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Anthracite City: Metamorphosis

By Psion

All Rights Reserved

After The Return and Demise of Crimson Screamer...

When Jessica McQuinn awoke again in the lingering afterglow of her previous adventure exploring the more sensual side of humanity, her guides on that escapade had vanished, leaving her alone but safe inside a small storeroom on the third floor of a multilevel mall deep within the ruined sections of Anthracite City. Down below, mutant carnivores roamed the ground level of the mall. But upstairs, there was nothing that threatened her as she rose to her feet and adjusted her outfit. As a cold wind blew through and caressed her bare furred legs, she briefly cursed whoever was responsible for her current predicament and gritted her teeth. Now was not the time, now she had to finish her patrol and collect her pay. There would be time to dwell on this later when she was doing damage control. Right now just finish what she originally was sent out to do, forget how badly she got sidetracked, and maybe find some warm pants that didn't clash with her current outfit too badly. The provocatively dressed she-wolf had just collected her rifle and resumed her directed wanderings when He finally called...

<Hey slut muffin, how the hell did you manage to get lost on a simple patrol that was only supposed to take an hour tops?> Brandon White, her telepathic handler, announced mentally. A latent human psychic native to this world that had his powers forcibly awakened with alien technology and enslaved to serve as a communications operator for the owners of said alien technology, Brandon did his job and did it well but there was no uncertainty as to whether or not he liked it. The human was rude, sarcastic, and sometimes downright derogatory to the mercenaries he was assigned to. Something that made the fact that he was encased in a nearly indestructible sensory depravation tank all the more infuriating.

Jessica fought to keep her cool but like water from a burst dam, memories of the unbridled passions she experienced a few hours ago rose to the surface. Brandon was silent, perhaps the quietest he had ever been since Jess was first recanted in the Rik-Tah's service... back when she was still Jonathan McQuinn.

Finally, after a long silence filled with an awkward sense of disbelief on her handler's end, Brandon finally spoke. <Well... when they said 'make love, not war' I didn't think they meant it quite as literally as you just did a little while ago. Damn... I won't say anything about how you got ridden doggie style if you don't.> He offered politely, unusual for him as there was nothing more he loved then collecting blackmail material and information about strengths and weaknesses. Wait, wasn't Adam's last name White as well?

<Yes, yes. Adam is my brother so yeah; it was kind of awkward watching him do you up. Least Elizabeth and he got laid, they certainly needed that.> Brandon replied reluctantly as Jessica continued to walk along, scanning her surroundings for a promising clothing store she could search for a pair of pants. It didn't have to be untouched; she only needed to find one pair of pants and cut a tail hole into them with her knife.

<There's a Ms. Fashion Plus over there across the sky bridge.> Brandon suggested nonchalantly.

Jessica looked in that direction and mentally balked once she saw the storefront and figured out what the "Plus" in the name stood for. Even though he wasn't physically anywhere near her or said anything, the wolf could see him quietly roll his eyes. Grumbling, she slung her rifle over her shoulder and cautiously looked inside. At first it didn't look like there was much, the front of the store had been picked completely clean by people looking for warm clothes or scrap cloth they could sew into blankets or whatever. But the back of the store there were still several boxes of jeans and shirts all neatly organized by size. On a reluctant whim, she took off her boots and put on the largest size left over her g-string bikini... it was a perfect fit. From his telepathic perch, Brandon continued to roll his eyes. <Oh grow up, at two hundred and ten or so you're still about a hundred pounds lighter then the pear-shaped donkey Adam was comparing you to. And while what do you expect? Your clone template was likely hacked by a bunch of half-frozen human rebels, of course a pinup girl for the resistance is going to have a little extra in her curves... probably even a little more then what you're already packing.>

Blushing and putting her white leather boots back on, the wolfess resumed her route, still aware of her size but suddenly a bit more accepting of it. Other then that brief detour she was going to deny ever happened, nothing of interest happened on her patrol through this particular stretch of ruins. Finished with her assignment, she reported its completion and verified receipt of her payment before returning back to the alien-controlled parts of Anthracite City. Out of the ruins and into the heart of the Rik-Tah's regional operations...

Downtown Anthracite City, rebuilt by its new alien masters in a bleak, oppressive style that looked like it was taken straight from a cyberpunk role-playing game, the alien constructions stuck out like a sore thumb against the older human buildings still standing. Between the trio of towers reaching towards the heavens and the buildup around their foundations, the reconstructed section was one part supply depot, one part pleasure palace, and one part Forward Operations Base for the aliens' mercenary legion. Almost anything a merc could want, from weapons to hookers, could be bought if he had the credit.

The way the Rik-Tah handled money was definitely odd and a little unsettling at first but Jessica couldn't deny the convenience of their purely electronic economy. No hard currency, just a little computer chip keyed to the data crystal implanted at the base of her brain stem. With that she could manage her accounts and make all sorts of purchases, even order take-out and have it delivered to her residence while she was coming in from the field. If or when she decided to cash out, she could elect to have her accounts liquidated and turned into precious metals and gemstones to turn into real money when she got home. It was clear the prices were artificially inflated but few could really argue with the reasoning, a sudden glut of gold and diamonds could make the wrong people suspicious. Still, the pay was good and the return policy on unwanted goods was exceptional thanks to advanced nanofabrication technology.

The route back to her dormitory took her past the cloning vats and the transit hub that provided mercenaries with their first look at Anthracite City. As she passed into the inner city between the three towers, the population demographics changed immediately. Where the occupied portions of the outer city were predominantly humans that were forced to work in the factories and support industries that kept the Rik-Tah and their armies entertained and supplied, the inner city was dominated by anthro mercenaries of seemingly countless worlds and the occasional sighting of their Rik-Tah handlers. Being a strange-looking race of three-legged reptilian hermaphrodites, the Rik-Tah did not like the endless cold that much more then the furless natives they inflicted it upon. As such, they tended to stay indoors and left the city streets to their hired guns and robotic foot soldiers; the former was a diverse crowd ranging from supervillains on the run from authorities and career mercenaries to amoral cyber-fantasy adventurers and wizards wielding digitized magic. It was as if someone opened a massive toy box full of superhero, cyberpunk, and science-fantasy action figures then dumped it all over the streets of Anthracite City; an amazing sight that was almost worth the trip in itself.

"Hey love jugs!" A voice called out, causing her to stop and look around. Why did that voice sound familiar and was it talking to her?

Finding the source of the caller only succeeded in sending chills down her spine. A muscular bovine male with bright, cherry red hair and dressed in unremarkable-looking ballistic armor looked right back at her. Ralph Casing aka Panzer Beast, the super-strong muscle of the villain group Jessica used run with back in Aphrodite City, it was clear he didn't recognize her at all. It was also clear that stopping like she heard him was a mistake. An emotion she never really felt before began to well up inside her as Ralph managed to thread his way through the crowd towards here. A broad grin crossed his face but there was none of the emotions she saw in Adam and Elizabeth, only something else... something else she realized must have been on her face dozens of times back before some irate hacker took her previously male body and turned her into a female pinup not too different from the ones she once lusted after endlessly.

She turned to walk away but it was too late, he had a hand placed... firmly on her shoulder. "Come on, why don't you and I go some place private?" Ralph asked in a tone that wasn't a question.

Jessica tried to speak but the words died in her throat, she looked around to see if someone was going to intervene but no one seemed to even notice the exchange going on beside them; no one except the two hulking security robots that were suddenly and subtly pressing their weapons against the small of Ralph's back.

"Hey scab muffin!" A familiar voice intoned through the eight-foot-tall metal goliath's digital voice box. "Your paperwork still isn't order. So quit showing off your award-winning charisma and follow me back to the office so you can actually get paid for being an asswipe, the lady doesn't look interested in riding your steroid shriveled junk anyway." Brandon barked, apparently being able to occasionally control robots via remote was one of his many abilities and duties.

The brown hide bull looked like he wanted to argue or at least punch one of the robots in the face, especially after their operator openly mocked the size of his family jewels, but instead he reluctantly smiled and turned to follow them. "Call me." He said to her over his shoulder, holding up his thumb and pinkie to pantomime a telephone. Jessica saw her chance and took it, disappearing into the busy street and doing her best to discreetly hurry the rest of her way home.

Home was a tightly packed place too big to be called a dormitory but too small to be considered a studio apartment. Twin-sized bed, a computer terminal that connected her to the rest of the city's data network, a small amount of table space for tinkering or eating, a large closet, and a handful of cooking appliances including a bioprinter configured to produce virtually any foodstuff imaginable out of a biomass of generic carbohydrates and proteins defined the major features of her apartment.

After shutting the door and double-checking to make sure it was locked, the bioprinter was her first stop upon getting inside. Standing in front of the microwave-like machine, she paused only long enough to check her daily biomass allotment before punching in an order for doughnuts. When the interface asked what variety she punched the option to give her a random variety of a little over a dozen and a half. Jelly-filled, cream-filled, covered with chocolate frosting, or dripping with a sugary glaze, she didn't particularly care. For a reason that would probably make perfect sense to any spectator of the previous twenty minutes or so, she wanted Some Fucking Junk Food.

The machine had barely finished replicating her entire order, producing a small pile of donuts on an edible serving plate using a combination of alien nanotechnology and conventional cooking techniques, before she grabbed it and carried it over to the table. Soft, fluffy pastries with a variety of toppings and fillings were consigned to her gullet one after another, her abdomen beginning to swell out into a small pillow-like dome as it filled with sweet, sweet carbohydrates. The last donut cruller, a long stick of soft dough sticky with a honey glaze, was chewed up and halfway down her throat when she finally slowed down enough to realize what she was doing. Staring at the digestible, crumb-strewn plate sadly, she folded the soft material in half and stuffed that into her mouth before swallowing it and accepting reality.

Lying in her bed, she stared at her swollen middle and contemplated the possible irony over a stomach full of doughnuts. She still remembered how it was for Crimson Screamer, an identity that might as well have been a different person for how much she resembled him now. Bestowed a license to terrorize an entire city by a pair of adolescent godlings and given a gaggle of reluctant heroines he was to pay "special attention" to, Crimson Screamer was the terror of the women of Aphrodite City, especially the ones forced to be its guardians, up until the game was ruined by someone he should have suspected all along. Driven into hiding and ultimately killed by one of the heroines gone mad, leading to him being cloned into a new body on this world, everyone back home believing he was dead.

And a lot of bloody good that did, apparently she made plenty of new enemies to replace the old ones, including someone skilled enough to hack the control systems managing the cloning vats. Which lead to where she was now, with a plush hourglass figure that just wouldn't quit, fully internal plumbing, and a passionate set of female hormones. Making her a bit thicker then the kind of fuck toy she once lusted for but apparently one that Ralph still wanted to forcibly bend over a table. As she sat in the dark room, resting a hand on her stomach as it continued to work through her carbohydrate binge, the chubby wolfess stared at the ceiling. Was this what it was like for Shield and the others, get sent on a horrible emotional roller coaster then cry themselves to sleep over a box of snack cakes or a bottle of booze?

For an hour she lay in bed just like that, crying where no one could hear her as an extra eight hundred or so calories continued their way down to her hips. Finally, she got out of bed and turned the lights on, why the hell did she have to be such a damn girly-girl anyway? Goddamn estrogen... Opening her closet, she did her best to avoid cringing as she went through all her outfits. The same malicious hacker that corrupted the template information for her cloned body had also issued an order for all her clothes to get recycled into thirty copies of the exact same outfit; a sleeveless white-furred parka that cut off at the midriff, elbow-length white leather gloves, knee-high white leather boots, and a winter camouflage g-string bikini. Each one of them completely identical to the outfit she was wearing now barring the pants she scrounged and each of them horribly impractical for traipsing around in the snow. It might be nice to keep the one she was wearing for... reasons but no way in hell did she need the other twenty-nine. Gathering them all up in a box, she took the excess outfits to an auto-tailor a few floors down to see about getting some proper cold weather clothing.

Masters of fabrication nanotech, the Rik-Tah had designed a number of machines for making multiple products on demand. Bioprinters manufactured food and medicine while fabricators assembled simple, easily mass produced items like ammunition, components, even clothes. More complex objects like computers and weapons required final assembly but that was easily accomplished by the influx of slave labor that was also employed in operating mining equipment and other industrial machinery needed for providing the fabricators with a steady supply of raw materials.

The auto-tailor was a machine that, as the name suggested, manufactured clothes on demand from a variety of pre-programmed styles. It also broke down unwanted articles into base material that could be used as credit for new outfits. Breaking down the duplicate outfits, McQuinn stepped on the platform in the center of the machine. Red dots danced across her body as laser pointers took her measurements to calculate the perfect fit. Once that was taken care of, she placed her order. The first item was a no-brainer, two suits of Adaptive All-Weather Clothing, smart fabric jumpsuits that would keep her comfortable in anything from the sub-artic conditions outside to Sahara-like desert heat. It could also double as light armor in a pinch if the situation called for it, which was nice.

As the machine worked on her order, she checked the value of her returns versus the cost of her order. Still was plenty left even with AAWCs taxing the machine and its material reserves to its relative limits. Even after adding some casual clothes and underwear to her order, she still had credit left over. Shrugging, she decided to deposit it back to her account. If she needed more clothes she could always buy them later.

Returning to her quarters with her new outfits tucked under her arm, she locked the door behind her... and promptly stopped in front of the full-length mirror. A mix of emotions swirled through her mind as she stared at the gray-furred timber wolf staring back at her. Anger, resentment, and fear danced through her thoughts in equal amounts but there was also something else. Her mind wandered back to her encounter at the mall, feelings of unbridled passion, of a pair of hands gently caressing her ass, and two warm bodies rubbing against her fur. Lost in thought, her fingers retraced the paths taken across her body by people who were supposed to be her enemies. Managing a weak smile, she began to look at her body with a more admiring eye. Perhaps she was still being too harsh on the way things had turned out....