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Chapter 8: To The Tower

David ran into Bailey almost as soon as he left the shop, though he managed to keep it from becoming literal. He looked up at his friend, at what he had become, and slowly shook his head; there really was no hope unless they were able to get to Rannoi.

Reptilian as David remembered, Bailey looked down at him, smiling in greeting. "Hey, David," he said. Throwing a thumb over his shoulder to the other shops, he added, "There's nothing back there that I can see. You and Cari have any luck?"

He absently held up the paper with the clover mark, turning to look back at the door. There was nothing to be seen on the other side as of yet, but he doubted that it would stay quiet for long.

Bailey looked at the paper, but as he looked towards the store like David was, the smile on his face slowly went down. "She-"

"Yeah...Rannoi got her. Him. Cari. Got Cari all the way," David said. "Let's...let's get Ashley and Adam; there's a change in plans we need to talk about."

"Yeah...alright, man." Bailey nodded, putting a hand on David's shoulder as they started walking down the street.

As they walked, David couldn't stop thinking of what had happened. Cari had tried to help him, had tried to do something to go along with his idea, and had ended up punished for it. Not just punished, but...well, erased. The magic had gone straight to his head, and taken not just Cari's body, but his mind as well. From what he'd seen of the Transformed, there would be nothing left of the person he knew, not the slightest hint. Just a person that wanted to change others, to spread the transformation around.

His mind was blank, his body numb as he kept walking. There was only some small piece of hope left, a little bit that might turn the tables. If they could just get rid of Rannoi's conduit...

But that just raised another question. Whenever he'd appeared, he'd carried something else. A wand, a cane, a gun; all of them something different. Were they different conduits? Was he using magic to change them into something else each time to match the theme of his costume?

David thought that there was a chance that they could get rid of one conduit, but if Rannoi had more, there was really no way that they could beat him. They would just have to hope that it was a single conduit; if it was more, then they were done for, and if it wasn't, it wasn't worth worrying about.

They passed by several shops, and David only became aware of his flagging footsteps when he felt a tug on his arm, yanking him out of his thoughts. He looked up slowly, and saw that Bailey had started walking ahead of him, pulling him along rather than just walking alongside. Realizing that he had started dragging his feet from being too deep in his thoughts, David picked up his feet and started walking a little faster.

"So...what did Cari become?" Bailey asked.

He shook his head. "A...a raccoon, far as I know...and completely male," David added. "Very...very male."

"Did you...you know...do anything?"

He stopped, turning to look up at his friend. "Do you really think I'd just do something like that, to someone that was being forced to -"

"Hey, I wasn't meaning anything by it!" Bailey protested, holding up a hand. "I just...I know the temptation is there. I just wanted to know if you went with it or if you were able to hold back. I don't know if I could have."

Continuing to glare for a few seconds, David slowly dropped his head with a soft sigh. "I know. I'm sorry, Bailey, I'm sorry. No, I didn't do anything...but I did feel kind of tempted." And that temptation was going to get worse and worse the longer that he went with ignoring it, not to mention any time that he might get transformed.

For that matter, he was pretty darn lucky to have gotten out of the shop without anything having happened to him. With all the rules that Rannoi had, he would have thought that actually attacking the guy would have been the biggest one to violate, something that would have gotten a full body transformation and then some. After all, he had taken Bailey's arms away just for an attempted touch; David had tried to take away his wand. That should have merited some major payback.

Yet...

Rannoi had let him go. After nearly getting the wand away from the guy, after making him fight hand to hand, Rannoi had let him go without a single additional transformation. It didn't make any sense at all.

Bailey interrupted his thoughts again with another question. "Do you still want me to, erm, not do anything to you?"

"Um...what?" David said, slowing as he looked up at his friend, suddenly conscious of the hole in the back of his pants again. Funny how he had completely forgotten about it for a while; he supposed one could really get used to anything. "What...-Do you mean, sex things?"

"Yeah; I was wondering if you still didn't want it," Bailey said with a shrug of his shoulders. "I mean, we've got enough privacy to do something, and I've been wanting to do things with you for a while; the more you change, and the more I change, the better it sounds." He reached down, rubbing the massive bulge in his jeans lightly. "And it's getting harder to say no, you know, so if you'd like to -"

"No." David shook his head rapidly. "No, Bailey; if we were outside, maybe, but not while we're still in the park." He should have been blushing at the thought of the big man wanting something like that, particularly out in the open like this, but there wasn't even a hint of embarrassment in his mind. In its place was a great deal of desire, and that was harder to ignore.

The temptation was just avoidable, and that was more because of what Rannoi had claimed, that someone in the group had given up and gone to the Transformed. He didn't think it was Bailey - though that was mostly because he hadn't transformed further than the last time he'd seen his friend - but he could easily be wrong. It might be a trap.

"Maybe...maybe later," he said when Bailey continued to fondle himself while looking at him. "Let's just find Adam and Ashley. I've got a new idea; there's no way that we're getting the clovers now, so we need a new idea."

"What do you mean?"

"After he got Cari...Well, there's no way that we're going to be able to make it to the other four clover marks without losing all of us. We need to try something different." David shook his head. "We need to do what we should have done in the first place. We need to take the fight to the big guy."

This time it was Bailey's turn to freeze in place, and he looked down at David like he was crazy. "Take the fight...to him?" Looking at his arms, Bailey said, "Do you even remember what he did to me the last time that I came anywhere near touching him?"

"I remember. But I don't think we have a chance any other way; at least if we can get that damn cane away from him, we have a chance to make him weaker. Maybe we can blackmail him or something. I don't know; but it's the only way that I can see us getting out of here anytime in our lifetimes with any part of our minds still intact.

"And I can't do it without you, Bailey," David said. He held out his hand. "You've helped me a lot at college, and you've been my best friend for years. You're the strongest guy I know, and I need you to help me here. Will you go along with this? Please?"

They looked at each other for almost a minute, with Bailey hesitating and David holding his hand out to his friend. David couldn't back down from this. There was no way that he would get even partway to the Golden Tower now without Bailey's help. The Transformed would be around before long; they had already lost their lead from the Looper getting down here, and with the way that the Transformed followed their creator all around the Park, he really didn't know how much time they had before they arrived. In all likelihood, they'd have to run through them, and he had no doubt that the creatures would be able to overwhelm all of them.

Except for Bailey. The man was built like a tank before, and now he was built like a juggernaut. The shell that he carried around gave him immense bulk, and unless he we met by something equally massive, David was sure that he'd be able to clear a path through the mindless creatures that roamed the park. It was just a matter of whether Bailey was willing to do it.

Eventually, the reptilian man stepped forward, taking his hand and giving it a single shake. "Fine. But if this doesn't work, I'm going to find you and fuck your brains out," Bailey said with a small smile.

"If this doesn't work, I don't think I'll care," David said back, chuckling as he tried to forget that he wouldn't care now. Sighing in some relief, he nodded his head towards the road again. "Alright. Let's hurry up before the Transformed get here and get Adam and Ashley; we're going to have a hard enough time getting out of here again without having to start all the way from the gate of the park."

Bailey nodded, and they were off again.

It didn't take long for them to stop, though, as they saw two figures running towards them from the direction of the gate. David blinked, holding a hand to his head to look out towards them, and smiled. "Here they come!" he said, throwing a hand up to wave. "Adam, Ashley! We found it!" he called out.

As they got closer, David's smile faltered as he saw Adam in the lead, and from what little he could make out, not looking very happy. When he was about a hundred feet away, he held up a sign, a big one. But rather than let them read it, he stopped and brought it around in a powerful swing, hitting Ashley in the side hard enough to knock her over.

"HEY!" David shouted. He started to run forward, but was stopped by a large hand on his shoulder. "Let me go, he's gone nuts!"

"Look at the sign!" Bailey said. "I think you got it backwards."

Shaking his head, still fighting the grip on his shoulder, David looked to the sign as Adam held it up. The letters were big, black, and - if text could be said to do it - shouting their message. "She's gone nuts! Transformed! Her eyes!" the sign said before it was thrown back over Adam's shoulder, left behind as dead weight as he continued to run as fast as he could.

He looked past the coyote towards Ashley, his head shaking slowly. "No...no...not her too...." David whispered.

She was pulling herself to her feet, her face covered in feathers. Her skirt was abandoned, her nudity clear and her arousal just as much so as she managed to stand up straight again. Wings flapping, she somehow managed to pull herself off of the ground, flying forward almost as fast as Adam was running away from her, and it didn't take long for him to be able to get a good look at her face.

Whatever had been left of Ashley was long gone; her face was completely animalistic, and her eyes had been drowned in the lustful light that seemed to devour all of the different Transformed across the park. She literally dripped as she flew towards them, leaving moist spots behind on the pavement beneath her, and her beak somehow twisted in a smirk, as if she knew that she was about to get what she wanted.

Bailey grabbed him as he stared, pulling him along by the arm. "No...no..." was all that David could say while he was pulled away, a little tear running down the side of his face. This was worse than seeing Jeremiah go, more terrible than the sight of Cari's mind disappearing inside of the shop. Ashley had been his friend for years; she had restored him some hope, had given him reason to keep going.

And now...and now she was gone.

Adam rushed past them, only slowing as he got in front of the big reptile. He held up a sign, "What now? She's gone nuts."

"Keep running, straight for the Tower," Bailey said.

"The Tower?! That's even -"

The sign didn't even finish what it was saying, dropped as they reached the border between the shops and the Game Gallery. Bailey's hand let go of him, and David turned to see why they'd stopped.

His jaw dropped as he stared at the massed horde of creatures that stood in front of them. There had to be dozens, possibly even hundreds of Transformed milling around in front of them, each one of them with a smirk on their muzzle or beak or snout, each one dripping with musky fluids. The scent in the air made his head swim, and he groaned, barely able to keep on his feet.

Fluttering feathers and soft footsteps announced two others behind him, and David looked over his shoulder.

Both Ashley and Cari approached from behind, the former walking awkwardly on her scaly feet, the latter on nearly silent feet. Both were naked, and both were completely in the thrall of whatever the Transformed were run by, either Rannoi or Mirari. Dripping both pre and pussy juice, they walked slowly towards them, intent on either forcing the three of them into the horde behind them or claiming David, Adam, and Bailey for themselves.

"What do we do now, genius?" the sign popping up above Adam's head asked. It fell, almost on top of one of the advancing dogs from the horde, as another one popped up. "How are we going to get to the Golden Tower now?"

The air rumbled softly, and for a moment, David thought that they were even more screwed than he thought. It was so close to the sound that Mirari made when it was talking with Rannoi, or the feeling that had filled the magic shop when the park owner had been shouting and angry.

But there was a subtle difference to it this time, something that was a little bit weird about it. It was closer, for one, and it wasn't rumbling so much through the ground as it was through the air. It was deep, powerful, and more than a little bit angry. Just the feeling of it was making his ears buzz, and it left a slight tickling feeling across his body as the vibrations got stronger and stronger.

He looked at Bailey, seeing that his friend had hunched his shoulders and had his head lowered, almost like a bull would do before charging. The normally calm, cheerful look that Bailey gave everyone had been replaced with a look of utter rage, his eyes turned red.

Before David could say anything, Bailey grabbed one of the signs on the ground. Swinging it back and forth, he suddenly turned and hit Ashley in the head with it, hard enough to knock her into Cari, and then carry the both of them into the nearby wall. Both slumped back, immediately unconscious.

Shoved by the reptilian strongman into the coyote's arms, David could only look up at his friend as Bailey looked Adam in the eyes. "Take care of him," Bailey said.

"Wait!" David cried as Bailey turned to the crowd, taking a few steps forward. He tried to rush to his friend, but Adam held him too tightly, keeping him back. "Wait! What are you doing?"

"Getting you to the Tower..." Bailey said. He paused right in front of the Transformed, and looked back. A small smile crossed his face, and he waved slowly. "Goodbye, David," he said.

Still holding the sign in hand, Bailey lunged forward into the crowd. The large wooden post that the sign was attached to served as a massive club as he swung it from side to side, bashing the different Transformed in the head, the chest, the stomach. It sent them flying to the sides, and his bulk formed a whole in their crowd, a hole that they were not brave enough to close up behind him.

Pulled along by Adam into the hole, David watched as his best friend continued to carve a hole out of the Transformed for them to get through. He never paused, never faltered, just kept swinging. Even when several of the creatures would leap on him from the side, he would pick them up, throw them off, and keep going.

They were making slow, but steady progress, with him and Adam only needing to do occasional work to keep the other Transformed from leaping on Bailey from behind. An ever growing pile of bodies were lining up on the side, knocked out by the powerful swings of the club, and despite the pained cries from the mutated creatures, David had no sympathy for them. Maybe before, he might have, but they had taken three people from him. They didn't deserve it anymore.

Suddenly the swinging stopped; they'd reached the central square, and the horde had been mostly in the Game Gallery. Bailey grabbed Adam, and since Adam was still holding onto David, they were both pulled out of the Gallery, and half thrown towards the Looper, and the Tower behind it. "GO!" Bailey shouted.

Adam ran, and did not let go of David's arm no matter how much he squirmed. The coyote tugged him across the central square faster than any human could have run on their own, leaving David to watch as Bailey faded away behind them, fighting against the Transformed still as they regained their courage.

Tears fell down his face as he was guided under the tracks from the Looper, pulled through the different holes between the frame of the track and the Tower behind it. It was only when they stopped moving that he was able to wipe his eyes free of all the liquid and look around, see how far that they'd gotten.

All around them, scattered pieces of metal and ground up bits of garbage were scattered. It was like they had reached the one area that the park never bothered to keep clean, the one spot that didn't get wiped down for the visitors. Then again, considering that most of the park visitors had been turned into a sex obsessed horde, did it really matter what they saw anymore? David doubted that Mirari really cared about keeping up the illusion of a clean, fun park any longer, not when it didn't have to.

Before them was the Tower, the great golden monolith that oversaw the entire park, and not far from where they stood, there was a door. It was almost invisible against the golden walls of the structure, but there was just enough of a slit between the walls and the door for it to be visible.

Looking back, he could only see the small crawlspaces between the pieces of the Looper track, where they must have come through. No matter how hard he looked, he couldn't see through the metal pieces to the square beyond.

But just because he couldn't see didn't mean that he couldn't hear. And he could hear a great deal. The sounds of Bailey's shouts, the shrieks of the Transformed, collective grunts from the group that could have meant anything; it all added up in a jumble of confused noise that painted pictures of the worst situations that David could imagine for his friend.

He shook his head, slowly turning to look back at Adam. "What...what happened with Ashley? When did she turn?" he managed to ask.

"You sure you want to know?" Adam's sign asked.

David nodded, and Adam sighed, shaking his head. "This is going to take a lot of signs, and a little while to read. Are you okay with that?"

He nodded again, sitting down to look at the signs as they popped up. They came up quickly, so much that he had to take them one by one, lifting them off of the ground to see what Adam had said.

"We were checking out a costume shop near the gate. I can't remember much that was in it, but we split up to look at more stuff than we could look at alone. I looked at the front, she looked at the back.

"I guess not everybody walked out when they were transformed, because I heard something in the back after she'd been back there for a while. I decided to make sure that she was alright, but when I got back there, I saw her fucking a monster of a crow creature, his wings around her, and her moaning as she bounced on his cock.

"She didn't even stop when she saw me, and when I tried to help her, she almost bit my hand off with her beak. And the crow was worse. Neither of them let me get anywhere near them, but they both looked at me like I would be next.

"So...I couldn't do anything. She fucked herself into being fully Transformed, and then tried to do the same to me."

Setting down the last of the signs, David shook his head. He leaned against the Tower, slowly sliding down it until he was curled up with his chin against his knees. His body shook, and he knew that if he let himself, he was going to start bawling. He wanted to just let it out - dear god, he wanted to let it out - but he tightened up, clenched his fists, squeezed his body into an even tighter ball to try and keep his tears inside. If he broke down now, there was no way that he was going to be able to pull himself back together.

Soft fur pressed against his arm, and he turned his head slightly to see Adam sitting beside him. The coyote patted his arm lightly, but didn't offer a smile. He didn't know if Adam couldn't bring one to his face, or if he knew that it would be a bad idea, but he was glad for the coyote's tact.

He looked forward again. Memories of all that they'd done together, of all their history outside the park flooded his mind. How they met before college, and had been friends for years despite all the different classes and interests; how Ashley had helped him come to grips with his feelings and his sexuality; how Bailey had always been there for him to lean on, and be a work-out partner for him; how the three of them had been almost like the Three Musketeers, friends forever.

It was all gone now. All gone, except for memories. His memories. And if he screwed up any further, those would be gone too.

A sign gently poked its way into his field of vision, causing him to turn and look. "Do you want to keep going? Or turn back?" it said.

"There's no way that we can turn back now," David said. He gently poked the side of his head. "I'm the only one that remembers Ashley and Bailey as they were anymore. If we turn around, eventually we're going to get caught, and I'm going to forget. I can't....I can't let that happen."

Adam was quiet again, and then slowly stood up. He held out his hand with a sign attached. "Then let's get in there, and find some way to kick Rannoi's ass. Maybe he's got some machine in there I can use or take over or something."

The idea was completely ridiculous, but in ridiculous situations, one takes hope from whatever is offered. The slightest of smiles slipped across David's face as he reached up and took Adam's sign, pulling himself to his feet with a small nod of his head. "Okay. Let's do this," David said, turning to the large door.

It didn't take much to open it; it wasn't even locked. Rannoi doubtlessly expected something like this eventually, particularly with a clover piece hidden inside of the Tower. They were probably walking to their end, here, but David didn't care. Either he'd lose here, and be transformed for good, or he would have it happen out in the park.

At least this way, he was meeting his fate on his own terms, he thought to himself as he entered the darkness within the Tower. The doors ground shut behind him, sealing him and Adam off from the rest of the park.