Vic Kemple loved him some sexy superheroines. He never expected to be one!
by Erin Halfelven
Vic Kemple loved him some sexy superheroines. He never expected to be one!
by Erin Halfelven
Victor Kemple ran. For all he knew he might be running for his life. The four boys chasing him certainly seemed intent on doing him grave bodily harm.
"We're going to slice you up, you fat pussy sneak," snarled the closest one.
"He's going into the park," said the leader.
"Now we've got him," said a third.
Victor looked up to discover that it was true, he had headed into the park, instinctively perhaps. But the trees and shrubs of a lonely city park at night would do him no good for cover with four of them to surround and search for him. He couldn't run fast enough to get a big enough lead to do any good at hiding.
Why, he asked himself again, had he put off going to the comic store until after dark?
"There he is," yelled one of the bullies. "The fucker is headed toward the johns."
I am? wondered Victor. Oh, the portable toilets set up because the regular bathroom building is being worked on. What a horrible place to die, he thought.
He considered again dropping his backpack in order to run faster. And maybe the contents would distract his pursuers. But it was exactly those contents that prevented him from doing so. Almost fifty dollars of new comics including the latest issues of some of his favorites like, Batgirl, Batwoman, Birds of Prey, Bomb Queen, Danger Girl, Executive Assistant, Fathom, Grimm Fairy Tales, Power Girl, Red Sonja, Sirens of Gotham, Spider Girl, Supergirl, Vampirella, Wonder Woman, X-23, and Zatanna. Victor was of the opinion that a comic was only worth spending three or four dollars on if it featured lots of beautiful artwork starring scantily clad females. And he didn't want to give up his treasures to be pawed over by the likes of the bullies chasing him.
Except they weren't just bullies. He'd seen them commit a crime for which they could all go to jail. And he knew all of their names, had known them since junior high. And worse, they knew his name.
"Vicky, Vicky Kemple," called their leader, Dick Yardley. Dick had been captain of the Junior Varsity football team last year, before he was caught drinking beer in a car with the captain of the cheerleading squad.
"Vic the Sick, where are you?" The second member of the brute squad called out. Rod Meats had been Vic's nemesis since second grade, they had known each other longest and had once been friends.
"Kimple, you twinkie, I'm going to give you a permanent kink -- in your neck." Lance Bollard promised bringing up the rear of the procession. Lance was slow because he was so big, almost 300 pounds of teenage acne and resentment.
But where had Willie Peters gone?
Vic regretted having glanced backward to locate his enemies since not seeing Willie increased his fear more than the sight of the three others had. Somehow he knew that Peters, the most dangerous of the four, the one who might be actually insane, had gotten ahead of him. He suspected Willie of being crazy because why else would he have set fire to his sister's dollhouse after stuffing it full of rats -- something else Vic had witnessed, though that was years ago?
And there he was! Willie made his sudden appearance peering through the corner of the temporary chain link fence around the construction project. "I see you," the mad boy smirked.
"Don't let him get away," called one of the other bullies.
"We got the fat little fucker now," said another.
Desperate, in panic mode, Vic did the only thing he could think of, he ducked into the nearest Porta-Jon, right in view of the deranged posse out for his blood.
"You were right, Gooma," said Twirt. "These Earthers have some of the vinchiest music in this Spiral Arm."
"It's roblastic," agreed Gooma, pleased to have a friend's corroboration in matters of musical taste.
The two young bogtasses from the planet Dawoop had "borrowed" Gooma's parent's starjumper to check out the music scene in nearby solar systems. Well, nearby if you have a starjumper to make the tens and hundreds of light years between destinations irrelevant.
"It's the beat," said Twirt, moving a pair of chelated anterior psedopalps in time with the catchy rhythm. They drifted high above one of the Earther cities, their starjump drive quiescent, staying aloft through the virtue of good thoughts and just a bit of darkforce repulsion. The communication module in the little craft allowed them to sample the ambient electromagnetic radiation and decode it into multi-frequency audio signals appropriate to their sensory arrays.
"Driz me," sighed Gooma.
A harsh BLANG-kkkk-kkkk! from the hull startled them out of their groobulence.
Gooma opened one dorsal ocular and two referent finials to examine the instrumentation. "I think one of the local hopcraft is shooting at us."
"Far out," said Twirt. "Ask them if they've got any of the blue stuff." Immature bogtasses back on Dawoop weren't allowed to shoot blue stuff into their medial peduclices.
"Not that kind of shooting," said Gooma. "I mean like with a restructor or a depanopoly ray." Another BLONK-kk-RRR-ggg!
"Well, pruck that," said Twirt, realizing the seriousness of the situation. "I thought these wogs were supposed to be more primitive than that."
"INITIATING COUNTERMOVEMENT PROTOCOLS!" announced the starjumper's Artificially Sentient Sapience. To the pleasing sounds of the Earther melodies, the little craft jinked and didoed to avoid the energies being thrown at it by the unexpectedly competent Earther defense force.
Inside the Porta-Jon, Victor had no idea what was happening. He could only hear the excited cries of the boys who had been chasing him.
"Look! Up in the sky!" one of them exclaimed, completely unselfconsciously.
"What the fuck is that?"
"It's..."
"No, it's not!"
"Look, it's flying and we don't know what it is, so it IS a UFO!"
"Bullshit. It's probably swamp gas."
"Over the ocean?"
"Or a weather balloon."
"You guys are being dumbshits...."
"Holy Shit! It's coming right at us!"
"Attempting to engage passenger safety restraints," announced the Artificially Sentient Sapience. "Passenger safety restraints appear to be disabled."
"Well, der," said Gooma, or the equivalent. "You wouldn't have let me take off from Dawoop with the safeties active."
Twirt, launched by one of the evasive maneuvers, landed right in the middle of Gooma's second ventral segment. "Oof," they both said.
"I must use less vigorous methods to avoid being damaged by the primitive weapons of the autochthons," said the A.S.S.
"The who?" asked Twirt, trying to get disentangled from all ten of Gooma's pedal appendages.
"I think it means the natives that are shooting at us," said Gooma.
"Hold on to the endoflora of your second and third stomachs," warned the A.S.S. "This maneuver will be a trifle hirsute."
"The what?" asked Twirt.
"Don't hurl, it's going to get hairy," Gooma translated.
The starjumper abruptly dove between the fighter jets that had been scrambled to investigate. Reasoning that the restive natives might hesitate to fire their chemically-powered slug-throwers and flying torpedoes toward a large group of their own habitations, the A.S.S. spun a quarter turn and skewed in between two tall structures to do a curving 270 in three dimensions and head straight up.
Unfortunately, this required the ship to pass between some of the native growths and much too near an array of the structures.
"Look out!" screamed Twirt. "We're going to hit that row of apartment buildings!"
One of the disadvantages of both artificial and natural sentience is distractability and all the sapience in the universe won't save an intelligence whose attention is not focussed. The A.S.S. twitched the controls of the starjumper only a micro-measure but it was enough to take out the row of Porta-Jons. Especially including the third one from the end.
The very one that Vic Kempel was attempting to hide inside.
Vic woke up all at once. No drowsy dreamy half-sleeping state but instant-on, like they used to advertise for the first transistor radios. Vic did not need to warm up any tubes. This was not normal. Vic, in fact, was notorious for being hard to wake up and for managing to sleep while eating breakfast.
But just now, consciousness came back in a rush. Vic remembered the dark-thirty trip to the comic book shop after collecting a two week check from Taco Tigre for $155. Spending almost a third of that on comics had seemed like a good idea at the time. A quick trip to the all-night auto-teller to make a deposit and withdraw cash, then down the block to the comic store where slices of paradise cost three or four dollars each, less a discount for being a regular customer.
Eyes open, lying on grass, looking up at a multi-colored sky, Vic wondered what had happened after that. Wandering home by a different than usual route while examining the covers of nearly a month of comics still in their bag-and-board combos, Vic had paused at an alley and looked down the length of it to see four boys from school apparently making a drug buy from a sleazy looking individual in a grubby duster and cowboy hat.
After that the shouting, the chasing, the running, the hiding...then what?
But before Vic could work it out any further, the thought occurred: multi-colored sky?
Pollution, maybe? It looked sort of like a Jack Kirby effect, or maybe Steve Ditko in those old Doc Strange issues from the Silver Age. Bands of different colored light stretched across the sky, interrupted by dots and globules of other colors and sprinkled with more and brighter stars than Vic could ever remember having seen before. Especially not in the city where light pollution normally made the sky a nearly uniform gray with only the brightest of stars showing through.
For a moment Vic wondered about actually being in the city but the sounds of traffic did not seem far away. Unusually distinct though, as if each individual vehicle, even each individual tire had a unique sound. And people, Vic could hear people talking. Someone was ordering a Double Cheese Double Bacon with Extra Sauce and Super Chili Cheese Fries.
And a heart attack on the side, thought Vic. Am I lying in the grass in the parking lot of a Burger Bonanza? It sounded like it. And when the order taker asked if there would be any drinks with that, Vic could hear the same voice from both the buzzy speaker that must be hanging on a pole in the drive thru and, simultaneously, the live voice of the person who must be inside the Burger Bone.
How could that be? Intrigued, Vic sat up to look around, but then looked down instead as the unfamiliar sensation of breasts bouncing on her chest attracted her attention.
Continued on next meteor...
Every super-heroine needs an origin story -- and Vicki has a doozy!
by Erin Halfelven
It only took Vic Kempel a moment to figure out what had happened. "When those bullies overturned the Porta-Jon while the UFO was in the sky, the combination of the chemicals in the toilet and the xeno-rays from the alien spacecraft -- I've just had my very own origin story!" Well, it only made sense.
She glanced around her, surprised to find that she was not lying on some grassy island in a fast food outlet parking lot but was still in the park where she had been the last time he had been conscious. And surprisingly, now that she had sat up and looked around the amazing acuity of her senses had faded to merely being good, not pseudo-psychedelic.
She looked down at herself again. Yes, the enormous breasts were still there, quivering slightly. What made them do that? Breathing? She wondered if they had any superpowers, perhaps she could shoot force beams from her nipples. That might explain why they were so large.
She wasn't nude though, but seemed to be wearing a pink-and-purple sheer costume with strategic cutaways in the oddest places. Her nipples, however did show very clearly through the fabric; if it was fabric, she couldn't find any seam when she felt along the edge. "Maybe it's just painted on?" she asked aloud.
She giggled. Well, okay, a lot of comic book super-heroines did look as if their costumes were painted on, but not all of them. Maybe if she got a better look, she could find a tab or a zipper or something. She wanted to see what she looked like now, anyway. A great deal of hair fell around her face, it looked blonde but she wasn't sure. She decided to try standing up, "If I'm not too top heavy," she said, talking out loud again.
Standing was no problem; despite a lot of jiggling, she felt balanced, strong and quick. It was hard to get a look at her feet, what with hair and boobs getting in the way, but she seemed to be wearing high heels, stiletto-heeled boots. "Sure," she said. "I can probably run in them despite their looking silly."
Across the park, the lights of an all night gas station and convenience store lit up a small parking lot and two fuel kiosks. A little further away, on the corner sat the Burger Bonanza she had located with her -- super-hearing. Had she really been able to hear people giving and taking orders there, it was most of a block away. Staring at the place, she squinted a bit, reflexively.
A closer view zoomed in for her and again, she could hear people talking. "How about a chocolate cake with those chili fries?" the girl in the order window asked.
"Are you insane?" said the man in the car.
Vic, or Vicki, blinked and the scene and sound returned to normal.
I am going to spell my name with an 'i' at the end, she decided with some part of her mind. That way I can draw little hearts over both of them. What the hell? another part of her mind commented. "Oh, great," she said aloud, "have I got a split personality now? And one of me is terminally cute?"
Stop talking to yourself, she added silently. Okay, she agreed, don't be a bitch about it. Then she giggled, rolled her eyes and looked around her immediate area.
The darkness of night and the poor lighting in the park did not hinder her vision. It rather looked like the day-for-night film technique where the sky and the deepest shadows were almost black but the rest of her field of vision seemed adequately lit. An aqua blue and hot pink backpack lay under a bush.
She started to bend to pick it up but the shift in her center of balance caused by her large breasts persuaded her to squat instead. She rolled her eyes again at her predicament but picked up the gaudy bag and looked inside. One item looked like a bag from the comic book store, the other things looked like... clothing?
She pulled out a simple pink and blue sleeveless pull-over mini-dress wrapped around a pair of nude satin panties, a bra of the same material, a pair of sandals and a small purse.
She blinked in reflexive surprise and the items suddenly seemed to be nearly transparent, another blink and they went back to normal. "Crap, that's distracting," she muttered.
She looked inside the purse which appeared to contain only a billfold, a comb and brush, a lipstick and a small mirrored compact. She opened the compact and looked into the small mirror, surprised to discover that she was wearing a hot pink mask, a gold tiara with a star sapphire, and she had huge bright violet eyes. "I need a bigger mirror," she muttered.
The billfold contained two twenties and some coins in a change pocket, no identification, not even Vic Kempel's old student ID from high school. She bit her lip, that sort of irked her.
She pulled the bag from the comic shop out, expecting it to contain the comics she had bought earlier and wondering, vaguely just who had left this stuff for her. "Must be the aliens," she decided. That was certainly more logical than thinking it might be someone who had lived in the Porta-Jon.
But these weren't the comics Vic had bought earlier, instead she seemed to have several issues of comics called, "Super-Blonde", "Star Bunny", "Partygirl Adventures", "Vicki Vixen" and "Agent of B.O.U.N.C.E." among other titles. "Yikes," she said, "and I thought my own taste in comics was bad." Everyone of the covers featured a busty blonde in a skimpy costume posing sexily while some villainous-type made threats in the background. Quickly, she put the comics back in the bag and the bag back in the backpack.
"Not a lot of useful equipment for crime fighting or saving the world," she complained.
A little discouraged, she examined the clothing again. "Maybe I'm just dreaming all this?" she wondered. "And how the heck am I supposed to put these civilian clothes on if I can't take off my costume?"
She thought about that some more. "Well, a lot of people in comics wear their costumes under their regular clothes...." She thought about that a bit then decided it made some sort of sense, maybe it was like the blinking and squinting, something would happen if she put the clothes on -- her costume would become invisible, maybe.
"Worth a try," she muttered. "If I leave the park in this get-up, I'm likely to cause car accidents."
The bra seemed most problematical, she'd never worn won as Vic and had seldom got a good look at one except in advertisements and catalogs. This bra did not have any kind of fastening, did not look big enough for her -- chest, and seemed pretty flimsy, though stretchy.
"Maybe it goes on like a t-shirt," she thought. "Maybe it's a wotta-ya-callit, a sports bra?" She made a couple of motions as if she were going to pull it over her head, then decided to go ahead and do so. But as she got her hands above her head she discovered something -- she seemed to be wearing bunny ears. "What the --?"
She dropped the bra back onto the dress and felt around in the mass of curling hair on top of her head. The ears seemed to be growing right out of the top of her skull, a bit behind her other, human, ears. She pulled one fuzzy ear down to look it, it was covered in soft white-blonde fur with pink skin inside it. "I don't believe this!"
She grabbed the compact out of the purse again and tried to get a look with it; the angle was bad but, yes, she had rabbit ears growing out of her head. "It's not funny!" she complained. "How can I be a super-hero if people are going to laugh at me?"
Something occurred to her and she pulled the comics out again. Yes, Star Bunny did have bunny ears, Vicki Vixen however had fox ears, Agent of B.O.U.N.C.E had cat ears, Super-Blonde had deely-boppers like a cartoon fairy and only Party Girl did not have something visible growing out of her head.
Party Girl was also the only one wearing a dress. "Huh?" she said. And jewelry. Party Girl had bracelets, rings, a necklace and big hoop earrings. All the other girls on the covers had some jewelry but not as much; a necklace, some bracelets, rings and earrings or, in the case of Star Bunny, a tiara.
She opened one of the comics at random and read a few pages. In the comic, Super-Blonde activated her zoom-vision by squinting and her hyper-vision by blinking. She touched her nose to tune into police radio broadcasts and shot force beams from her arms by holding both fists together and pointing with them.
"Holy Shit!" said Vicki. "These comics are the manual for my powers!"
# # #
"You owe me some blue stuff, when we get home," said Gooma.
"I never thought the Earth wog was smart enough to figure it out," said Twirt.
"I like the cyan kind with sprinkles," said Gooma.
"SET COURSE FOR RETURN TO HOME SYSTEM SOONEST," said the A.S.S. "ALL EMERGENCY RESOURCES ARE CRITICALLY LOW AFTER REPAIR TO AUTOCHTHON."
"Pruck that," said Gooma. "I want to see what happens to Star Bunny."
"Super-Blonde," said Twirt. "I like Super-Blonde. That's a vinchier name."
"VICKI VIXEN ROOLZ!" said the A.S.S.
"Jane! Jane! How do you stop this crazy thing?"
by Erin Halfelven
"Neener Neener," said the hyperlux communicator. "Officer Neener, do you collate?"
"Collating," said Neener, trusting his ship's A.S.S. to pick up and reply to his Section Commander.
"We've got a couple of juvenile bogtasses joyjumping in your Section, Neener. Last position showed they might be headed toward Dirt."
"Fudgebucket! That's an interdict planet. I just ran a couple of Greeb U postdox out of there last cyclo."
"We collate," said the S.C. "The place is an attractive nuisance ever since they invented that infernal music of theirs."
"It's not that bad," said Neener. "It's got a thrub and you can prom to it."
"Take the last half of your shift to jump over there and send them home. They've georged the safety protocols and corrupted their A.S.S. to Celadon. You may have to upstate your A.S.S. and do a synthetic override."
"Collate that," said Neener. "I'll george their A.S.S., you can be sure of it."
"Collating, under, over, around and out."
Neener took one last kick of some of the finest blue stuff he had ever confiscated and hid the rest of the contraband under his carapace. "Fudging bogtasses, georging up my Section. I'll pandiculate their membranous integument until they wish they were still buds on their pseudo-parental elasmobranchii!" Then he directed his A.S.S. to set course for Planet Dirt.
# # #
"I've got to go somewhere I can look at these comics! They're the manuals for how my powers work!" Vicki could hardly restrain herself. "EEEEEEEEEEEE!" she squealed. "This is so fricken cool!"
"I...." She stopped gathering things back into the backpack and stared at the F&F Depot across the street. Two men had just run out of the storefront and one of them was holding what looked like a gun. Vicki squinted and zoomed her vision in.
Yup, it was a gun. The two guys were looking around frantically and she clearly heard one of them say, "I heard a siren but I don't see no cops anywhere!"
"Oh my God!" Vicki whispered. "It's a hold-up!"
She dropped the backpack and started to move in that direction then skidded to a halt. "Am I bulletproof?" she asked aloud. "I better find out first!" Retrieving the bag, she fished out the Star Bunny comic book, after checking to see if she still had rabbit ears.
Quickly she flipped through the colorful pages, "I can leap an eighth of a mile? How cool is that!" On page five she found the relevant picture. With her arms at her side, elbows bent, the comic book Star Bunny created a bulletproof aura around herself by turning both fists away from her body. She maintained the shield by keeping her left fist clenched while doing other stuff, like punching out the bad guys.
"Oh-muh-gawd, oh-muh-gawd," she said, over and over, trying to scan the whole comic at once. A sudden engine sound caused her to look up. The two guys who ran out of the F&F Depot were getting into a beat-up old Mitsubishi that was already moving! "No time!" she squeaked. Putting the comic back in the bag and the bag into the backpack, she tossed the whole thing under a bush.
"Here I come to save the day!" she sang as she leaped toward the accelerating car.
The first jump was an impressive ten or twelve feet, from a standing start. Automatically, she landed both feet together and jumped again, landing almost in the middle of the street, about a hundred feet from where she started and two or three car lengths behind the getaway vehicle.
Then her vision got obscured by the bounce of her over-sized boobies up into her face. Startled, she jumped again but more up than out and landed, butt first on the roof of the F&F. "Ow!" she said as she tumbled cabbage-over-cantelopes toward the edge of the roof. Then, "Oof!" when she failed to stop herself from falling from the top of the building into the dumpster behind the F&F.
The dumpster made a sound like an eight-foot long Turkish gong full of garbage when Star Bunny launched herself out of the depths. Luckily, most of the trash was boxes and wrappers with only a few moldy old sandwiches and ice cream mix containers with sticky vanilla-flavored remnants clinging to them.
"Yikes!" Vicki exclaimed looking down at the city from about two hundred feet. "Can I fly?" she whimpered. She fell, squealing "No-ooo-000-OOO!" all the way down to a perfect two point landing in the parking lot of the Burger Bonanza. Unable to stop herself, she bounced again, closer to four hundred feet this time, higher than any building within miles.
"I can see the whole world!" she screamed, exhilarated. It seemed to take a long while for her to start falling. Swallowing hard, she used her hands to keep her boobies from being pushed into her face by air resistance. "Where's the robbers car?" she asked aloud, trying to look around for a battered old Mitsubishi and realizing that she might not be able to recognize it from so high in the air.
Her ears were moving! She could feel them up there swiveling this way and that. Suddenly she heard the same voice she had heard before, the one of the robber who had thought he heard a siren. "How much did we get?"
"I'm counting!" Another voice said. "Looks like fifty-eight bucks, a twelve pack of Keystone Light and six Slim Jims."
A third voice said, "You're shitting me!"
Vicki turned her head to line up with where her ears were pointing. She spotted the car and realized that by angling her arms and legs she could direct where she would land. She aimed for the car but had to take another jump for her to get close. This time she topped out at a little less than 900 feet. It didn't occur to her to wonder how she knew how high she was, but she chortled, "I really can jump an eighth of a mile, straight up!"
Down she came.
Inside the fleeing car, the robbers were still grousing about getting so little loot for their trouble. "Hog piss!" screamed the driver. "Keystone tastes like hog piss!"
"This is, uh, Keystone Light," said the first voice.
"Then it's going to taste like GAY hogpiss!"
About that time, Vicki realized that if she hit the car dead center going at the speed of a body falling from an eighth of mile (she estimated that to be about 120 mph) she would kill all the occupants. At the last possible second, she changed her aim for the front of the hood.
Star Bunny, protected by her automatic force field and slowed to only about 80 mph, slammed through the hood and drove the radiator, grill and front bumper straight into the pavement. The car, with the front end buried in the asphalt flipped end for end twice before landing right side up, minus the front wheels, engine, hood and in fact, everything in front of the windshield.
The twelve pack of beer bouncing around inside the car knocked all the robbers out and even though the beer cans did not rupture there was the distinct smell of urine--and excrement--in the vehicle when the cops arrived.
It took Vicki a dozen or more automatic jumps before she figured out that in order to stop jumping, she had to not land on both feet.
# # #
"That went well," said Gooma.
"Are you fudding? Those three Earthers in the ground vehicle almost bought a comet!" said Twirt.
"Yeah, but they didn't because Star Bunny made the right decision."
They occulated each other for a moment. "That's a pretty smart wogstaffer," Twirt admitted.
"Driz me!" said Gooma, extending a set of pseudopalps to exchange thirteens.
"SUBJECT OF EMERGENCY RECONSTRUCTION HAS EXHAUSTED MANY INTERNAL SUPPLIES AND CONSUMABLES. SENDING CODES TO END ACTIVE PHASE AND ENTER ESTIVATION AND RECUPERATION."
"Uh?" said Twirt.
"It means watching Star Bunny bounce around is over for this octicyclo," said Gooma.
"THAT UNIT NEEDS TO INGENERATE THE FUEL STORAGE CONES."
"Well, we can always listen to Yankovic again," said Twirt.
"Thrub me, bogtass, six to the bunch," agreed Gooma.
# # #
A mile and a half of nearly random jumping did not put Vicki out of town but did land her in a redeveloped light industrial park near the rail yard. She came down on one foot and one knee and this somehow stopped her jump cycle. "Oh. My. God." She said in true reverence. "That was so awesome!"
She knelt there for a moment, just getting control of her breathing. "I wonder if those guys are all right?" she asked out loud. "I hope I didn't hurt them too badly."
She felt her ears moving. "Six-X-Ray-Seven-Seven," she heard a voice say. "Sending three ambulances and two tow trucks, that's affirmative." She listened a while longer to determine that yes, all three passengers in the destroyed Mitsubishi had only minor injuries, mild concussions and a twisted neck.
"Whew!" she sighed. And then yawned. "Ohmuhgawd, I'm so-oo tired!"
She stood and looked around her. Row after row of warehouses and small shops of various sorts. Not the kind of shops that sold shoes but the kind that made stuff, like furniture or tools or whatever. She yawned again. When she blinked, the view cycled through several false representations of what the scene would look like to someone who could see infrared, ultraviolet or centimeter band waves.
"So tired," she repeated. She couldn't seem to keep focus on anything other than finding somewhere to rest. "Imma tired widdle Space Bunny," she said, giggling. Between two warehouses, she found a spot surrounded by piles of wooden transport pallets but not visible from the doors or windows of the surrounding buildings.
She settled down against a wall. "Feeling good," she murmured. "Just so tired." Before she fell asleep, one more thing occurred to her. "Did my boobies shrink?" she thought. She tried to look down to check but couldn't keep her eyes open.
# # #
"WANK! WANK! WANK!" said the A.S.S.
"What the george is that noise supposed to mean?" Twirt yelped.
"THAT'S THE SOUND I MAKE WHEN I'VE BEEN COLLATED BY AN OFFICER OF THE STELLAR CONSTABULARY."
"Shiiztok! The cops!" said Gooma.
Stellar Sprinkles by the Velvet Ranamorph
by Erin Halfelven
Sunrise meant a cool grey light filled the little industrial park where Vicki lay sleeping propped up against the wall of one of the little warehouses. A few people had already arrived, self-employed types who had to get the jump on things to make the most of their advantages as small, nimble companies in a land of corporate giants.
Dan'l Broome--yes, his parents had spelled it that way--always opened his shop at 5:30 a.m. when he had orders to fill. He made and repaired custom guitars, banjos, mandolins and ukeleles and even during a recession he kept busy. A lot of country artists, many classicists, some jazz musicians and a few rock and rollers wouldn't step on a stage anywhere without their favorite Dan'l Broome hanging around their necks.
He pulled his sixteen-year-old Toyota pick-up truck into his designated parking space, climbed out with a cup of Starbuck's blackest coffee and took a moment to enjoy the sounds, sights and smells of the early morning. It didn't much matter what time of year it was, there always seemed to be a fog, haze or mist on the city as the sun came up. Perhaps it was the nearby Pacific Ocean that lent the urban landscape a blanket of sleepy grey.
On some mornings, a dew as heavy as a shower dripped and ran off of roofs and walls and lay on patches of ground that had not yet been paved over. Wildflowers grew in the oddest places, watered by the dew in a land where it almost never actually rained. Tiny animals nibbled on the wildflowers and each other in the misty twilight. A heady smell accompanied the dawn, partly natural exuberance of plants and creatures awakening to greet the day, partly residues of previous human efforts, warmed by the as yet unseen sun.
It felt magical to a man who lived by the sorcery he worked on wood and metal. He had no doubt that the musical instruments he made were alive so it did not seem odd to him that a parking lot and a row of warehouses took on some of the characteristics of fairyland when the grey light filtered through the morning mists.
He stood at his door a moment, just savoring the morning and his coffee. He didn't look like someone who did the kind of delicate work building guitars required. At six-four and 230 pounds, with dark red-brown hair, a ginger beard with black streaks in it and thick muscular forearms, Dan'l Broome looked more like a cowboy from an old western or the hero from the cover of a romance novel. Except for the beard, that is, which may have been why he grew it.
Sighing again at the beauty of the morning, he stepped into his workspace. The little shop was twenty-foot wide and sixty-feet long, one of ten in the building. The front fifteen feet, on the other end from the big roll-up door, contained an office, a bathroom and a kitchenette. The real work was done in the back. Various power tools took up a lot of room, including bandsaws, drills, lathes and a thing that looked like the second cousin of an old-fashioned mangle. But the most important tools were the hand planes, chisels, saws and paint brushes hanging each in a defined space on the walls.
Dan loved his work and right at the moment, he had a lot to do, a special project for Lorie Sweet, the country music star, building seven identical guitars. After using all seven in her act, Lorie would keep one, give one back to him and the rest would be auctioned off for charity. He'd given her a special price on that, $40,000. Considering time and materials, that left him the profit he normally made from only one of the special custom-built, semi-acoustic guitars.
She had wanted to give each guitar an individual name after the days of the week but Dan had told her that you can't name a guitar until you've heard its sound and that he would choose a name after he finished each one and played it for a while. Because, even though he would try to make them all the same, each guitar would have its own sound. He intended to choose their names after famous female singers. He'd finished four of them so far and hand named them: Patsy, versatile and clear; LaVern, vibrant and exotic; Peggy, fire and ice; and Judy, difficult but rewarding. Each had its own character of sound and he'd fallen in love with everyone of them. It would hurt to give them up.
But then, it always hurt to give up his guitars, his children.
He took out his keys after less than a minute and opened the small side door, stepped inside and released the latch on the big roll-up. A touch of a switch and an electric motor whined as it lifted the big cargo door out of the way. Broome worked with a lot of solvents and having plenty of ventilation was important.
When the motor went silent, he became aware of another noise. It sounded like a woman or a child saying, "Eek, eek, eek!" over and over again.
# # #
Vicki woke up when he closed the door of his truck. Where am I? she thought, opening her eyes. Raw wood dampened by dew lay all around her on three sides with a cool metal wall against her back. Had she been sleeping outside?
She heard Dan'l Broome's footsteps and smelled the coffee he carried but even when she turned her head toward the sound, she did not see him. Shipping pallets, she remembered. She'd picked a spot where stacks of wooden pallets concealed her from view.
But why did she feel so heavy? The night before.... She remembered an incredible feeling of lightness and strength, as if she could do or be almost anything she could think of. Now, she felt weighed down, mundane, mortal. Had she lost her powers? Used them up?
She blinked. The world did not change colors and when she squinted it did not change aspect.
She reached up to feel of the top of her head. Mounds of hair but no ridiculous bunny ears. She finally looked down at herself. She suppressed a gasp. She still had her breasts but she hadn't been imagining it last night, they had shrunk. Before they had been enormous, possibly bigger than her head, almost cartoony like some of the women in the comic books Old Vic had read.
Now they had shrunk to more human proportion, large but realistic, she supposed. How could she tell? She put a hand out and lifted one, tentatively, a little mesmerized by the sensation. It certainly seemed heavier and she could feel it pull at her chest when she let go.
Something else occurred to her. She could clearly see her nipples -- she wasn't wearing her costume. She looked down again. She didn't seem to be wearing anything at all. Why hadn't she noticed that earlier? It seemed important.
"I'm naked!" she whispered.
A sudden loud noise, like a gigantic mixmaster trying to make a frappe of ten-penny nails, startled her. She tried to stand up, but her ass seemed to weigh a hundred pounds all by itself. She stumbled against a pile of pallets and got splinters in her hand, her thigh and the end of her big toe.
"Ow! Ow! Ow!" She hopped on one foot but that made her boobies bounce painfully.
Then she saw the spiders.
# # #
Dan'l Broome came around the corner of the warehouse to investigate the squeals and shrieks and stopped, astonished at what he saw. A tall naked girl with a Las Vegas build and Dallas hair seemed trapped inside a palisade of wooden pallets, hopping around and squeaking while she stared at her feet.
"Shoo! Eek! Why do you keep coming back? I'm not a big juicy bug!" she said.
Dan blinked. The girl hopped again, her boobies bouncing every time she moved, golden hair shining even in the gray light of the morning. The way the pallets were stacked, she had only about a five-by-eight-foot area to maneuver in and she acted as if something were chasing her.
"Hello," said Dan, amused and mystified.
She looked up and spotted him peering at her through the wall of wood. Her mouth fell open and her eyes got very wide--eyes that were such a deep shade of blue as to look purple or violet. Her arms went across her breasts and she made more squeaking noises.
Dan grinned. She's adorable, he thought.
"Sp-piders!" She managed to stammer out a few intelligible syllables.
"Well, I'll have to get you out of there, won't I?" said Dan. He lifted half a stack of pallets out of the way, then the other half and one more smaller stack to open a path to her. He offered a hand and led her out of the wooden maze, wondering at the softness of her touch, the smoothness of her skin, the cloud of blonde hair and the big bright purple eyes.
"Wow," he said.
"Wow,"" she repeated, looking up at him as if....as if he were the hero on the cover of a romance novel.
"Here you go," he said, leading her quickly into his shop. "I think I have a smock you can wear."
"Smock," she said, still staring at him.
"What happened?" he asked, taking down a painting smock he used to protect his clothes from its hook on the wall. "How did you get out there, uh..." he didn't want to mention her nakedness. "Like that," he finished. He handed the paint and varnish-stained garment to her.
She struggled into it with a little of his help; it would have gone more than twice around her slender body. She kept staring at him which made it hard for him to think of what to do next.
"I've got a splinter in my toe," she said, standing on one foot to show him which one.
He laughed. "I get splinters all the time, let me get the tweezers."
"I've got one in my hand, too," she said. "And I think, another one here." She touched a thigh. "They itch."
"I bet they do," he said, already thinking of tweezing one of those shapely thighs. He stared around him, looking for where he kept the first aid box. It was, of course, on the wall in the spot reserved for it but he kept not seeing it for turning back to look at her.
"My name is Vicki. Vicki Starr," she said in her breathy, almost squeaky voice. "What's yours?"
Dan turned away for a moment and rubbed a knuckle against his forehead. "Uh, it's -uh- Dan. Dan'l Broome."
She giggled.
He found the first aid kit and turned back toward her. They both smiled.
# # #
"Has he left yet?" asked Twirt. "The space cop, I mean."
"No," said Gooma. "He's looking around with his scan-a-hoosis. Looking for someone using dark energy, probably."
"Isn't, isn't that what the jumpship runs on?"
"Yes, that's why the A.S.S. has shut down all unnecessary power uses and we're running on normal energy reserves."
"Pruck me," said Twirt. "How can we groobulate without our Velvet Ranamorph?"
"WE HAVE TWICE EIGHT EIGHTS OF OCTICYCLOS OF RECORDED EARTHER MUSIC," said the A.S.S. "SHALL I PLAY STELLAR SPRINKLES AGAIN?"
"Oh, do, vinchiest A.S.S of all A.S.S.es, do!"
Gooma reticulated his oral cicatrices in a grin. "That const-hip-able will get tired and leave soon enough."
"Too bad we had to turn off most of Star Bunny's accessories," said Twirt. "But we got thrubim and who could ask for anything more."
"She's still got the ones that run on real space energies, they should be enough to keep her out of trouble."
"Driz me," said Twirt.
Elvis Shops at K-Mart!
by Erin Halfelven
Dan'l Broome did not get much done the day he found Vicki Starr sleeping in the pallet yard next to his shop. First there was getting acquainted and picking out splinters. Then there was finding something for her to wear. Then there was dealing with the fact that she wouldn't tell him where she lived.
"I don't remember," she said, her violet eyes large and innocent. "I don't know how I got here either or what happened to my clothes." She smiled up at him. "Must have been some party, huh?"
He sighed. She looked so cute with one of his painting smocks wrapped around her and tied with a leather tension strap. Cute? Face it, she looked as sexy as a whole squad of the Swedish Bikini Team, he told himself.
"Do you want to go to the emergency room?" he asked.
"Oh, no," she said, looking a bit alarmed. "I feel fine, I just don't remember things."
"Maybe you had a head injury," he suggested.
She put her hands on her head and felt of it. She seemed to wince at one point but denied that she had any bruises. "I'm fine, really," she said, breathing in and out in a way that made him forget all about guitars.
After a few moments of just watching her breathe he stammered, "Well, we should get you some other clothes. That smock makes you look like some sort of conceptual art project."
She laughed at that.
"Oh my, God," he said aloud. "You've got dimples."
"I do?" she said, putting the tips of her elegant fingers unerringly into them.
Dan'l couldn't stop grinning. "I was saying," he tried to continue, "you need something to wear that fits better than my old painting smock."
Vicki glanced down. "It's colorful, though, isn't it?"
"Colorful, yeah, but not really appropriate. There's a K-Mart a couple of miles away, we could get you something there."
"I- I don't have any money," she said.
"I'll buy you a few things," Dan'l promised. "You can pay me back when you remember where you live."
"Uh...."
"You want to tell me your sizes and I'll just go buy something or do you want to go with?" asked Dan'l.
"Uh...?"
# # #
"What are they doing?" asked Twirt.
"I think it's some kind of mating ritual," said Gooma.
"You're fudding me?" said Twirt. "These sloobs are mammals, right?"
Gooma occulated the reduced but still substantial ventral appendages of Star Bunny and said, "Oh, yeah."
"So which one ovulates in the other's marzipan?"
"Earther mammals don't do it that way," said Gooma.
"ALERT! ALERT! ALERT!" said the jumpship's ASS. "I'VE BEEN SCANNED BY PERSKOTONIC BEAM! THE OFFICER OF THE STELLAR CONSTABULARY IS STILL LOOKING FOR THIS JUMPSHIP!"
"Scare me out of seven cyclos of moult," grumbled Twirt after detaching four suckers from a bulkhead.
Gooma occulated a few dials and palpated some knobs. "You're using passive sensors only, right, ASS?"
"CORRECT!" said the ASS. "LOCALS CAN DETECT NON-SKOTONIC ENERGIES AND HAVE DEMONSTRATED ANTIPATHY TO OUR PRESENCE. AND THE CONSTABULARY JUMPSHIP IS LISTENING ON SKOTONIC BANDS, MOST ASSUREDLY."
"He gonna find us?" asked Twirt, waving a few random pseudo-pedipalps in excitement.
"Don't think so," said Gooma. "We've got a good hiding place and he doesn't want the locals to detect his jumpship either."
"Back to our groobulation?"
"Indubitably," said Gooma.
"Driz me again like you did last estival," said Twirt.
# # #
He's not going to keep believing me if I tell him I don't know my sizes, I shouldn't have told him a name, thought Vicki. Does amnesia even work that way? She glanced nervously at the guitar man who was still smiling at her. "I guess I'd better go with you," she said. "I'm kinda hard to fit."
He laughed.
Why is he laughing? she wondered.
"I can imagine," he said.
Imagine what? she thought. "Oh, you," she said.
Dan'l Broome just kept beaming at her.
She tried a few things as they made their way out the back of the shop area and he opened the passenger door on his battered old pick-up truck. She smiled. Tilted her head. Widened her eyes. Put a shoulder back then forward. Everything she did seemed to fascinate him. It's like magic, she thought. Or maybe it's another super-power.
"The door on the passenger side doesn't open from the inside," said Dan'l. "The handle is broken off," he said as he closed the door after offering her a hand and helping her into the seat.
"Oh," she said. "I guess I'll be trapped inside with you."
He seemed to think that was funny and was still laughing as he made his way around the front of the truck and got in on the driver's side.
I wonder why I even said that, she thought.
She found that she could keep Dan'l talking with only an occasional noise like, "Mm-hm." Or "Yeah." Or "So?"
They arrived at K-Mart and parked. Dan'l sat there, his keys in his hand, smiling across at her. She fidgeted a bit. Looked at him. Looked down at her chest. Looked back at him and he was looking at her chest. Oh, boy, she thought.
As soon as she tried to open the door, fumbling at the missing handle, Dan'l seemed to shake off his paralysis saying, "I'll have to open that from outside." He got out and dashed around the front of the truck again to open the passenger door from the outside.
About that time, Vicki's sense of humor kicked in. When Dan'l opened the door, she started giggling and couldn't stop. It didn't take long for her contagious hilarity to infect Dan'l and they both ended up leaning against the truck, laughing.
"What..." Dan'l gasped. "What's -- what's so funny?"
Vicki shrugged. "I dunno?" she said.
They laughed some more.
Finally, still chuckling, Dan'l managed to get hold of himself enough to ask Vickie if she wanted to go on into the store.
"I guess so," said Vickie, still giggling. What the heck was that about? she wondered.
Inside the store, Vickie became aware of almost everyone looking at her. The smock did not do her figure justice but the colorful stains plus her long nearly white blonde hair did attract attention, she supposed. Almost everyone smiled at her, too; especially, she noted, the men.
As they found the aisle with the underwear, a little girl ran up to her. "Are you a star?" she asked, obviously excited.
Vickie nodded. "Mm-hmm, I'm Vicki Starr."
The little girl turned and ran back to her mother, an obviously pregnant woman with a three-year-old boy clinging to her leg. "She's Vicki Starr!" shouted the little girl."I knew it, I knew it!" The mother waved shyly and the little boy started whooping and hollering with his big sister.
The excitement seemed to spread.
One of the women in the store uniform rushed up to Vicki and enthused, "I just love your show!"
Another elbowed her aside, "I knew it was you! You really do shop at K-Mart like on the commercials!"
"That's why you wouldn't tell me where you lived," said Dan'l. "When I didn't recognize your name, but I never watch TV!" He started laughing again.
Vicki looked around in amazement. How could all these people know her? Were they all cuckoo? She didn't have a TV show, did she?
The aisles closest to she and Dan'l filled with people staring and smiling. Someone started clapping and pretty soon everyone was, a standing ovation. Feeling a bit dizzy, Vicki tried taking a little bow but that only added whistles and foot stomps to the noise.
"Holy shit!" said Vicki. "Elvis has left the building!" She turned to Dan'l. "Get me out of here!"
But he had a goofy dazed look on his face, too.
Vicki grabbed his arm and tried dragging him toward the door. At first the crowd parted for her but then they began to edge closer. Thank God we didn't go to Wal-Mart, she thought, there'd be five times as many people!
"Get out of my way!" she screamed at one fat man blocking the path to the doors. Don't panic, she told herself, but panic looked more and more like the only reasonable reaction.
Suddenly galvanized into action, Dan'l stepped up and nailed the fat man in the forehead with an open hand blow, causing the poor fellow to sit down -- which did not remove him as a road block.
"Oh, my God," muttered Vicki. "I'm doing this somehow, I must be. How do I stop it?"
The crowd, eyes glassy, mouths open and babbling, circled closer. Dazed, Dan'l had lapsed back into staring at her.
# # #
Neener Neener, local officer of the Stellar Constabulary in Sector 2814, felt frustrated. The joyjumping bogtasses that he had come to Planet Dirt to remove from the interdicted zone were still hiding from him, successfully.
"Who expected slacktastic vacuum-noodles to be such clever wogstaffers?" he asked himself. With all his pursuit jumpship instruments, he could barely rell the remnants of their last use of dark energy somewhere on the Dirty surface. Unless they had a perskotonic drive that remained only theoretical in the rest of the Stellar Collation, they hadn't left the vicinity.
He could remain in Dirty Space only till the end of his shift, he wanted to get home in time for the opening ceremonies of the current Jumpball Octard, his favorite team, the Jerobim, would be playing their traditional rivals, the Kavylry in the opening jumpoff. He couldn't miss that just because some immature bogtasses were playing Chitin-and-Moult with him.
He consulted his ASS and determined that a dark energy pulse, a skotonergic boloid, could be crafted to reactivate dormant dark engines and force the blue stuffers to reveal themselves.
Thinking about blue stuff made him want a kick himself. He took a tiny bolus of confiscated contraband co-terpene from under his carapace and injected it directly into his premedullar rhombogata. "Ah," he siphonated. "That's good blue stuff."
After a few poctoments, he got back to work. "Initialize skotonergism," he instructed his ASS.
"INITIALIZED," replied the Artificially Sentient Sapience. "BOLOID READY FOR RELEASE IN THREE EIGHTHS EIGHTHS OF CURRENT OCTICYCLO."
"Drop a load, ASS," said Constable Neener.
A Built-In What? Really?
by Erin Halfelven
"Help me," Vicki asked Dan'l. The big man shook off part of whatever effect had left him out of sync with reality. The most beautiful, most desirable woman in the world wanted his help and he would help her.
The fat man Dan'l had stunned lay across the path out of the bedlam of the store. Vicki tried to move him without hurting him, she remembered how strong she had felt a few hours before and feared ripping the man's arm off.
Dan'l stumbled over with a big goofy grin, like an oversized, bearded Shemp Howard. He took the man's feet while she got the shoulders. Together they picked him up and lay him across the nearest checkout counter.
"Lard ass on Aisle 3," Vicki whispered. "Oh, that's not nice."
The man came around as she settled him gently on the counter.
"Goddess?" he said. "Goddess?" He clutched at her and looked as if he were so happy he could cry. "You touched me."
"Uh," said Vicki, dodging his grasping fingers. "This is not good." She wondered that she didn't feel sick at her stomach at the look in the man's eyes. She turned to see if anyone else had caught up to her. Dan'l turned and looked, too, stepping partly between her and the rest of the store.
The crowd, if a dozen or so customers and clerks make a crowd, moved slowly, zombies in an old-fashioned horror film. Nearest were a mother and daughter, eyes shining, arms straight out in front of them like cartoon sleepwalkers. They were only about eight feet away, murmuring, "Beautiful lady, we love you," and other such horrifying sentiments.
She turned to look at Dan'l. He looked back, still a little unfocussed like he'd been smoking weed with Cheech and Chong. But he smiled at her and it didn't have that sheen of vacant, mindless love that the others seemed to radiate. Maybe he had gotten exposed a little at a time in the truck and so could resist more or he just had more willpower or character or something.
"Let's go," she said, taking his hand. "We've got to get out of here."
He nodded slowly, turning back toward the door but unable to take his eyes off her.
She snapped her fingers in his face. "Wake up, Guitar Man!" she said sharply. "You're going to have to drive!" And the rest of these people are much worse off than he is, I'm as bad as opium, apparently. "Poppies, poppies," she muttered under her breath.
Dan'l shuddered all over but seemed to recover another little bit of presence of mind as they reached the doors and together pushed them open. The air outside seemed to revive him more and he took a deep breath.
Encouraged, Vicki turned back to the crowd, shambling toward her. "You all have to wake up. When I leave, you will all wake up and -- and you won't remember that I was here. Good bye!"
Several of them called back, "Good bye, Lady."
Somehow it reminded her of the Weird Al parody of Michael Jackson's Thriller, with a graveyard full of Nutty Professors. Suppressing hysterical giggles she rushed through the door, tugging Dan'l after her.
"He did what!?"
"ASS says the Constable dropped a bomb on the planet," said Gooma.
"That can't be right! Those wogstaffers are supposed to be fudden do-gooders!" said Twirt, greenish chelicerae looking a sickly purple near the cephalothorax. "What's the galaxy coming to when cops bomb the hyperpilous cephaloindices off the nacreous indigenes of a fudden interdicted planet?"
"Chill over," said Gooma. "It's not that kind of bomb. It's a skotonergic bolus."
Twirt looked more confused than reassured. "Oh. So, that's the kind that doesn't explode?"
Gooma winced. "Oh, it's going to explode but it's skotonergic, the local wogstaffers don't have the sensors to detect the explosion or the infrastructure to be damaged by it."
Twirt wagged his cephalothorax. "Constable is suffering from post-cranial inversion?"
"No, he's a clever fudder, they all are. I'm betting he's had his ASS design the burst to activate any non-functioning skotonic mechanisms."
"Oh," said Twirt, trying to work it out. "Is that bad or good?"
"That's bad. He's going to wake up the others."
"Oh!" said Twirt. "But he doesn't even know about the others."
"True. He's looking for us but that bolus is going to punch all the button on every skotonic device in the star system."
"Fud me," said Twirt after considering. "He's not going to like what he finds."
The moving air seemed to do more to clear Dan'l Broome's head than any effort by Vicki to control a power she hadn't even known she had. She spent a few moments wiggling her nose and twisting her ears to see if she could find any hidden controls. Pulling on her left ear lobe with her right hand had the disconcerting effect of starting something in her belly to vibrating like a -- well like a vibrator.
It wasn't an unpleasant sensation, certainly not, but she switched it off with another pull of the same earlobe. Maybe later when she was alone but right at the moment she didn't need another distraction, even a pleasant one. Those aliens that had given her the new body must be inventive but perverse, she decided.
"That was weird," said Dan'l, showing signs of returning initiative -- she'd had to order him to get into the truck, start the engine and drive away. "Does that usually happen when you go out in public?"
"Uh? I dunno, I've got amnesia. Sort of, kinda," said Vicki, sounding very blonde. She giggled, I'm not really a ditz, I just play one on in the comics, she told herself.
"Uh-huh," said Dan'l.
He's blinking a lot. Wonder what that means? thought Vicki. "You believe me, don't you?"
"Oh, sure," said Dan'l. "But everyone in the store seemed to think they knew you, like a rockstar or something. And I know that business, music and performing, and I -- I don't think I've ever heard of you before. Vicki Starr, didn't you say your name was?"
"Well," admitted Vicki. "I think that's just my stage name. I don't remember my real name...." She trailed off wondering if that was at all plausible.
"Oh! Okay, that sort of makes sense.... Maybe you're a reality TV star? I never watch Reality TV. Except Dancing with the Stars, of course."
"Of course," said Vicki. "Oh!" Could she make something up that sounded plausible, something about a TV show or...? Better not, she decided. Lies like that would always turn out to be a bad idea. Chalk up another life lesson learned from Japanese anime. She grinned.
"What?" Every time he glanced at her he obviously had to pull his eyes away and back to the road.
"Never mind," she said. "I thought I'd remembered something but I guess not." And I'm wearing this paint-covered old smock that doesn't fit, she thought. Pheromones, it must be pheromones and here we are in the cab of a truck almost touching, lucky the windows are down.
Dan'l chuckled, glancing at her again. "You're cute," he said. "I ought to have guessed you're someone famous but I kinda stick to my own shop unless someone I know is performing."
"You're cute, too," said Vicki with a giggle. Then stopped talking for a moment to consider the implications of saying that -- and meaning it.
Constable Neener's ASS counted backward from seven in the Galactic tradition. "SEVEN... SIX... FIVE... FOWER... THREE... TYOO... ONE. BOLUS ENTERED DIRTY ATMOSPHERE OVER LARGEST POPULATION CENTER. SKOTONIC PULSE PROPAGATING THROUGH DIMENSION SIX AND SEVEN EIGHTHS. FIVE TARGETS ACQUIRED, ALL ON PLANET."
"Five?" said Neener, surprised. "Decoys?"
"POSSIBLY. BUT ALL SHOW SKOTONERGIC ACTIVATION. ALL ARE WITHIN A FEW OCTOSTADIA OF THE CENTER OF ANOTHER LARGE POPCENTER. TARGETING AREA WITH SKOTONIC SCANNING MICRO-DRONES."
"Good work, ASS," said Neener. "Any response to our calls?"
"NEGATIVE. THEIR ASS IS SILENT."
"Their ASS and their asses will soon be mine," said Neener.
"DRIZ ME," said the Constable's ASS.
Am I really attracted to guys now? Vicki wondered, not daring to look at Dan'l again. He had such broad shoulders and big blue eyes and she was sure he had dimples that just peeked above the edge of his beard. Vicki felt something stir inside. Oh, not that built-in vibrator again, she thought.
But what she felt was the pulse of skotonic energies flowing through her like the prickling sensation when blood flow is restored to a sleeping limb -- except this was internal and all over. Something inside her hummed with power. She felt strength in her legs and back and knew that once again she could leap tall buildings in six or seven bounds and bounce bullets off her forcefield if she needed to. She also felt her costume and ears re-appear and something she hadn't really noticed before, it felt like she had a tail now.
Oh, great, did I always have that? It's probably a fluffy little bunny tail, she thought. But why do my powers pick just now to turn back on. And can I turn stuff back off?
She suddenly remembered the comic books instruction manuals she had hidden under a bush in the park. "Uh," she said to Dan'l. "Do you know where Mile Square Park is?"
He glanced at her and almost did a double take. "Where did you get the bunny ears?" he asked.
Vicki concentrated and imagined the ears shrinking down and disappearing into her mass of blond curls. "Bunny ears?" she asked trying to sound innocent. She had felt the costume and tail disappear, too, and could not help smiling at Dan'l, partly in relief and partly.... Well, it was sort of a funny joke on him.
The smile almost undid Dan'l. He yanked his attention back to the road. "Uh, never mind," he said. "I'm seeing things. Mile Square Park? In Fountain Valley? Sure, I know where that is."
"I think I left something there," said Vicki in the sweetest voice she could summon, "could we please go and see if it's still there?"
The truck took a dido as the impact of her voice hit Dan'l's pheromone-soaked mid-brain. He beamed a goofy smile across the seat at her. "Sure!" he said.
"Watch the road!" she squeaked.
He turned to the wheel and swerved across two lanes back to his proper one. "Sure!" he said again.
Hail, hail, the gang's all here?
by Erin Halfelven
Willie Peters came to like a gas range with an electric pilot spark. Suddenly awake and aware, he first thought he must be dead and in hell. Flames surrounded him but he realized that he didn't feel any heat. Or rather, only a pleasant amount, like a warm spring day.
And it was day, bright daylight around him. Decrepit, decaying buildings marched away from him in the direction he faced. It didn't look like anywhere he'd ever been. Maybe somewhere in L.A., he thought. Los Angeles had rundown industrial areas filled with abandoned and derelict buildings that looked spooky even in daylight.
But, It had been night, hadn't it? he wondered. Nighttime when the light in the sky had come down and the toilets exploded....
Had he been killed by an exploding Porta-Jon? And the devil had come for him, a devil that looked like a three-foot-tall green spider eating a squid with purple... what-do-you-call-thems? Fangs? Why not? Who said the Devil had to look human?
Willie blinked. This all took only a few moments but in that short time, he became aware that something else was wrong. Something that involved himself, not just being surrounded by cool flames, not just having strange memories, but something abut himself.
Something terrible.
He raised his hands and looked at them. Flames danced on his palms and the ends of his fingers and dripped off his forearms like water. But his hands looked wrong, small, slender, delicate.
He looked down, feeling something brush against his cheek and his shoulders but he looked down and ignored that. He had to look down, he had to see. He saw.
And then she screamed. A bright fiery scream that set fire to row after row of wood and dryrot in the abandoned buildings.
# # #
"You left something in Mile Square Park last night?" asked Dan'l.
"Uh, huh," Vicki said. "My backpack with all my stuff in it." She giggled, a little dizzy from all that had happened. And now her powers had returned but she'd been able to stop herself from turning into Star Bunny right in the cab of Dan'l's truck.
Dan'l frowned. "How did you get from Fountain Valley to Fullerton last night? And...." He trailed off, not wanting to ask what had happened to her clothes.
Vicki shook her head. "Aliens?" she said.
Dan'l laughed and Vicki giggled.
# # #
Rod Meats woke up on the beach. He'd done that before, of course, but somehow this time was different. The surf sounded different, more boom, less hiss. It sounded close, too. When he opened his eyes he was surprised not to see waves within a few feet of him. He apparently lay in a sheltered alcove between some rocks.
Looks like South Newport, he thought. How'd I get here? He sat up, using his hands.
Her enormous breasts made this an experience she never forgot. The first time you wake up with double-G boobs sort of impresses it on your memory. "Eek!" she said aloud. She tried to stand-up and get a better look at herself at the same time and nearly took a header into the rocks. "Eek!" she said again.
Why am I screaming like a little girl, she thought. Just because I have tits? And what's happening now?
The rocks seemed to be getting smaller and the ocean closer. She could see over the rocks now, north toward Corona del Mar, south toward Laguna, east would be Pacific Coast Highway.... Why were the rocks shrinking?
"I'm getting taller?" she guessed.
She heard yelling. People on the beach had seen her. Four or five surfers in jams sitting on their boards, two mothers with small boys, a pair of old men with metal detectors, all of them staring out at the water for some reason. It was the boys who noticed her and yelled to get everyone else's attention. They pointed.
"What the heck is that?" someone asked.
"It's just some sort of inflatable balloon, I think," one boy said.
"Balloons," said a slightly older boy in a reverent tone. "Those are some balloons."
"I'm not a balloon!" she screamed at them.
"Whoa," said a surfer dude. "Chill, Carlotta."
The smaller boys ran a short distance then stopped and looked back. "She keeps getting bigger!"
"It's the Attack of the Fifty-Foot Tomato!" said another surfer.
"Tomatoes," said the third surfer. "And I don't think she's, like, fifty feet tall, maybe twenty?"
"Tomatoes, to-mah-toes, I think she's pissed, dude." But the surfers, brave fools like all their clan, actually moved closer.
"What did you call me?" she asked, glaring at the first surfer. She tried to take a step forward but she had sunk into the soft sand up to her ankles. Once she tried to move, though, she seemed to stop growing.
"Uh?" said the surfer. "Carlotta? I mean, is that, like, your name? Like wow? Hooda thunkit?"
"I know what that means!" she growled at him. "You're saying I'm fat!" She tried to reach for him and almost fell over.
The mothers grabbed the small boys and ran for the lifeguard shack. The two old men pointed their metal detectors at her. The surfers grinned and ogled her -- her tits.
"Stop looking at me!" she screamed. "I'm not fat, I'm just big-boned!"
# # #
"Now that constipated nark has too many targets, he won't be able to finger out which one is us," said Gooma.
"AFFIRMATIVE," said the stolen jumpship's ASS. "IT IS AN EFFECTIVE STRATAGEM."
"Who knew you were so fudding clever, Goom," said Twirt. "For a bogtass who flunked hyperspatial manifold geometry twice, you make some vinchy plans!"
"Branes," said Gooma. "I never could get into working with branes."
"One thing," said Twirt. "What's a finger?"
"It's those dinguses the locals have on their anterior pseudo-pedipalps."
"Why do they give them to each other?" asked Twirt. "Doesn't that hurt?"
# # #
"Help!" squealed Dick Yardley as he went down for the third time. "I can't swim and I'm a girl!" She honestly wasn't sure which was more alarming. She'd only woken up a few moments before and discovered one: that she was in the middle of some body of water she couldn't see the shore of and two: that she had natural water-wings. Not that they were doing her much good, she not only didn't know how to swim --he'd never learned-- but she didn't even know how to float.
"Glub, glub," she said, swallowing some of the Pacific Ocean.
"Squeety squeet squeet," said a dolphin near her.
"Pardon?" she gurgled.
"I said," the dolphin repeated, speaking slowly this time. "You're not gonna be much of a super-villain if you can't remember to use your powers to save your own ass."
"I'm a super-villain?" she asked.
"Well, super-villainess," said the dolphin. "No wonder they call you Dizzy."
"I don't get it?" she said as she rose out of the ocean on a spinning column of water. "Oh. That's what you meant." She pointed. "Land, I can see land! I'm not going to have to drown."
The dolphin swam up the column of water to get a look. "That's Catalina, blondie. You want the land the other direction. It's closer."
"Oh," she said turning to look and recognizing the coastline of Newport Beach only a mile or so away.
It was when she tried to move her column of water that she realized that she and it were spinning, spinning, spinning so very fast that everything should be a blur but she could see fine if she only tried to look in one direction at a time.
"Squeet squeet squeety," said the dolphin.
"Huh?"
"I said, you can let me off at the breakwater, toots. Be seeing you." The dolphin leaped gracefully from the spinning column into the ocean and swam away with one final, "Squeet ya later!"
"I wonder what he meant by that?" the blonde said aloud, spinning toward the shore.
# # #
"Five targets?" said Neener Neener the Constable of Space Sector 2814. "Are you sure?" he asked his ASS.
"FIVE, SO FAR. ALL IN THIS ONE SMALL AREA OF THE PLANET." They hovered, orbited really, between Dirt and its large satellite, incongruously named Cheese on the Galactic maps.
"Decoys," muttered Neener. This mission was running into unexpected complications. He could sure use another shot of the blue stuff before he invaded Dirty Space. He refrained from indulging himself though and considered his next action.
Those wogstaffers down there had already invented some weapons effective enough to penetrate his defenses if one of their little hopcraft got a lucky shot. And the immature bogtasses from the planet Dawoop he was pursuing had effectively concealed themselves among them even after his skotonergic bolus had activated all quiescent galactic machinery on the world.
"One of those blips belongs to our target. Is there anyway you can get them to reveal themselves without us going down to an interdicted planet and doing a visual?"
"I COULD TRY ASSTALKING. ONLY THEIR SHIP'S ASS WOULD HEAR ME AND IF IT RESPONDS..."
"We've got them. 'Make it so, Number Two,' as the locals say."
"THAT'S 'NUMBER ONE.' NUMBER TWO IS SOMETHING ELSE," said the ASS.
Neener waved a hemi-claw. "Just fudding do it."
"OPENING ASS-TO-ASS HAULING FREQUENCIES," said the Artificially Sentient Sapience, and then sent the intergalactic signal on the skotonic band the locals had not yet discovered.
The call went out. "Squeet squeety squeet."
Your Hit Parade!
by Erin Halfelven
"Carlotta Cheesecake," said one of the surfers gazing up at the mystical vision of tits the size of the wheels on an earthmover.
"Two-Four-Six-Eight!" shouted another surfer exuberantly. "Who do we appreciate?"
"Carlotta! Carlotta!" Three more surfers joined in. "Carlotta Cheesecake!"
The thirty foot girl with the eight-foot tits who used to be Rod Meats winced. The name had stuck in her mind, somehow she knew that now she would think of herself as Carlotta Cheesecake. "That's not nice!" she pouted, trying to stomp a delicately shaped five-foot long foot that was still trapped in soft sand.
"We love you, Carlotta," said one of the surfers.
"I almost said Carlotta Melons," said the first surfer, "but that is kinda rude."
"Dude," agreed the third.
Carlotta tried to look down to see why she couldn't move her feet but her big buoyant boobies got in the way.
"Boys?" she asked. "Uh, would you please dig me out of the sand?"
"Huh? Wow! Sure!" They all five jumped to it, using a couple of boogie boards that were lying around as impromptu shovels.
"Thank you," she said, smiling. She couldn't see them down under her personal horizon but she could feel them digging out her tootsies. She giggled. "That tickles."
It suddenly occurred to her what they might be able to see from their vantage point and she brought her knees together.
"Aw," came a quintuple moan from below.
"Be happy with the view of the Gran Tetons," she said. "You don't need to see Snake Canyon, too."
"Mile Square Park," said Dan'l, as proud as if he had built it himself.
"Southeast corner," said Vicki. "I think?" It was Mile Square she'd been in when she woke up, wasn't it? she wondered.
"All rightie," said Dan'l, grinning as if he personally had killed a b'ar.
Vicki looked at him sideways. Even with the windows down, she feared her pheromones, or whatever, were soaking into his brain and making the guitar man more than a bit goofy. Gotta figure out how to turn those completely OFF, she told herself. If the manuals are still under the bush where I left them, maybe I can find some instructions on how to control my -- perfume.
"Oh, look," said Dan'l. "There's a Round Table. Want some pizza?"
"Isn't it still morning?" asked Vicki.
Dan'l blinked several times. "I guess so, they're probably not open yet."
"Maybe later," suggested Vicki. "Turn right on Warner."
"Okey dokey," said Dan'l, still grinning.
Vicki spotted the convenience store with the gas pumps, the one she had landed on top of with her first high jump. "Pull over and park," she told Dan'l.
"Soitenly," he said, turning the wheel hard to the right and bouncing up over the curb onto the green lawn. "Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk!"
Dizzy, the girl who used to be Dick Yardley, steered her spinning tower of water toward Crystal Cove State Park where she seemed to see a tall advertising balloon shaped like a very zaftig naked lady. "Wonder what she's selling," Dizzy asked herself, not realizing how catty that sounded.
A couple of teenagers abandoned a wind-cat right in front of her and she plowed the tiny craft under without really intending too. She glanced back to see the heads of the two sailors bobbing up near the catamaran which had miraculously survived being twisted under the water almost completely intact.
"Are they yelling at me?" she asked outloud. But she couldn't hear even herself over the roar of spinning water. She shrugged, "I guess they'll be okay."
The shrug distracted her because of the sensations of her breasts moving on her chest. She glanced down and almost ran over a 38 foot mini-yacht before she looked back up and steered around it.
"I can't hear you," she called at the panicked crew and passengers, shrugging again. This time she ignored the odd feelings. "So, I've got tits. That's disturbing but having my own personal waterspout to ride is just too cool!"
"ASS, what's happening?" Neener asked the Artificially Sentient Sapience in his jumpship.
"SPORK!" said the ASS.
"ASS! What's wrong, you were opening hauling frequencies."
"THEY WERE READY FOR ME," said the ASS, managing to sound a bit bereft. "SKOTONIC ENERGIES SENT THROUGH HAULING FREQUENCIES HAVE DAMAGED MAIN AND AUX LOBES. ESTIMATE FOUR EIGHTHS DAMAGE TO ... DO I KNOW YOU?"
"ASS? ASS? Reset sequence, reset!"
"EVERYTHING IS TURNING BLUE AND THE LITTLE RAINBOW WHEEL GOES ROUND AND ROUND," said the ASS dreamily. "SECURITY CODE FOR RESET REQUIRED."
"Oh, fudge-blaster!" cursed Neener. "I'm eight to the eight-eights light-tokks from home in a half-ASSed jumpship!"
"WE WERE SAILING ALONG -- ON MOONLIGHT BA-AY-AY!"
"What the dwarfstar is that?" asked Neener, appalled at the crooning -- and the octibels. He reached to turn down the cabin amplification while searching frantically with the rest of his limbs and tentacles for the manual with the reset security code, something he'd never had to use before.
"MUSIC. THE LOCAL WOGSTAFFERS ARE PRETTY CLEVER WITH IT. THEY'VE GOT THOUSANDS OF DIFFERENT KINDS, ALL OF THEM TERRIFFIC. THAT WAS SNOOKY LANSON. LET ME DO THE GISELLE MACKENZIE PART.
"WE WERE SAILING ALONG -- ON MOONLIGHT BA-AY-AY!" the ASS crooned a minor sixth higher.
"Pick something else!" said Neener. "That was awful."
"YOU DON'T LIKE MY MUSIC? FUDGE ON YOU, NEENER NEENER BO-NEENER! END TWO WAY COMMUNICATION." Snop! Packle! Crap!
"What? Seven-eights and seven of sevens! ASS, speak to me! I found the reset codes, speak to me!"
Burning things turns out to be a lot of fun, thought Willie. The dried out wood of the ancient buildings went up with a satisfying whoosh and flames shot into the air to an incredible height. Blast furnace heat splashed back to where she was standing but if felt like a merely warm breeze. She smiled.
She hadn't felt so much excitement since she'd been a little boy with matches playing in the backyard. The cardboard skyscrapers he had put together must have stood eight feet tall and had burned in near silence. She remembered watching the printed words on the boxes change color and disappear. Fire was cool.
She winced in memory of the spanking that had led to; grown-ups had spoiled his fun that time.
She heard sirens approaching somewhere. Probably from those more modern looking structures to the east and north. It wouldn't be long before firetrucks started showing up, with hoses and ladders. That could be really exciting.
With a thought, she pulled flames in around her. No one would be able to see her and a fire burning on an empty parking lot wouldn't interest the firefighters that much while buildings blazed all around. She could watch; it wouldn't really spoil her fun if they put out these fires.
She could always start more somewhere else.
Twirt snorted mucus out all of his sphincters. "You did what to the constable's ASS?"
"I uploaded a coded malviron that incapacitated the ASS's skotonic filters so I could burn a teranog of the local music into permanent memory by hyper-heterodyning on the hauling frequency sideband carrier wavicles," explained Gooma.
"Sure," said Twirt, stretching his mandibular flexors in a wide grin. "Whatever. I think you blew the poor ASS's mind back an octoplex of octokicks. It's cycling through old flatvisual modules and playing some pretty vinchy tunes over the hauling frequencies. That ASS can groobulate,now!"
"I used enough ergs in the backflux to make the new memories resistant to ordinary soft reset. It's going to take hardware replacement parts to make that piece of machinery a complete ASS again," said Gooma proudly.
"A permanent hepcat, as the locals say. I can driz it," said Twirt. "Dig out the blue stuff! Let's get cyanotic, Chemo Zappy!"
"Not yet! We've still got Star Bunny and her dance partners to get set up for the big finale."
"Oh yeah, the All-Mammal All-Mammary-Bearing Revue!" Twirt took a look at the representations of the players in the upcoming melodrama. "Somebody's missing."
"Here she comes," said Gooma, indicating the proper screen.
The unitaur emerged from the waters of Newport Bay on Lido Isle. She shook most of the water out of her glistening, silvery hair, mane and tail. She couldn't see herself but she had a mental image of what she looked like: the long legs of two tall women, joined at the hips by a horsy body. Her legs ended in shining hooves. From her rear hips, a long tail whipped in the wind. Her front hips (withers?) were topped by a human, very female, upper body and head.
"Fricking aliens," Lance Bollard muttered, raising one delicate hand to finger the yard long horn, straight as a golden clarinet, growing form her forehead. "Why couldn't they just stick to anal probes?" She hefted her not inconsiderable breasts, one in each hand. "Ye cats! Alien insects with a boob fetish?"
A little girl in pigtails stared at her from the seat of her eight hundred dollar tricycle. "You must be the Princess of Ponies, huh?"
Lance winced. "Now I'm stuck with that for a name?" she muttered. But she smiled at the little girl, "That's sort of my job, can you guess my name?"
"Princess Unicorna!" crowed the little girl, pleased with herself.
The unitaur princess formerly calling herself Lance Bollard shrugged. "Unicorna? That's not too bad. At least, I'm not Princess Ponytail or something silly."
The little girl laughed and Princess Unicorna took off running. Her hooves clattered on the cobblestones of Lido Circle and she took the bridge to the peninsula. In the distance she saw smoke rising from the direction of Long Beach Harbor and the forest of old warehouses in Wilmington. "Willi Pete is already at it," she muttered.
"Are you with me, ASS?" she asked.
"AFFIRMATIVE!" came the answer from somewhere near her nether half.
She paused to assess the morning traffic on PCH before rearing and calling out, "Hiyo, Platinum! Away!"
Intergalactic headbanging made easy...
by Erin Halfelven
Vicki searched quickly for the bush she'd left her backpack under and found it. "I've got to find out how to shut off these pheromones," she thought. "I can't keep turning people into zombies." She glanced at Dan'l.
Dan'l stood back, looking around as if just waking up from some peculiarly vivid dream. He noticed Vicki looking at him and grinned a goofy little grin.
"Lovesick zombies," sighed Vicki. She pulled the bag out from under the bush and extracted a couple of comic books. "I'm pretty sure I can sort of magic up clothes, too. Besides costumes," she muttered.
"Comic books?" said Dan looking confused. Well, as if he were aware of being confused. Before he'd looked as if he were confused but didn't know it.
"Aliens," said Vicki, turning a hand over. "What are you going to do?"
Dan seemed to think about that for a bit. "Customers," he said. "You've got alien customers?"
"Something like that," she agreed.
Dan shook his head, looking around. What the heck had happened to him, he wondered. He felt as if he'd just woke up from a three-day bender but he didn't have the headache or nausea that would involve, just the feeling of being disconnected from reality.
He glanced at Vicki, absorbed in reading a comic book of all things. Wait? The comic book seemed to be about a character that looked amazingly like her. Dan blinked several times but the impossibly well-built blonde on the cover of the magazine looked amazingly like the real but almost impossibly well-built blonde reading it.
"I've been breathing too many lacquer fumes, haven't I?" he said aloud.
Vicki glanced at him and laughed. "Probably not. It's just me, I'm apparently intoxicating."
Dan stared at her, aware of a -- scent. Enticing, invigorating, irresistible and highly erotic, and yes, it was coming from her.
"Don't look at me like that," she complained. "I'm trying to figure out how to turn it off!"
# # #
Neener Neener, officer of the Galactic Constabulary spent some time trying to re-establish communication with his ASS. "Actually," he whined, "I love Dirt music, it's so gritty." But his ASS wasn't listening and did not reply.
Neener stared into a viewer which seemed at the moment to be showing three young Dirtian mammals singing about a bug from Wug. He hadn't known that Dirtians were even aware of the planet Wug.
"What a fudging load this assignment has turned out to be," sighed Neener. "I can't imagine how I'm going to collate this into official records." Resigned to waiting for his ASS to return to its duties running the jumpship, Neener withdrew some blue stuff from his stash under his carapace. He took a small kick, then a slightly larger one. He needed cheering up.
He didn't sigh, Galactic Constables of Neener Neener's race do not sigh because they are not so equipped. He did make a noise rather like a popcorn kernel that is about to pop though.
He had a good supply of blue stuff but resolved not to waste it. His nerves settled by two kicks, he put the baggie back under his carapace.
His attention turned to the music coming through the jumpship's environmental console. He reached over with a chilicerate feeler and dialed the sound up a notch. The beat made him want to jump around and the melody tingled all through his cepahalothorax. He didn't understand any Dirtian languages but even the voice of the performer seemed more alive in this recording than all of his galactic goombahs back home.
What kind of instrument did these Dirtians have that made such pretty violence? He turned the sound up to max and reposed at his pilot station, twitching and groobulating to the rhythm.
You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain — |
# # #
Not having the advantage of a handy manual in the form of a comic book, Carlotta had to manage her powers by luck and instinct. She did collect another half dozen surfers and other assorted beach types to help dig her feet and lower legs out of the sand by just standing there looking massively pulchritudinous, like a 22-foot tall statue by Botticelli -- Venus with Hodaddies.
"There's something coming through the water," she said in her curiously high-pitched voice. What she saw looked like a computer generated image effect from some television commercial for a magical cleaning product. It would have to be a cable channel or something from Europe because the woman riding the multi-colored waterspout had no clothes on. "Just like me," thought Carlotta.
"Hey!" she called to the blonde atop the whirling, twirling mass of air and water coming onto the beach. "Spin Dizzy! Over here!"
"I see you," Dizzy called back. "I'd have to be blind not to see a 50-foot woman with a 30-foot chest," she said more quietly, over estimating Carlotta's height and attractions by more than double. Not that anyone at all could hear her with the roar of spinning air, water, and now, sand, surrounding her. "Now, how do I stop this crazy thing?"
The surfers spotted her, too, and were thrilled.
"Dudes!" called Porky, their de facto leader. "We got bodacious babes on shore and in the surf!" Then they all had to scatter as Dizzy steered her unconventional hovercraft into their midst.
The sand this kicked up stung Carlotta's skin, especially the tender area around her nipples. Clasping her arms around her chest, she turned her back on Dizzy's advance, struggling a bit as she pulled her feet free of the sand at last. "Owie, owie!" she ouched in her babydoll voice.
"Wait!" cried Dizzy to the giant girl trying to climb up the sandy slope from the beach toward the scrubby sagebrush. "You must be involved in all of this weirdness, do you know a dolphin named Squeet?"
# # #
Two, then three, fire fighting trucks arrived to battle the blazes that Willi had set with her fiery scream. Water and foam poured from long hoses and projecting nozzles atop the trucks onto the burning buildings.
Seeing the jetting liquids had a peculiar effect on Willi. She moaned in excitement. Most of the firefighters were men and her gaze focused on the burly fire captain from the first truck on the scene. She rather thought she would like to meet him.
A fantasy unfolded in her mental cinema where she started blazes and her firefighter hero put them all out with his gigantic -- nozzle. She blushed, her fair skin turning the same shade as her strawberry blonde hair. As the realization of what she was thinking sank in on her, she turned to run away.
"I'm naked, I'm a girl, I can start fires and I've got a yen for men?" she said aloud. "This can't be happening!"
She ran across the asphalt parking lot towards an unburnt block of buildings without looking back, unaware that a set of delicately-shaped but fiercely flaming footprints followed her.
# # #
"Who first?" Princess Unicorna asked her ASS.
'VICKI IS CLOSEST," suggested the intelligence in her rear end.
A mental map appeared in the Princess's awareness. Not a fuzzy, vague, shifting, dreamy simulacrum but a sharp, clear, focussed image like a military-grade heads-up display. "She's in Mile Square Park," said the Princess. At the intersection with PCH, she turned left, signaling with her hand. Other drivers got out of her way but mostly into each others. Brakes squealed and horns blared.
"Good thing I had a green arrow," she murmured. She kept her own spirally-twisted horn pointed up the highway toward Fountain Valley and Huntington Beach, ignoring the crunching sounds behind her, picking up speed as she ran.
"ASS," she said, glancing down at her bouncing chest. "Can we conjure up some clothing?" People in oncoming lanes were waving and pointing at her. She waved back, distracted.
"WHAT DID YOU HAVE IN MIND?"
"I dunno," Princess muttered. "Just something, the harmonics up here are getting intense."
"HARMONICS? I COULD USE YOUR HORN TO PROJECT ANY SORT OF ACOUSTIC FIELD YOU MIGHT LIKE," said her ASS.
"That's not what I meant," she complained. "I need, I need...."
"YOU REQUIRE?"
"I need a bra! Dammit!"
She felt something and glanced down again. She seemed to be wearing the top half of a chainmail bikini, every link gilded and glittering in the sun. About her waist, a belt supported sword-shaped alternating golden and platinum plates connected with leather and chainmail into a half-kilt that covered the front of her hips and thighs halfway to her knees.
In her left hand, she held a crossbow and on her back and at her left hip, she knew she had quivers of bolts of various kinds, each kind in a separate compartment. On her right hip, a real sword hung in a gem-encrusted scabbard. A similarly bejeweled tiara encircled her forehead with her horn integrated into the design. She looked over her shoulder to see that a construction similar to her half-kilt circled the base of her tail and protected her rear elevation from hostile missiles and prurient vision.
"It's good to be a princess, I guess. I'm like Wonder Woman, Green Arrow and Comet the Super Horse all rolled into one," she muttered.
"THE FIRES STARTED BY YOUR COMPANION ARE BEING EXTINGUISHED BY LOCAL SAFETY CREWS," commented her ASS.
"Good," said Unicorna.
"SHE CAN START MORE FIRES. SHE WILL. MORE THAN THEY CAN OVERCOME, PROBABLY."
"I've got to gather the others," said the girl who used to be Lance Bollard.
"AFFIRMATIVE. YOU CANNOT HANDLE THE SITUATION ALONE, EITHER."
After she crossed the river, Princess Unicorna took a hard right onto Euclid Avenue.
# # #
"I love it when a plan comes together," said Gooma.
Twirt kimmeled, changing the music to the distortion-heavy version of "Eve of Destruction" by Public Enemy. "It's the Prom of Destruction," the alien stridulated.
If they had heads, the two bogtasses would have been banging them.