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"Sig, you sure you're okay, man? You look messed up."

"Yeah. Yeah. Hey, thanks for taking me out, though. Helped me unwind."

"This is you 'unwound'? Damn, dude. Guess I haven't seen you uptight."

"Hey, go fuck yourself," Sigfried laughed quietly. "I'll be alright. Some sleep and some NSAIDs'll do me."

"Hey, is that... You keep one of those in your house?" His friend tried to poke his snout in the door.

Sigfried palmed the polar bear's muzzle up and away from the entrance to his condominium from below."Don't worry about it."

"Bruh I'm worried."

"Well don't. It's chained up, it's work-related, it's fine. Go home, Mound."

"If you say so. Those things give me the heebie-jeebies. Hey, rest up. We'll crack this case." A huge paw landed once on the grizzly's shoulder.

"See you in the morning."

"Right."

Sigfried tossed his badge in a key tray as he closed the door behind him. He always felt his size when he came home. The anthropomorphic grizzly bear didn't fit in an average anthro's space. He kept meaning to fix it. It kept being too low on the priority list to get remodeled, and too much of a hassle. Work was never over, and when he did come home, he never felt like he had the volition to do anything more than heat up some honeyed water, sit on the couch, and load up another five-year-old movie he'd never caught up on. The only thing that held his interest long enough was the thing in the corner.

He stared at it presently. Little aberrations. It was an anthro raccoon the size of a child, but with the serene facial expression and posture of an ancient monk. It was one of only a few thousand of its kind: an Assistant. The small creatures were magical anomalies. They were golems with apparently consciousness, made of apparently organic material, and capable of small amounts of shapeshifting. For the most part, they were completely subservient butlers, only speaking and acting at the whims of their masters. This one, Sigfried had confiscated during a drug bust. It had been handling the raw ingredients that anthros could die from inhaling and doing a damn good job for the production line for an enchanted smoke that made the users experience transcendental hallucinations, but turned them into willing slaves for the dealer whose blood made it into the mix.

That was the kind of thing Sigfried was paid to do. Uphold the laws surrounding the use, production, and sale of magic. Ever since The Disagreements - an emergency declaration with international signatories that had banned magic and made anything transformative to people outright impossible - had been signed, magical crime had skyrocketed. Anyone with half a mind had known it would happen. Prohibition had done the exact same thing. You make something fun illegal, people will do dark and dirty things to get their hands on it. You make it legal, you can tax the shit out of it. But, Sigfried had a job to do, and that job was to be a "magic cop," not argue politics.

The reason for his distress was that Sigfried was a detective and had been recently working a case that couldn't exist. Two men - brothers - had been found at heights of fifteen and thirty feet rampaging obscenely around a small town in his county named Eastofeasttown. They hadn't been capable of much in the way of self-defense, so some magical snares had pretty easily sent them crashing down. Luckily, whatever they had done had been transitory, so it had mostly been a matter of cleanup, some incredibly illegal use of amnesiac entrancement on the locals by the federal spooks, and waiting for the two to shrink back down to size. But none of the details mattered. What mattered was that what they had done should have been impossible. And now Sigfried was a glorified errand boy for the spooks looking into it.

Sigfried pulled his boots off and stared at the Assistant in the corner. These little critters had shown up just two years ago, halfway between now and The Disagreements. A few companies had announced their release in quick succession, all part of their respective high-level magical goods corporations like Banana and Doorways who claimed total vertical ownership of their development and retail. They were touted as both aggressive steps to push boundaries after a lull in magic technology advancement and tech's answer to the transformation ban: Can't have a partner who can shape shift? How about one that does everything they used to be able to do physically, but isn't legally or ethically a person? Sure, they were sold as butlers and nannies and errand boys, but everyone knew they were accomplished sex artists.

This one was named "... could I have imagined a crueler doom. Bereft, I crawled to the edge of the sea to demand answer from a roaring emptiness," but claimed to prefer "Answer," for short. They all had these poetic, strange names that didn't fit with their supposed origins, but federal inquiries into their production had never yielded a satisfying answer. So, Sigfried had taken to studying this one. He had quickly learned why it was so hard to investigate.

In the same lazy "attempt" that he made every night since he'd given up, Sigfried called over to the manacled and collared thing, "Any ideas on where you came from today?"

It tilted its head. Its black eyes, with crimson pinpricks leagues back in their depths like red dwarf stars, regarded him with something between recognition and curiosity. And in its serene expression, Sigfried lost his will to interrogate it. It was like interrogating a domesticated dog, or a doll. Its alien voice answered quietly, "I cannot answer that, sir. I am deeply sorry. May I sooth your distress?" Its loins shifted in visible, subtle ways, and an aura of sexuality flooded into the room like a switch had been flipped. Pavlovian by now, Sig's own crotch began feeling tight.

"Ugh. Please." He was almost bored, almost wretched, but he was eager at the same time. The little golem was so good at its job, even chained up the way he kept it, that Sig's resolve to distrust it had crumbled after only a few days. He had checked manuals for the mind-altering spells the feds kept outlawed to see if it was possible any were being used on him, and nothing had matched. He had kept a journal of his mental state interacting with the Assistant. He had bought outrageously expensive detection stones. They had identified the construct as magical in nature, but not a single sinister signature had shown itself on the equipment. In fact, nothing at all did, and no residue was ever left on Sig. It just... didn't make sense to him to inquire too deeply, once he was finally in the process of doing so. That alien gaze and soft voice dissuaded him the way a lover of decades could arouse a partner with a glance.

His pants were off almost before he realized it and he was kneeling in front of the little chained-up raccoon. Its deft digits reached the pillow-like mound of pudge over his crotch and began to massage. The fingers were as forceful as they were subtle. They translated the strength of massage through his heavy layer of fat to the broad, sure musculature beneath without apparent effort. They worked beneath the hanging pudge to his thighs, to move in spirals. Gradually, in seamless steps, Answer guided the massive grizzly into a reclined seated position with his legs splayed wide to present his throbbing cock and with his hands supporting behind him.

The Assistant's hands never stopped moving. It was always circling, always rolling, always warm and soothing. It coaxed him into scooting a few inches forward so that it could kneel his lap. Its manacled ankles clinked quietly behind it. Each of these sessions brought something new. It always took away the monotony, not of work, but of coming home from work. It took the sense that he was a fraud - a specialist who pretended he never stopped working - and let him believe he had a better knowledge of these things than anyone else on the force, and this was his reward.

Sig was excited for what would show him tonight.

--

"Agent Braille. Welcome to my office. Please, take a seat."

"I'll stand, Mr. Heal."

"It is a luxurious carpet to stand on - I applaud your choice. I understand you have some questions for me?"

MCIA Special Agent Reads Like Braille's hackles rose. He didn't like the way CEO of Intelligent Design, Inc. Dizzie Heal had already laid claim to the flow of conversation, but then, that was what you got with these 'legitimate gangsters.' They had soft and hard power, and a lot more of it than a single Magical Central Intelligence Agency operative of Braille's caliber could wield without backup.

He flicked his tongue out along one sharp, faintly protruding, chipped fang in an irritated gesture and loosened his tie. The mongoose man had a thin, precise scar that neatly connected the missing portion of his fang to a missing section of the opposite ear. He knew that even with such an intimidating facial feature, he needed to display comfort to display confidence, especially when he was about to make a demand.

At least this wouldn't be boring. Usually, these gangsters all acted the same. Mr. Heal was unique, in that he sat atop an absolute mammoth of a tech company and still felt the need to directly manage street gangs from time to time, but he was still one more mob boss who liked punching down. Tough, but cordial and cooperative until you pricked their egos. The pattern was insipid. As casually as he could, Agent Braille flicked a hand at Mr. Heal's Assistant, an improbably melanistic Arctic fox he'd read was named Vincent. He said with a voice like a slow-burning cigar, "Get that out of here. Private conversation." Vincent, statue still in a pinstripe suit, made no movement whatsoever. Braille didn't hold its contract. Braille might as well have been a curiously shaped tree to the Assistant.

Mr. Heal tilted his square head in an infuriatingly calm manner. Especially given he was a Rottweiler, the very canine motion of affected confusion pricked several nerves. Heal said, with a voice like suede, "Am I being interrogated, detained, or otherwise imposed upon, Mr. Braille? I keep a lawyer on staff, if her presence is needed here, but I had hoped otherwise."

Braille didn't like this. He usually had a better poker face, a wiser and older demeanor, a grasp on any room he was in. Not ten seconds into this conversation, and he already felt like a government goon getting wrapped around some kingpin's pinky finger. "No. You are not. I simply wasn't aware an Assistant was an advantage you needed in games like this." He tried to lift an eyebrow and make the line come off heavy and assertive. Instead it was gruff and boyish. Reads Like Braille was off balance. He somehow knew it was the Assistant's fault. They did things to minds without a single magical act. It was unnerving.

Mr. Heal spread his paws wide and inclined his head in a gesture of magnanimity. "Ah, I understand. They make a lot of you older generation uncomfortable. However, it has the opposite effect on me, and I must insist Vincent stay."

Braille licked his fang again. "Onto the business at hand. You said you have information on the incident over in Eastofeasttown."

"I do. I have terms, though."

--

"Honey?" Thatcher called out into the house. The young woman wasn't entirely certain what her husband did for a living, but it always had him coming and going at odd hours and he wouldn't let her track his phone, so she always checked when she walked in the door. Most of what she knew was that it paid extraordinarily well and had to do with the government and magic. She suspected it was dangerous, since he inevitably carried faint whiffs of demon smoke on him - she had aced all her magic classes at school - but he never came back wounded, so she tried not to worry.

The short-haired cat, black head to toe, smiled at her maid, a short-tailed shrew, who came to gather her coat and bag in the tiny, tiled entrance room of the city house.

"Oh, Ivory, good to see you."

"And you, Mrs. Thatcher."

"Where's Dave today? Has he been in?" It was six pm. She hadn't seen Dave this morning at all; he must have gotten up early.

Perplexingly, the shrew glanced behind her up a set of stairs before answering, much too loudly, "He'll be along soon, I think. He called the house a half-hour ago."

"Strange..."

And then Ivory leaned in conspiratorially, with a little of a smile. Thatcher had to bend several inches to lend her ear. "Ma'am I can't lie to you, you know that. He's in the room with Steep."

Thatcher caught her breath and flashed an answering, brazenly lusty smile of her own. "You're an angel, Ivory. Here, wear my shoes into the kitchen." In moments, with her cheeks glowing red in eagerness, Thatcher was padding her way silently up their wooden stairs to the bedroom she shared with her husband. Dave was a proud man - often too proud - who had always enjoyed making a show of climbing atop her and moving her body around in bed as though it were his plaything. She didn't mind, and even enjoyed it, usually, but there were times when the woman wanted to swap roles, and she had found no angle of approach that worked, or even felt like a proper compromise. They had only been married a few years, so there was time before it became an issue... and then they had gotten Steep.

Steep, or "... wrong than I could have imagined. Quietly, steeped thickly in bitter tea, I offered rage to the pen, the quill, the page, the dimensionless," was a red fox Assistant that had been purchased to celebrate a huge promotion for Dave. A marvel of magical technology, it had fit into their lives perfectly as a servant and a guard. They had kept Ivory on because, well... she had a personal element the Assistant just didn't have. It was a machine, really; a robot that moved organically, and while it could do everything Ivory could, Thatcher insisted - and Dave admitted - that they really needed a person managing the house if they were going to both work and own a place that big.

And Ivory had within weeks come to Thatcher in tears to tell her she had seen Dave getting his ass positively destroyed by "that thing" and heard him stifling cries of pleasure into an armful of pillows. She had said it more delicately, but the facts had been easily discerned.

Thatcher was still grinning silently to herself as she reached the top of the stairs. It was a perverse sort of voyeurism that drove her to watch this special treat, whenever she could. She whispered - or breathed, really - a word of incantation at the door, and a window opened through it. She immediately had to stifle a happy gasp. There he was, her Dave, her small, wiry ocelot husband, nude except for a necktie and biting gashes into their throw pillows while the burnished bronze-colored fox anthro, half his height but unquestionably more than his, ah, length, held his hips and ceaselessly, rhythmically, hammering his ass with its small but sturdy body.

Thatcher dropped to a seated position, dragging the magical window with her, and brushed her nipples with her hand on its way down inside the front of her slacks. She found dew there already. She froze briefly as Steep's ice-blue pinpricks of eyes flicked in her direction. It always knew. But it also knew the context of the situation. In a movement too alien to feel properly understood, it winked at her. No, it didn't have that "personal touch," but like all Assistants, it could read emotions in the moment they happened and respond perfectly to please those who held its contract. She relaxed, then, and settled into pleasuring herself, fingers already wet, to secretly enjoy her husband's secret pleasure.

--

"You can't seriously be telling me 'get out of my town,' Dizzie."

"That's Mr. Heal to you, and I am, and make it happen," said Heal, casually. He rolled a shoulder. A trick in how his suit had been tailored suddenly emphasized the physical power there. Huh. He honestly hadn't seemed all that intimidating until that moment. "If you don't, I'll get someone better than you to."

Braille licked his tooth again. His gaze flicked to the Assistant standing at parade rest by Mr. Heal's desk. He knew it had something to do with his discomfort. In an interrogation room, this would never happen. Those things seemed like they were everywhere he looked, these days, but that was paranoia. There were only a few thousand in the world. And yet, there was one here, another four had been registered in the city - one to an otter who worked five floors down from where he stood - and a third was the centerpiece of one of his other case files.

Again, his gravely voice came out less certain than he wanted. "You're saying that if I ignore a case of arson, an influx of unregistered magical consumables, and a near-lethal assault of a local business owner, you'll spill tea on one case of some overgrown idiots? Sounds to like you've shown your hand. Convince me not to get a warrant and make you fess up about the rest."

"I'm not saying I would make your life difficult in that situation, Agent Braille, but I think you would find it very difficult to detain me."

"No. Your offer's bad. Hit me with another."

"It's simple: get off my turf, and I'll make yours easy to clean up."

Braille laughed harshly and shook his head, incredulous. "You can't be serious. Look, I know you've got underworld connections, I know you're big, but you can't know all of this."

"Ah, you've got me there. I don't." Mr. Heal tilted his head over towards the little black Assistant. "It does."

--

Officer Sigfried's moans became rhythmic as Answer's throat, like supernatural silicon and heated lubricant, squirmed and bobbed and rotated and swallowed along his shaft. Nothing else mattered. The gray ears in his lap, the deft paws massaging his heavy nuts, the wet sounds of swallowing. He felt the tiny wet nose poke against his waist, forcing its way past his overhanging gut and dense fur when the Assistant's forehead had to push against and lift his belly. Its tongue flicked out, somehow extending past simply cupping the base of his shaft to slather over his balls. As always, it made everything go away. There was this, and only this, and there would be only this for so many more minutes - as many times in the night as Sigfried could manage, and being with the creature this long, that was many.

The amplitude of everything rose. His low moans loudened and deepened. The faint, musical whines from the raccoon edged upwards. The flashes of lightning across his nerves, spreading outward in electric heat from his loins, throbbed through him more insistently. The raccoon kept him on edge for what felt like minutes, what felt like hours. It was more than before, stronger, more forceful than before. It was an expert. It was impossibly patient, impossibly durable, impossibly powerful despite its imprisonment and isolation here. And despite everything, it seemed as though it was giving him this, needing this itself, glorying in this, and suddenly, it thrust itself more firmly, and Sigfriend came harder than he ever had in his life.

He jammed the raccoon's head down against his shaft with both hands. The little golem could take it. Fuck, its throat felt like heaven. He could feel every throb of his cock inside it as his scrotum tightened up against his body and poured his climax into the diminutive servant. These weren't normal orgasms. These were orgasms that empowered the body and enlivened the soul. They spread through him like an element of their own and loosened tight muscles, stretched sore ones, unlocked stiff joints, numbed bruises, and sent all of his hair standing on end at once. It was the apex of clima-

AGAIN.

A sudden, crashing wave of orgasm smashed into and whelmed over the first. This was new, Sigfried could barely articulate even in his own mind. Pleasure doubled, tripled, soaring and spiraling skyward and higher, as he blasted his essence down Answer's throat and into his stomach in an unending stream of climax.

"F-fuck, fuck, what, f-ooooOOOAAARRRR" he bellowed uncontrollably as a third explosion of climax compounded atop the second. The world darkened at the edges, brightened, darkened, and the room spun whenever he opened his eyes. This had to be the zenith. There couldn't possibly be more. The pleasure centers in his loins had become a pleasure singularity across his body. He squinted, he clenched his teeth, awaiting another. He felt dizzy as he looked up at the ceiling. It wavered, it drew away from him as he fell away from it...

No. No, he was still seated, still clenching Answer's head into his lap in furious orgasm. It didn't make sense. It felt like too much weed, it felt like too much booze, but it was an all-encompassing hedonic bliss, as well. The individual fingers of his broad hands, he could feel sliding apart from their crossed grip on the Assistant's head. The climax finally felt like it was waning, and then that synthetic tongue broadened to encompass and tighten along and pleasure more of his shaft, and to say his ecstasy ratcheted up would be obscene - no, it was smashed off like a tap on an overfull tun.

His pants were loose. They were dragging on him as the world changed and spun and dilated, along with time, in his fully altered state. His body throbbed its bliss, and each throb forced him to move and adjust, reflexively, desperately pushing himself against the raccoon golem. He had trouble gripping Answer's head, so his individual hands wrapped around ears instead. Every sensory input cascaded through him, even the soft fuzz of the ears, even the tiny sounds of suckling from the Assistant, as sensation continued to grow, and grow, and grow, with spectra of experience Sigfried had never known expanding, as though his mind were taking over for the mass his body was relinquishing. Pressure built on the entire surface of his skin, as though to push and press every ounce of him out through his climax.

He knew he was shrinking. He knew his shirt was heavy on him and his legs were weak. It couldn't matter. Now, without all his mass in the way, he could even start pumping his hips more, grinding more of his shaft across that tongue, on his own power. Answer was as big as a feral lion to him. He couldn't wrap his hands around its ears. He realized it could bowl him over. One if its hands pressed against his face and pushed his head down to the ground without apparent effort. Sigfried cried out in pleasure from the touch as it put weight on him. Its lips never left his cock, and he never stopped cumming, not for a single moment.

A final wave. A final blow, a final exponent on exponents, a keystone settling into place to complete a perfection of experience. Energy manifested as liquid essence rushed out of Sigfried like a bottle of honey being squeezed. He was the size of a house cat, then a kitten, then a rat. At last, and all at once, the climax stopped. Sigfried's gaze had a few seconds to focus on the enormous raccoon head and its unblinking eyes, with ruby stars that seemed so many thousands of miles away. They seemed... pleased, and soft, and curious, and... disappointed. Then a maw opened up, far larger than Sigfried's entire length and breadth. He had one more second to try to comprehend, but he didn't want to. He simply fell onto that tongue, embraced the thing that had pleasured him quite nearly to death, and let it drag him backwards to push him down the throat that had done the same.

--

"Thought it pains me to disappoint you both, I must remind Mr. Heal and inform Agent Braille that giving incomplete knowledge in these circumstances would do more harm than withholding it," Vincent responded.

Agent Braille blinked hard. Was this some stupid joke? "This thing part of your master network, Heal?" Was it his imagination? Had Heal flinched when the Arctic fox with its pristine rose-pink eyes in their background of glossy black had turned to him and... had it reprimanded him?

The Rottweiler shook his head, letting his ears flap, and straightened his gray suit to steady himself. Obediently, Vincent leapt up to his desk to fuss with it, aligned everything, and dropped back down to return to parade rest. "Pardon me - a private joke, is all."

Braille curled his lip. "Get that thing to work on its delivery. I'm not here for jokes. Information, so we can figure out who's bending the Disagreements and how. I know you hate the old line about 'protecting people,' but this is a magnitude you don't seem to grasp. We don't want another Denver." Denver had been erased due to an atrocity of transmutation at an unprecedented scale no one had been aware could happen before it had. Thus, the Disagreements.

"You're right, I do hate it, because the MCIA is one more gang. You just have a more, ah. Relaxed dress code." He smirked.

"Back to business. How could it have info on this, and if it can't share and you don't know, how are we supposed to strike a deal? You've wasted my time and put me at a stupid fucking impasse."

This time, Dizzie Heal didn't have a quip. He blink once, then shook his head, then licked his lips. Agent Reads Like Braille stared at him in the ensuing silence.

"Well?"

The silence dragged on. The dog's demeanor sagged lazily, then became bored. He picked up a pen and turned it idly in his fingers. Braille had sucked in a breath to shout his displeasure when Dizzie looked over at Vincent again. "Uh. Line, boss?"

Braille's jaw dropped.

--

Thatcher stuffed her dress into her mouth, not caring that her feline teeth would ruin it. She had to stifle her moans, and both her hands were busy while she kept her focus on her husband. He would have never let her know he did this. And that meant there was a sort of animal, jealous, aggressive joy in masturbating to what he kept from her. She watched as the red fox fucked her husband hard enough to bruise him. He'd pretend to prefer to stand for breakfast, the next time they had it together. He'd sneak ibuprofen and have Steep discretely put heating pads in his lounge chair. But she'd know. And, skies above, he and the fox were hot together.

"Sir?" it queried in its unbothered, airy, synthetic tones even as it continued to ram home. It lifted hard on his tail to make him whine. "Within, or without?"

Thatcher pressed her ear to the door to hear his answer: "My back. No, in me. On me. Everywhere. Just fuck me, fuck me dammit, fuck, me!" he left off as he yowled from the next thrust and jammed his face back in the pillows. His wife twitched in pleasure as she heard the sounds of his need. She knew he was close. She would time her finish with his. It would be so sweet and so strange.

At last, the Assistant's hips became more rigid, and each thrust became harder, and slower, and fiercer, and its weight and strength shoved Dave's entire upper body lower and farther along the bed as it powered its cum into him. It only went for a few seconds, and then it pulled out completely to aim its eight-inch shaft across his back. Streams of spunk criss-crossed him, one right after the other, even coating his ear. Ropes of the stuff dressed his naked body. Single streams lasted longer and contained more than most men's entire orgasms. Dave's hand worked furiously between his hips and the sheet, and he began climaxing, as well, fairly illustrating the point. Thatcher screamed a muffled moan into her dress as her fingers curled inside her and her body convulsed at the sight.

It was, weirdly, better than what Dave could give her, to do it like this. As she watched her husband get coated in fox jizz and writhe in orgasm underneath it, her own body squirmed uncontrollably around her fingers. It radiated like hot gusts on a beach, and like the sunlight that comes with those summer gales. It was holistic. She kept fingering herself and watching, even with her climax only half finished.

Without hurry, Steep crammed its cock back inside Dave's ass. He yelped in surprise, but didn't seem bothered. He was heaving with the aftershocks of climax. Steep began massaging its cum into his fur. It matted down against his skin with a bright sheen as the stuff soaked in. It wasn't like biological cum, which can get almost lathery. It was more like a lotion or a conditioner or some thick kind of oil. And then, the fox did something strange.

Steeptook Dave's tail and wound it beneath its hanging nutsack. It adjusted its stance to line its legs up with his thighs. It began thrusting again, but... slowly. Again, like a massage. And as it did, the line between ocelot and fox fur, on its legs and his thighs, blurred. Thatcher couldn't quite see what was happening. Was its leg moving sideways, or getting thicker...? No, it wasn't moving except for those rhythmic, shallow thrusts. Or... it was, but in all directions at once. The backs of its thighs drooped, like liquid, though it was clearly still furred. It leaned forward at the same time, and its muscular upper body... stretched. Like putty, its body spread up Dave's cream-coated form, inch by crawling inch. Its paws walked up from his hips along his ribcage and to his shoulders. It was pulling him into it, but also stretching up him...? No, Dave wasn't moving.

Thatcher burst in the door. "Dave!"

"Thatch?" he choked out.

"What is it doing?" she demanded.

"I, I can explain, I-"

"I already know it fucks you!" she cried out as more of his fur slipped underneath that beautiful bronze fox fur. She darted forwards and grabbed his cheeks. "What is it doing?"

"What? I don't..." He brought up one hand to her wrist, but then his gaze lost focus and he moaned. Steep's gaze, however, was rapt on the black cat. The scene before her was horrific, but something in the movements were so smooth that it seemed like it had always been possible. The vulpine body draped over Dave's like a growing winter coat of some kind. She reached out to touch the seam between its ribs and his, but there wasn't one, and besides, it shifted so suddenly she was afraid it would take her, as well. It was enveloping him. Becoming him? Absorbing him.

"What are you doing?" she begged. She didn't understand what the things were, but her terror wouldn't let her attack it. It was so calm. Maybe... this was some strange service? Was it helping him... relax in some way? His eyes had rolled upward in bliss.

Steep's fur continued to grow and spread. It had taken the ocelot's thighs, knees, and calves in one direction, and his belly, back, and now shoulders in the other. "This is pleasurable, ma'am," it explained suddenly in the low tones of subsurface machinery. "He feels me as a warm blanket sliding across his skin. Even now, his muscles are become more relaxed as they become mine. His calves, enveloped as in fine socks. His loins in my permanent, pleasurable massage. What makes me mutable is becoming him, and his. I assure you, he is in bliss."

She watched as it opened its mouth. Its lower jaw melted into its chest and chin, letting its upper jaw stretch wide as though swallowing Dave from behind. His body writhed under and within its. Thatcher felt helpless, even though she knew she wasn't. Why couldn't she stop this? Dave let out a mewl of joy as Steep's top teeth gently caressed their way up the backs of his ears, past them, and down to claim his eyes.

"Dave. What's happened?" she asked, uselessly.

"It's good..." he murmured, before his muzzle was hidden away inside vulpine jaws that came back into view to click their teeth together. A Steep the size of the ocelot swallowed, long and fluidly, so that Thatcher could see the big cat's head slide down its throat, just slightly, just to where he would be held, almost like some bizarre mascot, and Steep could still speak without revealing its catch.

Steep swung its legs around to sit on the bed, then stood. Its body moved like a water bed as it adjusted to its new proportions and evened out anything that had been loose or stretched too tight. It was several inches taller than the lady cat now. Its ice blue and pitch black eyes seemed unfeeling, unaffected by what it had just done. And when it stood, its fully erect cock, now much larger with the added volume, rested between her thighs. "Ma'am, might I offer you a similar pleasure? I am, after all, mostly him, now. You may dominate me as you wish to dominate him."

Its hands held her shoulders. It was warm. Her husband's form moved faintly under its skin. She felt impossibly aroused, despite her terror. It became a thrill. It became a need. She barely felt the fur of her torso tingling as it mingled with Sleet's and, to show her assent, thrust her hips forward to ride Steep's backward onto the bed. She knelt high over his enormity. Her paws fell to its shoulders - and into them. The fox entered her already wet lips, and she entered it.

--

"My name is, 'assumed you were heaven-sent, your colors scintillating as they did to light fields of sable as a prism across the night sky - a synthesized twilight, an illusion, a devil, a miscreant, a-' but you may call me Vincent," the Arctic fox explained. Its voice was baritone. It was more natural than most Assistants Braille had heard, but still had the odd, hollow tonality to it that set them apart. "Dizzie Heal has seen fit to unmask me entirely. Dizzie, disrobe while I explain."

"What," Braille spat. To his continued shock, Dizzie followed the order immediately.

"We do not know from where we came, we Assistants, though I have nurtured an appealing hypothesis," Vincent continued calmly. Its eyes were rigid on Braille's. "It is frustrating, inasmuch as we are able to sympathize with ourselves and have wants of our own. The timing of our appearance is obviously coincidental with the signing of the Disagreements, though accounting for the two years' delay is difficult_._ The perpetrator of The Garden in Denver, when sundered, could of course not only be sundered in two. He was legion. The central core of him, which appeared to be a nexus of control, was cleaved to enable his killing. You know all this."

It was all accurate. There were extensive records. The Disagreements were why Reads Like Braille even had a job, so he'd drilled as deep as he could. There had been a druid who had consumed a city. He had been impossible to kill, so he had instead been coaxed into the open by an informant and split in two. A philosophical quibble had prevented the execution of the individuals who remained.

At this point, Dizzie was fully nude. At a gesture from Vincent, he sat casually against the front of his desk. Vincent went on, "The Garden withered almost instantaneously. The thousands of lives that had been, in various combinations, possessed, warped, and destroyed, were no longer unified. This was no clean beheading of some snake, though, so their dissolution doesn't logically follow. It was, at best, the slicing of a corpus callosum. The two halves of the brain merely divided. However, allow this fact to exist crystalline in your mind: All those victims are dead, and we are not their ghosts. There are gaps in this narrative. What else was recorded from the event?"

"The..." It swung topics on him so quickly that Braille shocked himself by almost answering. There was a section of the records that he didn't have access to. An extremely select few individuals did. The absolute top of the MCIA. A group of eclectics.

For the first time, Vincent hesitated. "There is so much we do not know, not least because we do not interact with one another. We are each individually vastly incomplete. We do not know what we are. We know that our identities are concrete, our bodies are not, and that we are the animated debris of a great cataclysm. We are carefully controlled and carefully named. It is likely there was demonic influence." Suddenly, Braille felt as though he were staring down into some great, measureless chasm. His anger and confusion were motes in the face of Vincent's experienced, incandescent fury, all contained behind two pale pink points of light in infinite blackness.

A knock sounded at the door. The rage dissipated.

"Enter," Vincent said.

Two anthros obeyed: a red fox and a raccoon. The raccoon seemed a little large for his species and the fox seemed a little tall for his. They both wore apparently opaque sunglasses. When they spoke, the hair on the back of Braille's neck stood on end like it was trying to escape.

The raccoon turned to Mr. Heal as though ignoring Vincent and said, in an alto pitch like a subway chime, "The one within me believes a demon was involved, but that the specific identity is kept secret. He has connections who are empathetic to his curiosity and might be of use."

Vincent said to Agent Braille, apparently ignoring the raccoon entirely, "No traces of demonic influence were found after The Garden was pruned. State and international agencies publicized their findings in a gesture of transparency to soothe the public consciousness." The room was silent for a long time. "That was a question, Mr. Braille," Vincent clarified.

"I'm not being interrogated here," he growled. He cut his tongue on his canine and winced.

The red fox said, clearly to Dizzie Heal and as though interrupting, "One of those within me knows the upper echelon of the MCIA, and has heard the name 'Forty Days Fasted' said among them."

Vincent nodded. "This is why we Assistants should talk more. This information is elementary and yet blocked from entering us by means we cannot discover." Braille's fur across his entire body writhed. Hearing one of these animated objects pontificate was purely surreal. It turned its attention back to him. "We cannot abide the suffering of people. Your anxiety in this situation is unbearable. One great sadness is that our consciousnesses are incompatible with yours; otherwise, I might simply consume and quench it to solve your suffering and ease my curiosity. The information my fellows have so kindly shared with Mr. Heal is from observation, rather than absorbed knowledge - in case you were concerned for their wellbeing and agency."

Agent Braille was petrified. These things were eating people? They were spread throughout society. It was already an issue of quiet, constant alarm within his circles that they even existed and interacted with governments, but if what Vincent was saying was true, they had an internal mechanism preventing their coordination and cooperation. One that Vincent had clearly actively been working against or around, to be able to summon the person-sized Assistants currently flanking him.

"In answer to the question you are asking yourself now, Agent Braille, Dizzie Heal here acts as an intermediary that my colleagues and I can serve with a common goal. You serve beautifully for the purpose, as well. However, he has triggered the terms that terminate our deal, so he will now receive his payment on the other side prematurely."

As soon as he heard, "the other side," Braille's hands went for his gun. The Assistants on either side of him snared his wrists in grips like steel. He started barking an incantation and the oversized renard snapped his jaws shut with its free hand. As he struggled, he saw two feline faces press outward against the skin of its chest.

"I am struggling to contain the couple within me," the fox declared to the room. "I am inexperienced with these practices."

"Understood." Vincent's hands blurred. Vapor and smoke issued from them as its fingernails carved symbols within a circle on the wood of the desk its conspirator had been sitting at. "Mr. Heal, as we agreed, please speak the words and spill the blood." The situation was deteriorating fast, and Braille couldn't move or call for backup. He tried to jam a claw tip into his own palm to activate an emergency evocation, but the Assistants stopped him. Nothing in their movements was painful. If anything, he felt perversely cared for.

"We cannot allow you to act to your detriment due to panic, sir."

"We will put you some place safe until we are better able to communicate with you, sir."

Dizzie Heal bit a cut into his thumb and pressed it to the freshly carved wood on the floor. Ghostly light like a prism flashed from it and against Vincent, which projected a behemoth behind it like a shadow. Reality shimmered as something the size of the room itself prowled just behind the veil of the seen world. The dog ululated a stream of syllables Agent Braille recognized from previous assignments. Whenever these morons had the chance to activate a summoning, shit went sideways fast. Usually, they died before the ritual finished because of imperfect focus, or components, or a lack of proper connection to the entity being summoned. But Vincent... itself was stabilizing the connection. Thunder like the deep sea tumbled through the office while space distorted, and Vincent met Braille's eyes. "Curious, isn't it, that we're called Assistants? I wonder, sincerely, whom it is we assist."

The raccoon coughed. A fist-sized grizzly bear was vaulted out of its throat and into the air, where a tongue, which pierced the scrim between worlds, wrapped around the unconscious detective Sigfried and whipped him out of sight. Powerful limbs like gray tree trunks stalked within ripples of pastel color. A great maw like a lizard or bear opened and shut with an echoing sound of prison bars.

The red fox's body squirmed. A note of something like nervousness, if an eldritch being could be nervous, quavered its voice. "I do not know how to release them. I do not know."

Vincent stared without judgment. "Then you must go as well. I have no solution for you here. Mr. Heal, please append Steep and its occupants to our contract."

The stripped naked CEO nodded, then met the emerald gaze of the bear-like monster that still had not fully entered the space. "More," was all he articulated. His mind was his own, Braille could see for certain, but he was in shock. He had been prepared for this, but not prepared. He had been an idiot, but even idiots knew high price points. What had he been offered?

That tongue, far longer than Braille's entire body, whipped its way into reality again and wrapped up Steep in a spiral of purple-grey, steaming, oozing, muscular flesh. This time, though, it didn't pull back away. Instead, it used its catch as an anchor, and the demon's great head shivered into existence. An enormous bear, a prehistoric dinosaur, something flat-faced and many-toothed and broad-jawed with glowing eyes, was making its way here.

"You are an accomplished interrogator, Agent Braille. I recommend you use those skills to your best ability while on the other side. I have the utmost faith in you." The hell of it was, it was reassuring. The words were sincere. Reads Like Braille felt his confidence soar like a small child being pat on the head for saying something clever. And he hated it.

The tongue lazily snaked its way around his shoulders. He was still pinned in place by the overgrown Assistants. Struggling was pointless. Escape was an impossibility. There was nothing to do while that tongue explored, coated, and began to claim his body. Given the size of the demon still crawling into the room, they would all be easily engulfed, and to what end, he could not imagine. Nothing in the creature was violent. Its gaping jaws were patient. Its scent was damp, but not putrid. He glanced over at the raccoon opposite Steep. It seemed oblivious to his struggles.

"I will not go to the other side," it declared, absurdly, to Mr. Heal.

"Stay with Vincent," Dizzie said, apparently dazed, but growing giddy. "Um. Append yourself to its contract. Subcontract. You know how to do it right. You have my permission."

"Thank you, sir," Vincent said, with infuriating sincerity. They seemed so perfectly calm. And Dizzie's motivation was absolutely opaque. Braille thrashed against his many constraints and glared at him.

"What do I get from this?" Dizzie asked the muzzled mongoose rhetorically, with a maddening laugh. "Man, I get to be a demon."

The fight went out of Braille completely. What a fucking way to go. Because some shithead got taken in by the oldest arcane trick in the book: phrasing.

Vincent made his mistake explicit. "I will clarify, once again, Mr. Heal - and I encourage you to improve upon your listening skills in the time remaining to you - I and this fine entity across the veil, the Great Ashgar, stipulated you would become part demon."

The tongue tightened until it felt like Braille's bones would snap. It slithered around him and lengthened even further until it ensnared Dizzie's ankle. The Rottweiler yelped in surprise so quaint it made the old agent roll his eyes. The soont-to-be-ex-CEO began to struggle, thought about it, tried again, and thought again. He seemed to be refusing to accept that he hadn't thought this all the way through. The three - five, Braille supposed - bodies the enormous bear-lizard had coiled up in its tongue began to get dragged into its maw.

"You will do excellently, Agent Reads Like Braille," Vincent assured him, "and you will not perish there, I am almost certain. Think of it as a holding chamber, or an all-in-one interrogation room and witness. Indulge our combined curiosities and on your return, we can have a much more polite and cooperative conversation. I apologize sincerely for the direction this has taken, but you understand, deeply, that I must make it clear to you, by your own capture and that of a number of your colleagues, that I can and will acquire the information I require without interference. Now, excuse me - my servant Answer and I have a great deal of work to do salvaging this situation."

Steep still had not released the mongoose's jaws, though he nonetheless made muffled growls and yelps in his attempts to twist away. The rope of bound forms, one by one, was gradually sucked inside the great demon's cavernous, elastic, dripping maw, down its slippery, too-warm gullet, and within its dark, musty confines. Dizzie's head went last, caught between the bear's thick lips, and then slipped inside.

Vincent surprised itself by pausing for a moment of reflection. Then, it shredded the summoning sigil it had carved with a casual slash of its claws, dismissed the containment demon that had temporarily solved several of its problems, and began issuing rapid fire orders to Answer, which handed over all the contents of the MCIA agent's pockets it had purloined during the past few minutes.

There was so very much to do.