FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

“Captain Bennett, why in heaven’s name are you naked?”

The woman snapped a quick look past her distant shoulder to peer down her eight-foot-tall, thirty-foot-long body in a movement that sent her eight whiskers slapping across the bluish-tinted gills along her neck. Her new secondary manner of breathing still felt like raw wounds that should have been deadly, air passed through them right into her windpipe. It was yet more irritation that made her first reflexive comment, locked behind clenched teeth, all the more difficult to bear. She shook her body instead in a wave. The motion traveled the lengthening distance between her head and shoulders, shoulders and hips, and past her hips to the scythe-like formation of the hardened fin at the tip of her tail.

A tail, an appendage that continued to provoke marvel over the uniqueness of the additional stimuli and bulk hanging supported by her hips. As always she could feel the weight of it behind her feet and the pressure of the scales and fins along it against the ground. There were still some hints at what she was leaving behind. Pink flesh across her snout and on her hands and feet where the softly glowing alien veins shone through from beneath. Fringes of hair around the still growing spines that swept out from her aching jaws, the steady tug of the larger dorsal fins down her spine as they spread scaled flesh. The uneasy back and forth between stances as the bones and ligaments of her shoulders and hips ached with maddening intensity.

“Sir, as I am no longer human.” She held up a four-fingered hand from where she was resting on it in a sejant crouch with thighs tucked up against her flanks. An attempt to bring it in view of where she thought the camera was below the marvel of the foldable monitor. Somewhere in that large paw of hers, she could still feel the horrible itching sensation of her two smallest fingers fusing, bone and all, into one digit. “I no longer feel obligated to continue the fiction of having any decency to cover. No one demands that chimpanzees, ravens, or dolphins cover themselves.”

Which was not the real reason she went nude. The gowns they had been given were shapeless enough to accommodate the new body part and greatly extended dimensions. She just enjoyed watching people squirm between looking at the swell of her breasts and the shadowed expanse of her reptilian crotch bracketed between two inhuman fins. Whatever was needed to bring them to arousal and let the transforming woman feel some attachment to the world as her tethers became alarmingly frayed.

She saw his eyes, just for a moment, flick from the fantastical webbed hand to the more tempting sight of her green-tinged, featureless breasts.

The human pig.

Titania shuffled her hands to squeeze her arms together and push what remained of her mammalian chest up, toying with the disgusting human. All of them were disgusting. She hated them. She hated everything that didn’t fill the hole within her. Above all, she hated herself for not knowing what she wanted.

“Ahem.” he said, flustered. “That may be so physically…”

“Do you want to see my tail? I have made excellent progress on working to control it.”

“…but your behavior has become worrisomely erratic. Has anything you learned at the interdicted site compromised your allegiances, Captain Bennett?”

Titania was sitting on a bean bag of some undoubtedly extra-terrestrial variety and leaning forward with her hands on the floor in a way that brought attention to her unsupported breasts but was really meant to free up room for a body that stretched far past her hips. She flexed her spine and the tip of her finned appendage rose up over her shoulder to wave from the far end of the cabin. It wasn’t nearly as flexible as the Children of the Egg’s appendages.

“Captain, is another being there behind you? Have you compromised our discussion willingly?”

“That tail, sir, is still me.” Titania raised a hand and the tail at the same time, waving one to match the delayed movements of the other. For her next trick as a trained lizard, she brought her tail around to face her raised palm and gave it a high four.

“Nature teaches beasts to know their friends,” she said in lyrical tones, every word backed by a bob of her head. Titania’s tail scratched at her thigh and then flicked away a shedding scale. She was growing bored with this small human and his small questions. His eyes tracked the path of the tossed scale with interest, most likely thinking of the military applications of living armor. Titania wondered when he’d finally ask for a sample from her.

“Alright, Captain. I have indulged you enough,” her handler’s demeanor hardened glacially. His brown eyes glinted with malice.

And now we come down to it, Titania thought with impatience. She felt the flesh of her tail strike the ground behind her hips and sweep a table through the bug netting at the edge of the cabin in a wooden clatter with casual strength.

“If you no longer feel capable of supporting your nation’s interests, it may be time for us to move on to other options to maintain control of Patricia Moreau and the documentation of the alien’s fixation with her. Do you understand, Captain Bennett?”

She was done with this charade as well. Titania slipped on a particularly icy mask that befit the slit pupils of her eyes and the yellowish-green scales grown around her widening eye sockets.

“I had a full physical done before I was transported to this island. A full physical. Why wasn’t I told about what was discovered?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Captain Bennett.”

“Don’t play me, sir. Cancer. Ovarian and blood, just like my mother. She died at the age of thirty-eight. Only two years older than I am now. My maternal grandmother, dead at thirty-five. As you well know, women do not live long past a diagnosis of cancer in my family.”

“Am I to understand that you believed these aliens when they told you this?”

“It sounds like it, does it not?”

“I will look into your medical status…”

Titania was willing to bet her favorite stuffed animals that he had no need to do any such thing. She wished she had brought Roo and Piglet with her instead of leaving them to be packaged off with all her other possessions into government storage. Probably lost forever in a labyrinth somewhere under Groom Lake. When she was done growing, she might pay them a visit.

“…after receiving your report for the record on week eleven day three. Tell me about the capabilities of that giant sea creature in the shallows of the bay. I need to know strengths and weaknesses after it was seen pushing that sinking boat over the edge of the coastal shelf. I also need a full accounting of the crew of the sunken vessels. How many stayed to turn, how many left.”

“No. First you will explain why you did not tell me I was dying before I volunteered, volunteered, for this assignment.”

“And tell me why that matters, when you knew you were going to become one of these things?”

“Because I need to know that someone has my back when I can no longer reach it! How can I trust you? How can I trust any of you now?”

“Who are you referring to when you say that, Captain?” her handler’s eyes narrowed. She didn’t even know his name. Nor care any longer. Her tail curled around her, wet from sticking out in the morning dew. She looked at it in puzzlement with a tilt of her head, not having consciously moved it. A sudden realization came that a small but growing part of her was relaying exactly what the pattern of changing lights on her fins conveyed.

“Bennett scared!”

The alienness of another voice in her head rocked Titania, causing her to lose focus on the irritating noise of her handler’s probing demands.

“What are you feeling right now, Captain? Explain to me what that look on your face is.”

“I’m… I hear a voice… She has a name… She has a name… She is… me… but not me…” her fingers clutched at her face. The still blunt points of her claws pressed against the rough hide of her lengthening cheeks.

“Captain Bennett. Do you still consider yourself an effective asset?”

“I…I…” Titania stumbled over her answer as one hand rubbed the side of her muzzle and the aching skull that shifted outwards beneath the skin. She found a blank screen when she looked up from the table with the beautiful carvings of a coral reef in her and Patti’s shared bungalow to answer. Titania didn’t know how long she’d been staring at the table, but it had been long enough for her handler to have his answer. She had been cut loose. The yawning emptiness swallowed her. Her thoughts tumbled in the void pleading, calling. An echo returned in a voice that was hers, and not hers, saying what it felt. Not what Titania did. A stranger in her head. A stranger that could flash what it felt on Titania’s body.

“Bennett scared.”

“Titania scare Bennett.”

“Titania need help.”

“Bennett go now.”

With the voice now silent, the hybrid woman crawled awkwardly by pushing along with her elongated feet and dragging tail to where she had hidden bowls of alcohol and food out of sight of the camera. Gorging herself before shakily rising on two legs to seek out the satisfaction that a very different sensation demanded. A burning desire for release radiated from her loins to the fins running the length of her body with a primal itch that could only be filled one way.

She swept the feet out from beneath the first being she found when he exited the communal spring. Her burning need was so hot that she was in no mood to discriminate on species or sex. Using her greater size and mass to straddle him. Her tail pinned his webbed feet with its weight to keep him from running. Her feet pinned his hips, and her hands his shoulders. He cried out in fear, his still human eyes widening in realization at what was happening, what she was doing. He tried to resist, clawing at her arms, at her chest. Titania smiled dazedly with her eyes lidded. She could feel him. Soon he would be ready for her. To encourage him, she folded her legs and arms until she was flush against his heat and could bask in the fine, sensitive scales of her ventral side catching and slipping past his as she aligned herself.

Bugling roars came from above, and then terror that was not hers rocketed into Titania. She saw herself from someone else’s sight, looking up at her own sneering, half-formed dragon face with insatiable hunger in her glowing teal eyes. She felt helpless in the coils of the beast that was above her and yet herself.

A weight slammed into her side. Titania saw the blur of the running human-hybrid that heaved her into the air in Tane’s eyes, and then she was gone. Back in her own head. The world spun as she rolled with her tackler, sliding into the bushes. Titania lifted her head to vomit across the grass before her too large nose from the disorientation of two senses of sight, half-digested fish, lobsters, and entire pizzas spraying across the edges of her jaw. But all of that was beyond her concern as the confusion caused by her actions overwhelmed her thoughts.

The smell of the hybrid holding Titania in her large, webbed hands and feet was a familiar musk in her lengthening nose. Titania wanted to be let go, but the words wouldn’t come. Just a howling cry as she thrashed her head and tail within Patti’s wrestler’s pin. Titania was larger, but Patti was an experienced fighter with years of military training and getting into drunken brawls under her belt.

“Is he okay? Are you okay? Did she hurt you?” Patti asked the man she’d nearly raped.

“Kei te pai ahau. Kei te pai ahau.”

Titania groaned when a clawed foot pinned her tail to the ground. When the fins along it were crushed, it drew a protest from the stranger in her head. Titania didn’t know when the voice had chosen its own name, that it had chosen her last name meant she was aware of Titania at least. It was like it had always been there, feeding her information. She hurt. The ground was damp. Wind was shifting to come from the South. It would rain soon. A plea to see with her eyes. Titania wanted her to stop, but she didn’t know how to talk to her. She didn’t want to know.

“Bennett hurts!”

“Snarl chirp chirp snarl howl tweet whistle hiss snarl!” Titania heard a dragon speak as immense flapping wings grew nearer. A gale-force downburst of wind and heavy thumps in sets of four told the hybrid-woman, beginning to cry, that more winged-dragons had arrived.

“Get Soma over here too!”

“Sheeeee isssss ssssswimming with theeeee elder.”

“Then get them both! Look at her eyes, look at what she did, something’s wrong with her!” Patti commanded.

“Kanna,” an unfamiliar dragon with a deeper voice betraying its size, said. “You know their lights. Brighter than even Ophelia and yours.”

Titania’s thoughts jumbled in a burst. For a second, she felt she could engage with Bennett. She used the opportunity to mentally shout at her to shut up. Bennett unleashed a dizzying wave of emotional hurt in response before retreating from the forefront of Titania’s thoughts.

“Squeak whistle trill whistle hiss.”

“Grab her, Chloe.” Patti said. “We’ll hold her in our cabin until they get here.

It felt like a mountain had reached to encircle Titania in a stony embrace as a new pair of arms wrapped about her. Slender tendrils draped down to caress the frightened changeling from the extended snout casting her in shadow. Chloe burbled her response in the guttural tone of someone not used to the shape of their new mouth as she effortlessly heaved Titania from the ground to her great height. The formidably deep-chested woman had more bass to her words, but they also came with the same doubling echo that Soma had as they rolled through Titania’s body like slow-moving waves.

The Spy, or ex-spy, she reminded herself, was still in Chloe’s embrace when she was sat down across from Patti in their hutch. A burst of emotions never far from her thoughts surged into her mind. Patti felt exasperated, Chloe was watchful. Two from far beyond the family were focused so critically on her that Titania fled from Kanna and Ophelia’s…thing.

“It’s not a thing.” Chloe rumbled with her presence so much closer. Not just in the physical, but the mental sense as well. “It is us, bound to each other to help all. Little American, your mind aches for a mother.”

Titania wished she could slap the tentacles draped on her neck away. That she didn’t feel so helpless as a passenger in her own body. Her vision locked on Patti, tugging on her blouse to cover herself after sitting on her haunches and hands had kicked it up. “O! Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; keep me in temper; I would not be mad!”

“What does that mean?” the giant holding Titania asked over her shoulder. Patti’s mind felt sad, but her expression betrayed nothing. She shifted and groaned. Her folded legs adjusting for some discomfort.

Patti grunted in pain and then kicked at something beneath her until a thick stubby tail slid backwards to push up the hem of her gown. The tip with its fin buds just peeking out from the edge of the voluminous cloth that she refused to shed, unlike the naked Titania. “She thinks she’s crazy. After trying to rape that guy, she might be right.”

Titania gagged as Chloe’s tentacles moved across the patchy remains of her hair, nudging at the fins peeking through on her neck.

Patti lifted a hand and rubbed the side of a claw musingly across the scales on her chin. Chloe’s whiskers flashed brightly in the corner of Titania’s vision, then wormed their way to caress her fin again. Her ululating cries grew louder. She was helpless, adrift, with no control over herself anymore. The hunger in her was a physical thing that yearned to swallow her. In her mind, a second voice cried out her name. A voice that wanted to help her but was afraid of her as well. Flashes of the assault ran in her vision, like an unseen projectionist was at work with her own memories.

“I hear…” Chloe said tentatively. “…there is another with her. Reaching out to her. The hunger, the pain. She is lost, so lost, the darkness calls to her.”

Yes… that was what Titania wanted. An end to her self. Like some of the dragons, she wanted to embrace the end of her own identity. They were stopping her!

“No touchy of sensors!” Soma said authoritatively as soon as she arrived, halting the soothing touch of Chloe’s sensory bulbs along Titania’s spinal fin after she had balled herself up. Unable to cry anymore, her body shook in time with the wavering keen that was all Titania could manage. “She has mind break. A psychotic phase that can happen in Dreamers going through second birth. It can spread to other unhappy Dreamers through whisker translation. With human thoughts unknown how you react. Much revered elder take over care for broken sneaky sneaky A’mer’I’can. So’waa’Ma’wae watch and learn how to heal.”

“No.”

Patti yelped at the unexpected voice and sprung away from the edge of her cabin on her dog-legged limbs to land in a crouch with her tail slapping the floorboards hard enough to crack one. The voice was Wisdom, who had been forgotten about after her unmoving legs had been mistaken as trees in the gathering dusk. She lowered her head to bring one eye to the bug netting.

“To help the hybrid, a Matriarch will also be needed. We’sol’Tu’qut’Shel and Ophelia together will need to join to heal her. She has too much human left in her for the customary procedure of Dreamers to succeed here without the guidance of a Matriarch.

“Ophelia,” her head rose out of sight while turning to give direction. “I will help you prepare.” Soma withdrew to join them, the portions of her tail visible to Titania flashed as she spoke to her waiting elder in their own language. Another Child of the Egg came. The maroon-eyed newcomer distinguished by a large silver tattoo stretching down her right flank to wrap around one leg. Titania could not tell what it was as she came closer. The buzz in her head grew stronger, the presence of the other clearer. A sense of invitation coalesced in her thoughts. As if a friendly face was extending a hand for her to take. Titania imagined accepting the offer, wanting help but not wanting it.

“She has lost her way after suffering a shock. I feel… her mother. Gone. Her… trust. Gone. There’s another reaching out to her. But she is in pieces, she rejects her.” Kanna blinked and looked around at the others. “I want to draw on your thoughts for this Dreamer, who will join with me?”

“Māku”

Titania brought her gaze up to the figure hunched over in the doorway and gasped. It was the man-Dreamer that she had almost raped. Come to help her, of all creatures.

“I’m sorry!” Titania wailed as these strangers welcomed her. All across the camp came more ribbons of support to heal her frayed mind.

****

“As you can see,” Simone said to the little square of a camera atop the breadth of her nose, straining to cross her eyes enough to verify it remained secure as she walked. The bungee cord holding it wound between the still sore twin rows of fangs interlocking in her mouth. Her snout was now one bungee cord wide and three in girth, Simone noted of the massif cleaving her vision, and an unknown distance longer than her hands. It had been a strange and trying experience, measuring the length of her own face, one best not lingered on.

Now, she pointed her head at the winged dragons sitting in one strange beastly way or another, Simone certainly did not sit or lie like that, in a circle with their own snouts turned inwards toward the large one in their center. The larger alien-human pointed with a stick held in its curled tail at a map of what Simone knew was the island of Madagascar, which had clusters of red dots around the landmass. The other dragons burst into a loud squabbling with their heads bobbing in synchronicity like the pistons of some weird engine at a screeching point made by their teacher.

They were the source of the loudest of the buzzing vibrations that ate at her thoughts. Simone knew this after documenting the subjective feeling at intervals from one of the winged demons at the top of a cliff. The dragoness had given the French-American a very dubious look as Simone had stiffly paced out ten-meter intervals, she thought, and logged the results to her snout-cam.

At times, she could feel more than she should. Awareness of every inch of her body in a way she could make little sense of, and the feelings of others. Sometimes she could even hear the words in voices that she knew definitively were coming from animals. Like the people that kept popping up out of nowhere to have a few drinks and then walk into the bay to turn into whales and dolphins.

For some reason.

The six-meter-tall nessie thought the world had sure gotten stranger, lately, but couldn’t quite put her tail on why.

“The dragon cult are performing their daily ritual, possibly trying to summon Beelzebub as befits their demonic appearances. I can feel their enticements beckoning me. As those of my viewers from the mid-continents are aware, only prayer can keep the devil out! So please give me the strength to continue down the path of scaly serpenthood on my quest to fight evil.”

The ears of the dragon nearest her twitched at her narration, and the demon swiveled her head completely around to look at Simone with both irritated black and purple eyes. Her tail made a diagonal slashing movement that the French-American from Samoa was reasonably certain meant ‘fuck off’. The spiky static in her thoughts tripled in volume, instilling in her an uneasy sense that they had invaded her mind. Which was impossible, of course. The dragoness started writing a word in the dirt, probably a hex, but Simone’s attention turned to something else. Something more important.

“Merde! This is some conneries! They get to keep five fingers and she only gets four? Conneries!”

Simone padded away, shaking her head to create a cloud of her tendrils, shedding her distraction with each toss. She still needed to focus on walking on four limbs as their relative locations on her body changed from one day to the next, and with a seemingly endless stream of the all-too-fragile, unchanged little humans underfoot, to document the next of the multitude of conspiracies on the island. Her tail was still nothing more than a three-meter-long nub just barely long enough to touch the backs of her thunder-thighs, leaving her feeling unbalanced by her longer head and neck.

Most everything else about her body had long since waved goodbye to humanity. She sneezed, her hands leaving the ground with the force, before she collapsed to her elbows, as one of her eight limp tentacles caught under her clawed hands. The strange facial appendages were numb and lifelessly drab, unlike some of the others who had whiskers aglow with dancing light. The ones who imagined voices speaking to them. Mass psychosis caused by a ley line conjunction, the clearest case the French-American had ever seen.

Crossing the camp, the nessie, as she’d decided female sea dragons should be called, with males being called nesses, stopped for a drink from the onsen where fourteen children splashed playfully. Simone slipped easily into the water, soaking her expansively billowing gown to plaster against the fins and scales of her body, barring the occasional patch of pink flesh and her still extant but minuscule belly button.

With her mouth open she spun in lazy circles within a new expansion to the water feature that had increased it to lake-sized proportions. There was something in the taste of the water that made the nessie habitually swallow it by the hundreds of liters for the rejuvenating tickle of passing it through the gills that now lined her long neck.

Seven other nessies seemed to agree with her by swimming in idle circles propelled by gentle tail sweeps and with lids nearly shut over distant eyes. Among them, she saw the hot-headed American lush. Her dorsal fins were much more narrowly arrayed and resembled the teeth of a wood saw. Simone stayed well away from her.

“A refreshing swim!” she bellowed for her two hundred nineteen million three hundred and fifty-three thousand six hundred and forty-nine subscribers, including, she was proud to claim, the official accounts of the intelligence and national law enforcement agencies of eighty and seven countries and territories. How the tables had turned when they came to her after all the years of ignoring her warnings about the coming of Ragnarök. Now look what that had gotten them, hundreds of Jormungrs transformed right from humans to encircle the Earth!

She arced her head up and shut her gills to blast a fountain of water fifty and two meters into the air with a squeeze of her pythonic body. The young rescues cheered as they thundered towards her on their raptor-like legs, leaping with powerful springs into the water around Simone. Their thick tails hit the water first in torrential splashes as they bobbed around her with giddy laughter, rousing the other nesses from their idle half-states. All of the rescues crowded Simone’s sloping flanks. She extended her limbs to give them ramps to run up to her back where four could fit at a time along her finned spine. Their weight barely even registering to the nessie as she enjoyed giving them what joy she could after the youths had left their lives of misery.

The very first thing she had done after spying the poor waifs months before, besides feeding them as much as they could stomach, was to see their ragged clothing destroyed and ensure soaking baths for the lot of them. Once clean, she had let them talk in a cabin with all its screen deployed to hide them. A safe place, guarded within the boundary of Simone’s body, for them to pour forth the years of trauma. A slow and careful process, the French-American knew, that required much patience.

At least Simone was doing something worthwhile for the poor children. Unlike that American sot and her alcoholic sailor friends who spent all their time lying splayed inconveniently across the trails through the forest in drunken stupors. That is when they weren’t flipping gunboats of armed combatants fighting each other offshore. Everyone else spent all their time coping with their transformations and listening to the depraved ravings of the aliens as they taught them conspiracies that were patently false.

Yes, Nikola Tesla’s weather control machine was still a real thing. She didn’t care what the aliens said about humans not being mature enough to have such technology. Or that Tesla had destroyed his version when he’d realized the same. And that he might have been helped to his decision by a visit from grey aliens. That was all nonsense of course. Grey aliens. Hah! What world did the dragon aliens turning her into one of them think this was?

Phillippe had told Simone all about their upsetting lives yesterday from within the safety of her arms while she looked down at him and the seven others who had appeared three days before that. They had walked out of one cabin at exactly seventeen fifty-three, and immediately screamed when a devil dragon had landed in front of them to welcome the newcomers.

“I come from Vietnam. I was walking to my school when men I do not know put me in a van and took me. For six years I made shoes every day. I did not see the sun for six years. We slept in the same room as we worked. Then seven days ago a god with gold eyes appeared. She asked us if we wanted to leave that place. To go far away and become a dragon that might make things better for other children. I pledged myself to her.”

“But… why? Didn’t the golden-eyed aliens let you return to your family? Didn’t you want a human future?” Simone’s head recoiled on her long neck in shock. Phillippe took his time answering, scratching at his side with one foot instead.

“Two in our group did. But not me, after the… the hurt they did to me… I did not want to be human any longer. I was not the boy my family would know. It… it is better that they think I am dead and go on to have another son.” Phillippe hung his head and cried with mournful chirps and his eyes tightly closed. Simone had wanted to cry in sympathy, but her eyes were no longer capable of tears. The other Diggers nuzzled up against his sides and Simone laid her head across them all until Phillippe had calmed. It was the only way she could think to comfort him with her changes.

“I was twenty-two, when the alien appeared to me as a Digger,” another lost one, Veronnica, said. There were just a few strands of long red-tinged blonde hair left to overhang the fins of her neck. Beneath her shapeless garment was her human skin and the swell of her substantial breasts to mark her as the woman she once was. “I was once a lass from Cork and befriended a woman in Costa del Sol who drugged me. By the time I was lucid, my masssster,” this she hissed, her long tongue flickering out and her pupils constricting until they nearly disappeared in the brilliant green of her irises, “had already raped me.

“For seven months the bastard violated my body more times, and in more ways, than I could count on his yacht in the Red Sea. He laughed when I told him I would kill him one day, and said as a prince of Arabia, I would need an army larger than the Yankee one backing him. I swore to the aliens when they asked for my throwing in that they could have my allegiance if only they would let me have my vengeance. When they have shown me what I need to know, I will return to that prince and revel in the taste of his flesh. I don’t give a bloody shite what his death does to the middle east.” This she said with her mouth opened wide and her narrow tongue running illustratively over every tooth within. Simone shuddered at the cold delivery of this declaration.

The former human burbled in the water to cheer herself up at the little one’s present antics, the chuckle from her open mouth making the water foam. Her eight whiskers drifted limply as she passed more water through her gills. It was a behavior that emerged in her and the seven other Dreamers of the lake, yet not one that any other Dreaming brother or sister had. Even So’waa’Ma’wae, when she’d been caught staring at Simone while she filtered water, had looked askance at her behavior. The Dreaming sister had said nothing about Simone’s actions. Instead, she had brought her an entire tuna and recommended that she eat more unprocessed whole animals after the former woman had consumed the entire two point three meter catch in six great bites.

“Thirty-three more children from Bangladesh. Saved from slavery by the aliens running The Zoo, have appeared this morning. Bringing the number of the poor waifs to four hundred two and fifty.” She told her viewers, updating the tally with her head panning to show a horde of the formerly enslaved children being chased by one of the Dreaming brothers. Simone thought he was from Arizona judging by the accent she heard through the translator still embedded in whatever she could call her ears now. She knew these things, after all.

“They won’t listen to me after I told them they don’t need to remain on this island to transform into the mini-Dreamers. But even if I could talk them around, many of them don’t have homes to return to…Two little girls told me they were sold by their parents! Can you believe that? Isn’t that the saddest thing ever?” She asked her audience. “My heart burst when they told me that if they’re big strong lizards then no one will ever steal them again!”

“This is a protected island. Please leave the indigenous wildlife alone!” the ness called breathlessly. The scampering children stopped in their frenzied activities to turn to the panting Arizonian and his partner, joining him thirty-four seconds later due to a hitch in her gait as she alternated between two and four legs.

“Please don’t disturb the birds.” The dragoness at his side said, falling on to her hands again and sitting down on her unfemininely muscled thighs to kick her legs forward and ease the aggravation in her hips. As she panted, her large wings partially unfurled to release baking heat coming off their membranes. Her winglets flapped to pass more of the stifling air over them. With the growth of those wings, she had shed her top, revealing still human breasts with smiley face stickers that she had conscientiously sourced and placed over her nipples as a substitution for the naval uniform of the Philippines. That which was now reduced to a cap with an anchor insignia pinned to it.

The nessie’s pupils suddenly constricted into razor sharp slits as movement caught the Demon’s eye, and she slammed her hand down to trap a scurrying creature off to the side within a cage of long claws. She raised the wriggling rat to show the juveniles sitting back on their tails with hungry expressions.

“Eat?” a dark-skinned boy with his head just beginning to extend into a pointed muzzle asked, sounding hopeful. Simone shook her head sadly. The rail-thin figures of the children upon their arrival, open sores, half-healed injuries, and their ravenous appetites, were an appalling display of their lives before they had been brought here. Their poor, blighted existences sold to the aliens for freedom from their enslavers.

The adult female stuck her pointed tongue out in distaste and flung the convulsing rat to her audience where it was promptly snarfed up into an eager maw.

“Yes. Eat, or catch.” The dragoness said. “Catch and kill every rat that you can find! But leave the birds alone. If you kill all the rats, I will uh… ask Patience to make my favorite treat when I was your age for all of you. How does that sound?”

“Can I have a hat?” one little girl asked, pointing with a clawed finger. Only identifiable as a girl by patches of long mousy hair and the torn remnants of a skirt that a slowly wagging tail grew from beneath.

“Ah… a hat?” the Arizonian said with his muzzle twisted in confusion. His dull whiskers suddenly blazed to life and he grunted before falling on his side, clutching his head as colors blazed across his body. The demon dragoness took one look at him and shook her head to dislodge the hat the children were admiring, shooing them away as the ness had a fit. The young girl asking for it jammed it proudly on her head, ripping off the last scraps of her Hello Doggy t-shirt with the motion, to strut off leading a column of her fellow refugees. Two winged demons landed and hummed soothingly as they got to work brainwashing their latest victim in the Arizonian with the winged demoness at his side, holding his hand like she even cared. Her eyes looked up at Simone’s and her ears pinned back as she hissed gutturally at the French-American.

“See their reactions to me? They know I am on to their game. Witting pawns in the machinations of the Rockefellers to breed chaos in the world! Tell me my loyal followers. Where did you think these aliens really came from? From the bowels of the United States military industrial complex to sell weapons, that’s where! I, Simone Genevieve, will get to the bottom of this no matter how many thousands of kilograms my once sexy body puts on! Now close your ears my young legion of fans, this one is just for the adults. A reminder to my platinum subscribers that it will be a steamy night in the jungle with three new lovers as we explore every centimeter of each other! All captured on my newly patented snout-cam! I’m signing off now, but I will see you all for this evening’s broadcast as you join me for a swim and a discussion of the real estate prospects at the world’s first alien colony! Get in on the ground floor because this market is hot!”

Picking up her nearby action stick, a wooden pole with a narrowly tapered point that she had carefully gnawed, Simone poked at her snout-cam until she saw the power light wink out. Now all she had to do was upload the footage to her alien computer. Maybe she could finally discover why most of the videos she shared went missing only seconds after she posted them. It seemed to happen whenever she mentioned how to join her on the island to bring the fight to the frontline in the battle for truth.

“The stars up close to the moon were pale; they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon,” a sudden voice, unseen, came from next to Simone, making her leap nearly clean out of the water. A mirage near a pillar supporting the bathhouse covering the spring pool shifted, and then a nessie shimmered into appearance.

It was Titania. The dead, piercing eyes gave her away. Frantically, Simone prodded her camera to reactivate it. Not able to succeed, she was helpless as the predator slunk around her with head bobbing and weaving. The American was much larger than the French hybrid and more than a little terrifying after she tried to rape that Italian guy and then vanished for seven days with the giant sea serpent into the ocean. The prowling nessie produced a whistling tea-kettle sound from her gills, baring her twin rows of teeth with scales and whiskers alight in golden agitation.

“The Children are not demons. Stop referring to them as such.”

“I’m…” Simone gulped before her resolve hardened and her gaze narrowed as she broadened her stance challengingly. “I know what they are…” She halted as a band of light swept across Titania’s from snout to tail tip before she vanished again.

“Sometimes a woman wants to be stupid if it lets her do a thing her cleverness forbids.”

The French-American woman spun around on her feet precariously with a long whipping neck but only ten and four percent of a counterbalancing tail, looking for the vanished spy whose scent she knew remained close by when her tongue flickered out of her mouth. Simone was daunted but not yet defeated.

“Where are you!” She bugled through her long neck before suddenly her head was forced upwards and to the side when she felt a horrific pressure at the base of her skull. Something sharp and menacing tapped against the spine halfway down her nape. A slithering anaconda had wrapped twice around her throat and drawn tight as Simone wheezed. Only then did the tapering snout of her attacker reappear in the frozen nessie’s sight.

“Not everybody can be famous but everybody can be great, because greatness is determined by service.”

“Hey! Leave her alone!” the squadron of children-Dreamers cried, stomped their feet, and slapped the ground with their tails as their irritation at Simone’s treatment grew. Six of them leaned forward with their tails raised into the sky and twitching like metronomes, their hands spread with powerful claws flashing. One child-Dreamer made a high-pitched screech that the others, fully or nearly transformed, took up as well. The sound drew Titania’s attention and Simone saw her whiskers flash a message to the children.

“Don’t hurt them,” Simone rasped, not understanding. Her mind raced wildly with panic. She had no idea what the nessie would do. What she could do. But the spy-dragon’s attempted rape of the Navajo man was fresh in the front of Simone’s mind. Brainwashed as Titania was while suffering from multiple personality disorder. “It’s me…It’s me you want,” Simone begged her.

Titania’s one glaring eye shifted colors as her iris widened and shrank around her pupil slit. Simone felt the band around her throat loosen and took a great shuddering breath at the same time she realized she could have tried to use her gills to breathe. It made her feel stupid. An uncomfortable and unfamiliar sensation for the nessie that was always the smartest one in the room.

This time, when Titania evanesced, it was for good. Now that Simone knew what to listen for, she could hear her thumping away along with the dry rustling of her fins and scales. Leaving the nessie sitting on her rear to mewl plaintively in fear. To wonder what she meant in this strange new world where she and others were becoming beasts that could fly, turn invisible, or be brain-washing web-spinning psychic queen bees. It didn’t take long before her dark thoughts drifted from the meaning of what she sought with her video broadcasts to the strutting children being led by the young nessie with the officer’s hat in a plan to exterminate the invasive rats.

When her eyes moved to track the children, she saw that her camera was gone from its place on her muzzle. The children that had spoken up for the newly despondent nessie nudged against her sides, asking their larger companion to perk up with a story that makes her happy. Simone’s cries faded, and she smiled down at the eager snouts looking up at her as the scales wetted by her sadness flared with a warm yellow hue.

In the corners of her mind, a new voice made its first tentative contact. The paranoid woman retreated, fearful, from the presence she now shared her mind with. With every step she retreated, this new entity advanced, always with a calm expression of his fins and an inviting aura. In the end, Simone gathered her courage and reached out to the warm glow. The last thing Simone felt, was the scruffy grass prodding at her fins after she fell to her side. The worry of the children surrounding her, and the great nose of a snuffling demon-dragon with kind eyes filling her sight.

****

Rieko’s newly grown sensors, three from each side of his broad snout, explored with their bulbs flashing under Ulithi’s control as the two who were one ambled along the beach on unsteady legs beside Eiken Sihna. Between them, barely coming up to their shoulders now, was Ophelia, making sure she maintained contact between the two Dreamers with touch.

Rieko latched onto the shining star of the Matriarch in his struggle after a lifetime of the loneliness of a human existence. Now, another voice, a childish new mind desperate to understand, and needing the body that was Rieko so that Ulithi could…

The creature that was once a singular man dropped the bag of litter they’d been carrying to be filled by the young Dreamers and staggered off the beach into the trees. Away from the immediacy of the Matriarch, her light dulled just when he needed it most. With a strangled gurgle, he folded his legs and bent his head to vomit a steaming pile of half-digested crab, shells and all, into the bushes surrounding the palms.

Eiken Sihna, their wife, touched his sickle-like tail fin with one of their whiskers. Ulithi’s mental cry of fear at the sudden discordance with Rieko quieting when Sihna spoke with their wife’s mind to Rieko. Ophelia’s light waxed incandescent when she laid a gentle hand next to Eiken Sihna’s on Rieko Ulithi’s twitching fin.

“Be calm, Rieko Ulithi. Do not force the connection. Let it grow just as any other intimacy. We are here to help you understand. It is not easy to be more than yourself.”

Rieko could feel Ulithi expressing his dismay, his fear, that he had caused Rieko Ulithi distress. Rieko Ulithi soothed themselves, as their half beings remerged. A lifetime of human experience coupling with a mind that never knew anything but that of being a Dreamer. For now, Rieko Ulithi was one again. Two minds seeing with one set of eyes and shared sensors.

Rieko Ulithi retrieved their bag and nosed lovingly at Eiken Sihna in a movement they’d decided approximated a kiss. They watched and were there for them as their eyes shifted in color and dilation. First one, then the other, becoming mismatched as they experienced brief dissonance. After they recovered, Eiken Sihna twirled their sensors with Rieko Ulithi’s, and they traded their secrets with each other through the mated link that Ophelia provided. The two twinned-minds and Matriarch were on the beach with seventeen other Dreamers, six Children of the Egg, and eleven humans in removing more of the trash from the sea-battles and beyond that was borne in with each high tide.

It had been six months since they’d come there to shed their prior lives. Six months to be Dreamers, not humans. and the changes were at last reaching their end. No more days and nights that left them moaning as nerves burned through their bodies or suffering through the tension of ligaments and muscle wrenching their limbs into new orientations. Rieko Ulithi was thrilled they’d never have to feel again the inexorable lengthening and popping of their spine as vertebrae multiplied and dragged sheets of skin, scale, and muscle along with them. The only thing left for them was the itching growth that pushed the ground and the tip of their caudal fins further away from their head with every passing hour.

No new parts sprouting from their bodies anywhere, at last.

As severe as what Rieko’s body underwent, it paled in the face of what his mind had been through. But the second voice in his body didn’t see it that way. Instead, Ulithi reminded them they hadn’t changed, they had met. She told him how proud she was, how happy she was that he welcomed her, after being alone for so long. Ulithi, Rieko sensed, was terrified at the thought of there being no one else to share everything she was with. Rieko would never leave her alone.

Less than a week, Rieko Ulithi thought, since one had become two, and the fullness of his form had been realized. It had happened just before Eiken’s joined-mind had animated their limp sensors into cheerfully announcing her awakening.

Their family, remaining to safeguard their home island, could scarcely understand. Rieko Ulithi and Eiken Sihna could not make them. Not why Ulithi had decided she was female, why Sihna was male, nor their echoing voices speaking for two who were two. Even the Matriarchs, and the single Patriarch chosen by Kanna, had been unable to help over long-distance video calls. Now, Rieko Ulithi and their partner had to sadly bear the fear and wariness in the eyes of those who relied on the Dreamers from their island to leverage their new existences into a future for them all.

That didn’t help that something felt lost. Disconnected. Rieko Ulithi could not place his sensors on why. And the feel of Eiken Sihna’s agitation was clear through their sensors. He sent an inquisitive thought to So’waa’Ma’wae and was told with a flash of irritation to wait twenty-three minutes.

Rieko Ulithi abandoned the beach sweep with a bounding turn that kicked up a whirlwind of sand with a swish of Ulithi’s mighty tail. The unceasing hunger clawed at their belly, and the fun of a lark in the water with their mate would be perfect.

They raced off to leave behind the voices squalling about the careful lines that had been planned to sweep the coast with more efficiency.

“My pattern!” a Child of the Egg screeched in wing-flapping irritation at the departing pair as the artfully construed plan she’d cajoled them into enacting disintegrated into chaos.

But Rieko Ulithi and Eiken Sihna felt free of their obligation to help. While Rieko and Eiken quailed with the thoughts they’d become shirkers, Eiken Sihna lowered themselves to the sand and squirmed playfully while looking up at her mate. They wanted to go back to the water and eat those rocks that were so perfectly satisfying. If Rieko Ulithi got Eiken Sihna one of the overabundant sharks from the reef, Eiken felt like she might be in the mood to teach them what sensations a lady would enjoy now that her mate was half-female. It would all be so much fun, Ulithi and Sihna told their fretting other-halves. Rieko and Eiken, not quite the somber elders their families expected anymore, did not take much convincing.

“The water!” Rieko Ulithi called in his echoing voice.

“Into the water!” Eiken Sihna led the answering roar as their eagerness raced through Ophelia’s connections. Coaxing fourteen Dreamers and two Children of the Egg into a stampede through the surf that battered their legs and into the deeper, calmer, water beyond.

The others passed Rieko Ulithi and Eiken Sihna as they skidded to an alarmed stop with their wake surging forward to crash into Wily’s chest as she emerged from the ocean with her throat and chest strangely swollen. The golden-eyed alien’s lights flashed a direction and Ulithi Rieko followed with their mate back to shore as Wily had asked after casting wistful looks at the others.

Wily tipped her head to point straight down before cracking her jaws wide. With a gushing torrent of sea-water, a heap of black stone and two thrashing sharks were deposited before Eiken Sihna. Working her jaws in discomfort, the alien stepped around her mess to array herself along the tree line backing the shore with an aggrieved tinge to her markings.

“So’waa’Ma’wae has sent me to do her unimaginably degrading bidding by bringing you to have a comforting circle-jerk with the others suffering from Pica. So, hurry up and feed your diseased impulses so we can get this over with.”

“What’s a circle-jerk?” Rieko Ulithi whispered to Eiken Sihna, chivalrously passing her the first shark after using one claw to end its life.

“I don’t know, it sounds like something the Yankees would say. Something vile that would cause them shame, if they had any,” Eiken Sihna replied after eating the sharks in five tidy bites. They paused, staring at the rocks instead of gulping them as they palpably desired. Unnerved by Wily’s words, as most on the island found themselves at any given time.

“For the sake of all that is living on this world, eat the damn rocks.”

Her earlier excitement for the meal tasted like ash in her mouth. Sihna Eiken gloomily threw the rocks back where they’d been fished from, no longer wanting to enjoy the sensation upon their tongue or the relief they brought to the unsettled desire nestled deep within their body.

“Follow me then and try not to join in with anyone fucking among the trees on the way there. So’waa’Ma’wae says this is more important, although she could have told you at any point in the last six days. But what do I know?”

As large as Rieko Ulithi and Eiken Sihna had become, they were still smaller than Wily. Or perhaps she had made herself larger as well. A handy reminder of their difference in sizes being that the acerbic alien’s tail twitching back and forth was in constant danger of crashing into their snouts. They followed one after the other down a new path marked out just for the day at the insistence of the scientists who were adamant that the marks of their trespassing on the island be kept to a minimum.

Just as Wily had said, the sounds and feelings of others emerged from the near distance. Displays of passion that were enticing, but not enough to overcome their desire for what So’waa’Ma’wae might have to impart. Among them, the double-light of Blake Walker and Kanna growing closer until they joined in a blinding conflagration. Ulithi Rieko thrilled at the roaring inferno of the joining, sighing through their gills when they felt Eiken Sihna nibble their tail frills with promises for a union of their own.

They stepped over a pair of the juvenile Dreamers, tumbling out of the bushes in a ball as they necked each other, and pushed their snouts carefully through the last tree boughs to enter the expansive and much changed village.

So’waa’Ma’wae spotted them from the side of the lagoon that now took up approximately seventy percent of the clearing, dipping one sensor bulb into the water to activate its luminescence and waving it overhead to attract their attention. She sat on the bank of the water where Ulithi Rieko saw eleven more Dreamers. Eight of them had their bodies nearly submerged, just their eyes and their fins visible. The other three interspersed among them held their heads high to focus on So’waa’Ma’wae unlike their partners whose gazes were lidded and unfocused. The three paired Dreamer’s tail fins swished in gentle unison, creating eddies that many smaller Dreamers and Children played in.

“Ah! Very much not bad! The last nine have arrived,” So’waa’Ma’wae exclaimed while Rieko Ulithi and Eiken Sihna settled, looking but not spotting seven others. The female amongst the pair, in body at least, slid her eyes nearly closed as she too filtered the water through her gills just like the others. Sihna Eiken reveling in the sensation and passing it on to Ulithi Rieko. The feminine becoming dominant in the pair.

“Okay! All here, yes? Body and mind both for all? Very important! Okay. Enough bramble before rose. Now truth. All females here carry eggs. Very good, yes? So’waa’Ma’wae think so. Even with import of human slave childs, very much want to return to home waters and bring fleet to delete humans for that if ask us, more new eggs always sublime.”

So’waa’Ma’wae’s sensor bulbs rubbed against each other energetically as her lanky body rocked from side to side on her paws. The bottom edge of her tail fin ripped up a narrow furrow in an arc that had two Children with them cry in disapproval.

“All in despair, yes? Hu-mans call preg-nant. Like waiting, yes? Waiting for new life to scurry out to challenge and find. Very exuberant time for any species, Earthlings. Even for us, though we do not hold the same guardianship of our offspring. They tend to get into very much trouble and there are so many of them.”

She bent her head so that her sensors could reach the distant remote of her belly as her eyes fell with a melancholy light. Through their connections, Rieko Ulithi felt her momentary sadness. She turned her head back to them, a false smile revealing the offset twin rows of teeth. The feeling of her morosity slammed shut, her allowance to be attached by the Matriarchs always shaky at best and done more to demonstrate her trust than any real desire to share. But, before it did, Rieko Ulithi felt her want.

“Can you feel her pain?” Wily asked where she lay, towering over all of them as they fell into uneasy chatter after So’waa’Ma’wae’s announcement. “Dreamers are bound by their beliefs not to have children off world.”

So’waa’Ma’wae’s agitation flared when her bristling fins vibrated with a rattle. She stood to squarely face the golden-eyed one with her sensors cracking like whips. A cluster of children, sensing her anger, arrayed around her with their jaws open and tails thrashing furiously. Their hands with their claws raised threateningly.

“Not that they care too much about the little spastic raptors on the whole anyway. Which is why this lovely little meeting…”

“Wily…” So’waa’Ma’wae ground out through her creaking jaws, her tail jerking back and forth in sharply truncated fits. “Your words are not conductive. Go find much respected elder and message to him that you’ll take his place keeping the loud arrow shooting humans from landing on the island.”

“It’s been taken care of.” She smiled at So’waa’Ma’wae and placatingly tapped her snout with a sensor bulb. “You see, hybrid abominations, it is a cruelly unforgiving universe, and you have yet to realize…”

“Wily, we do not care where you go as short as you go there postage haste!” So’waa’Ma’wae snapped at the alien. A blinding wall of rage, the voices of hundreds of minds, slammed into Rieko Ulithi and sent him lurching into his mate to knock her completely under water with a stifled yelp. The physical force of the anger sent the meeting into chaos under the psychic assault.

A group of seventy-three children screeched in unison and ran in waves at the golden-eyed one laying on the ground. As large as she was the attack didn’t immediately kill her, if she even could be killed. Waves of the children jumped to kick at her sides, legs, and tail with vicious swipes of their claws. Others ran up her tail, slashing at her fins until they reached her lofted head as they sought what they believed her most vulnerable point. There, they scrabbled and tore at her ears and eyes to Rieko Ulithi’s shared horror.

It felt like immense spotlights passed over his being. Minds that focused on the unmoving form of Wily and the horde of young behaving as none should. A crushing sense that felt like a request but had instead the force of a command. Stop. Disappointed. Before Rieko Ulithi or any of the other’s could act, the young Dreamers froze, and then jumped down with heavy thumps from the giant they’d tried to dismember like ants on a piece of chocolate. Rieko Ulithi felt their confusion as they milled about before facing the descending Children of the Egg. Two of them glowing like the sun with emotional intensity their heads lowered and pupils narrowed as they swept their gazes around in challenge.

The man, the dragon Blake, was the one to speak, with the Matriarch, Kanna, at his side watching him expectantly. Rieko Ulithi felt the dragon was being assessed. When his mouth opened, it was not words that came forth, instead there were whistles, hisses, and other sounds that only Ulithi could tell Rieko the meaning of. The Patriarch used the essence lent him by the female watching and judging to make himself understood. Her smell, her aura, nearly blanketed his. Rieko Ulithi’s raised sensors could feel it. He was she, and she was he.

It only took Blake point zero zero five seconds for realization to shift his disappointment in the violent children to anger at Wily. Rieko Ulithi considered that he might have known the situation before he’d even landed. The Children were remarkably faster thinkers than the Dreamers, and far more so than the humans they once were. Rieko Ulithi knew from his years as an elder that such wild intelligence could lead to an imbalance in one’s spirit.

Their anger, however, were not the least of the reactions prompted by the corrosive words of Wily. The ground shook, as The Elder Dreamer approached with hundreds more juveniles on his back and running amidst his legs. A tsunami that strode with raised tails switching in their agitation. The last of the Dreamers, the diggers, jumped down from their conquest of Wily, revealing that she had not a scratch or injury on her frame. Rieko Ulithi wondered if they should have expected that.

“Are you all done barking like dogs at one of your unfathomably inefficient automobiles? I…”

Rieko Ulithi joined Eiken Sihna in flinging themselves to the ground with eyes shut tight as the titanic elder from the stars raised his house-sized head to give a gurgling roar loud enough to split the heavens before glaring with his sensors snapping fury at the golden-eyed one before him.

****

Patti-Sam groaned at the relentless backward growth of the spines from her cheeks. A constant tension in her head as her skull continued its march to a new shape. The former woman moaned loudly again, this time sounding almost lusty, as their lanky body rippled and shivered in a wave to alleviate the stress of her spinal fins adding to their own stature. Patti-Sam could see in the ten and five-meter-tall mirror that their sea-green fins sparkled with flashes of amber distress where they stretched between the spines erupting right from their skull and vertebrae. The colors were able to come to life while still damp after their cleansing swim in the spa pond created for the aliens of the island.

They arched their back until they felt one particularly irritated fin slip incrementally further out with a wild moan and a stomp of one foot. “God, that almost feels better than sex,” they exclaimed with a shiver that rocked their body, feeling their pelvic muscles tighten and then relax in a rippling wave.

So’waa’Ma’wae had told Patti-Sam that their fins were gorgeous and their ear crests everything that could be desired in a Playboy, which had made Patti roar with laughter while explaining it to Sam. It was good to know what was considered attractive among her new species.

Her desires were strange to her now after Sam had joined her with his awakening. He had felt like an unseen friend who’d been with her all her life. She felt like she’d always known the masculine presence sharing her body. Male and female thoughts twining together, making her feel a balance that she had never known possible. Yin and yang, all in one. To give, and take, in the tumultuous love affair had driven them to heights that the female in the pair had never imagined possible. With their partners with them, they had roared their passion into the night sky when surge after surge had made their tail dance.

In the mirror, Patti-Sam could see outside to the tryst she had just left where the lines of So’waa’Ma’wae’s tail drew her eyes to its joining with her hips, a marvel of sensual movements. The lithe grace of Emanuel, a corpsman from the ship BAE Orion, now a temporarily wingless Child, his limber build just as exciting in the pillow-lined bowl sunk into the earth that he slept within as anywhere else the black scales of his haunches rippled over lean muscle. Mixed in with him were the mated Children of the Egg pair of Kanna and Blake, their enormous wings overhanging the bowl in crinkled disarray. Their minds had become so close to each other’s that when So’waa’Ma’wae had worked their tongue inside Kanna, it had been Blake that bucked and shrieked for them both when her walls had come crashing down on the Dreamer’s delving.

When Patti-Sam had felt the Child of the Egg’s weight on their back and his malehood rubbing along the fine scales of their groin until it entered their canal, her powerful tail encircled the Child and drew him tight against her haunches. They had relished the heady aroma of him as it swirled around their snout. Their sensors reached back to caress his head as they rocked together, the whiskers adding to the joining of sensations encouraged by Kanna and Blake. Patti-Sam’s legs failed altogether and brought them both down on their sides as they ground against the ness. Emanuel’s penile nubs extended to tease their inner walls and were dragged back and forth every undulation of the Dreamer’s body to heighten the divine feeling that burned in every nerve of Patti-Sam’s conjoined mind. His rod heated by the internal fire of the Children of the Egg teased their vulval slit with every movement of their lanky bodies against each other.

All the while So’waa’Ma’wae had licked and nuzzled at Patti-Sam’s sensitive whiskers and gills as the five joined in a serpentine crush. It was Sam using their shared voice when he roared with his first release and Patti had swooned within his thoughts as three of them rolled out of their love nest and into the artificial lagoon around the tiki bar with a tremendous splash. A riot of voices and emotions amplified the intensity of their coitus as it spread throughout the camp until all shared in the waves of bliss rocketing between one and another. Patti-Sam’s head had broken above the surface of the lake, their pupils dilated and whiskers rubbing their own neck as they howled like Eros himself had joined with her.

God, Patti had never felt as alive as she did then, sharing everything with Sam.

A sleepy and contented rumble came from the heap of Patti-Sam’s lovers and they felt somedragon nuzzle and flick their tongue at the tip of the American-alien’s tail, stretched away around the corner and out of sight to disappear into the mass of living scales. They turned their attention back to the mirror they crouched on their thickly muscled tail in front of, experimenting with being two minds in one body.

“Do left right right left left left right right left!”

Patti-Sam had four sensor stalks drooping from their upper jaw like vines that they carefully dipped into the washbasin under their head to roll the bulbs about in the residual moisture. Dutifully, the bulbs flashed a staggering array of colors at the control of Sam with Patti’s urging. They roared in laughter, drunk, until suddenly, the world became fuzzy and distorted, shocking Patti-Sam and making them fall off their tail to all fours.

“What!”

In the next instant, the world cleared. With the action much slower this time, she could see that it happened from her nose outward. A second set of eyelids! Would the wonders never cease? Patti-Sam buzzed with excitement to each other.

“Kanpai!” Patti-Sam chortled exuberantly, a la the Japanese sea noodles, in celebration of their new discovery before dunking their half-formed muzzle into a bowl reeking of spirits on the wash basin counter. The sound of their overlapping voices boomed back and forth in the bamboo washhouse and startled the nearly human man at the basin next to her. Seven and forty meters away came the thundering cheers of an unknown number of humans, whales, dolphins, and dragons from the central meeting house to match their cry.

The Navy Captain looked over as one of Sam’s whiskers touched over the recoiling dark skinned man, and then looked down, and down from where her head crests scraped the thatched ceiling.

“Hey, you’re new! Wanna fuck, whale-man? You are still human down there, aren’t you?” Patti-Sam tilted her head to ostentatiously peer at his gown-clad body. Sam, ever curious, made the man jump with a squeak when he brought one sensor up between his legs. Sam informed her that the man’s skin had been changed to rubbery blue-tinged whale gray across his body beneath the robe, a reminder from the golden-eyed aliens for him. But, otherwise, he looked human enough if a little stretched in height compared to other humans. His eyes might have been a little wider apart.

“I’ve forgotten what a human feels like.” She cocked her head to look the tiny man’s frame up and down in consideration. “Although at this point, it might be like throwing a hotdog down a hallway for us. Wanna try anyway? Sam has never felt a human before. He’s curious after the stories I’ve shared about how nimble you fleshy little things can be. Just try to rub the walls of the hallway with your hotdog, since you’re not going to fill it. I’m sure you’ll figure it out.” She leaned over to lip at his ear and snuffled into it. He yelped and backed away with his hands covering his crotch and batting away their sensor bulb. Patti was amused to realize the small creaking sound she just heard was his arousal perking up beneath his shielding hands.

“No…” the man protested in Korean and the translator gadget wedged in Patti-Sam’s ear canal spit out his words. “You’re like twenty times my size. I don’t want to die here having sex. I want to swim the oceans.”

“Ah, well…” Patti-Sam sighed regretfully and stopped crowding the man by folding their legs until they felt their knees up against her stomach’s flanks while she regarded his smaller frame. She couldn’t ever remember feeling so horny in her life. So’Waa’Ma’Wae had told her that yes, Dreamers did have something like hormones, and also yes, hers were spiking up and down all over the place because of the transformation and for seven other reasons.

“You should enjoy the pleasures to be found here while it lasts,” Patti-Sam told him. “And try not to breed too much once you’re out there. If we must, we’ll eat your children to keep them from starving. It will take at least five and thirty years before your new species can breed freely according to krill biomass trends in the Atlantic and the anticipated effect of ourselves.” Patti-Sam quickly grew bored with talking numbers and snaked their head around to examine him again with one hopeful eye.

“Are you sure you don’t want to fuck? You can be on top so we don’t smother you. All you need to do is lie between my legs on my belly and then…just…I don’t know, flop around spastically like most other men until you hit the right notes. Maybe you could use this natural sponge we found to do us instead? We only must go pull it out of Kanna and rinse it off first.”

The unnamed man left remarkably fast after that. In his escape, Patti-Sam spied one of those adorably small dorsal fins that Blue Whales had tenting the blouse on his lower back above a sexy ass that she already regretted not feeling grind against their scales.

“And tell every whale you can speak with to stop feeding right in front of cargo ships!” Patti-Sam called after him in their overlapping dual voices.

They would have to check with the aliens to see exactly how much the humans volunteering for the re-wilding program were actually being told about their part in the grand plans. A great deal less than anything growing scales on the island, it seemed. Was it in the plan to keep them uninformed? Patti had some strong feelings about that, which made Sam quail a bit until she reached out to embrace him once more. They could only rejoin after Patti expressed enough to him to make him understand.

Patti-Sam played with six more aspects of their body in front of the mirror, poking around to define just where she ended and he began. At least the way the paired identities figured it, she did gross body movements, and they saw, smelled, heard, and tasted together. He, from his location in the neural bundles within a protected bony cavity that their spine passed through just before the hips, controlled touch, communication, whisker and fin movements, sensory feedback, and all unconscious body functions.

How did she know that last one? Because he had shown his displeasure once by making their shared body as cold as ice when he threw a tantrum after Patti had accidentally cut him off from seeing out of one eye. Sam was only a week old, and Patti struggled against her human identity to remember that she shared a three thousand four hundred nine and seventy kilogram body with him.

In the end, since Patti was there first and she knew humans needed titles to identify with others, and their shared body still had something that could, extremely generously, be called a vulval mound, two uteri, and everything between, they were she when they weren’t they. Sam did not care what they were called. Patti was his other, and Sam was hers. Together, they were Patti-Sam, The Scourge of Oceania, as she had informed Sam they were called when he had learned of personal names. He had thwapped their head with his whisker for the lie before they burst into rolling waves of laughter.

They were whole, and Patti wondered how she could have ever lived alone all the years before the island of Dr. Moreau with a part of herself missing. She hoped, she prayed, as much as she could bring herself to anyway, that one day she could introduce Sam to their estranged human daughter. Their whiskers dropped as a realization struck them. Why couldn’t they speak to her now with an island full of God-like technology? Sam’s exuberance for the idea helped her ignore the alarm bells going off in the back of her mind.

****

“We don’t think you’re going to be happy with the results of what you wish for,” Patience said to Patti-Sam the next morning from his place behind the bar.

They, or more accurately Patti, as Sam was busy using their eyes to watch Patience serve a pack of angry Diggers standing on the bar, took five point three minutes to respond to this comment while she digested the fact that since oh-nine-thirty-five yesterday morning they had grown one point one three meters longer and two and seventy kilograms heavier. More than she’d ever weighed as a human had been gained in one day. That and their head continuing to itch intolerably with the extension of their crest fins were enough to leave the former human woman a bit distracted from her plan to reach out to her estranged daughter and explain that she would have siblings.

“Whether she wants to talk to me or not, she deserves to know that she’ll have siblings.” A sudden thought struck them as their whiskers rose to undulate mid-air. “Who is their father?”

“You should know that…”

“I know what So’waa’Ma’wae told us, but we’re not on her world, are we? On this one, we will care about our children.”

“Their fathers are…”

“Fathers? Fathers!”

“So’waa’Ma’wae described your reproductive system to you already, we do not know why this information surprises you. Because of how rarely reproductive adults of your new species’ home world meet, female Dreamers store the sperm equivalent of their sexual encounters until one of your two uteri are in a state of ovulation. With the erratic and unpredictable hormonal levels in your body as a result of the transformative process we put you through, they are both ready for insemination, just as all the other females of your species on the island are.”

“You’re really killing our vibe here, alien.” Sam lashed their whiskers in agreement and knocked a Digger off the bar. She jumped up again right away to attack Patti-Sam. They ignored the ticklish feeling of hardened claws scrabbling across the scales of their back until their fifteenth dorsal fin was bitten.

“Ow, fucker!” They scooped up their own drink, a vat of Moscow Mule, and waved it at the enraged Digger wearing a t-shirt declaring the Rams the winners of the 2022 Super Bowl. She looked up from worrying Patti-Sam’s fin back and forth like a steak to glance at the bowl. “Here, go away.”

Grumbling, the Digger made the four-meter leap to the ground from Patti-Sam’s back. She landed with the tail that pushed her shirt up slapping the ground in a crouch that showed the fearsome strength of her muscular legs before stalking back to her group with the peace offering in claw.

“The fathers of your children are Rieko Ulithi and Ronaldo.”

“Ah,” Patti-Sam said with a pleased burble rising in their throat at the memory. “Ronaldo really knew how to throw his dick around, that’s for sure. Where is he?” they asked Patience, hopeful for a repeat.

“Preoccupied with his former Captain on the beach.”

“Oho…” Patti-Sam cooed, thinking of the hatchet-faced woman and that monster of her first officer from the Orion. Jump species, and the chain of command goes right out the window. Patti-Sam had thought it was as good as any time she’d ever had drinking in a bar with other sailors to swap stories between them and the Ecuadoreans. They in turn helped the pair through the trial of learning just what to do with three meters of tail and six sensory whiskers.

“The level of activity off the coast of the island has increased a great deal.”

“Ah,” Patti-Sam grunted, disappointed and then further annoyed as their body chose that moment to be two-legged again. Their body snapped upwards with some violence as their hips spasmed to slam their head into the ceiling.

“Mother fucker!” they trumpeted, pulling their fin spines from the thatched roof. “When is this going to settle, Patience? We’ve had enough with this interim human-Dreamer bullshit!”

Patience’s whiskers stopped serving to wave in the air in a complex pattern that Patti-Sam was at a loss to interpret.

“Oh good, then. Perfectly understandable, whatever the fuck that meant!” More questions tugged at Patti’s consciousness as well after the unsatisfying exchange. “And you confused my half-other again, too. He’s all of three days old, by the way, so thanks for that.”

Thinking of their daughter inevitably drew their thoughts to their reproductive features once again and then onto what was adding a gentle swell to their long abdomen. A feeling that Patti never thought she would have to deal with again after menopause, nor wanted to after her single daughter. She…they were pregnant. Or gravid, or whatever. She bent their body into itself to let Sam play their sensors over part of their belly just behind their barrel-shaped rib cage and well forward of their hips. He could feel them from where his mind resided, but using their whiskers Patti was bemused to see a three dimensional map of their

“It will take approximately two star orbits before they have developed enough for you to make whisker touch and feel.” So’waa’Ma’wae told Patti-Sam, coming up beside them to sit and watch the different species going about the alien settlement. “When you can sense their thoughts, it will be time for you to deposit your eggs with the Diggers.”

Patti-Sam felt their snout wrinkle as they looked at their partner with some skepticism. “You make giving birth sound like dropping a check off at the bank.”

The alien gave the equivalent of a shrug with her whiskers. A serpentine dip and rise of the undulating sensors. One of her whiskers came over to Patti-Sam and touched their still growing snout and then traced its way back along the lines of her extending skull to the great crests erupting from her scalp.

“You are still unsettled from yesterday.” It was not a question that So’waa’Ma’wae had given voice to.

Patti-Sam sighed and relaxed her serpentine body until they could feel their webbed hands sinking into the coarse grass tickling the underside of their aching tail. Sam sent their tendrils questing as Patti worked with him to form their next comment, showing him memory after memory to answer his questions about the human world. They rose up on their coiled legs and placed one hand on a palm tree as they reached for a coconut that Patti gave to Sam. He swiftly brought all four of their sensors to feel it over. An image of its smooth interior and the sloshing milk within formed in their mind after he buzzed one bulb to probe. A distraction for him as she thought over their next words. The waxing crescent moon had shifted seven degrees across the sky when she knew what they should say.

“Eight Diggers from the Malagasy children died yesterday fighting those Chinese marines before they could land. You only glanced at them for three point five seconds before turning away. Why? Why do you care so little for the young striders?”

So’waa’Ma’wae picked up a fallen tree and fussily scalped the twigs and branches jutting from the trunk with their sensors before flinging the four-meter-long log over one shoulder into the forest three and twenty meters away. They both ignored the furious roaring that followed.

“OW! What motherless shit is throwing sticks?”

“We are just as unsure of what will make straw for human-Dreamers as you are,” So’waa’Ma’wae said. “Our life cycle is two stages, and one does not have much to do with the other. But half of you is human in mind, and we know that humans care about their offshoots at least as far as convenient.”

“I think humans could get fifty percent more credit than that,” Patti-Sam said before reconsidering with a thoughtful rumble. “At least seventy-one percent of them anyway.”

“Wily speaks half-truths with much slight of fin, but she is not incorrect in thirty-three percent of what she says. On the Dreamer home world, we not commonly see to the welfare of our offshoots. Other too-young Diggers see to their needs until they can think and claw on their own feets. If they survive to maturity and are chosen for rebirth into adult water stage, we pay more attention then. We understand this is not human way of child throwing, but this is also not our home world and our way of making civilization.

“Much and more will be new and recorded for thinking of on home world. It is your choice how to go forth, only instinct we have is to lay eggs on the dry soil and the Diggers to dig, protect eggs, see to other Diggers, and return to birth waters if they answer call of adult life-stage. All else is much history of fakery made by Dreamers over many, many star orbits. Our way of culture was never meant for you of Earth to follow. We have come to guide, not to proselytize.”

So’waa’Ma’wae turned her head to look at Patti-Sam as they abandoned their coconut and twined as many of their sensors as they could with each other. The alien’s eyes fluttered their second eyelids rapidly with emotional distress and Patti-Sam sidled from her crouch until their flanks pressed together. Patti-Sam thrummed in their long neck and nuzzled gently at their alien partner. The feel of her partner’s smooth facial scales on her nose were just as alien to Patti as the attempt to comfort, her sense of personal space in constant change.

“It is difficult,” So’waa’Ma’wae said with her head hanging sadly and fins drooping. Patti-Sam tightened her pythonic crush of their partner’s sensors to hold them in comfort. “To witness how much humans can, and Children of the Egg do, care for their offshoots. Dreamers and Diggers have flaws as awaited, like all kinds of life. But So’waa’Ma’wae learns much in their time on Earth-sphere. They cannot return to scratch itch of making their own eggs and adding to culture of theirs until humans decide if they want to die, or live.”

Slowly, So’waa’Ma’wae sank to the ground and stared despondently with lifeless sensors. Patti-Sam did not know how to comfort her. Instead, she stood guard with one whisker entangled with So’waa’Ma’wae’s as the alien shuddered with the grief of their choices being jammed into their snout. Soon, more cool scales and gentle sensors were pressed to their bodies, and four sets of wings came with the whisper of the curtains that draped over them all.

For Patti-Sam’s new friends and their former species, they would move seamounts. Sam’s thoughts nudged her as he understood his other half, and what it meant to be her and them.

****

“I can’t watch this anymore. Seeing those people willingly become animals makes me sick.”

The video on the screen was of another group of hand-holding hippies treading water in the Elliot Bay. Overlooking them were a dozen giant alien dragons that had emerged from the depths like leviathans to join the one that was once the director of the local sea-life rescue. But they were far from the worst of it. There were several dozen more of the flying variety of dragons on the roofs around the bay. It was hard to get a count of them as they constantly shifted and flew about.

Someone in the bunker vomited as the group of five women and one boy suddenly flailed their arms in the water. With the high-resolution video from the looping drone in the air, the leaders of the United States could see in freakish detail as a woman slapped her hands to her head. Only for them to see her fingers elongate and ensheathe with tough flesh as they turned to chest fins that she flapped frantically.

Her eyes, and then the eyes of those around her, spread to the sides of their swelling black and white heads. Teeth became large and conical, and their noses sealed shut while smoothing away to nothing, just as new nostrils opened on the tops of their heads. Large tails with widespread flukes emerged from beneath rapidly overwhelmed swim trunks and wetsuits that tore in half against the might of newly grown muscle, reorienting the swimming humans onto their stomachs. Just in time for those watching to see dorsal fins spring to life when they cut through swimwear to tower above sleekly broadening backs that bore signature grayish saddle patches.

The humans, throwing away their birth species, thrashed with their shrinking legs. Within minutes, where there had been voting citizens of the United States, there was now a small pod of killer whales struggling with the new reality of being conscious breathers.

“Why are they doing that to themselves!” the president exclaimed. “I’ve been having the Northwest tribes badgering me for years about there being no salmon. Isn’t that what they eat? What are they going to eat? They’re setting themselves up to starve in the ocean!”

The president paced the length of the conference room bunker that he’d lived in for most of a year now. He’d honestly forgotten how long at this point. The room he was in now was only one among many in the sprawling five-story underground emergency shelter built under the Virginia mountains. Just in case anyone wanted to drop something larger than a tactical nuke on the people’s house. At least he didn’t have to worry about that anymore. The scientists at the national labs hadn’t shut up about celebrating that yet. The president just didn’t agree that nuclear weapons were the greatest sin science had ever undertaken. They had kept another world war from happening for over eighty years.

“Can anyone make sense of this for me? How are people still expressing so much freedom? I mean,” President Lincoln rubbed his cheeks in frustration. “Look at that boy!” He pointed at the smaller orca in the middle of the protective ring of the adults. A pair of the largest dragons, the ones that traded gills for wings, escorted the pod to another waiting further out. The president could see them from the blasts of their breath. “Aren’t small fins like that female? Being transgender is abuse! Their choices are making me feel confused and uncomfortable, and I don’t like it!”

“Well?” Lincoln whirled on his attendants. “Is anyone as outraged at this libertine behavior as me? My god! What will come next? Will we be ruled by whales and dolphins in addition to the traitorous dragons? That psychiatrist. What’s her name? Chan? Why isn’t she here explaining this nonsense?” the president finished peevishly. A military aide ran from the room, checking on that exact thing.

On the video screen, one of the dragons standing on a roof pointed at the camera with its tail. Seconds later, a shadow fell over the video feed before it frantically spun as the drone plummeted from the sky. The last frozen image was the side of a dragon’s head, peering closely at the fallen surveillance drone with one vivid bronze and green eye. The president was not amused.

“Destruction of government property! Those drones cost… what do they cost, General Becker?”

“A hundred grand or two,” the four-star general responsible for the defense of the North American continent said, staring at the frozen video before stirring herself awake by rubbing her eyes. “The more pressing problem is that we won’t have any way to replace them with the halt to shipping. Those drones come from active-duty units that need them to guard food and fuel depots. The defense contractors are running out of the raw materials and components needed to make more. It doesn’t help that the dragons do this to anything they find.”

Becker picked up a phone at her station to give a command. “Switch to the feed from Athena 3, and make sure it stays at maximum altitude. They know we’re watching them again, and we still have no idea how far they can see or hear.”

The main screen on the wall switched to a more distant view. Far enough that wisps of cloud and haze obscured some detail. But not enough to hide that there were a handful of dragons around the downed drone, poking and prodding at it with makeshift tools made of scrap metal to fit their large hands. As the president watched, the broken wings and propeller were replaced along with the battery pack. A real American emerged from the rooftop stairwell and plugged a computer into the surveillance drone once the repair was complete. Soon the little drone was carried into the air and dropped by one winged dragon that dwarfed its size. The stolen property zipped off to the north, apparently under their control.

“They steal and repair them whenever they can. They strip them into individual parts when they can’t. I wish half of my soldiers would show a fraction of that initiative. If you’re wondering why they could hack them so easily, half the workforce that built them lives in the Seattle area.”

“Spare us your admiration of the traitors,” the president muttered. “I just saw fifteen federal law violations. I don’t want any of you to ever forget that is what these things are. But that doesn’t mean we can’t exploit them for our ends. Imagine what these creatures might be capable of when they are under our strict control? We need their versatile strength and resourcefulness, not what I’m sure are their corrupted alien ideologies. They might be communists, anarchists, or, worst of all, atheists now. Can you imagine that?”

“The problem isn’t that we can’t imagine their human-formed ideologies, it’s that we can no longer imagine how they think at all,” the psychiatrist, the one the president had been looking for just a short while earlier, came in. Doctor Alexis Chan limped in on her cane to blink languidly about the room she’d been ushered into more than a hundred meters below ground. Incongruously, she wore a lightweight bulletproof vest and carried a satchel in her other hand. A nearby Air Force orderly quickly wheeled a chair over for her to arthritically lower herself into and then pushed her up to the conference table overrun with telephones and computers.

President Lincoln yelled in outrage when the video feed went out. This time the last image seen was a black, thick-skinned hand reaching its claws toward the camera. In the background, the widely swept wings of the creature could be seen locked in place, gliding as the drone was overtaken by muscular arms.

“And how much does that one cost?”

“About 20 million. But, sir,” she said, trying to force an enthusiasm that wasn’t there and tugging on her combat uniform’s sleeves. “We learned they can fly up twenty thousand feet and maintain enough control to dive at speeds of at least sixty-five miles per hour onto our aircraft by positioning themselves in its path. Everything we learn about them, the better, sir. We got all that confirmed intel from one obsolete drone. I’ve gotten less at a far higher cost before.”

“Thank you, general,” he snapped at her, falling into a chair and his black thoughts. As well he should, with the deficit for the year already at seven trillion dollars with two months to go. It wasn’t just the cost of mobilizing the entire military and federal services against the apocalypse that had led to such run-away. It was also the fact that tax and duty income had fallen to levels not seen in two hundred years. “I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that fiscal accountability is not just an election speech anymore.”

Nearly a year after Zero Day, and the world’s economy had ground to a halt. There had been so many suicide attempts each day on Wall Street that the New York Fire Department had strung up nets for city blocks every ten stories. Overseas markets were faring no better. In Japan, someone had bombed their stock exchange. In China, their military had hacked the Hong Kong exchange in a panic to stop a global rout. Which had backfired spectacularly, to no one’s surprise. The world economy had shrunk something like sixty trillion dollars. Cut in half from a year before, and still falling. Each and every weekday the markets closed when losses reached ten percent. Often in less than an hour.

Which was all to say the loss of the drones was keenly felt.

“Why are my citizens volunteering to go over to these aliens?” he stood and strode over to a corner of the room where one of those ‘aliens’ had been thrown haphazardly to its current place. The president picked the weightless thing up, he knew he only could because it allowed him to, and shook it, looking for a response.

“Well? What are you promising them?”

The motionless creature’s eyes, however, remained the same lifeless gray they’d been for nearly three months as its head lolled on its long neck and its wings shook with a rattle of claws. The only monotone thing it would normally say was…

“You must ask the right questions to solicit a response from this unit.”

“Useless ambassador!” the president shouted and flung the creature at the wall. Only for the derelict being to waft like a feather to the floor and lie there once more with head and limbs bent at whatever uncomfortable angle they had taken. It wouldn’t allow anyone else to so much as touch it, so there it would remain until the next printed list of questions to try came to the president from NASA’s exopsychologists. When they weren’t trying to talk to octopi and humpback whales, at least.

The most maddening thing of all was that others of the alien race would still speak to select citizens of his country, but not him. The most powerful man on Earth. They even still spoke to the assembled UN, but not to him, or China, or anyone who mattered!

“I decide,” the president thundered, pounding the table, “what is the right question to answer! Not you things from the stars!” He chose to ignore his security council looking warily at each other. “Explain to me the psychology of people wanting to transform!” he wheeled on the best psychiatrist that could be found capable of the security clearances for admittance into the doomsday bunker. Her jaw clapped shut on her raspy snore and she jerked awake when she felt all eyes on her.

“Oh, dear. What was your question, young man?”

“The whale people,” President Lincoln said through gritted teeth, “and the dragons. I need their mindsets explained to me.”

“Right, the metamorphosed. It is reasonable,” she muttered to herself, scooting closer to the table with her feet until she could reach the courier satchel she came in with. Inside it were a dozen manila folders with security classifications on them that she handed to everyone within her arm's span.

“Those nice fellows at the FBI let me have a team of their psychiatrists to assess these human volunteers in situ in Seattle before they lost the ability to speak a human tongue.”

“Traitors!” the president sneered.

“Young man!” Dr. Chan admonished the president, really feeling as if he was one of her grandchildren or a first-year student. “The reasons for the actions of these people have nothing to do with allegiances, but a great deal with the ennui they feel from their lack of purpose and their need to reclaim a sense of agency within their own lives!”

“So what? They need jobs? Hah! I’ll find them jobs, breaking concrete into smaller chunks of concrete to build the wall of Jericho I have planned for our borders. I’ll create an unemployment relief program that will have FDR spinning in his grave with its size. Someone, write this down. A new civilian corps of volunteers. You can leave out the conservation part this time. No alien is going to order the United States to coddle Bambi! Where’s my Department of the Interior director?”

“You fired her, sir. Last week,” a weary aide informed him.

“Well then, get my deputy DNI director on the line,” the president snapped.

“He um… he’s…”

“Well? Out with it!”

“He is… his last sighting was among a pod of humpback whales leaving Chesapeake Bay. The tracking chip under his skin shows him two hundred miles off the Atlantic coast.”

“Traitors!” the President yelled. “Quislings! Turncoats! Add him to the list! The next time he shows his head above water, I want his blubber for the emergency lanterns!”

“They’re… they’re battery powered, sir, with a hand crank.”

“Get out! Go find me someone from Interior to speak to!”

“As you can see with your personnel, young man…”

“It’s President, Dr. If you won’t respect me, at least respect the people that elected me.”

She squinted at him through her thick glasses, exuding an air of confusion. “You’re the President? But you’re so young!”

“Is this woman really the best we can do?” the disparaged man, his ego bruised, asked the room in general. He got no verbal responses beyond the furious braying of a jenny standing in one corner with a sign hanging from its neck that identified her as Veronica Morningstar, Director of Homeland Security. The donkey jumped on her front legs and struck the wall behind her with two hooves to add to the scattering of dents in the stainless steel plate mounted there for that purpose. When she had collected herself, Veronica shuffled over to a large keyboard placed on the floor and began tapping a hoof across the improvised array of labeled keys on touchpads. A mechanical voice responded at the tap of each button while she watched with her head turned to one side.

“Yes. Security. Security. Security.”

“Anyway, young President,” the psychiatric doctor fixed her glasses to peer closely at the donkey. A useless exercise for her watery eyes, all that she saw was a dark gray blur. “It is certainly not as simple as needing an occupation. In the increasing industrialization of the world, many humans can feel disconnected from nature. There is an estimated four to five percent of the United States’ population willing to give up their species of birth.”

The president looked up at the ceiling as he did the math in his head. He could appreciate the enormity of what was being told him. Eighteen million more dragons in the skies of the country. When less than two million of them were already responsible for so much chaos. ”How do we stop them, then?”

“Well, that is above my pay grade, young President. I can only inform you of what they feel their intentions are. They all feel their best interests have been disregarded by encroachment on what they hold dear. Some believe that their transformation will materially better the world somehow. A number merely want to do something new. A small minority desire it for the most base of human desire, sexual stimulation. Although what they’ll do when they find themselves living out their lives as some new species, I’m sure I don’t know.”

“Eighteen million dragons,” the president whispered again.

“Now, young President, there are no indications to be seen yet that the… um… aliens… are willing to transform that number of volunteers and certainly not into whales or the creatures we have seen so far. My word, there would be nothing left on Earth to eat if they did!”

“I am certainly not bound to explain my very prescient concerns to you, doctor. You may go at any time. And by that, I mean now…”

“Oh my,” the elderly woman said a little faintly as two servicemen appeared at her elbows and pointed toward the exit.

The Commander in Chief of what he hoped was still the world’s greatest military watched as the elderly Asian woman was escorted from the room by marines who each must have weighed twice what she did. He felt empowered, knowing he could still direct such force with a single gesture or word against a frail octogenarian sociologist.

“Now get my security council together to brief me on options to shut this nonsense down in Seattle. I won’t have my citizens exercising too much free will by deciding they no longer want to be human. As of this moment, anyone who joins or intends to join with the aliens is a clear and present danger to the security of this country. And that includes anyone who becomes a fish, as well.”

“Kill. Justice. Kill. Justice.” Director Morningstar gave her enthusiastically equine clip-clop of approval, following it up with a deafening bray that showed all her teeth and pinned her ears back. Just in case anyone mistook her intention.