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Graphic design was the correct major for Dustin. All his design classes went swimmingly. He knew he could do it. He knew there were jobs at the end, and he was sure he knew enough about the industry that he could secure one before graduation. If it involved colours, shapes, or geometry -- all that good stuff -- then he passed that class with flying colours, shapes, and geometry.

Everything else was the problem. It was learning by rote he couldn't do. Why his degree in graphic design had to include classes in science and history, Dustin would never know. He really wouldn't. Chemistry was the worst, somehow. Some of it made logical sense, but there were so many names and little exceptions to the rules that he felt overwhelmed and supremely bored at the same time.

So, Dustin asked for a tutor on Gregsindex: a tutor for studying itself. He mentioned his memory problems, retention skills, that he felt he needed something, anything to help him with this. Anything except ritalin. He took pains to conceal his identity while posting: his new username was, ingeniously, 'justin88', whereas his usual one was 'dustin88'.

After three messages asking him to see a doctor if it was that bad, which Dustin ignored, he received an interesting offer.

Now, the part of town in which Dustin and his Spider hosts lived was home to more Beasts than humans. Just over half. The town itself was known for its accepting attitude towards Beasts, even weird and magical ones. (This was partly why the young man had all these psychedelic experiences with new friends, but he was a magnet for that anyway.)

This acceptance meant that the town was home to Beasts which people considered unsavoury. The ones with actual written laws about their powers, which could pose a danger to the public.

The most feared Beasts among these were the Basilisks.

Basilisks were magical Reptiles, and had aspects of snakes and lizards to them, but they varied hugely in appearance. Generally, your Basilisk had a chunky, snake-like body, with four legs they sometimes walked with, and four arms on a sort of anthropoid upper half - at eye level with a tall human. On top of their heads, behind and between the eyes, were complex squamous crests, like crowns. The shapes of these were unique to each Basilisk.

Sometimes they closely resembled certain lizards and snakes, sometimes they were so stocky and lumpy as not to appear like either. There were different kinds of Basilisk, like the Greater Basilisks, which were a good deal larger than a human. The leg and limb situation varied between each one, too. Some were armless, with four to eight legs, and a few were totally legless, like serpents. Some had wings on upper half, others the bottom, others both. Most had none. Interestingly, they were all male, and reproduced by issuing pups from their mouths.

Despite all that variation, what truly made a Basilisk a Basilisk was its eyes. They were big, and they didn't blink, and if you made eye contact with them, you would die or turn to stone. Their saliva had an even more terrifying aspect - with a kiss, a Basilisk could steal your memories, erasing them forever. (A disproportionate number of them made a living as therapists.)

When civilised, living away from the rural tribes they all came from, Basilisks sometimes had themselves enchanted to lose their fatal vision. Others wore sunglasses or blindfolds, keeping their power for self-defense. The latter strategy was more common. The days of ritually blinding themselves as a sign of contrivance were gone, because the signal hadn't worked. Few people were prepared to believe in a harmless Basilisk, and they'd get killed.

There were many stories about how these misunderstood Beasts got their power. Some people said it was natural, and that they had evolved their death-magic like a snake's venom or a raptor's talons. Some Basilisks believed they had been 'blessed', centuries ago, by a minor god of Death. Supernatural explanations tended to dominate over natural ones, which was fair enough, since magic was involved. Also, while it is well-known for lizards and snakes to do away with males and form all-female races, equivalent fraternities are not yet known in nature.

As if this wasn't complicated enough, and this is where things become relevant to Dustin, there were also the Pseudo-Basilisks.

An obvious relative of the Basilisk, they also had their branched, unique crowns, and their sauro-serpentine bodies. Your Pseudo-Basilisk was gracile where the Basilisk was chunky, arboreal where the Basilisk was cave-dwelling. They also had their long snake morphs, and their many-legged, many-armed ones.

However, they weren't such effective predators.

See, they also had big, magical eyes that could never blink, and this magic was also powerful, and it did alarm people. However, where the Basilisk's gaze caused death, looking into the Pseudo-Basilisk's eyes caused love. Well, 'love'. More often it was arousal. Eye contact with a Pseudo would give you urges, or feelings, both emotional and physical. For some, it messed with their bodies and put them into a heat or rut instantly. For a few unlucky Pseudos, this meant that every time they made eye contact with someone, that someone was treated to an instant and uncomfortable orgasm. For others, it was more like pouring out wine from a jug until it flowed over.

For an equally rare number of them, the Pseudo's gaze would instead cause a truly loving emotion, of trust and acceptance.

There were just as many stories about how these forest-dwelling brothers got their power as there were for their Basilisk cousins. Sometimes, you'd hear Pseudos were 'blessed' by a minor god of love or fertility. When asked, they'd just shrug, and say, 'a wizard did it'.

Fewer Pseudos had their eyes removed or enchanted than did the normal Basilisks, though people often didn't know the difference between them. Pseudos were too rare. Folk feared any four-armed and four-legged reptile as a matter of course. Besides, there were plenty of eyeglasses that filtered out this power of theirs. They had other magics about them, too, which varied from individual to individual.

So, Dustin was elated when a Pseudo responded to him quickly, saying he had a memory-lotion that would work for maybe five days at a time. Helpful before any tests. Longer with more exposure. This e-mail said there was a catch, but the Pseudo did not say what it was in the message. Dustin was a little wary, as the user did not specify a price. The human didn't, really, want to have to sit on some stranger's sofa and have orgasm after orgasm pulled out of him -- wait, no, that was prejudiced. Just because their eyes did that didn't mean they wanted to.

Dustin arranged to meet this person, screenname 'tutti_von_frutti', in a cafe on third avenue. It was a quiet place in a very open neighbourhood. There was space on the floor for all manner of enormous Beast customers, and many pipes installed on the roof for the climbers. There was even a dark room for the troglodytes. Dustin didn't really feel out of place, as he'd lived here most of a year now.

That said, tutti_von_frutti was quite late. It had been half an hour. Dustin was certainly a pliant man, but he was not a patient one. He sank into the plush leather chair of the cafe.

A great black claw tapped him on the shoulder.

"Sorry," a lisping voice said, "traffic was murder." Dustin turned, and looked up at a very beautiful Reptile with perfectly smooth scales, green and patterned with red swirls. Four big legs, four long arms. He was athletic-looking on top, this stranger, but fat and round on the lower half, trailing into a long, prehensile tail. This tail was raised in a big curl above him, perhaps so as not to trip anyone up or knock anything over, or perhaps to keep it ready as a third - er, fifth hand. The claw that tapped Dustin was offered to shake. "I'm Surus. You're Justin, right?"

"No," Dustin said, "uhm, my name's actually Dustin...."

Basil laughed.

"I guess we have to be discreet, then," he said. The viperine creature's eyes were probably quite big, behind his sunglasses - those were huge. "You said you're having trouble remembering things...?"

"Yeah," Dustin said, glancing from side to side. He realised, only just now, that this probably counted as cheating. "Finals are in two weeks. My project grades are good, but my memory for everything... it just goes away, in an exam. "

There was an expectant silence, then Surus prompted him.

"Have you been studying?"

"Yep," Dustin said. "Doesn't help with the mock tests."

"Hs," Surus said. "I can help you. The catch we talked about..."

"Yeah?"

"...actually, no, first I should explain something: it's not a spell I cast on you, it's a power I have in my body."

Dustin shuffled his feet on the cafe floor. Surus sipped what smelled like a spicy tea. Maybe chai.

"Specifically," he continued, "in my tongue."

Dustin clutched his cup.

"I have to kiss you?" the human said.

"No, you silly man," Surus said. "You don't have to kiss me. I have to lick you."

"That's a little worse," Dustin said. His eyes narrowed. "Are you sure this actually..."

The Reptile's four arms spread out.

"Would I tell you all this in public if it wasn't?"

"I don't know," said Dustin, "I don't think anyone's listening."

"I am," said Dorothy, 72, from the big chair behind Dustin's. "I think he's telling the truth."

Dustin, 24, frowned in embarrassment.

"If we do this," Surus said, "I have one condition."

"I thought I was paying you in money?"

"You are. You're also helping me with something else, something personal, if you want to ace those tests."

"Is it sex?" Dustin asked, as his heart sank. Why was his whole life a procession of weird sexual encounters with monsters? Why was it always the only solution to anything in his life? First the breakup, then housing, now homework. And always male! The student would never have admitted it aloud then, but his image of himself as a heterosexual was fading.

"No, it's not sex." Surus' lower arms tapped their claws on his front pair of legs, stuck out akimbo from the little spiral coil he 'sat' in. "It's shedding. I need to shed all in one go, or I get sick. I can't reach all of myself for it, so I need your help."

"That sounds painless," Dustin said.

"For you, it will be" Surus said. "Have we got a deal?"

Dustin held out his hand, and Surus curled his one big scaly hand around it. Those hooks could have ripped him apart - but they held him so gently they had no chance of breaking the skin.

"Good! Grand. Deal. My place, tomorrow, at 11." Surus unwound his coils and legs from underneath him, and gulped down the last of his tea. He was obviously in a hurry, but his movements were sluggish, sleepy - even his rope-like tail.

"But --" but the Serpent-creature was already on his way out of the cafe.

"I'll text you the address," he said on the way out, not looking at Dustin.

-

Surus did indeed text Dustin the address, and Dustin did indeed turn up at eleven. It was a good long way from his apartment. Good. No-one he knew would see him go there. He could shower there, and no-one would know he'd helped a snake-lizard shed, or paid a large sum of money to get himself licked into academic success.

Dustin had felt an anxiety before coming to Surus' place that he hadn't felt in a long while. All the other times he let himself get vulnerable for other people, it was a spur of the moment thing, something the other person had led him to out of honest desire, or that had come out of chemistry with Dustin. This was just cold-blooded capitalism.

Surus' hand hadn't been cold, though. No, there was a good warmth there.

He got a text, as he left the bus at ten-fifty: 'Wont need to shed for another fortnight, so don't worry about that today. Well just get your memory working.' He pressed on the buzzer, and Surus' voice said,

"Come on up."

So clipped. Dustin felt like either Surus didn't like him, or he was like this with everyone.

The boy climbed the ratty staircase of the apartment building, nodding awkwardly to a pair of Rats as he passed them. He'd not thought much about what he wore today, but was now regretting it: khaki shorts and sandals were fine for the weather, and his t-shirt was a properly sporty one, capable of dealing with sweat. However, the shirt had a few concentric circles on it, which one could interpret as a target. He worried a part of him had done that deliberately.

In the dark, beige-painted stairwell, Dustin thought and overthought his situation. He realised as he got to the door that he wouldn't really have much control over it anymore, not once he stepped into the lion's den. Surus' den. A long picture on the door caught his eye --

-- a sticker. It showed a cartoony marmoset, who held a sign saying "welcome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!".

Dustin felt more and less afraid. The door opened.

"Welcome," said the red and green serpent, more quietly than his door-monkey. He had a different pair of sunglasses on this time - pink. He seemed to hold his head strangely high, as if trying to look down his nose at Dustin... he realised that this was probably out of fear that he'd catch a look at his naked eye and become ensorcelled or whatever. "You're a little early."

Dustin looked at him quizzically. He pulled out his phone --

"Wait, no, you're not, crap, it's eleven," Surus said. He gestured for Dustin to come in, and he stepped in, finding a narrow corridor filled with the prehensile coils of the Reptile. It was a small apartment even by this neighbourhood's standards, in an old redbrick building, but it was tall and homey.

There was little in the way of decoration, and he could faintly smell something like cleaning products. The carpet was soft under his feet - Surus insisted he take his shoes off.

"We're going to have a chat about this shenanigan in my room, and then get on with the memory thing." Surus' smile was infectious, and oddly reassuring. His words were authoritative, but his tone of voice wasn't. Dustin felt soothed. The creature's room was not so devoid of personality as the hallway: there were framed photos all over the walls of what must have been his relatives, all smiles and scales and coils.

"Oh," said Dustin, walking right up to one - a relatively large portrait of Surus himself. (Who displayed photos of themselves?) "So that's what your eyes look like?"

They were perfectly round, and perfectly yellow. The pupils were slit. Like a Snake, there were no eyelids. Surus managed to make his gaze less striking than convivial. He did have eyebrows, after all.

"Yep. Are they nice?" Surus' tail tip poked at Dustin's scalp, and scratched him pleasantly. It was a little humiliating, and Dustin shooed it away.

"I... guess so," said Dustin. "Sorry."

"I'm flattered you were curious." Other than the photos, there were a lot of flags and slogans Dustin didn't recognise. An old soul record was playing on a record player. Surus, it seemed, was a bit of a hipster. "Now," he said, "here's how it's gonna work: I can actually do the whole thing in about twenty minutes. My tongue's pretty long. The more it's in contact with your skin, the faster you absorb it all, the better you'll remember stuff. Get it?"

"Got it."

"Good. Take off your clothes." Dustin's jaw dropped. Surus had been reining in his bluntness in the cafe. "You can keep your underwear on if you want." Dustin did want, so he did. He busied himself with buttons and belt while Surus kept going. As before, his words were abrupt, but his tone was soft. "You have the choice of a little licking over some of you, over a few sessions, or one long one over all of you. Choose now."

Dustin flushed a little, keeping his eyes away from Surus. It was probably something the scaly person was used to.

The human realised the odd layout of the room once he looked away thus. There wasn't a bed - there was a collection of pillows and rugs, mauve and pink. He saw a few rolled-up sleeping bags in the corner. Did he go camping? No, he was too big for those bags. Did people camp in this room? What the Hell was going on?

"You're not that comfortable naked, are you? If you want this over quickly, you ought to tell --"

"I'm leaving you," said a familiar voice, outside the room.

"Who's that?" said Dustin.

"Dustin?"

"Don't open the door, Justin," Surus said. "I'm here with my client Dustin. I think this is the same Dustin, Justin."

"Dustin!!" said Justin.

"Hi Justin," said Dustin, relieved Surus had stopped the roommate coming in. The Pseudo had picked up on how exposed Dustin felt. He crossed his arms over his chest.

Dustin had met the Centipede months earlier in the Spiders' great celebration, where Justin had been a bartender. They did something like flirting.

"We're going to be a while. You'll have to get the groceries yourself," said Surus.

"No worries. I was gonna offer anyway. You two lovebirds have fun, now. I'm not jealous. I'm not."

"We're not --"

"We'll have lots of fun," interrupted Surus, so deadpan as to be menacing. His tail curled around the blinds' string from across the room, and closed them. "Bye, Justin."

The Myriapod's exit was announced by the front door's click as it closed. Dustin breathed out, having had no idea he was holding his breath.

Dustin felt a little apprehensive about his acquaintance with Justin. It wasn't that Justin being an enormous Centipede was a problem, but Dustin knew he would not understand, or respect, the many different layers of Dustin's sexuality.

Like how he was straight.

"I want you to lick all of me, " he told Surus, who smiled and nodded.

"Okie-dokie," Surus said, and his tail flopped over the floor to wrap round Dustin's shins. With almost no concern for Dustin's safety, this tail hoisted him upwards, his own face upside-down in front of Surus'. "If you want down, you say. Got it?"

"Get - I mean, got it."

"Good." The monster obligingly opened his mouth up wide, and like water from fountain, his orange tongue emerged. After its fork, it was pretty much as broad as Dustin's wrist, but flatter. Dustin could see that it was rolled up inside a tube, and unfurled as it emerged from it. It slid through his hair, and down over the shell of his ear... Dustin, unused as he was to such a sudden and strange feeling, wriggled, but the tongue had an unnatural strength and wrapped tightly around his face. It held him as strongly, at least, as the coils of Surus' tail had.

Said tail began to unwind.

Over the course of several minutes, the endlessly wet tongue coiled round, held up, and wetted Dustin where the dry tail peeled off. It made no sense that something that size would be so strong. It broke several important laws of physics. Dustin was fairly certain it did, at least. Then again, so did magical spiders, and Typhon's smoke rings, and the exact technical meaning of a round of revision when everyone knows the client won't even know what that means, but still. Super strong tongues holding grown men in midair, when there was no space in them for the muscle to do so, were offensively unreal.

The tongue was warmer than the serpentine Beast's scaly skin, too. Almost hot. It wrapped around his wrists and hips twice, crossing over. Why he had to be bound for this, he did not know.

The tongue, which Dustin realised probably counted as a sixth limb, slithered on still further, winding between his thighs and making its way down. Well, up, since he was upside-down. Dustin wriggled when the fork brushed past the backs of his knees, and thrashed, but was held still. It was strangely pleasant.

Like having his posture corrected, back when he was little, when he used to slouch in class. And Mr. Impet had poked the very top of his scalp with a finger to indicate that it wasn't pointing upward. Dustin's emotions around that memory grew warm, for a second, but they were very crude compared to the clear image of Impet's face, and the little marks on his wedding band.

Finally, the fork of Surus' tongue lay across the tops of his feet, and Dustin presumed that whatever was going to happen was going to happen, now. Dustin figured he should concentrate on his notes, or what he remembered of them --

-- it had been hours into his last study session, and he'd gone from detailed yet concise notes on each paragraph of the textbook to writing nothing and reading only the first and last sentences. He couldn't remember what was in between because he hadn't read it.

He remembered the lectures, though. Every word, when he focused on it. Start to finish. Dustin sorted through the information - where he'd checked his phone, he focused - what was that sound in the background? Oh, that put everything in context for the next slide, which showed the right composition of the previous wrong example, and Surus' tongue was beginning to unwind already.

It had dried slightly throughout the short time the thick tape-like organ had been wound around the boy, so it was going back in slowly. That suited Dustin fine. At this rate, he was sure to pass. As the tongue let go, the tail returned, and Dustin was moved to be right-side-up again.

As Surus' tongue curled past the shell of his ear again, Dustin gave the Pseudo-Basilisk two thumbs up, and in his nod in response, those pink shades fell off his eyes, and -

"Oh!"

• they'd only looked at each other for an instant, but the combination of Surus' magic and his other magic was potent. Dustin tried to dampen his sudden, intense hardness by focusing on more disgusting memories - bad meals, their consequences - but the eyes had been right there, and he'd felt his whole face blush, and felt himself stay hard.

"Oh my god, I am SO sorry!" Surus said. He was obviously mortified.

And it was like every time he remembered the situation he was just in, the effect was repeated. Dustin grasped at the Pseudo-Basilisk's shoulders.

"It's okay, Dustin. It's okay. I'm so, so sorry. You can - you can take as much time as you need," the serpent said, covering his hands with his own. His tail, meanwhile, fetched an opaque white bandana with intricate black patterns, and wrapped it around his own face, more effectively obscuring those eyes. "Do you want me to leave you alone in here - to - you know?"

"I don't know," Dustin said, cringing so hard he wasn't looking at anything.

"Okay. You're safe, Dustin. Think about - do you watch any sports?"

"Tennis," Dustin said.

"Okay, Dustin. Think of tennis. Think about the scores of your favourite player." Mandy Arrow, six-love, last time, against Tina Johns. Dustin had been in a bar, and everyone had screamed when the last point got in at the last second, thoroughly trouncing Johns. But Surus' eye had been round, and yellow, and had little crenulations and valleys in the all-over iris, leading to the central pupil, which wasn't, quite, black, and Dustin's cock surged again, and he pressed his hands down on Surus' scales.

"Please," he whispered.

"Their scores, Dustin." Six-love last time. And four-two the time before, in tropical heat. And she won three-love the time before that, in Winter, in the stadium in Dustin's home city.

The erotic fuzz receded after a long minute. Dustin relaxed, sifting through happy memories of Mandy's many tennis conquests.

"Thank you."

"The effect's going to last for the next two weeks. Every time you remember it, uh, what just happened might repeat. Just do what I suggested, and you'll be fine. Scores of anything, and list them going backwards in time." One of Surus' pairs of hands wrapped around Dustin's wrist - the claws didn't interfere with that, huh - and lifted them off him. Dustin realised he'd sort of been massaging at his host, and focusing too much on the feel of his skin. "And you can pay me now."

Dustin nodded, and fetched the money from his wallet. He re-robed himself, still with the tightness in his throat. His roommates cuddled him that night, sensing something was a little wrong - months later, he'd confess to what happened while drunk, and the people at the party would console him, saying it was silly of Surus not to wear a blindfold from the beginning.

Surus would write a heartfelt letter of apology.

Before that, though, Dustin passed his exams, with mid to high As and a prominent dark spot on his jeans.