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ADVENTURE

The explorer shivered, welcoming the cooler air inside the pyramid as the desert heat faded behind him.

A stone slab fell down across the door behind him, preventing the humanoid vulture who had been flying after him from following him inside. After diving in headfirst, he got back up to stand on his big rabbit feet, looked around, and dusted himself off. His camel guide had warned him that it would be dangerous, but he had not let it deter him, and was confident that he would make it through in no time.

It was not the first time he had done something like this, and it was not going to be the last. Treasure was always nice, but the real treasure he was after was always the journey. The bunny lived for adventure. For him, it was all about being out here, being a part of the world, to create and bring back an experience he would never forget. He was compelled to test his abilities and expand his knowledge to feel truly alive.

He was intrepid, driven as if by the wind - irrepressible. He would make incredible time.

The map on the papyrus that had led him there ended here, so the rest of the way ahead of the lagomorph was unchartered, which he liked best. It would be up to him to chart it, but he was not going to be scribbling his way through. He would commit it to his mind, which he trusted, and take in everything around him live on his way, giving himself over to exploration.

He went left, torches on the hieroglyphics-covered walls around him lighting his way.

He came upon a corridor with cobra head statues looking in on each side, and inferred what he would have to do to get across. Backing into a slight runner's crouch, taking a deep breath, he fixed his rabbit eyes on the very end of the corridor and, breathing out, started running as fast as he could. As he ran, the cobra head statues, activated by motion-sensing pressure tiles, spat streams of venom on the wall across from them behind him, their crisscrossing patterns falling flat on the ground missing him by a hair's width.

A right turn led him to the edge of a large underground pool a few meters below, a series of platforms protruding from it just high enough not to be reachable from the pool itself. The bunny, noticing a humanoid crocodile looking up at him hungrily from the pool while swimming on their back in it, got a running start and, when he reached the edge, leapt up onto the first platform, then on the second, third and fourth, landing barely on them each time. The reptile jumped up to snap their jaws at him as he made the final jump to the other side, dropping back in the water with a splash to swim on their belly, frustrated, waiting for the next trespasser.

Noticing a boulder to his left, he took a step toward it to examine it and, to his surprise, it rolled just an inch toward him. Without wasting a second, having realized what was happening, the adventurer turned to the passage to his right, and raced across it at top speed, his legs becoming a blur under him as the boulder rolled after him. He was on completely level ground - how was this possible?

Had the builders installed some kind of Pinball spring to push it after him? Coming to the end of the corridor, the lagomorph panicked for a split second before spotting another corridor to his right, diving into it as the boulder rolled past him. Looking back over his shoulder and turning around to lie on his back before scrambling back to his feet, he saw a humanoid scarab behind the boulder standing on her hands, pushing the boulder with her feet, blocking her way after him - and his way back.

A large pit opened up in front of him. Down in it, on its sandy floor, a humanoid scorpion looked up at the explorer with a look of defiance on his face, daring him to make his way through. Looking up at the ceiling, he noticed a series of horizontal bars set under it, in just such a way that someone could cross by grabbing them one by one. Determined to do so, he wrapped his fingers around the first bar and, keeping his eyes firmly down on the scorpion as he did, began to swing his way across the pit.

It was a good thing the rabbit did not let himself get distracted by the effort of crossing. As he pleaded Bast that his arms not fail him, the arthropod, while he could not climb out or reach the bunny's feet with his claws, struck up with his tail, narrowly missing them. Seeing that they were out of range, the invertebrate began a series of handstands, flips and cartwheels, definitely bringing his tail within striking range when he was in the air and/or upside-down, forcing the adventurer to pull himself up with his arms and lift his feet at the last second before he finally reached the other side of the pit.

After another right turn, the pit that opened up in front of him seemed bottomless this time. A bridge of platforms much like those over the pool led across it, but the lagomorph did not trust it for a second. Taking another running start, he began to dash across it at top speed, not regretting his foresight but not turning his head to look as he heard the platforms collapsing behind him every split-second after he had stepped on one of them, only stopping to look at the yawning chasm behind him after he had made it all the way across, catching his breath.

This time there was no turn, no corner, and no passage, leaving him puzzled for a second. What the explorer did notice right away, though, was that there were a seesaw and a rock next to each other, so naturally he looked up and, sure enough, there was an opening in the wall to his right several feet above him. Normally he could have simply jumped this height, but the shaft that he was in and the collapsed bridge did not give him room to gather momentum for it. So he did the next best thing and, grabbing the rock, he stood on one side of the seesaw, dropped the rock on its other side, bounced up high enough to grab the ledge, and pulled himself up.

The walls and ceiling of the corridor the rabbit walked into looked the same as before, but the floor was now a crisscrossing metallic grid, as though it belonged on a cage, with only a larger area covered in quicksand visible far below. On the walls, near the ceiling along the way, rectangular openings at intermittent intervals would periodically let out sandfalls. They would have been enough to pin someone to the ground right against the floor grid, burying most of them there and making it prohibitively difficult for them to continue.

Because of the grid, rather than accumulating on the ground, the sandfalls would fall through the floor, becoming part of the swirling mass of quicksand below. The most challenging thing about them was that they seemed to obey no discernible patterns, and they were not waiting for a pressure plate to be activated - they were already going, and seemed truly randomized. He could not simply wait a set amount of time, and systematically step through each time, so what would he do?

Then he noticed something.

When he stopped and paid close attention, the adventurer realized that, when they were about to drop a sand heap down, the mechanisms between the walls and ceiling would produce an audible click, a split-second before activating. Well, they may not have been audible to just anyone, but to someone with great big bunny ears that could hear just about anything, they were as easy to hear as a rock falling in a lake. Carefully listening for it as he made his way through, jumping out of the way or stepping back from under the sand vents whenever he would hear the warning clicks, he managed to make it all the way across unscathed.

Through the door, the grid floor was replaced by a solid stone bridge in a wide open area without walls or a ceiling other than those far from him that appeared to separate the inside of the pyramid from the great outdoors, stretching over the quicksand expanse. Rocks hanging from ropes swung back and forth over the bridge like pendulums about navel-high and, while they would have done no real damage to him if they had hit him on their own, they would have knocked him off the bridge and into the quicksand below. Fortunately for the lagomorph, their momentum had been more difficult to randomize, depending on gravity just as the trap did, so it was only a matter of timing. He was able to simply calculate whenever they would pass, and dart across their flight path when they were absent until he had dodged them all and reached the other side of the bridge altogether.

He walked into a room where, carefully stepping around a small cat statue facing away from him, he came to a much larger statue of a sphinx's head embedded in the wall facing the entrance. There was no visible way out of the room, other than the way he came in. Ah, but a sphinx - surely there must have been a riddle for the explorer to solve? Remembering the original, he stood facing it and, first, went down on all four, stood on his two feet, then put one hand on the ground.

He thought that, if he had "four legs, then two, then three," he might satisfy the sphinx's expectations, which seemed sensible enough - but had no effect. Dejected, the rabbit turned around and, sitting down, idly petted the cat statue that had been observing him, finding it cute. That was when he was surprised to hear the sphinx head's mouth open - he had paid tribute to Bast, unbeknownst to him as it may have been. Only cat-worshippers may enter.

Inside the sphinx's mouth, it had the golden, stony head of a bull where its tongue should have been, a bull with the Eye of Horus on its forehead and an ankh around its neck. Walking up to it, putting two and two together, he grabbed it by the horns, just as the saying went, and pulled on them like the levers they were. The adventurer yelped as a trapdoor opened under him and for the few seconds it took for a secret sandslide to drop him off in the crypt.

He only had time to notice the sarcophagus in the room, did not even have time to think about approaching it to open it himself, before the lid was thrown open on its own, almost knocking down the canopy jars around it, as if he had disturbed someone or something that had been sleeping in it when he had fallen in - which he had. With a loud yawn, two black-furred arms wrapped in bandages stretched out of the stone coffin, before a mummified jackal's upper body rose up in it, smacking his lips and scrubbing his eyes as he sat up from his extensive nap. His bleary eyes lit up brightly when he turned to face the newcomer.

"Ah, it's you!" He belched, a handful of buzzing bees flying out of his mouth as he did. "Sorry."

Vaulting out of the sarcophagus, some of the canid's bandages seemed to have stayed behind in it, as if they had been wrapped too loosely, only to rewrap themselves swirling around him after the fact, as if yanked by some invisible force like so many vacuum cords. "You're fast," he said, "quite fast. You made incredible time," he conceded, "but now," he continued, "your quest ends here." The bunny did not seem convinced. "Is that right?" He crossed his arms, tapped his foot and tilted his head, giving a sly look while wondering what to do next.

The guardian nodded and smirked at him. "Quite." The lagomorph started taking step after step, outwardly confident but inwardly cautious, toward the undead, gauging the reaction he got as he did. "There was a way around everything else until now," he asked, "why not you?" The mummy was unfazed. "This time, the only way is through me."

The explorer cocked an eyebrow quizzically. "Anything I can do to change your mind about that?" he winked, idly running a hand through his hair with his other hand on his hip that he had moved slightly forward. The jackal brought his thumb and fingers around his muzzle with his hand over his maw looking up, seemingly really thinking it over before answering.

"Depends," he said, arms crossed, a look of mock-innocence on his face. "On what?" the rabbit asked, pretending to examine his nails. "On how good at it you are," the canid managed to say with a straight face. "Well then," the adventurer repressed a chuckle, scratching him behind the ear and caressing the side of his face, "you tell me."

The guardian leaned into the caress, finger tracing the bunny's chest up to his chin as he reached for a small container by his sarcophagus, easily mistaken for embalming ointment, and which he used to lather up his member for their impending tryst. The lagomorph, turning around in front of the undead, went down on his knees, eagerly looking over his shoulder, put his hands on the ground, and arched his back while reaching as far forward on the ground with his hands as he could to lie face-down flat on his chest, spreading his legs as wide as possible. The mummy licked his lips, kneeling on the ground with his legs close to each other between the explorer's thighs, whose tufted rabbit tail twitched invitingly as he raised his rear in front of the jackal's cock to make it more easily accessible to him.

Lowering his chest down to press it against the adventurer's back, the canid brought his hands on the ground around the sides of the bunny's head, right over his shoulders. Feeling his wet shaft resting between the lagomorph's butt cheeks, the guardian, endeavoring to cross the last boundary that separated him from unexplored territory, briefly supported himself on only one arm, striving not to fall face-down on top of the explorer's back with his full weight as he did, and grabbed the base of his length to aim his tip right up against the rabbit's tailhole. Guiding just the very end of his glans ever so slightly across the threshold to keep his penis well-anchored in, the undead brought his arm back forward by the side of the adventurer's head to spare his other arm from having to keep him up all by itself.

The bunny closed his eyes, letting out a contented sigh, savoring the moment when he felt the mummy's hips slowly pushing, bit by bit, more and more of the jackal's member deeper and deeper into the lagomorph's welcoming entrance under his tail. It was such a release for him, to allow himself to be penetrated like this, to give himself over to the canid who he knew would only find his own release within him, that every hair on his body stood on end. Their bodies were so close to each other's, all along the way, that the guardian could feel the explorer's body heat warming his own from under him, their fur rubbing against each other's.

The tufted tail tickled his abdomen as he determinedly finished pushing his way as far in as he could go, poking at the rabbit's prostate. Pulling back almost all the way out but not quite, the undead repeated his earlier thrust, almost as slowly as the first time, nibbling on the back of the adventurer's neck sending a shiver down his spine as he did. The mummy waited less time before the third thrust, completing it in just under average speed that time, and by the fourth and fifth he had already began to settle into a rhythm, every movement forward and backward building on the momentum that had been built up by the previous back and forth motion in and out of the bunny's ass.

The rhythm had built up in such a way that, in-between thrusts, the lagomorph was always caught for a split-second between missing the previous thrust while remembering it very fondly indeed on one hand, and eagerly anticipating the next thrust while regretting that it had not happened yet, on the other. During the thrusts into his rear, his cock would strain to its hardest, leaking pre as it rubbed against the ground just far enough from the ground that it was not enough to provide enough stimulation to him to get him off, but close enough to the ground that he could not reach down under his crotch with one of his hands to masturbate while he was getting fucked. He was caught between his growing desire to have an orgasm right away and his enduring desire to have the pleasure that the pounding that he was receiving was bringing him continue indefinitely and did not know which one to pick, trusting the jackal to make the best possible decision about when he should climax.

"Ohh...!" The canid moaned as the explorer deliberately contracted his anal muscles around the top's shaft, flooding the many nerve endings along his length with the most interesting sensations as he did. "You are good at this...!" The rabbit chuckled confidently to himself as he heard the guardian's raspy voice praise the warm embrace of his confines in his ear with so much enthusiasm. The adventurer's characteristically sensitive ears shot up when he heard and felt the knot of the male who was mounting him pop into its expanded, locked state near the base of his spine.

Pushing his chest up off the bottom's back with his arms, the undead slowly maneuvered his arms to the side of one of the bunny's hips while maneuvering his legs to the side of the lagomorph's opposite hip. His knot keeping them locked together no matter what, his firm penile bone preventing his penis from breaking no matter how bent it became, the mummy continued turning around until they were head to toe, arms resting on each other's ankles. The jackal whimpered when the explorer started licking his feet, the rabbit feeling him harden inside him as he did, and the adventurer groaned when the canid duly returned the favor, giving his big bunny feetpaws the attention they deserved after so much running and jumping, feeling the lagomorph's butt tighten around his member as he did.

Grabbing the bottom's shins to hold them against his chest, the top rolled onto his side, maneuvering them both so one of them would be on his left side and the other on his right, facing the same way as the strained, inverted penetration continued. The explorer, now that his hands were free, finally reached down to start stroking his cock as the guardian humped him. As comfortable as they were despite the weird angle, the undead had other plans, and finished rolling them onto their backs, still penetrating the rabbit whose legs rested on top of the canid's chest, and whose feetpaws were still in the jackal's face getting licked by him.

Before he could resume jerking off, the adventurer's arms were pinned to his sides by two lengths of mummy wrap coming out of the ground around him. "Told you I'd keep you here a while," the guardian panted as he thrusted downward and forward into the bunny's tailhole. Mercifully reaching down as he felt his own peak approaching, the undead wrapped his hand around the lagomorph's shaft to start pumping it for all he'd got.

"Get ready for it," the jackal smirked. "Yes, please!"

Intensifying his thrusts to finish getting himself off, the canid grunted, seeing the explorer's toes wiggle in his face as the jackal ejaculated in his ass. The rabbit, overjoyed to feel the mummy's seed fill him, felt the guardian's hand speed up around his length as he came, faster than he could resist. The adventurer cried out and squirted his semen upward in a vigorous, wonderful series of spunk spurts that rained back down on their fluffy abdomens.

That was when the vulture, crocodile, scarab and scorpion from earlier all walked into the room, one of them carrying a cat-o-nine tails, each of them more eager than the last for their own turn sitting down on the knot-trapped bunny's persisting sundial until he would also make them come...

BETWEEN THE WORLDS

"Don't act so nervous."

His head darted right to the hyena who had just spoken.

"I'm not nervous!"

But the ram's body language seemed to belie his statement. "If you say so," the hyena chuckled, "I don't mean to make you nervous by saying so." The ram fidgeted. "It's just that it's easy to get nervous if you tell yourself that everyone can tell," she explained. "If you think about it too much, that's what people end up picking up a vibe from," she went on, "and you end up thinking there was something wrong with how you looked in the first place, even if that was never the problem."

But of course they could tell. How could they not?

"People will accept a lot more if you just show up and act like you're supposed to be there, you know?" His eyes looked around at the other shoppers at the mall around them as he listened to her. "But my...!" She looked right at him. He was being loud - possibly risked drawing glares for it. "But my horns..." he caught himself and whispered. "How in the world could they not tell with my horns?" Considering the marked difference that existed between the horns of rams and ewes, this was an understandable concern for him to have had.

"Forget the horns," she waved off. "The horns aren't important," she grinned. In daily life, they usually went by a male pronoun - they were a drag queen, not trans - but they went with a female pronoun when it was time to be in character. And they were definitely in character at this point - that was the whole purpose of their outing.

"Aren't they, though?" he asked. "Well," she shrugged, "to a lot of people, they would be, I suppose," she conceded. "I just meant to help you put them out of your mind for now." She stopped, and thought more about his question. "Have you ever thought about having them removed?" He became flustered, his heart fluttering, butterflies in his stomach and a slight bulge in his pants combining into an undecipherable emotional cocktail.

"Well," he finally settled on, "having your horns removed is a big decision." He looked down, more to avoid other shoppers' lines of sight than to see where he was stepping. "It's not something I'd want to just rush into without thinking about it more first. I mean," he chuckled, trying to make light of his own tension to help dissipate it, "they're hard to put back." She gave him a meaningful look.

"I guess that's true." They kept walking as they talked, the crowd around them changing as they went from store to store. "I'm sorry," he said, "I hope it doesn't make me seem like I'm lacking commitment." She shook her head reassuringly. "No, if anything it's refreshing to see a ram who doesn't rush into things," she winked. "Go at your own pace, darling - we're all here to learn." That seemed to put his mind at ease somewhat.

"They're no piece of cake to have removed either, I can tell you that." He blinked. "You used to have horns?" She rolled her eyes. "I hear things." He strove to weave his way through the crowd to keep up with her. "Oh, of course." He furrowed his brow. "I thought drag queens and transfolk were..." She tilted her head at him. "Well, I heard you'd had your differences." She stopped, and thought about his statement.

"Now and then," she said. "Some straight people get confused easily and put us all in one basket. I can see why they don't like that." They were all decked up in 100% female regalia, wigs, makeup, nail polish, perfume, the works. "Then again, some cis women think we want to mock them, some cis men think we want to trick them..." The ram had eschewed the heels the hyena was wearing for the time being because they were too challenging for him to tackle then.

"You can drive yourself crazy worrying about what people might think," she gestured at him, her hips swaying as she walked, "but everyone has to go through some kind of process where they figure out who they are." She noticed that his body language was slowly catching up to his appearance, his mannerisms becoming incrementally more feminine here and there in understated but noticeable ways, and smiled. "And I mean everyone, honey."

He looked at the other shoppers around them. What had they had to go through to figure out who they were, for those of them who knew, he asked himself? What were those who didn't going to? How many of them did, and how many didn't? How did you even know whether you knew yourself or not? She gently grabbed his arm in a gentlemanly way to steer him just barely away from walking straight into a plant. "Just keep your wits about you," the hyena winked.

"But yeah, some of the transfolk I've known started out just as drag queens, and eventually figured out it went deeper than that." The ram kept thinking about how other people could hear them while they talked about this, people they didn't know, and consciously turning away his reflex to let that stop him, like the tide turning away debris on a shore. "And some people I knew who thought they might be transfolk eventually figured out they just liked to dress up."

It was fun, he had to admit. "That's why you've got to have a space where you can test the waters for a bit," she went on. "See where you fit in the grand scheme of things." He was definitely something, he just wasn't sure what. "Thanks for helping me with that," he said. "Eh, I had to have someone help me take my first steps too," she waved off, somewhat flamboyantly. "Wouldn't be where I am today without Bjorn the narwhal, I can tell you that."

The ram found that he had to release a lot of tension he usually kept in his shoulders, as though being a man had to mean being like a football player. "Wasn't he a drag king?" He was puzzled by this. "He loved that people couldn't tell for sure without already knowing." She seemed to remember him fondly. "His female and male personae were just as exaggerated. It was all a performance, if you asked him, so why not just embrace the absurdity of it all, you know?"

This was proving to be an instructive outing, he thought to himself as he struggled to adjust his panties so they wouldn't crush his balls without having any of the other shoppers notice. "So we're here, now... performing, as you call it?" He tilted his head at her. "Well, I don't mean that it's not for real, don't get me wrong. I mean it's as real as you believe it, as real as people believe it. But a lot of things are like that," she clarified, "a lot more than most people think."

"I don't know what I believe anymore sometimes," he sighed. "Bit of a crisis of faith I guess." The ram scratched one of his horns absent-mindedly as he spoke. "I know what you mean, sweetie," the hyena sympathized. "For all you know, maybe you only want to be a girl some of the time and stay a guy the rest of the time, maybe you're a bit of a girl and a bit of a guy all the time, maybe you're neither, maybe you are a girl... maybe you're a guy who likes to dress up."

He tried to adjust his bra over his breasts without having shoppers notice, which proved to present different challenges than he had faced adjusting his panties earlier. "So how do I find out for sure?" The hyena spread out her hands amiably as she answered, almost knocking something over as they walked near it in the process but just not quite. "Take your time," she said, seemingly not noticing. "There's no wrong answer. Remember the scientific method."

The ram looked at her askance as he stopped himself from reaching for what she almost knocked over, belatedly noticing she hadn't. "Pay attention to detail, observe closely, take notes, check your observations against each other, interpret the results... keep an open mind," she grinned, looking much like her feral namesake. "Ask yourself the right questions. When was it that you first thought about crossdressing? Why are you trying it now, not earlier, or later?"

He reached for his wig, checking how it felt around his head to make sure it was on straight. "Seriously? When I was a kid... Promise you won't laugh, okay?" For once, the hyena looked entirely serious. "The other kids would make fun of me because of my weight. They'd say I must've been pregnant or, when they'd see my chest in gym locker rooms, they'd say I had 'man-boobs,' that I should wear a bra." She put her arm around the ram's shoulder.

"I didn't even know what a bra was. That was how I learned that," he continued. "So at first, I hated the idea. It was something I was already being told I'd be supposed to feel bad about, but, at the same time... It was something they implied I'd have liked enough to do despite their teasing. So I'd have had to like it a lot," he explained. "It briefly made me wonder if there was something to it, if it would've felt nice. But the teasing eventually made me forget about that."

The hyena scratched the ram behind one of his ears. "People tend to say men can get away with having more weight on them than women can, but I'm sure that did you little good," she empathized. "But it's telling it still came down to you being like a woman somehow." He shrugged. "Rams are supposed to be manly. It doesn't help that we belong to a species where the female is literally 'ewe,'" he stuck his tongue out. "They had a field day with that one."

"Kids are assholes," she said unselfconsciously with two kids within earshot whose parents' glares she ignored completely. "They latch onto gender because it's all about power, and kids feel powerless. Why do you think most people find drag queens funnier than drag kings?" He imagined Bjorn would have known the answer to that. "I'm not sure." He applied some lipstick to his mouth pensively, without reflexively finding it counterintuitive. "Why do you think?"

She intertwined her fingers behind her head, an air of complete confidence about her as she spoke. "Because women start out with less power in wider society than men, women who imitate men are pretending to have more power than they do, but men who imitate women are pretending to have less power than they do - at least superficially," she explained. "The predatory mind doesn't understand intentional vulnerability. It short-circuits it somehow."

The ram smiled. "And that short-circuit leads to laughter." She shrugged. "Sometimes it does. But the laughter of bullies is nothing like the laughter you hear at a drag show. When you're giving the show, when it's your show, you own the show, you own that laughter, because you fought to earn it, and it proves you're good at something. Bullies grow up to become hecklers, surrounded by a crowd that hates them anyway because that crowd came to see you."

He noticed a male lion looking at her, seemingly transfixed by her beauty as they walked by him, without a visible hint of queerness about him, but spellbound. "Being vulnerable has to be risky though, doesn't it? I mean, that's why they call it that." She gave the lion a coy look, implying that he'd like what she had if he could get it, but that he wasn't going to. "That's true. But being vulnerable isn't the same as being weak," she completed as they walked away.

"Is that what you meant by 'superficially' vulnerable earlier?" She laughed that characteristic hyena laugh. "Men have been complaining about women's power over them for a lot longer than women have had any 'superficial' power. There's more than one kind of power, just like there's more than one kind of intelligence. Feminine power is just power men are taught to suppress, just like masculine power is power women are taught to suppress," she snorted.

"So, you do what you do to feel...?" He was searching for the right word. "... Complete, I guess," she provided. "Besides, everything is different for us." The ram scratched his head. "For hyenas, you mean?" She talked with her hands a lot. "Well, yeah! For us hyenas, it's women who have power, and men who don't. Feral female hyenas can't even be raped, their genitals are shaped to resist." The ram was putting the dots together. "So you get power back by imitating them."

She pointed her finger right at his face without looking at him, so emphatically that he had to be careful not to get it in his mouth. "Now you're catching on!" she congratulated him. "Oh my gods, that guy's checking you out," she said, putting her hand on the ram's arm as she spoke. "Is that right?" He almost couldn't believe it. "Yeah, that rhino over there," she pointed subtly. He was. "Do you think he can tell?" She grinned. "He likes what he sees. Who cares if he can?"

"Hey!" Just when the ram had the presence of mind to look back at the rhino confidently, his mole girlfriend backtracked to get his attention. "Come on!" The rhino pried himself away from the ram grudgingly. "Aw, she's no fun," the hyena pouted. "He shouldn't have been if they're exclusive, but still. Felt good, didn't it?" She nudged him with her elbow. "We don't know she was a girl," he reminded her. "You're right, we don't!" she chuckled. "Just looked like one."

"But since you asked, yes," he admitted, "it felt pretty good." She winked at him. "Good thing he left before he saw your massive boner, or we'd have known he could tell for sure." He blushed, trying to cover himself up as she put a hand on his shoulder reassuringly. "Relax, it's all good. You got thrilled. Affirming, validating events like that can be huge turn-ons for people," she grabbed his hand as they walked away, "that's part of why so many of us seek them out."

He shook his head in disbelief at everything she was getting him to do that he always thought he wouldn't. "When I first came out to myself, I thought, at least I'll never have to see a bra... They were something I wanted to get away from at the time," he revealed. "And now that you and I are wearing some?" she asked. "I wish I'd started wearing one all the way back then. But I'm glad I finally came around after all that time." "Hear, hear," she welcomed.

"Now let's go buy you a handbag, darling."

Once they had been finished with shopping, his heart started beating faster as she led him back to her apartment. She had more than shopping in mind. But the more he felt himself getting anxious, the more he reminded himself of everything she'd said to him, and the more he wanted to listen to the part of himself that wanted to go along with what she had in mind. "Sit, sit," she said, patting the bed she sat on next to her, and he complied, still hard from earlier.

She wrapped her arms around him, and started making out with him, passionately. They were friends, but friends on a date, after all - this was a part of their world. Giving himself over to her, the ram wrapped his arms around her as well, running his hands across her back as their tongues swirled around each other's. He moaned when she caressed his horns, bringing his hand to her thigh before she grabbed his crotch altogether, just as he reached for her own.

"What a well-endowed girl you make," he said through their making out. "You're no slouch yourself," she breathed into his ear as she grabbed his ass. "Tonight, you're going to be my girl," the hyena said while pulling the ram's shirt off, "and I'm going to be your guy." The ram pulled the hyena's shirt off in turn, pressing their chests together to feel bras touch. "I can live with that," she said, tugging down at the hyena's pants as the ram nibbled on his neck.

"No," the hyena said as the ram was about to take her own bra off, "keep it on." She desisted. "I am," the hyena winked, pointing at his own. "Okay," the ram said, reluctantly pulling away her crotch from being pressed against the hyena's so they could both unzip and pull down their pants. "Keep these on too," he added, pointing at the ram's panties after they'd removed their pants. "Oh, you will too!" she said, pleasantly surprised. "Oh yes," the hyena grinned back.

"I like the sound of that." The ram ran her hand through the hyena's wig tenderly, as though it had been his real hair. "Wow, you even have stockings on," she commended the hyena. "Oh, those are my everyday stockings," the hyena smirked, copping a feel of the ram's chest through her bra as he spoke. "I wear those all the time." He guided the ram gently onto her back, slipping her cock out from the side of her panties as he laid on his side next to her lovingly.

"Now, let's start with this..." the hyena said, slipping his finger around the panties' fabric to press it against the ram's taint, making her cry out. "It's fun down here, isn't it?" he went on, sliding his finger back and forth between her cheeks while nibbling on her ear. "You like taking it, don't you?" he asked, wrapping his maw around one of her breasts through the bra fabric. "Uh-huh..." the ram nodded weakly, her mind wrapped up in everything she was experiencing.

"That's good," the hyena said, moving his hand from her taint to wrap his fingers around her shaft, "because you're going to," he finished as he started moving his hand up and down her length. "Oh, yeah..." "Just a moment," the hyena said as he paused his stimulation, getting up to grab something from his nightstand. "Get up," he asked the ram as he ripped open and unrolled a condom onto his dick, "just let me lube up." He grabbed a small bottle, and did.

The hyena went to lie down on the bed on his own back, grabbing the ram's shoulders to guide her so that she'd be sitting right on his crotch. The hyena slipped his own member out of the side of the panties he was still wearing as the ram played with one of his nipples through his bra and, grabbing the ram's hips to position her properly first, he reached over to move the fabric of her panties out of the way of her descent onto him, and gently brought her down on him.

"Ahh..." Still holding the ram's hips, the hyena slowly moved his hips up and down in and out of her a few times. "Now, this is a good position, because it gives you a lot of control..." He kept his hands there for guidance, but tried to meet the ram's movements and follow her rhythm with his own. "So take that power into you, my girl..." the hyena panted, "... and make it your own." He could feel her ass tightening around his penis as their hips met faster and faster.

For a moment, the ram thought she was going to be able to cum just from the prostate stimulation that her wild ride on the hyena's crotch was giving her, but when she felt herself getting close but not quite there, she just couldn't make herself wait any longer for it. "Stroke me!" she begged, "stroke me again." The hyena, grinning, obliged, feeling her butt twitch around his shaft in time with how fast he was masturbating her penis, knowing she was close.

As she pushed herself down on the hyena faster and faster, the manual stimulation that was added to her pounding brought her overboard, and she moaned as he felt the ram's thick spurts of semen landing on his chest. Pulling her up out of him, he removed the condom from his shaft, guiding her onto her back on his bed again. Sitting on her chest, he grabbed her horns, and started thrusting his cock in and out of the groove formed by her breasts pressed through her bra.

His thrusts became a blur, a low growl resounded in his throat, and she could feel his warm load of spunk cover her face and her lovely, lovely breasts...

BUGFUCK

The skunk had been walking in this field for what felt like way too much time for how long it had seemed like it should take for him to do when he had first walked into it. He wasn't sure of why this could have been the case, but he felt like he'd lost all sense of time during his wanderings somehow. He kept trying to remember how he'd gotten to where he was, the precise route that he had taken to get here, but it was as though his mind had been recoiling at the task of having to do so.

He had not remembered having altered his perception on purpose in any way before having come here, so no explanation for the current haziness of his mind readily presented itself to him either. Nevertheless, it was as if he couldn't make himself care about it too much, as if any time or energy that he would've spent on trying to figure it out could have only been a waste of time and energy that would have been better spent otherwise. The most important thing, the thing that he had to focus on at the time, was to keep going, to figure out how to get out of where he was, and to get back home, then everything would be okay, and he could reassess things more clearly from that better vantage point, he reasoned with himself.

The mephit kept putting one foot in front of the other, vainly digging through his mind for any clue as to which direction would have been the right way for him to go, with no working phone on him to show him the way. He thought of asking someone which way to go, and he would have done exactly that, if anyone had presented themselves to his sight, but the more he stopped and thought about it, the longer it had been since he'd run into anyone else who he could have asked. Curious. Yes, that was the word for it. Curious.

Oh well. He was sure that he'd have to end up somewhere or other, if only he walked far enough.

He picked something out of his teeth absent-mindedly as he walked, swallowing a small remaining piece of what had been... a mushroom! That was it, he'd eaten part of a mushroom that he'd run into earlier that day. He was not usually the kind of person who would have eaten a random mushroom he'd have run into, that would have been a rather silly thing for a person to have done in this day and age, with everything we know about everything, wouldn't it?

He must've had some kind of field guide telling him it was a good idea to eat it, or have seen a picture of it in one before, it stood to reason. Why else would an educated person of our time do such a thing, the mammal asked himself? Perhaps he had checked to make sure it was safe to eat on his phone? But he had no working phone on him.

The fact that he couldn't remember why he would've eaten it only struck him as a little odd, but not enough for it to ring any bells for him. Maybe someone else had told him it was safe to eat? But if he hadn't seen anyone in a long time who could've shown him the way, who would've he run into, who he would've trusted at that, who would've told him something like that? Yet there was the piece of it he'd dislodged from his teeth as incontrovertible evidence that he'd eaten something, somehow.

The wandering skunk had always had a hard time finding his way around. Born with the curse of having had a lousy sense of direction, when phones had become the way we are used to them being now, able to show you your way to anywhere from anywhere at all, he'd greeted it as one of the most welcome blessings that the heavens had ever bestowed on someone like him. When he was out without it, he felt as though something that had become a part of him had been missing, and he was always worried about becoming unable to find his way around when he would need to do so. What then?

And yet... There could be a guilty, perverse pleasure to being lost that a secret part of him regretted sometimes. He hoped that it had never been an unconscious part of why he had used to get lost a lot, since situations had occurred in which the results of it had definitely not been the least bit comedic, which would have made it not only embarrassing but a genuine problem. And yet, when it was legitimately not his fault he was lost, and he did not need to concern himself with the consequences, there was sometimes something to it that was hard to describe.

It was a little bit like when the power would go out, and the mephit would suddenly be forced to remember everything else in his environment from which his electronics would usually take away most of his attention, and find new joy in it. There was this feeling hovering in the air about him that, for the time being, anything was possible, even things that he normally would not have expected to have been possible, outside of the boundaries of his everyday realm of experience. In our heavily surveilled, well-regulated era, he was somehow still heading into the unknown.

Was he seeing things?

He thought he noticed something moving, far off in the distance. But what could it have been? It was just a speck at first, but even from a distance, it seemed too small to have been a tree, but too large to have been a bush - and there was movement, whatever it may have been was moving, he was sure of that. Could it have been two small trees swaying in the wind? It was a little windy, but was it really windy enough to make trees move this much, even small ones? He wished he'd had better eyesight.

No, they were people.

He was shocked, and dropped into a crawl, when he realized that this was what they were, hoping to hide near enough to the ground that they wouldn't notice he was there. As he crept forward toward them, he was able to take in more information about what they were, and more information about what they were doing. He hadn't meant to walk in on them like this, but now that he had, he had to figure out how best to react to it, his mind racing to come up with something, anything in time.

Boy and girl.

The boy was a humanoid dragonfly, as tall as the mammal inadvertently watching them was. His large membranous wings fluttered behind him periodically as he moved, and his bluish, translucent skin shimmered breathtakingly as the bright rays of the sun's light were reflected everywhere on him. His long, prehensile, segmented tail went up, back, down then forward behind him, continuing in front of him between his kneeling legs to come back up and finish just in front of his face.

The skunk knew that faceted eyes have no eyelids and that with them you can see pretty much everywhere around you. There was little chance without cover that he was anywhere outside of the dragonfly's field of vision, but it didn't seem to matter. The bug's antennae were flailing wildly on his head, as though he were trying to contain an overwhelming emotion and didn't know what to do with them.

The girl who was standing in front of him was a snail, the mephit noticed. Had he become really small, had they become really big, or had their bodies simply been made to have been the right size for most other humanoids to interact with in the first place? He couldn't tell, but he eventually decided that it didn't matter, since the situation remained the same either way.

She had a dark brown shell and light beige skin, completing each other's tones without clashing, her shell big enough to provide some measure of protection, he imagined, but not so big that he pictured her having to strain to carry it on her back when she walked. Her head was thrown back, her mouth open, her eyelids closed over her eyes as though she were in another world all of her own. Her skin was moist, and while it didn't glitter the way the boy's skin did, you could still tell it was well-hydrated from how parts of it shone when the sunlight hit it. She had a smaller chest than average perhaps, but well enough for her to appear female.

Her hands went down in front of her, holding the kneeling dragonfly's head where it was in front of her crotch firmly with her fingers around his antennae as if to discourage any thought he may have had of moving it away before being done preemptively. The mammal saw that the boy's long tongue, made to reach in and lick nectar right out of flowers, was extended all out of his mouth and that he'd inserted most of it in the girl in front of him, pushing it in and pulling it out of her repetitively, slurping up her copious juices as one of his hands persistently rubbed a small protrusion on her over it. His second hand went around her hip, one of his fingers moving up and down in her rear end, as he stroked himself with his third hand and fingered his own backdoor with his fourth.

Finally, his tongue wasn't alone in its efforts to fill her up. The dragonfly's tail went up in front of him right inside her, sliding in and out of her entrance even as his tongue slithered around it, sending shivers through her that seemed to drive her wild. The skunk knew that dragonflies had a second shaft at the end of their tails, one that was every bit as sensitive with its nerve endings and capable of emitting seminal fluids as the one between the boy's legs was, and he could only marvel at how extraordinary it must've felt to have been able to do that.

Or to have been on the receiving end of it, he mused.

He was more than ever unsure of what to do. Lost in the throes of erotic empathy, he really, really wanted them to be able to finish what they were doing, really didn't want to become a reason for them to have to stop, so he was very afraid that they would notice him and put an end to their amorous encounter because of him. At the same time, his erection right against the ground as his crawl had slowed to a stop really, really wanted for him to be able to stick around long enough to see them finish, so that he could carry the visions and sounds and smells from the experience around in his mind for the rest of his life whenever he'd play with himself to push himself over his threshold without fail.

The snail abruptly stopped moaning just when it sounded like she was getting close. Her hands still on the dragonfly's head, she felt him withdraw his tongue and tailcock from her vagina, pull his finger out of her ass and stop rubbing her clit all at the same time. She whimpered, still holding his head in place as if to remind him that he had some very important work to finish, frustrated.

"Why'd you stop?"

He tapped on her mound with one of his antennae and leaned his head sideways toward the skunk, grinning.

"We seem to have a visitor, don't you know."

She made a sound that made it seem like it may have been worth it to have been interrupted after all. Cold sweat poured down the skunk's back, a shiver going down from the nape of his neck all the way to the tip of his striped tail. So he'd been found out after all. He hadn't meant to! Really!

"We... like visitors, don't we, my love?"

She caressed his head behind his antenna as she spoke - he seemed to like it, looking up at her smiling as she did.

"But," he continued turning his eyes from her to the mephit next to them, "we like participants even more, don't we, darling?"

Hint, hint! The mammal was taken completely off-guard. It sounded like they wanted him. In all his years of fucking, he'd never, not even once, tackled the mysterious and unknown lifeform known as 'girls.' Then again, he'd never been offered such a perfect opportunity to attempt the impossible as a threesome with a snail girl and her dragonfly boyfriend before. He could hardly think of a better occasion for him to try something new for once, just to see where his disorientation would take him.

The skunk got up from the ground, fighting off his shame and shyness with all his might as he looked at them, and the way they looked at him finished reassuring him that they liked what they saw. "You, back there," she gestured to her boyfriend in a commanding tone, who promptly stood up to go stand behind her as the mephit meekly disrobed in front of them, and the bugs looked on at what he had to offer with unconcealed interest. "You, down here," she told their visitor with the same assurance, pointing to the ground between her legs where her boyfriend used to be.

She moaned when the male insect's tail re-entered her vagina from behind as the mammal knelt in front of her. "You help now," she grinned, grabbing the skunk's head to bring it to her crotch, and he didn't have to be told twice. The mephit, his hands on her hips, stopped and looked at what was in front of him like an engineer looking at an unfamiliar set of controls.

"Lick this," the dragonfly said, reaching down with one of his four hands to spread her labia apart and indicate her clit to the mammal, "sort of rub it with your fingers and lick it like it tastes really good, she'll like it a lot, you'll see." That's right - it was harder for most girls to get off from just penetration without additional help, the skunk remembered having heard that somewhere. She looked over her shoulder to her boyfriend as the decidedly non-straight mephit started his foray into the unknown below.

"Go on," she encouraged her fellow bug by wiggling her cheeks at his crotch behind her, "get in, get - ah, yeah!" she let out when he pushed his crotch cock into her well-lubricated rear as well. Their visitor licked from the base of the male insect's tailcock that was half up in her vagina, all the way up to her clit as he rubbed it the whole time, licking around the dragonfly's balls in-between circling her grateful mound with his differently textured mammalian tongue. He knew that girls couldn't get off from something in their rear the way guys could because they didn't have a prostate, but the combination of something in both holes and his own oral and manual stimulation seemed to be doing wonders for her.

"Oh that's so good, oh, OH...!"

He felt her entire body shake above him and heard her ecstatic cooing while she pushed his head as close to her crotch as it could go and he licked her frantically as her orgasmic fluids spurted out of her tunnel, offering him the fresh new delight of a delicious taste he'd never enjoyed before as he saw both of her boyfriend's cocks move in and out of her faster than ever. She grabbed him by his headfur, careful not to yank on it painfully but firmly enough for him to know she was pulling him to stand up in front of her and, as the dragonfly pulled his tailcock out of her, she sultrily wrapped an arm around the skunk's shoulders, pressing with her other hand against his lower back toward her crotch. "Your turn in here now," she intoned, and, by that point, he was happy to oblige.

Slipping inside her, he sighed contentedly when he felt the warmth of her entrance welcome him as though he'd always belonged in it, the mucous she secreted as a snail acting as natural lube in addition to all the pre that her boyfriend had already left in there. So this was what he'd been missing out on for all that time, the mephit thought as she wrapped her legs around his waist, lifted up between them with the butt-humping dragonfly holding up her ass and shell behind her, reaching down to rub her clit from behind even more. The mammal was already wondering how long he was going to be able to last when he felt the male bug's shaft push its way into his own backdoor, going down between the snail and skunk's legs to find its way back up into him.

This had to be the best feeling in the world. If this feeling was a drug it'd have to be illegal.

The male insect seemed to agree, as his insistent hip-grinding against his beloved's rear end grew to a frantic blur and his heartfelt grunt left the mephit no doubt that he'd released his pent-up tension from his crotch into her ass. The tailcock kept pistoning in and out of his furred butt, no less aroused for the other shaft's climax, the back-and-forth motion hitting his prostate each time finally forcing the mammal beyond the point of no return, and the skunk ejaculated into her. His ass contracted so firmly and tightly around the dragonfly's tailcock as he squirted his load into her that the insect's shaft also sped up its pace, until the mephit soon welcomed spurt after spurt of the groaning bug's semen deep into him under his tail.

The mammal panted as he withdrew from the snail and as the dragonfly withdrew from both of them, also breathing heavily. The skunk could feel the juice that the male insect had pumped into him slowly drip out of his butt, and the snail pushed the mephit's head back down to her crotch to make him lick his own musky seed from her nether regions like a good boy cleaning up after himself. When all three of them had finished licking each other clean, still intoxicated with the heady smells and tastes of their shared sexual fluids, they all collapsed in a big, happy heap half on top of each other in the field to catch their breaths.

"So... Do you guys know how I could get back home from here?"

CITY OF GOLD

"I feel like I don't belong here sometimes."

The visible half of the moon seemed to hover over them far above, its light reflecting ever so slightly in a small stream of water that had mysteriously been left to run on the street right by the sidewalk to find its way into a sewer grating that was far behind the two mammals by then.

"What do you mean by that?"

The jaguar almost kicked an empty can on the sidewalk then thought better of it. He would have only done something like that because he had seen other people do it before. What would it do to alleviate his frustration about not belonging to vent as if by rote? The can had done nothing to him.

"Do you mean this city?"

The feline shrugged as the raccoon tilted his head at him. It was the middle of the night, so life was now mostly measured in terms of light, islands of lit windows up in skyscrapers meaning that people were still awake. Were they burning the midnight oil from their day jobs, working night jobs, enjoying their nocturnal lifestyle with others, or simply restless, wondering what to do to get to sleep or to make the night worth their while somehow?

"I don't know. I don't think so. I think I mean, like, in the world." The scavenger's countenance darkened momentarily. "You don't mean you want...?" The jaguar shook his head with a look of strained patience at the misunderstanding for which he blamed himself. "No, not like that, mapachitli," he reassured his friend. "I don't know," the raccoon apologized, "people get weird when they lose their jobs sometimes. It seemed like the right thing to ask," he strove to explain.

The feline had just lost his job for the most recent of over a half-dozen times in the previous two years. The scavenger, meaning well, had offered to take him out on a great big walk all throughout the city that night to help him drown his sorrows in shared nocturnal urban exploration, as they had done on occasion now and then when the situation had seemed to call for it. The raccoon cursed himself under his breath for his misstep.

"I understand, but that's not what I meant. I just mean that..." The jaguar struggled for a moment, looking for the right way to put it into words. "I just meant it feels like things should be... different somehow." The raccoon scratched his head. "In a deep, underlying way, it just feels like this world is made so that I can't... belong in it in that way," the jaguar gestured to drive his point home as he spoke, "not the way people mean when they talk about feeling like they belong somewhere."

The scavenger nodded as they walked, encouraging the feline to continue. "It's like there's something... missing." They walked through a gas station's empty parking lot. "I can't put my finger on it." The jaguar half-ducked, covering his head with his arms while moving aside to go around a cloud of gnats that a streetlight's oasis of illumination had revealed to him in his face, then weaving back the other way to keep from walking into a fire hydrant. "Or like there is something here that shouldn't be, either way," the feline stuck his tongue out, "maybe both."

A dog barked in the distance, probably left on the balcony of a high apartment somewhere.

"How do we know what should or shouldn't be anywhere, though?" The raccoon almost immediately frowned, noticing a crumpled up piece of wrapping paper on the ground near them - clearly he did not seem to think that it belonged where it was. "I guess I don't know," the feline answered, "it's just an impression I get." The scavenger gave the jaguar a knowing look. "Oh, I see."

They could hear a few cars going in the distance, in spite of the fact that it was the middle of the night. "Why do you think?" the raccoon asked, walking around a puddle. "Maybe everything that's here does belong here," the feline considered, "except for me." The raccoon tried to sound less worried than he was. "Where do you think you do belong, then?" The jaguar shrugged.

"I don't know. Nowhere, maybe." He smiled, trying to reassure the scavenger by mitigating his emotional honesty with half-comedic detachment. "I wish there was somewhere else to be," he chuckled, "but there's not." He breathed in the smell of freshly watered lawn grass, admitting to himself that he did not find it altogether unpleasant. "So I'll just have to do the best I can here."

The raccoon smiled in a way he hoped would come across as encouraging. "There's hope for that, you know," the scavenger said as a flock of pigeons descended to peck at seeds on the ground on grass near them. "Maybe," the feline conceded. "Do you ever wonder what this place used to be like before it was like this?" he asked, gesturing at the skyscrapers, parked cars and asphalt around them as he did.

"What do you mean?" The raccoon smiled, noticing pacifist, anarchist graffiti on a wall that it cheered him up to see. "You mean before the city?" A stray cat ran out of an alley behind them, yowling, vanishing into another alley before they could get a good look at it. "I mean before any of the cities that are here now, yeah." The scavenger nodded in understanding. "That's a big one, I can see that."

The summer wind blew stronger around them, loudly reminding the world that it was a force to be reckoned with, even though no one could see it. "I wish I could see what stood here then sometimes... I wish I could talk to the ground beneath my feet, to ask it what the people who used to walk on it were like then, that it could tell me about them." A squirrel climbed a tree near them, carrying an acorn up to a branch in its mouth to eat it.

"But who knows," the jaguar shrugged, "I may have had just as much of a hard time for different reasons then and there, for all I know." Crickets chirped above around them, still as eager for love as chirping crickets had been thousands of years ago. "That may be," the raccoon granted, "but you're not wondering about this in a vacuum, are you?" The scavenger moved his foot in mid-step to avoid stepping on a bug on the sidewalk.

"Do you know one of the things I like best about you, mapachitli?" The raccoon shook his head. "You make living here seem natural. You seem to... belong here, in this city, for lack of a better word." The scavenger shrugged. "I've always lived here. It's easy for me to take it for granted." The feline furrowed his brow. "But I've always lived here too. Well, not here here, but, close enough, you know? So what could I be missing?"

Rats scurried out of a trash can near them, carrying off their precious, discarded cargo. "Well, one person's trash is another one's treasure, as they say," the raccoon answered, "people don't all experience places the same way." The jaguar looked up. The clouds around the moon looked like a shroud for it. "Or time," he answered, almost staring off into space while still paying attention to where he walked as he did.

"What do you mean by time? Do you mean time in terms of different periods in history, or on a day-to-day basis?" The feline thought about the question for a moment before answering. "Either. Both." They walked by a public monument, possibly commemorating someone who had done awful things for all they knew. "We haven't always spent time the way we do." They walked by an empty children's park, its colors and designs, cheerful during daytime, appearing vaguely creepy in the moonlight, like a reminder that their childhoods were over, swallowed by the night.

"I mean, take us right now, for example," the jaguar pointed at the raccoon as he spoke, "neither of us is really 'supposed' to be here right now, are we? We're not prevented from being here now, but we're discouraged from it, aren't we? This late at night, we're 'supposed' to be at home in bed. We're expected to be." The raccoon nodded, listening. "It's weird that we'd be out here now on some adventure like this, in this world."

They walked by a public fountain, and caught themselves staring at its unexpected beauty in the moonlight. "Weird, but not impossible," the raccoon grinned, "but you're right. You and I don't experience time the way normal people do, in a way that has to do with why we're out here now, doing this." The steps of the stairs that led down to the subway went down on their side, but it no longer ran this late, so there was no point in going down them.

"I love nights like this, don't you? The air is alive with this sense of infinite possibilities, permeated by it, you can almost breathe it in... It's like anything could happen, you know? It's the night that belongs to us," the raccoon concluded, "not the other way around." The smell of food wafted through the air from a nearby restaurant that was still open, making the jaguar salivate in spite of himself. "To do with as we please?" the feline asked.

"To a point," the raccoon answered. "I do like the sound of that," the jaguar said. "Imagine a world where people can just sleep when they're tired, eat when they're hungry, have sex when they're horny, say what they feel when they feel it... Do you think a world like that could work?" The raccoon smiled. "I don't know for sure, but it's a compelling thought. The night is a little bit like that, isn't it? The rules aren't the same."

When they came to an intersection with a red light, the jaguar stopped, even though there were no cars to be seen anywhere around them, while the raccoon kept walking across the street, turning around to look at the feline with a look of surprise on his face before backtracking to rejoin him incredulously. "Even in the middle of the night, with no cars around, just because the red light is on, you still stop at a crosswalk?" The scavenger shook his head in disbelief. "Dude, this is your time," he added, putting his hands on the jaguar's shoulders, "you don't need to live by the rules all the time, you know?"

The raccoon turned back to start crossing again, turning to look at the feline to see whether he was going to follow him or not this time, briefly motioning for him to follow. "Well, you don't have to cross now if you don't want to," he shrugged. He had already started walking back to the starting side of the intersection when the jaguar, having changed his mind, started walking toward him to join him halfway through his way back from the middle of the street.

"Well, there's no telling what can happen from this," the scavenger grinned as they finished crossing the street just as the perpendicular green light turned yellow. "See, your problem with those jobs is, you're approaching the problem completely from the wrong angle," the raccoon added, spreading his arm to his side for effect. "You shouldn't be trying to work at those jobs in the first place. They're bad for you." The feline seemed surprised at the scavenger's candor.

"You're not doing something you really believe in. I mean, you can do hard things if it's something you care about. You can do something that's just to survive even if you don't care about it and do stuff you care about the rest of the time, if it's easy. But to do something hard, that you also don't care about?" The raccoon winced. "It's not weird that you'd walk away from that. It's not something you should have to do at all."

The jaguar pondered the meaning of the scavenger's words. "How do you make a living, though?" Fallen leaves swirled in the wind on the sidewalk before them. "You mean me? You? Or people in general?" the raccoon inquired. "People in general. Well, me, really... No, you, come to think of it," the jaguar's train of thought went, "I can't pick pockets, you know." The scavenger rolled his eyes at him.

"I don't pick pockets! That's just something my enemies say about me. I just know sleight of hand. Why do people always think raccoons are thieves?" The feline had not wanted to put him on the defensive. "I... My skill base is limited for getting around having to work at those jobs, I meant. I do wonder how you live sometimes, I don't think you've ever told me, you know?" The raccoon gave him an innocent look. "By my wits."

The jaguar was the one who rolled his eyes at the raccoon that time. "What does that mean, you're witty at people, so they give you money?" The scavenger pouted dubiously. "Money isn't everything, you know." The feline looked at how the shapes of their shadows changed as a light opposite it threw them onto a brick wall they walked past. "People say time is money, do you believe that?"

The raccoon scoffed. "I'm not sure I believe money is money, kitty." The jaguar laughed.

"But it makes it so we have to be believable," the feline said. "We have to go in there, and put on a mask over our faces to hide how we feel every day." The raccoon grinned, pointing at his own face. "I can see why you'd think that'd be easier for me." The jaguar smiled. "We jaguars used to make our own masks... but that was a long time ago." The scavenger pointed at weeds growing in sidewalk cracks.

"Look at them," he said, "they're certainly not supposed to grow there, and yet, somehow, they push their way up through the cracks. When they can't break the asphalt... they bend it." The raccoon pulled a spray can out of his pocket to hand it to the jaguar near another brick wall. "Have you ever drawn graffiti?" The jaguar shook his head. "Didn't think so. Try it!" The feline grabbed the can and looked at the wall, contemplating what to draw.

"First thing comes into your head." The jaguar, on instinct, started drawing an elaborate network of corners, lines and curves, intermingling into a hypnotically intricate pattern. The raccoon was impressed. "Good work! Where'd you see that?" The feline shrugged. "It just seemed like the right thing to draw." The raccoon pulled a joint out of his pocket, lighting it to draw on it, and handed it to the jaguar while holding the smoke in before letting it out.

"You just slowly breathe it into your lungs and hold it for a bit while it's lit," the scavenger explained, "make sure your lips are airtight around it, and don't squeeze it too hard or hold it too long. You just let it do its thing, and slowly blow it back out." The jaguar stared at the tip's flame increase while he drew in, breathing in through his nose as well while he did, and felt as though sentient plant roots were snaking their way in his brain to tickle his neurons.

His eyes almost blurred for a split second when he let the smoke out of his lungs, and it hit his pharynx on its way back out in front of him, as if it were going off to spread the thoughts it had coalesced into in his mind while it had been in it to the rest of the world. "Never did that either, huh?" The jaguar tried not to laugh. It was not especially funny but he felt like laughing. "No, not really." He felt tension in his shoulders dissipate that he did not even know he kept there.

"Makes everything a little more beautiful, doesn't it?" The raccoon lit up, and handed it over to the jaguar again. "It does, actually!" The feline was surprised. The raccoon coughed a few more exchanges in, before he shared the last draw with the jaguar through a 'shotgun,' something else the feline had never done. It was like they were... They were kissing. It was a kiss. When the scavenger threw down the joint to twist his foot over it, they just kept making out.

"Let's transgress everything," the raccoon whispered into the jaguar's ear, pulling down their zippers, "let's paint the town green." The feline could not believe that they were about to do this, but here they were, in an alley, between a dumpster and a trash can, where they pulled their pants down to their knees. The jaguar turned to face the wall and to put his hands on it, the raccoon's hands on his shoulders, around his waist, his maw nibbling on the feline's neck sending shivers down his spine to the tip of his spotted tail.

The raccoon's striped tail swished behind his rear as he spat in his hand and reached down to cover his shaft in spit to make it slipperier. Guiding it so its tip would be pressed against the jaguar's entrance, his other arm wrapped around the feline's chest, the scavenger half-knelt to be low enough to get in, and thrusted his hips forward and up under the jaguar's tail, making the feline whimper on his way in. He started with just his glans but, securing his grip to make sure he would not slip out, petted the jaguar while nibbling on his ear to help him relaxed as he slowly pushed the rest of his way in, starting by just staying there for a moment.

The raccoon held onto the feline's hips, keeping the jaguar's butt close to his crotch so that his length would not slide out when he pulled some of the way out so that he could push back in, hoping he was giving the feline's ass a proper chance to adjust to his width. The jaguar arched his back to make himself more easily accessible to his top and, when the raccoon judged that the feline's tailhole had wrapped itself around him snugly enough for him to stay in if he removed his arms from the jaguar's backside to wrap them around his chest, the feline reached behind himself to grab the scavenger's buttocks himself, to push him deeper inside. The raccoon could feel their balls slap against each other's every time he pushed in, almost lifting the jaguar off the ground in front of him, whose cock was now leaking pre all over the asphalt before them.

This was everything forbidden... If they were discovered they could get in real trouble. Somehow how much it raised the stakes of their illicit tryst drove them wild. The raccoon knew that he could slacken his penile muscles and the jaguar knew that he could loosen his anal muscles if their goal was to last, but every instinct told them to come as fast as possible, and they tightened their muscles as much as they could, increasing the friction on their most sensitive nerve endings to stimulate their growing pleasure through the roof.

"I'm so close!"

The jaguar had never come without manual stimulation before, had always wanted to, but there was a first time for everything. He could feel that, this time, the repeated pokes at his prostate were going to set him off, he could not believe his luck. The moaning feline's ass contracted around the raccoon's cock while the jaguar ejaculated on the wall. The scavenger humped him at top speed to catch up.

"Oh, shit!"

Police sirens started going off nearby, making their hearts race, but the raccoon growled, not letting the feline go, he was so near, he had come so far, it would have been such a shame not to have an orgasm. Impressing the urgency of the situation on his mind, he let go of his every inhibition, and let the full primal force of his animal mind drive him up into the jaguar as though everything depended on it. As the raccoon's penis finally twitched and shot his semen up deep in the jaguar's ass, the lines of the graffiti that the feline had drawn in front of them started glowing.

Before they knew it, they had pushed through the graffiti on the wall, into somewhere... else.

The raccoon shook his head. "What happened?" Jungle and ziggurats surrounded them now. The gods accepted all kinds of sacrifices, not only blood. Any major bodily fluid would do. The expression of astonishment on the jaguar's face was the most indescribable thing that the raccoon had ever seen.

"I think I'm home..."

CURRENT

They came from the sea.

The beach was virtually deserted. There was no one there to interfere with them in any way, as far as the eye could see. They emerged from beneath the waves in no particular order, not quite simultaneously but not one at a time by any means either, not at all like a procession of any kind would.

This was their spot.

They were busy people, who could not do this more than four to six times a year. It was not easy for them all to be able to get time off from everything that they needed to do at all, let alone for them all at the same time. So, when they did have time to meet here, they had to make sure that as many of them could be there at a time, so that they could make the most out of the time they would have, and they had every intention of doing that, then and there.

There were ten of them.

They had been doing this for long enough that they had already had time to try a number of different arrangements with each other. Halfway between planning and spontaneity, every structure was a new experiment in discovery, each time figuring out more things that they liked and that they did not like about what they did, getting to know themselves and each other just a little better each time. It was like a puzzle game that they played together, in which they played the roles of the puzzle pieces themselves.

They all won every time. The game was designed for shared victories.

By this point, they knew each other fairly well, even beyond the parameters of the game that they played with each other now and then, so that the shyness and awkwardness of their first times had progressively given way to mutual knowledge and shared experience. They were a team by then and, when one of them moved, the rest of them fell right into place. They greeted each other warmly, exchanging welcoming gestures and expressions, bringing back the comfort level that they had established around each other's bodies to the forefronts of their minds for the occasion.

Their humanoid shapes formed a haphazard lineup against the shining backdrop of the clear blue sky. The sea turtle and the octopus found each other, wrapping their arms around each other, their beaks counterintuitively finding just how to lock with each other in a passionate embrace, seeming like they had really missed each other a lot after all this time. The shark held the lanternfish's chest pressed against her own, feeling the dangling, lantern-like protrusion that came out of the lanternfish's forehead brush against the grey, cartilaginous back of her own neck over her shoulder.

The crocodile petted the toad's head approvingly as the amphibian snaked their extendable tongue down the reptile's throat through their long, open maw, trusting that it would not shut itself down unexpectedly on their tongue as they did. The eel and the orca ran their hands all over each other, a spark of static electricity passing between them as they explored each other's bodies. The catfish nibbled on the side of the seahorse's neck as the seahorse, feeling the catfish's whiskers on his face, brought his arms around their hips to press their crotches as close together as they could be.

As they backed away from each other to reform into an inward-facing circle, the turtle, with a smirk of anticipation on his face, broke from their ranks to lie on the ground on his back among them facing up. His erection standing proud after all that making out, he motioned over to the octopus to come sit on his crotch and, moving to be near him and facing away from him, she lowered herself on his scaly cock, carefully guiding it into her rubbery anus as she sat. The reptile put his hands on her shoulders while she put her hands on the ground around him behind her, and the cephalopod also laid down on her back to rest on his shell, which was solid enough to withstand far more.

She splayed all six of her arms on her sides like a six-pointed starfish, raising and spreading her thighs in the air as she did. They were arms, not tentacles, that is, while they did have a few vaguely sucker-shaped protrusions that ran across them, they consisted of an arm and forearm ending in a hand, separated by an elbow. Since she had three on each side, one pair starting at her shoulders and continuing with two other pairs starting below it, she thought about them in terms of her upper, middle and lower left and right arms, respectively.

The crocodile knelt in front of her middle right arm, the eel knelt in front of her lower left arm, the catfish knelt in front of her lower right arm, the toad knelt in front of her middle left arm, the orca knelt in front of her upper right arm, and the seahorse knelt in front of her upper left arm. So the orca faced the seahorse around the octopus' head, the crocodile and toad faced each other around the cephalopod's chest, and the catfish faced the eel around the mollusk's hips. The lanternfish approached the octopus from the front and, first stepping over her legs to set her feet around the cephalopod and turtle's hips, she then knelt down so that she would be sitting down on the mollusk's crotch, her knees around their flanks and her feet behind her, around the turtle's thighs.

The shark finally approached them as well, putting her hands on the lanternfish's shoulders from behind to kneel behind her rear and in front of the octopus' spread-legged crotch, which were in the same spot by then. The shark reached down to grab ahold of her lower cock - she had two of them - with one hand, while first reaching into the octopus' vagina with a finger on her other hand, moving it in and out of the cephalopod a few times so as to get her juices flowing to make things easier for both of them. She pulled her finger back out of the mollusk and, spitting on her hardening lower length, guided it so it would slip its way right into the octopus' depths under her, feeling her balls brush against the ass-fucking turtle's testicles on her way in.

The cephalopod licked one of her middle right arm's fingers in kind, the crocodile rasping their thanks as the mollusk slid her wet finger up into the reptile's vagina. The shark brought her finger to her mouth, sucking the cephalopod's fluids from it and, grabbing her upper cock, started fingering the lanternfish's vagina from behind as the shark slowly stroked her own upper cock as well. The octopus raised her lower left arm, bringing her rubbery hand up to rub the eel's clit lovingly, hearing a faint buzzing sound come into being as she did, as though she had turned on some kind of electronic device.

When the lanternfish's tunnel was nice and moist, the shark spat on her stiff upper cock as well and, gripping it firmly, pushed it up into the lanternfish's vagina from behind, without pulling her lower cock out of the cephalopod's vagina as she did. The mollusk brought a finger from her upper left arm to her mouth and, moistening it, brought it up between the seahorse's legs so that she could penetrate his vagina with it. Reaching in front of herself around the lanternfish's hip with her left arm, the shark started rubbing the lanternfish's clit with her left hand.

The octopus extended her right lower arm to start rubbing the catfish's clit with her lower right hand, their whiskers twitching in delight at the cephalopod's touch. Knowing that the turtle enjoyed being on either side of a good pounding just about equally as much, the shark brought her right finger into her maw and, covering it in her spit, she reached under the turtle's balls with her right hand to slip her finger into the reptile's ass, and the mollusk felt his length stiffen in her butt at the welcome intrusion. The octopus, struggling not to let her pleasure distract her from everything that she needed to do, lifted her middle left arm to wrap her hand around the kneeling toad's penis.

The lanternfish purred as she felt the shark gently nibbling on the back of her neck. The cephalopod finally brought her upper right hand near her face so that she could lick it wet and slide her right upper finger up into the grateful orca's vagina. The crocodile, still enjoying the mollusk's finger moving in and out of their vagina, scratched the catfish's back next to them with their right hand from the back of their neck all the way down until the reptile's hand reached the catfish's buttocks and taint, and they snaked their scaly right finger up into the catfish's vagina from behind under their fish tail.

The eel, her whole body as slippery as eels were renowned to be, only had to bring her right hand on the toad's behind before her right finger slithered up into the amphibian's rear, plugging it into them. The octopus looked into the lanternfish's eyes, enjoying how much fun the look on her face made it clear that she was having. The crocodile reached over to their left to start rubbing the orca's clit with their left hand, even as the cetacean's vagina was still being probed by the cephalopod's upper right hand, and the orca turned to her right to kiss the crocodile's left cheek in thanks.

The toad brought their right hand down on their right to the seahorse's crotch to start rubbing his clit with their big amphibian fingers as the catfish turned to their right to kiss the valiantly humping shark's left cheek. A third eye opened in the mollusk's forehead when she felt the turtle that was lying down on his back under her start nibbling on the back of her neck. The orca reached down to her right to add her part to the efforts of the octopus' plumbing of the reptile's depths to her right, rubbing the crocodile's clit with her right hand in front of the cephalopod's middle right hand.

The toad's left hand found its way up the back of the eel's right thigh until they reached under her, plopping one of their bulbous fingers into the eel's vagina like some kind of weird organic sex bead. The lanternfish reached over to her left to grab the catfish's boobs with her left hand while the mollusk stared into the shark's eyes meaningfully as she penetrated her and the lanternfish, since the lanternfish being translucent made it possible for the shark and octopus to see each other's faces right through the lanternfish. The turtle brought his right finger to his mouth and, making it wet, brought it up and to his right to slip it into the orca's anus above him.

The seahorse turned to his left to lick the toad on their right cheek, pleased to discover that the amphibian's sweat seemed to have mild psychotropic properties as he did. The catfish reached to their right to grab the lanternfish's left boob with their right hand. The orca brought her left arm across from her to put her finger into the seahorse's mouth, making him suck on it as if it were someone's cock. The eel turned to her right to lick the toad's left cheek, her mind also reeling from the way that the amphibian's sweat started enhancing every touch she felt.

The catfish reached behind and under the crocodile's tail with their left hand, making the kneeling reptile groan when their finger entered the crocodile's ass. The turtle brought his left hand to his maw and, making it wet, reached up to push his finger up into the seahorse's butt, who was so overwhelmed by how good it felt that he had to wrap his left arm around the toad's shoulders as his knees buckled to even be able to keep standing. The lanternfish reached to her right with her right arm to play with the eel's boobs as she kept bouncing up and down on the shark's upper cock and on the cephalopod's crotch.

The toad extended their tongue from their mouth across the mollusk's chest to wrap it around the crocodile's penis in front of them, using their salivating, prehensile, red appendage to stroke up and down the reptile's length. The seahorse brought his right arm onto the orca's chest, enjoying how pleased the cetacean seemed to be at the attention that her nipples were receiving from him, and the eel's left hand found its way onto the lanternfish's chest to start cupping the lanternfish's right boob. The turtle's thrusting up into the octopus' ass intensified, making her shake visibly from above and the shark's thrusts in and out of the lanternfish and cephalopod's vaginas became frantic, the female and male penetrators' semen building up at the base of their respective urethras.

At that point, everything happened at once.

The eel and catfish came first and, when they came, they took everyone with them. Their bodies were made so that they could generate electricity, and the others had the right kind of kink for this to be something that weakened their resistance to going over the edge. When the two electric fish reached their climax, they became completely electrified, starting a cascade reaction of cause and effect that spread current and orgasms throughout their aquatic playmates like a lightning bolt.

The shark felt the lanternfish's vagina contract around her upper cock as her lantern-like forehead protrusion lit up like a streetlight, illuminating all the rest of them as though she had been a lamp that had just been plugged in and received the power that she needed to function. The turtle, toad and mollusk all felt the seahorse's vaginal fluids cover their hands as they were expelled from his vagina while he yelped in ecstasy, reaching his peak. A waterspout erupted from the top of the orca's head and a soulful whale song escaped from her throat as she closed her eyes while she was getting off, also as though it had been activated by some mysterious mechanism.

Ink spurted from the thrashing octopus' vagina as she hit her release, darkening the shark's lower cock and the turtle's penis under it as she did. The cephalopod, catfish and orca all felt the crocodile's love juices spill out of the reptile's vagina while the toad could taste the crocodile's squirting semen with their extended tongue, receiving it on their chest. The mollusk felt the amphibian's penis twitch in her hand as they shot their own load of toad spunk across the octopus' chest up on the reptile's chest, both their jets of seminal fluids crossing each other's path as they came out of their shafts like crisscrossing water jets at a water fountain.

The turtle felt the current flowing through his body, the shark's right finger firmly wriggling in his ass, and the cephalopod's butt contracting around his length as she came. Hearing her three hearts beating so fast against his chest as he thrusted up into her wildly, he reached the point of no return, his cock pulsating as he pumped his reptilian seed way up into the mollusk's ass. The shark, feeling the lanternfish's vagina contract around her upper penis and the octopus' vagina contract around her lower penis as both of the women that she was penetrating went overboard, grunted while thrusting her way across her threshold.

Emptying her balls completely, she ejaculated her semen through both of her urethras, out of her slits and deep into the cephalopod and lanternfish's warm confines that welcomed her so well. They took a moment after they had all come to catch their breaths, each of them taking care to look into the eyes of all nine of the other participants, hoping to make sure that everyone who had been involved had had a good time. The current would keep them all well powered up for the coming months, until they would slowly run out of power over time, and meet to recharge themselves back to full the next time all over again...

EBB AND FLOW

The mongoose and the fish sized each other up in the ring. The lights of the bar illuminated their match brightly so that the audience could see the contestants. It was important that they be able to distinguish the fight clearly, since some of them had made bets as to which of the two would win, and would not take kindly to perceiving any sign of foul play.

The lights reflected on her iridescent scales, making them shine in his face almost blindingly at times. The vast majority of them were a deep red, with light hints of orange and pink here and there across them at the most, but her head frill, dorsal fin, and tail fin were intermingling streaks of purple and yellow, erupting from her body like plumes of flames, and she wore blue shorts, a turquoise top, and grey bandages wrapped around her hands and feet. His fur was a comparatively drabber admixture of shades of brown, beige and tan, and he wore green cargo shorts, a white tank top, and fingerless black gloves.

His kind had been drawn into betting matches since long ago, when it had been discovered that their immunity to venom's neurotoxins had made them more than a match for many snakes in the ring, and had remained in them ever since. Her kind had been into them ever since they had been pitted against each other in her homeland's fish tanks for gamblers to bet on the outcome as to which of them would defeat the other, renowned for their fierceness. This would not be the first time that either of them would fight by a long shot.

They eyed each other's shifting guard and footwork, looking for an opening to get through.

He turned around into a back-facing crouch under her punch, putting his hands on the ground for a high back kick at her. She crouched under it, but before she could retaliate he was already kicking down at her head with his other foot, which she crossed her forearms over her head to stop. When he half-cartwheeled to her side out of the way of her front sweep at his arms that were supporting him, his eyes widened as he thought he saw her foot flicker like a lighter, leaving a half-circle of scorch marks on the ground on its way.

Her leg shot back up into a knee strike stopped by his lowered crossed forearms. Cold sweat dripped down his back as he arched it just out of reach of her spinning back kick that followed, his whiskers almost singed by the torch that her foot had temporarily turned into. He barely crouched under the round kick she brought the same leg right back into, thanking his lucky stars that he had short hair since he could feel that, if his long hair had been trailing behind his descent, it would most assuredly have been set ablaze.

How was she able to do something like that, he asked himself?

After she had crouched under his side-splitting handspin kick, he arched his back out of what he thought would be a single-legged backflip kick, but was forced all the way back into a backbend to dodge her other leg when it shot forward after the first as she went into a front split in mid-flip, the crossing flames producing an eye-catching effect as her feet crossed paths. Using the momentum from pushing himself back on his feet from his backbend with his hands, he went for her midsection with a headbutt right as she landed, hoping to catch her off-guard and knock her off-balance. She moved out of his way, grabbing his shoulders and borrowing his momentum to throw him face-down on the ground behind where she used to be.

He narrowly rolled aside onto his back as her fiery ax kick burned the ground where he had just been face-down, and rolled back onto his feet behind him so that her subsequent kneeling with the same leg would not pin his torso to the ground. She span back as she stood, aiming the back of one of her elbows at his head, barely stopped by his crossed forearms on his side. Finally, she picked him up right over her head, and threw him over the ropes, forcing him to land, on his feet as it may have been, right outside the ring.

He lost.

The fish back-somersaulted on the ring, raising her arm over her head with a smile on her face as the raccoon referee declared her a winner. The mongoose was just glad he had been lucky enough to lose to her without having gotten burned by her feet in the process, he thought to himself. While he counted himself fortunate that she had not left an indelible mark on his body, she had definitely made her mark on his mind.

But when he tried to track her down after the fight to congratulate her on her victory, he found that he was unable to find her. He had not seen her go to collect her prize money but, when he went to ask the one who was in charge of giving it to her, was told that she had already received it. No one who he asked in the bar was able to tell him when she had left, let alone for where, and no one seemed to know her on a personal basis.

Typically victors enjoyed sticking around after a fight to enjoy the acclaim of the crowd, the free drinks that were sometimes offered to winners, the offers to dance by impressed would-be suitors, and the congratulations of the vanquished, yet someone, or something, had pulled her away from these victory celebrations. Did she have an appointment with someone who she did not want to disappoint, an obligation to help someone because of an emergency, was she in some sort of trouble that she needed to get away from, or did she simply not like crowds? Any of these theories could have been possible, or it could have been anything else that he could not think of, she may even not have put that much thought into it for all he knew.

Time passed.

As months went by, when he was not fighting, he would continue hitting the dance floor, as he had already been wont to do, mingling with the other celebrants, sometimes picking up or being picked up by some of the other guys who danced there when luck would be on his side. His thoughts would sometimes drift to the fish he had fought against that time, and he would catch himself wondering why she had left so abruptly, where she had gone off to - what had happened to her. In short, while in some ways it was easy for him to remember that there were other fish in the sea, since the bar was swimming with them, she still somehow ended up becoming the one that got away.

It had been practically half a year.

While out looking for a good time, the mongoose spotted a guy on the dance floor who really caught his attention. The light show was in rare form that night, interspersed as it was with moments and places of darkness for effect. While he could only do his best to distinguish the guy's coloring in the shifting lightings, it appeared to the mongoose, as he observed the other dancer while continuing to dance, that he was looking at a bare-chested male fish, one covered with deep red scales and with a purple head frill, tail fin and dorsal fin.

Squinting as he rhythmically made his way nearer to the fish in question, the mongoose even saw a slight streak of yellow in the man's frill and fins. Noticing that the mongoose was checking him out, the fish smirked at him as he danced, seeming satisfied to have caught his attention. He changed the direction he was facing and the way he was dancing in such a way as to let the mammal know unmistakably that he knew that the mongoose had been looking at him, and that the fish was now checking him out as well with just as much interest as he had been receiving, hopefully for the same reason.

The mongoose, surprised, had not been prepared for such a reaction, and did not have a planned response for it. If anything, it had not even occurred to him that getting close enough to be able to make an assessment about the fish would naturally also put him in a position in which he would be subjecting himself to being evaluated through someone else's perspective himself. The fish winked at the mongoose, his arms flowing around him in the rave beat and lights like algae caught in the current to emphasize the seductiveness of his curves to the mammal with as much welcoming elegance as the fish could muster, and the mongoose's nether regions informed him that the fish's performance was definitely having an effect on him.

So they danced.

It was as if the night club had become an ocean around them, the other dancers with the multicolored shifting lights dancing across their bodies looking as if they were huge swarms of fish having the light of the sun reflecting on their scales as they swam near the ocean's surface, the smoke machine's fog like hovering clouds of salt caught in the light of a coral reef. As the dance floor around them teemed with life, as they became a part of that life together more and more, even though he would think that he recognized a dance move here and there that reminded him of how the female fish had moved when they had fought, the mongoose's preoccupations about the male fish's identity slowly receded to the back of his mind. They may have been siblings, she may have been male on the inside and transitioned to male on the outside since he had last seen the fish for all he knew, or really, they could simply belong to the same species, and coincidentally both have been there at different times for different reasons, it would not have been that far-fetched.

None of it mattered. He was having the time of his life, and it looked like the fish was too.

As they danced, the mongoose eventually turned to almost rub his backside against the fish's crotch as they danced and the fish, not to be outdone, soon turned to nearly rub his own rear end against the mammal's crotch, eliciting another noticeable reaction from them both below their belts. They ran their hands all across each other, longing through each spin for their eyes to lock with each other's once more, grabbing and letting go of each other at all the right times, their dance telling the story of the glory of being together and of the wretchedness of being apart as they moved about. It did not take long for the two men to start passionately making out on the dance floor, lost in each other's arms among the other couples who continued to dance the night away around them.

When the fish invited the mongoose back to his apartment, he wholeheartedly accepted.

This was going to be the moment of truth, the mammal thought to himself as his heartrate increased while they went into the fish's dwelling. The fish wasted no time leading him to the bedroom, since the rest of the tour could wait, and getting no argument from the mongoose about that. As they continued darting their tongues in and out of each other's mouths, their wandering arms held their chests pressed so closely that they could feel each other's heartbeat. They also felt each other's hard-ons pressed against each other's, and the fish only stopped kissing the mammal long enough to pull the mongoose's shirt off.

Their maws locking again, their groping hands reached down to undo each other's zippers then pulled down each other's shorts, and the fish removed the mammal's underwear, revealing his erection for him to see. Finally, the mongoose went down to pull off the fish's underwear with his teeth, and a big, dark orange boner sprang back up from the fish's crotch after it had been removed. The fish, smirking, pushed him back on the bed onto his back, and dove forward on top of the mammal after him, kneeling between the mongoose's thighs around his hips with their chests pressed against each other's with their mouths still exploring each other's relentlessly.

Pre leaked out of both of their cocks as they rubbed them against each other's, making their abdomens wet as their balls brushed against each other's. The fish backed up to kneel by the bed side, holding the mongoose's thighs wide over his shoulders as his tongue expertly prepared the mammal's entrance for his impending arrival to the vocal appreciation of the mongoose, whose hands reached down to gently hold and scratch the back of the fish's head in thanks as his toes wiggled over his kneeling lover's back. The fish reached for a small container on his nightstand, covered his length in lube before kneeling back on the bed between the mammal's thighs with their chests pressed against each other's, and the mongoose reached down under his tail to guide the fish's shaft so its tip would be right against his tailhole, raising his lower back for access.

Putting down his hands on the sides of the mammal's head, over his shoulders, the fish thrust his hips forward. They looked into each other's eyes, seeing each other's expressions change as the enjoyment they felt while the fish's penis slowly penetrated the mongoose's ass warmed their bodies, adding to their own pleasure by vicariously experiencing each other's. The fish bent down nibbling on the mammal's neck, progressively increasing his slow ins and outs until they settled into a more average back and forth rhythm, and making the mongoose moan and relax his butt around the fish's cock with abandon in response. It felt so good, the warmth spreading throughout his pelvis like wildfire, to be dominated, pushed down on the bed like a ship dragged underwater by a sea monster, his shaft rubbing against the top's abdomen as the fish's length slid in and out of his tailhole - if only he could have reached his own member, the mammal thought, wrapping his arms around the fish's shoulders...

The fish, as if he could read the bottom's mind, raised his chest upright and, lifting the mammal's shins up on his shoulders, kept humping the mongoose as he grabbed the bottom's penis with one of his hands to start stroking him. Being masturbated while he was being fucked felt intense, and the mongoose whimpered as his ass tightened into an even more stimulating vise around the fish's pistoning cock in response. The fish strove to strike the right balance between paying enough attention to the hand job that he was giving and not slowing down his thrusting, bringing the mammal's foot to his mouth to lick it and make him shiver.

The fish rotated his pelvis, penetrating the mongoose in a corkscrew motion to explore every nook and cranny of the mammal's rear with his shaft, and poking the bottom's prostate from various angles with his cock in ways that made the mongoose's knees weaken on the top's shoulders, before returning to a steadier back and forth that picked up its pace. Taking the mammal's pleas to heart, the fish briefly paid less attention to his thrusting to focus on stroking the bottom's shaft as fast as he could, making every hair on his body stand on end. "I'm gonna..." The fish's hand became a blur around the mongoose's length and he smirked, satisfied, feeling the mammal's ass contracting around his member even more tightly than before while thick spurts of the groaning bottom's ejaculate erupted on his chest from the tip of his penis.

Lowering himself back on top of the bottom, the fish kissed him again as he felt the mongoose's legs crossing behind his lower back and the mammal's hands reaching down to push on the fish's ass, bringing his cock even deeper into the bottom's rear end. The top, focusing on his thrusting again now that he no longer had to masturbate the mongoose, felt the warm-blooded creature's torso below his, contrasting with his own cold-blooded body, fur rubbing against scales. The fish rammed his penis in the mammal's butt as firmly as if he had been being fucked in the ass himself, and he soon felt his seminal fluids gathering at the base of his shaft. His pleasure building his way beyond the point of no return, he reached that thrust when he knew that, even if he stopped moving completely, he was going to ejaculate.

"Finish inside..."

Rather than stop, the fish kept thrusting harder and faster as he felt all the right valves in his pelvis open and close for his spunk to emerge, his pleasure multiplying exponentially with every thrust beyond ejaculatory inevitability, even during the first seconds of his orgasm before any of it had come out of him yet. Feeling of the mongoose's body against his, the warm furred ass wrapped snugly around his pounding member, his own rear twitched from the impulse that ran down toward the base of his spine under his tail as he reached his peak. Grunting with effort, his momentum starting from his feet up his legs through his pelvis, the fish's prostate pulsated rhythmically between his taint, ass and shaft.

"I'm coming!"

His pelvic muscles squirted jet after jet of his semen with all the force that his accumulated pleasure had given it through his urethra to inject it deep within the mongoose's tailhole with enraptured looks on both their faces. With every twitch of the fish's length in his rear, the mongoose felt another load being fired in his tailhole, quivering helplessly as so many of them started coming in so fast in a row that it forced some of it to start to drip out of his ass around the base of the fish's cock before the top had even finished ejaculating in his butt. Pulling out after having finished pumping his seed into the bottom, the fish laid on his back next to him, sighing contentedly and running his hand up and down the mongoose's body affectionately as they dozed off.

"Oh, shit!" The fish reached down to her crotch, finding her previous endowment missing, looking at the mammal with a stricken look on her face. "I didn't remember it would be tonight..." He was certainly surprised, but it at least partly explained the resemblance he had noticed. He looked at her compassionately, encouraging her to continue. "You see, my people are male half the year, and female half the year... It's part of our life cycle." It had not occurred to him this was something that happened. "You'll probably want me to leave now," she finished dejectedly, getting up to get dressed. But he put his hand on her arm.

"I'd be up for round two... if you are. Ready for a rematch?"

She smiled, relieved, and rolled onto her back as he climbed up on top of her, smiling and kneeling between her thighs just as she had knelt between his. He pressed his furred chest against her scaled breasts, his pelvis rubbed against her clitoris, and their tongues played more hide and seek in and out of their mouths. His hands on the ground around her head, he looked into her eyes, let her guide his tip correctly, and pushed his cock into her vagina.

Penetrating her was not so different from humping another man's ass, he thought to himself, panting happily as he felt her pelvic walls contracting around his length. He rotated his pelvis to explore her entrance much as she had explored his own not so long ago, before returning to a steadier, slippery back and forth that soon brought him back to that same recognizable sensation. "Can I...?" She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, grabbed his ass to push his penis deeper into her, and locked her legs behind him. "Yeah, do it...!" He buried his face between her neck and shoulder, thrusting faster and faster into her as his dam burst.

"OH...!"

Her climax tightening her around him, his thrusting hips a blur, he ejaculated squirt after squirt of semen deep into her, crashing into her like a wave...

"There's something I'd like to ask you about your body," he asked, "I have to know."

"What is it?"

"... How do you do the thing where you light your feet on fire?"

She laughed.

FOR SCIENCE!

The otter had been working on this scientific project for such a long time.

If this worked, it would be his crowning achievement! If it failed, it would have been a lot of time, effort and resources down the drain, never to be heard from again. He flicked his whiskers in mixed apprehension and anticipation as to what the results that he would get were going to be.

Gingerly holding a glass tube over a bubbling beaker, the genetic engineer was careful not to let drop any more than he was supposed to so that nothing would blow up in his face and, more importantly, ruin his experiment. He held his breath as the drop fell, his brown furred ears flattened against his head as he breathlessly awaited the result. He had so much riding on this, the mammal thought to himself when the drop finally hit, and began to mix with the solution below it.

Nothing.

The mustelid's countenance darkened noticeably. He stood and waited over the mixture, waiting for something, anything to happen. This could not possibly be all that he had been going to get out of all of that. It would have been too unfair, it would not have made any sense, it would have been too illogical for it not to have worked at all, the scientist lamented in frustration.

He picked up the beaker in his furred paw, gently jostling it back and forth, hoping against hope that he would get better results if only the primordial soup beneath him was incrementally better mixed than it had been at first. His efforts turned out to have been in vain nonetheless. He could never tell in advance which of his projects were going to be a success and which ones would be resounding failures, a lesson that he already knew, but that he continued having to learn all over again.

The researcher's whiskers drooped even as the new liquid that he had poured settled at the bottom of the beaker, inert. He felt something else droop down, along with his mood, but the less to be said about that, the better, he stopped and told himself. He blushed, even though he was the only one in the room.

He had not noticed that, in his excitement about the impending results of his experiment, his blood had rushed to his extremities, and that his lutrine manhood had been straining against the fabric of his pants. When it had failed, he had flopped back down so fast that it was difficult for him to explain it away to himself as him having had too much coffee pressing against his bladder to keep himself awake enough to work, inadvertently causing him to rise to the occasion from the inner pressure. Correlation may not have proved causation, but it did not preclude it, either.

The end of his tail twitched in irritated embarrassment as his attention drifted away from his work to wider questions in the rest of his life around it. What had become of him? Was this what his life had come to by that point?

People had always told the otter that he may as well have been married to his work. It was a figure of speech - a common expression that people would often use, without always fully thinking about everything that it could be taken to imply. It was true that he had no love in his life but his love for his research.

Science was the first thing that he thought about when he got up in the morning, it was the thing that he worried about the most throughout the day, it was the last thing that he would think about before he would fall asleep at night, and he would even dream about it as he slept. Had his love for his research reached a point where it had evolved into physical attraction, the final straw that broke the camel's back and made his detractors more right than they could have ever imagined? Had the genetic engineer gone for so long without the touch of any but his own brown paws down his pants that he had fully sublimated his attraction to other living things into getting stiff when his work went well, and flopping down when his projects flopped?

He had some psychotherapy training himself, he stopped and remembered. If someone had come to him with a question like this asking him for his advice about it, he continued his reasoning, what would he have told them? "Are you happy?" "Does it keep you warm at night?" Ah, but the therapist who diagnoses himself has a fool for a patient, the mammal chided himself, and sighed dejectedly.

"An otter never tries doing the same thing the same way twice," he told himself, and tried to smile. That was what made them such persistent researchers, he encouraged himself, straightening his wrinkled lab coat as he did. His attention was quite gone from his physical surroundings by then, and he stared off into space waiting to see where his ongoing train of thought would take him, looking up from his experiment quite oblivious to the rest of his lab around him as he did.

His experiment did remain completely inert as he pondered, just as it had started out doing in the first place. It was another one of his experiments, one that he had already given up on and forgotten about a long time before that, which started having unexpected results behind him unbeknownst to him then and there for some reason. Had most of the best discoveries not been caused by accidents for so much of history, after all?

The mustelid gasped, feeling something cold and slippery suddenly wrap itself around his ankle. What in the world could have been happening to him, he asked himself as he turned around to face his creation that was surprising him so? What he saw turned out to have been something that he could never have been prepared for by anything.

It was an amoeba.

It was as tall as he was, and it was almost as wide as it was tall, just not quite. In all his years of research, well into domains and kens that could have easily been referred to as having made him into a mad scientist by mediocre minds, he had never seen anything quite like it, not until just then. It wriggled and writhed before him, almost seeming like it was trying to communicate something through its wavering, aquatic dance, yet almost certainly only inadvertently expressing its own internal states to the world by doing so.

It was very different from seeing it through a microscope, even though his many observations of such creatures through these devices made its identity unmistakable to him nonetheless. In the world of the infinitely small, even though he would have been the first to tell anyone that the realm of creatures invisible to the naked eye was not to be trifled with, at least because of his scientific training, he felt as though he could be expected to have some level of control over it. One of them had never extended its flagellum toward him to wrap it around his ankle, this much was for certain.

Now that it had crawled out of its vat, it was the erstwhile microscopic being that was in control, and the tables were turned on the researcher as it was his creature that was now going to use him as a part of its own quest for discovery of the world around it. Was this what he had been bucking for all along with his meddling experiments, he asked himself? And, now that the inevitable had finally happened to him, how did he really feel about it, he asked himself? As the amoeba continued to ooze its way nearer to him and its watery appendage crept its way up his pant leg he felt a small tent forming in front of him further up.

Crap.

He should have been able to see this coming: all the signs were there. Not only had he accidentally gone far enough into mad science to have created a giant amoeba that was about to do something to him, he wasn't quite sure what, but he'd become sufficiently perversely obsessed with his science projects that he was going to stand there and let it do its thing, just to see what was going to happen next. He hoped that he would survive whatever happened, as he had no desire to be simply devoured by it, but it felt so refreshing, so cool to the touch, there was nothing rugged or acidic about the hastily formed tendril, only something that felt like a soothing balm on an aching wound, the aching wound of his unfulfilled lust.

Should he chance it, should he not? Were the risks too high, was he letting his latent attraction to this mutated freak of nature cloud his judgment about what a threat it could still represent to him? This would be his last chance to try to use his combat training to fight off this potential attacker, if he wanted to bet that this was what this was. His lutrine boner already felt like it was about to rend his pants altogether by then, when the flagellum finished reaching up his leg in his pants to rest its tip up against his perineum, seeming to wonder what to do next.

"For science!"

The genetic engineer considered reaching down and trying to direct it where he wanted it to go, or at least to pet it in approval of what it was doing, but he did not know enough about how its sensory system might have been altered by its change in size to determine how well it would react to this treatment, and it seemed to have been getting a clear idea of what it was doing. As the first appendage slowly slid up and down between his cheeks under his tail, a second tendril had already wrapped itself around his other ankle, inching its way past his buckling knees on its way up to replace the first flagellum that was teasing his entrance when it moved away to cup his balls instead. A large, musky stain had already formed on his pants crotch and he gasped when the second appendage pushed up in his rear, slipping in as easily as if it had been made from lube itself.

The helpless mammal had the answer to all of his questions from earlier, yes, he had always wanted this, no, it had never been enough, yes, it was finally going to be enough, yes, finally, forever, just like this, oh yes...

As the amoeba's first tendril moved away from his balls to wrap itself around his erection, two more emerged from it to push their way down his pants at the hips on his sides, pulling them down as they continued extending themselves to remove them from his legs entirely. Panting excitedly, he abandoned all thoughts of resistance as he removed his lab coat from his upper body himself. The lifeform's nuclei were rearranging themselves in interesting patterns and its shape and color continued to shift in front of him as it got nearer and nearer the longer the experiment went on, his scientific curiosity would not allow him not to notice.

Could it have been getting turned on by perceiving the otter's naked body somehow? He had no way to be sure, he thought to himself as four more flagella came out to wrap themselves around his wrists and ankles, holding him firmly in place as a fifth emerged at crotch level to start rubbing his balls while the first started stroking him and the second started moving in and out of his ass. He moaned uncontrollably at the amoeba's ministrations, his moaning becoming muffled when yet another appendage extruded from it at face level to shove its way down his throat.

The creature was so near to him that he could feel its cool skin by then, the same on the outside as on the inside, unable but unwilling to move on his own other than to meet its slippery intrusions with enthusiastic abandon. It was all the freshness of the joy of swimming on a warm summer day in sentient, sexual form, a burst of play into his life of work that he welcomed into his life just as he welcomed the amoeba into his quivering body while every strand of hair on him stood on end. The lifeform started merging into its own tendrils as it advanced enough to begin wrapping itself around the mustelid's limbs and tail, engulfing his glans with a watery protrusion even as it kept stroking him with another flagellum.

His entire body shook as he felt the inserted appendage conclude its feverish pistoning with a remarkable spasm that made him feel like it was discharging something in his butt with the greatest pleasure it could feel. His back passage irresistibly clamping down around it as it did, the soothing pressure up against his prostate weakened all his resistance, giving himself over to it completely like a stringless puppet in its grip. The creature felt his balls twitch and he yelped helplessly as they emptied themselves into spurt after vigorous spurt of his musky lutrine semen through his pulsating shaft and into the creature's welcoming, watery embrace.

Dazed from his orgasm, he did not resist when the creature continued to engulf him, finishing entering him through his ass, mouth, ears, nose, pores and urethra, until he completely contained it and it completely contained him. At first there was the thought somewhere in the back of his mind that he would not be able to breathe but his lungs did not heave and shake, there was no panic, it was as though his body was now made for whatever had happened to it, for whatever it was going to be from then on. He blearily opened his eyes, shaking off the remaining buzz of sexual bodily chemicals from his mind as he took in his new form.

He extended his arm as a flagellum all the way to the wall, and it flailed as he retracted back into his arm socket from the wall like a whip or a power cord on recoil. He extended protrusions everywhere around himself to every wall and corner in the room before slowly moving them around, both on the wall and on his body, twisting them around each other while they stayed connected to him and to the wall the whole time, before pulling them all back into himself again. He could feel it all. Wondrous.

He was now both otter and amoeba, and neither at once.

He now embodied everything he had loved about the pleasure that he had just received and provided, and he would now be able to bring his gift of healing, love and play to others, more than he could have ever dreamed of while being 'married to his work' the way that he had been. After all that time, he had finally given birth... to himself. Thinking of everything that he was now going to be able to do, of all the doors that were now open to him that had always been closed, Mandrake grinned to himself wickedly.

This was going to be fun.

GOD MODE

He was ready.

The reptile had finished all of the appropriate preparations for his spell - it was only a matter of setting in motion what had already been put in place. In his grove, he looked down at the Seal of Memory he had traced on the ground in front of him as he reached for a hex bag that was tied to his waist. As dark clouds gathered above him and thunder rumbled overhead, he pulled on the string that kept the bag tied and, reaching into it with one of his two scaly hands, he pulled out... a handful of breadcrumbs.

With an expression of complete seriousness on his face, the witch doctor extended his arm ahead of himself, opening his hand as he did so as to release the breadcrumbs so that they would fall squarely within the sacred circle he had cast. As he heard lightning strike down somewhere nearby, a flock of six pigeons came down from the skies between the branches of the trees in his grove, the characteristic cooing sound that they were known for emitting somehow still audible in spite of the gathering storm which accompanied their arrival. Surprising as it may have been on its own that they would have appeared so calm in spite of the Apocalypse weather that surrounded them, it was nothing compared to what was yet to come.

His eye slits narrowing to their utmost, the humanoid snake watched intently as the six cooing pigeons all flew directly toward each other in patterns that led them all to collide with each other at the center of the sigil he had drawn on the ground as a welcome mat set out for them. In a chaotic whirlwind of dark smoke mixed with grey, black, and white pigeon feathers, the six birds merged with each other, two of them becoming arms, two of them becoming legs, one of them becoming a head and one of them becoming a torso to form a short, humanoid rat silhouetted against the forest dusk. Looking him up and down cursorily, the scrawny rodent seemed to belie her size with the air of calm but infinite confidence that she somehow still managed to exude, as if her eyes could see right into his soul, and find nothing there for which she could be unprepared.

He gulped.

This was not something that the reptile got the chance to do all that often. It was not easy for him to get all the right components to be able to cast this, especially without being able to leave his grove himself. While he did have people he could ask to bring him some of them, he had to struggle to ask them to do so out of fear of asking them too often, because he felt bad at the thought of taking advantage of their generosity for a purpose like this. The witch doctor tried to grow some of them in his grove himself as well as he could, which was possible but only for some of them, and which was not easy even for those for which it was possible, so there were limits to that approach as well.

So he had to make it count.

"Welcome."

She dusted herself off.

"So... What do you have in mind?"

He sat on a stump near them, a makeshift place to sit in a forest clearing, some of his components scattered around it among the ferns like so many outgrowths. The reptile tried to look like he was not looking at her, looking innocently to the side as he held one of his scaly hands in his other hand, which of course she could tell meant he was in fact looking right at her, and wanted her to know he was. The mammal looked right at him, joining her hands in front of her abdomen, her fingers intertwining like so many snakes of her own at her beck and call, waiting to be called upon to do her bidding.

"Nothing."

He switched hands so that the hand he had been holding would become the hand with which he would be holding the hand which used to hold it, and looked to the other side, still ostensibly away from her.

"Is that right?"

She disentangled and re-intertwined her fingers behind her back as she slowly walked toward him, as if she were pacing back and forth while delivering an important speech to some kind of ancient senate.

"You did call me here."

The witch doctor finally looked up at the rat, releasing his hand to intertwine his fingers behind his head, inadvertently drawing her attention to his cobra flaps as he did.

"I guess I did."

She looked to her own left and right, slowly, as if taking in the full scene of the trees in the grove around them with a wistful expression on her whiskered face.

"It looks like you've been taking good care of these," she said.

He lowered his head, looking at the ground.

"I've been doing my best."

She brought her finger under his chin, lifting his head to make him look up at her.

"Thank you," the rodent added, simply.

The snake frowned.

"Are they still after you?"

She shrugged, and smiled a bitter smile.

"I have to assume they are," she answered, "they have been for such a long time." The resignation in her voice emphasized how much she wished that she could have stayed longer if that had not been the case. "Maybe they'll always be after me." He looked downcast. "I'd hide you from them forever if I could." The mammal scratched him behind his cobra flap, knowing he liked it. "I know you would. I can barely stay a step ahead of them myself though... You'd have an even harder time doing so than I do," she admitted realistically, without arrogance, "I don't want you hurt." The serpent sighed.

"But, as long as someone remembers you, you can't die, isn't that how it works?" He tilted his head at her as he asked. "That's right," she nodded, "but they can make people forget anything. They've always been why anyone forgets anything. It's what they do." He shook his head. "They could never make me forget you," he told the rat, "I wouldn't let them." She chuckled at the witch doctor's statement, touched by it in spite of herself, presumptuous as it was. "That's why I can't let anything happen to you, now, isn't it?" There was no point in elaborating. Hopefully they would never find out.

But she was still a runaway.

Would they ever have more than this, he sometimes wondered? The world that she existed in was so different from what his was... Still, even if they could never have more, he would never want to lose what they did have together for anything, no matter what, the snake thought to himself. While his two other lovers were males, and he had an overall predilection for the male form in general, the rodent represented something unique to him, just as irreplaceable as both of his guys were, in her own way, which was why he was willing to go to such lengths for her.

She just had to always have a foot in another dimension.

As he still sat on a stump before her, she leaned forward and grabbed his cheeks, kissing him on the mouth under the rustling treetops while she did. Each time, he tried to find things to talk about, to delay what they both knew they would eventually do, to make their time together last a little longer. But the longer the mammal stayed, the likelier it was that they would catch her, and they had so little, precious time...

The reptile's body swam with adrenalin as their embrace deepened, and the hairs all over her body stood on end as she felt his forked tongue snake its way into her mouth, slithering around her tongue like a much smaller snake climbing a tree itself. She snuck the tip of her small, pink nose and maw in-between his jaws when they opened, making him gasp involuntarily as she did, but slowly retrieved it, leaving a short trail of spit slowly dissolve from his mouth to the tip of her face. Putting her hands on his shoulders, the rat stepped up onto the stump around his hips facing him, standing in front of him to bring her hands behind his flaps.

"You know what to do."

Catching her cue all too well, the serpent brought his hands up to hold her butt cheeks close to his face with them, and brought his maw forward as close to her crotch as he could. The back of her throat rumbled with appreciation as she felt the same forked tongue that had so delightfully explored her mouth earlier find its way into her entrance to writhe about inside her, tickling her most secret places in all the ways she liked best. "Ohh...!" She scratched the eye-like patterns on the back of his flaps in thanks when he brought one of his scaled fingers up over his tongue to start rubbing her clit and another finger right under her pink rodent tail to push it up in her rear without stopping the oral attention with which he was providing her while doing so, sending a shiver down her tail as he did.

The witch doctor looked up at her, smiling to himself as he enjoyed seeing the happy expression on her face, happiness he knew she needed so dearly, happiness he knew he was the one bringing her. Reminding herself to return the favor, she brought her tail forward between her legs to start playing with his balls with the tip of her tail before wrapping it snugly around his shaft to start stroking his length up and down with it determinedly. The mammal felt his forked tongue stiffen in her entrance at the pleasure that she was making him feel, hearing a muffled groan escape from his busy throat and, feeling his pre start dripping on her pink tail, grinned a satisfied grin to herself, proud to know that she knew just how to get him going in a heartbeat every bit as well as he did.

Removing her hands from the back of the snake's head, she brought them both down onto his shoulders, struggling to pry herself away from her most immediate sources of enjoyment. After he removed his tongue and fingers from her pleasure zones, and she stopped stroking him with her tail, she lowered herself into a crouch, pushing one of her legs forward to bring it down to the ground behind the stump on which he was sitting, followed by her other leg, to sit on his lap with her thighs wrapped around his hips. Lifting herself up ever so slightly, the rat grabbed the base of his penis with her hand to guide its tip toward her entrance, lowering herself right back onto it with a heartfelt, contended sigh.

"There you go..."

Holding onto the serpent's shoulders for support, she started slowly bobbing her pelvis up and down on his crotch assuredly, riding him like a vehicle that she could never forget how to ride. He hissed in joy, draping an arm across her shoulders behind her as he brought his other arm between them to caress one of her breasts - reptiles had no breasts, but he knew enough to know that mammals liked to have theirs touched, and this was certainly confirmed by how she responded to it. As he removed his hand from the rodent's chest to bring that arm around her hips, he brought his other arm up to scratch the back of her furred head, and lowered his head to start flicking his forked tongue around her other nipple, eliciting another positive reaction from her by doing so.

As she wrapped her arms around his shoulders with abandon, he lowered his hands back to grab her butt cheeks, holding them up to meet her riding halfway by moving his own hips so as to thrust his shaft in and out of her entrance himself. A low growl escaping her throat, her own pink tail slithered its way so that its tip would find the witch doctor's rear, slipping into him unexpectedly while he penetrated her. He snarled, throwing his head back, his primal bliss overcoming everything else in his mind as the mammal felt his penis stiffen to become even harder inside her, feeling the pre that her intrusion had squeezed out of his tip dripping out of her around his length.

His maw opened as wide as it possibly could, which was wider than any normal person's head, so wide that he might as well have been able to swallow an elephant with it. As she leaned her head forward between his jaws, he leaned his head forward and closed them around her neck, making her feel as though she was wearing his head like some kind of scaly balaclava without holes for her eyes. Relaxing his throat muscles to their utmost, the snake continued to thrust his hips up into the rat's nether regions as his neck extended while his maw kept inching its way down around her.

He engulfed her shoulders, then her elbows and breasts, her head continuing deeper and deeper down his infinitely flexible esophagus as he did, down around her hands and abdomen. Her entire upper body wrapped in warm, dark, wet flesh, her legs thrashing around his hips on his stump, she could still feel him fucking her, and he could still hear her moaning all that way down his throat through it. The serpent had to remove his hands from the rodent's butt cheeks when he reached down past her hips, briefly giving himself a blowjob with his own mouth when he reached the point where his penis had been entering her before throwing his head back again, pulling her legs up above him while regretfully feeling her tail slip out of his rear, pulled over him along with her legs.

Loosening his throat to an impossible extent, he shook his head back and forth a few time, bringing a bit more of her lower body down into himself each time, until her legs were all the way in and he tasted his pre on the tip of her tail as it finished wriggling its way down his throat. His belly became bigger for a moment, almost as though he had become pregnant somehow, before a resounding belch echoed among the treetops, and his belly slowly flattened back to its previous form. The reptile's expression made it look like he was slowly coming back down to Earth after having been very far from it indeed.

Nothing happened for a moment.

Then, he made a sound, almost like retching, but not quite, as if it was not really what it could have been. Then it happened again, he threw his head back, opening his maw as far as it could open again, and it really sounded like he was going to throw up for a moment. As the witch doctor's whole body convulsed helplessly, even his infinitely flexible jaw seemed to dislocate itself as the upper part of it along with the rest of his head were thrown impossibly far back while his lower jaw was pulled even further down.

As her whiskers preceded the rest of it back out of his throat, the mammal's head, somehow intact even after all that, made it seem as though she had killed a snake and was wearing its head as some kind of tribal headgear, his upper jaw and cobra flaps thrown behind her head like a hood, his lower jaw having become her primitive chin guard. Her eyes shone with a bright white light, pupil-less, and a set of two giant pigeon wings sprouted from her (his? their?) back. Her pink hands appeared at the end of his scaly arms, seeming either as though she were wearing snakeskin sleeves or as though he were wearing small pink gloves, and her pink feet replaced his scaly feet as well, either as though he were wearing pink socks or as though she were wearing snakeskin pants.

The penis had not changed shape, but it was now pink, not green. It was hers now.

Still feeling the fading echoes of the waves of pleasure she had sent through his body by stimulating him earlier, she wasted no time reaching down with one of her hands to wrap it around her newly acquired appendage and started stroking it uninhibitedly. As the traced lines that formed the Seal of Memory caught fire in front of her - he had put a stone circle around it to stop it from causing a forest fire, bless his heart - every knot that was visible on the bark of the trees around them opened into large eyeballs, leering at her as though the forest itself were enjoying the show that was being put on for it. While the storm still raged above, a half-dozen twigs that littered the forest floor around them stood straight up as though they were being pulled up by invisible strings, leaking sap from their upper ends as if the forest were leaking pre through them from the arousal that it was feeling because of them.

The eye-patterned markings on the cobra flaps turned into real eyes, and she could see the world behind her and below her through them just as well as she could see it in front of her with her regular eyes. Getting an idea from seeing her ass with them, which now offered her new possibilities that it normally did not, even as she kept moving her hand frantically up and down her erect shaft, she directed her new rattlesnake tail so as to guide its tip right into her rear. Gasping as she felt its tip enter her to press against her prostate - what a sensation that was! - she could only brace herself as well as she could for the even greater pleasure that she started feeling when she started making it rattle the way it was known to do, using it like a vibrator, spreading delicious warmth throughout her whole pelvis.

It happened so rarely, and it felt so good. She could never last long.

While part of her would have wanted to prolong the experience, that part of her was soon overridden by the part of her that craved release, yearned for it, focused her mind on it like a flame, a bright objective right in front of her, waiting only for her to reach for it with her whole heart, if only she could let go of her last bit of restraint and give herself completely over to it... Huffing and puffing like a wolf about to blow a house down, having stuck almost her entire tail in her ass by that point, she could feel the phase of her plateau shortening in front of her, yielding before her like the last few steps of a race before the incomparable elation of crossing the finish line. Feeling her semen finish gathering at the base of her urethra, she roared her heart out as the first drop shot out of her slit.

Rather than weakening after the first few spurts, as male orgasms were wont to do, the pleasure and intensity that she felt with each squirt kept going further and further up, reaching higher than anyone had any right to in an ever-increasing, unstoppable crescendo. On her tenth contraction, rather than a final jet of seminal fluid, the sensations and pressure were so powerful that she fired her whole penis up out of her crotch like a giant sperm, springing up in front of her like a jack-in-the-box to fly away from her and land on the ground near her Seal.

As she caught her breath, her flap eyes closed, flaps shifting back into pink ears, her arms and legs regrowing her brown fur, her tail returning to its original pink coloring and her pigeon wings retracting into her back.

The slit of the ejected shaft started opening on the ground of its own volition, wider than it seemed like it should be able to, and became a miniature jaw as its glans turned into a tiny serpent head around it, its thin base extending into a small rattlesnake tail. The propelled length kept growing larger and longer at a steady rate until it had become all of six feet long, sprouting arms and legs in just the right places, the torso filling out between them and the reptilian head growing back to its normal size. "Thanks for letting me borrow this." She grabbed the penis that had regenerated from his crotch.

"I wouldn't want one all the time, but it's a hell of a test-drive," she winked.

LIKE A TEMPLE

Intricate patterns on the temple floor and the incense that permeated the otherwise Spartan atmosphere invited a contemplative mindset from its visitors. There were no walls as such, but the temple was in relative isolation, apart from the world of day-to-day living so they would not interfere with each other, as the goals they had been built to fulfill were quite different. The warmth of its environs meant its open concept did not prevent it from being temperate, regardless of one's garb. It had been built to welcome visitors from far and wide, but also as a testament to Venus, Freya, Hathor, Aphrodite, Kali, Tlazolteotl, Astarte - all goddesses who had written the book about sacred sexuality eons before their domain had been overtaken by those who could only see it as just another sleazy product to be fought over among many.

The skunk concentrated on his breathing, going through asana after asana waiting for his friends. All in the breathing, they always said. Breathe in, breathe out. Get your hands dirty, clean them up. Sleep, wake up. Ingest, excrete. Come to the temple, leave the temple. Something happens in-between each, something which was, on some level, the foundational axis of everything.

What they were going to do would be no different: push in, and pull out, again and again. After long enough, what happened in-between would make something happen. They had been preparing by fasting, stretching, relaxing, focusing their minds and, notably, abstaining from orgasm for several days, their bodies, used to frequent climaxes, growing more sensitive and straining as their cravings were given time to expand. After long enough, the slightest sexual thought popping into their heads, the most innocent caress, became enough to make every hair on their bodies stand on end. As they would intermingle, the time they would hold back would accumulate even more energy for them to release with even greater force.

Breathe in, breathe out.

As he moved from posture to posture, the skunk thought about the role of sex in his world, in his life, how he had come to know the friends he would receive, allowing the thoughts to come to him as they did, turning them over in his mind to look at them from different perspectives before letting them go. The truth was, he was not certain about how his various role-models from different worlds would have handled matters in practice, he knew there may have been discrepancies he could not be aware of, gaps he could not bridge, blanks he could not fill in. There may have been things he would have believed he was doing wrong if he had had access to all the information he could have wanted, compared to a better earlier example, in a way that had not occurred to him, or there may have been things he would have believed his models had done wrong themselves, if he had known them perfectly.

He kept all of this duly in mind, but they would not let it stop them. If nothing else, they would do their best to honor what those models represented to them, the world that could exist if what those models represented to them held wider sway, and that was still better than nothing by a long shot. Based on everything his senses and mind told him, they were going to do something beautiful and free, full expressions of what it meant for them to be alive, celebrating the connection they shared, however unusual it may have seemed to most people in their day and age.

The body could do great things, when it was in a proper disposition, and its connection to what would take place in their hearts and minds would be paramount. Today, the skunk would use the skills he had practiced for a long time to bring joy to those who brought joy to him. They would do what their bodies had been made for, and create an unforgettable experience. He breathed abruptly in mild surprise, inadvertently disrupting the slow, steady flow in and out that his breath had become.

They were here.

Pausing from his training with a smile on his face, he greeted the armadillo, dove and kangaroo as they walked into the temple between the pillars, through the openings that stood where the temple's walls would have been if it had had any. It would not be the first time they would do this, yet every time they walked into the temple and breathed in its incense, all their memories of every previous occasion on which they had shared their bodies with each other's there would flood back into their minds, as if they had been unlocked by the scent that served as a vector for them. Every time carried echoes of the first time, would be the first time things would happen exactly the way they would that time, and no other, knowing it would become a fond memory in their minds in turn before they even started, just as the tree was already within the seed before it was planted anywhere.

The dove and armadillo kissed while the skunk kissed the kangaroo, the armadillo and kangaroo kissed while the skunk kissed the dove, and the kangaroo and dove kissed while the skunk kissed the armadillo, groping and fondling each other to remind their bodies they were used to each other's presence after their time apart. Their garments absent, they strove to feel as natural as they could without them, enjoying the sight of each other's bodies as they really were, even though they remembered this was how their species had existed for ages before any particular meaning had been ascribed to it. It was the fact that they were all there at that specific time and place, feeling the way they did as they ran their hands all over each other, the signification they had chosen to ascribe to the sensation of their feathers, scales and fur rubbing against each other's, which had given their bareness purpose and meaning - but it was no less enticing for it.

Once they had eased themselves into the right headspace for what they were there to do, they all stood in a circle, gently stimulating themselves on their own facing each other. While part of them wanted to jump all over each other right away, it was good for them to take a moment to breathe first. The skunk, gently pulling his skin down around his growing erection, felt his heartrate increase ever so slightly while looking around, knowing the others were looking at it, thinking both about what it had done to them before, and about what it would do to them again.

The armadillo, still shy under his efforts to come out of his shell like this, held up the base of his slowly stiffening hose for the others to take in, presenting it gingerly like a present he was offering them while worrying they may not accept it, even though they had already accepted it many times before, and would accept it many more times again. The kangaroo, visibly eager to do something about his arousal despite his efforts to restrain himself, was already moving his hand up and down his hard-on at a sufficient frequency for it to have been said accurately that he was definitely jerking off then and there, but it did not seem to be easy for him not to go even faster, overwhelmed by arousal. The dove reached between her legs with her right hand, slipping first just one finger, then two, then three into herself up under her pelvis, and cooed as her left hand joined it in its effort, bringing her left fingers to her crotch to rub her clit with them while her right fingers wiggled their way into her, imagining how their shafts would feel replacing fingers.

When the skunk pushed the skin around his length back up to his glans after his first, protracted pull down, the show had already made him start leaking pre from his slit in anticipation of what was yet to come. It was important they not think of any of this in terms of getting it over with, but in terms of allowing it to run its course at its own pace, to free their minds from their conditioning to do everything as fast as possible, to focus on enjoying the moment for what it was, not in terms of gain and loss, in terms of journey, not destination. They were not supposed to merely consume the experience so it would prove something to someone, but to allow themselves to become immersed in it, to let it take them away from the demands of their everyday existence into another place, where they were encouraged to exist as their true animal selves without issues of pride or guilt in the way.

They had to push through the fear of having what they most wanted taken away, to enjoy it.

The armadillo, having gained enough self-assurance from having seen the positive reactions of the three others watching him masturbate in front of them, stepped into the center of the triangle that the three others now formed, and laid on his back between them. The skunk stepped forward placing his feet so they would be around the armadillo's head, toes facing away from his shoulders, and arched his striped back as far back as it could go until he had gone all the way into a full backbend to rest his hands on the armadillo's bent knees. Craning his neck back as the armadillo supported the skunk's lower back with his hands, the skunk opened his maw wide, taking the armadillo's member as deep into his mouth up his throat as it could go, his supporting arms trembling as he almost gagged on it.

The kangaroo laid down on his back next to the armadillo, scratching the back of the skunk's head by his hip in thanks for the service that the mephit was rendering to the armadillo as the dove stepped over the kangaroo's waist, placing her feet around his hips before kneeling down with her shins around his flanks while sitting down on his crotch to guide him into her with her hand. Supporting herself with one hand on the kangaroo's chest riding him, she started stroking the skunk's penis with her other hand while the armadillo and kangaroo kissed each other on the ground. The sensations the armadillo was experiencing were interesting, even though he probably could not have come this way, but the kangaroo had to make more of a conscious effort not to thrust so hard up into the dove's vagina that he would shoot his load so soon - they had so much left to experience...

The skunk moved his hands off from the armadillo's knees to place them on the ground around the armadillo's hips, and the armadillo pulled himself out from under the back-bent mephit as the dove got up off the kangaroo's crotch and the kangaroo got up to stand behind the arched skunk. Pushing himself up with his feet off the ground, the skunk raised himself up into a full handstand, just as his species were so widely renowned for doing. The kangaroo, grabbing the skunk's ankles to hold him up upside-down, took the inverted skunk's penis into his mouth while the mephit took the kangaroo's cock into his own mouth, not letting the kangaroo's subsequent thrusts in and out of his maw distract him from maintaining his handstand or continuing to give the kangaroo the best blowjob he could.

The armadillo knelt sideways behind the kangaroo after the dove had gone down on her hands and knees in front of him. She gasped when the armadillo grabbed her butt cheeks to guide his boner into her vagina, thus continuing what the kangaroo had started. Once he was settled well enough into her that he no longer needed to hold onto her to stay inside her, he swiveled his upper body to his side, grabbing the kangaroo's buttocks to spread them wide so the armadillo could rim him. The skunk felt the kangaroo's dick harden in his mouth as the kangaroo felt the armadillo's tongue licking his pucker, the kangaroo felt the skunk stiffen in his own maw, the mephit aroused by the taste of the kangaroo's pre, and the dove looked back at them over her shoulder, enjoying the sight that they were offering to her while she was getting fucked.

When the armadillo pulled out of the dove and both of them stood up, the kangaroo stepped back out of the skunk's reach, and the skunk re-bent his back forward in mid-air so his feet would land back down in front of him in another backbend. The dove stepped over the skunk's waist and, supporting herself with her hands on his abdomen without applying pressure on him so as not to break his backbend, she lowered her hips to sit on the skunk's crotch, maneuvering so the skunk penetrated her. The mephit strove to maintain his posture even though he could not help arching and un-arching his back as much as he could so that, even like this, he could still thrust up into her somewhat.

The kangaroo stood next to the dove riding the skunk, facing in the same direction that she was facing and, when the armadillo moved to stand behind him, the kangaroo bent over in front of him at a right angle, lifting his tail to rest it on the armadillo's abdomen. Holding the kangaroo's rear with one hand and guiding his erection with his other hand, the armadillo slowly pushed his hard-on deep into the kangaroo's tailhole in front of him, and started humping him. As the armadillo turned to kiss the riding dove at his side, she reached down at her side with her hand to stroke the bent kangaroo's shaft while his anus welcomed the armadillo's length.

When she stopped stroking the kangaroo, she raised herself back up, letting the skunk pull out of her, she stepped back over his hips while the armadillo also pulled out of the kangaroo, the skunk pushed his body up and back with his feet from his backbend to end up performing another handstand, and brought his legs down in front of himself at another right angle. The armadillo went to stand behind the mephit between the skunk's thighs and, grabbing the skunk's hips, stepped in close enough behind him to slide his member into the skunk's backdoor while holding him up. The kangaroo knelt by the armadillo's side, the dove on her hands and knees in front of him next to the skunk, the kangaroo spread her open with his hands so he could also insert his penis into her while the skunk supported himself with only his arms, and the kangaroo started fingering the thrusting armadillo's ass and stroking the skunk's cock.

The armadillo backed off to pull out of the skunk, just as the kangaroo withdrew from the dove's vagina, and the armadillo pushed the skunk's legs back up into a handstand, before the mephit's legs started falling forward again, only to be caught on their way down by the kangaroo who was now standing in front of the skunk, whose backbend stayed half-finished. The kangaroo, holding the arched skunk's thighs up on the sides of his waist with his arms, rammed his boner forward into the skunk's tunnel, the skunk making sure that the thrusts of the kangaroo's erection in and out of his butt would not destabilize his handstand. The armadillo laid down on his back behind the skunk perpendicularly to him, the armadillo's hard-on appearing in the skunk's field of vision upside-down, the dove stepped over the armadillo's waist to kneel around his torso and sit so his shaft would penetrate her rear, and the armadillo thrusted his tail in and out of her vagina as she stroked the skunk's length.

The kangaroo, withdrawing from the skunk, pushed the skunk's legs back into a straight handstand as the dove got up off the armadillo and both got out of the way of the skunk's legs on their way back to the ground behind him, wide enough for the armadillo to lie on his back between the skunk's feet while the skunk went down in a side split on the armadillo's member. The dove knelt with her knees around the armadillo's head facing the skunk, leaning forward to kiss the skunk while the kangaroo knelt behind her to slide his penis in and out of her tailhole. The armadillo thrusted up into the skunk's widely spread legs, holding the mephit's buttocks, while the armadillo licked and fingered the dove's vagina over him in front of his face as he watched the kangaroo's boner moving in and out of her.

Getting up off the armadillo's pelvis as the kangaroo pulled out of the dove's anus, the skunk laid down on his back and, raising his legs over himself, brought them back so his feet would rest on the ground behind him, supporting himself on his shoulders with his backside up in the air. The kangaroo, standing behind the skunk between his feet, bent forward to put his hands on the ground in front of the skunk, slipped his cock into the skunk's backdoor upside-down, and humped him as he also licked the dove's mound in front of him. As the skunk enjoyed watching his ass getting fucked by the kangaroo's penis with his pre dripping on his face, fingering the kangaroo's rear while stroking himself, the dove stroked the armadillo next to her, who pleasured her vagina with his tail.

"Let's finish this!"

The kangaroo stepped back behind the mephit, pulling the skunk's legs back making the mephit roll back onto his hands and knees so he could fuck the skunk doggy style. Pulling out momentarily, the kangaroo waited while the dove went down on her hands and knees, the armadillo kneeling behind her to fuck her butt while sliding his tail in and out of her vagina. The skunk knelt behind the armadillo to insert his boner into the armadillo's tailhole. The kangaroo knelt behind the skunk to push his erection into the skunk's anus. Every move back pushed the kangaroo into the skunk, every move forward pushed him into the armadillo.

She was the first to go, rubbing her clit as the armadillo's tail and hard-on penetrated her ass and vagina, emitting a shrieking bird cry when the armadillo felt her squeeze spasmodically around his boner, juices flowing. "I'm so close!" The combined feeling of the skunk's shaft poking the armadillo's prostate and the dove's orgasmic contractions around his length were too much for him to hold back. The armadillo's member fired his spunk into the dove's butt. "I'm almost there!" The skunk, feeling the armadillo's rear contracting around his boner as the armadillo came, felt he was going to be next. The armadillo slipped his tail into the kangaroo's rear behind the skunk. "You like that, huh?" The kangaroo sped up uninhibitedly, growling while his erection squirted thick jets of ejaculate deep into the skunk's tailhole.

The skunk went hurtling past his threshold. "Oh man!" The skunk's eruption was turbocharged by the kangaroo's hard-on unloading his semen into him while pressed right against the skunk's prostate. Thrusting frantically, groaning with abandon, the skunk's butt clenched around the kangaroo's cock. "Oh fuck!" The skunk's penis ejaculated spurt after spurt of semen deep into the armadillo's ass. The skunk kept thinking he was finished coming, but kept being surprised more of his spunk kept rushing out of his urethra while he pumped it all in, as if he'd been stockpiling it. "Oh, yeah...!" His whole body finally shuddered through his last squirt inside after all.

They stayed still for a minute, no one pulling out of anyone, basking in the afterglow. What was the rush? There was nowhere else for them to be then and there. They measured their luck at having been able to have shown each other such a great time in a world where happiness could be in such short supply for so many that they could not afford to take it for granted. They greeted both the pleasure that they had given and the pleasure that they had received with the same gratefulness, as two sides of the same coin. They did not regret that what they had done was over, but they were happy that it had happened at all. They were... at peace. After finally pulling out of each other, they fell asleep in a heap all over each other, only to wake up so that they could leave the temple the next morning.

Breathe in... breathe out.

RUMBLE

He sniffed at the air.

The raptor raised his head, craning his neck to turn it as far as he could on his sides, pupil slits narrowing as he did. If it had been a matter of following a trail on the ground, it would have done him better to have his snout lowered to the ground, smelling the fresh trail while following it as fast as possible, head barely raised enough so his eyes could still detect obstacles between him and his prey. As it was, there was no immediate trail for him to follow, and it was still a matter of determining which direction he should head to even get close enough to it without startling it into too much of a premature run so that he would be able to begin the hunt.

He smelled fox on the wind.

The dinosaur could be a creature of deceptive subtlety, when the situation called for it, in spite of his renowned ferocity. Having inferred the mammal's location from the wind's direction, the next question to answer was what would be the best way for him to make his approach. Should he track the vulpine on land?

There was always the risk of stepping on a twig, or otherwise alerting the hunted of his approach if he was not careful. As unprofessional as that could seem, and though he had successfully avoided making this mistake many times, it was never a foregone conclusion. He could not afford to take anything for granted or allow himself to become overconfident, if he wanted to keep himself sharp - and he did.

Should he have climbed one of the nearby trunks up to the treetops, to survey the environs from the canopy and to get nearer to his prey without risking being visible among the trunks by a quick look around, or heard from disturbing the forest floor's micro-ecology? Then again, the fox could have also been alerted that the reptile was getting nearer by the rustling that he would have caused among the leaves, or by him startling small birds into flying off from branches. Ultimately, there was no perfect way to conduct his approach every time, a mechanical strategy that could simply be repeated without variance.

The only thing that he did know for sure was the he had to pay the closest attention imaginable to every single thing around him, to take every detail about the world that surrounded him into himself through all of his senses completely and without reserve. This was a game as old as time itself. If there had been an easy way for predators to get their prey every time, it would have been found a long time ago, and there would be no more prey, no more hunt, no more chase, and no more game.

The outcome would depend on his skill, effort and chance, plain and simple. He trusted his skill, but there was always a chance that it would fail him. How could you know how sharp a blade still was, without putting it to the test? It was an organic process; he would have to trust his instincts to guide him. His effort would be a reflection of his resolve, of his ability to find that place in himself that would give him the strength to keep going, even after his initial burst of energy would falter. The rest of it was up to the vulpine. How resourceful, how clever would it be?

There was only one way for him to find out.

Restraining himself from smacking his lips outright - a sound that the hunted may have heard in and of itself - the velociraptor salivated as he gingerly began to step nearer to where the smell informed him the fox was located. Striving to breathe deep breaths to stay focused and energized, while still concealing the sound of his breathing from his target, the hunter kept both eyes, on each side of his head, firmly on the ground and ahead of him by that point. Dodging his way around tree trunks as he advanced while still hiding behind them enough to remain camouflaged by them, he paid attention to how the ground felt beneath his talons with each step, ascertaining whether it would resist or yield and, more importantly, making sure it would do so quietly before putting his weight on it.

Not a single insect skittering out of his path escaped his attention. Yet there was not infinite time ahead of him, and he had to balance his cautious advance with an underlying sense of urgency. After all, the longer it took him to reach his destination, the likelier it also became that the mammal would reach the end of whichever amount of time it wanted to spend there, and would leave the woods for somewhere where the dinosaur could not follow before he could have reached it anyway.

Finally, his sense of judgment told him that he had gotten close enough. Downwind himself, so he could smell his prey without being smelled by it, the raptor could now glimpse it if he peered around a tree trunk ever so slightly, withdrawing his head back just as fast to keep from being spotted. He could not only smell the vulpine by then, but hear it breathing, so it stood to reason that it could no longer take long before he would be detected himself regardless of whether he deliberately came out of hiding or not, which meant that the moment of truth was at hand. His target lifted its head up at the reptile when he stepped into the clearing, and yelped.

The hunt was on.

The most immediate challenge faced by the hunted started out being how to go as fast as it could go without going in a straight line. The most natural way to make a run for it was to go from point A to point B, yet this was not a possibility on this particular occasion. There were too many trees around them for the fox to run in a straight line without running into a tree. Not only that but the mammal, although startled, still had enough sense of self-preservation about it to know that it would make it an incrementally more difficult chase for the predator if it wove back and forth in a zigzag between the trees than if it ran in a straight line, but this increment could mean the difference between being caught or not.

The leaves and branches that surrounded them as they ran soon became another reason for concern. His prey wished it had brought a machete, which would have made it easier for it to get the foliage out of the way faster so it would not have been slowed down, not to mention that it would have given it a much better chance of defending itself against the velociraptor's fangs and claws, which its own relatively sharp ones paled in comparison to. The vulpine pushed a supple yet resisting branch out of its way, darting its way around the branch before letting it swing back behind it on its way.

Without missing a beat, the hunter snapped his jaws around the branch right in mid-swing. Sinking his claws into the branch's sides, he used them as leverage to rip it apart with his maw, yanking the central part of it out to spit it out to his side, barely slowing. Far be it for the hunted to forget the fate that awaits those who make for easy targets.

The fox came to a river that flowed across the forest floor and, its heart beating even faster than it ever had, used the momentum from its run to leap off its shore at full speed. It grabbed a low-hanging branch over the river with its arms to swing forward across it, narrowly making its jump to land into a crouch on the other side and bouncing up to its feet to keep running. The dinosaur, screeching to strike terror into the mammal's heart as he leapt, lowered his head and extended his tail over his head halfway through his following jump, wrapping his tail around the same branch to swing his own body forward feet first, and back-flipped to land on them by a slightly wider margin from the river than his prey had.

The vulpine's heart sank when it felt itself trip over a root that it had not noticed protruding across the ground in its path. Rolling forward onto its feet to continue running, the hunted stole a look over its shoulder, hoping that it had not lost significant ground and that the raptor would not catch on in time about what had just happened to it to avert tripping over the same root himself. Surely enough the reptile, reacting on instinct, saw an opportunity to catch up with his target easily, neither stopping to consider that the fox would get back up so fast nor that the same thing would happen to him if he was not careful enough, and tripped.

Landing face-down with his hands on the ground and his foot caught in the root, gritting his teeth, the predator grabbed the root using his feet's talons. Using his hands on the ground to push the rest of his body up and forward, he also used his feet's talons to rip the offending root out of the ground. Pulling his foot free from it, he brought both of his legs over his head then in front of him to land back on his feet further up ahead.

Coming to another river, the hunted thanked its lucky stars to see a fallen tree trunk set across it like a bridge, seemingly easier to cross than the previous one. Extending its arms to its sides for balance, its hips swayed and its tail swished back and forth behind it as it crossed, each leg stepping in front of the other like a tightrope walker's, without sacrificing a second more than strictly necessary so as not to fall off. Still, the hunter, dashing across on all four rather than upright, made it across the trunk bridge just a little faster than his target, gaining just a bit of ground because of the extra speed granted by his forelimbs.

Bird calls echoed through the treetops while various clicks resonated among the undergrowth, punctuating the high moments of their chase as it unfolded. The fox came upon another fallen tree trunk, this one horizontal and barring the way across its path at waist-height. Grabbing the trunk with its hands and swinging its legs up front in a vault over it, almost in a half-cartwheel, the mammal was quickly followed by the dinosaur, leaping into an aerial front flip over it and grazing a low branch over it with his tail on his way before landing back on the other side of it as well.

Coming to another clearing, the raptor noticed that petals and dandelion spores littered the ground around them. Vines hung down from the branches above them like so many chains in a mysterious dungeon. His prey ducked under an overhanging vine stretched across low between two trees, while the reptile simply kept his toothy maw wide open as he raced after it. The vine shredded from the impact as though his jaws had been scissors closing around it to cut it from its fastening so a segment of it ended up lodged between his fangs.

The vulpine came to a point where, seeing a tree in its path, it could not help but gauge that the time that would have been necessary for its course correction so as not to run into the tree would cost it the race. So the hunted jumped up to grab one of the tree's branches with its arms overhead, brought its feet around the trunk to shift its arms' grip sideways, and pushed its legs up between its arms to wrap them around the branch from the side. Pulling its head up along with them, it sat then stood on the branch just in time for the predator's jaws to close around thin air rather than around his target's head hanging from the branch like low-hanging fruit.

The fox used the branches as footholds and handholds to make its way up the tree as though it were a naturally-occurring, geometrically incorrect spiral staircase and jungle gym. The velociraptor simply dug his claws and talons into the trunk, climbing straight up after the mammal with alarming alacrity. His prey may not have factored in the fact that his claws and talons were made for climbing and pinning more than for ripping things open, but the hunter had not.

Having reached the other side of the tree, the vulpine, followed all too closely by the dinosaur, turned around on the branch to face him, nearer to the trunk than it was. Lowering itself into a rapid crouch, it wrapped its paws around the branch and swung its legs below it, now facing away from the raptor who was still walking toward the hunted on top of the branch. Brachiating all the way to the end of the branch, stretching it on its way until it was closer to the ground, it jumped down and rolled to its feet to break its fall.

The reptile screeched again as he dropped down feet first after his target, missing it by an inch.

Coming to a steep downward slope, the fox descended into a half-crouch to lower its center of gravity as it slid down, striving to maintain escape velocity while still slowing its descent enough so as not to lose its precarious footing and zigzagging between the brambles and pebbles that littered the slope. His claws and talons serving him well again, the predator was less hindered by the descent than the mammal was, digging them into the ground to control its speed and trajectory more easily. When his prey reached level ground, the velociraptor pounced after it off the slope, failing in his attempt at landing with his feet on its shoulder-blades to push it face down...

... but succeeding at grabbing its ankles with his hands, making it fall face-down.

"Here's something for you," the hunter said, switching which of his hands held the vulpine down to bring them further up its legs and back until he was sitting on its lower back. Pulling the vine segment out from between his fangs, he grabbed an end of it and, bringing it around itself further up, wrapped and tied it into a loop around his target's neck. "There," the dinosaur continued, carefully scratching the fox's head without drawing blood with one clawed hand while holding the other end of the vine with his other hand as he spoke, "much better."

They were a makeshift collar and leash, to be sure, but they would do nicely for the occasion. "Mine now." The new pet whimpered on the ground, torn between knowing he should fight being caught and the satisfaction of being pinned down and gently scratched on his head. "You made me earn it," his new master smirked, "You gave me quite a thrill." The mammal felt his shaft pressing against the ground below him. "The thrill of the hunt," the raptor went on, opening his jaws around the nape of his prey's neck without closing them. "Good run."

This had been a real hunt, as they had before gunpowder, before humanoid life even existed, nothing like the bastardization that passed for it today.

The vulpine turned his head to look at the reptile who was sitting on his lower back over his shoulder. "Now that I've caught you, though," the dinosaur added, bringing one of his raised fingers down near the fox's face, "you're going to be good, and do everything I ask you to do, all right?" His claw traced a line from behind his pet's ear across his furred cheek to end at his chin, punctuating his master's request. "Good," he continued as the mammal nodded his head yes. "That's not too much to ask, is it?" The vulpine shook his head no. "Good fox." He patted his head.

The sub strained to lift his lower back off the ground without much success. "You may get up," the dom allowed, "when I say," he finished as he got up off his pet, who stayed down as commanded. The raptor walked around his prize to stand in front of him. "Hands and knees for now," he asked, still holding the vine leash, and the mammal obliged. "My feet are sore from chasing you," he explained, "can you help?" The vulpine lowered his head to lick and rub his face on the reptile's feet, ankles and talons, making his scaly length harden. "Very good," he petted the fox in thanks.

"On your knees." The sub obeyed unwaveringly as the dinosaur brought the leash down between his legs and up behind his shoulder, pulling the mammal's maw to his crotch. "Take it," he ordered, "yeah," he encouraged as his pet wrapped his lips around his member to slide it deep into his throat, "just like that." The vulpine's cock stiffened as he tasted his master's pre on his lips, gulping it down greedily like nectar. "Stroke yourself," he decreed, the fox grabbing his penis to start masturbating unquestioningly, "but don't get off," he specified as the sub strove not to get so lost in his own pleasure that it would affect the quality of his blowjob. Keeping his hands on his prey's head, throwing his own head back, he struggled to take his own advice.

"Now stop, both," the raptor commanded, pulling the mammal's head away from his crotch as the stroking ended. The dom, turning around, still holding the leash, went down on his own hands and knees in front of his pet, raising his scaly tail to expose his rear to the vulpine. "You know what to do," the reptile told the fox. The dinosaur wiggled his ass at the sub's crotch to emphasize his point.

Lowering his head, the mammal started rimming his master dutifully. "That's it!" the raptor shivered as he felt his pet's tongue licking his entrance to get it nice and loose, preparing it for what was next. "Good job." The vulpine raised his head, advancing on his knees, spitting on his shaft to make it slippery. "Get in there," the dom ordered. The fox grabbed the reptile's butt cheeks to spread them apart and aligned their pelvises with each other's. He then grabbed the base of his length to guide his tip, placing it so it would be pressed against the dinosaur's pucker.

"Now!" his master emphasized, yanking on his leash as he did. "Don't keep me waiting."

The raptor, resting his tail against the sub's abdomen and chest, its tip slung over the mammal's shoulder, turned his head to look over his shoulder. He so enjoyed seeing his pet's expression changing on his face to reflect his heartfelt delight as he started sliding his furred member into the dom's tailhole, the confines of warm reptilian flesh yielding to accommodate the vulpine glans' entrance. "Go all the way in," the dinosaur insisted toothily, pushing his rear back against the sub's crotch.

Holding his master's hips firmly, the mammal obeyed, slipping the whole rest of his cock as far as it could go into the raptor's ass, filling his dom's entrance completely. "Ah, yeah!" The reptile's eyes and maw opened wide as he felt his pet's tip pressed against his prostate. "Right there!" The vulpine could feel the dinosaur's balls brushing against his own. "That's good." His master petted him with his tail tip.

"Now fuck me, my fox," he commanded. "Give it to me good."

The sub started with a few slow thrusts, making sure the raptor's butt adjusted to his comings and goings. "Faster!" The hunt had gotten the dom all worked up, he wanted to come so badly. "Yes, sir!" The mammal, right there with him, obediently quickened his hip movements accordingly. Settling into a rhythm, he pushed and pulled his penis in and out of the reptile's tailhole at a steadily increasing pace.

As the dinosaur's pre formed a small puddle on the ground between his legs, he pulled on the leash to encourage his pet's ardor, who grabbed the scaly tail between his teeth. "Stroke me, boy!" his master begged. The vulpine felt like he was stroking himself through the raptor's pelvis. "Go for it!" Just a few more quick thrusts... "Oh sir, I'm coming!" The dom groaned, his spunk spurting out of his shaft continuing the trajectory of semen that the fox's pulsating length squirted into his ejaculating master's ass. Basking in the afterglow, he turned to the sub behind him, who was not going to pull out until asked.

"So... Next time, will you hunt me?"

"Oh, yes!"

SIGHT UNSEEN

The wolf always ended up having the same problem when he would go to clubs.

He could not simply not go - he loved going, everything about it was something to live for. He would dance his heart out, and the first few times he had done it, he had almost passed right out. That was when he had learned his lesson about how important it was for him to stay hydrated when he would go out to clubs.

The combination of the heat from all those other bodies around him and the sweat he would work up dancing would overwhelm him if he did not get plenty of water from the bar for him to be able to last the night. He only drank a little alcohol, not enough to get really drunk, just enough to get tipsy, while still not impairing his judgment altogether. He would never get so drunk that he would not be able to remember who he had spent the night with or how it had gone between the two of them. What would have been the point of that, since he went out to create good memories for himself in the first place?

Yet the beer or two he would drink and the water he would imbibe to keep up with the other factors that would otherwise dehydrate him added up throughout the night. They would join forces in his bladder over time to make it more and more urgent as he danced for him to stop his dancing to head over to the men's room. It was so hard for the wolf to pry himself away from his dancing, because he did not want to miss a single part of it for anything, but he would eventually have to reason with himself that he would not be allowed to keep coming back to dance other times if he pissed himself all over the dancefloor, and he did not want that to happen.

He had never liked public washrooms.

They had a reputation in clubs such as these that went beyond the usual situations that most washrooms were intended to feature, but these vague promises had never materialized for him at any point in time. As a wolf, even though he walked on two legs and thought himself a civilized being, he still subconsciously could not help thinking of urinating in terms of marking territory, on some deeper-seated level than his rationality that knew better. He was afraid of accidentally peeing outside of the urinals or toilets, because the guilt that he associated with it went deeper than the inconvenience it would cause the washroom attendant to clean it up. On some level, it meant he was trespassing on their territory, which represented a more shameful offense still.

He was no alpha wolf. Not all wolves were, by definition.

Public washrooms brought some of what he still repressed about his sexuality to the surface. He usually avoided the urinals, not because he did not want other men to be attracted to him, but because he felt self-conscious at the thought that they would see what his goods were and that they would decide that they did not like what they saw. So he would go in stalls and, in spite of his reluctance about the seats, would still sit and go like a girl, because he did not want to risk making a mistake and making a mess that would make him feel so terrible for having made it.

He always preferred it when there were no other men in the room when he went. While that was a luxury that he could not always afford, especially when he needed to go very badly and the room would be too packed for him to wait for other people to leave, it was one that he afforded himself whenever it seemed realistic for him to do so. He would think about the sound that his urine would make when it would hit the water, think about how other men could tell how long he was going for based on how long they heard it, and he could not put his finger on why, but it felt like some kind of infringement on his privacy somehow, just a little too close for comfort.

When he was a teenager, he would spend many happy dozens of minutes hiding in the washroom jerking off while sitting on the toilet. With books by his side on the washroom counter, and the believable excuse that it was normal for someone to need to go to the washroom for other reasons from about fifteen to about twenty minutes now and then, it was his favorite secret hiding place in which to pleasure himself again and again, unbeknownst to anyone else in the house as far as he could tell. The wolf would hide porn between the pages of the books that he would bring with him, slip it out from in-between them once he would be sitting on the toilet with his pants down around his ankles, and bring himself to heaven, coming to life as the males in the pictures he would look at, in the stories he would read, tissues and toilet paper mute aides and confidantes to his lust.

It was so easy to clean up and dispose of everything - no one would ever know. There were times when he had had to hold it for a long time, and legitimately had to go a bit more than usual. The pressure from his bladder against his prostate would make him get hard, and make him have to awkwardly guide his boner downward without touching the seat so that he could still pee without spillage.

His erection still fresh from his erstwhile restraint, he would not waste a drop of the blood that had flooded his shaft because of it. He would keep pulling on the folds around his member right after he had finished urinating as many quickening pulls as it would take for the valves in his urethra to shift, holding his shaft under the fold between his index and middle finger, and he would muffle his orgasmic cry as his ejected semen would stealthily rush out of his penis to join his pee in the water below him. It was this way that urination and sexual pleasure would first begin to become mixed his mind.

When he had started going out to clubs, where to meet men to do things with like the things that he used to look at on the toilet in real life, it had meant getting used to public washrooms. For the wolf, considering what he had become used to in private washrooms before, it had been a big adjustment. On some level, by hearing and seeing other men going around him, he felt like he was infringing on their privacy on a deeper level than nakedness, something that was sexual for him and that they did not know he felt about the way he did, that he could not tell them about without exposing too much about himself, that they may not have wanted to had they known about it.

It also meant that he was exposing something that felt sexual to him to others, who may or may not have felt the way he did about it - he had no way to tell. He would sometimes look at other guys and try to guess whether they were also into watersports or not, but it was not like spotting a toupee, and the costs of guessing wrong could be higher than he wanted to deal with. He had always fantasized about masturbating to orgasm while sitting in a washroom stall after having peed in it, just like he used to at home, but he had always been too scared of getting caught to try it.

It was one of those nights.

He had danced too long at the club, drank just a bit of beer but too much with the water, and just kept putting it off and putting it off, hoping to squeeze just a little more out of the night first like a kid who does not want to go to bed just until the next commercial. He had dashed into the washroom with a sense of urgency in his gait. He knew that this would be one of those times when he would have to go regardless of whether there was anyone else in the room or not, hoping against hope that there would not.

With a pang of guilt, he instinctively ran into the disabled stall, because no one else seemed to have been occupying it at the time and because it was the largest one. He would get out if someone else needed it, the wolf tried to tell himself. It was after he had pulled down his pants but before he had sat down on the seat that his heart missed a beat.

There was someone in there.

He had an excuse for not having noticed: the man who had already been in the stall had been completely invisible when he had walked into it. As he shifted his colors, seeming as though he was slowly materializing out of thin air, the more his silhouette filled itself out into a fuller humanoid form, the more the mammal understood why the hidden intruder had been able to perform such a disappearing act as that. He had snuck in there completely naked, hiding in plain sight, right under everyone's noses.

He was a chameleon.

The wolf had noticed him earlier on the dancefloor, as their eyes had met across the room for a moment. The canine had tried to give him a confident, flirty glance as well as he had been able to, hoping to lure the reptile home for some energetic fun together, but had received no ostensible look back to the effect that the scaled man was interested in his offer, and had dismissed him as someone whose radar he simply fell outside of. Evidently he had been mistaken in that assumption, he realized in a most enlightening heartbeat as the chameleon grabbed his wrists and pinned him against the wall on the side of the washroom stall.

"Can I go to the bathroom first?"

The reptile smiled a toothy grin, and shook his head.

"No."

He pushed the mammal's shoulders down, forcing him to his knees in front of him, and guided the wolf's maw to his crotch, determined.

"Me first."

The scaled man shoved his throbbing length into the canine's maw, fingers around his furred ears. He let out an extensive, contended sigh and arched his back as his penis started letting out one, long, uninterrupted stream of urine deep down the wolf's throat, almost making him choke as some of the pee almost came out of his nose. His entire sense of scent, in spite of his higher reasoning capacities, still filled a sizeable amount of his brain, enough that smell and taste were much closer to him in their scope to seeing and hearing than they were for most humanoids, and the aroma and taste of the chameleon's urine flooding his sensory input channels overpowered him.

The reptile, looking down at the head of his so helpful receptacle to enjoy the sight of where his urine was going, also saw that the wolf's cock was now fully erect, already leaking pre from the sensory overload that he had received at his scaly hands. "Well, well," he said assuredly as his member shivered his last drops off on the canine's tongue, "looks like someone's enjoying himself, isn't he?" The mammal, now firmly ensconced in subspace, could only nod and whimper in approval as the chameleon lifted him up in the air against the wall, wrapping his furred legs which could no longer reach the ground around the man's scaly hips and back.

The wolf panicked, desperately repressing a moan as the reptile entered him: he'd heard someone come in!

For a moment the mammal wanted to cancel the whole operation, scared that they would get caught by the newcomer in flagrante delicto. What rotten timing this was! Just as his lifelong dreams were coming true, someone had to come along and turn them into his worst nightmare.

What could he have done to deserve such a fate fit for Tantalus, he wondered? The canine tried to shake his head no, indicating the open washroom door with his head even as his arms were still wrapped around the scaled man's shoulders to keep himself from falling. But the chameleon looked at him in his eyes, grinning more wickedly yet than before, and nodded his head yes nonetheless.

His whole body seemed to vanish.

The man who walked into the public washroom saw nothing when he looked under the stall partitions. The reptile's bare legs and feet had shifted colors so that they were completely indistinguishable from the washroom walls themselves, and the wolf's feet were too high up to be seen. The mammal held his breath, afraid that the newcomer would try to walk into the same stall that they both occupied and find it locked seemingly with no one inside it to justify the locking, and breathed out in relief as quietly as possible when he saw the man sit down in the stall next to theirs instead of theirs itself, still close enough for them to risk detection though.

As the canine fought back his mounting urge to piss, he heard the sound of the pee of the man sitting down in the stall next to theirs hitting the water, that same sound he was afraid others would hear when they were in public washrooms next to him, but without the man having any awareness that he heard him, how long he must have had to hold it for it to come out so long. The chameleon's legs and tail still seemed to be holding him up at the waist like some kind of tripod, he thought as he heard the newcomer squeeze out and shake off the last drops in the water below. He stopped and hoped for a moment that this would be all it would be, that the man only had to go number one, and would not ruin the experience for him with anything else, when he was confronted with a possibility that he had not initially considered.

He heard the man start going number three.

He could not believe it! All those years of thinking about how fun this would be, but never daring to, and there he was, getting an earful of another man, whose species he had no way to tell, beating him to the punch. The loud, short, shallow breaths he was taking, the sound of his toilet seat sliding back and forth ever so slightly as he moved, and the slippery sound of well-lubricated folds of flesh being pulled down then quickly back up faster and faster, there was no mistaking it, you could almost hear his heartbeat, convinced he was alone and lost to the world, racing toward his climax. When he was in his teens, the wolf thought, it used to be him who was alone on the toilet, imagining two men fucking near him as he did, picturing himself as one or the other of them as the case may have been, and now that he was an adult, he was one of two real guys fucking near another man jerking off on a toilet near him, unbeknownst to even him, the flipside of fantasy.

Was he going to...? Yes, there he was, the mammal realized, his erection straining upward on the reptile's belly as he listened in rapt attention, the low growl in the back of his throat as the slippery sliding sounds quickened faster than ever distinct enough for the wolf to have been able to imagine just how warm his seminal fluids must have felt on their way out of him. At just that moment, the chameleon leaned forward to kiss the canine on the lips, shoving his length as deep into him as he could while pushing him against the wall, muffling an involuntary yelp with his scaly lips as the man in the stall next to them was too wrapped up in the throes of his own orgasm to hear them.

After they heard him pull scraps of toilet paper from the holder to clean up his ejaculate, the man in the stall next to their stood up, flushed, opened the door of his stall to go out of it to the public washroom sinks, washed his hands with the hand soap under the automatic faucets, dried his hands at the wall dryer, and left. The wolf gave the reptile a disbelieving look, like he could not believe how much balls the scaled man had to have had to have done what he did even though he could feel said balls right on his own ass cheeks. The chameleon just grinned at him wickedly again, as if to say 'What? We didn't get caught, did we?'

As the reptile's hips bucked against his underside, the mammal struggled to hold back, straining vainly to articulate that he really had to go, but the scaled man had him pinned right against the wall, and his mind was too far gone by then for him to be able to even form a sentence. As a river of his canine pee started spraying from his hose, he breathed out an involuntary sigh of relief while it flopped left and right covering each side of the chameleon's chest in his rank, liquid gold without a care in the world. The reptile extended his extendable tongue down to lick the urine sensuously off the wolf's cock, continuing to lick some of the mammal's chest and some of his own chest to bring as much of the musky released fluid in his mouth as he could.

He leaned forward to kiss the canine on the mouth again, and tasting his own bitter pee from the scaled man's mouth brought the wolf dangerously close to the edge, his pelvis tightening like a vise around the chameleon's thrusts. The mammal felt the reptile's hands clutch his butt cheeks more desperately than ever and heard a low snarl rumble in the back of the top's throat. He was pressed flat against the wall with his feet still dangling around his penetrator as he felt the scaly shaft pumping jet after jet of warm chameleon spunk into him right under his furry tail. The reptile's body shuddered against the canine's body throughout his ejaculation, extending his tongue back down to wrap it around the bottom's pleading shaft between their abdomens.

Deciding he had not overstayed his welcome in his furry companion's rear end, the scaled man, still hard enough to stay firmly inside even after having come, did not pull out, but finished what he had started earlier by urinating the rest of what he had needed to let out before right up in the wolf's ass. Feeling himself filled to the brim with yet more warm, masculine fluids even as the chameleon's semen was still trickling out of his butt around his dangling tail against the washroom wall, combined with the extendable tongue that was now stroking his cock faster and faster between them, proved too much for the mammal to hold back, and made short work of his resistance. The reptile sighed a satisfied, contended sigh, able to tell he had been hitting just the right sweet spot with his thrusts when the canine's penis pulsated uncontrollably between them, erupting into an erratic fountain of cum that shot up so high from how pent up the bottom had been that it hit the top's face on its way up, almost howling as he just kept ejaculating longer and longer.

Then the scaled man pulled out of him, barely letting him put his legs back down on the ground before becoming invisible again. "Hey, wait!" The wolf called after him, but he could already see the stall door then the washroom door seem to open on their own as the reptile stealthily made his way back out. He slipped in the puddle of pee and semen that had formed under him as he had been getting fucked, hastily pulling his pants back up as he ran out of the club out of breath, reeking of cum and urine on his rushed way out for all the world to smell, wondering whether it would be a good idea for him to come back to this club or not after a display like that.

Worth it, though.

THE MACHINE IN THE GARDEN

It had caught him completely by surprise.

The bat had circled the woods from above a few times, as he was wont to do, looking down at them as he flew about. Not detecting any sign of the friend he was supposed to meet from over the treetops, he dove down under them through an opening in the foliage, gingerly continuing his circling so as to avoid flying into any trunks or branches while continuing to search about. It was when he had been right about to land, passing between two trunks just as he was readying his legs for landing underneath him, that his flight path had been suddenly cut short.

He was caught in a web.

It was certainly larger than a web woven by any ordinary spider would have ever been, which had to lead to the conclusion that it had not been woven by any ordinary spider. Not only was it of much greater size, but the interwoven strings and threads that composed it were mostly green, with hints of brown here and there, rather than the whitish tones that usually characterized webs. What sort of creature could have created something like this, strong enough to incapacitate a flying creature as resistant as he was, the bat wondered?

As the leaves shuffled over him, he first saw the green head of a snake descending upside-down through the canopy, scanning the visible horizon with its eyes without eyelids to suddenly notice him below it. If he had been puzzled to see it instead of a spider's head in its stead, he would have been downright astonished to see it followed by a scaly, two-armed upper body... and by the brown lower body of a giant spider. Dangling from one of its vine-threads, the creature carefully lowered itself to the edge of the web that it had woven in which it had caught its unsuspecting prey, shifting from upside-down to right-side-up as it landed.

"Well, well..." the hybrid intoned.

The bat tried to pull his right wrist free, but it was being firmly held down by a piece of the sticky, greenish web that had wrapped itself around it like a handcuff. Trying to pry away his left wrist yielded the same unsuccessful result. He tried to kick his right foot then his left foot loose, but they had been wrapped just as snugly in the substance secreted by the creature as his wrists had been, preventing him from any means of escape. From up close, he noticed that the spots where the green web cuffs closed upon themselves looked like miniature snake heads biting their own bodies at an earlier juncture.

"What do we have here?"

It looked like he was not going to be going anywhere for a while, the bat could not help thinking. What would a being such as this want with him? Normal spiders were known to keep prey tied up and paralyzed for long periods of time, only to wake them up to snack on parts of them at intermittent intervals until none of them would be left. This was not a fate that he would have wanted for himself by any stretch of the imagination, any more than he would have wanted to be digested down a snake's gullet over a period of months, or to end up like a character from The Little Shop of Horrors.

But was this what the hybrid had in mind for him? Or was there something else?

"Seems like someone's indisposed..."

The bat's mind raced. What could he possibly have to offer to this bewildering entity, other than his life... or his body? What other needs could it have to fulfill beyond such appetites that could have overridden them enough for it to consider sparing the bat's life and virtue, and that the bat could have had access to with its limited resources in this time and place? Nothing came to mind.

"If you let me live I can make it worth your while!"

The snake head cocked an eye at him as the leaves rustled overhead.

"Is that right?"

The creature sounded unconvinced.

"If you let me go I can give you, I don't know, money! Gadgets, shiny things. Shiny's good, right?"

His captor smirked at the chiropteran knowingly. "And what guarantee do I have that you'd come back if I let you go, hmm?" The hybrid had been scuttling closer and closer to him while circling him on its eight bark-covered, root-like, chitinous legs as they had talked, and had inched its way within a mere breath of him. "You seem like a shiny enough gadget yourself." The creature traced a scaled, chlorophyll-veined finger across the bat's chest intently. "I think I'll keep you."

The mammal's ears perked up atop his furred head.

"What if, uh..." he struggled to say, as if the desperation from looking for a way to come out of this predicament intact was making it hard for him to speak, "what if I could make you feel really, really good?" He would have covered his mouth in embarrassment about how he had phrased that, about having had it there for him to phrase at all, but his hands were tied, and he could not take his words back, so he may as well have kept going with them. "Would you let me go then?"

The hybrid clicked its forked tongue at him.

"Now where would be the sense in that?" it asked matter-of-factly. "If you make me feel good, then wouldn't I want to keep you here forever?" The chiropteran's leathery wings thrashed behind him, but he could not free them from their vegetal bonds either.

"Me and my big mouth," the bat shook his head.

"And what a big mouth you do have," the creature grinned, running a finger across his captive's nervous smile from ear to ear, feeling the distance between his fangs as he did. "You're just full of good ideas today," it continued, fixating its spiraling, hypnotic gaze on the mammal's eyes as it spoke. "We'll have to make the best of that."

On these words, the strange entity transformed before the bat's very eyes. Rather than appearing as a spider-taur, its lower body morphed into two green, scaly legs and a vegetal serpent's tail to match the hybrid's unchanging head. The eight brown spider legs that were under it merged into four brown spider legs coming out of the corners of its back in its humanoid form.

It was also sporting a raging boner.

"I'm glad you chose to venture out," it hissed as it positioned its crotch in front of the bat's mouth in-between his fangs, "into the wilderness." Before the chiropteran could protest, the creature had shoved its cock down his throat, almost causing him to gag. The shapeshifter looked down to the mammal's crotch with a satisfied grin on its face, pulling some but not all the way out as it did. "It looks like you're enjoying your trip."

The bat's penis had shot up as though a switch had been flipped in his mind to make it do that when the serpent's shaft had pushed its way between his fangs into his maw. He loved giving head, with every part of his being, loved it so much that even in a situation such as this, his body would respond, there was no helping it. The scaly hands rested on his head with its fingers spread around his pointed ears, guiding his head up and down the hybrid's member at a deliberate but steadily increasing pace.

As the sap-like taste of the creature's copiously leaking pre filled his mouth - had it come? He was not sure whether or not it had come - he saw it rear its head back in abandon, opening its snake jaw as wide as it could while thrusting its length into his maw. Its forked tongue extended out of its open maw like a root or vine, going over the chiropteran's head to creep its way down his back to reach down between his wings. It was surprising enough that it would have been able to do all this, but what could it have wanted with the center of his back?

"Seems like you're no ordinary bat." The mammal would have wanted to answer, but his mouth was too full of plant dick for him to speak. There was little he could have said to disprove the claim being made about him, though.

It had found his wind-up key.

"You're just full of surprises." Deciding to make the most of what it had exposed, the metamorph held the bat's head as close to its crotch as it could. Air snorted out of the captive's nostrils as the hybrid's penis kept getting longer and longer, prehensile, changing shape and becoming thinner and more plant-like as it continued extending down all the way through the chiropteran's esophagus, stomach, small and large intestines, ending in small vegetal strands that splintered into nothingness in his bladder. "Yeah, but you can take it, can't you..." the snake head nodded to itself more than asked while the bat struggled but lived, his own pre leaking out of his shaft even as he did.

Rattling behind its rear as it spoke, the creature's tail shapeshifted into a carnivorous plant, reaching down behind and below it as it did. Carefully aligning itself as it closed its vegetal maw around the chiropteran's penis so that its plant teeth would be closed right around it, they held it in place without biting into it. "You can take a lot of things that normal bats can't take," the hybrid continued while a flower bloomed from the tip of its extended cock in his captive's bladder. "That's what makes you special, isn't it?" The mammal moaned as the petals of the flower came to life inside him like so many fingers and started massaging his prostate through the membrane that separated his bladder from it. "But I know how to push your buttons," the being finished, finally turning the bat's wind-up key on his back with his extended forked tongue.

That was all it took for its captive to whimper his way through an overwhelming orgasm, his ass twitching from the flower's internal prostate stimulation, his penis shooting his load into the carnivorous plant in front of his crotch, set off by the wind-up key turn, his truest weak spot of all, over anything else. His captor retracted its penis from the mammal's body and out of his mouth, and retrieved its tongue from his back. "You -" the bat had to stop to catch his breath as his body shivered while a last remaining, unexpected jet of semen finished erupting from his tip into the vegetal tail-maw - "you do know me," he conceded, as the carnivorous plant moved away from him and transformed back into a rattlesnake tail.

A toothy grin came upon the chiropteran's face. "And I know you."

Before the creature could answer, four multi-jointed, metallic sticks popped out of each corner of the captive's back. On all four of their ends small circular, metallic saws span as fast as it seemed that they could possibly spin. Noticing that the cyborg could have easily cut himself loose by going for the web-vines that had snared him at any time to slice them off his ankles and wrists, the hybrid quickly had them untie themselves from around his limbs and withdrew them into the ground and branches around them, the whole forest an extension of its body.

"Now it's your turn!" the bat chortled.

The chiropteran, now free to move about at will, retracted the four saw sticks into his back. Instead, as he looked into its eyes, a series of chains came out of his wrists, ankles, knees and elbows. He ran toward his erstwhile captor at top speed, seeming like he was going to run right into it and launching himself into the air at the last second to begin flying barely around the shapeshifter as he did. Almost faster than the eye could follow, the mammal started flying in lightning quick crisscrossing dashes in three dimensions all around the creature with the chains extending out of his body trailing behind him as he did, and the tables turned.

It was now the hybrid that was caught in a large, 8-spoked web of chains that hung halfway between the ground and branches.

"Looks like the captor's become the captive," the cyborg smirked. "What are you going to do to me?" it rasped, its hiss and widening eyes betraying its growing nervousness. Like many plant-folk, it could never leave its grove - that was a curse it would have to live with for the rest of its life. Visits from other beings, like the bat, were the most that it would ever get to see of what belonged to the outside world. To have been even more limited in its movement, even within its grove, to the point where it could not even move, should have felt even worse, should have driven the point about its forced immobility home even further.

Somehow, it felt liberating.

The captive, as terrifying as it looked outwardly, actually had to spend so much of its life using its magic to heal those who came to it with their problems, always having to put its duties ahead of its own concerns, that to suddenly be incapacitated, rendered unable to work, not responsible for anything other than enjoying what was going to happen was... freeing. The chiropteran, free to fly all over the world with just a flap of his cybernetic wings, had felt for the metamorph's plight, and decided that, if it could not go to the outside world, he would bring the outside world to it. It was just more... interesting when they role-played their way through like this.

"You don't have to worry... I won't even touch you."

Now the confusion on the hybrid's face was genuine, but its interest was definitely piqued. "Is that right?" The mammal, rather than approaching the creature as it had approached him when he had been tied down himself, flew up into the air above in front of it, slowly and steadily flapping his leathery wings to hover in place completely out of reach. "No, I won't," he continued, now that he had gotten the hybrid's attention with his cryptic statement. "I won't even need to." The cyborg pulled something out of his left thigh, and his captive squinted to see what he was bringing up from it to his lips.

It was a flute.

Bright green as it was, it almost looked like the serpent's cock itself, as though it had been designed to make the plant feel as though it was its own shaft that the bat was holding between his fingers and bringing up to his mouth through sympathetic magic. Without waiting any longer, the chiropteran's fingers flickered across the flute's length like so many wriggling worms dangling on hooks for the snake head to crane its neck up at and try to bite. The mammal closed his eyes for a moment, seemingly almost lost in a trance of his own making while he concentrated enough to remember to hit all the right notes as he played.

It was as though he were a pied piper, his captive unable to follow him to its own willing perdition.

A lot of people assumed that snakes responded to snake charmers because they could hear the notes being played, even though nothing could have been further from the truth. Serpents, which could barely hear, would become mesmerized by following the motion of the fingers of the flute player on the flute while watching them play, as hypnotized by their fingers' movement as their prey were supposed to be hypnotized by their own eyes before being caught. Spiders did not have conventional hearing, their auditory receptors situated on their legs rather than on their heads, mostly able to perceive vibrations, whether on their webs or as sound through air.

But plants... plants loved music.

It was something one would have found in a lot of handbooks about how to take the best possible care of plants that one could. Play music around plants, the books would say, on some level they can feel the music, they like it, it creates an environment around them that makes them grow. As the shapeshifter listened, enraptured, to the private concert that was being given for him, the cyborg realized, re-opening his eyes to look down at his captive's body, that the books must have been onto something.

It was definitely growing.

Reaching up as though he were the sun feeding it with its light, the reptilian cock strained upward toward the hovering flautist. It was so moved by the music's beauty that its feelings became translated by its body into pure audiophile arousal. It was as though its entire being were struggling to rise as high as it possibly could, as if everything that was good for it were above. It thrashed to free itself from its chains like Ulysses tied around his mast attempting to break free from the knots of his sailors to throw himself at the mercy of the sirens' song for all eternity.

The metamorph gasped and whimpered when he paused, just as someone would were the stimulation they received abruptly stopped during sex. "More, then?" the bat smirked, proud of the effect he was having. The creature nodded, maw agape, in mute approval, and the musician smiled a kinder smile. "Let the world come to you, country mouse..." he whispered, his fingers and mouth gently returning to their most sacred task.

Could it really come from this?

The hybrid was not sure but, as it turned the question over in its head, it quickly vanished from its mind when it became overtaken by what happened next. As multicolored lights began to flash on and off all over different parts of the chiropteran's body, a drum sound joined the flute's sound through the air, seemingly out of nowhere, then a bass sound, making the ground and chains vibrate, then a horn, blaring over the growing din, then an electric guitar sound, bringing everything together into a flowing melody. The natural, woodwind sound of the flute remained underneath, merging with the electronic music that was being mixed in with it on top of it by the living synthesizer, just as the natural and artificial beings they were merged with each other.

The mammal's joints began to release a cool, harmless smoke around them, spreading between the tree branches like mist, without making it harder for them to breathe. He modulated the heat emitted by his body in creative ways, invisible to the naked eye but perceived by reptilian heat pits, a uniquely targeted art form. His cybernetic body sent out laser-based lights of every color of the rainbow to reflect everywhere in the fog that was forming around them, flooding its vision with incomparable delight. The virtuoso, lost in his performance, opened his eyes to see that dandelion spores were now floating everywhere up from the ground around them amongst the smoke and lasers, released by the dryad through the forest in its excitement.

The cyborg, transferring the flute's unearthly, ethereal part of the melody to being produced by his synthetic body, turned the flute into a directed sound-emitting device, aimed down and in front of him toward the captive's crotch. He emitted the directed sound waves as an inch-wide, several meters-long cylinder of sound, forming a 'fleshlight' made of sonic energy that contracted, expanded, and swirled around the creature's pulsating shaft. Already coated in sap-like pre, the stimulation with which this provided the hybrid made a handful of treetops surrounding them spontaneously blossom in ecstasy, raining down a flurry of flowering petals from the branches to cover the ground around them, combining with everything around them.

The relentless crescendo of the bat's auditory ministrations to the shapeshifter finally became too much for it to hold back, making it reach its peak. The creature hissed a protracted, full-throated hiss, the spider legs sprouting from its back thrashing wildly as its twitching length sprayed its seed upward and forward through the sonic cylinder that continued invisibly stroking it to increase its pleasure over the course of its paroxysm. The powerful jets of its sap-like semen spurted from its penile slit like a gooey, fractal-like whirlwind, dispersing itself chaotically as it fell back down around it as if to fertilize the Earth below it.

"Ohhh yeah...!" it sighed contentedly as the final drops oozed out of its glans. "That was so good..." It basked in the afterglow like a snake basking in the sun. As the bat swooped down, the hybrid stuck out its tongue, transforming it into a blooming rose for its playmate to pick out of its maw as a gesture of affection.

"For you..."

WHAT YOU WON'T KNOW

"Anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life."

(Thomas Nagel)

He blearily opened his eyes when he first came to.

Had he? It had seemed not to have worked at first. Had someone taped his eyes shut somehow? Or was there the more distressing possibility that he had lost his sense of sight altogether? Then, he felt the reason for it on his face and around the rest of his head.

A blindfold.

A lot of blindfolds were shoddy at best, insofar as accomplishing their stated purpose was concerned in any case. Sure, they would reduce your vision somewhat, but you could still distinguish the basic facts about whatever it was that was in front of you at the time through them, if you didn't intentionally keep your own eyes closed to play along with it. They would hide your eyes from the world more than they would hide the world from your eyes.

Not this one.

This strip of cloth was wrapped around his head tightly enough and was thick and dark enough that not a single ray of the brightest light there could be would have stood a single chance of making it through to his eyes. With his eyes wide open, he could not even tell whether the light in the room that he was in was on or off. He could have had REM sleep through this blindfold if he had been left to fall asleep in a sunny desert on a hot day, if it had been only a question of darkness without the heat in any case.

As it was, the room temperature was neither too hot nor too cold but in-between as he would have normally wanted it to be, but there was something else that was wrong with him. He had a moment of disorientation, but it did not take him long to figure out what that was. The blood was mildly rushing to his head, he felt pieces of cloth that felt much like the blindfold did wrapped tightly around his ankles, and his arms were being stretched up over his head without effort, almost in spite of himself.

He was hanging upside-down.

He had come to rely on his sense of sight a lot over his years living among other humanoids than his own kind, he realized as he was then being unexpectedly deprived of it. Shaking his head slightly trying to chase away a minor headache, he strove to rebuild the chain of events in his life that had led him up to this most singular predicament. He blinked, even though it changed nothing in terms of what he saw or did not see, to clear his head, and he was forced to admit to himself that he could not, for the life of him, reconstruct them in his mind offhand.

'It had to have made sense at the time,' he would have shrugged if he had been right side up.

Wriggling his toes to make sure that they were still receiving appropriate blood circulation from the rest of his body, he turned his mind over to the more pressing question of how he was going to get out of the situation that he had gotten himself into in the immediate future. Breathing in deeply, doing his best to adjust back to this rarer manner of existing, he turned the question around in his mind, trying to examine it from as many different angles in his head as he could, just as he was unknowingly being examined from a different angle than he usually was himself. He became so absorbed in his own train of thought that he did not pay as much attention to his surroundings as he otherwise would have.

When he heard his captor approach him, he gasped, startled. He had not heard him coming.

A shiver went down, or rather up, his spine, and his pointed, triangular ears perked up atop his furred head when this realization hit him. In the old days, it would never have been possible for him not to have heard the other person approaching him even if he had been lost in an intricate elaboration of escape plans that was just not quite coming together as well as he felt that it should have been by then. Had his senses themselves become dulled from living where he had in the most recent part of his life, or was it simply that not having had to listen to the world around him as attentively as he had had to before had conditioned him to pay less attention to what he heard than to what he saw over that period of time?

He assumed that it was his captor who was nearing him, at least. He had no way of knowing for sure whether the person who was approaching him was the same one who had tied his feet up to hang him up upside-down or not, but considering that someone who would do such a thing would probably do it somewhere where no one else could find the person who they were going to be tying up to hang upside-down, it stood to reason that it was. Either way, with the way that things seemed to have been going, it was not going to take much longer for him to find out, he surmised.

A cold drop of sweat dripped from his lower back to the nape of his neck.

"Well, well..."

He could get an idea of what size the room in which they were was from the sound of the person's voice reverberating through the room.

"You really didn't hear me coming, did you?"

It was fairly large, at least 20 feet wide, maybe up to 25, he assessed roughly from the time it took for the echoes of the other person's voice to return to his ears after having bounced on the walls of the room.

"Tsk, tsk..."

He could hear his captor - he was sure it had to be his captor - start walking in slow, deliberate circles around him.

"What will we ever do with you?"

He could tell that he was hanging up upside-down in the center of the room, and that the circular pattern that the footsteps he could hear going around the room was being described approximately halfway in-between himself and the walls of the room - which he decided had to have been circular as well. It was as if his sense of hearing was slowly being returned to him, as odd as that thought could appear from a different point of view. He had technically never lost his hearing, for one thing.

"After all..."

He hated making assumptions in that regard, but he would have said that it would have sounded like a male voice, if he had had to pick one over the other on instinct.

"What kind of bat can't hear his way through life?"

He strained his back muscles, flapping his leathery wings upside-down behind him. They were not restrained the way that his ankles were but, hanging there as he was, they were no use to him. Had he tried to fly toward it, he would not have been able to fly his way to the very ground below him, which had to be just a foot or two under where his hands could reach, he determined.

"I'll tell you what kind..."

The person's voice made them sound so... disappointed with him. It was as though he had personally slighted this person, whose voice he could not even recognize, with his unacceptable sensory shortcomings. What did it matter how well he could hear or not, he asked himself?

"A degenerate!"

He heard the person spit on the ground in front of them, as if in disgust at his performance.

"That's what."

Every hair on his body stood on end. Who was this person to judge him so harshly? But, suspended above the ground upside-down by his feet with no ostensible means of freeing himself, what kind of position was he in to argue with anyone about anything? The question was unavoidably brought to the forefront of his mind, and lingered there unwelcome.

"It's true, what they say about you."

The person's footsteps continued at the same pace and distance from him as they had from the start. It was as if the circle that they formed around him were as reliable as the march of clockwork. It was as if its cycle were as inevitable as the onward march of time which clockwork would have represented itself.

"You've been living among the diurnals too long."

How did this person know all these things about him? These were details concerning major decisions he had made in his life, and insecurities about these decisions that very few people would have known about. What would this person have had to have done to have gained access to such privileged information about him, to be able to use it against him so?

"You've lost your senses."

The person snorted to themselves in contempt, as if making dire light of the fact that both meanings that could be ascribed to this expression could be applied to him in the situation he was in, as far as his captor was concerned.

"You couldn't tell where I am if your life depended on it."

He gulped, an unpleasant thought making its way into his mind as he heard this.

"Does my... life depend on it?"

He heard a low, disapproving growl in the back of his captor's throat.

"So you really couldn't."

From the slight creaks he could hear emanating from the person's neck, he could tell that they were shaking their head sideways as they spoke.

"I didn't say that!"

He heard something falling from their hands, part of it hitting the ground next to them, making a quick swishing sound on the way down, as if gravity had been enough to make it unfold just a little too fast, whatever it could be. He could hear how much it sounded like it must have weighed in his captor's hands as it did. Feeling more cold sweat coming on, he decided that he had been hanging upside-down by his feet for long enough and, bending his waist forward and up as far as it could go - and he was a flexible bat if there ever was one - he reached up over himself to grab at the lengths of cloth that were wrapped around his ankles and struggled with them, trying in vain to undo them.

*SMACK!*

His heart racing, he lowered his upper body back down and brought his arms back below him as fast as a lightning bolt. He had heard the sound strike just an inch from his arms. It explained everything he had needed to know about the object that his captor had been twiddling around in their hands unbeknownst to him earlier on.

It was a whip.

"We'll have none of that, thank you very much." As much as he wanted to free his feet, he decided to listen for then. It seemed rational enough. "I'll be the one to decide when - if - you get down from there." He wasn't sure he liked the sound of that. "Got that?"

He nodded enthusiastically, eager to make sure that he couldn't be misinterpreted as disagreeing. It had been made clear to him that lack of cooperation was not going to yield the best possible results for then, so it seemed smart for him to adjust his response accordingly. The footsteps resumed around him at the same pace and distance yet again, as if to emphasize that nothing he did could alter his situation in any way at this point.

"Good. In the meantime," he could hear the person smack something that could only have been the whip that they had just used against the palm of their other hand as they walked, "we're going to play a little game, you and I." Somehow the bat thought that they were not going to be playing charades, although there was still a chance that his captor would surprise him by proposing exactly that by this point. By then, he would have agreed with that - and he hated charades.

"I'm going to keep walking around you. As I do, when I ask, you're going to tell me where I am."

That seemed easy enough. He had been worried that it had been going to be something hard. He breathed an involuntary sigh of relief, nodded more calmly than earlier on, and felt some of the tension that had been accumulating in his shoulders dissipate.

"If you're wrong, you get this."

His captor struck to the side with the whip, the lash echoing through the chamber as it did. The bat gulped. So much for playing with low stakes.

"If you're right, you get this near you... just not on you," they explained. "So you're going to be hearing this whether you answer right or not." Listening to the sound of their teeth, he could tell they had grinned toothily when they had said that. "You'll just be feeling it if you don't." He tried to do what he could to rationalize to himself that he was going to make it out fine. How hard could it be? He did have his above-average bat hearing working for him, after all.

But still. One mistake. One mistake would be enough. That was enough to get his attention.

"Where am I now?"

That had come faster than he had expected that it would. He had not been ready.

"Left!"

*CRACK!*

After having flinched with his whole body, he mentally scanned it for pain signals coming to his brain from anywhere on it. Nothing. He could hear that the whip had hit a mere inch from his left side, but it had stopped just short of reaching him. His left side had been the correct side.

"Good."

The footsteps started zigzagging from their previously tightly predetermined pattern in an attempt to throw him off their tracks. He wondered how long this game was supposed to last. How many times would he have to risk being wrong?

"What about now?"

He could hear that they had kept walking to a different spot after having asked him to trick him.

"Right!"

*SNAP!* "OHHH!"

The lash had hit his right butt cheek. He could tell it was going to leave a small red mark. "But you were!" he protested. "I was when you spoke." He could hear the whip swishing as his captor shifted their grip on it in their hands. "Not when I asked." He would have to make sure to remember that was how the game was played. "Yes, of course." No one had told him that.

He stiffened.

His clothes had been removed before he had been tied and hung upside-down like this. It was his face that flushed red when he noticed that he was getting hard from the treatment that he had been receiving at the hands of his captor. He blushed even redder when it occurred to him that his captor had to have been able to see his excitement plainly as well, even though he couldn't see what their reaction to it may have been. Were they naked? He had no way to tell.

"And now?"

"Behind!"

*SCHTAK!* "AGHN!"

He could feel that his left buttock had also been struck, and would also be sporting a nice red mark on it in the morning.

"But you were behind me!"

At least he was privately glad that he was being whipped on the most padded part of his body.

"Oh, I thought you were telling me where you wanted me to hit," his captor snickered. "But don't worry," they said as they approached his crotch, gently lifting the bat's erect cock with the coiled up whip as they spoke to take in its condition, "I won't hit anything really important." He cursed himself when he could smell that the pain that had overwhelmed his mind as it had shot through his body, making everything come into focus in a flash, spreading warmth throughout his pelvis as his brain released endorphins to combat it, had been making him emit drop after strong-smelling drop of pre from his tip, surely visible on the ground under his head.

"What I want you to do," his captor said as their footsteps started up again, "is to rely on hearing me completely. So often," they continued, "among the diurnals, you're being asked to ignore sound, to pay attention only to what's visible, to treat sound as though it's not real, simply because you can't see it..." The bat could feel the pain slowly fading, but his excitement remained, and he listened in rapt attention. "Well, I want you to treat me as though I'm real, right now, even though you can't see me. Because I'm really here," they finished.

"That's what all of this is for, isn't it?" He was starting to get an idea. "That's right." This time, rather than bending his waist to reach for the restraints around his feet, he reached behind his head to try to untie his blindfold.

*SWISH!*

The whip stopped in its tracks. He had grabbed it on its way.

"Front," he said, smirking.

"Well done," they conceded. "Superb reflexes. Still," he could hear them approach him along the line of the whip between them, "for your own sake... no looking." For the first time, with their proximity and the surprise he had just caused them, he heard a hissing sound emanating from his captor's head. "Please..." Understanding flooded his mind, just as the pain had earlier.

"You win." There was a reason his captor did not want to be seen. "You win the game."

Different frequencies of hissing left no doubt to him that there had to be multiple sources of it. Several dozens, certainly. "What do I win?" His captor moved behind him, using the whip to tie his hands behind his back, to avoid a repeat of his previous trick. Stepping back in front of him, his captor brought their hands to hold the sides of his face right in front of their crotch.

"This."

Feeling his captor's breath on his own shaft, the bat smelled the pre on their length in front of his face and, understanding what was expected of him, opened wide. His penis twitched when their cock was shoved up his throat between his fangs, almost making him gag as it did. As it withdrew part of the way, he swirled his tongue around their delicious, pulsating cylinder.

He listened to the groans, grunts and moans of his captor as they humped his mouth as attentively he would have listened to a symphony, picturing how every sound of pleasure could be traced back to its own physiological reaction and the sensation associated with it, his own pre dripping down on his face and on his captor's member from above. He could even hear their heartbeat quicken as his head was held fast in place, their breathing growing faster as the thrusts into his maw quickened into an uninhibited blur while the snakes on their head went wild.

"Ohh... Ahh... HNGF!"

He savored and swallowed every spurt of his captor's semen up his throat. "Ohh..." A shiver went up his back. "You did good." His captor scratched him behind his ear in thanks, withdrawing their shaft from the bat's mouth as they did. "You earned this well."

Before he could ask what his captor meant by that, he felt their hand wrap itself around his still-twitching, upside-down length near his tip, just over where his glans started under it. They brought their hand up, pulling back the skin folds over him up to the base of his penis on his crotch, and brought their hand back down. Bringing his skin all the way back down and, pulling it back up only enough to uncover his glans this time, they gave his frenulum a lick, his wings flapping involuntarily when they did.

Gently poking and rubbing his taint with their other hand, they finished bringing it back up, then down, again and again, without stopping, slowly at first, but at a gradually ever-increasing pace. Feeling the finger massaging his perineum being removed, he heard it being put into his captor's mouth, gasping as it was brought back and shoved down his ass under his small, twitching bat tail. His legs thrashed in their restraints, toes wriggling overhead as he hit his plateau.

Finally, he cried out, the mounting excitement the stroking and fingering brought him carrying him over his threshold. The gorgon continued both while the bat's spunk rained down from above, gravity on its side. He couldn't see his cock covering the ground under them in white as he came.

This was what it truly meant to find release...