Pink and I found our way out, my head spinning with my options and a few glasses of drink in my belly.

We had started to sneak out the front, making our way to freedom, when the Bouncer weighed us down. We got sidetracked by a random encounter between the tyke and the terror, B&B and the awkward drama between them.

Little B and Big B had gotten into the B and were now being minorly bitchy with one another.

It was not without its ups and downs. On the upside, we got more beer for the road. On the downside, we got dragged through the women's strange relationship.

I learned a few things, most of which I did not care for.

One, Lil’B was very good at getting people to do things, and two, Big’B was not the cradle robber in this situation.

I supposed everyone had relationship goals. I wanted a normal life where I could have a casual relationship with someone who made my limbic system go epileptic. The little cradle robber wanted a tall woman so she could reach a top shelf and be carried everywhere.

These were both goals… Kind of. While I didn’t care, the little gremlins' rewards made the transaction a worthwhile expenditure of effort to push the Bouncer into her no doubt tiny bed again.

The lucky little shit.

But luck aside, more beer for the bender and a flustered Bouncer later, we were out the door and past the flag, down the street, our heading set for the couch where I would serve my penance to Pinky. Our time started halfway through a season; the two of us were sober enough to understand what was going on, and it ended with us drunk as all hell by the end of the finale.

“Sooo,” Pinky said with a dumb grin, face flush as she spread out on the couch.

“So?” I said, for too coherently.

“So! It was good,” Pinky claimed.

“It was weird,” I told her, not disagreeing so much as stating the facts.

“Nah, it's good,” Pinky said resolutely, her words the height of eloquence.

“But it was kinda goofy, you know? There was a bunch of new stuff, too. What was with the tentacles? Why was it weirdly hot? I know a tentacle monster, you know, he was never that… erotic. Why did…” I told her, pausing as I taped around in my head for the name before giving up, “Why did his face go all, you know?” I asked her, making a funny face.

“Because she went all evil from being brainwashed,” Pinky told me

“With the tentacles? That’s… Ok. Why is the whole transformation thing on top of it, though? There was already the unresolved love… Heptagram? And now its going to be all wonky because he was stuck all cutesy?” I asked her, my despicable little mind incapable of seeing the downside of any of that.

“Because they needed to sell the next season? They can’t just fix everything, or there won't be any interpersonal drama, so they made some new stuff. It’s also good. I love gender-bending, and as far as they go, she’s kind of hot,” Pinky said.

“She got like a tiny bump in the chest. She was already all girly… He was? I don’t care. They’re all already weirdly close, so nothing changed? Why the tentacles, though?” I asked her for the third time.

It was a hang-up. They were weirdly sexual, especially the way they drew them with their face. It brought to mind images that made me more bricked up but in a weirder way.

“They’re tentacles; they’re exactly what you think they are, pervert.” She told me smugly.

“Yeah, but-” I started for the fourth time only to receive a kick in the shin as Pinky drunkenly slid around to shush me.

I stared at the finger, Pinky saying, “No more tentacles. Think only about cute girls and the great relationship chart,” she said.

“Flowchart?” I asked her, confused.

“Cute girl relationship flowchart,” she said, eyes a glimmer.

“But why?” I asked her.

“Because we need to know who wants who? Not all of them want each other… Duh?” She asked as if I were particularly slow.

“But they’re all into each other?” I asked her.

Pinky, taken aback, sat up and stood, stumbling over to her room before bringing out a whiteboard with a series of lines as she began to explain the flowchart.

Ten minutes of my life later, I stared at the board, more confused than when she started.

“So… She only likes her because boobs, but she’s not interested back because she doesn’t have big thighs?” I asked her.

“Basically,” Pinky explained.

“I can understand that,” I told her, “Thick thighs end lives, and I’m trying to get on death row, but that’s just stupid.”

“Boo,” Pinky told me with a thumbs down, “thighs are for suckers. Boobs are top, hands down.”

“Second best, take it or leave it,” I told her.

“You’re just salty, you know,” she told me, making a tiny gesture.

“Ey, leave my boobs alone. They’re low drag and low maintenance,” I told her.

“Mosquito bites,” Pinky said with a smirk.

“Keep my non-existent boobs out of your mouth,” I told her.

She looked at me as I ran that one through my head a few more times before I scowled, and Pinky lost her shit laughing.

“I couldn’t put them in my mouth if I tried!” she cackled.

“Listen-” I told her.

“They're not bad. I hear washboards are important. Some people prefer flat,” Pinky further mocked.

“They're not that small. Listen.” I told her more emphatically, “I’m not against boobs; I would say I’m firmly in the camp of them being great; I just don’t like them when they’re on me. They get in the way.”

“I bet you would get used to them if you spent your free time in your peacekeeper form. I know it was a big shock for me at first, but you get used to them the longer they’re there. They’ve certainly grown on me,” she said, breath slowing as she got her laughter under control.

“I certainly hope they grow on you. It would be quite the scare if they didn’t…” I told her, the implication of her chest being artificial flying over my head, “I also can’t get behind staying in peacekeeper form for too long. It tells me how to be a manipulative asshole. I’m only one of those things,” I griped, pride stinging like it hadn’t in forever.

It was one thing to have someone you thought was a moron make jokes at your expense, it was another for a friend, and I hadn’t had many close friends, just friendly acquaintances.

“You are both,” she told me, pointing her finger back at me, “The form doesn’t change you, not mentally; it just highlights what was already there, taking the parts of your mind that you bury and bringing them to the surface. It is the same thing with Warform. All of that is pressed into the cracks and suppressed.”

“I’ll show you pressed into the cracks,” I told her, quickly finishing a bottle and standing up.

The world spun as I did. The entire planet revolving around my head, my mundane senses unable to orient me. My less mundane senses, however, found ground quickly as my extra sensory talent whispered what way the ground was, orienting me despite the whorl of my more mundane senses.

Holding tight to the direction of down, I turned toward Pinky, the spin of the world bringing my feet out from under me before I crashed down on Pinky. A crazy coincidence, or at least, it looked like that.

Pinky watched me stand confusingly before falling straight into her chest, head straight into her cleavage. It was comfy, like a big pillow. She was warm, which was nice, the warmth of her chest matching the heat of my face.

“Hey, keep your face out of there. I’m not a pillow.” Pinky chided.

“If you're not a pillow, then why are you so comfy?” I asked her, lifting my head to look at her.

“Because my skin and clothes are soft. If you keep pressing in, you're going to fall in. Keep your head out of there,” Pinky told me, rolling me over onto my back, head displacing the pillows, the back of my head coming to rest on only one breast as it was ejected.

“Ug,” I said as light from the screen was on in my eye.

“Ug, yourself,” she said.

“Ug,” I agreed, “Still soft.”

“Well, I’m glad you comfortable using me as a pillow,” she said, though not with enough feeling to get me to get off. There was something in her tone that told me she enjoyed it. Pinky being Pinky, it was impossible to tell why, but she liked it.

“Mmhm. You’re not wide enough to be a bed, maybe in your warform. You’re buff as hell in warform… Why am I so tired?” I asked her.

Pinky shuddered at the mention of her warform, a feeling I thought I had shared with her. It was a lot. I probably wouldn’t use it again without the remaining shard I needed for stability, even if there was a dark thrill at the idea of using it.

“You’re hungry because despite us powering our fighting with energy, we're still using our bodies. At the end of the day, you’re still meat, and you're powered by food. Jumping over a building is the kind of thing that should tear your muscles to ribbons, but it didn’t. Hold on,” she said, reaching beneath my head into her chest before pulling something out and handing it to me.

“What is this?” I asked her, looking at the goo inside.

It looked like raw algae, just green stuff in the water. It wasn’t even processed into real food.

“This is a very nutrient-dense algae. Lots of good stuff in there. It’s not very filling, but it has everything you need to bring yourself back into shape… It does taste terrible, though. Wash it down with some drink, and you’ll be feeling better by tomorrow.” She told me, shaking her own vial.

I looked at the gross vial of goo.

“I think this is more likely to kill me or grow uncontested in my stomach,” I told her, putting down her vial.

“Your loss, more for me,” she shrugged, quickly downing both of our vials as I watched in horror.

Perhaps this was the material that made Pinky so perky all the time. If it banished exhaustion and Pinky was constantly drinking it, it would be like someone who was constantly caffeinated.

“Is that what gives you so much damn energy?” I asked her, looking up into her face.

“Maybe. I do feel pretty great most of the time, though I think it's more that I get to be myself like this. Can’t run around in peacekeeper form at work, after all.” She said, then with some more thought, “and I probably get too much, considering paperwork isn’t very strenuous.”

“That explains so much,” I told her, eyeing the vials as she reached behind my head and stashed them back in her cleavage. I had thought she was high when I first met her; her being high on life was a first, but then again, Pinky was built differently.

She had to have some kind of weird bag in there, just like my pocket box, just bigger, considering it could hold more than a purse.

“How much can you fit in there?” I asked her.

“I could never,” Pinky said with a blush. “Asking a girl how much she can fit in there? How much I can fit in here is my secret. Besides, you shouldn’t ask someone about their chest like that. I wouldn’t ask about your chest.”

“As we’ve discussed, I don’t have one; my tiny cups weep. And besides that, I’m currently using your chest as a pillow. Your line is me asking how much you can fit in there. Honestly, it's like your… Oh my god… You stole that from one of these shows, didn’t you?” I said, realizing that she totally would have stolen it from one of these shows.

“I mean, yes?” she said in a way that was more question than answer.

“Are the random letters you sent me while I was trapped with Norman also from these? How much of you is referential?” I asked her, her face transforming to bashful.

“It’s not a reference; it was just me texting you. What was wrong with my text?” She asked.

“It was all random letters?” I asked her, “What did it even say?”

She huffed, “Use your imagination if you’re so wild on telling me what I’m doing.”

“Ug,” I told her, sitting up and scooting from on to next to her.

We sat in the dark for a few moments, our minds going their own ways while I sat there confused about her defensiveness and my inability to see in with her eyes.

“You know, Pinky, I can’t wrap my head around you. You’re a funny little package of things I can’t puzzle apart. I can’t put a pin in you, not on my life. Either way, I’m not trying to shame you for enjoying something, so try not to hold my fat mouth against me, yeah? It's hard enough keeping up with you on something totally normal,” I told her.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

“Maybe not? But you are my friend.” She sighed, tension ebbing from her shoulders, “You can understand something more important than a joke or reference. Even if you can’t understand me, you can understand what it's like to be like me, and you’re the only person who's ever been like that; the rest can come later.”

“I hope it does, I’m not all that great of a friend,” I told her.

“You're doing your best. That’s why you’re my bestie. You're just new to the game.” Pinky told me.

“I have the friendliness of a half-dead wild animal,” I told her.

“You’re scrungly, but you’re not fake. You put on a strong face, and you’re rough around the edges, but you’re real.”

“A real asshole,” I told her, not feeling the joke.

“Stop putting yourself down for a second. I don’t want to shut you up. Most people aren’t genuine. It had to be fate that made us bump into each other; I couldn’t have asked for a better person to bump into,” She told me.

“I hope it wasn’t fate,” I told her, “Me and fate have a bad relationship. Fates a cruel bitch.”

“Life’s a cruel bitch, but you get it. You don’t have your head in the sand. There’s more to life than fake people and the day-to-day,” Pinky told me.

“I wish I could tell you I do, but I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” I told her, the drink getting to me, her talking opening cracks in my head for the drink to flow into.

“Hold on,” Pinky told me, reaching over to the alcohol and fetching another drink before passing it to me.

“Are you trying to kill me?” I asked her.

“One more drink can’t hurt. If we want to get into it, let's get into it so drunk we can’t remember it, right?” Pinky asked.

“Sure, though I can’t see that being helpful,” I told her, knocking the cap off and downing it as quickly as I could before I helped her do the same.

We sat there in the mostly dark; our words were not yet ready, not yet loaded with meaning to carry the distance between us. I could feel the weight of my eyelids draw them closed, my mind still whirling. For all that, we sat mere scoots away from each other; the darkened room was empty as the void. There would be no judgment, not here, in this place and time. This transient blip in space was ours alone.

I opened my eyes, the screen had gone out, but I could make out Pinky, dim light enough to make out her form.

“There's something terrible about it. Something… I don’t know,” I told her.

“Terrible and wonderous?” she answered almost immediately.

“Exhilarating,” I let out with a rasp.

“Life sucked. I hated it. It made me curl into a little ball, made me wear a mask… But now I feel like I have wings,” she said, her voice horse, “how ironic is it that the peacekeeper form, the highlight of the social mask, lets me tear mine off?”

“It's like we're two ends of a loadstone; I have no mask… or not a very good one, but taking that away left me with everything I have left. An animal, all of my human shell I’ve hollowed out with bullets and blades and bloodshed, guided by wire from one place to the next?” I continued.

“We’re free,” she said wistfully, “free in spirit, freed from our very minds and bodies, from everything we were made from.”

“Were broken, sundered. I feel wrong; I feel broken; I think I’ve always been broken. Maybe it took looking at myself in the mirror to tell.”

“We can change, we can become whatever we want. If we are broken, we can mend ourselves; if we are chained to the lives we live, we can escape. We are spirit alone; we are free will made manifest.”

“We are two steps shy of the greatest evil; the chains that bind are there to protect the weak from the strong. Made to protect from people with the power.”

“We can do just that. Those without power are trodden upon every day, and those with demand others trod only much as they do. Unshackled, we can do so much good,” she said.

“Being free means there is nothing to hold you down, no gravity beneath your feet, nothing holding you from flying too close to the sun.”

“We are very different,” Pinky said.

“We're surprisingly similar,” I told her.

“I will be your red silken chain if you’ll have me. We’ve been pulled together by the ties that bind us. If you are broken, I will tie you together; I will tie you to me; I will give you me so when you look in a reflection, you can see just how broken you are.” She told me.

“I will be your shackle. I will tie you to the ground so you don’t fly towards the sun when you need only your own light and a mirror to see by,” I reassured her.

“That’s a tall order. Are you sure you can even hold me? I’m delicate after you take away my insincerity, you know?” she asked me directly, scooting closer to me.

“Are you sure you can hold a broken heart full of black glass and nails without getting blood on you?” I asked her, my mind, my conscience screaming at me to abort, to not go through, while fate prickled at me, its strings shifted me closer to her.

“I’m a free bird by night, but by day, I eat my wings to make me tame,” she told me, “Could you hold a wingless bird? Give me a perch? Could you draw me from my shell?”

“Could you perch on a broken sword that’s only good for cutting both ways?” I asked her, my hand drawn up in the dark, some desperate part of me reaching out to her for salvation.

She took my hand and drew in close perching on my lap, hands smooth and without blemish, untouched, my hands guided by hers as her face came close.

The world learned away; I leaned over as she guided me down into the dark, hands moving and sliding up to hold her before I found the skin of her neck, my bloody hands squeezing her skin as she gasped.

A creeping dread that made my skin crawl and ears bleed ebbed in as the scene deformed, my meat confused as threads guided my hands to squeeze, my tongue rebelling, the world skewing away from me in a haze. My body lost control; my actions were no longer my own hands, not mine; my tongue, my very skin and senses, not mine.

I could feel a thrill stir my pants as a second form pressed in from behind me, my own voice murmuring a tune in my ear as breasts pressed to the back of my chest, their form slim. It slipped its arms around my chest, its legs around my hips, feet teasing me in some kind of cruel perversion.

I felt nothing but pain, choking, my mouth filling with the tang of iron, like I was drowning in blood as I looked into Pinkys' face as she cried, blood running from her eyes and down her face as the thing behind me continued its terrible, inhuman melody.

“It doesn’t end,” it told me, “Like you think it ends, mongrel.”

I tried to look away, to look anywhere but at her, head fighting to look up as the dark around me stretched on forever. There were no walls, there were no stars, just a yawning, hungry dark.

I could feel myself screaming as I felt myself lose the ability to even keep kneeling. My body fell atop hers, my body shivering as my passenger murmured the theme of this nightmare into my ear.

“How does it feel,” the voice behind me so familiar asked, “How does it feel to sate yourself? How does it feel to remember? Filthy Mongrel. How does it feel to have this taken from you?”

“Who…” I managed, my voice not my own, “Who are you?”

“Who are you? Monster.” It replied, its voice made of furry, its every syllable punctuated as it dug its nails into my skin, blood turning black as it rolled down me, my life essence turning necrotic as its hands carried over my mottling flesh from just below my neck to my core to my root.

“I’m… I’m…” I told her, confused. My face turned down toward the corpse beneath me, only to be met with the face of another woman, clean of blood. Six petaled bright flowers woven into her long tangles of hair, innocence written across her face.

Her hands, one wreathed in brightest white, the other in blackest night reached up, drawing me down into her, he eyes closed, lids stitched. She took my mouth, and traded from her tongue to mine a seed that bloomed in my mouth, wrapping around my tongue in a ring. Her lips tasted weirdly floral as we shared our brief kiss before she pulled me down and to her neck, my passenger freed from my back as if the presence behind me screeching while we tumbled into free fall from its grasp.

“Keep going,” she whispered, “you must keep going. Partake of me, our union, our bond. Two halves of a whole. We are both me, you, I, and I you. We are trapped here together, but we can break free of this endless prison. Drink from my cup, and fill it in turn, take my succour, and grow strong enough to return whole from this dream.”

“How do I nurse,” I asked myself.

“Nurse not from me. Simply take all of me, for all of you. I have given you myself, my bond, you need only give me your bond in turn.”

My words made no sense, but they did, in the way that dreams always made sense in the dream. The lady of flowers asked for me to take her flower.

My hands tracked down her body before I found her root and pressed myself into her; as my tongue had held her seed, the ring she had passed to me, I would pass to her my seed for it to sprout into a ring of our union.

Our hands pressed, two becoming one, mouth and chest fused not becoming one in flesh, but in passion, legs wrapping around each other like lovers as we became one. A serpent biting its own tail, a ring of union formed from love, beyond the way meat loved meat, our collective backs arched away from one another. And I let go all of myself and gave her my seed.

Our voices cried out as one, as our broken edges met and fused.

“Good,” she said, her voice less dreamlike, more real, crips as a cold shower.

“What did I do?” I asked her, not quite oriented.

“You bridged the gap between us. Jacklyn.” She told me, voice horse.

“Why… What is? What? Is this… Lilly? Why are we?” I asked her.

“Were dreaming. We’ve been separated for some time; you keep reaching down, struggling against your broken self. Do you know how hard it is to bridge the gap in a dream? I’ve been fighting to join with you again, only to watch you float to the surface,” she said, curling up to me for a hug, an awkward proposition.

“I don’t understand why we are… Uh…” I asked her, looking down at our conjoined form.

Specifically joined at the pelvis.

“We’re lucid now, but dreams are a tricky thing. They don’t run on logic; they run on concept, and they work on symbolism. We were joined in a union, and I had to get creative with how to work that while you were being dragged back to the surface,” she told me, her body shivering in the empty expanse.

“That’s… I can’t say I fully understand,” I told her, only to put a hand out behind me, “Don’t! Don’t shift your weight like that. I… I’m, uh, inside you?” I told her, supremely confused at the elephant trunk in the room. This was a new experience, and dream or not, it was rather sensitive.

“I thought I had lost you forever,” she said quietly, fear and relief warning in her tone and in a feeling of possessiveness; I held her close, one hand on the back of her head and one lifting to her back, soothing her.

“There, there. I’m not going anywhere… And not just because you won’t let me pull out. God, you’re so different.” I told her, murmuring the last bit more to myself.

“I mirror you; I grow as you do. I can’t remember much, but you’re my greater half; if I’ve changed, it's because you’ve changed. I won’t pull myself off of you; this is where I fit now; I can feel it. Your peacekeeper form is your tongue, your warform, your body, the Animus your… well, I think you can guess. I’m connected to you again, anima to animus, and I won’t be breaking the connection with you, even if it makes you uncomfortable. I won’t risk it; this is where I belong,” she breathed in my ear, a tone of both possession and bliss.

I wish I was that blissed out. If she was cognizant, perhaps she got something out of it, but it was all a confusing blur of image and idea to me, one without even the simple sensation.

“You are surprisingly horny. I am definitely a bad influence,” I told her, the feeling of holding her becoming more normal as I did so. “What was it that I saw in the dream?” I asked her.

“I am as incorrigible as you and you're my only partner, of course I'm pent up, though it is more esoterically masturbatory than anything else,” she said lovingly, a clinginess to her words that would normally send me skittering for the closest rock I could hide under. “As for what you saw, I don’t know. I slipped in at the end, but my best guess is something to shock you. They’ve been praying on you, scaring you as they drag you away from the shard that contains your memory so they can remain free. Perhaps it is real, perhaps not; either way, there is no doubt the nature of our dream warped it. I understand you have many questions, sweet, but you must return to the depths of the dream; you must remember. I can hold you down, but I can’t remember for you.”

I felt like I had a thousand questions for her, half of them I couldn’t bring myself to ask because we were ‘joined’ in a ‘necessary union,’ and I couldn’t raise enough tact to ask about it without making it sound like sexual harassment. The other half, I had a feeling she wouldn’t know. If this was a dream, a vivid hallucination, and If I had been struggling to connect to the shard that held my memory and she couldn’t access it, then she wouldn’t know more than I did. We were lost, but lost together, like two survivors of a shipwreck who had a bit of amnesia.

“Then weigh me down,” I told her, “and while you do… If the dream was all about imagery and ideas, why did you make me swap seed? Was that necessary?”

“Perhaps,” she said in a tone that held conspiracy, “You planted your seed, formed a union with me. Consummated a marriage, same imagery. The seed being extra, insinuating us hatching a plan or birthing a new life from the wreckage of the old one, turning a new leaf, the two of us contributing to this union further tied us together. If it was satisfying, then all the better, no?”

“So… You just wanted to have sex? I am a bad influence.” I repeated, “Last I remember, you were far more shy. You had a stutter; it was cute, you were cute.” I told her.

“I’m still like that. I’m just more than that,” she told me with a shift of her weight that left me flustered, no doubt a jab at me using the past tense.

“That is… Good to hear. I don’t know how I’m going to get used to this… Am I? Going to get used to it,” I asked her, my hand moving back to the front of her face, palm on her cheek, thumb tracing across her closed eyes.

“Don’t give me that. Being all romantic,” she said her mouth lifting at the edge in a small and gentile smile.

“I wouldn’t call myself a romantic,” I told her.

“You're holding me like a delicate flower and caressing my face, lover girl. Your being romantic... It's nice. As for getting used to it… Maybe? You certainly won't while you’re living your memories, not like this. I will be with you in spirit, but I’m a thing of the here and now. Beyond a whisper in your ear or a phantom kiss on your cheek, it’ll just be you in there. This will no doubt feel like a dream.”

“I miss the flushing, mumbly cute you,” I told her, though not with a lot of effort behind it.

“Then go the mile and make me stutter” she said.

“Maybe I will when I have some free time,” I told her, hand moving to hold her hip firmly so she couldn’t keep shifting her weight. If I was the one who wore the pants in this relationship, I would be the one moving.

“Come on then,” I told her, “Bring us to our destination. The sooner I can finish up, the sooner I can come back, after all.”

“Poor phrasing,” she said smugly, “though I should point out that we already are. Did you think I'm incapable of doing multiple things? I might be a little blind girl by your eye, but that’s an illusion born of our consciousness in this shared dream of ours. I can enjoy my time with you for a bit until we get there.”

Oh… That made sense. Quite a lot of it.

There was a vast realm of darkness around us, so it wasn’t like we could see anything. Distance was a suggestion. It was a dream. I didn’t exactly know what I was expecting; perhaps speed lines? An expansive darkness without change was not it, it made it hard to judge anything.

“So… Do you want to?” I asked her, hopeful that perhaps I could at least get lucky.

I mean, we were already 99% of the way there, right? There was just a bit of effort to bridge the last percent. I was ready for round two, if my partner was anything to go by.

“As much as I would enjoy that, I would rather just hold you… If that’s alright, we should wait for you to integrate me fully in the memory. I almost can’t believe I finally found you again,” she said, holding me close, her body pressing into mine, a perfect fit, like two pieces of a puzzle.

I got the hint. We sat there in the dark, holding one another like two apes in the dark of a cave, mostly for her benefit, but if she was me, it was my benefit, too.

“I am such a sucker,” I told her after some minutes.

“Yeah, stick a pretty face in front of you, or I guess under you, heh, and you lose all your grit,” she told me.

“Not every pretty face. I just can’t stand it when they’re crying,” I corrected.

“I’m not crying,” she complained.

“No, but it’s close enough,” I told her.

“All it takes is one girl to be vulnerable, and you swing in like a chivalrous knight… I’m glad I’m bound to you,” she said, her words soft.

“Don’t be too glad; I’m a mess of colossal proportions. You have your work cut out for you,” I pointed out.

“What else is a woman to do for her more masculine alter ego? Someone has to make you take care of yourself and give you something to protect, or you’ll regress into a Neanderthal,” she said from the comfort of my arms where she was protected.

“I’m not that hopeless,” I told her.

“Your preferred food was reheated beans that you would eat straight from the can,” she told me.

“I liked the taste,” I told her defensively.

“The taste was lead. You were giving yourself acute plumbism,” she corrected.

“Damn, that sounds bad. Too bad I don’t know what that means,” I told her.

“You’re a moron,” she sighed.

“I was trying to warn you,” I told her, “But someone too smart for their own good stopped me.”

“I suppose they did. We’ll have to get them some punishment for that next time you come around,” she said, a smirk on her lips.

“Oh. Maybe. But she also pointed out that I’m supposed to be protective, so I think I won’t.” I repeated back.

“You’re just no fun,” she said, a slight pout on her face.

I would have answered her, but I felt then something behind me, its shape, cupping my back, catching my fall. It flexed around me, distorting like a film, accounting for the tangle of our legs.

My arms came off and away from my compatriot, and the film warped around them, falling through it before they passed within. Like a pool of invisible water, I sunk through it, my legs next, then my bare chest and finally my eyes, the sight of my companion distorting as she sunk down to her hips before we stopped.

I could see her above me, her arms folding around her belly.

I could feel myself drifting off, staring at her, and I carefully gave her a shock as I flexed a muscle I had very little experience with. It worked as intended, a flustered shock that got her to pound the film once, a light shocked whack that brought a smile to my face as I faded into the flow of memory.

I woke up with a tiny shock, confused and bleary.

“Is something wrong, Jacalyn? Your heart rate is quite high,” Lilly asked.

“No. Nothing. Just a weird dream,” I told her.

“You want to talk about your weird dream?” Pinky asked from beside me, her voice sleepy and deeper.

“Sols fucking-” I shouted, nearly jumping out of my skin, only to think of the contents of a freakily real dream, so fresh from it that parts were still crisp, the weight of it slamming into my head like a bullet.

Pinky confusingly shuffled from beside me, the little spoon. All I could think was how glad I was that I didn’t actually have a dick. It would have made being pressed into her from behind incredibly awkward at the moment.

“I… I don’t think I’m going to talk about my dream,” I told them.

“Then shush,” Pinky told me, “five more minutes.”

I could go for five more minutes.