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Original description below this line
Three fraternity bros, on a dare, investigate the mysterious cave deep within the husk of the abandoned mall. Exposed to its air, they transform into sorority sisters – but the third, slipping by accident into a syrupy lavender pool, suffers additionally a far stranger fate…
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https://x.com/Horselover_Fat_/status/1758203354574893199?s=20
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https://x.com/Horselover_Fat_/status/1758203354574893199?s=20
Really looking forward to the story for https://derpibooru.org/images/3275617 !!
Thanks, and working on it! I have 11 parts/chapters of Lexi’s story on the site, but NOT submitted yet. Some pre-readers pointed out a lot of the typos and a few other issues. There will be some re-writing involved now that I’m spending more time to step back and look at them and getting some other viewpoints. I think they’re all changes for the better.
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/552572/the-pal-in-palimpsest
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/552574/cross-purposes
Also drafting up at least one more non-Lexi story, for this image/prompt: https://derpibooru.org/images/3275617
Ha, well the “extra” TF part is so far from my thing I basically have no frame of reference regarding what sort of stuff to push for. Basically just flailing in the dark on my part. And (IMO) the way the AI executed the hybrid aspects makes it more awkward than the average anthro stuff. Thanks though!
I opted to kind of imply that she’s akin to a draconequus now, and I’m leaning towards her having a sort of ethereal tether to the stuff in the pit, acting like a conduit/anchor point to funnel weirdness to the normal world or draw people into the other one.
My original idea was to have her more explicitly merge physically into the pit, and be connected by the tentacle, acting like a sapient “lure” in anglerfish fashion, but I thought leaving her down there might be too limiting. Still might do something like that in the future, making her connection to the pit more physical over time, possibly luring guys into a trap and having them merge into it like male anglerfishes into female ones. But you know me by now, that’s a little dark for my preferences. Feel free to take that as an alt canon, though.
Glad you liked it! Now I think I can continue to extend this continuity a little bit. But I’m definitely not looking to write another novel.
dunno why you thought you were “out of your depth” at all, that was fantastic !!
Spoilered: Physical and mental TG/TF, body horror, weird TF, suggestive, vulgar.
“That didn’t hurt, did it?” the now much, MUCH shorter girl asked.
“Ever had your nipples tweaked?” Cassidy asked. Charlie had to think for a moment… she couldn’t remember ever experience that, no. Seeing her head shaking, Cassidy continued, “Well, the whole thing feels like that anyway. Everywhere you touched was like, ‘nipple nipple nipple’” she said, a surprising red flush painting her cheeks and the top of her small muzzle. “Um, both of them.”
Charlie took her friends hand reassuringly. Then she suddenly realized… “Oh god, this doesn’t feel like that, does it?” she asked, dropping the lavender digits suddenly.
“No, no, that felt normal,” the horse-like head of Cassidy spoke from the end of a gracefully arching neck nearly as tall again as the rest of her body. “Um…. try something else, please?”
Charlie bit her lip and it was her turn to flush. Tentatively, she reached out and placed her had on Cassidy’s slim stomach. Looking to her friend’s face, she was relieved when it shook ‘no.’ “Sam,” she called out to their friend who had stood by, shining bright lights from her goggles-like optics onto them the entire time. “Give her… tail-thing a touch, please.”
Sam silently carried out the request, clipping over on her oversized platform heels (that still didn’t quite bring her up to the same height as Charlie), knelt down, and placed her hands on a section of Cassidy’s ten-meter appendage. It shuddered instantly.
“OH SHIT!” Cassidy cried, straightening out her neck and taking her head far away, at the same time drawing her knees together and wrapping her arms around them. She pulled her thick tail-like extension away from Sam’s panel-lined fingers. “Whoa! That was… um… sensitive.”
“Painful?” Charlie asked again. The asymmetrically-horned head swung side to side quietly, cheeks reddening deeper. “Oh,” Charlie acknowledged. As she looked at the entire length of the girthy, smooth-skinned, moving-spotted mass that wriggled in the air within this dim caver, Charlie realized that whatever happened to her friend’s body was going to be … difficult to adjust to. That part of her body alone was as long as a telephone pole and three times thicker at the base. “Okay, we’ll get you home and fix this-”
“FIX THIS?” Cassidy shouted from deeper within the cavern, her serpentine neck twisting with sudden animation. “Oh sure, we’ll call an ambulance, cram my fat ass-tower into it, drive down to the hospital and get some penicillin! ‘Here you go, Miss Monstrosity! Be sure to take the recommended dose every hour on the hour for three days and you’ll be right as rain!’ HAHAHA, fucking AS-IF!” the inhuman-looking college student cried loudly, reverberating up and down the passage they were in.
Something sloshed in the pool of ooze behind them, startling them to action. Charlie pulled the surprisingly light Cassidy to her feet, picked up their bags, and had Sam lead them on at a running pace back to the main chamber.
“The ropes are gone,” Sam said matter-of-factly as she switched off her light functionality.
“What do you mean the ropes are…” Charlie asked before spinning around, failing to see their neon-orange climbing lines anywhere.
“Perfect,” Cassidy said in a defeated tone. “Well at least I look the part of a cave-dweller now.”
“Maybe we can call for help. Sam,” Charlie said, turning to her assistant. “Can you get a signal now that we’re by the sinkhole?”
“No service,” the blue-haired girl said after tapping the side of her head. “Too deep.”
“Maybe with can climb up those weird fossils?” Charlie suggested, indicating to the coral-like formations that lined the cavern walls from floor to ceiling. She walked over and touched one to gauge its strength. Contact with her finger tip caused it contract suddenly, closing up and shriveling into itself. It wasn’t stone at all. Charlie backed away to the others.
“No dice,” she admitted, sighing deeply. “Wait a second, didn’t we have harnesses when we came down?”
“That’s correct,” Sam replied.
“So… what happened to them?” she asked as Cassidy huddled down into the fetal position, now with one million percent more neck and a billion percent more tail-kite. Charlie was desperately trying to think of something to keep hers and her friend’s spirits up.
“I’m not able to answer that question,” Sam replied unhelpfully.
“I’m sure we didn’t take them off,” Charlie said, thinking back over their steps to this point. “I remember it pinching my ballsac- uh… my… no, wait, that’s right… Wait, what the hell?” she asked, suddenly puzzled at a set of incongruous memories related to her own anatomy. “Fuck, that can’t be right!”
“We were indeed male prior to our descent and exploration,” Sam confirmed without alarm. “I speculate that something in this cave has transformed all of us into our current state.”
“Hah, so I guess I’m not alone in being a freak,” Cassidy chuckled darkly.
Charlie looked down at herself. Cute top, hip-huggers, a couple of bracelets, high heels… that all seemed right and natural. She looked at Sam, clad in a breezy dress that softened the artificial design language of her hands and optics, standing steady on the highest platforms of all of them. She regarded the way Cassidy’s billowing dress was stretched out by her altered anatomy but clung to her slim body in other places like normal. She tried to remember what they were doing down here; obviously not dressed for caving. Hadn’t they come here to find some things to impress the fraternity bros from Eta-Rho-Sigma at tonight’s party? Or… was it to impress her fellow sisters of Pi-Omega-Nu? Nothing made sense.
“We really have to get out of here,” she concluded anew. “I think this place is messing with our heads, too. Cassidy, can you, like, stretch up and reach the rim of the sinkhole?” she asked her mutated friend whose head was resting inertly on her own ankles.
“I don’t this so,” she doubted, raising her head up to full height (from a sitting position this was almost as tall as Charlie standing). She bit her muzzle’s lip in consideration, the green shimmering discs of her eyes flicking side to side with fast mental calculus. Experimentally, she knelt down on all fours and arched her back, the re-curved motion flowing through her ‘tail’ like a wave and raising it upwards improbably high, like it weighed nothing. But even once it was fully extended, it fell about twenty feet short of the rim and their salvation. “Nope, sorry. No Cassidy-ladder for us.”
“Okay, okay… think….” Charlie said, turning in place and darting her eyes around them. “What if we went and got a bunch of stuff from the caverns and piled it-”
“Forget it, I’m not going back out into there!” Cassidy yelled as she stood back up, rearing her head to its full three meters of height. “Look what happened to me last time! Hell, look what happened to all of you! It’s suicide! We’ll end up turned into hermit crabs or something!”
“We can’t just give up now, Cass!” Charlie insisted.
“Maybe you can’t, but I can,” the draconic-equine girl insisted, sitting back down and crossing her legs. “It’s not like I’d have a normal life anymore, anyway,” she muttered. “Might as well starve down here and spare the world a fright.”
“Hey, we’re NOT going to starve down here!” Charlie argued, suddenly wondering how many calories she’d brought in her handbag. The usual protein bar was suddenly seeming really meager to the task of climbing out, once they even figured out how to do that. She looked to Sam, who simply stared back impassively. “Any ideas?” she asked.
“I’m cut off from my online functionality, so my generative facilities are reduced to local resources only,” Sam responded. “Sorry, I’m at a loss right now.”
Charlie sighed and regarded Cassidy, sitting on the floor and looking like she was just waiting to fossilize. She indicated to Sam to join her in sitting with their friend and offering some comfort.
“Heh, thanks girls,” Cassidy said with an unsteady voice as the two knelt down and hugged her around the shoulders. “Sorry your first caving experience turned out to be such a bummer, Charlie.”
“Hey, it’s not over yet,” Charlie said while picking up Cassidy’s limp hand and weaving their fingers together. “We’ll think of something, we just need some time.”
“Yeah well, that we have in abundance,” Cassidy smirked sardonically. She commanded her hovering tail to encircle them, slowly drawing closer, until it was holding the three of them in a gentle embrace.
“Um, Cass? Didn’t you say that your tail, uh, that touching it was…” Charlie started.
“It doesn’t matter,” Cassidy said with a shiver as the erogenous sensations paddled lazily through her nervous system at the feel of her friends’ bodies against the impossible extension of hers. In a quiet and vulnerable tone, she continued. “I just need a hug right now. No homo.”
The three of them were curled up on a joined-up quad of mattresses laid on the floor of what was obviously a bedroom, with no bed frames to be seen.The fitted sheets were color-coordinated to make a black and white chessboard pattern of the four queen-sized rectangles beneath them, and there was a massive pile of extra large sheets and bed spreads bunched up behind them at the closest wall. A closet door was open, revealing all manner of dresses, skirts, and blouses. Stacks of shoes, too. Cassidy pivoted her head on its snakey monopod and saw a messy desk with her studying supplies and a closed laptop by the window, and in the opposite corner across from the door a jumbo-sized lava lamp of glowing pink globs in clear purple fluid. She blinked her plate-like green eyes in confusion. Then she felt a thrill draw her attention as Charlie and Sam rose out of her coiled tail and stepped carefully over it to set foot on the floor underneath the quadruple mattresses.
“What happened?” Charlie asked.
“GPS acquired. Network signal acquired. Wifi password accepted,” Sam announced. “We are in the Pi-Omega-Nu sorority house. The current time is… 7:56 pm, Friday, M-”
“Wait, no shit?” Charlie gasped excitedly. She looked around to take it all in. “This is… your room, Cass,” she said after a moment. “Don’t ask how I know, I just do.”
“Yeah,” Cassidy responded with the same amazement. “But that doesn’t make any sense.”
“Nothing makes sense, but at least we’re not in that hole anymore,” Charlie said after a moment. “It sounds like the party’s getting started. Um, you want to come join in?”
Cassidy’s pony-like head gave a look as though she’d just been asked to join in on eating a human corpse. “Are you crazy? I can’t go out there like this,” she said, reflexively pointing to where her face would have been on her old body rather than where it was now, about three feet to the right and a foot higher with her horns nearly scraping the ceiling.
“HEY CHARLIE! SAM! CASS!” shouted someone from the other room. “COME ON OUT! WE PROMISE WE WON’T GOSSIP IN FRONT OF YOUR BACKS!” followed by some good-natured laughter and the clinking of glass bottles. Charlie looked at Sam, who was impassive as usual. She looked to Cassidy, who had the expression of a drowning sailor adrift at sea.
“Um, I’ll go out and get a feel for things, okay? C’mon Sam, let’s test the waters and report back.” She held out her hand and her assistant took it, escorting her out to cheers from the party-goers.
“Me?” Cassidy asked in reply, pointing to herself.
“Of course you, girl! C’mon, the boys don’t bite unless you ask them to!” she strode over and took Cassidy’s hand (a lot of that going around, she thought) and started pulling to lead her out into the crowd. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Not feeling it? I can tell them you’re getting sick if you want,” she said, looking into Cassidy’s enormous green eyes without flinching. In fact, she seemed… genuinely concerned her friend might be sick?
“Um, I just need a minute,” Cassidy said hastily. “My, uh…” she looked down (way down) at her body. “My dress got all dusty earlier, I need to change into something clean?”
“Oh hey, yeah!” Rebecca said with a snap of her fingers as she looked to the handbags piled on Cassidy’s mattress nest. “Are those the things you guys found in the old mall? Mind if I take them out so Charlie and Sam can show us while we wait?”
“Um, I think we’d better not…” Cassidy answered hesitantly.
“Okay. Don’t be too long, Cass!” Rebecca said as she turned and took a sip of her glass while walking back out. “She says she’ll be out in a minute!”
“Hey guys, how’s it going?” Cassidy asked nervously.
“We were just getting to the part where you guys rappelled down the sinkhole,” said a handsome frat bro. He turned back to Sam, who was apparently narrating the whole thing in detail. Maybe a bit too much detail, Cassidy thought.
“Okay, ready?” asked one of the sorority sisters as Sam laid her silicone-skinned hands on the girl’s chest. “Quick, someone call Charlie’s number!” A few phones left their owners’ pockets and a lewd smile split the girl’s face when Sam’s hands started to vibrate in waves. Silent mode. The girl buried her blushing face in the neck of a frat bro who hand his arm around her shoulder as the crowd cheered her daring spirit. Cecelia broke up the experiment after a moment; she was ‘cool’ but she still had a job to do as House Mom, and one of those was to prevent any unplanned pregnancies by not letting the party get TOO out of control. Her attitude was that some exploration was fine and healthy, though, so she was about the least strict manager the sorority ever had in recent memory.
Charlie’s head rested on Cassidy’s shoulder. “See? After all the weirdness, I think this is just what we needed.”
“Yeah, the day’s been pure chaos alright,” Cassidy admitted. “At least this is the fun kind of chaos,” she said, pointing her empty glass at the way the group had split into various little sub-parties with old friends getting together and new ones being introduced to each other.
“You know, what you said earlier,” Charlie began. “About ‘no homo’ back in the cave?”
“Yeah?” Cassidy replied, suddenly feeling very flush.
“Maybe it’s just the booze talking but I’m just saying, if you ever want to… y’know, deviate, me and Sam are here for you.”
“Thanks,” Cassidy said, blushing with the fury of a thousand sons. This was a little much to process. “I think I’ve had enough to drink, though, so I’m just going to go comatose in my room.”
“Okay, get some rest.” Charlie gave Cassidy’s neck-mane a friendly scritch before the taller (much, MUCH taller) girl rose to her feet, a little unsteadily, and crooked her neck to avoid putting holes in the next storey’s floor. Waving off pleas to keep partying, she doubled-back on her oddly weightless ten meter tail and, when she was sure it was all accounted for, closed the door to her bedroom. She looked at the handbags full of cursed mall detritus with an uncomfortable glare before grabbing their straps and throwing them into her closed. Brushing off the center of the four mattresses, she kicked off her shoes. Not even bothering to take off her dress, Cassidy hunched down and began winding her inordinately large and floaty tail around herself in a tight coil, noting with some relief that doing so didn’t seem to trigger her… sensitivities. Hugging her knees and balling up as the powerful, pattern-shifting tail supported more and more of her weight and encased more and more of her body, she took a deep breath, let her head come to rest on one of her coils, and drifted off to sleep. This certainly has been a chaotic day, she mused under heavy eyelids.
1: WTF? XD Soooo out of my depth with this one.
2: Half the reason I wrote this all out is because it gives me an idea for the sweater-dress Rarity pic that went up earlier. More sorority fun?
Spoilered: Physical and mental TG/TF, body horror, weird TF, suggestive, vulgar.
“Yeah, trust us. We know knots and climbing,” Cassidy said as he and Sam as they secured their ropes around one of the huge, reinforced concrete columns holding up the building’s roof. Cassidy a full head taller than Charlie, and had a lean and wiry physique that ran in his family. His sisters often complained about getting cursed with “bird leg genetics,” while the men were always recruited into games of b-ball in school. Charlie didn’t care for sports, which gave him a healthy disappointment in other people’s assumptions based on his frame. It also sometimes became a burden when squeezing into tight spaces in old concrete or natural caverns. Despite that, he loved the challenges and solitude of caving and the ‘ruins of our recent past’ aspect to urban ex. This trip had been his idea.
“Don’t worry man, I’ll descend with you clipped to my harness so I’ve got us both,” Sam said reassuringly. He was the shortest of the three, but an absolute unit of compact musculature. He wished he had Cassidy’s build for his climbing hobby, but being a ‘mountain dwarf’ (as Charlie called him when they discussed their shared love of fantasy novels) with a penchant for raw strength had its advantages. Especially since he and Cassidy had started the fraternity’s unofficial Urban Ex Club. (Unofficial, of course, because it was basically glorified trespassing.) Sam set up the light at the edge of the sinkhole that would help them orient themselves down at the bottom and motioned for Charlie, medium build and nervous about his first rope trip, over to show him how to wear the spare harness and how to secure himself to Sam’s.
“Alright, brothers of Eta Rho Sigma,” Cassidy said as they verified their safety checks and shouldered their packs. “Are you ready delve deep and plumb this fallen temple to Consumerism for its untold forgotten riches?” Sam and Charlie gave each other a skeptical look at his florid prose. “Allow me to rephrase, then,” Cassidy said. “Are you ready to find some cool shit to impress the chicks of Pi Omega Nu at the party tonight?”
“YEAH!” the other two shouted enthusiastically, though Charlie still sounded a little more nervous than Sam.
“Looks like a coral reef,” Cassidy said beside him. He’d been first to land and secure his line and was now slinging the beam of his headlamp around the vast cavern. “Could be this was an ancient seabed in prehistoric times?”
“That usually produces solid limestone which gets dissolved by the passage of water,” Sam said as he took care of his own line. “So while that could explain the sinkhole, it wouldn’t explain the state of preservation,” he added while looking around in awe a the various polyp-like forms that covered every surface their light hit other than the cavern’s floor. It was definitely a cavern, stretching out in multiple directions, with the strangely patterned rock columns stretching from the floor back up towards the foundations of the old mall. As they landed, they must have kicked up some old dust; drifting particles glowed in the beams from their headlamps as well as the spotlight above.
“This is why I love spelunking,” Cassidy proclaimed. “Look at this place! Charlie, get some video!”
“Right,” the neophyte said as he pulled out his phone and started capturing digital footage of their surroundings.
“How do you think it got down here?” Charlie asked as he swept the camera over the detritus. “Another sinkhole?”
“Had to be,” Cassidy said, though when he looked up the beam of his headlamp didn’t quite illuminate the roof of the cavern enough to pick out such an opening. “Hey, some of these clothes are in good shape. Think the sisters of Pi-Omega-Nu will be impressed with the fashions of yesteryear?” he asked, picking up a few items and setting his pack down.
“Dude-” Charlie started to say, but was interrupted by the scratchiness of his voice. “Ahem, dude. This is probably stuff their older sisters were wearing, not their thrice-great grandparents.” His voice actually broke a couple of times, and he rubbed his smooth and slender throat to try and clear out whatever it was.
“Yeah,” said Sam, his voice squeaking similarly as he attempted to clear it with a few coughs. “Still, though, couldn’t hurt. I WONDer-” he stopped as the pitch of his voice shot up about three octaves momentarily. “I wonder if there’s still a cash register around here?”
“How do you think the rock started growing over these racks,” Charlie asked, nervous energy seeming to elevate the register of his voice too. He scratched his chest and adjusted his pants; for some reason they felt baggie AND tight, in the wrong places. He started to suspect the humid air down here was affecting his fitness.
“Limestone can accrete in the space of a few years under the right conditions,” Cassidy said, now afflicted by the same nervous energy that preferentially made their voices sound higher and more excited. “Some creationists used to find ‘fossils’ of old mining boots covered with limestone and say it was proof evolution couldn’t be true, but really it’s just normal mineralization. We like to think the rock below us is unchanging, but the truth is it’s always changing. Terra firma’s more chaotic than people suspect.”
“Remind me to crib your notes in geology,” Sam said with a chuckle that sounded more like a giggle. “Hey, come look at this!” he said, calling the others’ attention to a pile of junk in a corner of the cavern. Their combined lights illuminated a massive stack of mannequins and other partial-body displays, heaped up in a rough cone nearly five meters tall against one of the coral-like stone walls. “We gotta get a picture! Charlie?”
“On it,” Charlie said as he finished framing the wreckage. “Now you two!” he directed for the others to squeeze in and mug for the camera. They adopted various lewd poses with some of the mannequin torsos and legs, chuckling (more like tittering) like young girls who’d just discovered they could strip their dolls naked. “Okay, now you get a picture of me in there!” he said, motioning for a volunteer to switch places and take his phone. Sam stepped up and Charlie moved next to Cassidy, opting to forego the suggestive poses and merely spread his arms to indicate the treasure hoard behind them. Just as Sam was framing them, a loud bang and a cracking sound ricocheted around the chamber, eliciting surprisingly girly screams from the shocked fraternity brothers. A piece of the wall gave way, tumbling down the steep slope and crashing onto the pile of mannequins, exploding into a cloud of the same sparkly dust that drifted in the still atmosphere of this shopping necropolis. The dust cloud spread with the rapidity of a pyroclastic flow (thought Cassidy), engulfing the three in a fine powder that clung to their sweaty skin and burned like lips subjected to ultra-hot pepper sauce, then rushed into their lungs and seemed to displace all the air. Sam, standing a few meters back, was swallowed by the tsunami of dust as he held Charlie’s phone up to try and protect his face. Their bodies desperately attempted to expel the foreign particles from their lungs, reducing them to coughing lumps huddled on the cavern floor. Dizziness overtook them all, their awareness shrinking down to the contours of their own bodies as oxygen was depleted and their torso spasmed uncontrollably. Consciousness began to fade…
“I guess,” sputtered Sam, standing a fair distance away from the others. “My hands feel kinda numb, though,” she added.
“Cassidy?” Charlie asked.
“Present,” her statuesque companion spat out, literally; she was trying to rid her mouth of dust. “I think we should get out of here,” she said, slowly rising to her feet.
“What happened to our lights?” Charlie asked, noticing that not a one of them had a beam projecting from their heads.
“Must’ve been taken out by that dust,” Cassidy speculated. “Let’s follow the light back to the sinkhole.”
“Right,” Charlie agree, brushing dust off her bare arms and then her jeans. “Sam, where’s my phone?”
“Here,” Sam answered, holding out her arm.
“I can’t see, turn on the flash light,” Charlie said. She waited for a moment and two bright beams blinded her. “ACK! WHAT THE FUCK, SAM?” she cried.
“You said turn on on the flash light,” the shorter girl replied. The twin beams remained locked onto Charlie as she blinked, her dark-adjusted vision burnt away with the sudden illumination.
“I mean on my phone!” Charlie griped, shielding her eyes and looking to where Sam stood.
“I did,” Sam replied.
“Oh…” Charlie said, her mind whirling as if caught in the eddy of a stream she couldn’t see. “Oh… right. I forgot for a second. Okay, um, lead us back out, Sam,” she requested.
Sam gave an acknowledging chirp and turned to shine her eye beams down the passage they’d originally come from.
“Sometimes I forget she’s a digital assistant,” Charlie said to Cassidy, who was dusting off her ruined dress.
“I know what you mean,” the taller girl said with a final cough to clear some lingering phlegm. “Let’s get our bags and get out of here.” She stooped down to pick up their packs… no, wait, that wasn’t the right word. She picked up hers and Sam’s handbags while Charlie dusted hers off and the three followed Sam’s guidance to retrace their steps.
“Whatever shifted to cause that rock to fall back there must’ve opened up a crack here and let something flood out,” Charlie suggested. “I think we can jump across there, where it’s narrow.” She pointed to the right-hand side where the cavern wall met the floor; the pool only reached about five feet across there. The three girls made their way over. Sam took the bags and tossed them across, then went back to get a long running start. With the practiced ease of a gymnast, she hurdled the pool and cleared it by a few extra feet on the other side. Charlie went next, but despite her longer legs she was not as powerful as her assistant; she only made the jump with inches to spare. “Your turn, Cassidy!” she said, waving to the taller girl on the other side.
Cassidy felt confident she could top them all; her lanky build and bird legs being a benefit in this situation at least. She went back and gathered up speed to make the jump. However, her platform shoes slipped on a loose stone and sent her sprawling on her back into the thick goo with a sickening SPLAT.
“FUCK! Help me get out of this!” she cried, reaching for her friends. She meant to finish with ‘It’s some ooze,’ but what reached their ears was “It’s s’m’OOOz-MMMGLB!” before it was muffled by a thick glob of the liquid, rebounding off the far edge from her splashdown, filled her mouth. Her eyes flew open wide in panic as the heavy, gooey sludge slid down her throat with alarming speed before she could react to spit it back out. By the time her friends hands reached her own, it was already a done deal. “Eaugh, shit! I swallowed some of it!” she cried when her throat was cleared enough to speak. She could feel her skin starting to crawl with revulsion as whatever it was settled down into her stomach thickly.
“We’ve got to get you to a hospital,” Charlie said with a flair for the obvious. “Are you feeling okay?
“N-no… I’m not,” Cassidy answered, her eyes growing wide. “I feel… sick… and… twitchy? Oh god, something’s happening!” she cried. Slender hands reached for a throat that was already starting to swell and turn purple before Charlie’s eyes in the light cast by Sam’s. Something glinted green in her pupils as her face began to contort.
“Oh my god, can you breathe?” Charlie asked.
“Yes… but… oh god… please…” Cassidy replied without any signs of chocking, despite how thickly her neck bulged outwards beneath her chin. “Pressure! Pr-” SNAP
Charlie stood in shocked silence as Cassidy’s skull wobbled. But her friend’s limbs were still moving as if under her control, and her eyes shimmered green in Sam’s light, but didn’t stray from their lock on Charlie’s face. Then her head began to push upwards away from her shoulders.
“Oh god, what’s happening?” Cassidy asked, looking down on the stunned Charlie who was powerless to answer. “I feel my spine tingling! Something’s… pushing…” Her head ratcheted up another few inches as the swelling bud of her neck was engorged with a sudden pulse. And then another, with the same result. And another. Horrifying to watch, Cassidy’s face began so shift and distort even as it was pushed further and further away from the swollen neck. “Help, please…” she whispered desperately before her head was jerked further up with another pulse. Charlie’s eyes fell to her friend’s collarbone, where a light purple patch was growing downwards even as her neck was thrusting up. It started pushing out the neckline of her dress, obscenely inflating two round forms where her normal breasts had been seconds before. The skin on them started to crease in regular intervals, a banding pattern repeated on her still-growing neck as Charlie returned her look to her friend’s face. Except now it wasn’t that face. Her mouth had pushed forward like a potato-shaped muzzle, and some long, thin shapes were beginning to project form the top of her head. They were quickly obscured by a billowing cascade of her purple hair, now streaked with pink. Her eyes were enormous, the size of saucers, but framed with the thickest and longest lashes Charlie had ever seen. And their discs were adorned with two green circles of shifting, shimmering iridescence where iris and pupils had once sat.
The tower-like abomination growing out of Cassidy’s body toppled over to hands and knees, the thick neck-stalk arcing like a scorpion’s tail with its mutant head as the stinger… was that an actual stinger? No, there were two horns; one thick and slightly curved growing from the center of dome-like forehead and the other a sharp, irregular spike jutting up through her voluminous new hair. Two pointed, pale lavender ears flapped in distress as Cassidy cried out in misery
“Oh god, it’s not stopping! It’s spreading down my back!” she cried from five feet further out past her shoulders than before. Indeed, by the lights Sam’s eyes cast on their friend Charlie could see bowling-ball sized pockets of something shifting under Cassidy’s dress, running down her spine and lodging on the small of her back. Each pulse seemed to push the tumorous growth further… and further… further again… it tore a hole through the back of her dress and speckled lavender flesh like a finger flopped out. Instead of falling to the ground it hung in the air as if suspended by some unseen wires, wriggling and continuing to fill out, stretch on, and grow. Growing. Becoming as thick as a tree trunk, then as thick as the column to which they’d tied off their lines, the bottom half a lighter color top decorated with shifting, restless purple spots that flowed along her new skin impossibly fast and randomly. It touched the far wall of the cavern and Cassidy gasped at the alien sensation registering in her brain for the first time.
“Are you hurting?” Charlie asked, helplessness in her voice as she watched her friend’s body remodeled into something that defied all analogy.
“No, it… it doesn’t hurt,” Cassidy replied through a couple of strained grunts. “It feels… nice…”
Charlie looked to the placid Sam, who kept her eye lights trained on the gradually slowing mutation of their friend.