed
and fantasized about it more times than I could count. But I had imagined myself as a mere corporate
executive or president.

This was something else entirely. This was much, much better.

I again thought of the cartoon hell that I had just escaped from. What exactly was it? How did it
form? I still didn’t know. Were there more places like it, other pocket dimensions filled with
nightmares beyond human comprehension? Maybe, and it was probably my responsibility to deal with
them now, too.

It was sunny, I finally noticed. I looked around. The sea was a bright-Caribbean blue, and the sky
above it was just as vibrant, and literally cloudless. The sand that surrounded us was free of any detritus
and debris, and was so pure of color that it almost reflected the sunlight back at us. The heat … actually,
I couldn’t feel the heat anymore. I doubted I ever would again.

I could still see the beach house. I focused my hearing. Music was coming from it. I guess the
disappearance of our entire office hadn’t stopped it from being rented out to other vacationers.
Mortgages still have to be paid, I suppose, but such matters were no longer any of my concern.

I wondered if it was Sunday. How much time had passed? It had felt like years on the other side,
but who knows how that translated across universes?

But I did know that the terror I had once felt was completely gone. I had come face-to-face with
the unknown “it” that I had been able to sense all of my life, but not perceive, and emerged victorious.

I looked up at the Sun. I could stare directly at it now, and feel no pain or discomfort.

This was my day now.

Molly walked leisurely down the paved path that snaked through the woods. It was almost dusk, and she enjoyed taking these early evening strolls after particularly hard days at work, which it certainly had been.

Molly was an astrophysicist, and she was closer than she had ever been to what she knew would not only be a breakthrough for her career, but for all mankind: the mathematical equation that would allow our spaceships to achieve faster-than-light speeds, which would in turn allow our species to finally explore and settle planets beyond our solar system.

She could see it in her mind’s eye, as vivid as scenes from a film: colonies on Andromeda! The discovery of life on other planets! First contact with another sapient race! If only she could just solve this last bit of the algorithm, that, so far, had eluded her grasp.

Then, suddenly, and possibly through some mysterious, subconscious process, she had it. She knew what the answer was! The formula was now complete! This was it! Molly Joy, the world-renowned scientist, had figured out the key to the human species’ flourishing in the cosmos!

She went to find her phone, so she could write down her discovery for safekeeping, only to remember that she left the device at her apartment to avoid any unnecessary distractions on her walk. Determined to get back now, she picked up her pace, eager to get out of the woods and back to civilization.

…

Hours had passed, and, somehow, Molly was still not out of the forest. How could this be? She should have made it back to the parking lot ages ago! And now it was really starting to get dark! Even more troubling, the paved path had turned into a dirt trail, and the lamp posts that had appeared every 200 feet or so had totally disappeared! Had she made a wrong turn somewhere? She didn’t think the route, which she thought she knew so well, had any branching paths at all, at any point along its length.

She picked up her pace again, hoping this whole situation would be, before long, nothing but a distant, albeit odd, memory. Soon, she knew, she’d be back in the parking out, and she would find the map, and see where she had absent-mindedly taken the wrong turn somewhere along the way. Hell, this could even be a funny memory: how the brilliant Dr. Joy had gotten herself lost in the woods right after unlocking the secret to human space exploration! She could tell the story after accepting her Nobel! How they would laugh!

The trees finally opened up, but Molly was disappointed to find, not the parking lot, but instead a small meadow. But that wasn’t all – at its far end, resting under a large tree, was a…centaur?!?!? It beckoned to her, and Molly, desperate for answers, walked towards it.

The centaur was definitely male, and, Molly thought, a quite attractive one at that, with his broad chest, chiseled abs, big, muscular arms, and handsome face. She wasn’t sure what to make of the horse portion of his body, though, never having been much of an equestrian herself. She thought his hair…looked soft? Well, its brown coloring looked nice, at least….

Wait, she thought, why was she acting like this was all totally normal? This is impossible! There are no such things as centaurs! She, a woman of science, knew that better than anyone!

She must be having some kind of a mental breakdown, she reasoned, and this was all some sort of stress-induced delusion. It had been a hard day at work after all, another in a very long line. Therefore, maybe, the centaur, obviously nothing more than a product of her own psyche, could show her the way out of this fantasy, and back to the world of sanity. It was worth a shot, anyway.

“Uhhhh,” she said, awkwardly. “Do you know the way out of here, Mr. Centaur-Horse-Man? I just made the most important discovery of all time, and I’d really like to get back to the real world so I can, you know, share it with the rest of the human species.”

The Centaur looked her up and down. “Hmmmm, an Oriental,” he remarked, in an amused tone.

Molly didn’t know what to think about that. Should she be offended? This was, after all, nothing but a figment of her imagination. Could she really even be mad at her own mind for, apparently, being kind of racist?

“Tell me, Oriental,” the centaur continued, his voice deep and bass-ey. “What is the nature of this discovery you’ve made?”

She sighed. Shouldn’t he already know this, since he just was an extension of herself? She resolved to entertain him anyway, at least for now, and hoped doing so would speed up the process of restoring her sanity.

“It’s the mathematical equation that will allow our ships to reach planets outside of our solar system,” she responded, annoyed and exasperated. How long was this going to go on for?

The Centaur stroked his chin. “And why would you want to do that?”

Now Molly really was offended. “Uh, because this planet is doomed due to climate change?!? Because we need to get off this rock, if we want mankind to survive?!?” She was practically shouting at this point.

Still, the centaur remained calm. “I disagree – I don’t think your world is doomed at all. Far from it, I think your race and it have much left to offer one another. Not that you’re still on Earth, mind you!”

Molly shook her head. “Then where are we, exactly?”

The centaur laughed. “You’re in Arcadia, my girl. The place where myth lives! But the gods only send mortals here for a reason, and for you, the reason is obvious. Your head is filled with bad, poisonous ideas…”

Molly turned and walked away, through with this ridiculous creature and this whole ridiculous scenario. She would make her way back on her own, without his help! She didn’t need anyone’s help when she was getting her Doctorate now, did she? If she could do that by herself, she could certainly find her way of a….
“Ouch!” she yelled, and looked down to see that a dart was sticking out of the back of her thigh. She looked back at the centaur, who was now in the process of lowering the handmade, wooden blowgun that had obviously been responsible for firing it.

“…I think you need a new one,” he finished, and threw the blowgun onto the grass beside him.

It all happened very quickly. Molly’s hands fused and turned into hooves, her arms into hind legs, her head into the anus and vagina of a horse, and her hair into its tail. Simultaneously, her human legs became the front legs of a horse, while her vagina and anus transformed into a new human head.

The result was striking: where once a slim, dark-haired Asian woman stood, there was now a red-haired, voluptuous female centaur, whose human half was unmistakably Caucasian. The dart fell out of her front leg, now no longer needed.

“Oh, I just had the strangest dream, Georgios!” she exclaimed, shaking her head as if to banish it from her memory.

The male centaur got up and walked over to her. He placed one hand on her chin and titled her face upwards towards his. Their eyes – hers a bright green, his, a deep blue - met.

“And what was this dream about Eleni?” he asked, gently.

She laughed. “Oh something to do with the planets and the sun and the moon, I think. I’m already forgetting it!”

Georgios kissed her gently on her plump, red lips.

“Such is the nature of dreams,” he said. “But those heavenly bodies are not our concern, anyway. Such matters are better left to the gods.”

Eleni nodded, and eyed the massive, black penis that hung below the horse portion of her lover’s body. She bit her lower lip suggestively. “I think we have more “primal” matters to attend to right now, anyway,” she said, lustily.

With that, the mates walked out of the meadow, side by side, arms around each other’s waists. Another night of wild lovemaking was clearly in store for the pair, in this, the land of Arcadia, where dragons flew, giants roamed, and the Sun and Moon looked down upon it all, simple, serene, and unmolested.

The children, all twelve of them, made their way through the darkened mansion. It was 10:00 PM, the time that, on their first day here, they had been told was to be designated as “story hour.” The oldest two led the procession, lighted candles atop golden candle holders grasped in each of their right hands. They stopped periodically, to make sure none of the others had wandered off or gotten lost, especially the youngest. It was a real concern considering the maze-like layout of the estate. Fortunately, this time, they made it to the library without having to send out any impromptu search parties. All of the staff were asleep, so they’d be on their own if they had to.

In the library, before a great and blazing fire, itself situated inside a grand and ornate fireplace, sat their grandfather. Adorned in a red robe and gold slippers, eyeglasses perched upon his nose, he stared at the flames silently as his descendants shuffled into the room and dutifully took their places on the floor around his grand leather chair, just as they had done every night during their Christmas “vacation” at Timberridge.

For a few moments more he watched the dance of the fire, while the winter storm raged outside. The children hoped, quietly, that it would end before Christmas day. They, understandably, didn’t want to spend the holiday cooped up inside, like they had been for the past few days.

Finally, and perhaps because he had settled on what he wanted to talk about, or how he wanted to tell it, the old man turned toward the assembled, and started to speak.

“This is your sixth night here, at Timberridge,” he began. “Each evening I have told you one fantastic tale after another.”

“First, there was my discovery of a remote, hidden island full of beasts once thought to be long extinct, along with its tragic sinking beneath the waves of the Pacific Ocean shortly after I had made my escape via seaplane.

“Then, there was the time I rescued the love of my life, your grandmother, from a pack of fiendish centaurs, who had stolen her away from me and sought to make her the bride of their chieftain! I know you especially liked that one, Mary, as it ended with the story of our wedding.”
Mary, the oldest of the girls, blushed and giggled.

“Next, I told you of the epic saga of me and my compatriots’ (including your grandmother) successful battle against the cartoonish invaders of a parallel reality, bent on nothing but the destruction of our own! And all because, in their world, there were no cartoons, and they found live-action programming so boring!”

“Then, our subsequent adventure in which we saved the Soviet Union and all its people from the wrath of Jack Frost! That was the last time any nation ever conducted nuclear tests in the Arctic Circle, and for good reason! We came close to meeting our demise in that one, if you all recall, if not for the timely intervention of a mysterious figure that I’m still not convinced wasn’t an ancient Norse god in a mortal disguise."

“Finally, last night, I told you all about my personal battle with a witch from Eastern Europe, whose demise I still find myself entirely doubting in the late hours. She was only one of my many rivals from over the years, though she was my sole female one. I always found that fact interesting.”

Some of the children exchanged excited glances at one another, an acknowledgment of the thrill and awe that each of their grandfather’s stories had inspired within them, that had lasted beyond the nights and still burned brightly throughout the days.

“Yes, account after account, each more fantastic than the last. And yet, all true. Your parents all doubted me at the time, too, when they sat where you are all now. Of course, they’ve now all gone on to have adventures themselves, many of which have been even more extraordinary than my own!”

Their grandfather’s tone became more sober, and a shadow drew across his face.
“But none are more terrifying than the events I am about to relay to you tonight, I regret to inform you. I am sure of it. I know some of you are not quite old enough for this particular story, but I want you to hear it from me, and I don’t know how much longer I have left in this life before I join your grandmother in the next.”

“So, please forgive me if you have nightmares tonight. But also always keep in mind that fear is sometimes justified, and I would never scare you if I didn’t have good reason too.”

He paused then, and the house shook under the force of the howling winds. The ornaments on the Christmas tree in the corner of the study rattled delicately. Some of the children huddled closer together for warmth. The house creaked above and below under the strain of the elemental force outside.

The children were no longer looking forward to this particular story.

…

It was the day before Christmas Eve. I had gone into the city to go shopping for presents. I was on my own, not even having requested the assistance of a driver, as I thought the long ride there and back by myself through the countryside, what you might call “the long way,” might do my mind some good after the stressful events of the previous few weeks. I’ll tell you about that particular ordeal tomorrow, don’t worry.

I was on my way back - successful, but lighter in my wallet - when things took a turn for the strange. I was driving on one of the many back roads through the forest when, out of seemingly nowhere, a snowstorm hit. While the radio hadn’t mentioned any snowstorms on the forecast for the day, let alone one of such severity, I didn’t think much of it at the time. It’s not like they hadn’t been wrong before, of course.

I tried to make my way through the blizzard, inch by painful inch, but even after a few minutes, it was clear that I was headed for a car accident under the conditions, and on such a particularly curvy and treacherous road. Nor could I simply stop the car and wait it out, as I did not have nearly enough gas to last the night, which was quickly approaching. I was relieved then, to see a small wooden sign with the name of a town inscribed upon it: “Noel”, it was called, and the arrow below it indicated all I had to do was turn off the main road I was on to reach it. Not wanting to crash or freeze to death, that’s what I did.

After about fifteen minutes of driving, I finally saw the lights of Noel in the distance, faint as they were. Green, red, and white they sparkled, fitting both the namesake of their origin point and the time of year. My mind, involuntarily, conjured images of my destination: rows of single-family homes, each with a lit Christmas tree in one window, while lights glittered from their roofs and shingles. With any luck, there’d be a small hotel or Bed and Breakfast where I could wait out the storm. And if not, well, hopefully they were a generous people.

A few minutes later, I was driving down the main street of the village. But it was not as I had pictured it at all: it looked as if no new structures had been built there since the late 1800s! But this was obviously a small, rural community, I told myself. I never should have expected to see what you might call “modern development.” And, again, I was still in the middle of the gall, and had to find some sort of lodging, so beggars can’t be choosers. But, along with the unexpected storm, the lack of weaponry on my person, enhanced or otherwise, was beginning to feel like more and more of a problem. I had simply experienced too much over the course of my life to not be concerned.

At the end of the main drag, I spotted the only building that had any lights on at all. To my relief, the headlights of my car illuminated a sign outside it that read “Bed and Breakfast.” I parked in front, behind another car (the only other one I had seen in hours), and went hurriedly inside, bracing myself against the bitter cold.

In the foyer, lit only by a candle sitting atop the front desk, I met two brothers, who, like me, had found themselves trapped in the middle of the sudden storm. They were much younger than myself, however, and had been traveling back from college together for the holiday. Their names have been long forgotten by me now, but some details remain: they were only a few years apart in age, about the same height, and had the obvious physical builds of athletes. This will all be important later.

Despite our predicament, they were in good spirits, and we all agreed that we hoped that the wind and the snow would stop before morning, so that we would not risk missing Christmas with our families.

The owner of the establishment then emerged from somewhere deeper in the house, dressed in her nightgown and holding another candle, obviously not having expected any more customers so late and with the current weather. She was a plump, kind-looking woman in her early 40’s, and introduced herself as Agnes.

“Did the power go out?” I asked her, looking at the candle. She didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure if she was being rude, or didn’t hear me, but I didn’t want to press my luck with her, considering this was seemingly the only available lodging in town.

I paid for a room for one night. It only cost a quarter! And when I handed the coin over to her, she held the candle up to better inspect it, as if it was in some way strange or new to her. But then something changed, and the look of confusion I had just observed plainly on her face was suddenly gone, and she placed it in some hidden pocket in her gown without further fanfare
I said goodnight to the brothers, and Agnes led me upstairs and down a hallway to my room. It was modest but still very cozy, and I was not surprised to see it did not contain a television.

“Do you have a telephone?” I asked Agnes. Even if the power was out tonight, I hoped I could use one in the morning, to at least let my wife know I was safe, and would shortly be on my way back.

Again, Agnes look confused.

“No, we don’t,” she said, slowly, as if she wasn’t entirely sure of what she saying.
I was too tired to press her any further. I bid her goodnight, removed my coat, and, despite my growing unease and the prospect of sleeping in my clothes, I still found myself collapsing upon the very comfortable bed.

Before unconsciousness overtook me, I went over the events of the past few hours in my head: the spontaneous blizzard, the discovery of this town, perhaps (not) coincidentally called Noel, and its decidedly un-modern appearance. Had I somehow found myself in the middle of some sort of paranormal phenomena, when I, ironically, had least expected it? My conclusion: maybe. But I knew I had to get some sleep before any of my questions could be answered anyway, and maybe the cold light of day could assist me.

In the meantime, I was happy I had remembered to lock the bedroom door.

…

I awoke the next morning, happy to see the sun was indeed bright and shining. My instinct was to get back on the road immediately, but I was hungry, and still had a few hours of driving left before I reached home. And I had paid for breakfast, as cheap as it was.

I went downstairs, where I caught the two brothers, along with Agnes, already eating. It was a veritable feast: pancakes, eggs in all their varieties, waffles, muffins, bacon, sausage, crepes, croissants, and probably even more that I’m now forgetting. I have to admit, it was the greatest breakfast I have ever had, in quality and quantity, to the point where I barely spoke at all the entire meal, my mouth was so full.

But I did make a few observations. Agnes, out of her nightgown and dressed for the day, was wearing a very… retro outfit. I don’t exactly know what everything was called, never having been an expert in women’s fashion, but, like the town itself, it looked to predate the turn of this century. It was the kind of thing you’d imagine the ladies in A Christmas Carol to be wearing, if that helps.

Second, and much more concerning, I realized one of the brothers, the younger of the two, had appeared to have changed, physically, overnight. It was subtle, but still noticeable, at least to my trained eye: his hair had grown a little, and he appeared a bit thinner. And when they both stood to excuse themselves from the table, having each met their stomach’s maximum capacity, I made a final observation: he had shrunk a few inches in height.

I had two thoughts, at that moment. My first was that this was further evidence that there was something more going on here. My second, and which inspired much more panic, was a question: had I changed as well? I finished eating, thanked Agnes, who I had learned over breakfast ran the business with her husband and son, and retired to my room. It was difficult to climb the stairs back up, I was so full with her cooking.

There, I examined myself in the mirror, even getting undressed out of my days-old clothes to make sure I didn’t miss anything. As far as I could tell, nothing had changed. Nothing that is, beyond the usual ravages of time, that I had observed with much chagrin over the past decade. That, however, was regrettably all too natural.

Naturally, I began to second-guess myself. Maybe the young man hadn’t morphed at all, and I was simply misremembering? It was dark in the foyer last night, and I had been tired beyond all measure, after all.

Whatever the reasons, ultimately, my short-term goal was the same: get home. I could figure out the rest later, when I had the assistance of my brilliant and capable team. I retrieved my coat, went back downstairs, thanked Agnes for her hospitality, and went outside.

…

My stomach sank when I saw how much snow had fallen the previous night. The road was covered by at least a foot of it, and the cars, mine and the brothers’, were inundated to the point that not even their basic shapes could still be discerned.

Agnes had followed me outside. She placed her hands on her prodigious hips, and shook her head.

“My husband and my son will get your machine out for you,” she said. I noted her use of the word “machine”, instead of “vehicle” or “car”.

“But what about the roads?” I asked. “Will some snowplows be coming through soon?”

“Yea, the horses will be out here before too long,” she answered.

Horses, I thought. Of course they’re using horses.

“Listen,” Agnes continued. “Why won’t don’t you go into town in the meantime? It’s Christmas Eve, and everyone will be out shopping and doing the rounds! Oh, there’s no place else like Noel on Christmas Eve! I’m sure you’ll love it!”

I weighed the risks. Something odd was going on, I was now sure of it. The evidence was insurmountable. And I was alone, and without any of my instruments. But my curiosity had grown with my suspicions, and exploring the village might reveal some answers. And if it was obvious that this was more than I could handle on my own, I would simply come back with the lads and the ladies later. In the meantime, I would be sure to keep my guard up. It wasn’t like this was my first time.

I thanked Agnes for her help and her suggestion, and began to walk back into the main area of the hamlet that I had first glimpsed last night, albeit in the dark.

…

Over the subsequent hours, any lingering doubts were erased: I was in the middle of what began to think of as a “time warp”. Everyone I met and talked to was convinced it was 1899, with the turn of the century only a week away. All of the technology, fashion, and culture I observed were also squarely of the same period as well.

I had thought, initially, that maybe this was all some kind of grand performance by a community that had simply wanted to escape the modern age. But, unless they were all trained actors as well, that seemed unlikely, as none would drop the act even under intense examination. And why couldn’t this be some sort of “hole” in time? Stranger things had happened, especially to me.

Around noon, after hours of conversation with anyone that would entertain me, I sat down on a bench in the middle of the town square, in front of their massive Christmas Tree, and watched the citizens of Noel as they shopped, ate, talked, and played in the snow. I spotted young couples, full families, groups of friends, elderly retirees, and gangs of young children: all happy and content on this Christmas Eve.

Overlooking the town was a large mountain, and I could see a mansion seemingly embedded on its face. This, I had been told, was the residence of Barnaby Wilson: industrialist, philanthropist, and notorious playboy.

It reasoned that this man, in some way, was responsible for Noel and its condition. After all, he was apparently benefiting the most from it. But should I consider him an enemy? All around me were happy people living simple lives. The pews would be full at the midnight mass later, I had been assured.

By contrast, out in the real world, we had hate, disease, division, famine, crime, and the threat of Nuclear War hanging like the sword of Damocles over all of human civilization.
So what was the problem, exactly?

At that moment, I actually felt blessed to have stumbled upon the town of Noel when I did, as if God himself was rewarding me for my good works with a glimpse into this miracle. I even considered not telling anybody about any of this when I got back home, so as to preserve it from the wider, cruel world beyond its invisible borders.

I gazed up at the moon, faded in the daylight, but still visible. Was it altered as well? Was it the same heavenly body that had been so recently conquered by mankind? Was the American flag implanted on its surface?

Would it be good, if it weren’t? The thought even surprised myself.

But then, my gaze shifting back to the Earth, I saw something that quickly annihilated my optimism, or any notion that the good God of Abraham had anything to do with this.

I saw the two brothers again, walking arm in arm. And the younger one, the one I had noticed physical changes in earlier at breakfast, was now even shorter, thinner, and had longer hair. Moreover, he was now also sporting what were obviously, even under his (women’s) winter jacket, two large breasts, accompanied by much wider hips, and a behind that stuck out further than a bustle alone could account for (I’m sorry to be so explicit, children, but I need to explain how I knew he had turned female).

I ran up to the pair, and began to question them. They explained to me that they were born in the village a few years apart, had started as childhood friends (not siblings), before graduating to lovers in their teenage years, and now, were engaged to be married come spring. They had no memory of who they had been a mere twelve hours before, even after I reminded them. They took offense to that, actually, and abandoned me in disgust.

“How dare you say such a thing, and on Christmas!” said the now-woman, in shock and disbelief.

I hurried back to the Bed and Breakfast. Every bemused person I ran past, I couldn’t help but wonder: were they like the two brothers? Had they too been sucked up by this place, and changed to suit its twisted means? My mind raced with possibilities: had siblings become lovers, children become parents, and parents into children? Were even the pet dogs and cats I spotted once human beings? I could have ejected my breakfast onto the snow.

And why hadn’t I been affected? Actually, there I could make an educated guess. On my person I presently had: a cursed ring on my right ring finger, enchanted tarot cards in my left breast pocket, a necklace once worn by King Solomon himself resting on my chest, and a vial of sacred water from the Ganges in my right pocket.

There were also the various times I had been blessed by priests, shamans, rabbis, imams, and medicine men, and granted spells of protection by white witches, mages, and warlocks.
All of these were the prizes won from my previous adventures, and any of them, or even multiple working in concert, could have been responsible for keeping me from succumbing to whatever evil force was at work.

…

I made it back to the hotel, where I was not surprised to see that the cars hadn’t been dug out at all. No matter, I thought. I would do it myself. I still had my gloves.

I began to remove the snow by hand, but, even after 20 minutes of excavation, no vehicle was emerging. All it was, I realized with horror, was a giant pile of powder. It too, had been assimilated into this alternate dimension, along with the gifts I had stored in it.

I didn’t bother to check the state of the brothers’ car. It was easy to assume that it was gone as well, if the state of its owners was any indication.

I considered my options. I could try to trek back to the main road on foot, but it was about 25 degrees, even in the sun, by my estimation, and, even after reaching the main road, it might be hours before I saw another car. There was a very real chance that I would end up succumbing to the cold in the meantime.

There was also the possibility that the dimensional pocket that I had found myself in wouldn’t let me leave anyway – that I would find myself walking and walking only to end up back in town, or in an endless expanse of forest. Maybe I was beyond rescue already, and so this was all a moot point anyway. Or, even more disturbingly, maybe the outside world was gone, and only Noel remained.

I’d cross that bridge when I came to it, I decided.

Another option sprung to mind: horses! Agnes mentioned that they would be using horses to clear the streets of snow! I looked around. Clearly the streets hadn’t been touched. Maybe the horses were still in their stable? I ran inside and asked Agnes, now eating lunch with her husband and son, where I could find it. She told me the farm was located a little outside of town.

I started walking there as fast as my feet would carry me.

…

Arriving at the farm, I noticed immediately that something was wrong. It was too quiet – even if the animals had been kept in their pens on account of the snow, I should still have been able to hear them, even if muffled and at a distance.

I knocked on the door of the main house. No answer. I tried the handle. It was unlocked. I let myself in. I could handle the farmer, if that’s what it came to.

Inside, nothing looked out of the ordinary. But something outside, in the backyard, caught my eye. I moved closer to one of the windows, and through it viewed what I can only describe as absolute carnage. Masses of dead animals littered the area between the farmhouse and the barn, their blood and entrails staining the white snow red. I couldn’t recognize any of the individual species - such was the state of their dismemberment. I ran outside.

No ordinary animal, or animals, could have done this. The only creatures that came to mind that possibly could were the dinosaurs I had encountered on that now-sunken island.

Then I spotted him – the body of the farmer. And he was still breathing.

I ran over to him. Something had taken a massive bite out of his shoulder. There was nothing I could do for him. I had no medical expertise.

“What did this?” I asked him, hoping, selfishly, that in his final moments he could possibly still help me.

“The horses”, he struggled to say. By the sound of it, his throat was inundated with blood “But they’re not horses anymore. And they’re still in there.”

I looked over at the barn. A trail of blood led to its front doors, which stood wide open, but its interior was shrouded in shadow, hiding whatever lay waiting within. I became acutely, and uncomfortably, aware that, given the distance, whatever the horses had become could be on me in a matter of seconds.

I looked back down at the wounded farmer, hoping he could offer me some more information in his final moments. But they had already passed. He was dead.

What was there left to do? I looked behind me, back in the direction of the town, the looming mountain behind it. From that distance, the mansion that called it home was not visible, though I knew it was still there. I had earlier reasoned that the man who called it home was in some way the cause of all of this.

I decided I would have to confront him. There were simply no other options.

But first I needed more information. I left the farm without taking any further action, hoping, and praying, that whatever resided in the barn was content to stay there, at least for now.

…

I went back to the Bed and Breakfast and talked to Agnes, along with her husband and son. I went back into town, and questioned anyone I could. I even saw the two brothers again, though I dared not approach them. The female was now obviously pregnant. By the size of her protruding belly, I guessed she was probably in the third trimester. My stomach still churns at the thought.

But, overall, my endeavors were largely fruitless. All I had learned was that Barnaby Wilson was seldom seen in person these days, and that he liked to throw lavish parties with guests from out of town. There was talk that one such party would be happening that very night, but that morsel of information was more like a rumor that no one seemed to know the exact origin of, or who they had first heard it from.

At this point, dusk was not long coming, and I still needed a weapon. I went to the police station.

…
Fortunately, the town only had a single law enforcement officer: the sheriff. And since crime in Noel was nonexistent, as the residents had proudly told me earlier, it reasoned he didn’t have much practice in either shooting or fighting.

By contrast, I had much of both.

I entered the front door, and found Noel’s sole police officer shining his badge behind the front desk. To his left was the gate to the cells, which had been left open, indicating that there was nobody currently locked up in any of them. That suited me fine.

“Merry Christmas, sir,” I said to him in a cheerful tone.

“Merry Christmas,” he replied, and finally looked up from his book. He squinted at me, obviously trying to remember my name.

“Oh, I’m new in town. Just got in last night.”

“Oh…uh…what can I help you with?” It was as if he was in a play, and had forgotten his lines.

“Well, I’m going to need your gun, and every bullet you have for it on hand. Plus, your nightstick, and whatever else you might have lying around.”

I didn’t want to hurt him, As far as I knew, he was just as much a victim as everybody else here. So my goal was this: get him to draw his weapon, whereupon I would quickly disarm him, and turn the gun on its owner.

Over the next 30 seconds, that’s exactly what happened. The result: the sheriff, bound to a chair with a makeshift gag stuck in my mouth in the cell at the end of the hall, which I had locked. And now I had a revolver, with 20 additional shells stuffed into my pants’ pockets, and a nightstick, which I had placed in the breast pocket of my coat.

Someone would find the man, I reasoned. Eventually,

Now armed, I began to make my way up to the mountain, just as the sun was beginning to set.
It was getting colder.

…

There was a gate at the foot of the hill, with a heavy lock upon it. I shot it off.

…
I didn’t encounter a single other soul on my hike, nor did I see any animals or birds. I didn’t see any other tracks, either, until the path I was on merged with another that originated somewhere else further down the mountain. This road had obviously been the one used by the party guests I had heard about, as there were now many imprints in the snow before me.

But I didn’t see any that were obviously made by any wheel or horse. No, these tracks were made by … other things. Whether vehicle or animal, I do not know. None of them had been made by anything I had ever encountered, and no two were alike.

One set were square, as if made by a giant robot. Another was nothing but a deep cut, a mini canyon between walls of white. I imagined something like a miniature ship had produced them. A ship that didn’t need water, apparently.

A third pair resembled the tracks of a bear, albeit with 10 toes on each foot. The adjacent prints were nothing but three zig-zagging lines. The last imprint I could make out was a perfect circle six feet in circumference, each marking about 5 feet apart from the next, as if a giant had taken to playing with a pogo stick.

I could finally see the manor through the trees. I needed to get closer.

…

Now I was in front of the mansion. Whatever had made the tracks, they weren’t parked outside. Maybe they were inside, I thought. Maybe this mansion was bigger on the inside than the outside. Much, much bigger.

But there was certainly a party going on, as every window was lit, and an excited murmuring could be heard emanating from within. I couldn’t pick up any of it, however, and I still don’t know if it’s because the sound was too muffled, or if the language or languages spoken were simply alien to my ears.

Shadows moved behind the drawn curtains. Some were too big to be made by even a large human adult. Others were too small to be children. At one point, a huge shadow moved across multiple windows at once, as if it were being cast by a huge caterpillar.

Now I could make something out. It was hard to hear, but I realized it was “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” by Brenda Lee. Released in 1958, fifty-eight years later than it was supposed to be in this strange place.

Rockin' around the Christmas tree
At the Christmas party hop
Mistletoe hung where you can see
Every couple tries to stop

The song changed. Now a male voice emanated from inside.

There'll be parties for hosting
Marshmallows for toasting
And caroling out in the snow
There'll be scary ghost stories
And tales of the glories
Of Christmases long, long ago

“It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” by Andy Williams. This was a bit more recent – 1963. Then the song changed again.

The mood is right
The spirit's up
We're here tonight
And that's enough
Simply having a wonderful Christmastime
Simply having a wonderful Christmastime

I knew the voice – it was Paul McCartney. But I didn’t recognize the song at all. Then it hit me: this was a song from the future. For whatever reason, this final irregularity – this final insane contradiction - is what broke my resolve.

I stared up at the mansion, but for how long, I couldn’t be certain. I took out the revolver, loaded with six bullets. But I quickly put it away. It was now undeniable: I was in over my head.

Whoever, or whatever, was in there, it was more than I could handle on my own.

The party's on
The feeling's here
That only comes
This time of year

I had been beaten.

I turned around, and looked back over the town. The red, green, and white lights were back, and I now realized that their coloring should have been impossible considering the state of their technology. Another mystery. Another terrible wonder.

The word is out
About the town
To lift a glass
Oh, and don't look down

…

I walked back down the mountain, to the town. All the while, I considered what my next action would be.

I could try to start a fire, to create an inferno that would wipe out the whole of Noel, but who’s to say it wouldn’t be suddenly deprived of oxygen, snuffing it out? Or, I could simply go on a killing spree, and try to save as many of the villagers through the mercy of death that was as I possibly could. But how long before the doors of the mansion would fling open, and whatever is in there descended upon me to save its playthings?

The final choice was the simplest: suicide. I would use the revolver on myself, and die in this lonely place. Never see my wife, children, or team ever again. They wouldn’t ever even know what had happened to me.

What would they think? Would they assume that I had gotten into a deadly car crash? Been the victim of a simple carjacking and homicide? What an ironically pedestrian way for me to meet my demise that would be!

Or would they imagine something greater? Maybe one of my old, still-living rivals had finally bested me by striking when I least expected it? Or maybe it was a new foe, the vengeful sibling or friend of some villain I had once bested?

Whatever they theorized, I doubted any would ever guess this.

How could you?

…

Back in town, the streets were deserted, the residents of Noel no doubt eager to get some sleep before their namesake holiday. I stopped again before the great tree in the town square, where my hopeful delusions about Noel had been shattered only a few hours before.

I would decide my fate here.

The sound of bells interrupted my dark brooding. I turned to find that an ornate, red sleigh had materialized behind me. Along with 12 reindeer before it.

I inspected the sled, trying to discern whether or not this was some sort of trap. The bench, where Santa himself would presumably sit, was too small for even a thin man to rest comfortably. And in the rear, where there should have been a sack overflowing with presents, there was instead a single wrapped box. I took it out, and opened it. Inside was a scrap of paper, with one word handwritten upon it: “Leave.”

I looked back towards the mountain, where I could see a pinpoint of light emanating from its side: the mansion. Whatever was in there, it simply wanted me gone. It must have realized it was not going to be able to assimilate me, now having been in Noel for about twenty-four hours. And maybe it didn’t like how close I had come to its seat of power.

I sat down on the bench inside the sled, whereupon the reindeer suddenly took off into the sky. For a few seconds, I could again look down upon the town, along with the sea of trees that surrounded it.

Then I blacked out.

…

I awoke, still sitting up. We were back on solid ground. To my left was a truck, the bright beams of its headlights almost blinding me. I summarized, by the shocked look of the driver, that the sled had landed here right in front of him, no doubt almost causing him to crash.

One of the reindeer grunted: a clear signal to get out. I did, and the reindeer immediately began to turn round and head back into the sky. As they did, I caught a glimpse into the eyes of the head buck, the truck’s lights illuminating its pupils enough for me to see them clearly. Instead of being horizontal, as they are for all deer, horses, and sheep, they were round. Like a human’s.

I watched as the reindeer and the sleigh climbed higher and higher into the sky, until….they abruptly winked out of existence. A word popped into my head: firmament. Yes, that sounded right.

I walked over to the passenger side of the truck. I had half-expected the driver to refuse to let me in, but he was apparently feeling generous, as he leaned over and unlocked the door for me. It was Christmas Day, I suppose.

“You don’t want to know,” I said to him, before he could even ask me anything.

He believed me, thank God.

…

We arrived back at the mansion shortly after daybreak, where my wife (your grandmother) and five children (your parents) ran to meet me outside. They asked me where I had been. I shot a knowing look to your grandma, before telling them that I had been snowed in back in the city. They believed me, because they did not yet know what they do now: how strange and terrible this world, along with a few others, really are.

I gave the truck driver a handsome tip, and we all waved him goodbye as he drove off. Back inside, we opened presents (minus the few that had been swallowed whole by Noel), played with some of the newly unwrapped toys, and had breakfast.

...

In the early afternoon, when the children were all taking naps, exhausted from the excitement of the holiday, I told your grandma over hot chocolate what had really happened to me. She said nothing the whole time, and, when I was finished, only had one question.

“So, when do we start?” was all she asked.

She knew me too well.

…

The next day, I called the Company. I was able to get through to the Boss, and I told him the same story I had told your grandmother. When I was done, the line grew silent.

“Can you come in for an Audit?” he asked

I knew that was coming.

An Audit is a grueling, week-long process in which magic and medicinal means are both employed to get the absolute truth out of someone.

Actually, I misspoke: it’s to get the truth out of someone’s soul. That way, even the unconscious deceptions crafted by one’s own mind can be detected and discarded.

Usually, an operative will only ever be subjected to one Audit in their entire lives, when they first join the Company. This is standard procedure, to weed out any spies or psychopaths. So, yes, I’m sorry to tell you: all of you will likely have to go through one yourselves, if you choose to follow in the footsteps of your parents and grandparents.

But I wasn’t offended. If I were the Boss, I would be skeptical too. What were the odds that an operative would just happen to stumble into a situation like this? And it may not have even been deliberate on my part. The life of an operative is, to put it lightly, stressful. It was not unreasonable to think I had had some kind of mental break, and made up the entire story of my time in Noel while in the midst of it.

Or maybe I had gotten into a car accident, and the whole thing had been a kind of dream or hallucination? The possibilities were endless, really.

I agreed to come in.

…

A week later, and the Audit was complete. I was fifteen pounds lighter, and had more gray hair, but there was no longer any doubt: I was telling the absolute truth, as my own soul knew it to be. I was not being deceitful, or mistaken.

With all that cleared up, the hunt for Noel could begin.

…

The main team, along with two sub-teams, were summoned to Headquarters. Once all were assembled, I again retold my story, which was followed was a short Q & A session.

Then, we set out.

…

We combed the woods for months. We used every spell and piece of technology at our disposal, even at one point using a helicopter to survey the area from the air. We tracked down the truck driver who had rescued me. We interviewed local residents, amateur historians, and consulted the Native American tribes that had lived nearby since pre-Colombian times.

But we never found Noel, or any record that such a town had ever existed at all, at least in the State.

…

Back at one of the Company’s offices, someone crunched the numbers and found that the area in question had a higher-than-average rate of missing persons than in similar parts of the country.

And the consultations with the Native American tribes did dig up one interesting piece of information: the range of land where Noel should have been had a name that translated roughly into English as “Don’t Go There.”

I had also surrendered the sheriff’s revolver for analysis. Examination showed that its general design was of the late 1800’s, but that was all that could be gleaned from it. I’m sure it’s sitting in a warehouse somewhere now.

A year later, and this was all we had. With no more leads to pursue, the file was closed, as we used to say.

…

The last loose end was the matter of the brothers who had become husband and wife. We actually discovered their identities very early on, as their family had reported them missing on Christmas Day. Once my Audit was complete, the Company felt confident enough to leverage its influence with the FBI and Local Authorities to work with them to cover up their deaths.

Together, they planted and staged a fake car crash, complete with the burned skeletons of two unclaimed male corpses. What else could we do? It would have been crueler for the family to continue their search, when we knew it would forever be fruitless.

And, in a sense, they were dead.

I attended the funeral, under the guise of being one of their college professors. I stared at their weeping mother, and wished I could comfort her in some way, while still fully well knowing that that even this deception was better than the truth.

The truth was that the world she knew was a lie. That monsters were real, and could be hiding in your bed or in your closet every night when you lay down to sleep. That every time you went out on some mundane errand, there actually was a chance you’d suddenly disappear into thin air, in the short walk between the door to the grocery store and your car. That your children weren’t really safe playing outside, even when they stayed confined to your backyard, and away from the forest. That witches, vampires, ghosts, and werewolves were not only real, but were actually among the least of your concerns.

Yes, this poor woman had to believe her sons were killed in a car crash, so every other mother could still comfortably place their newborns in their cribs and not have to worry that elves would come in the night and replace them with a changeling.

After that, it was time to move. During the investigation, we had kept the children under strict supervision, not allowing them anywhere near where I had chanced up that cursed town. But, realistically, we knew we couldn’t keep it up forever.

Eventually, they would be more and more on their own, and what if, for example, one late December, my son found himself driving his girlfriend home for the holiday, eager for us to meet her? Then, when none were ever forecasted by the weather, a sudden snowstorm was to strike. And what if, desperate to find shelter from the wind and sleet, they were to see a sign for a town called “Noel”, and all they had to do was make that fateful turn to reach its shelter?

The risk was too great, so we moved out of state, and into Timberridge, where we have lived since.

But I still think about Noel, especially around this time of year. I have not suffered many failures in my life, or my career, but I still consider this to be the worst of them. I couldn’t save those people, and that is something I still cannot make peace with.

And what exactly was Noel, anyway? I still wonder. The company released a memo laying out all of the theories that the boys back in the office had come up with. They ranged from “incursion from a parallel universe,” to “a glitch in the simulation that is our known reality.” I never did come up with my own personal hypothesis, but I suspect that the Company hadn’t even come close with any of theirs.

Whatever Noel really was, I’d wager it was something so fantastic and terrible that it’s beyond our human imagining. That’s why, no matter how powerful you all might grow to become, and despite my personal regrets, I still hope and pray that you never stumble upon the town of Noel, or that the Company never tries to restart the hunt for it.

You must never see those terrible lights in the distance yourselves.

…

With that, their grandfather stopped talking, and turned back to the fireplace. The children knew that this meant he was done for the night. They slowly got up, one by one, and made their way back to their rooms.

Christmas was only a few days away, but the promise of it was not as enticing as it had been just a few hours ago.

Commission for anonymous

Sequel to:

https://www.deviantart.com/smokeysis/art/CMSN-The-Stepford-W...

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It was another sunny, warm Sunday in Stepford, Connecticut. Resting on the comfortable wicker chair on the wraparound desk of his Father's colonial-style home, Luke, 19 years old, was reading a comic book. It was one of his favorites: Mrs. Marvel #60, the one in which Kamala Khan, newly emancipated on her 18th birthday, fled to Saudi Arabia to get away from her awful, permissive, liberal parents in America. Once there, she was quickly married off to a rich man, who, a strict observer of Islamic Sharia law, mandated that she always wear a full niqab while in public, and never without a male escort.

She happily obeyed. Huzzah!

In fact, this was the last issue. The final page explained that she gave up her crime-fighting ways, and devoted herself fully to satisfying her husband's sexual and marital needs, even going on to give him eight healthy children, as was her obligation!

All's well that ends well! Make Mine Marvel!

What a shame, Luke, thought, that they did not have access to these kinds of comic books. No, out there, he understood, Kamala Khan was a so-called girlboss, a Muslim-in-name-only, the idealized image of a female superhero by way of white Brooklyn hipster.

What a damn, damn shame.

Oh well! Sucks to be them!

But that was one of the many perks of living in Stepford. It actually made him laugh now, to think about how much he had hated the place when he first moved there. It seemed like so long ago, when he, his father, his stepmom, and his two step-sisters had moved into this admittedly massive, gorgeous house. But then he had discovered the magic of the place: that one of its residents, Mike Wellington, a brilliant ex-Boston Dynamics engineer, had devised a process by which, through the use of advanced robotics and cybernetics, one could fashion the perfect woman.

All you needed was an imperfect one.

But that is just what his Father had done, bringing his new wife, Claire, and her daughters, Haley and Alexandria, here with the express purpose of transforming them all into said unblemished forms. And what a success it was! Claire, Alexandria, and Haley had all been among the biggest bitches on planet Earth, in Luke's estimation, and now they were the kind of female partners a lesser guy could only dream of!

Translation: they could – and would – do anything. Take, for example, Claire. As Luke read his comic, specifically the pages where Kamala permanently inflated herself to BBW levels to satisfy her beloved husband's refined tastes, Claire was mowing the lawn: with her legs! The way it worked was kind of interesting: to start, Claire would get into a kneeling position, at which point blades would shoot out of both of her lily-white shins. Then all she had to do to cut the grass was ride around on it like a human Roomba, vacant smile on her beautiful face all the while.

It was funny: on a gorgeous day like today, virtually every house had a living lawnmower servicing their yards. Sometimes, they would even wave as they passed one another by!

Luke looked up just in time to see Claire expertly maneuver around the Trump/Vance 2024 sign that had been up since summer, leaving the unruly grass under it for last.

Speaking of common sights in Stepford….

"Lunch, darling!"

Luke turned to see Haley, in a yellow sundress with a blue flower pattern, holding out a fine glass plate with a hotdog atop it, with a side of potato chips.

Haley leaned over as she placed the plate on the small metal table in front of Luke. The actual meat was completely frozen, but, like Supergirl, Superman's cousin-cum-wife (as seen in Action Comics #455, the issue where the Man of Steel claimed her as his bride), Haley had the ability to shoot lasers out of her eyes. She employed them now to cook the hotdog to a perfect crispness.

Luke shoved his right hand up Haley's skirt to grope her perfect, round hindquarters while the red beams that had shot forth from her pupils penetrated the meat, which like all hotdogs around the world, was of mysterious and indeterminate origin. This was another feature installed in the women of the neighborhood – the ability to alter the size of nearly every part of their bodies on demand.

A year ago, Haley had not had much of an ass on her at all, any weight she gained going mostly to her tits. Now, it stuck out so far that her frilly dresses clung to either cheek like plastic wrapping on a Christmas ham.

But her changes went far beyond the physical. Haley had been, literally, a whore. A squarely 21st-century whore, operating a moderately successful OnlyFans wherein she showed off her tattooed body to the anonymous creeps that made up her following. But it was more than just that: she was known to go clubbing with her equally-whoreish friends at least four times a week, hooking up with countless anonymous men every time she went out, some of whom even helped her make her "content".

Suffice it to say, she was headed to teenage motherhood, if she deigned to keep the bastard child she was perpetually in danger of conceiving. Which, let us be honest, was unlikely. Hoe probably had the local Planned Parenthood number already saved on her phone.

"Enjoy your lunch, honey!" she cooed, before planting a kiss on his right cheek, and leaving a bright red lipstick stain where her ample lips had made contact with his scruffy cheek.

Luke gave her ass another appreciative squeeze, then spanked it when she turned to re-enter the house.

"Oooh!", she exclaimed, before letting out a teasing giggle.

She opened the screen door, and went inside. But she was not going in there to relax, read, or even watch TV. No, none of those things were of interest, or necessity, to her now. When not in use, all of his girlfriends (that is what he considered them as), would simply find an empty space in the living room, and proceed to stand completely still there until summoned. In this mode, with perfect posture and perfect smiles, they were not unlike pieces of hyper-realistic art.

Speaking of, he could use Amber right about now. His poor balls were terribly full.

He took his smartphone from his shorts, and opened the app that had just been rolled out to the men of Stepford that same year. Another stroke of genius from Mike! Before, they had to use a remote control. Uh, how primitive! This was much more convenient, and offered so many more options to boot!

He clicked the button along the bottom of the App that featured a purple microphone as its icon. A pleasant "boop" sound emanated from his phone speaker, and he held it up to his face and spoke into it.

"Amber, get your ass out here and suck the cum out of my balls, would ya? Oh, and bring me another comic, and a blanket."

He liked to be gruff with them, harkening back to the same idealized past as the rest of Stepford, even if it made no actual practical difference what his tone of voice was.

Just moments later, Amber walked through the front door, wearing a tight white tank top and black yoga pants, blanket and comic in tow as ordered. She handed the comic to Luke, got on her knees before him, and placed the blanket over herself and his lap. She then pulled his gym shorts down to his ankles, and dutifully began to suck his stiffening cock.

"Hey, make it a slow one, huh? I don't want to blow my load before I finish my comic."

"Mmmmm-mmm," Amber responded affirmatively, not bothering to remove Luke's dick from her mouth to answer him. She learned well.

She had chosen the comic well. This was Avengers #366, the issue where it was revealed that Jennifer Banner's – She-Hulk – vagina and ovaries transformed into a colossal cock and pair of balls every time she hulked out. After revealing this fact to Black Widow, the two proceeded to fuck over the next 30 pages all over Avengers Mansion, in every room, in graphic detail. This was actually the beginning of the arc that featured She-Hulk fucking all of the female members of the Avengers, culminating in her taking Storm and Scarlet Witch – the ones that had satisfied her most - as her wives. In turn, that led to a conflict with Quicksilver and Black Panther, which led to the Planet She-Hulk event, and so on and so on.

It was appropriate that Amber chose this particular issue, because, like She-Hulk with her green-purple penis, Amber was also a futa. Well, that was how Luke thought of her at least, and she certainly looked the part, with her absurdly round boobs and ass, swollen lips, and, naturally, 8-inch long cock.

Amber, it should be said, was not part of their family, at least originally. She had been Alexandria's friend, and somehow got caught up with her in becoming Stepfordized. Whatever, the details didn't really matter. The point was, she was now part of his menagerie.

A real-life futa! How cool was that? Fortunately, her parents didn't take much convincing to let her live full-time with Luke and his other girlfriends. They were sick of her shit anyway, and whatever resistance that might have been left was quickly obliterated by him sending Alexandria and Haley over to give the Patriarch of the family a sisterly double-blowjob that almost literally caused his eyes to pop out of his skull (to hear Alexandria and Haley tell it) as a gesture of goodwill.

In some ways, Amber was his most prized possession. Every guy in Stepford had a woman (or two), but none of them, as far as he knew, had a goddamn futa. He wouldn't even let his friends borrow her (and how they had begged!), so jealous was he of this rare and wonderful part of his collection.

Case in point, Amber had begun fondling his own testicles, in such a way that the pleasure it gave Luke was almost beyond description. That was the difference with a futa – the women could download and analyze every porno known to man with their computerized brains, and they still wouldn't be able to work a set of male genitals like a futa could.

It was just at that very moment that Amber brought Luke to orgasm, and Luke gripped both sides of the wicker chair as he ejaculated into her expert mouth, and Amber, in turn, gladly swallowed every solitary drop.

"Yowza!" he screamed, almost involuntarily. Another retro affectation, but it amused him to say it.

As Amber began to lick the spit and cum off of his rapidly-shrinking cock, Luke leaned over, put the comic down on the table in front of him, and lifted the blanket slightly so that he could see her.

"That won't be necessary", he told her, even as she had already started running her strong tongue down either side of his dick to lap up the refuse that now coated it. "Go inside and tell Alexandria to come out here and clean me up."

Amber nodded, rolled out from below the blanket, and started to walk back to the front door, her own erect cock brushing up against the inside of her tight yoga pants, threatening to break out of them and spray the whole front deck with her load.

Luke empathized with the poor pent-up bitch.

"Hey, Amber," he called to her.

She turned and grinned at her master.

"Yes, honey?"

"Go release all that into Haley," he said, nodding at her bulge.

"Oh goody!"

Amber turned, and went back inside, a noticeable pep in her step.

Alexandria appeared shortly afterwards.

Alexandria was in the same kind of dress as her sister and mother: brightly colored, lacy, etc. etc. But Alexandria was voluptuous in a way that they weren't, so the dress in question hugged her every thick curve in a way that it just did not for them.

Now, it was true that Luke could have plumped up his stepmother and other step-sister in a similar fashion as well, if he had wanted to. But they weren't Rubenesque in the same manner as Alexandria was even before her Stepfordization, and Luke kept it that way to add even more variety to his foursome, along with maintaining some continuity with the otherwise regrettable before times.

Having already been told of Luke's wish by Amber, Alexandria silently got under the blanket and began to clean Luke's genitals with her tongue.

Luke liked to reserve these even more humiliating tasks for her, because, as much as Claire and Haley had been cunts to him before they were perfected, Alexandria somehow even out-cunted them.

It had started that very first time he had met Alexandria and Haley, over dinner at that local fancy Italian restaurant. He already greatly disliked Claire, who had made it openly known how much she disapproved of his comic reading and video game habits, disparaging both as hobbies unbecoming of a "real man." Still, he had held out hope that the bitchiness genes had skipped a generation, and maybe he could get along with her daughters instead. That would at least make the next few years more tolerable until he graduated college and moved to the city for work.

No dice. Haley was dumb as a stump, and Alexandria made even less of an attempt to mask her contempt for him than her mother had.

"What a fucking dork," he had overheard Alexandria whispering to her sister as they ate their pasta and chicken parmesan.

But she barely tried to lower her voice. She wanted him to hear her pointed barb.

Dork, nerd, incel, faggot, bitch, geek - she had leveled them all, and more, at him in the intervening time since.

That's why she got the short end of the stick now. When he needed a stool to rest his tired feet, guess who took the weight of them on her back? Who unclogged the toilets with their bare hands? Who disposed of the garbage – by eating it? And who ate his cum out of Claire and Haley, when they lay back feigning exhaustion after a marathon sex session?

Alexandria, eternally repenting for her many, many sins against Luke.

But that last example did bring up the whole "incest question," and just how did Luke address it? That taboo of taboos, that was broken so regularly in the Dunphy household that it didn't even register with him anymore.

Well, first of all, it wasn't like Claire, Haley, and Alexandria were his own biological family members now, was it? So the fuck did he care? Plus, he would wager one would be hard-pressed to find another red-blooded man out there who wouldn't jump at the chance to have two unrelated-to-him sisters at the same time, or even an (again, not related to him) mother and daughter-pairing. And if they started doing things to each other while in the throes of passion, do you think said man would suddenly call the whole thing off in disgust, or would he find himself getting more turned on at the (hot, hot, hot) display?

Don't answer that. It was a rhetorical question.

And secondly, they weren't people anymore: they were things. Was your phone "related to" your laptop? Was your coffee pot related to your coffee maker? Of course not, the idea was patently absurd!

Between the two arguments, the matter was settled in Luke's mind completely. The only thing left was to enjoy it, and that he did.

Finished cleaning his genitals, Luke dismissed Alexandria, allowing her to take her place inside alongside her sister and Amber, who, based on the satisfied sounds that had come from the living room earlier, had finished rutting and resumed their automaton's watch.

It was just as well. Even with Luke's teenage vitality, he still couldn't go more than twice a day, and that was with a moderate refractory period in between. So he likely wouldn't need his girlfriend's services, at least in that sense, until later that evening.

Claire had just about finished mowing the lawn. She placed the Trump/Vance 2024 sign atop the neatly trimmed grass, the final step of this maintenance routine, and walked briskly over to her lounging master, her blonde hair blowing slightly in the gentle breeze.

"Honey, I finished mowing the lawn!" she declared cheerfully. "Is there anything else I can do?"

There really wasn't, actually, the interior and exterior of their home were the perfect picture of suburban domestic living, every forgotten corner and centimeter of dust properly seen to over the course of the weekend.

So he let her retire inside.

Not that they needed to rest, or sleep, or eat. No, all of the energy they required they got from the Sun, absorbing it constantly throughout the day, whether they were inside or outside.

Mike was a fucking genius.

Still, Luke enjoyed having dinner with them every night, taking his rightful place at the head of the table while his girls delicately consumed the food they prepared but didn't actually require.

Okay, not "every night." And therein lay the rub: he only had them when his Father wasn't home. Granted, his Father was a successful businessman, and traveled frequently for his byzantine, didactic work.

So when he was gone, off to some convention or presentation, Luke was the Man of the House. But when his Father was home, he had exclusive ownership of the girls, forcing Luke to administer some "self-service", if you know what he means. Imagine the humiliation, his Father sleeping in his Alaskan-size bed, Alexandria and Haley on one side, Amber and Claire on the other, while Luke was relegated back to his room, the only sensual comfort left to him only what he could find in the stale glow of his personal computer monitors!
And that was bullshit. Luke was a Man now - a Man of Stepford - and a Man of Stepford needed, nay, deserved, a harem of his own, like the legendary Sultans of Arabia in Antiquity!
But that meant he had to ensnare (read: date and marry) some spoiled, pampered bitch out there in the world, and with the way things were for men now that could end up taking quite a while. At least, that was what he understood to be the state of things based on what he heard on the Internet. That wasn't an issue in Stepford, for obvious reasons.

Just then, as Luke mused over his misfortune, a moving van pulled up to the house next door, along with a dirt-stained green truck that drove up and parked behind it.

This caught Luke's attention for more than the obvious curiosity over who he would be living next door to, at least for the foreseeable future. Luke loved the before and after, the contrast between how the personalities shifted pre and post-Stepfordization.

So he wanted to get a good look at the female members of this new family, before they received their blessings from the man in their lives.

The first figure to step out of the truck was the mother, a slim thick middle-aged woman with short black hair. With her scattered tattoos (a big portrait of a man on her right bicep, and something scribbled in cursive along her left wrist) and functional choice of clothing (just a plain white tank top and blue jeans), she had a definite tomboyish vibe. This pleased Luke - her Stepford self would be a radical departure indeed from this current persona.

Next, emerged her daughter, a goth chick that looked to be, like Luke, in her late teenage years. She had her mother's wide hips and small breasts, but had taken it even further with the tattoos, the most prominent being a large black spiderweb that had been etched upon her chest. This was in addition to her septum, eyebrows, and lips piercings to complete the look.

Lastly came her "son." One could be forgiven for mistaking him for another daughter, on account of his painted fingernails, pierced belly button, and crop top. But the large bulge rising from the crotch of his jean shorts dispelled the illusion entirely. He was perhaps a "femboy," to borrow a term, not much younger than his sister.

The daughter immediately noticed the Trump/Vance sign on Luke's lawn, rolled her mascaraed eyes, and pointed it out to her brother.

"I knew these people would be a bunch of chuds," she complained, loudly.

"I told the stupid bitch that this place wouldn't be tolerant of LGTBQ+ folx like me," he replied with a scoff.

The Mother overheard the remark, and the clear reference to her as a "stupid bitch," and ignored it totally, going around to the front of the moving truck to talk to the portly driver instead.

Luke was delighted. These three did not stand a fucking chance. He silently commended the unseen Patriarch of the family, hoping for his sake that the two teenagers were his stepchildren, and therefore could be made into objects for his pleasure as well.

This was a subtle but no less important distinction. If a Patriarch applied to move to Stepford, he had to provide some important documentation before he was granted permission.

One was to demonstrate that his Wife was a bad partner: mean, ungrateful, and especially, feminist (with bonus points granted for a dead bedroom). The kind of prototypical disrespectful shrew that his own stepmother had exemplified before her transformation.

Two, if he sought to have his adult children Stepfordized as well, he had to prove they were not biologically related to him. Anything else was strictly verboten.

This city had decency.

The daughter and son trudged up to the entrance of their new home, and by their misery you would think they were on Death Row and their executions via firing squad were slated to take place inside of it.

The mother had opened up the back of the moving truck, and retrieved a couple of unboxed vintage Barbie dolls from its interior.

She followed her children, moving carefully so as not to accidentally drop the collector's items she held tightly to her flat chest.

Her children looked over their shoulders at her, and turned back around without bothering to offer her any help. Nor did they open the door for their poor mother, letting it slam in her face, and forcing her to awkwardly maneuver her fingers around the toy boxes to get it opened again.

Fucking brats.

But don't think the Mother was off the hook either – her obvious failure to instill respect in them was a severe character flaw in its own right. So she'd be getting what she fucking deserved too, along with her misbegotten offspring.

With that, Luke joined the rest of his family in the living room. He was tired after his lunch and blowjob, and was eager to take an afternoon nap. He should command Claire to give him a relaxing, naked massage with her strong mechanized fingers while he lay prone on the couch. That always put him right to sleep.

Luke lay on his Father's expansive bed, reading Wonder-Wife #58. It had just been released the previous Wednesday, and he had sent Haley to pick it up from the town's one and only comic book store. Its proprietor, Frank, wrote the scripts, and his wife, with her inhumanely fast fingers, translated his words into expert-level illustrations.

In this installment of the long-running series, Wonder-Wife taught her daughter, Elizabeth Prince, how better to please her new stepfather, Ultraman, who had traveled across the multi-verse with the express purpose of conquering the Amazonian mother and daughter. They had gone willingly, but only after the Kryptonian had bested both in battle, and thus proving his worthiness to own them.

Luke envied Frank's endless well of creativity, and was thankful that he was willing to endure reading the torturous "real" comics to better subvert them with his own versions.

And soon, with advancements in AI, along with Mike's own contributions, Stepford could have its own versions of popular films, television series, and video games. Imagine it: "Lara Croft, Supermarket Raider" (got to get that on-sale stuffing for Thanksgiving before it sells out!) or "No-Longer Wicked, Part 2," wherein Glenda could use her magic to make the unruly Elphaba into a good, albeit still green, witch, the loyal servant of the noble Wizard of Oz.

In the meantime, they would still have their bespoke comic books, and Luke eagerly looked forward to this week's release, which, based on Frank's hints when he saw him at the Men's Association, probably included the Invincible Iron Man, Tony Stark, permanently trapping his nemesis, the Mandarin, in a pink, feminized version of the iconic Iron Man suit of armor.

He could see how it would work: the female-voiced artificial intelligence system would be the armor's vocal interface with the outside world, on top of controlling its movements, and the suit's systems no doubt could convert sunlight and water vapor into sustenance to keep the redundant male body inside of it alive.

The concept would have sent a tingling through Luke's nether regions, but he was, once again, drained, his scrotum as deflated as a punctured balloon.

After a filling dinner of beef stroganoff, mashed potatoes, and garlic bread, perfectly prepared by Claire, they had gone upstairs to his Father's bedroom.

Then, they fucked.

Haley had sat on Luke's face, while Claire rode him reverse cowboy style as Alexandria licked her mother's pussy, touching herself as she did so.

Haley's juices could taste of anything, and he had chosen strawberry cream. He had never liked eating pussy - okay, he was a virgin before he moved to Stepford - but if he had eaten pussy, he doubted he would have enjoyed the taste. But Haley's vaginal discharge was what he imagined Ambrosia - the nectar of the Gods - would taste like.

And Claire's cunt...the way it gripped his cock...he could only imagine how loose it had been when she first married his Father. She was married before, obviously, and he could guess how many male partners she had had before and after her first divorce. Fucking her back then was probably like throwing a hotdog down a hallway.

Now, its internal contours molded themselves automatically to best fit his dick, and he pitied any poor sucker that would never get to experience the sublime bliss this induced.

Alexandria....well, he wasn't actually in physical contact with her, but he was sure she was licking her mother's clit with the expertise that came from analyzing thousands of Lesbain pornos.

That was about all he could muster to think about her.

When Luke finally came, ejaculating into his stepmother's wanting pussy, all three women climaxed as well, activating their orgasm protocols to synchronize with Luke's release. They had moaned loudly throughout their fornication, and it wasn't fake: using his app, he had heightened their sensitivity to the max. But their final release would not occur until his own was imminent. That was how he had programmed them.

Alexandria, as was always her duty, had handled clean-up, using the towel that the erect Amber had laid on her long cock as she stood at attention in the corner of his Father's bed chamber.

When the room was back to normal, Luke had sent the girls away, relishing the opportunity to collect his thoughts now that the "poison" was out of his system.

At dinner, while they were eating dessert – a carrot cake – he had gotten the idea to use the promise of food to find his way into the new neighbor's house. He could tell just from his observations that afternoon that their metamorphosis was sure to be a drastic one, and the more he could learn of their rotten natures now the better the contrast would be when they had been corrected.

With a full belly and empty balls, he could now confidently decide on a definite course of action.

He picked up his phone.

As he walked up to the front door of the neighbor's house, he remembered the previous owner, an old codger that, the fellas down at the clubhouse said, had been struck dead at the exact moment that he came inside his Stepfordized wife, who had been riding him like he was a goddamn horse. He had been a Vietnam veteran, and she had been a mail-order bride he had flown in from the Philippines.

Luke supposed the geezer had assumed that, being from the Third World, she would have been a little more grateful to be in America. Maybe she had been, at the start, but by the time they moved to Stepford, she had turned shrew, modern American culture being what it was.

But Mike had fixed her right up.

The downside was, after her owner had plotzed, they had to...decommission her. You might think it a waste, but what kind of precedent would it have served to distribute her to a new household? That you could knock off one of the Patriarchs, and maybe get his concubines as prize? It would create chaos, potentially setting off a turf war that could threaten the very existence of their suburban paradise.

No, for the good of the community, "widows" had to be destroyed. But not fully, Mike had explained to him one day. He recycled and reused as much as he could.

Waste not, want not.

Well, Luke thought as he knocked on the door, lime jello mold, baked by Claire, in his other hand, that was neither here nor there now. Best to focus on the present.

The Mother opened the door. Busy with unpacking, she hadn't changed from the decidedly masculine outfit that she had worn when Luke first saw her that afternoon.

He smiled at her and lifted the jello in offering.

"Howdy, neighbor! Thought you could use a snack after a long day of moving!"

They made their introductions (her name was Karen), and she invited him into the kitchen.

Score!

But on their way, Luke couldn't help but notice a theme: Barbie. There were Barbies everywhere. Old, new, boxed, and unboxed. But it wasn't just the dolls. She had Barbie paintings, Barbie pillows, Barbie blankets...Luke shuddered to think how much Barbie crap was still left to be revealed in the brown cardboard boxes that were strewn haphazardly about the place.

When they finally sat down at the kitchen table, Luke was not surprised to see that she had Barbie plates and Barbie placemats. Oh, and Barbie cups, which Karen filled with limited edition Barbie pink lemonade.

They began to chat, as they poked absentmindedly at their slices of Jello. Karen explained that her daughter's name was Jenna, and her son's name was Ashley. Jenna was 19 and Ashely was 18, which was just about as he had guessed.

Luke, wisely, attempted to artfully dance around the exact nature of his living arrangements as they stood now. Wouldn't want to scare her away, would he?

"And where is your husband?" Luke asked. He was eager to meet him, and shake his hand, even if they had plenty of time to get to know one another over cigars at the Men's Association later.

"Oh, he died over ten years ago now. Cancer. Same as his parents."

"So...are you engaged to someone else now, or just dating..." Luke awkwardly tried not to ask his actual question. She was still fully human, and he had to be mindful of that.

"No, no, it's just me."

That didn't make any sense. But before Luke could inquire further, Jenna entered the kitchen.

She had changed into fancier "going out" clothes, though they were no less gothier than her earlier get-up. She had changed into a black dress and thigh-high boots, and had even placed a spikier ring through her septum.

"I'm taking the truck. Don't ask me where I'm going or how late I'll be out."

Karen just nodded, and Jenna left the kitchen. Luke could hear her rummaging through her Mother's purse, which he had spotted hanging on a (pink) hook by the door when he had first come in.

"I'm taking some cash, too!" she called from the hallway. "What's the point if you don't get fucked up, right?!?"

Karen again did not protest.

The front door opened and closed, so loudly that their Barbie glasses shook a little.

At the same time, a cacophony of noise erupted from somewhere upstairs. Even muffled and distorted by the walls in between them and the source, Luke recognized it as hyper-pop, a genre favored by some of his gamer friends.

"He'll be blasting that until one or two in the morning," Karen said. "It's the background music he uses when he's camming for older men. I know because he doesn't even bother to minimize his windows when I go in there to give him his dinner anymore. Or when I come back to collect the plate."

Luke was still confused. Why had Karen been allowed to move here, if she wasn't planning on using the Stepfordization process? Unless...but no, that couldn't be. Mike would never allow it.

Karen raised her eyebrows at Luke.

"But it won't matter for much longer, right? I mean, you know. That's the only reason I can put up with it now. They'll pay me back, oh yes they will, when that bitch is sucking on my tits, and the little faggot is pumping me good with his big fucking donkey dick."

Luke stutted and stammered, at a complete loss for words.

"And when they're not helping me, around the house, or in the bedroom, they'll be standing stock still in the living room, just like big fucking Barbie dolls. I already have a place picked out for them and everything."

Luke again said nothing.

"Two should be enough, no? How many do you have?"

Luke stumbled from the neighbor's house, stunned and disorientated. This could not be. A single woman, allowed to move here, to assume the role of a Patriarch? And to use her own biological children...It was beyond the pale.

There must have been some mistake. Maybe she had lied to Mike, deceived him in some to get through the application and screening process. She must have been smarter than she looked, to get one by Mike like that!

He would get him on the horn right away, and get things cleared up. Mike could get her kicked out, evicted, without giving her any of the money back. Karen and her corrupted spawn would be on the streets sucking cock for cash by the end of the week.

Because what she could do, really: go to the police? They owned the police, along with the mayors and city councils of all of the surrounding townships (robot pussy went a long, long way toward buying you favors). They even had connections at the Federal level, if she foolishly went that route.

There was a reason Stepford had never fallen under any real scrutiny, and it wasn't just because of the 24/7 manned gates at every entrance to the community.

Sitting on his couch, Luke dialed Mike's phone number from his smartphone. Amber was standing close by, a bag of chocolate malt balls hung around his erect cock, and Luke was anxiously reaching into the bag, shoving handfuls of the treats into his mouth in a futile effort to calm himself.

Mike picked up on the first ring.

"Hello?" Mike sounded distant, dreamy. He was probably getting his dick sucked by his Asian Stepford wife.

"How the hell are ya, Mike. It's Luke." Despite his outrage, he found himself falling into the usual Stepford speech pattern.

"Oh, I'm doing a-okay."

He was definitely being blown.

"Well, I wanted to talk about my new neighbor. You know, Karen?"

"Yes, Ms. Osgold. Did you meet her?"

"Yes."

"And?"

"And?" Luke's voice started to rise in volume. "And? Mike, she's planning to give her own kids the Process. Her own natural-born offspring. You know I respect you, and everything you've done, but what the fuck were you thinking?"

Mike let out a long sigh, and Luke didn't think it was because his balls had just been emptied by his Asian fuck toy.

"She's a woman. I didn't think anyone would care..."

"Really? Well, wait until this Friday's weekly Men's Association shindig. I guarantee you're going to find that a lot of us care!"

Luke angrily hung up on him.

It never occurred to him how audacious it was for him, a teenager to speak like that to a man more than twice his age. Fucking one's own step sisters and stepmother so regularly gives you quite the ego.

He took some more malt balls out of the bag drooping from Amber's phallus and popped them into his mouth.

It was the following Monday, and Luke was back in that big wicker chair on the deck, reading another comic book. This was Joker #97, the thrilling issue where the Clown Prince of Crown won his rightful squeeze, Harely Quinn back - and convinced her girlfriend, the lethal redhead Posion Ivy, to join them as a supervillain throuple!

His classes were over for the day, and his homework had taken all of five minutes to complete: because Haley did it, using her Internet-connected brain!
He attended a local State School, opting not to matriculate into the more prestigious Ivy League he had been admitted to because it meant he would have been living away from home, in some crummy dorm with some slob loser of a roommate, coordinating around each other's goon sessions. More importantly, though, he would be apart from his girlfriends.

But it ultimately didn't matter much where he went to school. He had a job lined up at his Father's firm no matter where he graduated from, or what his GPA ended up summing to (which was good, because he was not doing so well on the tests).

He looked up from his comic to see Karen's green trunk pull into her driveway. He hoped, for her sake, that she had just come from a meeting with Stepford's sole realtor, Gary, who lived on the other side of town.

The driver's door opened first, and it was not Karen who stepped out from behind the wheel. It was Ashley, wearing the kind of bright summer dress that served as the unofficial uniform for all of the women of Stepford. His long brown hair had been dyed platinum blonde, and he walked with a certain lightness as he nearly skipped over to the passenger side door, and opened it.

That's where Karen had been seated, and Luke was astonished to see her change in demeanor (and clothing). She was adorned in a smart, form-fitting grey and black business outfit, dark sunglasses perched on her upturned nose. As her high heels clicked on the pathway that led to the stairs to her front door, she called over her shoulder:

"Get the bags, Jenna. And you, Ashley, open the front door for your Mother. Jenna can handle them all by herself."

Jenna manifested from the back seat of the truck, and as Luke had expected, she was as preppy-looking as her brother was now. And she didn't need Ashley's help, it was true: using the super strength that came with enhanced limbs, she easily carried three brown shopping bags in each of her thin arms.

Ashley, nearly as quick as The goddamned Flash himself, shot past his Mother, and opened the front door for her.

Karen didn't say "Thank You" as she briskly moved past him, and into her home.

Jenna brought up the rear, and Ashley followed her inside.

Motherfucker (literally).

Mike had gone ahead and Stepfordized the two of them, even after their conversation over the phone last night.

Mike had completely ignored him.

He needed time to think. He needed to clear his head. He felt himself almost floating off the ground as he retreated into the air-conditioned living room.

He spotted Amber in her favorite corner of the room, stiff cock forming a tent in his pink dress.

"Get over here and suck my cock, bitch," he barked at her.

Amber was fucking Haley on the floor of the den, missionary-style, while he rested his bare feet on Alexandria's straight back.

Periodically, he would yell "Stop!" at the couple, and would then gawk at how perfectly they ceased all movement on a proverbial dime. When he was finished admiring the unnatural stillness of their bodies, he would yell "Go," and they would resume their fornication until he said otherwise.

It was lazy, cheap entertainment, but it was just unstimulating enough to allow his own thoughts to flow, and he had a lot to process right now.

There was the outrage, yes, along with the shock at Mike's audacity at so flagrantly breaking the community's hollowed rules and traditions. Rules and traditions that Mike had been such an instrumental part of establishing!

But Luke was wrestling with another emotion on top of it. As he stared at Amber's dick as it moved in and out of Haley's immaculate pussy, he admitted it to himself: he was jealous of Karen.

The sight of the Stepfordized Ashley and Jenna had activated something within him, and he couldn't get the images of their reformed selves out of his head. He had even inflated the secondary sexual characteristics of his girlfriends, expanding their busts and butts to their absolute limit, and his heart of hearts still yearned unabated for the siblings.

Getting to know them before their alterations had backfired, clearly, very badly.

He tried to ameliorate his impotent longing by focusing again on the matter of Mike's betrayal.

Was he related to Karen? Did he owe her a favor or something? Was she blackmailing him? Did she help him bury a fucking body?

He adjusted his feet again on Alexandria's back, unable to get fully comfortable.

"Stop!" he screamed again at Amber and Haley, and they froze as if God himself had hit the pause button on all of reality.

"Beer, baby?"

Claire had brought the bottle over, and used her own titanium teeth to remove the cap. She swallowed it whole on her way back to the kitchen, where she would continue preparing supper (tuna casserole and Baked Alaska for dessert, for the record).

Did it need to be explained that normal alcohol laws did not apply in Stepford?

He stared at Amber and Haley's perfect spherical asses, and perfect spherical tits. Their perfect glossy hair, and perfect, unblemished skin.

Perfect faces.

Perfect legs.

Perfect arms.

Perfect feet.

Perfect cock.

Perfect pussy.

Holy shit. That was it. Luke understood.

"Alexandria, stand up."

She obeyed, not like there was any other option.

"Stand next to the wall facing Karen's house, turn on your thermal vision, and record everything you see. No breaks. Don't stop for anything until I tell you to."

It was so obvious now.

He directed Haley and Amber to resume fornication.

Every Friday a little shindig was held down at the Men's Association. Over beers and cigars, the Patriarchs of Stepford would regal each other with tales of sexual conquest (along with plenty of dirty jokes).

Attendance was optional, but why would they miss it? These parties were the only time any of them could talk openly to other men about what was really going on in Stepford.

You couldn't really say any of this shit at the office, or on the train ride home from the city. Obviously.

And whenever Luke's Father was gone he had permission to take his place. The other guys didn't mind. They liked having the little fucker around. The kid had balls.

They couldn't say the same for Mike at the moment, who boldly chose to attend even though word had by now gotten around to everyone present regarding the Karen situation.

So now, under all of the smoke and laughter, there was an underlying tension, and Luke knew that each Patriarch was wondering who among them, if any, would have the balls to confront their benefactor over his transgressions.

The awkwardness had reached an almost unbearable level when Karen walked into the clubhouse.

The room went so silent you could hear a pin drop.

Dressed in a stylish women's suit, complete with necktie, she sauntered over to one of the empty leather chairs, and sat down.

"What's the matter, boys? Have you been around your fembots so long you don't remember how to talk to a real woman?"

She reached over to the coffee table placed in the dead center of the room and picked up one of the unused cigars lying there. Taking a stainless steel lighter out of her breast pocket, she lit the cigar, took a drag, and blew a perfect circle of smoke out of her red-painted lips.

"That's not it and you know it," said Chris, one of the other Patriarchs, who lived a few streets over from Luke, with his Stepfordized Wife and her Stepfrodized sister.

"Then you're just offended I'm a woman? I knew this place went for a 50s thing, but I didn't think you would take it that far."

"That's not it either," this time it was Kirk who interjected, a man that Luke didn't actually know very well, but could safely assume loved golf whiskey, and the soothing sounds of Yacht Rock.

"Oh, so you're all just offended that I'm fucking my own, natural-born son and daughter. Please, like all of you aren't building human centipedes with your stepkids and their mothers every goddamn night."

"That's different," said Chris.

"Barely," she retorted.

She exchanged a brief glance with Mike, who was sweating so badly it was seeping through his grey polo shirt. It was quick, almost imperceptible unless you were already looking for it. But Luke was.

"Maybe you don't get it because you're a broad." This was said by Bob, who was good friends with Luke's Father. He had been over for Sunday dinner with his Stepfrodized adult stepdaughter enough for Luke to know that he had used "broad" deliberately, certainly trying to provoke a reaction from Karen, though to what end was beyond Luke's ken.

She didn't take it, opting instead to lean over again to empty her ashes in the nearest available tray.

"You fellas got me all stressed out. I think it's time I head on home, and let my son help me blow off some steam."

Provocation had been met with provocation.

The Patriarchs stared silently at her as she got up and walked out of the clubhouse, all the while still puffing away on the cigar she had claimed.

Mike, who now looked like he had just gone swimming in his clothes, such was his level of perspiration, ran after her as fast as his stubby little legs would allow him.

"Twisted fucking bitch."

Luke didn't turn to see who said it.

It was audacious. Outrageous. Unbelievable. Incredible.

It was just what Luke needed.

It was Saturday night, and Luke had spent nearly the entire week wracking his brain, trying to figure out a plan that didn't end with Mike having the upper hand. As of the previous evening, he still couldn't envision a scenario that didn't result in his death (or worse).

But Karen had changed all that.

Karen and Mike were fucking, and Mike had hours of footage proving it stored in Alexandria's brain. Yes, it was all filtered through the amorphous images of heat signatures, but it was clear that the short, stocky figure was Mike, especially when you considered that the relationship explained why he had so bent over backward for her, at such great reputational risk to himself.

But why did Mike want to have sex with a human, when he had a bionic bimbo at home that could fuck his brains out with mathematical precision?

Luke had a theory: Mike was the progenitor, right? The OG. The Hank Pym of Stepford. He had been at this longer than any of them. Throwing fuck after fuck into his fat-assed, big-tittied Asian wife night after night

He had bored of perfection, simple as that. Now he craved boobs of slightly different sizes, an ass that wasn't totally round and firm, and labia that stuck out slightly too far. He dreamt of birthmarks and sun damage, of faded tattoos and grey strands of hair.

But Mike was far too accustomed to his robo-wife's unyielding obedience to pull a real woman at this point, his social skills long atrophied. So somehow he had met Karen, and arraigned for her to move here and Stepfordize her kids, in exchange for giving Mike a daily pity fuck.

To avoid deception, Mike had built a tunnel connecting his house to Karen's, undoubtedly using his wife to excavate it. Luke could see it in his mind's eye: Sue's hands and arms morphed into miniature pieces of heavy machinery, furiously scooping away dirt, roots, and other debris.

That's what Alexandria had captured with her video eyes: the portly figure of Mike climbing through a trap door in Karen's basement, then joining her in her bedroom, while Ashley and Jenna waited outside, standing at the ready like the guards at Buckingham Palace.

Neither Mike nor Karen were there now, he had confirmed with Alexandria. He could guess that they were instead still at Mike's, arguing about her little stunt at the Men's Association. Luke was sure that Mike had told her explicitly not to come, and she had gone because he had. See, Mike: this is what you get messing with these free-thinking hoes…

Luke walked down to their own basement, and climbed into the tunnel bored by Claire, Amber, and Alexandria while he had been witnessing that spectacle down at the clubhouse.

Even if Karen hadn't inadvertently given him the opening he needed, he still wanted access to her house. He just had to have a go with Ashley and Jenna. But now it would be more than just a one-time thing.

As he ducked through the dirt corridor, he marveled at his girlfriend's handiwork. Claire had done the scooping, Amber had set up the lights and support beams, and Alexandria had eaten all of the dirt.

He hit a dead end. Well, it just looked like a dead end. It was a false, earthy wall, meant to hide his own tunnel from the one Mike had created. He opened it, and entered the section that Sue had built.

Luke laughed. It looked identical to the one his girls had created. Guess they had pulled from the same YouTube tutorials and Do It Yourself Subreddits!

Luke reached the end of this wing of the tunnel system. He reached up and opened the trap door above him, and climbed into Karen's basement.

Maneuvering his way through the piles and piles of army memorabilia, Luke made his way through the cellar, found the stairs to the upper floor, climbed them, and emerged into Karen's living room.

Now that it was fully furnished, it looked like a fucking Barbie museum, and, along one wall, each standing under pink neon signs bearing their names, were Jenna and Ashley, wide smiles exhibiting their crystalline teeth.

Karen had made it easy for him. Between them, mounted on the pink wallpaper, was their Remote.

He had been slamming Jenn's colossal, pale ass while she blew her brother, all of them never having left the altar to kitsch that was the main floor of their home.

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH MY PROPERTY, YOU LITTLE SHIT!!!" she screamed at the absolute top of her voice.

Luke knew she was coming. Alexandria had sent him a text as soon as she spotted her heat signature materialize in the basement.

Karen leaped forward, manicured hands at the ready to wring Luke's neck, but her attack was cut short by her's son firm hold on her wrist. He hadn't even needed to get up to stop her, instead shooting his arm up to catch her fast enough to have swiped a fly out of the air.

"LET ME GO, YOU STUPID LIVING DILDO!"

"Sorry, Mom." Ashely calmly replied. "Luke is our owner now."

Luke held up his phone and shook it mockingly at Karen.

"First thing I did. Don't blame yourself. You chose a pretty good password. But it was never going to be a match for my three girls next door when they combined their computing power together."

Luke removed himself from Jenna's wet pussy, and have her left ass cheek an appreciative slap.

"Jenna, please start dumping all of this Barbie crap downstairs. It's really not my style."

He had resolved to be nicer to Jenna and Ashley. He didn't bear them the same ill will that still lingered with his stepfamily.

Karen was still struggling futilely against her son's grip. With her free hand, she gestured wildly at Luke, a trapped animal desperate to thrash anything within reach, regardless if it would have any positive effect on her current situation.

"Ashley, please restrain your Mother's other arm. I don't need her taking out my eyes with her claws."

"Sure thing, babe!" Ashley responded, and took his Mom's left wrist in his right hand.

Now they were face to face, looking like they might just start dancing together on the pink carpet.

Karen spit in her son's face. Fortunately, the gesture did nothing to dampen his mood.

Luke opened his contacts app, found the entry for Mike, and called him.

"Hello?" Mike sounded dreamy and distant again. Luke was sick of this "getting a blowjob while talking on the phone" bit.

"Hey, buddy. I'm here with Karen."

"What?"

"I'm in Karen's house."

"Doing..."

"Detaining her. Warm up the workshop, and I'll bring her over as soon as I can. Ashely can carry her there with one arm"

"What are you saying right now?"

"I'm saying, you're going to give her the Process."

He looked over at Karen and winked. This sent her into even more of a rage. She leaned over and bit Ashley's nose. It had no effect. They only felt pain when they were told to.

"Why would I do that?"

"Because you have to."

"I really, really don't. In fact, I can see right here that you're using Ashley to restrain Karen. I can take direct control of him and release her."

Luke had figured that, even confirmed it with Haley's self-diagnostics routines. The protocols were there, built in by Mike, and they couldn't be deleted or altered. And he had tried.

"I have footage, of you sneaking in here. It's obvious it's you. I have Alexandria ready to send it to all of the Patriarchs."

"And I have control of the networks. It'll be deleted long before they see it, and then I'll access Alexandria and permanently get rid of the files."

The existence of such a capability was an easy assumption to make, once it was established that Mike had backdoors into all of the Stepford wives.

It was okay. Luke had planned for all this.

"It doesn't matter. All of the Patriarchs are ready to revolt after that display yesterday. They don't need hard proof. They know something's going on. I'm sure more than a few have figured it out on their own"

"You think that matters? I can have them all at the lab within an hour, including you, hand-delivered by your own toys. Hell, I'd start with you. I'd enjoy starting with you, you little punk."

"Yeah, like that won't arouse suspicions. All of us disappearing from our jobs and schools. Even you wouldn't be able to keep the authorities out if you tried that. There are too many important people here"

"Not if I do it right. I can fix it so that no one would know you had been through the Process. You'd appear to be your normal self, but underneath, you'd be mine."

"Do you even have what you'd need right now to convert us all?"

"I'll break down the existing cyborgs for parts."

He was right, but there was still one card left to play. The only card, really, from the beginning. The rest had just been a feint, a test to see if Luke could get away with more for less.

Time to use it.

"But Mike, listen, if you did all that, who would be left to genuinely lick your ass?l

Silence.

That was the kill shot. Mike would be rich under any circumstances, and he'd still have Sue to slam into, but in no other scenario would he have the respect of the kind of men that made up the Patriarchs. Big Law. High Finance. The respective Alphas of their industrial kingdoms.

With the setup he had here in Stepford, Mike had the admiration of all of them, the same exact type of guy that used to push him into the lockers back in High School.

Yes, we'd still worship him if we were Stepfordized, probably even more so, but it wouldn't be real. That was the thing Mike desired most. The Revenge of the Nerd. The meek inheriting the Earth.

Checkmate.

But one last appeal to sweeten the deal. An appeal to ego and masculinity.

"C'mon, man, are you going to let a piece of cooze ruin all this?"

...

...

"Alright, bring her over. She was fucking pissing me off anyhow"

As another pleasant Stepford Sunday drew to a close, Luke climbed through the trap door into his house. His Father was back from his most recent business trip, and that meant he would be spending the next few weeks here. Karen, Ashley, and Jenna were there to meet him, in matching light blue dresses, high heels, and satin gloves.

"Dinner's almost ready, sugar!" cooed Karen, her boobs inflated to the size of beach balls. Her hair was long and blonde now, to match her children's, and her unsightly tattoos were gone.

Mike had ceded them to Luke, on condition that none of the other Patriarchs find out. As far they knew, the three bimbos sat around in standby mode all day, a waste yes, but a necessary one to keep the peace.

Eventually, after enough time had passed and things had presumably cooled down, Luke would be gifted the house and its residents, and, by then, hopefully, no one would care that a Patriarch technically had absorbed an old family.

Admittedly, it might be a while before they could make it all formal.

Whatever, they could work out the details later. Right now, there was supper to enjoy: meatloaf and pineapple upside-down cake.

Then, there would be sex. Luke would shove it right up Karen's asshole, and have Jenna lick her clit while Ashely sucked on her tits.

You know, the usual Sunday night activities

Finally, he would read last week's new comic release, while laying on the same bed he had just dominated them all on. He had heard from some of his friends that it was a good one. It was issue #342 of The Amazing Spider-Man, and word on the street was it saw Peter Parker taming the villainess Silver Sable, and subsequently adding her to his stable of women (which already included Mary Jane, Gwen Stacy, and the Black Cat). It was the thrilling conclusion of a multi-year story arc, and, if what he heard was correct, what an ending it was! Rival to lover!

It all sounded kind of familiar, didn't it? Perhaps some of the other Patriarchs knew more than they were letting on? If they did, he didn't sense any hostility from them at the clubhouse each Friday. If anything, they came off as even friendlier than usual, like they saw him as more of an equal than before.

Maybe he could be the Man of the House sooner than he thought?

First, he shrank. Not dramatically so – this wasn’t like Honey I Shrunk the Kids or Alice in Wonderland or anything. He was very far from Dwarf height, either. At most, he lost a foot and change in stature, enough so that his eye line was now below the picture mounted on the wall in front of him, whereas just moments before he could look directly at it without having to crane his neck back.

The picture, for what it’s worth, was a rather bland painting of the blurry, indistinct form of a woman, wearing a red dress and spread out on an elegant couch. It was the kind of benign, unimpressive image you’d see hanging in any given hotel room, of any level of quality, from a seedy motel to a 5-star resort. One probably would barely notice that it was there at all, honestly. You’d practically see right through it, as if it hadn’t even been there.

This is all to say, that this common piece of mass-produced art probably had nothing at all to do with the very uncommon thing that was happening to the person who was, currently and ironically, using it as a way to measure the progress of this very same not-at-all-common event.

Probably.

Okay, it had nothing to do with it at all. I was trying to build up some sort of mystery as to what was going on here, but doing so has already tired me out only four paragraphs in. So, I
confess: “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me,” to quote that absolutely irritating song. I, your humble narrator, am responsible for this transformation of the transgender variety, but I’ll get more into the “hows” and “whys” later. Maybe, if I feel like it, and you haven’t put me off too much before then.

This, fear not, had only been the first stage. If one were looking at this man, one would
immediately notice how out of proportion his arms and hands were. If one had any knowledge of the animal kingdom, one might compare him to a Gibbon, with how absurdly long they appeared compared to his now-shortened torso and legs. His feet, too, were comically out of place - they now stuck out to the point where he looked like as if he were wearing fleshy clown shoes.

“Naturally”, these particular parts of his body were the next to change: his arms shortened, and his feet retracted, with the digits of each quickly following suit. They also feminized, though that is a much more subtle and thus harder-to-describe change than the others that preceded it, I confess. However, since I understand that these particular parts of the body are very important for some of you, especially the feet, I can reassure you: all now looked sufficiently small and dainty.

With that, he now resembled nothing more than a shorter man. That’s far from insignificant, of course, especially since we now live in a country where an increasing amount of men are undergoing (painful) surgery to make themselves even just a few inches taller. This particular man, too, had always taken pride in his height as well, not having much else to be proud of, so this sudden loss of it was causing him a significant amount of distress as well.

Not that what would follow would be any better for him.

Before we go any further, I think it is important that I tell you that this man deserves what is happening to him. In fact, were I to detail his many, many heinous crimes to you, you might even think that he has earned an even worse fate than the one that I am presently crafting for him.

I just think you should know that.

And I’m not a sadist, either. Search your memory: did I say anything about these changes being painful? No, right? And, believe me, I could have made them absolutely agonizing. I could have made him feel every inch of shrinking bone and muscle. He would have surely passed out from the pain by now, if I had wanted him to.

But I didn’t, because, again, I’m not a sadist, brute, or barbarian. That was not the way I was bred or raised. But still, having said all that, if I had made his transformation an excruciating one, he would have earned it. Because of the aforementioned heinous deeds, that I dare not utter aloud, such is their heinousness.

Let’s get back into it now, shall we?

The next thing to change was his hair. Not only did it lengthen, now reaching down to
the small of his back, but it shifted colors too, turning from a light brown to a stark blonde. Just as the leaves change color in the transition from Summer to Autumn –

Alright, I need to stop this. I don’t know what I was thinking. I sound like an asshole. Actually, I sound like that old British guy who narrates seemingly every nature documentary ever made. Come to think of it, he always came off as an asshole to me too, so that tracks.

Jesus, why was I talking like that? Did I think that was how I was supposed to narrate something like this? I have read my fair share of transformation “literature,” and I suppose that is the sort of formal tone that those stories usually take, but, fuck, I sounded so pretentious, I was even making myself cringe!

“His bosom grew prodigiously…” – yeesh! Who did I think I was?

So, from here on in, I’m going to talk all-regular-like, capiche? Well, maybe that’s going too far, but I’ll try to find some kind of middle ground. I’m not a mob boss, after all. Or Italian.

Can we get back to the fucking story, please?

His face began to contort. His chin sharpened, while his nose narrowed and became rounder at the tip. Each hair follicle on his face receded back into its individual pore, and both his cheeks and lips plumped-up, as if both were experiencing a mild allergic reaction to bee stings (though his lips swelled far more than his cheeks, it should be noted).

Understandably, he rushed to the dirty, smudged, floor-length mirror on the other side of the room to inspect the new features he could sense had taken shape. After the initial shock wore off, an ever more disturbing thought crossed his mind: it might sound fucked-up, but he couldn’t help thinking that the unfamiliar female face that stared back at him from the scuffed reflective surface was cute, maybe even downright hot!

However, he didn’t actually want to be a girl. Yea, this isn’t one of those situations,
if you catch my drift. If that’s a deal-breaker for you, the “Back” button should be available somewhere on your screen, probably in the top-left corner. I suggest you use it.

So, panic finally really setting in, he rushed to the decrepit wooden door, only to find it locked. That should have been impossible. The door didn’t lock from the outside! So he punched it, kicked it, shoved his (petite) body at it, and all to no avail!

Yes, that was all my doing as well. How? Magic, of course, same as what’s causing our friend here to undergo his changes. Oh, please – don’t roll your fucking eyes at me. What else could be at work here, if not magic? Hormones? Not that fast, and they don’t cause you to get shorter, either. Surgery? I don’t see a doctor around, do you? Does this even look like a hospital? It’s certainly not an American one, at least.

That leaves, what, Nanomachines? Last I checked, it was 2024, and that kind of technology just doesn’t exist yet. Or, if it does, I definitely don’t have access to it. I don’t work at Area 51, though that be dope as shit.

So, yeah, it’s magic. Which, I know, begs the question: how did I get so goddamn magical in the first place?

Well, that’s a tale unto itself. You see, it all started about 20 years ago. There I was, a pitiful orphan boy living in the cupboard under my comically abusive Aunt and Uncle’s stairs, and not a single CPS agent in sight. School didn’t offer any respite either, as I was mercilessly bullied there for my glasses and the lightning-shaped scar on my forehead. My luck all changed, however, when, one day, an owl came to the living room window, bearing a letter that informed me that I was to attend a boarding school with a really, really dumb name…

Okay, that was Harry Potter. What, did you think I was going to spill the beans to you? No way, Jose. You see, I intend to use my abilities to live my life to the absolute fullest. So, I don’t need any other magical motherfuckers around, potentially messing things up for me. All I want in my future are duplexes, not duels, you get what I’m saying here?

But if you like the Harry Potter explanation, by all means: take it. Or, if you prefer, you can instead believe that I was a gifted and renowned surgeon who was trained by magical monks in the Himalayas after breaking my hands in a car accident. Or maybe I was just simply born with my abilities, the latest in a long genetic line of wizards and witches. Or maybe I made a deal with the Devil at a backcountry crossroads on a moonlit night.

Pick whatever backstory you like. You could even mix them up, remix and recombine them into whatever answer you find most satisfying or titillating. Or can just make up your own: it’s all the same to me.

Because I ain’t telling. Or maybe I just did, and you’ll never know the difference. Ha!

What’s next for our boy? We got all of the boring transformations out of the way, so now it’s time for the main event. The meat and potatoes. The big enchilada. That’s right: primary and secondary sexual characteristics. You know what I’m saying: tits, ass, and pussy!

You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if you skipped to this part. I know this is what a lot of you really came here to see. But, I admit, I would be mildly offended. You missed out on a lot of really great prose, probably my finest ever.

So, first things first: hips. Now, maybe that’s not a big deal to you, but it is to me. A woman with narrow hips isn’t even really a woman as far as I’m concerned. And there they are, getting wider and wider and wider. Damn, my babies will be doing cartwheels out of her!

“Her.” Alight, I think it’s time that we can officially do the ol’ pronoun switcheroo. At this point, she now fully looks almost fully female, if you ignore the dick and balls. Actually, I think some of you would probably prefer if I kept them, wouldn’t you? I think I’ve seen some “art” to that effect, at least. “Fupa” or “futna” or some shit like that, I think it was called.

But I’m not about that life. So let’s go ahead and do ‘em now. Testicles retract into the body and become the fertile ovaries, while, at the same time, the penis retracts until it becomes a tiny, cute clitoris.

Hold on, give me a second, because now I have to make a decision: innie or outie vagina? I’ve never really had a preference, and can even see the benefits of both. I would be lying if I said a nice, meaty vagina didn’t appeal to me. But, in this case, I think I’ll give her smaller labia. There’s always the next one, after all. And the one after that.

Tits. Titties. Boobs. Breasts. Hangers. Honkers. Hooters. Melons. Knockers. Jugs. Breateses. Bazongas. You know ‘em, you love’em, and now, look at them grow! Bigger, Bigger, Bigger….Big! Let’s stop there. We wouldn’t want them to hang too low now, would we? She’s not a grandma (yet). But those have got to be double Fs, if my, ahem, trained eyes don’t deceive me.

But, just to be real with you for a moment, even such glorious boobs as these aren’t the most important physical feature for me on a member of the fairer sex. I like big tits just as much as the next red-blooded American male, don’t get me wrong, but, at the end of the day, in my opinion, it’s all about that ass, baby, the bigger the better! The best has indeed been saved for last!

20 inches…25 inches...30 inches…35 inches…40 inches…45 inches…46….47…48…49…50! 50 inches of ass! Excuse me for a second while I spout off every crass cliché I can think of: You could bounce a quarter off that fucking thing! You could serve dinner off of that ass It’s so big it needs its own zip
code!

If were a character in a cartoon, my eyes would have turned into hearts and be popping out of their sockets right now, my tongue would have rolled out of my mouth and now be literally dragging on the floor, my actual heart would be almost beating out of my chest, and steam would be coming out of my ears. I’d also probably be saying something like: “Awooga!” or “Humana humana humana!!!”

I hope you’re not one of those guys that’s not “into” ass. I know there’s a good chance you are. I’ve seen the studies and charts. I know there are a lot of “men” out there that would prefer we went back to the 80’s when the ideal female form was a stick-thin broad with a pair of bolt-ons and a small butt. Well, if that is indeed the case for you…too bad, so sad. My girl here is going to have an absolute dump truck, and you can fuck off back to the cry closet if you don’t like it.

But now we’re right back to that issue of proportionality again, aren’t we? She’s got huge tits, a giant ass, big hips…and a completely flat stomach and chicken legs. It just don’t look right! She looks like she had a BBL, actually, and I hate those fucking things!

So let’s pack on the goddamn pounds. There we go, let’s watch as that belly and those legs get bigger and bigger, thicker and thicker…. Now let’s add some weight to the face, give her a nice double chin…sausage fingers…cankles…biceps the size of Christmas hams….

Alright, I think we’re good now. Okay, okay, I admit, I was always planning on making her nice and fat. That was in no way spontaneous decision. What can I say, that’s how I like my women: BBW (“The kind you kind to suck you dry then eat some lunch with you”, as a wise man once said.).

That reminds me: I once went to this boring-ass museum, and in the “Ancient Mesopomania” wing or whatever they had this little statue some hick farmer found buried under a pile of cow shit. The face was kind of weird looking, but she had huge tits, big hips, and a thick gut. I actually remember wondering if the caveman who carved it wasn’t one of my ancestors, because that ancient fetish depicted my perfect woman!

Oh, she’s fucking crying now? Well, I did say that he didn’t want to be a girl. But, listen, don’t go feeling sorry for him - I mean her - okay? Like I said before, he’s lucky this is the worst he’s getting!

Listen, I can sense this is starting to kill the vibe, so I’ll tell you what he did: he tripped me! He fucking tripped me! Way back in middle school, this asshole, who I had never said a goddamn word to, put out his fucking foot and tripped me right there in the hallway when I was walking to my next class (probably Math or some horrible shit). Unprompted! Unprovoked! Undeserved!

Luckily, I didn’t fall down, but I did trip, and could do nothing afterwards but give him an impotent, albeit dirty, look. I still remember that shit-eating grin he gave me back, too. I can
remember it like it was fucking yesterday.

I should have lunged at him. I should have socked him right in his smug, ugly fucking face. But I didn’t, obviously, and have seethed over it for two decades now. In my defense, I went to one of those “zero-tolerance” schools where you could get expelled for going “pew pew pew” with your fingers, so it wasn’t entirely an irrational decision on my part to not stand up for myself.

Maybe you think that’s just cope. Maybe you think that’s pathetic, and maybe you’re right. But I’m the one with the supernatural abilities, so fuck you, and fuck him too.

But he did other shit, don’t get it twisted. This was one anti-social individual. Slapped his ex-wife around a few times, blew his kid’s college money on sports betting. This piece of shit even killed a poor stray dog with a few of his scumbag buddies not long after the tripping incident. So he got what wascoming to him, even if I’ll admit that what he did to me personally is why I’m doing this to him now.

So don’t feel bad for her, even though she may seem sympathetic now, blubbering naked on the floor. In fact, we can put an end to all of this crying right now, with one simple, easy fix! Wow!

Has a pit formed in your stomach? Is your jaw clenched? Is it because you know what I’m talking about … and you hate it more than anything?

Are mental changes really that bad? Can’t we all just get along?

I mean, let’s slow down for a second and really think about it. Let’s say I didn’t do anything to her mind. How do you think that would actually work?

We’ve already established that she doesn’t want to be female. So, logically, why wouldn’t she just kill herself, or even just run off and get corrective surgery to “fix” what I’ve done to her?

You might have pieced it together by now, but here’s my grand plan. Basically, I’m going to use my abilities for entirely selfish gain. End war? Solve hunger? Cure Cancer? Fuck that shit. If I do that, I’m responsible for all humanity after that point, the way I see it, and, frankly, that just sounds like way too much goddamn stress.

I am going to reshuffle reality like a deck of cards, and when they’re dealt out, I’m going to have a royal flush. Translation from the Poker metaphor: a ridiculously big mansion. Sports cars. Pools and hot tubs. Private chefs. A full staff waiting on me hand and foot. A king-sized bed. Exotic pets. A private movie theater. A bowling alley. Golden toilets.

And a harem of big fat bitches, of all races, all of whom will have once been my former
enemies, sleeping on said king-sized bed with me in the center, all us stinking of sex, every night.

So, tell me, how this is going to work without mental changes? Because, honestly, I’m really not seeing it. How can she ever be a good mother when she has all of these old memories of being a guy swirling around in her beautiful head? How can she ever be a good wife? For God’s sake, how can she ever throw it back?!?!?

I don’t even know why I have to defend myself to you. This is my show, and you’re just along for the ride. So you know what? Boom. It’s over. Identity Death is complete, just like that. See how she’s stopped crying, and is now just wondering how she ended up in such an awful place, naked? All of those nasty, old remembrances are gone for good, replaced by an all-new backstory: Helena is the only child of rich parents…we don’t need to go into all of this now. You get the point.

But this is no place for a high-class woman like my Helena, and naked to boot! She will have tight, stylish, expensive clothes that accent every prodigious curve. Jewelry, too: pearl earrings, a gold necklace, and the outrageously big engagement ring I used to propose to her just a few years ago (along with a nearly as decadent wedding ring).

Let’s fix up this room, too, while we’re at it. Soiled carpet becomes a polished wooden floor. The beaten-up coach turns into a leather loveseat, just dropped off that morning. Piles of discarded clothes, accumulated over years, will be pieces of art, and the scratched floor-length mirror is now an 8K television. And out goes the peeling wallpaper and faded posters for old Pinko meet-ups, and in comes freshly painted walls.

What’s left? Oh, right, that boring little painting. That can be a portrait of my new wife,
painted by a world-famous artist. Okay, I’m not sure what their name is, but I know I’ve seen their style…around. Maybe on T-shirts, or in a magazine? Well, whoever they are, I think I’ve done a pretty good job emulating their style, don’t you think? Who would have guessed how easy it is to paint well when you DON’T have to use a brush!

But this is a subtle, yet important, detail. In the new picture, Helena is lying back on an elegant fainting chair, and unlike in its previous iteration, she is completely naked. Let me spell it out for you: she doesn’t just accept being fat, she likes being fat. She embraces being fat.

Like me. Oh, did you assume I accidentally made myself fat just by eating too many cupcakes? No, I used my powers on myself to give me this big ol’ gut (along with some other modifications). I always thought being big was hot, but never wanted to deal with the, you know, health problems and shit that comes with it.

Well, with magic, you don’t have to worry about any of that bullshit. Helena and I’s arteries will never be clogged. We’ll never get winded going up the stairs. We won’t have BO. We don’t have to worry about dying prematurely.

Ozempic? Who needs it? My wives and I will be obese and healthy. You can get so much more out of life when you aren’t bound by those pesky laws of Physics.

It’s kind of cramped in here now, isn’t it? Especially for big ‘uns such as myself and Helena. Let’s expand those walls outwards. One room becomes a penthouse that takes up the entire top floor. On second thought, let’s change the whole building! Hanging chandeliers! Priceless works of art on every wall! Marble floors! Golden toilets!

This will be my “little” place in the city, when I want to take my old ladies out to a show or a fancy restaurant (before taking them back and having an big orgy with them, naturally).

But weren’t there other people in the building? Yet bet! But considering how much of a shithole this place was, I doubt any of them were exactly upstanding citizens. But I’m feeling generous, so I’ve made them into my new servants, and no, I won’t gender-bend any of them this time. I don’t want to overindulge and burn myself out on that little trick, as, like I said, I still have many more concubines to create.

But I have given them a full mind wipe, on top of correcting most of their physical imperfections. I don’t need ugly maids and butlers around killing the mood I’m trying to cultivate here. And, with the mental rewrites, I will be ensuring that none of my stuff gets stolen or any of my harem gets raped. Shit, I’ve probably helped to lower the crime rate for the entire city with this latest move!

My 6th grade bully. My roommate in my sophomore year of college, who cockblocked me on multiple occasions. My old boss, who gave me my walking papers when he knew the economy was in the tank. That fucker that rear-ended me that one time, and then had the nerve to yell and scream and blame me for the accident. Soon I will track them all down, and they will be my fat Black, Asian, and Arab wives, respectively.

Still with me? I guess we’re on the same wavelength, then. We’re vibeing, as the kids these days like to say. We get each other, to put it the way my grandparents might have.

I suppose, then, that there’d be no harm in getting you in all this, too, if that’s the
case. I don’t think I’d have to worry about you, even if you were as powerful as I am. Which, you’ve seen, is pretty fucking powerful.

Hell, we can be neighbors! With houses as big as ours we won’t be right on top of one another or anything, but we’ll be neighbors nevertheless! On Sundays, I’ll bring my wives over for dinner, and you can host for the Holidays! Our kids can be friends with each other. We can even swap transformation ideas!

“Hey, where did you buy your newest wife that big diamond ring?”

“Well, actually, I turned that horrible politician into it! Her body became the band, and her head became the stone! You should have heard the screams!”

Yes sir, I think there are good times in both our futures, my friend!

So you want powers? You want to run with the big dogs? Well, come closer, and I’ll tell you where to go and who to talk to to get the hook-up. Closer…closer…a little closer…. Nah, I’m just kidding. Still too risky: I don’t know you that well. What, you think just because we have similar tastes in women, and the process to make them, that that makes us friends or something? Bro, fuck outta here with that shit.

And besides, I don’t have the time for all that right now: I’ve got a hot date tonight, which is sure to be followed by hours and hours of hot, sweaty, fat sex. Now fuck off before I make I decide I need a nice big Latina wife to add to my collection!

Stacy had a problem, a BIG problem: her son. When she and her late husband, Chad (God rest his soul), found out that the baby rapidly growing in her ever-expanding belly was a boy, they had both been filled with such hope. What a handsome, strong man he would inevitably grow up to be, they thought! And virile too, though neither would dare say that part aloud (that would just be crude, of course).

But then Chad died in a car accident, and Stacy was forced to raise their child, named Ben, all on her own. She had tried her best, she knew, but something had, evidently, gone wrong - terribly, terribly wrong. Maybe it was always an impossible task – perhaps a single mother could never really hope to raise a son “right” without a man also being in the picture (she had refused to remarry after Chad’s death, despite her many suitors. There was no greater man than him - never would be - and she simply refused to settle for less). But this was all cold comfort now.

Presently, Ben was 25 and, sure, he had a job and his own apartment, but he was still, as far as Stacy was concerned, a loser: fat, greasy-haired, and with no girlfriend in sight (now or ever)! And he was a liberal too, if the stickers on his laptop were any indication. But he was the kind of guy Stacy personally wouldn’t touch with a ten-and-a-half-foot pole, so it’s not like she didn’t understand what women DIDN’T see in him.

“But he has a job! A well-paying one, in fact,” her air-headed girlfriends would protest, when she would habitually complain about her son during their girl’s night outs.

“A man’s job is supposed to support his wife and children! Not just allow him to buy even more Funko Pops and Poke-Man cards!” would be her eternal response, and they never had any counter to that, did they?

So, when a mysterious stranger, a gnarled old woman with a giant wart on her nose (complete with a lone, black hair growing out of it), pulled her aside while she was walking down the street one day, promising to help with her son’s “situation”, Stacy eagerly went with her, down a darkened alley and into a sketchy-looking store. “Fortune-Telling,” the flickering, neon-lit sign above the doorway read.

Yes, this was obviously a foolish thing for Stacy to do – maybe it was her sheer desperation that was to blame, or maybe the old woman’s magic was already being worked on her in some more subtle way. After all, why didn’t Stacy question how this stranger knew about her dissatisfaction with Ben in the first place? And why wasn’t she concerned with the fact that she had never noticed this shop before, even though she would have passed it countless times in the past?

Regarding her desperation – you must understand, Stacy and Chad came from a long, long line of successful WASPS. More importantly, they came from a long line of WASPS who reproduced. And with neither Stacy nor Chad having any siblings of their own, their whole line was in continuity jeopardy with Ben! So maybe magic wasn’t really to blame, and simple biology was the culprit all along!

“Through here,” the old woman said, and gestured to a door at the back of her store. Wordlessly, Stacy opened it, and was shocked to see Greg in the center of the bare room beyond it, bound to a chair and with a washcloth - a makeshift gag- stuffed into his mouth.
Now who’s this “Greg” fellow, you’re probably wondering? Well, Greg is none other than the piece of shit drunk driver that killed poor Chad all those years ago. Sure, the police didn’t have any evidence that Greg was drunk when the accident happened, but Stacy knew. She knew, alright, and had spent the last 20 years cursing Greg and the incompetent police that had allowed him to go free. Now here he was, finally at the mercy of Stacy (and her mysterious, new benefactor).

“This man – what would you have me do to him?” the old woman asked Stacy. Her accent was thick and decidedly not American.
“Is she Eastern European? Are Gypsies even from Eastern Europe?” wondered Stacy.

Not that it made a difference. And Stacy knew exactly what she wanted the old woman to do to Greg. She had fantasized about doing it to him on her own, many, many times before. Hell, she would have volunteered to take over and do the deed herself then and there, if she wasn’t so worried she’d somehow screw it up from a lack of experience.
“Kill him”, she replied, flatly.

“About what I expected. Good thing I came prepared,” said the old woman, as she took out a long knife and small vial from some unseen pocket in her dirty dress. Greg, seeing his captor’s weapon, and understanding its obvious implication, began screaming. Pleading too, probably, not that any of it was intelligible with that washcloth stuffed in his mouth.

Confidently (like she had done it many times before) the crone moved behind Greg, bent over – and slit his throat in one fluid motion. His eyes rolled back into his head as the blood began flowing profusely from the wound, and the gypsy collected as much into the vial as it would allow. The rest just spilled onto the floor, and Stacy had to shift her feet to avoid it getting on her expensive heels.

“I’ll clean later,” said the fortune teller nonchalantly, and Stacy couldn’t help but wonder if she would use a magical broom to do so.

It was kind of hard for her to think any further than that, though, as she now felt very similar to the way she had when Chad had given Stacey her first orgasm, one hot summer night when they were both still in High School: her heart was racing, her knees were shaking, and her skin felt like it was being massaged with faint electricity. Yea, she felt that good. And why shouldn’t she, after all of the pain this man had caused her? She cursed him one last final time, and prayed his torment would continue long after the last light faded from his eyes, which it very soon did.

“Come back in week,” said the hag, as she put the now-full vial back into the hidden compartment from whence it came. “And I’ll have what you need.” She then proceeded to explain to Stacy exactly what that was.

…

A week later, Stacy was at her son’s disgusting apartment. She had used the excuse that she wanted to cook for him as her reason for coming over, and so both were now standing in his filthy kitchen. Her original scheme was to slip the potion into his portion of the soup she was making, but you know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men…

You see, Ben had been droning on and on about some awful nerd shit (Marvel films? Star Wars?) when Stacy - not being able to listen to him for another single second – decided that she had finally had enough, and pulled the small vial out of her pants pocket. She turned on a dime, and tried to force its contents into Ben’s zit-ringed mouth.

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!! I WANT MY DAUGHTER ALREADY, YOU FAT FUCK!!!” she screamed.

The witch had explained it all back at her shop– all she had to do was give Ben the potion she would make with her husband’s murderer’s blood, and he would transform into a 100% biological woman almost immediately. Stacy was, at first, admittedly disappointed that he wouldn’t just become the Alpha stud she and Chad had always wanted him to be, but it’s not like she could go shopping around for other magical elixirs, could she?

And anyway, thinking over this prospect the past week, she had actually come to prefer this over her original desire. After all, hadn’t she secretly felt gender regret when she and Chad had learned that Ben was a boy? Hadn’t she always, deep down, wanted a daughter? Yes, the notion had grown inside of her each day since she had been pulled into that strange store, until it had become the seed of a kind of insanity.

An insanity that was now being expressed, very physically, by Stacy.

“Mom, what the hell are you doing!” cried Ben, before slamming his mouth shut.

He wasn’t making this easy for her. Thinking quickly, Stacy did the one thing she knew would get him to open his mouth – she kicked him straight in his balls. Sure enough, his gullet opened, and Stacy hurriedly poured the witch’s brew down his throat.
“He won’t be needing them again anyway,” she thought to herself. “Not that he was ever going to use them for their God-given purpose to begin with!”

Ben coughed and gagged, but the changes came quickly regardless. Before her eyes, Ben was transformed (very painfully, judging by his moans and screams) into a “slim-thick” young woman with supple breasts; a plump, rounded butt; a toned, flat stomach; and long, blond hair. Even his dark, stained, oversized clothes changed into a white tank top and denim short-shorts.

The last things to change were his eyes, and when they did, going from dark brown to a bright blue, something else changed, too.

This was the death of Ben’s identity, of course. Now he was Megan – always was and always would be, the only daughter to a single (but, thankfully, rich) mother, whose beloved father had died in a senseless car accident when she was still a baby.

Something inside Stacy changed too, as new memories of raising Megan flooded her mind: taking her to gymnastics; teaching her about the changes her body would be going through with puberty; watching her graduate High School, and then College. Her old memories of Ben weren’t rewritten, however, meaning she would be the only one left in this reality who would remember he ever even existed.

Did this bother Stacy? No, it did not. A week ago, after killing Greg and taking his blood, the old woman told her exactly what was going to happen, and every price she outlined was one she was willing and glad to pay to rectify this – her – mistake with Ben. Hell, the whole world would be better off with an attractive white girl like Megan than with just another male loser incel like Ben. Who needs more rapists, misogynists, and mass shooters, right? Stacy might have actually saved some lives by making Megan, even!

“Mom, are you okay?” asked Megan, causing Stacy to suddenly snap back to reality.

Mother and daughter were standing in the latter’s modest but nicely-decorated kitchen, Stacy having visited so she could check in on her precious daughter and cook her favorite dinner for her. They had been pleasantly chatting away when Stacy had suddenly gone quiet.
“Oh, I’m fine, honey,” replied Stacy, a little wistfully.

“Anyway, let me tell you more about this guy I went out on a date with last week,” continued Megan, picking up the conversation that she and her mother had been having before her mother had started acting so…weird.

As Stacy listened to her daughter go on and on about her recent date, a deep sense of calmness washed over her. This was something she hadn’t felt in…well, not since Chad had passed away on that fateful night, so long ago. Finally - finally - things were right.

And she had so much to look forward to, as she had no doubt that Megan would quickly find a husband, perhaps even this very same guy she was talking about right now. An engagement, a wedding, grandchildren…If there were any doubts left in Stacy, even somewhere deep in her unconscious mind, they were definitely gone now.

She had a beautiful, healthy, and happy daughter, and a Mother couldn’t ask for anything more.

…

Epilogue

Stacy did try to return to the gypsy’s shop, to not only thank her for her help with Megan, but also to see if she could enlist her aid in a few…other matters. She was disappointed then, but somehow not surprised, to see that the store was gone. No, not abandoned, not closed: it was as if it had never been there at all. Instead of the windows, door, and neon sign that had been there before, all Stacy found was a smooth, unmolested brick wall.

Stacy simply shrugged and continued on with her day. She imagined the old witch had moved on to help other poor, struggling women like Stacy, and found herself comforted by the thought.

Sam and Rick awkwardly got into the ride vehicle, a giant sturgeon with skin marred by peeling paint and bleach stains. The inside of it had been scooped out as if by some hungry giant, the organs and fat replaced by two benches dotted with droplets of water from previous loops.

Their father had wanted to sit with them, but his sons were simply too tall for them all to sit in the same row, and so they had taken the back, while their father sat in front of them. Which suited them just fine: they would rather be almost literally anywhere else on Earth than here, some rinky-dink fairytale amusement park that was a far, far cry from Disneyland, Universal, or even (and this was saying a lot) Six Flags Great Adventure.

That didn’t mean the place wasn’t crowded – on the contrary, it was packed, each faux-cobblestone street filled with strollers and the stressed-out, frayed parents that pushed them over their bumpy surface. And the attractions: there was not a rollercoaster in sight, the park having eschewed them in favor of “dark rides”, all of which were based on old European folk stories.

So why were they here? Their parents had just gotten divorced, and this place apparently offered some sentimental value to their father, as it had been a favorite vacation spot for him since his own childhood. But Sam and Rick were not that selfless: the only way they had agreed to go was through bribery, their father offering to pay for new phones for them both if they humored him and came.

They couldn’t help but wonder if the promise of new phones had really been worth it, as they suffered endlessly through water-based rides that took them through animatronic retellings of famous stories. But these were not the versions you would know – this shit was old-school.

In their take on the Little Mermaid, for example, Ursula didn’t take Ariel’s voice away with some colorful effects and a sweeping orchestral score. Here, the wicked sea-witch ripped her tongue out with her bare hands, and laughed mechanically while the little rubber organ limped flaccidly within the grasp of her automaton hand.

The ride didn’t even bother recompensating with a happy ending, either. Instead, the bastard of a prince chose a human woman, while Ariel and her sisters ascended to “Heaven” (represented by some sloppy-drawn white clouds and chubby cherubs) on taut silver wires.

Cinderella was even worse, especially when it came to bodily mutilation. Here, the evil stepsisters resorted to extreme measures to try to get their feet into the fateful glass slipper, one by cutting off her toe, the other by cutting off her heel. And their reward for their attempted subterfuge? Getting their eyes plucked out by red-eyed ravens. This particular image still haunted Sam, how the animatronics of the stepsisters moved back and forth fruitlessly on their axles as the furry avian puppets, suspended from metal clouds, assaulted their too-square heads.

Worst of all, though was Sleeping Beauty. In this twisted adaption, the prince didn’t just kiss Aurora – he straight-up raped her (“tastefully” implied with a creative use of projection and shadows)! Which didn’t even serve to wake her up, by the way! That duty, instead, was inadvertently left to the (wonky-looking, paper-mache) child she had born while still asleep. Mistaking her finger for her breast, it sucked the cursed thimble right out of the afflicted finger by total accident!

Why would anyone bring their children here? If they weren’t traumatized by the attractions, the sub-par food, oppressive heat, and rude staff would surely make this a trip to (hopefully) forget!

And, more pressing to the brothers, why did their father love it so much? Neither of them thought much of him, frankly, both having had more pussy by age 18 than their Dad had had in his 45 years, but this certainly pointed to some…darker aspect of his nature that they had never even suspected existed before.

Maybe that’s why their Mother had called it quits with him, not wanting to indulge in whatever weird kinky shit he wanted to get up to in their bedroom.

Evidently, then, their mother’s new boyfriend, the father of one of their best friends, was not as adventurous, shall we say. Or maybe she craved a man with a bit more muscle on him. Or any muscle at all, really.

The separation between father and son(s) was not just in temperament or mentality. It was, above all else, physical. The boys were tall and strong, each breaking the six-foot mark in early puberty, while their Dad was short and scrawny. It was almost comical, the obvious discrepancy between their parents – their mother was so tall and elegant, like an ancient marble statue you find in a museum. It was enough to even make Sam and Rick wonder how their Dad had ever bagged her. Guess being High School Sweethearts goes a long way, huh?

The boys stared daggers at their father’s narrow, bony back, wishing he could experience their suffering, as he, oblivious and with a child-like look of wonder on his face, took in the story that was unfolding around them, despite the fact that he had obviously been on this ride (many, many times) before.

Sam and Rick realized something simultaneously, however: with their father seated ahead of them, they were free to use their own (old and lame) phones without his knowing. So they did, furiously picking up their respective text and DM conversations where they had left them off. Sam re-entered his friends’ Group Chat, while Rick went back to trying to court the “town skank.” Maybe a few more pictures of his cock would seal the deal. It had worked for his friends…

But then something curious happened. Sam and Rick found themselves, without verbal agreement, both putting their phones away only after a minute or two, opting instead to actually pay attention to the trip through myth and legend they had, against their will, embarked on.

The tail of the sturgeon-ferry paddled rhythmically as it ferried its occupants into the first scene, which seemed to take place in a quaint, provincial village, sometime in what their history teacher would have called “the Dim Ages”.

Sitting on the rim of a fiberglass fountain in the town square, a young man held his face in his hands, obviously crashing out

The male voiceover, tinny over unseen speakers hidden somewhere overhead, explained:
Once upon a time, a poor young lad found himself in a bit of a tricky predicament! He was officially a man, and therefore ready for marriage, but all of the women in his town were….homely!!!

With that, three more animatronics rose from a trapdoor in the scenery, and, as promised, they were indeed ugly (Sam and Rick hadn’t known what “homely” had meant, but they were just smart enough to use the context clues).

Each sported an exaggerated facial feature: One had an absurdly large nose, complete with brown wart with a single hair growing from it, and another had the protruding brow ridge of a Cro-Magnon. The one in between them was the most hideous of all, though – her ears were so large, they could probably make the hoe fly!

Sam and Rick could empathize, they wouldn’t want to take any of them to bed either, and neither were known for their discernment, especially when alcohol was involved.

Though neither would dare express it openly, they were both reminded of a particular incident, when, after a night of drinking and partying, they had woken to find themselves in the same bed – with a big fat redhead, naked, in between them! Yes, she was sort of pretty, but far too big for either of them to feel comfortable being seen with in public.

So they dashed out the door of her apartment before she could wake up, then diligently ignored all of her messages in the proceeding days (they couldn’t remember her name, but the amnesia was not mutual, apparently). They had dodged a number of bullets in the process: not only was the bitch fat, but, judging by the posters on the walls and the stacks of books she had lying around, she had been one of those Wiccan freaks too!

Along with the fact they had apparently engaged in a threesome with the porker, the entire incident was best left long forgotten.

They didn’t feel bad that they had cheated on their respective girlfriends, either, as it was far from the first (or last) time for both of them.

The recall distracted them: they didn’t notice that their knees no longer pressed against the front of the vehicle.

The boat made a gentle turn, and they were now inside of a small, humble cabin. The bachelor in question was having a conversation with his mother in the center of the room, a large woman with wide hips and a full face.

“There’s no question about it”, his mother explained. “You must pay a visit to the Witch of the Woods! My son deserves a comely wife, and only the Witch can provide!”

Sam and Rick didn’t notice that their hair had gotten longer, now reaching to both of their shoulders.

It had also started to redden; the new color shining in the reflection of the Day-Glo colors of the ride.

The ferry opened a set of black doors with its pointed snout, revealing an ominous forest. The boy looked around him anxiously, surrounded on all sides by bare trees with angry, human faces staring out of their trunks. Ahead, they could see the Witch of the Wood’s home, a great mushroom with a human-sized door embedded in it.

Hey, at least the fucker was a go-getter. They could respect that. That was basically what they had planned post-college: to get out there and hustle, son, fucking bitches and getting that money. They weren’t going to just content themselves with a mediocre-ass job like their nerdy faggot Dad had, leaving him with nothing but an ex-wife and two sons who didn’t respect him.
The brother’s clothes got tighter, as their previously flat stomachs, the product of countless hours at the gym, expanded outward. Their jeans too felt more constrictive, on account of their thickening thighs, ass, and hips.

Rick scratched his right nipple through his tank top. It itched as it pressed against the fabric.

They were now inside the Witch’s home.

The Witch, bent over a black cauldron, her colossal ass facing the kid, explained to him:

With tail of mermaid, horn of minotaur, and fang of dragon, I can make you a potion that will provide you with the bride you seek. But first, you must do something for me…

Freckles began to manifest on Sam’s and Rick’s faces, along with forehead wrinkles and crow’s feet.

The little ship made another gentle turn, and now they were in the Witch’s bedroom. Standing in the doorway, the Witch greedily gestured to the bed. The implication was clear: the young man was going to have to earn the potion by having sex with the Witch.

To Sam and Rick, this was hardly a price to be paid at all. The Witch was nice and fat, as a proper woman should be, so what was there to complain about? The only thing they worried about was whether the poor inexperienced clod could make her cum. The old gal deserved that, at least….

Now the lad was leaving the Witch’s mushroom home, glowing green potion in hand and whistling contently, the previously angry trees now all beaming smiles. The Witch even stood in the doorway, waving him a tearful goodbye. Guess he did give her an orgasm after all, they thought, as their jeans morphed into shorts, and the meaty thighs they encased lightened in color.
Another turn, and the boy was now back in his village, busily pouring the potion down the throat of another, smaller young man. The latter had apparently put up a fight, as the hero was angrily grabbing his balls through his pants to get him to open his stubborn mouth.
He found the most pathetic, woeful lad in his village, and forced the Witch’s brew down his throat.

Sam and Rick’s t-shirts had morphed into tank tops, their massive breasts resting atop their substantial bellies (they didn’t believe in constraining their blessed femininity with paltry things like bras or underwear).

But they approved of the young stud’s target: the weak should be dominated by the strong. And, by the looks of him, he wasn’t much of a “man” to begin with. Hel, he was doing him a favor: maybe now the pathetic cur might actually pass on his genetic line!

A new tableau: the protagonist stood with his arms crossed, a devious, frenzied expression on his face, watched as the retching model of his victim fell through a trapdoor in the stage. A beat, and a new figure took his place: a beautiful young woman, the resemblance to her prior form obvious.

Sam and Rick simultaneously rubbed their fat, pale, exposed arms. It was so cold in here it was giving them goosebumps, even if the story was “heating them up” in a different way!

They came now to the final scene of the attraction: the young man and young woman, in white robes and adorned with crowns made from twigs and flowers, stood before a rabbit-headed humanoid reading from a book that appeared to have been bound with bloodied human flesh, if the stretched, pained face on its cover was any indication.

The whole town was assembled around them in attendance, with the groom’s parents front and center, crying tears of joy.

Everyone in the village celebrated! Well, almost everyone…the bride’s parents did not approve, and thus did not attend. They weren’t missed, and ended up being “tied up” anyway…

Sam and Rick moved their long red hair out of their chubby faces, and noticed another little detail. In the upper right-hand corner of the wall, the Witch had been painted riding her broom, and behind her gargantuan hindquarters, they could just make out the forms of a man and woman tied together.

Served them right: who were they to get in the way of true love!?!*

What a joyous ending! But the ride was over, and Caitlin and Kylee awkwardly helped lift each other up from the small boat. While sitting it had been a comfort for their bodies to be so close together: prodigious hip against prodigious hip, love handles pressed together like lovers under the black Steppe sky. But it did make extracting themselves difficult.

Even their husband, Keane, had a hard time getting up, although, in his case, it was his big, tough gut that was the culprit, having been painfully pressed up against the front of the vehicle for the entire duration of the ride.

Exiting, Keane took his rightful place between the two sisters, putting a strong, callused hand around each of their thick waists. They exchanged a knowing glance over Keane’s broad chest – they loved when their husband made claim to them in public, breaking any number of their social taboos in the process.

Case in point, a skinny, young, swarthy bitch, of indeterminate race and wearing acid-washed jeans and a beige jacket that would have more been appropriate if it were 35 degrees cooler, noticed them, and quickly looked away to hide her near-involuntary look of disgust.

If only she knew the half of it, Kylee thought, not bothering to even try to stifle her laugh.

Kylee and her sister had laid with each other every night since they had met Keane at that kitschy medieval-themed hotel in Vegas 8 years (and 80 pounds) ago, despite never having had a single sexual thought about each other their entire lives prior.

But then Keane had walked up to them while they had been sunbathing by the pool, both of them eager to forget their ex-husbands, and, just a few hours later, there they were, back at his hotel room, Kylee with her tongue deep in Caitlin’s soaked vagina, as she stroked and played with her long, red hair. How sweet her juices had tasted that first time, no less intoxicating than mead!

It was Keane (also recovering from a messy divorce) who declared them to be his new wives as they lay naked in bed with him, still recovering from the marathon sex session they had just finished, a cheesy old painting of a wizard hanging above the headboard.

But that wasn’t the last of his commands that night, going on to demand that they stop dieting and dying their hair to hide the grey. They were done living within society’s limits, he said: they would, in their lifestyle, harken back to a more visceral, more primal age, when men were conquerors and women were conquered. When being fat was a sign of health and wealth, and the physical “ravages” of time evidence of one’s wisdom, and thus something to display proudly, instead of trying to desperately cover up with the simulacrum of youth.

In their late 30’s, they would be starting over, new lives in a new world.

And it was funny – the girls complied completely, never once even considering disobeying, even as they both ballooned past 250 pounds each, not to mention having to cut all ties with their former lives to hide the nature of their new relationship.

It hadn’t exactly been a clean break, though. Their parents had, somehow, managed to track them down, and had begged them to leave this sinful, “disordered” arrangement.

Not only had the sisters flatly refused, they then went on to explain that, not only were they bound, body and soul, to Keane, not only would they kill for him, but they would die for him, too, without any hesitation. And if he met his end before theirs, no doubt cut down in epic battle against his foes, they would gladly throw themselves on the funeral pyre, not able to stand even the thought of going on living without him.

Because it was like a fairy tale, you know? When Prince Charming comes along and scoops you up, only a fool would do anything to drive him away. Do you think Snow White ever denied the Huntsman anal, or that Rapunzel complained when her knight pulled roughly on her long hair while in the throes of ecstasy?

Hell no: when a gods-damned king enters your life, you bend to his will, not the other way around. And Keane was a King, at least as far as the sisters were concerned. In an earlier, more sane time, he would be the King of all, particularly the feckless “people” that surrounded them now, as they made their way to the next attraction, an iteration of Little Red Riding Hood. What else could you call a man who had the confidence to take identical twin redheads as his wives? As his Queens!

The only thing that the sisters wanted for now in the whole world were children. Thank the Gods they had never procreated with their previous husbands: they shuddered to think what kind of weak offspring those “men” would have sired!

But were they just too bountiful now to get pregnant? Keane had emptied his testicles in both of them countless times, never once deigning to use “protection”, and the girls had been off the Pill since that day at the hotel. So why had the tests invariably come back negative each time? They would like to have blamed it on the false idol of their so-called “science”, but the reality of their situation was impossible to ignore.

They had come to this park for a simple diversion to pass the day, Keane refusing to attend any of the more “commercial” parks in the vicinity (they smacked of “capitalism and desert religions,” he had said with utter disdain). This place was much more their style.

But they had an ulterior motive as well: to find the sacrifice they had been looking for, the offering they would make to their ancient fertility Gods to bless them with the miracle of life. Was the mutt bitch that had given them the dirty the one they had been looking for? If so, she hoped the Gods were willing to forego their usual preference for virgins!

*They would later debate, over a messy lunch of turkey legs, what their ultimate fates had been. Caitlin thought the Witch probably turned them into her new animal familiars (there hadn’t been any, she had noticed, back in her cute mushroom house), while Kylee argued that she most likely killed and ate them, as Witches were want to do. Keane, seeking to mediate, only said that he was sure that, whatever happened to them, it was assuredly an appropriate punishment for their crimes, seeing as the Witch had been such a just and righteous figure earlier in the fable.

Keane excused himself from their meal to use the bathroom, giving each of his lovers a deep, sensual kiss as a parting gift. He dared anyone to notice and confront him about it - he’d be using their skull as a serving cup at dinner that night.

Entering the man’s bathroom, he made sure to lock the door behind them. He needed the whole facility for what he was about to do.

Standing before the mirrors, he removed his clothes, and admired his new form. The giant arms, the thick, sturdy legs, the gargantuan belly tough with muscle and fat - it was perfect. And his genitals - he estimated his (still circumcised, regrettably) cock was at least 8 inches long (his phone had disappeared, and had no way to measure it), and his testicles had swollen to the size of tennis balls.

Strangest of all though, were the two sets of memories he now held in his mind. One, now blissfully irrelevant, was sure to wither and die in time. But there was one instance he would like to hold on to, when he had traveled to that foreign place in the midst of his divorce, seeking sanctuary and healing.

To the end, he had taken an hour’s drive to a famous Hot Spring, and hurriedly found a desolate spot within it where he could have some time to reflect on what had seemingly gone so wrong in his life.

Fate had other plans, however, and he was soon joined by a very fat, very tall Nordic man, who had emerged out of the mist like a ghost ship drifting the Northern Sea.

At first, Hank was annoyed that someone would intrude on his scheduled isolation like this. Maybe it was the relaxing atmosphere, or maybe it was the Stranger’s comforting manner, but Hank found himself easing up.

So they got to talking, just pleasantries at first at first, but soon Hank found himself telling the Stranger his entire life story, almost despite himself.

The Stanger listened patiently, and only offered a single question when Hank had finally ceased in his confession, small body trembling and almost on the verge of tears:

“Things didn’t come out like you had wanted it, didn’t it?” he asked.

It was true - he had grown up reading stories of barbarians and heroes, only to reach adulthood and find a “real” world that only valued weakness and femininity. That, in turn, had killed something inside of him, and he had allowed his own being to atrophy in bitter disappointment.

Even his wife - his ex-wife - was a perfect product of this upside-down universe he had found himself in: tall where she should have been short, small-breasted when they should have sagged under their colossal weight, and narrow-hipped when they should have been wide enough for her to comfortably rest the bounty of the day’s hunt on both of them.

She thought she had settled? No, he was the one he had settled. What he needed - what he deserved - was a fat, beautiful wife who worshipped the very ground he walked on. Not the hard-faced, skinny, “career” woman he had been cursed with.

He had expected the Man to admonish him, to chide him for being delusional and selfless. To lecture him that he should be grateful for what he had, even if what he had was an ex-wife who despised him, a dead-end job he couldn’t stand, and two ungrateful twin sons who didn’t respect him in the least.

Instead, the Man closed his eyes, nodded, and said, without a hint of sarcasm:

“Yes, it is hard for men such as you, born into an age that does not - could not – ever understand him.”

Hank could have cried. If they weren’t completely naked, he would have run up and hugged the Man.

“But there is a way to right these grave, grave wrongs,” he continued.

“In your homeland, there are places where the Old Gods - the True Gods - still hold power. One of these places looks like an amusement park. Go there, and find the diversion that tells a tale of rebirth and transformation. After you journey through it, you too will be changed - into the man you want to be, that you were always meant to be. And, if you happen to bring a woman with you - say, a common whore, which would be easiest - she too will be molded into the mate you desire.”

“What about my bank accounts, my job, my ID…”

The Man cut him off with a wave of a chubby hand.

“Trifles. Let it trouble you not - you and your companion will emerge into a new realm, where these mere details will have already been dealt with thoroughly.”

Hank should have dismissed the Man entirely. He was obviously insane. He should have left the Hot Springs – left this entire backward country entirely, and traveled back to the world he knew. The world of grocery shopping, of Netflix binge-watching, of Tinder and Bumble. But some part of him - the little Midwestern boy that had laid on his stomach those lazy weekend afternoons and devoured stories of pagan princesses and fierce warriors, believed him.

So much so, he was already plotting who he could take with him. The obvious choice was his ex, and it would certainly serve the cunt right.

But then he had another, better idea.

“What if I bring a guy with me?” he asked.

The Man looked at crossways and replied: “Why, do you want to be with a man?”

“No, I’m straight.”

The Man laughed heartily, his great stomach moving up and down with the rhythm of it.

“I knew I sensed some kinship with ye! Yes, if you take a man with you, that man will become the maiden of your dreams.”

“And if I take two men?”

“Then you will leave that place with two wives, and you will be amply equipped to handle both of them.”

“It doesn’t matter who they are? Like, if I’m related to them?”

The Man laughed again, even deeper this time, his ample balls raising out of the water. “Oh, I see what you’re getting at - no it won’t be a problem at all. In fact, if I know the Gods - and I do - I think they will be particularly pleased with your choice.”

Their conversation over, the Man turned and began walking back into the mist.

Hand called after him: “Hey, what’s the name of this place?”

“Just use your Internet-thing: when you find it, you’ll know! You have already been imbibed! Oh, and make sure to come visit someday! We’ll have dinner with my wife, my daughter, and her new husband. Mermaid, dragon, giant – we will serve you all such exotic meats like you will have never tasted!”

The fog swallowed up the man, leaving Hank alone and with a raging erection that he doubted would dissipate soon.

Back in the men’s room, Hank too had a hard-on, this time, though, he dared not spill his seed in vain. According to the tenets of his new (better, actually real) religion, that would be a grave affront indeed. No, it was reserved for those two beautiful women waiting for him outside.

They were no longer related to him, he knew, but they were still related to each other. He was married to twin sisters! His chest swelled with pride at the thought. Lesser men (and they were now all lesser) would kill for such a life.

And the fact that they used to be Sam and Rick….For a time, he had told himself that it was only practical, for how else could he convince two other men to come with him to this place? But, eventually, he admitted it to himself: he wanted it to be them. He knew what they said about him to their friends and girlfriends. The names they called him: faggot, nerd, pussy. All of their text messages had gone to his laptop, the result of some programming quirk that neither twin was smart enough to guess was being used to spy on them (they were much more intelligent now, he was pleased to see).

They hadn’t respected him then, but they sure as Hel respected him now.
As he put on his clothes again, he thought about the sacrificial ritual they had apparently planned for that night. The girls thought they were going to ensnare some hapless bimbo in the park, but he had had a better idea.

They had emerged, seemingly, into a new reality, but he suspected, in actuality, that not much had really changed at all. He had wondered before if he was going to be transported into a fantasy world of elves and dwarves, witches and wizards, but it appeared that things had mostly stayed the same: there was still just one sun and moon each in the sky, and people still drove cars instead of riding horses everywhere. It was possible, he thought, that Hank, Sam, and Rick might still exist somewhere out there, going about their tired, little lives, trapped in a planet-sized prison with invisible bars that glittered when they caught the light in the right way.

He hoped it was true, because it meant his ex-wife* was still out there, that she had still broken the heart of an innocent man.

It also meant he knew where they could find her, and the cocksucker she had run off with.

The banging had reached a cacophony. Keane walked over, unlocked the door, and thrust it open. The men on the other side, desperate to relieve themselves, had been readying themselves for a fight – of the oral variety only – with their offender, but when they finally see Keane, they demure, directing their gaze downwards, and making for him a hole. They knew, instinctively, to defer to their better.

Keane made his way through the crowd, and was pleased to see that none dared to make eye contact with him.

*His old ex-wife. He understood now that he had a second ex-wife, and that his sister-wives had their own ex-husbands as well, but they could deal with them later.

 

He had been waiting for the CEO for hours. Leaning back in the darkened passenger seat of the stolen car, the Kid surveyed the sidewalk for the short, husky man whose physical features he had forced himself to memorize with the always dependable aid of Google Images.

The CEO should be passing this way soon. The jerk-off conference he was scheduled to speak out started in an hour.

It was 5:30 AM. Still dark, but you could see the morning light creeping into the sky. He was sure it would prove to be a beautiful day.

He gripped the gun, hidden in the front pocket of the old, grey hoodie. He had made the simple pistol himself with the 3D printer his Mom had gotten him last Christmas, using blueprints he found on a sketchy Russian website.

But it would work. He had tested it over 20 times, deep in the woods upstate, where he was confident not to run into any interlopers.

It had to work.

Christ, he was tired. That hostel was hot, and the stench had been nearly unbearable. Decades of bodily excretions of all kinds had seeped into the walls themselves, by the smell of it. Along with the excitement and anxiety he felt, it made sleep nearly impossible. But what was he going to do, rent an Air B&B? And paying for a hotel in cash would have raised too many suspicions, especially in this state.

Plus, with a hostel came the possibility of getting laid. That didn’t actually end up happening, no, but the possibility had definitely been there.

He thought he had had a chance with the cute girl with dyed pink hair and the nose ring that worked behind the front desk, and had even lowered his face mask at her playful urging to increase his chances. Suffice it to say, though, the effort hadn’t paid off. He could have really used it, too. It would have gone a long way toward claiming his nerves.

But he didn’t really like to think about it. Not just because of the disappointment, but also due to the horrible feeling he couldn’t shake that that instance of indiscretion would ultimately prove to be his downfall. The girl, after all, could prove to be a class traitor. Maybe she had aspirations of one day joining the PMC elite. Maybe she’d cooperate with the police to make it happen.

And he was well aware of the state-of-the-art facial recognition technology the State could leverage, especially in the service of capturing a dissident like him. But all he could do now was pray that the beaten-up camera he spotted behind the front desk that morning after he checked out, high up on the wall, was as nonfunctioning as it looked.

God, he wished he had moved to this city when he had the chance. It was vibrant, diverse, cultured, and, best of all, walkable. So unlike the Midwest, middle-class, conservative shithole he had been subjected to by unfortunate dent of his birth. But e he knew, even in some alternate reality where he wasn’t about to do what he was about to - what he couldn’t even stop himself from doing at this point - his time here would limited. Because before too long the water levels would rise and drown this place too, and all because of men like him.

Men like him. Men that not only were complicit in the suffering of millions, but reveled in it. Reveled in it to such an extent that they wanted to expand it, until it covered every corner of the Earth, every continent and sea. Nothing that walked or crawled would be spared. Men like him wouldn’t be satisfied until the oceans were boiling and empty, the jungles and forests burned to cinder, and the sky left a permanent inferno. No, even that wouldn’t be enough - they wanted to go even further, extend their tyranny beyond the sky and into the heavens above. The Moon would become a landfill, Mars an unending suburban sprawl, and Venus a planet-sized toilet.

Were it not for men like him, mankind could have stayed innocent. We could have continued to coexist peacefully with nature and each other, and never have known the horrors of industrialization and its Prime Mover, Capitalism. In this other, better world, racism, sexism, classism, heteronormativity - these terms would be as of an alien tongue, because the conditions they describe would never have existed at all.

His fantasies of this parallel reality had even bled into his dreams. That every night he had traveled to that hollowed plane in his restless slumber. But it didn’t have to stay that way. He could remake this world into a utopia.

There was no afterlife, no Heaven or Hell, no Nirvana or Reincarnation. So didn’t he - didn’t everybody, really - have an actual moral obligation to make this life as good as it could be?

This wouldn’t be a lone act of violence. This would be a revolution. With the help of the Internet, word of his micro slave revolt will reach far and wide. From device to device, forum to forum, and subreddit to subreddit it will spread, until everyone - everyone who matters - will know what he did. Know and be inspired by it.

Healthcare. Insurance. Media. Energy. Pharmaceuticals. Food. Tech. Titans of Industry will be struck down by ordinary folk just like him, and their bodies stacked to the sky like a modern Tower of Babel, which, like its ancient counterpart, will again serve to unite humanity, albeit now across class lines, instead of archaic tribal ones

And he dared God to strike this one down. Guess he was lucky he didn't exist. A fairy tale made up by the elites to keep the serfs and peasants from rising up and doing what was necessary to improve their material conditions.

His heart skipped a beat. His breath became shallow behind the cheap black face mask. The CEO had just passed his car. He recognized his short blonde hair and stocky build, and the douchey navy vest he wore eliminated any further doubt. It was him.

His stomach lurched as he opened the door and got out onto the sidewalk. His hands were shaking. His knees felt weak. Fortunately, getting too close wasn’t necessary - fat fuck. Probably too much McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A. Definitely Chick-fil-a. At least it made aiming for center mass easier. The burgers and chicken sandwiches would have their ultimate revenge.

He raised the gun, pulled the trigger, and…nothing. He squeezed it again. Still nothing. Fuck fuck fuck! He knew this would happen! He fucking knew this would happen!

“It’s not the gun,” the CEO said. His voice was higher pitched than he expected. “You did a pretty good job building it, actually. That’s a ghost gun, right? I listened to a podcast about them once.”

The CEO turned around. The Kid pulled the trigger again. Boom. The CEO staggered back, his face contorted in agony, his hands reaching impotently up to where the engraved bullet had entered his broad chest….

Except that’s not what happened. Nothing happened. Again. How could this have happened? Back upstate, he had shot homemade billionaire effigy after homemade billionaire effigy with it without a hitch. Bezos, Musk, Gates - the targets he had made in their likenesses were nearly unrecognizable after he had was trough with is target practice.

And yet the real oligarch before him remained woefully in-penetrated.

The CEO was now walking towards the Kid. Calmly, even leisurely, despite the silver gun still pointed at him.

Whatever, it was time for the Kid to run. He could figure out what went wrong later. He had a plan. He just had to make it to the park on foot, ditch the gun somewhere, and then…

But he couldn’t move. He was completely paralyzed below the waist, and yet, somehow, remained standing on the cracked, cold sidewalk.

What the fuck? What the actual fuck?

“Let’s see that face,” said the CEO in an oddly cheery tone, considering he was talking to someone who just tried to kill him.

The mask dropped. On its own. Impossible. Just as impossible as the Kid’s sudden and immediate paralysis.

“Hmmm, Italian, right? Interesting…”

What the fuck did that mean? Why had his mask slipped, why couldn’t he move, why wouldn’t the gun fire…

“Before we begin, I just want to know: why?” asked the CEO

The Kid didn’t have to tell this asshole shit. The handwritten manifesto in his pocket, scrawled in and ripped out of a notebook the night before, was all the testament he needed. That everyone would need. It was certainly long enough.

The CEO put his hands on his hips

“Not talking, eh? Let’s try that again: why did you try to kill me?”

This time there was something different in the CEO’s voice. It sounded deeper, more assertive. More forceful.

The Kid’s mouth opened, and the words just spilled out. Uncontrollably. He ranted and raved. About healthcare. About the economy. About the government. About the hot oceans and ash forests and burning skies and desecrated celestial bodies.

And the whole time, the CEO just listened. He even nodded a few times, to the Kid’s surprise. It even gave him some hope, now that his plan was scuttled. Maybe the CEO had been so taken by the Kid’s argument he would pledge to reform. Might he even invite the Kid to speak with him at the conference, wherein they would announce that the company he ran would be made into a cop-op, with 50% of all profits pledged to various NGOs and Non-Profits?

When the Kid was finished, or when the CEO decided he was finished, he finally spoke again.

“Well, that was all very compelling, and well-articulated. You might even be right. But I don’t know anything about any of that. So let’s get back to the, you know, attempted murder. Did you know he has a wife and two young children who are dependent on him? Oh, speaking of, there he goes now.”

They both turned and looked as a perfect doppelgänger of the CEO passed by both of them, seemingly completely unaware of the bizarre scene that was transpiring mere feet away from him.

And it wasn’t just him – the Kid now noticed that everyone who walked by them on the sidewalk now did so without nary a glance at either the gun-toting would-be killer or his would-be victim. Even in a city like this, that should at least warrant a side-ways glance.

“Yeah, none of them can see or hear us. Better for them, really. They deserve their ignorance.”

The Not-CEO finally turned back to look at the Kid.

“Who are you?” the Kid asked, not realizing this would be the last full sentence he would ever utter. If he had, maybe he would have said something more trenchant.

“All you need to know,” the Not-CEO replied, “is that I’m someone who likes happy endings. For example…”

The Not-CEO pulled out a sleek smartphone – a model that the Kid knew wasn’t even on the market yet - from the pocket of his dress pants and turned the screen so that the Kid could see it.

It was a photo from his Mom’s Facebook page. It showed him, his father, and his mother all seated at the old, faux-wood dinner table in his childhood home. The caption read: “Another Sunday night dinner with the family!!!!! Applebee's takeout FTW!!!” They were all smiling. That was the Kid’s first clue.

The timestamp showed that it had been posted only 10 hours ago. When the Kid had been at the hostel, still waiting and hoping for that knock that never came.

The Not-CEO put the phone back in his pocket.

“Remember that blow-up you had with your family this Thanksgiving? Well, nobody else does, not anymore. Along with a few other notable, disappointing incidents.”

“Please -“ the Kid started to say before his mouth slammed shut, again against his will.

“No more out of you. You made your choice when you got out of the car a few minutes ago. Did you even realize it was owned by an immigrant who uses it full-time for his ride-sharing business?”

The not-CEO sighed and shrugged his shoulders.

“Now there’s nothing to do but face the consequences, I’m afraid.”

For the first time in his life, the Kid knew and truly felt terror. His previous concerns about the future of the planet and society and outer space, he now realized, didn’t even begin to compare.

“But what can I say: I like happy endings. Including for myself.”

The makeshift gun melted in the Kid’s hand. It became an indistinct, silver mass of liquid metal, before beginning to creep over his fingers and wrist. Within seconds, the liquid had reformed again: on his wrist, it became an expensive-looking bracelet. On his finger, it became engagement and wedding rings. Both were far too wide in circumference for the digit they now rested upon

But before the Kid could try to take them off, his finger - all of his fingers - began to rapidly expand. They each got thicker and thicker until his ring finger in particular had swollen to the point where he couldn’t get the rings off even if he had wanted to. And he did want to.

The Not-CEO laughed. Except he didn’t look like the CEO anymore. Now wearing a black t-shirt and plain jeans, his body and face had changed drastically. He was even fatter than before, but more muscular, the sleeves of his tight shirt barely containing his biceps. And…handsome. Really handsome…

What the fuck??? The Kid wasn’t gay (not that there was anything wrong with that. In fact, he thought homosexuals were in many ways superior to heterosexuals.) But still, he wasn’t, and his “experiments” in college had more than proven that.

So then why couldn’t he stop staring at the Not-CEO’s huge bulge? Even his big belly was starting to turn him on…

“Now let’s get the rest of your body to match those nice, meaty hands.”

His stomach churned and growled, and he could feel it start to expand outward, effortlessly annihilating his washboard abs. His legs too began to grow, until they began to stretch his jeans to their very limit.

Conversely, he lost stature, two feet at least, and now found himself looking up at the Not-CEO, whereas before he was looking down at him. That previous status quo had given the Kid a sense of smug satisfaction, so one can image how he now felt.

His hips widened, painfully. His ass rounded and expanded outward, considerably. And his chiseled pecks became two giant, saggy breasts. The kind he would have himself ogled if he saw them on another woman on the street.

Another woman. It was obvious to the Kid now that was what he was becoming. In his less dire circumstances, he could try to disconnect the correlation between these physical features and sex. In less dire circumstances.

As if cued by the thought, his balls retracted into his body, along with his penis, which ejaculated their entire contents as it shrank. His testicles became his ovaries. His penis became his clit.

The next changes happened above his now much denser neck. His facial features shifted until he had the face of a beautiful, albeit older, Italian-American woman, and his hair grew out to match it, staying just as curly as it was before, but now with grey streaks that betrayed her maturity.

Finally, his clothes morphed into something more appropriate for his new sex - his jeans became tight black leather, and the hoodie and the ratty wife-beater under it became a cropped leather jacket and v-neck shirt with an all-over leopard pattern, respectively. Her thick belly, adorned with stretch marks, pushed against the thin fabric of the shirt

“Hey, babe, what’s wrong”, asked Mario to his wife. “You space out on me or somethin’?”

Angelina shook her head as if to clear it of some mental fog.

“I was just thinkin’ about somethin’,” she replied in a thick Brooklyn accent. “Nothin’ important. I think I’m just tired.”

They had booked a hotel room in the city for a quick romantic getaway. After a show and dinner, they had planned to get some sleep… and instead fucked until 1:00 AM. Angelina was getting horny all over again remembering how Mario's manly hands had gripped her prodigious hips, his big hairy hairy belly pressed up against her ass…

She gave her husband a playful smack on his bulging beer gut, harder to the touch than it looked.

“Fuckin’ asshole,” she said with a grin that widened her full face even more.

Mario pulled her close and gave her a long, passionate kiss on her plump, full lips, while his strong, wizened hands crept down and grabbed a handful of each of his wife’s considerable ass cheeks through her pants.

“There, that shut ya up,” he said, and flashed her a mischievous grin of his own.

Angelina gently grabbed his sizable balls through his jeans, no doubt once again filled with the seed, still potent despite his age, that had he already used to impregnate her multiple times.

“Let’s get back to civilization already,” she said. “I’m so sick of the fuckin’ freaks and weirdos in this shithole.”

And with that, the portly couple walked off into the dark of the early morning hours, bound for their SUV and the large house it would ferry them to.

Some, with an unsubtle sneer, might call the car a “gas-guzzler”, and the house a “McMansion”. The same people would probably call them “dumb, crass, and uneducated.”

They knew all that, and loved both, and each other, anyway.

Maybe even more so.

….

He would play this role for a while. It might be based on stereotypes and tropes half-remembered from various tired television shows, but he had still been looking forward to inhabiting this persona for a long time now. It certainly promised to be much more visceral than his last few.

Eventually, though, and like always, he would get bored, make his current form a distinct yet still sentient individual (he liked Happy Endings, after all), and move on to something, somewhere, and someone else.

There were still so many lives he still wanted to live. All would be built on the bones of the guilty. In this way, balance would be maintained.

Such was the transient existence of the Adjustor.

Note: this a written continuation of a comic I commissioned.

Page 1: https://www.deviantart.com/thet0wer/art/thet0wer-Comic-01-92...
Page 2: https://www.deviantart.com/thet0wer/art/thet0wer-Comic-02-92...
Page 3: https://www.deviantart.com/thet0wer/art/thet0wer-Comic-03-2-...

---

His Mother had explained everything: the two men he had seen entering the temple, through the magical Fertility Idol, had both been turned into 100% biological women. Moreover, their minds had been changed as well. Neither had any memory of ever being men, and, as far as they knew, they were just two helpless girls who had washed up on this strange Island, the only survivors of their doomed voyage (had his Mother had something to do with their ship sinking? Ka-Tar wondered, but honestly didn’t really care).

Their names (chosen by his Mother, and infused into their identities via their transformation) were Sheera and Mariko. Even better, his Mother told him that they were already madly in love with him, a claim that was confirmed when they immediately began kissing and touching him after their initial introduction. They were also in love with each other, which obviously pleased Ka-Tar greatly.

Unable to resist, they had their first threesome right there in the temple, the responsible Idol still laying just a few feet away where it had been unceremoniously dropped (Ka-Tar made sure to put it back on its perch before they all left. Who knows, maybe he’d find that even two wives weren’t enough for him).

Ka-Tar liked to see that both females bled during this initial ménage, and liked their explanations for their virginities even more: both had refused to have sex with anything less than a Real Man, and Ka-Tar was the first one either of them had ever met (Note: this was not Ka-Tar’s first sexual experience, but that’s a story for another time).

He then took them to their new home, the expansive, multi-room tree house he had built for himself many years before. Then they had sex again. And again. And Again. And again. All in all, their marathon lasted a week, with Ka-Tar only going out to hunt for food and to gather a specific fruit that would prevent either of the women from getting pregnant. There was probably not a single position three lovers could engage in that they didn’t try at least once during this time.

Finally, they felt satisfied, if only temporally, and the next day, Ka-Tar took his lovers out for a tour to see their new home and everything it had to offer. At first, it was just a lot of jungle, with few signs of fauna besides the distant calls of unseen animals, and period shuffling in the underbrush. That is until Ka-Tar stopped, laughed, and pointed to a nearby clearing. What they saw there caused Sheera and Mariko both to loudly gasp.

A large ape, having killed an equally-sized therapod dinosaur, had cut off its head, removed all of its teeth, and was now using it as a makeshift fleshlight. It furiously shoved its humongous penis in and out of the mouth of its decapitated foe, until finally, a long stream of semen shot through the bloody hole at the back of its reptilian head. The ape roared in ecstasy as the thick, white semen flew high into the air, before crashing down on the Earth below, forming a small pond in the process.

Almost immediately, small creatures of all sorts – bugs, mammals, tiny dinosaurs- began moving towards the newly formed jizz-lake, eager to consume the nutrients they would surely find contained within it.

Now satisfied, the large ape disinterestedly threw his organic sex toy to the ground, and retreated back into the surrounding jungle, no doubt eager to go back to his mountain lair and take a long nap.

“That’s Grog,” explained Ka-Tar. “And don’t worry, he would never hurt us. I think he sees a little of himself in us!”

This was far from the only bizarre sight the trio would take in that day. Ka-Tar showed them the vast swamps where the long-necked Honkers grazed, their curious trunks allowing them to still draw breath even when they dared venture into the deeper and murkier ends of the morass, in search of underwater vegetation.

He showed them the sprawling plains where the Hooters roamed in their great herds, ever watchful for the vicious Knife-Claws, which they knew were always on the hunt for easy prey: the young, the old, and the infirm. They even witnessed a pack take down one such vulnerable Hooter, an old female that had strayed too far from its family. The pod of six Knife-Claws swarmed the poor beast, jumping atop it and driving their claws deep into its vulnerable flanks. The Hooter bleated pitifully, but, apparently, none of the other herbivores were willing to risk coming to its aid. It finally fell, and the Knife-Claws didn’t even bother waiting for it to die before they started feasting.

Next, he showed them the dark, yawning entrance to one of the Island’s vast caves, where the multi-legged Spinners brought their prey after having caught them in their giant, inescapable webs. Chillingly, he explained, they weren’t even the worst of what the interconnected subterranean system of the Island had to offer (if his Mother was to be believed). He refused to elaborate though, despite their insistences, claiming that they’d be better off not knowing. They believed him.

But what he showed them last, just as the sun was finally beginning to set, shocked Sheera and Mariko the most. They had come near to the top of a large hill, and were now looking at a sizable village down in the basin below.

“There are other people here?” said Mariko. “I thought we were the only ones!”

Her husband shook his head. “No, that’s the Amazon’s village.”

“Amazons?” replied Sheera. The word meant nothing to her.

“They’re a tribe of seven-foot-tall women,” explained Ka-Tar. “They are proud, vicious warriors, but beautiful all the same.”

“But if they’re all women, how does the tribe survive?” asked Mariko.

“You mean, how they make babies?” asked Ka-Tar. Mariko nodded. “Well,” he continued, awkwardly, “that’s because half of them are … equipped like men.”

“Like,” said Sheera, and she pointed to her husband’s own large penis, outlined under his loincloth.

He nodded. “My Mother would tell me the story of how they came to be when I was a boy, before my bedtime. It was one of my favorites.”

He continued: “There was a war in Heaven, God against God. On one side was Zeus, God of Thunder. On the other was Athena, his daughter, Goddess of Wisdom and Warfare. The rest of the Olympians were evenly divided among the two sides, and, equally matched, they became locked in a stalemate that lasted for thousands of years. Eventually, so much time had passed that no one could remember why the fighting had started in the first place!”

“Athena, however, always one to think ahead, decided to create an insurance policy for herself, should she and her allies eventually be defeated. She came here and, using powers unknown to any other god, was able to create two copies of her herself. They were identical except when it came to their genitals – one had male organs, and the other, female.”

“They bred, their children bred, and their children’s-children bred. They were all immortal, just as Athena was, at first. But eventually, after generations of inbreeding, the familial line eventually lost its divinity. Now they were vulnerable to disease and aging, just like us. Still strong as Hell, though. I’ve even seen one tackle a Hooter to the ground single-handily!”

“But realizing that they would need “new blood: to save themselves, they began going on raiding parties. They built boats, and would pillage any coastal town they could find out there.” Ka-Tar nodded toward the horizon. “They’d kill the men and the boys straight out – they had no use for them. The women they’d bring back here, to be used as breeding sows. They’d use them until they were too old to have children, and then they’d be disposed of as well.”

“What happened to the original Amazons?” asked Mariko. “The ones who were still immortal, like Athena?”

“They’re all gone now,” answered Ka-Tar. “Totally wiped out. The original tribe, just like the Gods, began to fight amongst themselves, mainly over who would get the most prized slaves. Eventually, there was only a handful left, the tribe that lives in the village down there.” He again pointed at the settlement below.

“Your mother told you all of this?” asked Sheera.

Ka-Tar nodded again. “Yep, she even tried to reach out to the Amazons after they were established, but they rejected her. It turns out Athena was the only God they’d worship. And as for their creator, after she made her copies, she left to rejoin the war, and never returned to the Island.”

Ka-Tar looked at his wives very seriously now and his tone of voice became sterner, in a way they’d never heard before. “But what I said about the slaves – that’s why they’re so dangerous. When it was just me here with Mom, I was of no use to them. We’d even team up from time to time, to take down greater threats. But you two would be great prizes for them. That’s why this will be the last time you ever come this close to their village. Now come.”

Ka-Tar began climbing the mountain to its peak, and Sheera and Mariko followed dutifully. At the summit, they found a Leather-Wing’s nest, filled with 3 giant eggs. Ka-Tar pointed at the biggest.

“Dinner!” he exclaimed.
…

Later, after a dinner of Leather-Wing egg back home (which turned out to be fertilized and housing an embryo, increasing its nutritiousness), they again engaged in another marathon sex session. After all participants were thoroughly spent, they together fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, one wife to either of Ka-Tar’s sides.

At the same time, down below on the dark forest floor, a set of jealous female eyes gazed up at the tree house. But then, spooked after hearing a mysterious sound in the underbrush, the Amazon ran off into the jungle faster than any human being ever possibly could.
Ironically, if she had stayed, she would have seen that it was nothing to be worried about – it was only a small, feathered carnosaur catching its dinner, an even smaller rodent-like mammal.

….

“Why doesn’t his Mom just send a Knife-Claw to kill this cunt???” you ask? My son is a big boy, a very big boy, and can protect himself and his women all on his own. He doesn’t need me stepping in all the time. Hell, he’d be upset if I did! And, despite them turning me down, I actually like the Amazons. They remind me of myself.”

It was 3:00 AM, and the Thief…opened the large, ornate door. That was it. He couldn’t believe it. If his trusted Agent of so many years hadn’t been the one to tell him, he wouldn’t have. They had met earlier that day, in the busy food court of the local mall, the smell of bad Chinese food heavy in the air, stale, tinny pop music playing from some hidden speaker above their heads.

“Some old rich bitch with more money than sense,” his Agent had told him, in his own customary, trademark way. “No security system, no dogs, no camera, no nothin’. And she’s down in Costa Rica for her annual vacation, at some swanky all-inclusive spa with a bunch of other bougie cocksuckers.”

“It sounds like a trap,” he had replied, deciding not to take offense at the “bougie cocksucker” line. He had been around the bend one too many times to just waltz right into an obvious FBI or Interpol honeypot, especially when he knew both organizations were actively pursuing him. Plus, personally, He had known too many “colleagues” who had gotten careless and done just that very same thing, overlooking obvious, blaring signs that they were being set up, until it was far too late for them.

But his Agent swore, over and over again, and on everything he knew and loved that the Client (what they always called the one who had hired them for any given heist) was on the up and up.

“Then tell me who they are,” he challenged, struggling to keep his voice loud enough to be heard by his Agent, and, at the same time, not overhead by the unwanted and uninvited.

But he knew he wouldn’t, because, in order for the Client to trust the Agent, their anonymity had to be protected, always. And so, the Thief, as frustrating as it could sometimes be, just had to trust that his Agent wasn’t sending him into the proverbial “Lion’s Den.” Ah, such a complicated web international, high stakes, crime could manage to weave!

But his Agent had never led him wrong before, had always stuck by his side through thick and thin and thicker and thinner. Through countless betrayals, double-crosses, triple-crosses, manhunts, and bounties alike, the Agent had never abandoned the Thief, even when it had been in his very best interest to do so. That counted for something, especially in this world, where, as the saying goes: if you want a friend, get a dog!”

So he agreed to take the job, prompting the Agent to give him all of the usual details: the who, the what, the where, and the when – all orally, of course, always wanting to avoid a paper trail. But the bottom line was this: this unguarded mansion and estate, all owned by the wealthy heiress of a shipping empire with no children of her own, housed close to 5 million dollars in jewelry, and all he had to do was walk in there and take it.

If the Thief had to guess, based on his experience, the Client was some jilted associate of the “Rich Bitch”, an ex-husband or an old friend she had had a falling out with, probably over some kind of stupid social faux pas that would only make sense to others in their obscene wealth bracket. But he knew that, in the end, trying to figure out the true identity of the Client was just a big waste of precious time. At the end of the day, once the job was done and the loot was secured, they, regardless of whoever they were, would get their cut, the Agent would get his 20%, and the Thief would get the rest. Everybody happy, win-win-fucking-win.

But there was one other thing that had stood out to the Thief about his debrief, he remembered as he walked into the foyer of the manor. Even under the stench of sub-par Orange Chicken and Beef Chow Mein, he had smelled something else, something that was lingering on the Agent like a spider’s web he had unintentionally walked through while out for a pleasant afternoon stroll.

Whatever it was - wherever he had picked it up - at first it had almost repulsed him, to the point where he wondered if the Agent hadn’t actually showered for a few days. But as their conversation wore on, the scent began to grow on him, and by the time they were parting ways, the Thief hurrying off to start getting everything ready for tonight, he had almost asked his Agent where he had picked up his new cologne or deodorant. But that was sort of a personal question for two people who didn’t even know each other’s real names, and he had let it go.

Before him now, in front of a winding white staircase, lit from above by the moonlight coming in through the glass ceiling, was a large statue of the god Dionysus. A lesser educated person than the Thief might have mistaken him for Santa Claus, on account of his long beard, but the Thief, like all children of the gentry, had been well-versed by his expensive schooling in all things Greek myth.

That had never been his thing, however. Education as a whole, really, had never excited or satisfied him remotely in any way. While his foreign professors had droned on and on about the Iliad or the Odyssey, he had instead planned out in his head how he was going to sneak into the girls’ dorms and knick their Birkins, or how he was going to swipe the Principal’s brand new Swiss watch.

But enough had still made it through to him that he could still recognize the God of Wine and Fertility when he saw him. He didn’t like this particular depiction at all, though. As he walked by it to the rooms beyond, he couldn’t help feeling like it was hungrily leering at him, his stone eyes following the Thief as he passed.

The Agent had told him that the loot he sought was just kind of “scattered around the place,” as he put it. The Rich Bitch’s carelessness regarding her valuables meant she didn’t even bother putting them in a safe (not that that had ever managed to stop before). Not having to worry about running into staff or security, then, he took out his flashlight from his black backpack, turned it on, and entered the first room he saw, figuring it was just as good a place to start as anywhere.

A moment of panic. In the double-sized bed in the corner of the room, a woman was sleeping, possibly the Rich Bitch herself. Clearly, the intel was bad, and somebody had fucked up, royally, perhaps even the Agent himself. Every instinct was telling him to bail out immediately. Fuck it: he didn’t need the money anyway. This was all just a bit of fun, at the end of the day, something to help pass the time. He didn’t need the money, at all.

He turned off the flashlight, and prayed the woman wouldn’t stir. But then, even through the darkness, he spotted it. On her bedside table was a small golden ring.

His body and his mind alike screamed at him to turn just around and leave, and tomorrow, seriously think about severing his ties with the Agent. But still, almost as if against his will, he began to walk toward the nightstand, gently so as to not wake the female form beside it. It was like he had teleported: never taking his eyes off the ring, he found himself suddenly right there in front of it. Transfixed, he picked it up and inspected it. It was beautiful, the most beautiful piece of jewelry he had ever seen in a life full of beautiful people and beautiful things.

Everything around him fell away – the woman who wasn’t supposed to be there, the creepy mansion, the effigy of the God of Madness it housed, even his Agent and the mysterious Client that he was acting as a go-between for. It was just him and the bright, brilliant yellow band.

Put it on. The thought startled him, seemed to have come from somewhere outside the confines of his mind. But it made so much sense, didn’t it? Sure, he could – would normally – place the item in his simple, nondescript backpack and move on. But what if he took it off for some reason and left it lying around somewhere on accident? Or, more plausibly, since he now realized that he was in more danger of being caught than he previously thought, what if he had to make a quick escape, and the backpack got caught on something in the attempt, and thereby was tragically left behind? That would make this whole thing pointless, wouldn’t it?

No, no, best to put it on. And he did, slipping it onto the ring finger of his left hand. It fit perfectly. He held up his hand, admiring how the circlet looked on his long, slender fingers, noting also at the same time how it complimented the lush pink nail polish he had carefully applied to each of his lengthy fingernails just that morning…

Wait – “long, slender?” He had always had disproportionately large sausage-like fingers, remembered being teased for it by his cruel older sisters countless times as a child. And nail polish? That was the sort of thing he and the lads would have done a lot more than tease for if any of the boys back at school had been caught sporting it. This wasn’t right, something was very, very wrong here…

But that’s when he noticed the smell. No, smell wasn’t the right word – it was a fucking musk. Breathing it in, his previous concerns were washed away, and in its place his mind, was flooded with images of pristine meadows, the ruins of an ancient temple on a hill in the distance.

He shook his head to banish the vision. This was no time to be mucking about - he still had a job to do. He slowly backed away from the table, through the door, and gently closed it. This was all much harder to do than something so simple should have been, because, the entire time, he was fighting the overwhelming urge to jump into bed with the slumbering woman, who, upon closer inspection, was in fact far too young to be the owner of the mansion.

Then it was on to the next room, the discovery of the ring having entirely erased the anxiety of continuing with the operation.

Again, a girl, likely in her 20s, slept soundly in her spacious bed, while, on the table next to her, lay another piece of regalia. This time, it was a silver bracelet, no less breathtaking than the ring before it. Once again, upon picking it up, he had the strong, strange notion that he should wear it, just for safekeeping. So he did.

He had no trouble at all getting his hand through it and leaving it to rest upon his dainty wrist (Dainty? He had spent countless hours in his private gym ensuring they were anything but dainty). But, as soon as he had, he couldn’t take his eyes off of it. It reminded him of a similar bracelet he had seen one of his aunts wearing when he was little, and he still remembered how much he had desperately wanted it. At the time, he would have traded anything for it, all of his pretty pink dresses and pretty pink dolls. He probably still would, he had to admit, though now his barter would be sports cars and expensive pieces of art by famous painters instead.

Like the first chamber, the wearing of the jewelry triggered his abrupt noticing of the musk that filled it. But this one was different. When he breathed it in, he saw vineyards and olive trees in his mind’s eye. Together with the first vision, it was obvious what he was imagining was Greece, but why? He had only gone a handful of times, mostly for work, and it had really left no impression on him at all. No, scratch that, he held a decidedly negative impression of the country. He had found only dirty people in dirty cities, a nation that was nothing but a fading shadow of its former self, the vaunted progenitor of all of Western civilization. Was it just because of the statue that had greeted him in the foyer? Was it acting as some sort of mental priming mechanism, acting on a level below the conscious?

But this time, he could pinpoint the source of the scent, and it was undoubtedly emanating from the girl in the bed, who was currently lying on her back, snoring softly. He examined her features: with her dark curly hair, sharp nose, and olive skin, it was easy to assume she was Mediterranean, probably, and not coincidentally, Greek. But who was she, and why couldn’t he stop staring at her plump lips, imagining himself bending over and placing a soft kiss upon them, just like in the old fairytale that had so enchanted him when he was little?

No, no, no. This wasn’t him. This wasn’t professional, and he was a consummate professional - the consummate professional. He had never slept with anyone before while on a job, and he wasn’t going to bloody well start now, when things were as strange as they were. Again forced to fight the powerful urge to join the woman between her sheets, he used every ounce of willpower he had to tear himself from her bedside, and stole into the tiled hallway.

Slumping against the wall and onto the floor, he decided to take a second and try to think through what was going on here. Who were these women? The granddaughters and grandnieces of the Rich Bitch, who was supposed to be down in Mexico, and, oh yes, supposedly didn’t have any heirs?

And what was that smell? Some kind of perfume? Or maybe it was natural, and this whole family suffered from some bizarre condition that caused them to exude an unusually pungent body odor?

With each question, doubt began to creep in again more and more. None of this added up, none of this made sense. At some point something had gone wrong, a mistake or miscommunication, and he had walked into something he was absolutely not prepared for. And being well-prepared was something he took pride in, even if the habit had been literally beaten into him back in grade school.

What it came down to was this: how many jobs had he taken that, like this one, had turned out to be founded on faulty intel? And had he not aborted every single one, very early on? Was he not still free, still living and breathing? Were these facts not inextricably linked?

But his gaze had already drifted to the door across from where he was currently sitting. This one was covered in intricate details: nymphs and naiads playing amongst a complicated latticework of raised vines. In fact, now that he looked, even the doors to the rooms he had already explored had similarly elaborate designs etched upon them.

The entry to the room he had just ventured into featured male centaurs with raging equine erections chasing naked, voluptuous mortal women through a meadow, while the one to the first chamber he had checked out displayed male and female minotaurs copulating in a variety of decidedly unchristian sexual positions.

How had he not noticed all of this before, especially with his trained eye? Was he just too focused on the task at hand? At least it partially explained why he kept thinking about Ancient Greece, even if he hadn’t registered it at the surface level of his senses.

But even this new revelation was quickly swept away by a much greater fixation: what new piece of treasure would he find hidden behind the door sporting the visage of the frolicking female spirits? A sparkling necklace or glittering set of earrings? He had to know. He had to have it. He discarded the backpack onto the polished floor. Why bother pretending anymore? Whatever it was, he had to wear it.

But there was one last piece of his outfit to shed before he found out. He took off his black balaclavas, revealing the sweaty, handsome face and messy hair underneath. It was far too humid in the mansion to keep it on for even a second longer, and he no longer feared being caught. To some degree, for a reason he couldn’t explain, he now craved it.

Good girl…beautiful young satyrs don’t cover their faces….

Another thought that didn’t feel like a thought. It felt like a message, a mantra. And like it was coming from his right hand and right wrist, where the ring and bracelet, respectively, now lay. But all he did in response to this discovery was to shrug his shoulder as if this were the most ordinary thing in the world.

In the bedroom, he was a little disappointed to not find another exotic sleeping beauty. Instead, in the unmade bed that looked like someone had just gotten out of it, there rested an ankle bracelet, a counterpart to the one that had already found a welcoming home on his wrist.

Well, it was obvious what he had to do. Sitting on the still-warm bed, he untied the ugly, utilitarian boots he had on – both of them actually, for balancing purposes – and tossed them dismissively aside. Hideous things. Removing his black socks, he was surprised, for a brief moment, to see how small his feet were. But why should he be? He had always had small feet. His mother had even joked that he’d still be wearing children’s shoes at his Quinceanera!

A sense of relief washed over him: the pink nail polish he had applied to his toenails, the same color as on his fingernails, hadn’t chipped at all. Thank God - he had been worried about that for a while, since before he had first entered this bewitching palace. That now sorted out, he placed his left foot through the hoop of the piece of jewelry and moved it up so it would rest on his ankle.

Then he got to work. Leaning down, he stuffed his face in amongst the used sheets, comforter, and pillows, and took a deep, greedy breath in. This third musk was as distinct as the first two had been to each other: he smelled anemone and pomegranate and narcissus this time. But it wasn’t enough for him - not nearly enough. He got into the bed, and covered himself in all the pieces that made up its whole. He wanted to live in the fragrance, to let it fill him up and replace all of the profane, ordinary gasses that currently resided within him.

He felt himself get hard…then soft again. The moment of ecstasy had passed just as quickly as it had arrived. Taking this as some sort of signal, he got out of the bed and left the room, not even bothering to retrieve his discarded boots. But it was funny – the aroma lingered in the hall. He lifted his armpit up and took a whiff. It was coming from him, he was happy to find.
Good satyrs always smell good….
He couldn’t have agreed more with his new anklet!

He didn’t even remember walking up to the final door in the hallway, he realized as he stared at the dueling griffin and hydra that adorned it. The two beasts were locked in a vicious battle, both having inflicted serious, maybe even mortal wounds upon the other in their fateful struggle.

It disgusted him. Violence always had. How much better, he thought, would it be if the two creatures had decided to make love instead? Blood still might be spilled, but it would be in the service of something much more beautiful! He sighed. He had often felt that many of the wars that man had waged could have been avoided with a simple release of sexual energy. Take for example that…mustache fellow…what was his name again? Oh, it didn’t matter. The point was: if he had some nice big blonde German woman with pigtails riding him, draining his balls each and every night, he very much doubted he would have gotten up to all that trouble!

He realized he was letting his mind wander again. His maestra had always said that his head was in the clouds too often, that he needed to focus on his studies if he wanted to ever make something of himself. Jealous old puta. She was just mad that she was shaped like El Spongebob!

He opened the door, and once again found a room lacking a physical female presence. Nor did he detect a new musk – he didn’t doubt that it was there, but the one he was producing himself overpowered it completely. But there was something on the unkempt bed again – earrings. He walked over, the cool carpet pleasing to his bare feet. He picked up the platinum trinkets, eager to add them to his new collection, but then remembered – his ears were not pierced.

He gazed at the earrings while he considered his next move, paying special attention to the sharp posts. It would hurt. But the design of them…the face of the benevolent madre Aphrodite… he had to have them, had to have them on him, a part of him, all pain be damned.

He braced himself, then stuck the first earring into his right lobe. Before he could scream, he quickly grabbed a nearby blanket and stuck it into his mouth. Now, with it so immediate, the fragrance embedded in it filled his senses, bringing to mind an image of a woman…turning into a tree. He thought he knew the story, knew the name, but it escaped him at the moment, the pain making it hard to concentrate.

Without removing the makeshift gag from his mouth, he picked up the second earring and pierced his left ear with it. This time, the pain triggered the resurfacing of a memory, the first time he could remember physical distress as acute as this. Back in his village, as a teenager, he had gotten into a fight with another girl – all over a boy, of course. He was beating her easily, due to the natural advantage his kind had when it came to strength. So the other girl, the little hijo de puta, had pulled out a knife and slashed his perfect, flat stomach with it.

This had enraged him, and he jumped atop the other girl and pummeled her until his padre came and pulled him off of her. Back in their home, he had explained that it was okay – that for them, their emotions, good and bad, always ran a little hot. It was their nature, as unmovable and unchangeable as the tall cordillera that encircled the valley they called their home.

The agony receded, and he found himself on the ground of the deserted bedroom. Removing the blanket from his mouth, he inspected the wounds only to find that he could not feel any blood. But why should he? He had gotten his ears pierced when he was 12 years old, had begged his madre until he was blue in the face.

Pretty earrings for a pretty young satyr…

Madre Aphrodite was softly whispering to him.

There were no more rooms on the lower floor to check. Before moving to the upper level, he found the kitchen, and it was just his luck – he was positively starving. When had he last eaten? Back at that disgusting food court, that didn’t even have a Mexican place? But his fortune continued - on the kitchen counter he found a pile of still-warm empanadas, both beef and chicken!
He devoured them all in a matter of minutes. He had never been so hungry. In his frenzy he had gotten sloppy, and as he began to rest and digest on a chair at the large kitchen table he realized that his black shirt and pants were covered in spicy detritus. So he did what only made sense – he took them off, and tossed them into a corner of the otherwise deserted kitchen. Having gotten rid of everything else, the only article of clothing he still had on were his boxers. But who cared? Was he afraid of the one of these little mamacitas not finding him decent? At this point, he would have welcomed it.
He returned to the foyer and the staircase. This time he noticed that the statue – of Senior Dio, as he thought of him, sported a massive, raging erection, and set of a testicles as large as persimmons hung under it. He couldn’t deny that the representation of the organ turned him on, and began to absent-mindedly play with his nipples as he gazed upon it.

But, what was this? Something was coming out of his nipples. He used one of his fingers to catch some of it, then stuck it in his mouth to taste it. It was milk, leche, and it was sweet, sweeter than any he had ever tasted in his life. He would have gladly stayed in the foyer, milking himself until the break of dawn, when he heard giggling coming from upstairs. His cock became hard again in response. The promise of sex was heavy in the air, he sensed, and not a moment too soon.

He took the stairs, two at a time, and burst through the first door he came upon, not even bothering to look at what scene of mythological debauchery had been welded upon it.

There, on yet another double-sized bed, was a woman: an awake woman. The most beautiful black woman he had ever seen in his life, she spread her thick thighs apart to present her moist, dripping, pink vagina to him. Using a single finger, she beckoned him to come closer.

He dropped his boxers on her floor, and presented her with his throbbing erection, already leaking pre-cum in excitement. She surveyed its length, and nodded her approval. With that, he nearly floated across the room and entered her, so smoothly it was almost as if her organ had been made custom for his.
What followed was, to put it mildly, the best sex he had ever had. Which was saying a lot, as he had been with women of every race, on (nearly) every continent. All of them had been beautiful and skilled in their own right, but it was nothing, anything like this.

They kissed deeply, her pierced tongue finding his and wrestling it like two anacondas fighting over a wild pig, while waves of intense, near-maddening pleasure shot through his penis and down into his balls. He wasn’t surprised, then, when he came shortly thereafter, shooting load after load deep into her tight, wanting vagina. But what did surprise him was that he not only stayed hard, but found the strength to keep going. Honestly, he doubted he could have stopped even if had wanted to.

Again and again he came, each time thinking that there was no more left of him to be spent. Until, finally, his strength gave out, and he collapsed back onto the bed. However, his partner felt no such fatigue, and she used her long tongue to lick every last bit of semen and pussy juice off of his ever-softening penis, her large afro tickling his stomach in the process. Then she moved on to his balls, and lapped up all of the sweat he had accumulated there in the frenzy of their wild rutting.

But just then, when he thought he might actually recover enough to go again, she, with, uncanny strength, pulled him off the bed, and shoved him back into the hallway. She slammed the door behind her, and he heard her lock it promptly, before letting out a burst of high, feminine laughter.

He was about to try the handle anyway, defying the mocking face of the horned figure that sat above it, when he noticed a new sensation coming from his chest. Not only were his nipples now puffy and engorged, but both were now pierced, and the leche was now flowing forth from both and dribbling down to his belly button, like sap on a tree.

But then, from the adjacent room, he heard more giggling – from two women. He forgot his newly penetrated nipples and barged into that room, finding two more women waiting for him for him – two Asians. He didn’t hesitate – he took them both, and they took each other.

First, one sat her thick ass on his face while the other rode him, while above, they furiously kissed. Then, he penetrated one, while her companion sucked on one of her nipples and rubbed her clit, never breaking eye contact with him. Finally, they got on their knees, and alternated between sucking his cock and balls until he exploded all over both of their beautiful faces.

He sat back on the bed and played with his sensitive nipples while they licked his cum off both of their faces, then spit it into each other’s mouths until they had each ingested their fair share. And he had made a new discovery while this was happening: right above his soft cock, two new breasts had sprouted, and these had been pierced too, at some point while he had been in the delirious midst of ecstasy. These new nipples, he was pleased to see, could also be milked, and he giggled as it began to flow from both of them, and down onto his shriveled penis.

The two women, having noticed what he was doing, crawled over to him and began sucking on and playing with his nipples too – all four of them. While they did so, they began piercing him again – his big nose, his thick eyebrows, his plump lips, and his cute navel. The new holes didn’t hurt as they were made – quite the opposite: each new invasion of his flesh only sent more waves of pleasure to every region and quarter of his toned, yet very curvy, body.

When they were done playing with him, done adorning his new body with even more charms than it had already exhibited, they too banished him, shrieking with laughter as they did so, before, just like the black woman had done, slamming the door abruptly in his face.

But he was fine with that now. He knew where he had to go next, and it would be a place capable of inducing in him more change than any of these paltry little rooms ever could.

Down the hallway, each door he passed now was wide open, displaying beautiful women of all races engaged in passionate lesbian lovemaking. But he ignored them all, found the stone stairs to the roof, and climbed them.

He emerged into a lush garden. All around him were flourishing plants and flowers being attended to, even at this early hour, by an army of butterflies, bees, and other assorted insects. He might have known their names, but he was never good at Biology. Or History, or Math, or Reading, or Writing, for that matter.
He could hear birds singing from the trees that lined the edges of this rooftop oasis, and spotted little fountains scattered here and there among the foliage. But what he was headed for lay in the dead center of this elevated estate: a temple.

He walked up the cracked stairs of the holy place and into the shadows cast by the columns that held up its tiled roof. All of his new adornments were telling him the same thing, singing it: go to the center…good satyrs go to the center…pray to Senior Dio.

And that is just what he did. He got on his knees, and prayed…by stroking his once-again enlarged cock.

He could hear the gentle wind as it whistled between the columns and caressed his naked body. He could feel the cold marble under his aching knees. He could still taste the sweet milk – the sweet milk of his own making – on his tongue.

And he stroked.

He heard an owl hoot from somewhere on the roof of the temple. He could feel a dull ache where each piece of jewelry had joined with his body.

And he stroked.

He could hear a harp being played, from somewhere deeper in the mansion.

And he stroked.

His testicles began to rise in his scrotum, and rose, and rose, as they entered his body completely. Finally, he came, and every last ounce of semen that they had held ejected from his glans like a harpy in flight and splattered onto the sacred floor.

It was his cock’s final act, and it now hung limp and useless.

Push it in…

He pushed his penis down until it became a tiny, cute clitoris. Then he took his empty, pathetic ball sack and pushed it up too, and it became his labia. His testicles, he somehow knew, had already become his ovaries.

Something was glinting on the tile before him. He picked it up, and joined it in painful matrimony to his clit, sending a sharp pang of pleasure through his crotch and up into his brain.

Touch it…rub it…

He didn’t have to be asked twice. He began rubbing his clit with his right hand, not even bothering to pick himself up from off his knees.

Good girls love to be on their knees…

And he was a good girl, a very good girl. With his left hand, he stimulated his right upper breast, causing it to produce even more leche, which he periodically brought up to his desperate lips, the taste of it causing his eyes to roll back into his head in pure bliss.

He rubbed, as the owl hooted again, then swopped down from its perch, and with a scared squeak, caught a small white mouse, and carried it up into the many-starred sky.

He rubbed, as his already swollen upper breasts grew and grew, going from an A cup, to BB, to CC, to DD, to EE, and finally settling at a staggering FF. His nipples widened and darkened.

He rubbed, as his hair turned from blonde to a raven-black, and grew until it almost reached his ass.

He rubbed, as his thighs and ass thickened with fat, in the way he had always hoped and prayed would happen when he was still a little girl, envying the sheer voluptuousness of his madre, tias, and abuela, the matronly curves that attracted the attention of seemingly every man in their village.

He rubbed, as his skin darkened, turning from lily white to a rich caramel coloring, the product of his proud Latin American heritage, itself an unbroken line of American Indian and Spanish Settler ancestors.

He rubbed, as two black, budding horns began growing from his scalp, quickly pushing past the mess of curly black hair he got from his padre’s side of the familia.

He rubbed as fine brown hair sprang up all over his body, from just above his thin ankles to his youthful face.

He rubbed, as the brown hair on his legs darkened further, while his ears began to grow outward, into a distinctly animal shape.

He rubbed, as his feet fused together, and became hooves, while his legs bent, permanently, at an inhuman angle.

He could feel the orgasm began to build from deep within his new vagina, which had begun leaking a torrent of fluid onto the temple floor below him. The sensation crept up into his stomach, and then into his chest, which now sported a distinct tuft of soft fur. It then climbed further still, up his newly slender neck, and into his head, atop of which the ebony horns had reached their curved zenith.

Suddenly, and all, at once, he came, like an earthquake, like the eruption of a mighty and ancient volcano. He thrust his head back and screamed at the roof of the temple, at the god of Olympus that hovered invisibly above it.

The chattering unseen birds in the trees outside took flight. All four of his breasts shot milk outward from his brown nipples, landing on and mixing with the last of the semen he would ever produce in his life. His pussy squirted as well, and the discharge landed and added to that divine mix (and woe to anyone that came across it and foolishly decided to lap it up, as they would be transformed too, though into something far stranger than a satyr!).

He heard the owl hoot again, this time in satisfaction after consuming its prey, as his blue eyes turned brown and his pupils flattened and widened.

Then he passed out.

When she awoke, it was still dark. It could have been 2 hours just as easily as it could have been 12 hours, but, judging by the deep, dreamless sleep she had just surfaced from – the kind that could only be induced by sheer physical exhaustion - she had a feeling it was the latter.

When she had first arrived at the brothel, her new sisters had told her that it was customary for all of the new girls to come up to the rooftop and pray to their patron god Senior Dio (her name for him, as she had always found his full name hard to pronounce) in the way he most preferred – by masturbating.

And so she had, but, apparently, had gotten a little carried away with it, and not for the first time! But she shrugged her shoulders: she was a satyr, after all, and therefore always totally dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure above all else. It would have been unusual if she hadn’t prolonged her self-love session!

That’s how she had found the brothel. On her much-anticipated 18th birthday, she had left her home in the remote jungle of South America, in search of new carnal horizons – the typical coming-of-age journey for all satyrs, both male and female alike. She didn’t get much further than the biggest city that was closest to her puebla, however: the first night in the hostel she was staying at she had met the recruiter, a beautiful, red-haired, pale-skinned white girl named Samantha.

Samantha was a fellow satyr, though, like herself, she was using the natural enchantments their species had available to them to conceal their more animal features while out in the mortal world. Samantha could tell she was a satyr by her signature musk, however, which humans might accept as an exotic perfume or cologne, but other satyrs knew was the unique scent that their kind naturally produced.

Walking around on big flat feet, hair confined to only certain parts of her body, had been weird for her at first, because, back in the village, it wasn’t necessary – her family had founded the town over a hundred years ago and even the humans that lived there knew of their true nature – had known for generations - and accepted it, even sometimes worked to conceal it. Samantha, however, was a natural: if it hadn’t been for her odor, which brought to mind a vision of pristine virgin springs with bright blue water, she wouldn’t have suspected anything at all.

Samantha had explained that her Mistress had long suspected that there were hidden satyr tribes in Latina America, and had deployed a few of her girls to the region to find them. Find them, and invite them here to the brothel in America, wherein they would work as camgirls.

Samantha wasn’t sure if she would know what that was, but she did: her village might have been isolated, but with smartphones, they could still access the Internet. It wasn’t the Stone Age!

How fortuitous this had been! She had planned to do it all – prostitution, porn, random hook-ups (had already screwed a few cute guys that very day in the city), relationships both short and long term – and so why not start with a few live streaming shows? The only question she had for Samantha was how they concealed their true identity, since their charms didn’t work with cameras?

It was simple, Samantha explained: the website they had built themselves explained that all of the girls were just using elaborate make-up and costumes to offer a “special” experience to the “discerning” customer! How ingénue!

Her days could be her own – she was free to stay in and “play” with her sisters in the mansion, drinking, and eating, and screwing, or, she could go out and find some human companions to drink, eat, and screw with in the surrounding area. As long as she did her nightly show, she could still live in the manor, and would be still under the protection of the Mistress – a long-lived, powerful satyr (one of the first made by Senior Dio, rumor had it).

Eventually, though, she would return to her village, wherein she would be married to one of her primos, a very handsome, very hung young satyr that was off on his own little rumspringa right now. She wondered where he was at that very moment: he was eager to do porn himself, and she wouldn’t be shocked if he was already shooting his first “film” right now, no doubt themed after Ancient Greece or Rome, as he plowed some bleach-blonde white woman with big fake tits and a BBL in a robe.

This type of intra-familial marriage might seem shocking to humans, but for the satyrs, it only made sense: there simply weren’t that many of them in the world, and even fewer than that that they knew they could trust. Not that humans and satyrs couldn’t mate and produce offspring – that was certainly possible (and a story for another time) – but, even still, it was only natural for them to want to continue to breed new generations of their ancient, privileged race.

Back on the floor of the rooftop temple, she had rolled onto her muscular back, and was busy exploring all of the new piercings and jewelry that had been adorned on her shortly after she had come to the brothel, the usual welcoming gift, the sisters had told her. She even rubbed a few more out, remembering the journey she had taken from South America back to the United States on one of Mistresses’ private jets, during which she and Samantha had fucked the whole way, now free to expose their true, bestial forms to one another. Disappointingly, though, none of those orgasms were as powerful as the one that had so thoroughly knocked her out before.

She might have wondered why that was, but honestly, she wasn’t all that smart. Satyrs could be intelligent, yes, but she definitely was not counted among them. Not that she cared: mental adeptness simply wasn’t that valued a trait among satyrs, when, even among the intelligent ones, the highest pursuit was still the simple bliss of the eternal orgasm. And it wasn’t like she had ever seen any evidence that being smarter made you a better amante.

She could again hear the sound of a harp coming from somewhere back down in the building. It was time for her to finally meet the Mistress.

She left the temple, made her way through the garden, and walked down the stone steps back into the interior of the mansion. She again traversed the length of the upstairs hallway, her goat feet tapping against the tile, while, to either side of her, all of the doors that had been previously open on her first pass were now shut tight. But she had an idea of where she could find their prior occupants.

She descended the spiral staircase behind the statue of Senior Dio, but still could not find the source of the ethereal sound she had first heard on the rooftop. She listened again, more closely, and realized it was coming from what must have been the basement. But where was the door?

It was at just that very moment that she heard a sound like the grinding of large rusted gears, as a recess in the wall to her right opened. Warm light spilled out of it, along with the sounds of women laughing, and the sought- after, elusive harp.

She walked to the uncovered threshold, only to find yet more stairs. But she had no intention of turning back now, having come 5,000 miles just to be here, far from everyone she had known and loved. So she again descended, deeper and deeper into the earth. Down, down, down she went, even past sea level, until, at last, she reached the steps’ terminus.

She passed through an archaic archway and entered into a massive grotto, which, by the look of it, had been carved out of the very bedrock that supported the mansion far above. On one side was an expansive pool, steam rising from the water. But it was here she found the bulk of her missing sisters: they swam, played, conversed, and, in some of the more shallow areas, had sex with each other.

But what was most extraordinary to her was the variety of the girls. She didn’t mean their race, as she had expected to find satyrs here of every color, and she did. And she didn’t mean their age, as they looked to all be in the range of 18-35, the prime camgirl demographic.

What stood out to her was the diversity of their lower halves. When she had first arrived at the brothel, and had been greeted by a few of the girls tasked with meeting her and Samantha at the front door, they were all still using their magic to conceal their animal aspects. But now, with those affectations done away with, she could see just how many different satyr ethnicities (for lack of a better word) there apparently were out in the world (and here in the mansion).

Back in the village, she had only known of the “goat” variety, of which she and her sprawling family were a part. Here, though, and everywhere she looked, she seemed to see a new kind of satyr. There were more goat-bottoms, yes, but also sheep-bottoms, cow-bottoms, horse-bottoms, camel-bottoms, bison-bottoms, deer-bottoms, and even pig-bottoms.

“Maria!” someone called from across the alcove.

For a second, she didn’t register the name as being her own. But then she remembered, and chastised herself for being such an airhead. Of course her name was Maria! It had only been what her padres, tias, tios, hermanos, and primos had called her her entire life!

She looked to see who had cried out her name, and found Samantha standing on a raised platform across from the pool. And, sitting on a damaged, marble throne to her left, was the Mistress.

The Mistress wordlessly beckoned to her with one long finger, and Maria promptly obeyed.

As Maria approached the Mistress, the other satyrs began to take notice and cease their frolicking and fornicating, and turned to watch quietly, a hush spreading over them.

The closer Maria got to the Mistress, the more she realized how big she was. The Mistress, though having a goat-bottom like Maria and Samantha, was easily 7 feet tall, and as wide as two lesser satyrs placed side by side. And she was thick, and not just with fat, but with muscle, too. And the vagina her dense thighs had been spread to reveal: it was positively gargantuan!

The musk that spread up from it too, overpowering any of the weaker scents around it…to inhale it was to see Mount Olympus itself, the home of the gods. Maria got on her knees before the Mistress, and, without being asked to, completely unable to resist, began to attend to it.

She licked, kissed, and bit the Mistress’ supple pussy, while, around her, she could hear the other satyrs approach. Most merely watched, but others decided to participate. Her eyes were closed, but she could feel deft hands all over her body, seeking her own tits, anus, and vagina. One (she hoped it was Samantha) even began to lather her horns with a sensual mix of olive oil and honey.

The Mistress – her Mistress – said nothing, only moaned and occasionally ran her fingers through Maria’s curly hair.

Maria didn’t mind. She had a feeling she was going to be there for a long time.

Trevor looked in horror at the gaping vagina before him, the same one he had impotently obsessed over and fantasized about for so many years, he couldn’t help but think: where had everything gone so very wrong?

Yes, the vagina looked immaculate, even better in real life than it had through the LCD screens that had been his only window to it up until now. But there was a problem – he was only a few inches high, having been shrunk just moments before through forces unknown. And the vagina in question, already soaked, somehow looked …hungry. He didn’t know why he thought that, exactly. How could genitals look hungry? But the impression was unshakable nonetheless.

He turned, and what he saw then only reinforced his sense of helplessness: a 7-inch, hard white cock, leaking precum, and rapidly closing in on him. If he were in a joking mood, he might have made a joke, a play on being between a “rock and a hard place”. Understandably, however, he was not.

He started to run, but it was too late: the dick had reached him, and was now pushing him into the yawing opening of the vagina. Beyond that, he could see only blackness. As the precum soaked through the back of his ratty t-shirt, he closed his eyes, unable to bear witness to what clearly was to be his imminent fate.

To Trevor’s surprise, then, images from his life actually began to flash before his eyes, just like he had always heard happened before you die.

It was not pleasant viewing.

…

Where had it all gone wrong? Maybe it was his birth, or more specifically, when he was born. Trevor, you see, was a Simp.

When the decline of Western Civilization is written about in the coming centuries, these future scholars - be they robot, alien, or Chinese - will no doubt devote a chapter or two to the Simp. A Simp, if you’re not familiar with the term, describes a particular type of person that only existed in the dark corners of society before the turn of the 21st century, but then saw rapid growth thereafter. That is, a Simp is someone that not only pines after a woman they’ve never met, but actually helps financially support them.

Here’s how it works: the Simp will spend an inordinate time on the internet, mainly watching porn. Eventually, they’ll stumble upon a girl that’s a “cut above the rest”, at least in their mind. If they had met in real life, this would be considered “love at first sight”, if only unrequited. This is much more tragic.

In that case, at least the female in the equation might have actually glanced at their would-be lover, even if they ultimately made no note of him. For the Simp, on the other hand, the object of his lust doesn’t even think of him as human. He’s just one among thousands, maybe even tens of thousands, throwing money at them every month in exchange for periodic postings of poorly-lit nude photographs, along with the occasional short sex video that looks like it was filmed at the site of a recent murder.

If the Simp is really pathetic, they’ll go even further, paying for clothes, custom videos, and pay-per-view exclusives. They might even just send them money directly, not even bothering to launder it through the pretense of an exchange of goods and services.

Now, you might be tempted to think these women would be grateful to the Simps, without whom they’d be forced to join the working world, filled as it is with mundane tasks, endless meetings, and agonizing commutes. You couldn’t be more wrong. In reality, the Simp could not be held in lower regard by their benefactors.

For example, if some brute grabbed them one day, dragged them into an alley, and mercilessly raped them, they would still bestow upon them more respect than what they grant the Simp.

All because there is nothing women hate more in men than weakness, especially beautiful women, and the Simp is the ultimate expression of it.
…

Trevor is a perfect example. Now, he at least knows the truth of his status, and even has embraced it somewhat, having long since pushed the shame deep, deep, down, where he could no longer feel it.

This feat was achieved through a potent mix of a few of the realities of his existence, that: A) he hates women, while simultaneously being obsessed with them, B) he has no girlfriend or wife, and believes, at this point, that will never change, and C) that he is the only surviving member of his family, leaving no one around to care enough to try and save him from the errors of his ways.

Thus Trevor found himself in the same pitiful loop: discovering a new digital visage to obsess over, throwing money and gifts at them, then finally growing bored with them and setting out to find a new virtual partner.

This could have gone on for perpetuity.

But we know it won’t.
…
The series of unfortunate events that resulted in Trevor’s demise began when he found the latest recipient of his affections: Lucy. He couldn’t remember where he had first seen her, be it Twitter, Pornhub, or Reddit. But the minute he saw her, he knew he had found something special.

Lucy was Asian, and this fact alone did not distinguish her from most of Trevor’s targets. He had a type, clearly. But what made Lucy different was that she was curvy. Her breasts were small, yes, but her hips were wide, her ass was round, and her legs were thick and muscular. She was, literally, one in a billion.

It helped too, that Lucy’s boyfriend Greg was white. Thus, Trevor was more easily able to self-insert himself into her porn videos, particularly the ones shot from a Point-of-View perspective. Greg’s penis was substantially longer and thicker than Trevor’s, but he could overlook those details if he tried hard enough, fortunately.

So, he subscribed to her Onlyfans. He signed up for her exclusive Snapchat. He joined her official Discord. He even found the GoFundMe she had set up to pay for her boob job, and donated a not-insubstantial sum. He was hooked alright, at least for now, though he knew this affair would always be one-sided.

Until, shockingly, it wasn’t.

…

“Want 2 meet up?” read the text message. It was the first thing he saw when he checked his phone at 12:30 PM, his usual wake-up time.

The number was Lucy’s: he had paid to get it, so that they could sext for an additional 50 dollars an hour once every month. They were the happiest hours of his adult life, incidentally.

His first thought was that she must have decided to start escorting. Obviously, he would have loved to take advantage of this new service, but he doubted he could afford it. After all, disability checks can only be stretched so far. Still, there was nothing to lose by at least asking.

“How much, my love?” he texted back. “My love” was always how he addressed Lucy in their texts. She did not use it in return.

She replied almost instantly. “Free.”

Okay, he thought, this had to be a prank. Someone had stolen her phone, or otherwise spoofed her phone number, and was now using it to mess with her legion of fans. Obviously, Lucy had anticipated this, because the next message from her was a photo: Lucy, laying naked in bed, a white piece of paper covering her nipples. It read: NOT A JOKE. NO PRICE. I WANT YOU TREVOR.

Another message came through before he could respond: an address, date, and time.

…

One week later, and Trevor found himself knocking on the door to Lucy’s apartment. Naturally, he wasn’t able to afford the travel expenses, but she had been kind enough to cover those as well.

She had eventually provided an explanation: she was starting a “Fuck a Fan” series, and Trevor had been selected at random to be the star of the first video. Made sense to him, though he wondered if she knew he would be taking his virginity as well.

“Come in!” cried a female voice from within. Trevor obliged, opening the door and entering the apartment.

He was familiar with the layout, having seen it in so many of her videos: a modest studio, with a king-sized bed on the far side of the room. But now he was finally here, in the flesh, and in front of that bed was Lucy, beckoning him closer with her finger. Trevor was pleased to note she was wearing one of the lingerie sets he had bought for her.

He approached, and, just as he began wondering where the camera and the tripod were, she kissed him.

His first kiss! But the moment of triumph was ruined when Trevor realized that some sort of liquid had been in Lucy’s mouth, and she had used their moment of entanglement to spit it down his throat.

Whatever it was, it tasted awful, worse than anything he had ever drunk before. He backed away from Lucy, gagging and coughing.
That’s when he realized he was shrinking. He looked up at Lucy, helplessly. She looked down at him with a look of disgust.

….

As Greg waited in the closet, naked, he couldn’t help but think about the sequence of events that had led to this moment.

Everything had been going so well: they were in love, and their OnlyFans was bringing in tens of thousands of dollars a month. Clearly, there wasn’t ever going to be a better time to have kids, even despite the taboo nature of their lifestyle. So Lucy stopped taking her birth control, and they tired. And tried. And tried….

Nothing worked, not even IVF, which they spent most of their savings on unsuccessful round after round of. Was it Greg or Lucy that was the problem? Apparently, it was both, the first bit of bad luck for a couple that had always considered themselves so blessed.
They had given up all hope, when, after a day out shopping, Lucy came home, noticeably happier than she had been in years, at least since they had started trying to conceive.

The story she told him was bizarre: while walking down the street, Lucy had been approached by an old woman who sounded like she was from Eastern Europe. Impossibly, she knew about Lucy and Greg’s fertility issues, and offered Lucy a solution. As desperate as she was, she followed the crone to her store, where she gave Lucy a vial filled with a strange red-brown liquid.

“Left over from my last job,” she said.

All Lucy had to do, she explained, was consume half the potion. The rest should be given to a third party, man or woman, which would then proceed to shrink to a height of only a few inches. Then, Lucy and Greg would have sex, pushing the hapless victim into Lucy’s vagina.
This is when it got even weirder: the gypsy told Lucy that when Greg finally ejaculated, their unwilling partner would be transformed into a zygote, the 100% biological offspring of Greg and Lucy.

It was impossible. They’d be insane to try it. And yet, for some reason, they agreed with each other that they’d make the attempt anyway. Was it just desperation? Or did the old woman’s magic run even deeper than they thought, influencing their thoughts and actions on a subtler level?

In any case, their minds had been made up, and all that was left was to choose the unlucky victim. Greg and Lucy had long lists of enemies that they would have loved to snuff out, namely friends and family that had cut them out of their lives when they started making porn full-time, but they ultimately agreed it would probably be best to choose someone whose disappearance would go largely unnoticed.

Thus, one of Lucy’s Simps was the natural choice, and she picked the most pathetic one she could think of: Trevor. He had told Lucy that he had no friends, family, or job, and she also knew that he would blindly do whatever she asked; such was his unwavering devotion to her.

Greg, having interacted with Trevor many times before, whenever Lucy was busy or too tired to “spend time” with her fans, knew what she said was true.

Yes, it had to be Trevor.

…

Greg watched as Trevor shrank in front of Lucy. This should have freaked him out, he knew, but his sexual excitement overrode all other concerns. His penis was so hard, in fact, that it was almost painful.

He saw Lucy pull the thin fabric of her panties to the side, exposing her vagina. It was time. He sprang from the closet, and centered the tip of his penis directly at Trevor’s back. Then, he pressed forward, pushing his cock and the shrunken Trevor together into his girlfriend’s warm, welcoming vagina.

He pumped, each time feeling Trevor collide with the glans of his penis. It felt strangely good. It wasn’t long, then, before he came, and Lucy did as well, simultaneously. They exchanged a deep kiss until their ecstasy subsided. Later, both would agree it was the best orgasm of their lives.

When Trevor pulled out of Lucy, there was no sign of Trevor, not even his clothes.

It had worked.

…

The pregnancy test came back positive. That wasn’t a surprise, of course. Every other part of the spell had worked. The doctor confirmed the pregnancy. Again, no surprise there. That the tests later showed that the baby was a girl – now that was a shock! They had, for obvious, reasons, assumed it would be a boy. That it was twin girls came as an even bigger surprise! And identical twins to boot (though they didn’t learn this until they were actually born)!

Naturally, Lucy had to visit the Gypsy to express her gratitude, and a few months after the twins’ birth, the dust finally having begun to settle, she went to thank her for all she had done to help her. She was disappointed, but not surprised, to see that the old woman’s store had completely vanished, as if it had never existed at all.

Lucy simply shrugged, then began to make her journey home: the princesses would be waking from their nap soon, and she and Greg had wanted to get a shoot in before they did. After all, they had so many fans to please.

Fucking brute.

That was the only thing Jim could think as his Dad pontificated on all matters of life and love while he drove them both in his beaten-up white van to the job site.

His dad cleaned septic tanks for a living, and Jim was home on summer break for college, so he had been roped (read: forced) into accompanying him to today’s job, while his Dad’s regular guy, Simon, was out sick with a stomach bug, the product of some bad beef empanadas he had had for dinner the night before.

Jim looked out the window and sighed. Passing McMansion after McMansion, each one’s perfectly-manicured front lawn seemingly sporting the same sign imploring the reader to vote for that fucking asshole (along with his loyal running-mate, the other fucking asshole), he longed for nothing more than to be back in the City for the fall semester, among his own people. The tattooed, the pierced, the artsy - basically, all of the types his father would offhandedly dismiss as “fuckin’ queers.” But Jim knew what they really were: beautiful, unique, and vibrant, so unlike the tired, worn-out residents of this bleak, sprawling suburb, so caught up in the rat race that they didn’t realize it was slowly but surely killing them.

But it wasn’t just the people that he sorely missed. It was the food, sourced from all over the world, the entertainment, from live theatre to immersive experiences, the (liberal) culture, and last but not least, the public transportation, the subways and busses. Everything this boring, drab, car-centric, conservative shithole that he had grown up in and was forced to return to every extended break (they closed the dorms, much to Jim’s chagrin), decidedly was not.

“Now, listen, Jim: what you gotta do is dis: just go up ta’ dem and get him talkin’ to ya, about any fuckin’ ding. Ya know, “rizz” ‘em up or whatever da fuck ya kids say dese days, I don’t fuckin’ know…”

Jim rolled his eyes. He, personally, certainly didn’t say “rizz,” like some TikTok addict suffering from terminal brain rot. And he didn’t need dating advice from his Dad, who he wouldn’t be surprised hadn’t committed a few “date rapes” of his own back in the day (and maybe even more recently, at the local dive bar, where nary a craft beer was to be found).

His Dad just didn’t understand: the women (and non-binary front-hole havers) that lived, worked, and went to school in the City were more complicated than the inbred broodmares his Dad was used to out here in the sticks (and he was including his Wal-Mart cashier mother among them).

In the City, guys (and non-binary penis havers) always had to be cognizant of white supremacy, heteronormativity, rape culture, colonialism, the patriarchy, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, biphobia, capitalism, imperialism, and misogyny. I mean, don’t get him wrong, - Jim 100% supported the effort, would even compel it by law if he had the power to. But, at the end of the day, he had to admit, it did make dating really, really hard. And that was even with the aid of all of those dehumanizing dating apps currently clogging up his phone.

“When I met ya’ Mudda, fer example, I introduced myself by comin’ up behind her and giving her big ass a nice fuckin’ squeeze. She turned around to give me a smack, but when she saw yer Old Man’s Mug, she fell in love at foist sight instead. But then she went and got all uppity just because I gave her a backhand across da mout every now and den when she got too mouthy! Can ya believe dat? Afta’ all I gave dat bitch!”

Jim was about ready to just fully tune him out and daydream instead about museums, art galleries, protests, and axe-throwing / sushi restaurants, when his Father looked at him and addressed him directly, in a markedly more serious tone of voice.

“Unless, son….”

Jim turned to make eye contact with his Dad.

“….ya one o’ dem fags,” he finished.

Jim was just about to address the many, many problems with that statement - namely that it wasn’t true (Hell, there were days he desperately wished he were gay!) - when his Dad suddenly turned to face the road.

“JESUS FUCKIN’ CHRIST!” his Dad yelled, and frantically turned the steering wheel to the left, obviously in an attempt to avoid hitting something.

Jim, naturally, also turned to look, and saw, inexplicably, a donkey standing directly in the middle of the road, the faded yellow divider marks running between both sets of his furry legs.

“HOLD ON!” Jim’s Dad screamed, as the tires screeched as a result of his blunt, inexpert maneuvering.

The equipment his Dad stored in the rear of the van all moved and crashed into the left side of the vehicle. Jim screamed. His Dad screamed. Another, louder crash, from outside of the car, as they plowed through the metal guardrail.

Then, there was nothing but total and complete darkness.

….

Jim awoke on a large bed. An absurdly large bed, probably capable of offering a baby blue whale a comfortable place to sleep, if it one day decided it had no more need for the ocean.

A large, ratty, unkempt bed, with stained sheets, pillows, and blankets. But that wasn’t the most offensive aspect of the strange place in which Jim awoke. That was the smell, the stink, the stench. It was so bad, he wondered if they hadn’t managed to crash into the very same septic tank they had been on their way to fix, and had, inexplicably, found that some madman had built a home himself a cozy little home there.

He rolled out of the wide bed and walked over to the misshapen, square-ish widow. No, he wasn’t in a septic tank, but he hadn’t been very far off, because he was in a swamp. A lush, vibrant swamp, but a swamp, nonetheless, and that was never a very pleasant place to be.

In fact, as he looked around the room, he wondered if this whole house hadn’t been built out of mud, by hand. Not only was it a light brown, but upon closer inspection, he could see little leaves and the bones of small mammals and fish embedded in it.

But how had he gotten there, and where was his Dad? Remembering his phone, he took it out of his shorts pocket, only to find it had been smashed to the point of uselessness. How had it taken so much damage, and yet he apparently didn’t have a scratch on him anywhere?

Obvious he wouldn’t find any further clarification there, he walked out of the bedroom to further investigate.

But, the other room didn’t offer much more in terms of answers. All he found was a beat-up-looking (large) celadon-colored rocking chair and a non-descriptive (large) dining room table. Sunlight streamed in from a few more deformed windows, that looked as if they belonged in a sand castle made by a child, one that was already melting from the pummeling of the tide.

But then he heard whistling coming from outside. It was the melody to an old boomer buttrock song that he knew and hated. But it was a tune he knew his Dad loved. In fact, it was his favorite song, always making sure to put a nickel in the jukebox to play it whenever he went down to Al’s (the aforementioned dive bar) after work to unwind.

He opened the front door, and stepped into the swamp proper. On his right was a mud pit, and just beyond that, an outhouse. Some kind of long serpentine creature was swimming in the muck, while a swarm of large, prehistoric-looking flies hovered above the roof of the latrine. Somehow, Jim’s estimation of this little hideaway was getting lower by the minute!

But the whistling was coming from his left. Jim had never felt such relief at the prospect of seeing his ignorant oaf of a Father, a man he hadn’t respected or liked since he was 10 years old (nothing crazy happened, it’s just that by that point Jim already knew he was his Dad’s clear intellectual superior).

Emerging from the lush vegetation was… a green, humanoid monster. A naked green, humanoid monster, with a humongous head, small tube-like ears, a broad, hairy chest, massive beer-belly, and the biggest cock and set of balls he had ever seen (and Jim was, to his shame, an avid watcher of porn, despite his sincere belief that women could not every truly consent to it in their patriarchal system).

Upon seeing Jim, the monster stopped whistling, smiled, and, wincing, let out a nearly-deafening fart. Seriously, this thing could have registered on the Richter scale!

And it was just as potent as it was loud. Exotic birds fell from the trees surrounding the monster, struck dead from the smell of his body’s exhalation. The monster looked around him at the mass of felled avian, and smiled in satisfaction.

Jim, understandably scared shitless, ran back into the house, grabbing one of the wooden chairs at the dining room table and jamming it under the doorknob, all in a (likely vain, he knew) effort to stop the beast from entering.

This gave him some much-needed time to think. The monster had looked so familiar, but where did he know it from? But then he remembered - it was Shrek, from those old, lame, problematic animated movies. He had never actually sat down and watched any of them, of course, but one had played in the background at a sleepover he had once attended (with a friend that grew up to be a real chud), and he also knew the character from some obscene(but funny, he had to admit) memes he had seen on Reddit.

But what the hell was he doing here? This was ridiculous, impossible! Surely this was all just a bizarre, surreal dream, and Jim would wake up any minute now? Yeah, that was it, that made sense: this was all a nightmare! He’d be awake and posting Late-Stage Capitalism memes on BlueSky before he knew it…

He heard a loud crash, and ducked as the wooden chair he had tried to use as an obstruction flew toward him, colliding and splintering on the wall behind him.

Shrek entered the room and burped, the confines of the hut magnifying the sound to the point where Jim had to cover his ears to protect his hearing.

“I feel like I could eat a dragon, which is funny, because I just did!” Shrek said in his trademark Scottish accent. “A big, pink one – you should have seen the size of her! Should have minded her eyelashes, though – I can already feel the heartburn setting in!”
Jim made a break to run into the bedroom, but Shrek stepped forward and grabbed his wrist, his strong hand threatening to snap it like a twig. At that moment, Jim deeply regretted not ever bothering to pick up a weight once in his life, despite all of the warnings that “A fascist worked out today,” along with the obvious follow-up question “Have You?”

“And where do think you’re going?” Shrek asked, menace in his eyes.

“Please don’t eat me!” Jim pleaded in a high-pitched shriek.

“Eat you? No, I’m just “rizzing” you up. Remember, just like I told you?”

For a second, Jim was confused. But then he understood. God help him, he understood.

“Dad?” Jim asked.

Shrek-Dad winked. “But my style of “rizz” is a little bit different than you might think.”

Shrek-Dad pulled Jim towards him, opened his cavernous mouth, and let out an even bigger belch than the previous one. And, man, did it fucking reek!

He let go of Jim’s wrist, then, but Jim was no longer capable of escape. Instead, he fell to the makeshift wooden floor of the makeshift house, coughing and gagging on the noxious gas that he had just ingested against his will.

Never taking his brown eyes off his son, Shrek-Dad pulled up the last remaining chair, and sat in it, resting his powerful hands on his round emerald belly, his scrotum actually resting on the floor.

“I suppose you’re wondering how I became…this. Funny story, that. A few hours ago, I awoke from the crash, still in the van, with you knocked out beside me. My phone had been destroyed in the accident, so I lifted you out of the passenger seat and began to look for help. All I found was this empty cottage, though.”

Jim still couldn’t speak over all of the dry retching he was doing.

“I went inside, laid you on the bed, and went back out looking for help. I found something else, though. Deep in the woods, my arms and legs were ensnared by a bunch of vines, which held me in place as one of their flowers shot a spiked barb right into my neck. They let me go after, but by then it was too late: I was already turning into Shrek.”

“Everything got bigger, as you can see.” Shrek-Dad grabbed his handful of fat on his belly for emphasis, causing the penis hanging under it to twitch with a shock of pleasure.

“My clothes were no match – I think they’re still lying somewhere back in the forest. Oh well.”

“But, I have to say, when it was all over, I felt really, really good. This height, these muscles, and especially this!” He lifted his cock, before letting it go and allowing it to smack against his testicles.

“The source of the vines then revealed itself to me: a great Tree with a human face in the middle of its trunk, and it spoke to me. It told me that I was Shrek now, ruler of this swamp, and there was no way for me to ever turn back.”

“Now, boy, you may be wondering if I believed him, and the truth is: I do, with all my enlarged heart. You try talking to a giant sentient Tree and walk away skeptical of its claims!”

”But fear not”, said the Tree: for you will have a loyal, beautiful mate always at your side!”

“Well, I liked the sound of that, I can tell you. I was already very eager to try out the new equipment!

“So where is she, I asked?”

That’s when the Tree told me to go out and slay the she-dragon, eat her, and then come back here and burp directly in the face of, I quote: “your loser wimp of a son.” Then he said I could sit back, relax, and watch the magic happen!”

“There was one more bit, come to think it: the Tree started going on and on about why it turned him into Shrek, how I was supposed to be the “Protector of the Swamp” or something, but, honestly, I was getting bored and horny, so I punched it directly in its prattling face, killing it with a single blow. Then I came directly here to find you!

“So I really hope this is quick, because my balls are fucking full!” Shrek-Dad exclaimed, and Jim, to his horror, could see that his already elephantine cock was getting even bigger as it became ever more erect. And then, to top it all off, it started leaking thick, nearly translucent pre-cum, the product of Shrek-Dad’s obvious sexual (or, shall we say, Shrekexual) excitement.

But Shrek-Dad was lucky, because it was fairly quick. Over the span of a mere couple of minutes, Jim’s legs, torso, arms, feet, hands, toes, and fingers lengthened. He was still on the ground, but, had he stood up – had he been able to stand up - he would have found that he had gone from a paltry 5’5 (speaking of detriments to dating) to being well over 7 feet tall (not as tall as Shrek-Dad was, but still pretty fucking tall).

And this wasn’t the only thing that got longer. His hair turned red and grew until it was almost touching his small, square ass. But it wasn’t small for long - it, along with his hips and legs, began to swell and widen, beyond all natural measurements. When they were finished growing, his butt cheeks resembled two soft, squished-together globes, and his meaty thighs would have been too big for even Shrek-Dad to wrap both of his new hands around.

There went his black shorts.

The coughing had ceased. Now, with each new change to his body, Jim was filled with pleasure, not being able to help but loudly moan like a cow in heat. Shrek-Dad, for his part, licked his dense lips in approval.

His stomach followed suit, filling and expanding with fat until it touched the hard cold floor below and even began to pool out to either side some. His chest wasn’t far behind, either, as his ““““““pecs”””””” became HH-sized boobs that quickly joined his big fat gut on the ground, while his nipples also became dark and saucer-esque in shape.

And there went his white T-shirt.

His thin arms thickened with muscle and fat until they were nearly as big as his legs, while his neck shot his head forward with its sudden growth. Then his head engorged to match the rest of his body in size, and his ears became tube-like counterparts to Shrek-Dad’s.

As each of these parts of his body changed, they also became green, albeit a lighter shade than Shrek-Dad. But the final transformation happened, as you might expect, to his genitals. His already-small penis (dating detriment #2) shrank and became his clit, while his testicles receded up into his body and became a pair of fertile ovaries. While this was happening, his dick had expelled all of the remaining cum that had been stored in his testicles, as it was no longer needed.

With that, it was complete. Jim looked over at Dad-Shrek, and saw that he was already stroking his green penis with both of his hairy hands. It was clear what Shrek-Dad’s intentions were.

“But I’m your son!” Jim managed to stammer out.

Shrek-Dad leaned forward. “Do you really think I care?”

But, as Jim’s newly female brain flooded with hormones, and he gazed at Shrek-Dad’s handsome face, big, muscular arms, round, sexy belly, and gargantuan genitals, he had to admit: he didn’t care, either.

Second later, Shrek-Dad was carrying Fiona-Jim into the bedroom, their chests and stomachs pressed together, their tongues wrestling with each other like wyrms during a mating ritual.

Arriving at the bed – the same one Fiona-Jim had awoken on no more than an hour before, Shrek-Dad tossed him on top of it.

“Face down, ass up,” Shrek-Dad commanded with a growl.

Fiona-Jim complied, gladly, getting on his stomach and presenting his colossal, jade ass and soaked, pulsing vagina to Shrek-Dad.

Not wasting any more time, Shrek-Dad got up onto the bed, inserted himself into Fiona-Jim, and began thrusting. With each shove of his hips, his gut collided against Fiona-Jim’s butt, causing each cheek to ripple, and the bed to creak dangerously, threatening to collapse under the staggering combined weight of the two lovers.

“Who are you?” Shrek-Dad yelled between gritted teeth, desperately hoping to delay his ejaculation, and thereby strengthen it.

A strange question, but Fiona-Jim knew what Shrek-Dad wanted to hear.

“Fiona!” Fiona yelled in response, also desperately trying to hold back the orgasm she could feel building in her plump sex.

“And what are you?” Shrek barked, pulling Fiona’s braided red hair with his right hand. Fiona’s eyes rolled back in her head in ecstasy.

“Your loving, loyal wife” Fiona responded, “forever and ever.” She was begging to drool.

“That’s right,” Shrek barked. “Our old lives are gone. You were never Jim, and I was never your father! And we will never, ever speak of it again!”

With that, Shrek placed the thumb of his right hand deep into Fiona’s asshole, causing her to wail in pleasure. When he removed it, she let out a fart that rivaled even one of his own. He breathed his wife’s gas deeply. It smelled fucking good.

Finally, they could not contain themselves any longer, and the ogres roared in synchronized pleasure as they came simultaneously.

Outside the hut, the fearsome cry spread and reverberated, causing songbirds to spontaneously explode, deer to drop dead of heart attacks, and fish’s lungs to explode.

It seemed their lovemaking was destined to have a body count!

But never fear, Dear Reader: ogres, despite their obesity, tend to have a lot of stamina.

They were up and at it again in under 20 minutes. First, in traditional ogre foreplay, they licked each other’s pungent feet, savoring the taste. Then Fiona lowered her mammoth rear onto her husband’s face, and made sure to let out more than a few thunderous farts directly into his wide nose (at his explicit request). They finished up with some missionary, Fiona on her back, her feet behind her ears, and her gut popping out even more, while Shrek furiously kissed her. They came in concert again, the thunder of their voices causing fairies outside to combust into piles of pixie dust. This time, the bed did break, and they fell to the floor, laughing.

Then, at last, they took a little break, both of them falling into deep, dreamless, satisfied sleep.

Months have now passed, and Fiona and Shrek, standing in front of their home, are adorned in leather armor (only covering their chests and crotches, both of their bellies being far too rotund to ever wrap armor around), and stand facing a mob of angry, sword-wielding knights.

“Listen, if you didn’t want us to eat your wives, you shouldn’t have let them go berry-picking by themselves,” Shrek explained, in a tone of voice that implied it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“Yeah, but what was left sure made for some fine armor!” said Fiona with a wink, her prodigious stomach hanging over her thick, padded armor-shorts, the belly button piercing she had made out of a polished kobold skull shining in the afternoon sun.

The knights charged, and Shrek and Fiona, hand-in-hand and with a primal scream, leaped forward to meet them in vicious, bloody battle.

They would end up winning, easily, and each knight would ultimately find themselves reunited with their wives as fat (or as Shrek might put it: “fuck-padding”) on the bodies of the ogre husband and wife.

The story of these corpulent lovers would continue, of course. Both grew larger and larger, on a diet of dragons, unicorns, living gingerbread men, sentient bears and pigs, witches (both green and pink), blind mice, pied pipers (creepy fucks, they were), fairies (of the godmother and sugarplum varieties), (cross-dressing) big bad wolves, elves, wizards, dwarves, humpty-dumpties (always cooked sunny-side up), the old woman (along with her shoe), and many, many villagers. And all the while, they had lots and lots of hot, stinky sex, in seemingly every position two bipedal creatures could be capable of.

But they would reach new heights even outside the realm of these baser endeavors, eventually making themselves King and Queen of this land, and twisting it into their own personal, profane kingdom. A long-lasting, personal, profane kingdom, that would exist in perpetuity as shepherded by their many, many ogre descendants.*

But, for now, just to sum it all up? Well, what else can I say?

They lived happily ever after.

*Despite Shrek’s sizable harem of (adult) princesses, the spoils of their conquests, consisting of: the Pale One, the Blonde One, the other Blonde One, the Fish One, the Smart One, the Dark One, the Less Dark One, the Eastern One, the More Dark One, the Long-Haired-Blonde One, the Red-Haired One, the One that Could Control Water, the Other Eastern One, and the Cold One (and her sister). Not that Fiona minded – in fact she frequently enjoyed them herself, sometimes even without the presence of her beloved husband!

As he watched the sunrise on the horizon, causing the brilliant golden spires of the city to twinkle like the multi-colored stars that had just retreated from the sky, the King couldn’t help but issue a forlorn sigh. Even the flock of yellow and green dragons that passed by overheard shortly thereafter, off to begin their morning hunt for the red whales of the nearby purple sea, did little to lift his spirits. This particularly hurt, because the same sight had always delighted him as a boy, to the point where his father, then the King himself, would wake him up early so that he could witness it every morning.

Yes, his kingdom was a marvel unlike any that had ever existed before. Yes, its inhabitants – 112 different sentient species and counting – were the world’s most educated, wealthy, and artistically brilliant. And yes, he, as King, had presided over an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity. But what good was it all, if he were alone?

No, he wasn’t literally alone: he had his advisors, magicians, sorcerers, court eunuchs, scientists, philosophers, concubines, artists, diplomats, animal trainers (along with a full menagerie of exotic beasts from near and far), servants, cooks, and fools. But what he didn’t have was a Queen.

Sure, he had tried to find a suitable match. He had even lost track of the number of princesses that had been presented to him, such was their number. But the smart ones, he had found, were too ugly, and the beautiful ones were just too dumb. And, though he was loath to admit it, being the ruler of such a diverse country, he just couldn’t bring himself to look beyond the human race. While he was sure the elephant-headed Tarntarn people were attracted to one another, their physical appeal was quite lost on him!

Maybe he was too picky? The thought had obviously crossed his mind, and he was sure there were many others, even in his own palace, who thought the same, though they would never dare admit it to him. The King was not known to cruel or unjust, but that didn’t mean they wanted to test his limits.

He also knew they likely blamed his mother. It’s not like the notion had never occurred to him, either. She was, after all, considered to be, by far, the most elegant, gracious, intelligent, and comely woman to ever hold the title of Queen, at least in this Kingdom. Who could measure up to that? If only her native land hadn’t been annihilated by the most recent wave of the Laughing Plague, he lamented! Maybe they could have provided him with a fitting mate, as they had his father!

Still, his search continued, and in the meantime, he did have his harem of concubines to satisfy his baser desires, even if they couldn’t entertain him on any sort of intellectual level. Nor could he hope to sire any successors with them. No, the wars of the Third Age had made it quite clear that that was quite a bad idea!

His self-pitying was brought to a sudden halt by the sweet, unmistakable smell of the Prism Orchid. Of course, that particular flower having gone extinct some 500 hundred years ago, at least on this plane of reality, it could only mean one thing: a Djinn was about to manifest.

For many, this would be cause for alarm: Djinns were infamous for their mischievous nature. You would be hard-pressed to find anyone in the world that hadn’t heard at least one tale of a hapless fellow who, encountering a Djinn, and thinking he had finally found some fortune in his miserable life, ultimately found himself ironically worse off due to their ever meeting.

One such story had always stuck with the King, first told to him by one of the aforementioned court storytellers when he was “becoming a man,” as his father put it. It went like this, once there was a lonely man who, despite, everything thing he tried, just never seemed to have any luck with women. In fact, such was his incompetence in this area, that he had never had sex at all!

Naturally, then, when he encountered a Djinn, inadvertently freed from its lamp/prison by the man when he was rummaging through a pile of old antiques at a market, looking for a special trinket to woo his crush with, he had but one wish: to be made irresistible to women. The Djinn, and this was a particularly devious one, obliged, and turned him into a diamond-encrusted dildo.

And adding insult to injury, the next person to scavenge through the mountain of knick-knacks was a woman, and not just any woman, but the man’s crush, who had yet again turned him down for a date only a few days prior! She found the dildo, and promptly purchased it – it was, after all, irresistible!

“Was he ever turned back?” he asked the storyteller, an old woman that had served his family for generations.

“Of course not!” she replied. “Silly boy – the man’s crush had no idea her new toy was once a human at all. And it wasn’t like he could make the request himself, could he, being in the state he was in?”

“Well, could he think at all?” he countered.

The old storyteller laughed. “Can your bed think? What about your father’s throne? Do you think it sits there, deep in thought, while your father, in turn, contemplates atop it?”

The story had disturbed him, but, over time, it actually had come to excite him a little, too. In fact, he had added his own addendum to the story, imagining that the man’s crush’s eventually passed the dildo down to her daughter, then her daughter’s daughter, and so on, until it was finally lost one day, its ultimate fate to be forgotten at the bottom of a buried treasure chest, or floating in some flooded sub-basement somewhere.

When he became King, inheriting his father’s palace and all of his staff, he had even asked the Djinn- the very same one that was now in the process of manifesting herself, and that had sworn allegiance to his family centuries ago– if the story were true, and, if so, if the dildo could be retrieved.

He was disappointed that the Djinn, whose name he did not know, and never would, because names have power, and no Djinn would ever be foolish enough to reveal theirs, didn’t know if the account was real.

‘Well, could you talk to the other Djinn?” he had asked the spirit. “Maybe one of them would know?”

The Djinn laughed. “Do you think we have regular meetings? Like, a big conference once a year?”

He supposed not. And, despite some common misconceptions, Djinn aren’t omnipotent, either. Still, he hoped he might find the dildo one day, and had even tasked some of his servants with keeping an eye and an ear out for it.

But why? At first, he thought, if it were to fall into his possession, he would ask his Djinn to turn it back into the man it had once been. Eventually, though, he realized that, were he ever come to obtain it, he would no such thing. In fact, he’d display it proudly in the quarters of his harem, and even demand that his concubine use it on themselves and each other.

Nobody else knew of this fantasy. And if they did, he imagined they’d be shocked by it, such was incongruity between this dark desire and his reputation as a kind, fair ruler. To some degree, he didn’t fully understand the contradiction either.

However, as the Djinn slowly began to materialize, line by line, the outline of a humanoid being beginning to make itself clearer and clearer, the King wondered if there was one who actually did suspect.

And maybe even understood.