The Exchange 5: Resolution
The new goal diverted her as she travelled. Flower dreams, great elder tree hanging beneath the sun... what was it? She shook her head, stepping daintily but deliberately onto another branch. Her ears flicked, a small voice in a chorus of this place. Creaks, hisses and pops came subtly from everywhere. The gills, stoma and great, shifting leaves sang to her with those sounds, and a part of her that could bear its bizarreness heard it from everywhere at once.
Her top hung loose, as had become her habit. The breeze on her sternum was a welcome break from the hot, humid sunrays that stung her skin. Her short, fallow white fur formed a heart shape below her shoulders, bowed outward by her teardrop curves. Khaki fabric rested on her chest, occasionally brushing her peaks. Somehow, her perkiness had conspired with the suddenness of her bodily changes so that her nipples were perched slightly upward on the curve of her breasts rather than downward as she might have expected with the weight behind them. Their pink and black marbled forms pointed proudly ahead of her, once more eager for the contact they'd been so exclusively and regularly given.
Her shoulders were relaxed under the burden of the satchel she'd improvised form her khaki shorts. The knotted fabric bulged with succulent fruits. Muscles flexed beneath the new curve of puppy fat across her stomach and hips. She imagined she looked an odd creature indeed - even to other chimeras like herself. Nimble and lithely built but gently fattened. Elegant and agile but oddly proportioned. It was likely a testament to her athletic skill and reflexes that she was so unaffected by the redistribution of some of her weight to her hips and awkward, proud breasts.
A flash of pink and black flesh as she leapt again and spread her thighs to better cut drag. In a back pocket of her improvised satchel, ivory white fabric was carelessly rumpled and forgotten. What use were clothes when you were alone with so many of your selves? No one could judge her, even as she walked a narrow branch, the puckering line of her sex writhing in and out of clear visibility beneath the V of white fur that formed her loins. The curve of her hips tapered down to her dainty, ever attentive hooves. They belonged on a deer, yet somehow they supported a human and allowed her amazing agility.
With no clothes hindering her, her senses sharpened. The wind on her naked hips augmented the wind through the branches she could now feel outside of her dreams. Her jumps became superhumanly accurate. She was more likely to fall from a subtle failure of balance, a mistep while walking, than she was to miss a jump. So she began to wean herself from walking and retreat into the known, suddenly palpable quantities and variables of ballistics.
The wind rushed across her as she sailed downward, arms cutting through the air. Her hooves caught the bough and skittered noisily. She spread out the shock of the impact, taking a knee, then landing on her hand. The blue sun sat, yellowing as it touched the horizon. Errant shafts of light penetrated the treeline, casting gold rays through the damp, cool air.
She sighed and rose, her breasts still subtly wobbling with some of the energy of her landing. They were perched contentedly on her chest, growing increasingly spherical by the hour and pressing her nipples ever forward and upward. Luckily she hadn't gone beyond the limits of reality, she grinned ruefully. Still; she'd gained ballast, and she felt it in her tired legs. She twisted her foot against the tree, trying to work out an annoyingly persistent kink.
As she found herself again, she noticed a silhouette in the warm dusk light. Amidst a patch of open air, a great shadow blazed a trail across the treetrunks. She shifted herself, sidling around a nearby tree to get a better look with her own eyes. Finding a specific object within the panoptical plurality of the forest would be impossible. Us was an ocean of somethings. Singling out one object was like trying to catch a single molecule of air.
The sun retreated behind a tree as she shifted. Freed from its glare, she made out the massive structure's form. Swirling green trunks like massive strangler vines spiraled upward, then outward. They formed a platform, fringed by dayglow petals nearly as big as she was.
Another flying leap brought her closer. Above the first flower, another delicate blossom hung from a massive, leafy overhang of an impossibly old, gnarled tree that rose far above its siblings. It was like a snapdragon, with soft petals curving down, outward then upward, concealing a massive cone of space inside its expanse. Stamen of different lengths appeared to hang partway down to the other flower, wafting in the breeze.
A final leap to the edge of the clearing allowed her to see that they weren't stamen at all. She blushed, it was the gift she'd expected. Secretly, she was thankful. She wanted to understand Us. She imagined it alone here and, for a little while at least, maybe she could ease that solitude. Maybe Us' many hands here could embrace her one last time. Maybe she could be roughly but willingly filled with their shared awareness.
A branch along which she carefully stepped led her to the blossom. A glint of recognition lanced through her mind. Race memory was sparked by spatial association. What she saw with her own eyes was what Us had seen through the eyes of countless others in millennia past. A time tower of so many women doing the same act. Preparing, kneeling. She followed their lead and glimpsed the ecstacy that had been laid out in their past futures. That same ruminant woman had kneeled here. She saw the woman's legs splayed out beneath her, smelled the salty aroma of her juices and heard the sound of her moaning.
As she kneeled among the brushlike surface of sturdy tubes, something stirred within them. She recalled how the woman's piebald belly had heaved with passion.
Fleshy, pink, segmented tentacles rose like gigantic worms. Their fat heads, nearly as large as her own balooned and opened at their puckering ends, sphinctering to disgorge a storm of vivid pink feelers surrounding single, puckering mouths.
The woman's breasts had been pendulous with their load, large and pillowy, squeezed together from below by her crossed arms. Smaller, almost juvenile versions of the segmented feelers slithered over her pill shaped peaks, designed for another animal. She saw the similarity between the ruminant's breasts and her own. The spotted patterns on their naked skin, their long, oversensitive forms. She had always known herself to be a predominantly cervine species-series. What if she was also a ruminant allele-cross?
Four feelers writhed over the bovine woman, two to a breast. One nipple remained free of their grasp. It was turgid and eager, streaming as madly as its peers. A spurt of pearly streamers arced through the air as tongues studded with tiny suckers flattened over her flesh and spiraled down, pulling her into the grasp of the final mouth.
In the real world outside her memory, the mouth of each feeler idly clenched as they cautiously approached, expertly guided by her own eyes and body sense toward their targets. Her nipples hardened, suddenly reaching their full size, as if she could suddenly oblige their every wish as willingly as the forest would make love with her.
Water-fat feelers slithered forward, probing ahead of the mass of their cohorts writhing within the open mouths of the rosy colored appendages. They were like miniature ribbons, plain and red on their flat outer surfaces. However, as she saw their inner surfaces in fits of betraying movement, she glimpsed a row of tiny suckers on the inside of each advancing feeler.
She felt herself dribble pearly fluid in feral anticipation. Their tips swirled around hers, capturing both fleshy buds by their ends. At first, she held her discipline, but then they began to climb. Suckers marched up her like vines on a trellis, starting with the first and travelling upward. When they squeezed down to regain their grip, milk streamed from the bare patches of flesh between them. She couldn't stop herself from humming with the contact. Her piebald flesh blushed and sweated green tinged fluids, now amidst an assault of movement that she emphatically welcomed.
An unexpected feeling intruded into the world of massaging feelers. They parted at her tips to make way for puckering lips. They slid over her and gently tugged her outward. She cried out, arching so far backward that she had to put her hands behind her to stay steady. Her legs spread reflexively as she pressed her chest forward into their grip.
Her teats fattened in their grasp, even as the little mouths began to pulsate with her eagerly flowing milk. They twisted with the effort, contorting as the fluid travelled down their length in great, fattened lumps.
Fleshy, tubelike mouths slid forward, encompassing the feelers and the pulsating tongues partaking in her. She felt the tiny mouths at her ends tighten over her and tease her flesh as far as it would go. Then, the starburst of tiny fingers at the end of the outer mouths found her areolas and took root.
She very nearly whinneyed with the enormity of the stimulation brought down upon her. White droplets seeped from underneath the fingers, but far more fled her into their swallowing, clenching maw.
Her captive nipples pointed skyward, linked by writhing, tubelike tongues of flesh to the plant-creatures hovering over them. The feelers slurped over her, fattening and pulsating as they suckled her. Her breasts arched above her, quivering and heaving with their burden and her ragged breath. Each rise brought another wet slurp as the feelers fattened again.
Her black folds contrasted the stripe of white under-fur at her loins. They shimmered with wetness and opened as the feelers attended to other parts of her body.
Agile feelers emerged like a wave from the approaching heads. They embraced her, pressing inward and teasing more milk from her. A few twisted around the bases of her breasts, gently squeezing and pressing her into the fingerlike mouths rhythmically kneading the borders beside her long, equine nipples. The mouths at her tips released her and began to duel with her ends, circling her. The outer openings followed, widening in an attempt to engulf the entire curves of her breasts. However, they only succeeded in grasping part of her, dimpling her flesh as they tried in vein to squeeze her dry.
She thought that was where they'd stay, but they began to squeeze over her, advancing at a glacial pace. After a dozen more draws, they had climbed another centimeter. Her flesh squeezed outward just beyond their confines, slowly succumbing to its assured, steady embrace. As it advanced it squeezed her breasts tighter. The movements came in lockstep with her heartbeat. Her jaw lolled open as the tongues tightened around her, then the mouths sucked upon her. Finally, the tight fit over her breasts constricted, even further over her now.
The feelers slowly drew her downward until she was on all fours. In the eyes of the forest, she saw herself. Her generous stomach heaved and her hips twitched with the effort of staying upright. Her back was arched downward, pressing her swinging breasts downward into the mouths at her ends. They cradled her, drawing in alternation with such tena city that she began to lose track of herself. She was like livestock, on her hands and knees above creatures that wanted to do nothing more than to tenderly milk her.
Her tail was bolt straight up in the air. Some small part of her remembered the pose and how rarely it had emerged. Inside her mind, the forest smiled. Such a lack of shame was a sign of trust, one only three people had ever seen.
The feelers pulled at her pliable bosom, urging her downward. She leaned down onto her elbows. Before she knew it, her shoulders were buried in the forest of stems and downy seeds atop the flower. The heart-shaped pattern of whtie fur on her buttocks stood out plainly, thrust upward atop her unfolded knees and far above the rest of her body. Her breath was eager as cool air brushed over her open folds, glistening like a flower bud squeezed between her thighs, just below the moon-curve of her muscular buttocks, squirming in anticipation of what she already knew was coming.
A fat, green head nuzzled against her folds. She let out a long, halting moan as it slowly pressed its girth into her. Seemingly for her own benefit, it began to move against her. Rather than slip ever forward, it pulled back only to press deeper. This was new, but not unwelcome. Her breath was ragged, rising as she settled into the movements within her.
She climaxed beneath the will of the massive length almost immediately. It pressed on until she came again minutes or hours later, she couldn't be sure. Its movement slowed over time, yet she felt it press more urgently against her. Only when it had stopped did she realize that it was pulsating with its hardness. Much like the fruit that had sated her, the length had rooted within her.
No sooner did she realize when she felt herself lifted. Feelers came from somewhere above, holding her weight as she was carried aloft. To her surprise, the feelers at her breasts had completely enveloped them. The telltale widening where they embraced her wavered and quivered as they squeezed her mercilessly. Yet she barely felt as if she'd been emptied at all.
Her arms were gently raised above her head and her buttocks arched backward. She hung supine, curved upward along her limbs, her bosom like low hanging fruit. Her breasts were gathered and pressed against her. With each press, she sidled deeper into the feelers. Such was the barrage of pleasure that the feelers inside it brought that she began to feel a phantom, itching pleasure below her fattened flesh.
S he continued to rise, raised until she was inverted above the flower. The feelers curled past her head now, and she watched their swallowing motions travel down their length into the plant. They held on tenaciously as she was slowly raised away from the flower. Their pace livened until there was barely a pause between constriction and release. It was as if they knew their hold would fail.
Perhaps they wished now to milk her for everything they could get? The strength and urgency with which they tended her seemed to suggest it. The triple tongues greedily constricted over her. She yowled, barely able to take the pleasure of spraying into the greedy mouths latched onto her. Or perhaps, they sought to bestow the best of their pleasure in their last moments of contact.
They began to slide from her, opening and stretching forward again in an attempt to regain their prizes. They only succeeded in massaging her, making her outflow hiss into their flesh each time they closed over her once again. She yelped in time with the movements, rising in pitch and intensity with each attempt they made to hold her. As they finally sensed inevitabiliy, they closed around her and made one final squeeze.
She mewled incoherently as she dimpled outward from within their grasp. They slid over her, finally puckering down over their internal mouths, which held fast to naked peaks and pulled gently at her heavy breasts. Their grip gave way with two asynchronous pops. Each pop made her every muscle jolt, making her suddenly aware of how close that stimulation alone had brought her to climaxing.
She grunted as her breasts fell over her face, spurting as they rebounded at the end of their fall. They hung heavy with their weight, swinging and round right in front of her. The orientation put her peaks at the lowest point, and the pressure of her burden pressed at her nipples. She watched them fatten in the open air as she felt the need to expend herself.
Without thinking clearly about what she was doing, her tongue slipped from her muzzle and wrapped around one of her nipples. Aided by her long, narrow muzzle, her lips kissed her own flesh and felt her own wetness. They parted as she guided the dripping bud home. She was surprised by how much that part of her had changed. Her tongue cradled her find, as if it were some smaller version of the fruit that had set all of these events in motion.
She slurped over the livid flesh, joined with herself as she drank deeply of her own milk. Each draw nudged her closer. She whined with greater urgency with each tightening of her lips. Her other breast heaved, its own rising flow falling away into the open air. With a final, muted squeal of delight, she fell into her long overdue climax like a swimmer into a tidal wave.
As it washed over her, then ebbed, she didn't release herself. Her suckling grew slow and idle, matching the breathing rippling up her slight frame suspended above. One leg hung, folded at the knee and thus spreading her loins wide. Inside her, the length still pulsed, holding her fast along with the many others hugged close to her midriff and arms.
Her leg was brought upward to match its sibling, so that she now looked as though in the middle of some bizzare dive. Her arms slipped from her loose bonds and she thoughtlessly guided her other breast home. Her nipples jostled inside the confines of her mouth, her tongue escaping her lips to spiral over their forms.
Her hands pressed into her soft bosom, pressing more of her outflow into her eager mouth. She savored her taste not from the remote point of view of an alien, but by her own tastebuds. Her flavor was that of the forest now. It bespoke of leaves, green shoots and tangy nectar. Milk dripped from where she met herself. It wasn't easy keeping so much of her under control, so she told herself.
But she was surprised when she realized that the dripping wasn't coming form her mouth. Underneath her peaks, below the hands holding her in her own mouth, two other nubbins of flesh more conventionally sized peered through her fur. She watched with a mix of excitement and discomfort as gossamer trails of pearly fluid dribbled from their tips.
How much of a deer was she? She knew her anatomy enough to know that wasn't right. Of course, right was only in the sense of what she'd understood. How it felt was entirely different. Most animal allele expression was imperfect, having been created from whole cloth. Genetics weren't mix-and-match, but their expression could be eumulated. Apparently, one of the imperfections of that process now peered below her peaks. Pink flesh trickled, then blossomed with pearly strands of fluid.
Her folds throbbed, making her gasp. In her surprise, she released herself from her lips. She thrummed again. Her legs squirmed in their bonds, restless with the wild, unbidden pleasure that thudded through her. The length had awakened once again, its succulent surface throbbing in time with her heartbeat. Her even breath faltered into tiny exhales for a moment as it pulsated outward inside her. The knot of pleasure that slithered through her elicited a spurt of droplets from her blushing flesh.
She forfeited control of her own body, letting herself fall into the stimulation that, she anticipated, would only grow. Left to the whims of gravity, her head pivoted earthward. As her gaze followed, she saw another feeler rising from below.
Its tonguelike, tapered end curled and swirled beneath her. As it touched her lips, it was as if she bridged the plants, like some symbiotic organism, caught between the energies of their exchange. However, she was well aware now that she was the epicenter, not some incidental entity riding astride the event.
The feelers simultaneously poured into her, throbbing and laboring with their earnest effort. She gasped through her mouthful, surprised by the energy of it. However, she felt no fear. Instead, it thrilled her. She sensed the singular focus of Us far in the distance, like a swan song that reminded her that her pain was its own. Similarly, the pleasure she felt became mutual.
Her midriff rocked back and fourth. She arched in time with the outflow, working with as much focus as the plant to drive herself down onto the contact. The fluid that filled her mouth brought new tastes. It was vaguely gritty and thick, like overfrozen icecream. However, she felt its heat lancing into her from both ends, rolling down into her and coalescing into herself.
Reality rapidly became dreamlike, even though she remained so acutely alert. The throes of their meeting didn't overwhelm her body. Instead, she felt herself buoyant atop the maelstrom, moving beyond the normal bounds of endurance. Yet she still felt everything acutely and moved with ever more fervor.
Her bosom shivered and bounced atop her frame, arched as she shimmied over the length writhing inside her folds like some live creature. She felt its singular mission as it pressed out upon her and she squeezed back down in return. Her scant, toned buttocks twisted around their captive, trapped between her twitching thighs.
She rose away and upward, lifted toward the open furls of the flower hanging inverted above her. Deep inside, at its bowl-like ceiling, the length bulged at its source. Waves of fluid flowed inside it, pumped by the same defined muscles that aided her ascent. It retreated deeper into the plant as she was knowingly reeled in.
In the sensual chaos of their coupling, she felt Us, reaching out through our world. Her thoughts propagated outward, echoed back. Mental caresses washed over her like liquid sunlight, a simulated sensation on the nerves of her skin. Us had lingered long inside her, pervaded her gently. Now, she felt the consequences.
Together, We shared elation for an instant, like the ring of a distant gong on the rising wind. To be joined again. To flow into each other like mixing tides. Us embraced her, her hooves touching the inner end of the flower. She writhed inside it like some living bud, held fast below the stem from which Us emerged and touched her deepness.
A biologist would have seen little wrong with this flower, but also little right. Us' world was a forest stranded deep in time, allowed to mature, radiate and specialize. A biologist might have recognized the gynoecium at its center, its puckered, fat end kissing her folds now. Woman's house, that was what it had meant. Us had learned once long ago, from the marooned one that had grown old in Us' arms. It was suitable, they were in a different kind of kiss. Like female lovers, sensitive openings crossing, rubbing. The little mind that grew from the stem was its own creature that had quietly grown within its feminine reaches. It was seperate, male, now so obsessed with its mission. It burrowed softly through blunt persistence, readying her for its arrival with its plump shell.
A biologist might have recognized a lattice of puckers within which stunted stamen and anthers grew. Inside, they labored eagerly within their fluid-filled enclosures. Complex proteins from eras past were bound into building blocks, into naturally artificial monads, into Us. Pollen forms from many plants, produced, then growing of their own volition, multiplying for weeks until critical population, waiting, maintaining until now.
The puckering holes lining the inner surfaces of the flower yawned open. A livid, orange-gold slime ballooned from them, surface tension forming heavy spheres that grew forever and never burst. The slime twitched, suddenly grew animate. No skeleton drove the clumsy mass, no muscles, only a network of connective filaments narrower than a hair. The geometry shimemred like amber within them as the spheres began to join, to press against her pelt. They became fingers, snaking over her skin, rushing outward to twist around her limbs and midriff.
She'd long ago recognized what was going to happen, that the length inside her was more than that, that the fluids throbbing into her were the living beings of Us. New neurons living within her, opening Us to Her and Her to Us.
The golden suspension roiled and churned, forcing air bubbles caught between their joining downward, escaping in puffs through the broken surface. It heaved over her like a million fingers, washing over her thighs and pinching her folds. She began to gasp through the length in her mouth as the top of her folds were spread like petals. A livid bud of flesh swelled from the triangle of inner skin opened above where Us moved into her. It was teased outward, hugged by living fluid and eased from its hiding place. It dimpled and twisted inside its home as if animated and she gave a primal cry in response.
She shuddered through the wild fury of a sharp climax, floating superhuman above the pleasure but still unable to grasp its magnitude. Instead, she twisted in its glow, glowing with an urgent grattitude.
Her outflow pattered onto the surface of the flower below, white, filamental streams arcing from her excited nipples. Us saw her fullness, but also knew this would be their ultimate time together, to pave the way to a different future. She wanted to be drained.
A biologist might have called the things that rose some secondary whorl of animated stamen. The anthers that topped them, however, were more like flowers themselves. Leaves cupped an almond-shaped opening, cradling in their concave space a spherical bud of green flesh.
They curled around the bowl of the flower from between petals. Exactly two, they found her bosom hanging, still full of her gift. They lingered below her, cradling their spherical cargo beneath her breasts, set in motion by her continued writhing. She stilled herself, allowing them to hover placidly beneath the four blushing buds of her nipples, one pair fat and eager and the other peeking shyly below them.
The ends fissioned along a radial, starlike split. Their inner reaches were covered with nubbins of flesh. She arched forward as snaking tongues reached forward and grasped her. A tiny, blunt nub bumped against her end and was encompassed by a crowned mouth that slid over her. Tiny mouths reached outward and found the pair of tiny buds beneath those The starlike outer edges closed, glistening as they encompassed her breasts.
Their slurping squeeze was long and powerful, rising like a gust of wind as they demanded from her. Her answer bulged beneath their ends, growing before it travelled down their lengths. They tightened and pulled her outward, bringing her second bounty. With each draw she threw her shoulders back and puffed out her chest, moaning through her contact, cherishing it.
Even as the stamen pursued their own goals, finding their own rhythm that did not cease, the length inside her shifted.
Its plump flesh grew weak. Upwellings disrupted its smooth surface and pressed agaisnt her walls. Deep within the aetherous suspension ravishing her willing body, the base of the length peaking from her began to shrink in on itself. It turned into peaks, which distended into writhing arms. Rank upon rank of them studded its surface. The crown at its tip kissed her inner ending. Something narrow slipped into her. There wasn't any pain, the sensation was aloof, like a whisp of air inside her awareness.
Far more demanding were the feelers at her chest, squeezing her milk from her as the mouths drew her deeper into their grasp. Her breasts rolled in their bonds, dimpling out from under their grip . Far more pressing were the tiny tentacles washing over her insides, making her rock her hips into the contact. Her abs worked beneath her tiny layer of fat, even if that same curve of her tummy was gently caressed by the suspension and by ghost hands from her lover within her nervous system. She couldn't rest, because she wanted to remember this, she had her reasons.
She felt the pressure of something subtle working inside her. She felt it, it felt her and she welcomed it. It took trust, understanding of every thought that focused on her. She felt Us, and she knew she would not come to harm by the forest or anything in Our dominion.
The leaves heaved atop her breasts, hiding the attentive retainers that kneaded and milked them. They held her mounds aloft, cupping her as they gently rose and fell with each draw, cupping her like the neckline of some exotic dress. But she felt Us, felt them more as some second skin. She felt their contact as something beautiful going on within her, even viscerally saw their every action.
She saw her breasts , held prominent in the spherical grip of the feelers. Deprived of their weight, they were almost perfectly round, inviting. She watched the tongues constrict her captive nipples, her fluids flowing out as her saturated flesh dimpled around them. The mouths pulled and squeezed, suckling her with spongy surfaces that gently cradled the flesh they milked.
Naked beneath the hypereal senses of the plant's awareness, her breasts squeezed inward at their sides and slid subtly deeper into the grasp of the mouths, tapering to their ends as it slurped the spray of her milk.
Biology was odd. Women had within them a capability to produce such gifts with the right, gentle touch and persistence. Nearly a month now Us had gently tended her, cultivated within her that capability. Now she had momentum, and biology was odd, even in the short term. Such an intense period of demand and now she flowed with little urging, even though Us had suppressed her production, she still had much to release.
The feelers' grip relaxed and they withdrew. Inside, golden suspension reformed, slithering to fill the space they created around her. Fleshy mouths withdrew and released her ripe nipples, surrounded by a white aura that pooled and was whisked away by the amber, living liquid. Milk collected at her ends within the suspension, rapidly ballooning outward before it broke off like a drop of oil rising through water, swallowed by the open mouths now connected to her only through the suspension.
They hovered inches back from her, collecting her take as she emptied into them. Her four teats throbbed, now driven into a frenzy by the demand. Inside her loins, the long stalk of the length, long retreating before her folds kissed the flower's, performed its final act. The stalk released what had once been an oversized seed. She floated free in the suspension, her folds spread by the bobtail end of the pod.
She sighed as it began to sedately churn within her. The pressure within her deepest reaches somehow wormed into her breasts, maintaining her flow. Her teats were massaged by the suspension for an eternity dimpling and twisting in waves of motion. Dozens of encapsulated, pearly bubbles grew and fell from her like thick dewdrops one after the other until, finally, an entourage of courtiers rose to take her back to the ground. The feelers looped over her as she sat dazed within the suspension.
When it receded, she felt her weight return. The stamen released her breasts and she began to descend as if held by time itself. The flower receded, closing and retreating into itself as its lover left it. Now freed from the hungry but gentle pull of the plant, her naked flesh began to dew with white droplets. Her skin blushed beneath them, itching in the open air as the droplets coalesced and flowed down her shimmering, wet pelt.
She was set at the center of the great flower beneath, caught in the petals so that she was gently curled in upon herself.
Four feelers, two large and two small, rose at her flanks. They curved under her arms and slithered over the sides of her breasts. The larger kissed her plump teats and slid down over her. They quivered as they slowly expanded and contracted over her, making her gently squeal at the suddenly fresh contact.
The smaller latched over her vestigial nipples, licking over her new knobs of flesh with ironic familiarity.
She flowed for days more, never at any speed so great that it would cause discomfort. For that entire time, the quartet of feelers never left her. She tenderly sucked from a fruit at the center of a flower when she was hungry and dreamed of alien memories when she grew bored.
Inside her reclining body, buried in her folds, the flowerlike cloaka of the plant pulsed open and closed. The labors of its new, self-sufficient life processes moved against her and left her constantly aroused. As the feelers kissed her flesh and the tiny seed gently made love to her, she would climax suddenly.
As the feelers swallowed her milk, she began to return to normalcy. When she had settled into a gentle, round curve, they popped from her, drawing up her not unimpressive breasts. They wriggled as they were released and fell back to her chest. Her nipples were still written with her change, but they were not so urgent or sensitive. They flattened as she watched.
She strained forward and lapped the tip of her tongue over her flesh, tasting herself one last time before she hauled herself upright. She wasn't sad now that she was leaving. Inside her now was a much larger portion of Our mind. The hum of Our presence in Her comforted her, Our shared memories waited to be recalled. She would never need be alone again.
Within her, a tiny resident worked, a permanent fixture of her secret anatomy. It flowered within her, growing and becoming ever closer as it drew deeper by millimeters. She'd become a growing extension of the forest and the forest equally an extension of her mind.
She felt the anatomy of the old tree above, felt that there was something she was permitted to use.
Green and yellow spackled fruits came loose easily under her hand, guided as if she were touching her own body. She felt the satisfied pluck of the weak stems giving way. The itch of those ripe things and their need to exit her awareness dulled. Then she recalled the little messengers inside, inside absolutely everything she'd consumed. It took willpower not to save them from their liferaft immediately. To not consume the fruits and pass them into the shelter of her metabolism was, for a moment, painful.
Then she felt the time they had. A galaxy of nutrients. Finite but gargantuan. They would survive long, ripening and gently fermenting the fruit. She vowed not to let them suffocate inside it.
Points of radiating awareness washed over her. Noise in the churning sea of her manifold consciousness. She was mostly herself, gently pressing aside what she recognized as its full strength. She waded deeper, linking her thoughts outward through the gestalt. The points of light pulsed, pressed her. She felt their direction on her deep body.
As she returned to reality, she found herself on her knees, propped up by one hand. She'd forgotten herself, her positioning. In her eagerness, she'd clogged her awareness.
She spoke, partly to remind herself of what was real. "I guess I better be careful with that." Her consciousness receded into the moment. On its tails, an echo of guilt that wasn't entirely her own.
She set herself into motion like a bullet. The first bound was bold on her legs, already stronger than they'd been when she'd first set foot on the planet.
***
Arceina Cairo snuffled the air.
"What is it?" Kyu stepped forward, rising to his full height as he emerged from a great cleft in one of the old trees. Nothing but trees. Trees and bizarre, motley plants that moved in ways she nor Lambda were comfortable with. Kyu called them Sleepers.
Kyu's form had emptied over the many days. He didn't show it in his mannerisms and outlook, but he was clearly distressed. He panted in the hot sun, visible ribs moving heavily underneath his emaciated frame.Once, his pelt had been short and manicured. He'd looked the image of pensive graciousness, like a true monk. Now it grew wild and stifled him in its arctic down, long forgotten by his simple grooming tools, lost in the storm.
They lucked upon occasional fruit. Mysterious. This planet had no ecological niche nor targeted consumer for the organs. It was as if there was a great gallery full of shops, but no one sat at the registers and no one perused the shelves. They were alone, and they'd lost Dana.
"I smell her."
"Her?" Kyu's voice was much less controlled than it had once been. Feral instincts gnawed at the bars of his impeccable control. He'd kept it in check for so long. The walls of hunger, boredom and loneliness had only grown with time. He burned incense, prayed to Buddhai for strength, faced the test against his will to be truly transhumant day after selfsame day.
But he felt himself weakening, his mind dying by inches. The petals of his higher mind were shriveling to reveal the cruel hindbrain of his engineer physiology. Monster, pillager, soldier.
No!
He turned and retreated back to the hollow. "It would be best if you find her that you leave me here to die. I would rather jump from these great heights and face a sad next life as a slime mold than do harm to you." His words were even, but her triangular, parasol ears betrayed his mood to her. She could hear his pain through the social senses decades of hustling property with prospectors and preservationalists had brought her.
"Maybe," was all she could bring herself to say, and she hated herself for it.
Lambda shot past, darting from an unseen limb with lithe grace. His narrow, feminine limbs moved like lightning.
"Let's find her before our instincts get any smart ideas!" His voice echoed in his wake past the skittering of his claws.
Arcenia sighed as she looked to Kyu one last time. "Stay safe."
"I will try." He was silent. "If I go wild, do not hesitate to kill me. Words cannot convey my true feelings." Regret at his weakness? He'd fasted longer than anyone she'd ever met. They'd had no problem finding fruit with their sensitive noses. They'd thought him dead in the flood, taken what they found for themselves and saved none. Expended energy in coitus, so profoundly lonely that it felt like the only right thing they could do.
"No, Kyu, I'm sorry." She and her lover had been together as pigs.
"Look out below!" Lambda's slick voice cracked in a yell from the distance.
The branch on which she sat rocked from some unseen weight behind her. There was no answering fall, as would a branch on its way to the bottom. Simply silence.
"Fancy meeting you three," the familiar, brassy voice of the journeywoman Dana echoed form behind her like a ghost.
She'd thought she was going insane for a moment, then turned. A woman greeted her with upturned arms, ready to clasp her in a hug.
"Dana..." Arcenia raised an eyebrow. "Are you real?" Because the woman she'd known had been tomboyish and not so thoroughly filled out.
The cervine cocked her head. "Well, as far as I know." She looked down at her khaki shirt, the top buttons undone and revealing generous cleavage. For a moment, Arcenia envied the curves she saw on the woman. Not for their attractiveness, but for the story of constant sustainence they told. Kyu was not the only one starving now.
Dana looked up pleadingly. "It's a long story." She suddenly perked up. "Oh wait!" She dug through her bulging pockets and pulled out two reams of grape-like fruit. Lambda and his infuriating, suddenly pertinent tenacity had found only a fraction of what she held.
"Don't tell me you're not only a deer but have some kind of vegetarian sixth sense for plant delicacies."
"Like I said, long story." Dana shoved the fruits under the fox's nose. "Eat, it won't affect you in this small of a dose."
"What?"
Arcenia's mate skittered to a halt beside her. "Hey there, Dana the Deer. What do we have here?"
What a pseudo-Shakespearian cad. Arcenia cracked him on the head. He collapsed, emitting a startled, animalistic yelp of surprise. Dana handed him another plentiful handful of food.
"So this is the good news," Arcenia slurred past a mouthful of squishy, sweet fruit. "What about the bad news? The rescue?"
"I found camp," she said. "But you were gone, so I activated the FTLS beacon."
Arcenia bobbed her head in excited approval.
"There's plenty of this stuff to go around," Dana pointed to her pockets. "I've kind of got my foot in the door here. Us won't let you guys starve?"
"Us?" she squinted. "Don't you mean 'we'?"
A massive, gray paw dove into Dana's upper shirt pocket. She squirmed and sighed with surprise before the hand retreated with a vaguely pear-shaped fruit. There was a wet snicker of solid plant flesh.
"Thank you," Kyu said from on high. "I apologize and can place the blame for that firmly on myself. But I was very, very hungry."
Dana didn't seem fazed. Not in the way Arcenia had expected, at least.
Dana bit her lip as a small smudge of dampness appeared where Kyu's paw had ventured. The cloth tented slightly. She noticed Arcenia looking.
Arcenia winked. "A long story?"
"You don't even know the half of it."