Yes, bring it over here. That’ll do nicely. But tape down the cables. We don’t want anyone tripping.
…?
Who cares? Most of this garbage is on the verge of falling apart, and the transportation bay doesn’t even have a transport! If anything, diverting power away from unused or less important systems will slow down the degradation.
…?!
< scoff >
And just who do you imagine attacking us all the way out here? This is an uninhabited—
< loud buzzing from the still-flickering display >
—an entirely abandoned sector.
No, no. Plug it in here… through the transformer. We want to boost power, not fry the station.
…!
And what about them? Just because their base of operations is nearby, that doesn’t mean we need to worry about pirate raids. Do you imagine a bunch of freebooters and scoundrels are going to waste fuel hopping from system to system in the vague hope of finding a random film crew to attack? Ha!
Trust me. You’ll seldom encounter those types unless you’re traveling along established shipping lanes.
…?
Young lady… You don’t get to be my age in this business without learning a thing or two about the criminal underbelly. I would blame the government, but they take exception to talk like that…
< Bzzt! Boop! >
Ah ha! That’s more like it!
Places everyone! Transmission resumes in three… two…
*
—about to blow his lid.
He could feel his need for oxygen encroaching with every moment; his shoulder was itching like crazy; and to top it all off, the urge to chew on the walls was growing near uncontrollable. Honestly, that last part would not have been so bad if it actually tasted like something. Or was in any way satisfying. Then, at least, he would have some justification for the impulse.
As it was, all he had accomplished was to piss off Naomi. Again. That girl had certainly adapted to talking with her hands in a hurry. For yelling, especially. But then she yelled about everything. Getting hugged. Not getting hugged. Whether he liked her hugs. Liking her hugs too much…
Bah! It was enough to drive a man to madness! What was he supposed to have done? Push her away?
As if! A man had to take whatever enjoyment out of life he could. When a woman decides to press her cleavage against your face, you damned well let her!
And what had happened to all that lovey-dovey talk? The kissing? Hell, she had been feeling him up not an hour ago, on the verge of ripping his pants off. What had happened to that?!
Ah, well… At least she had only scratched him up a little. Crazy-ass woman… One minute, she was assaulting him, and the next, she expected him to just sit there, pretending as though nothing had happened, while she hovered over the wound he had taken for her sake like some mother hen.
He picked at some of the moss she had slapped over his shoulder and began nibbling on it, which earned him a swat over the head.
‘Don’t eat that! It’s a bandage!’ she flailed from behind his back.
He tried not to roll his eyes. ‘We heal faster when we eat.’
‘So eat the other moss, you boob! It’s only everywhere!’
He blinked in confusion for a moment—mostly because he was unused to women insulting him via an acute jostling of one of their own tits.
‘Stripes…’ he began, trying to remain patient, ‘I’m fine. So can we please start looking for—’
‘You are not fine,’ she interrupted. ‘Your shoulder is a mess! I swear…’ He lost the rest. Something about… gigantic heads? And penises?
He narrowed his eyes. Either she was coming on to him, or she had just called him a dick for brains.
On a side note, having this conversation via their makeshift and ever-evolving sign language was really driving home just how much the English swear vocabulary relied on direct references to genitalia. He had to wonder how the non-verbal community got around the problem of pointing toward body parts and groping themselves.
‘Woman!’ his hands thrashed through the water, finally out of patience. ‘We are going to suffocate way before my shoulder ever gets infected. Now stop hovering and help me find a way out of here!’
He expected her to argue… or at least some more yelling, just out of simple consistency, but she merely smiled, blew him a flirtatious little kiss, then turned to begin happily pulling patches of moss off the walls—for all the world pleased he had lost his temper.
Crazy. Ass. Woman.
If they ever got out of here and back home, he shuddered to think how she would get along with his mother… assuming they didn’t instantly resort to murder.
Regardless, as Naomi began working her way outward from where the final plasma round had impacted—a good place to start, he thought, despite its eventual failure to reveal anything that might have explained why the room had sealed itself closed—the strange, almost syrupy flashes of lightning pulsing beneath slowly illuminated the room.
It was surprising just how welcome a bit of light could be. Granted, it exposed nothing he was not already aware of beyond a touch of color. There was just something about finally being able to see after so long in the dark that soothed his hackles. And his temper. It made him feel as if things might just work out.
His first thought was to check the ‘door’ that had slammed closed behind them, but it remained as opaque as ever. Though not for any lack of transparency, counterintuitive as that might be. There was no moss growing on it nor lightnings conducting through it. If he had encountered a door like that before gaining his other senses, he would have had no way of knowing it was even there… short of running into it, of course.
There was no need for that now. He could feel it intersecting his bubble of awareness just as solidly as stone for all that the ocean beyond was clearly… well, not visible exactly. It was still just as black out there as it ever had been.
So… a force field? That was the only way he could conceptualize what his senses were telling him. There were no seams nor edges to the thing, and it appeared so tightly welded to the moss-laden walls, he doubted even a molecule of air could have passed through.
It was certainly impervious to bullets, though. The glowing balls seemed to deflect off the field like a mirror, so their assailant had given up trying not long after they had been sealed in. Hopefully, that meant the bastard had lost interest, but he would not count himself so lucky just yet.
This whole scenario was giving ‘Predator’ vibes like nobody’s business. Abduct a couple of people, pump them full of adaptation technology, then set them loose on an alien planet? The movie practically wrote itself! Within a couple of weeks, the two of them would either be dead or dangerous enough to count as quite the hunting trophy.
All of which meant the asshole was probably right outside, hoping to discover a way in. Part of him wished it would so he could finally get his hands on the little maggot… not that facing off against a Predator sounded all that appealing.
Besides, he had other things to worry about—namely, where to begin his own search for the control panel.
He was currently resting at the bottom of the room along one of the sloping walls. Down here, a person could maintain a quasi-seated position by bracing their feet against the floor, the width of which seemed far too narrow given how cavernous the rest of the area was.
What sort of aliens would need such an immense entryway, anyway? Why it would require such an unusual configuration? What was the purpose of making it wider at the top than at the bottom? Why not a more universal shape like a rectangle or a square? Was it a simple question of aesthetics? Some unknown cultural convention?
He could only speculate. But if they were at least vaguely man-shaped—however unjustified that assumption might be—and phenomenally tall, would that not mean the control panel should be up nearer the top? Closer to where the head would be?
It was at least a place to start.
Distracted for a moment by a fleeting but otherwise uneventful flash of brightness coming from the wall Naomi was working on—he had to expect alien places to do alien things—he kicked off the floor to ascend to an appropriate level, then began working his own way around the room.
He just wished his stupid shoulder would stop itching. The damned thing was distracting him to no end, and the rough texture of the poultice Naomi had slapped over top of it was not helping at all. Unfortunately, the only means he knew of to fight it off was to chew on things.
And the moss was at least a viable. More so than the bare walls, anyway. So he began grazing as he worked.
It was a thankless meal, somewhere between broccoli and kale as far as texture went and supremely bitter. Given the unexpectedly remarkable flavor profiles everything else around here seemed to have—even the penis clams for all that he was loath to admit it—he had to wonder whether there was some deeper meaning behind his sudden distaste. Eating was his path to further adaptations, after all. So it made sense that some alteration to his taste buds had occurred to reflect that need. Why then, would a thing taste bad? Was it poison?
He shook his head slowly. His computer would have almost certainly known if that were that the case, so it would have warned him. Or more likely, quickly altered his body to compensate. That was close to the only thing his interface was good for.
Unlike Naomi’s. From what she had said, hers had loads of interesting features. Visual highlighting. Buttons. Fill meters. Why couldn’t he have gotten something like that? The only way he could even pull up his UI was by looking at a reflective surface through his heat vision… for all the good it did.
There had to be a better way to convert the language settings. Maybe buried in a menu somewhere?
Regardless, he would have killed for a health bar. Or just something to let him know how much of this crap he needed to eat in order to recover. If it even helped with that.
He could so easily envision an appropriate tooltip, too. It would have rounded edges, a background suitable for night mode aficionados, perhaps even a bit of gold filigree along the corners. The moss would have a nicely embossed label, declared as something like… Purple Alien Sea Lichen?
He waved the thought away dismissively. Alien plant-life implied sci-fi, so it would need a proper scientific name. Regrettably, his working knowledge of Latin was practically nil, so coming up with something appropriate was out of the cards.
It would need to be something pretentiously clever, too. Scientists were always doing nerdy-ass things like that. Sure, the thing would have a fancy sounding name, but once you pushed it through a translator, you would find out it was called Grumpy Oscar’s Trash Salad.
Names aside, there would be a few lines of flavor text beneath—seldom read, of course. Then, near the bottom, it would say something like… consume to regenerate 1 hp per second for 5 minutes.
He could only dream. One of these days, he was going to need to have a serious chat with whomever had designed the barely functioning garbage currently nestled within his brain.
Da doom.
Mark blinked in confusion at the sound, then glanced toward Naomi to see whether she had heard it as well. But she seemed oblivious. Which either meant he was imagining things, or his computer had just coughed up the poison warning he had been afraid of.
Except… it had not sounded like a warning. It had been too short for that. A warning ought to be a sharp whistle or a siren, something to get your attention and keep it until you resolved the issue. This had sounded more like an error message. However, when nothing else came of it—even after chewing his way through another clump of moss—he reluctantly decided it must have been some internal glitch and returned to his own thoughts.
At the very least, he could tell something was happening with his shoulder. Mostly because itching was about the last thing he expected from a wound less than ten minutes old. He should have been in absolute agony! Unfortunately, his own body represented a man-shaped hole within the bubble of his extra-sensory perception, so he could do nothing to inspect it.
He… could see Naomi’s, though, even under the poultice she had wrapped around her arm. But when he focused his attention there, he discovered her skin was beginning to—
He grimaced, instantly repulsed by what he found.
There was no scab, for one. But that was not surprising. She had never bled to make one. Instead, the edges of her wound were slowly sending out little questing tendrils… rather like a slime mold. Or a fungus. The tendrils were almost imperceptibly coiling and twisting along as though hoping to find a partner somewhere across the gap, and those that had were gradually fusing together. Some few of them were even beginning to close the gaps between by growing outward into strips of fresh, pink skin.
He tore his attention away from it quickly, wishing he could forever delete that vision from his memory, but it was futile. He would just have to wait for the end product, he decided. As long as it eventually looked like a normal woman’s arm, he figured he could… at least ignore it. Probably.
Though knowing something similar was almost certainly going on over and across his own shoulder was not helping his state of mind. So he settled into the task at hand, and eventually, his thoughts quieted.
He and Naomi toiled their way slowly around the room, discarding bits of moss into loose piles as they went, but they found nothing that so much as resembled a control panel. There did not seem to be anything like a button; there were no catches, or even seams. For all he could tell, the whole place could have been sculpted from blown glass.
That said, there was a certain periodicity hidden within the otherwise random lightnings. Every fifteen to twenty seconds, another of those momentary flashes of brightness would light up Naomi’s strip of bared wall. Then, a few seconds later, his own section would follow suit. Bottom to top, always the same.
He glanced down at his companion, only to find her eyes on him as well. It seemed she had arrived at a similar conclusion. Those light waves had to be coming from somewhere… and they were going somewhere else. Finding out where or what might finally reveal something useful.
With a nod, they turned as one to investigate, she to the bottom, leaving the top of the room for himself. From the pattern, this would be where the light was going toward.
It only took a few seconds of scraping to realize this was going to be a moment he looked back on with regret. He was just glad they had discovered a way to increase their lung capacity instead of developing down a gilled evolutionary path, so at least the flood of plant matter dropping on her head would not impede her breathing. It would just get in her eyes… and her hair.
Pulling a face, he redoubled his efforts. If an ass-kicking was going to be coming anyway, he might as well get it over with quickly. Besides, he was only trying to solve the glaring issue of their inevitable deaths by oxygen starvation. Why did she have to glare at him like that?
Eventually, his efforts revealed the edges of… well, something new, anyway, and he hastily scratched away at it until the whole of the structure was visible. Neither his fingers nor his extrasensory perception could detect any sort of texture to it, of course. Like everything else in this room, it rested behind a seemingly impenetrable barrier, so without his eyes, he would never have seen it at all.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Which was… completely obvious, he realized with sudden clarity. How else was he going to see it? With his tongue? He was just glad the observation had not emerged from his mouth. Naomi would have given him no end of hell over it. One of these days, the two of them were going to need to sit down and invent some new vocabulary for this whole ESP business. The visual metaphors were not working at all.
In any case, the thing behind the glass looked like a…
It seemed to be a…
Well, it was…
Abruptly, he snapped his eyes shut and gave his head a quick shake. Identifying the object was impossible; he could barely even describe it. All he knew was that the longer he looked at it, the more drawn to it he was.
Unfortunately, it was proving a futile and empty gesture. Already, his mind had seized upon the object like an iron vise, obeying neither tact of rhyme nor twist of reason. There was just something about it, something that defied explanation. It was otherworldly. Hypnotic. Breathtaking and beautiful.
His eyes seemed to force themselves open of their own accord, and he slowly turned to stare. There were… uncountable disks—sometimes two, sometimes far more—all merged at their centers, rotating about and through one another in spastic jerks as though unaware any of the others existed. Which they might well not. The disks looked less like solid objects and more… distortions of emptiness? Meanwhile, the whole of it slowly reverberated as it absorbed pulse after liquid pulse of lightning.
Absolutely none of which should have been making his mouth water.
***
Naomi scratched at the floor wildly, desperate to get at the strange thing beneath the glass. She had to have it. Needed it! More than anything, she needed it. Even air, for all that her lungs felt black from carbon dioxide buildup. In that moment, she would have killed her own mother to get it.
Her chest constricted as wave after wave of gnawing hunger ripped through her core, mirroring the pulses of light emanating from the object. Each one pulled her lips into a vicious snarl. The object was mocking her, slowly bleeding its essence away while hiding behind its impenetrable barrier, but her claws only slipped and skittered ineffectually across the ice-slick surface without purchase.
This was bullshit! Did she need to beseech the heavens? Howl her frustrations to the moon? Her claws were instruments of death! Not tools for—
Thump!
The sound yanked her chin upward, and her eyes widened with sudden clarity.
Of course! Mike was the one with digging claws. Ha ha! She knew there must have been a reason to keep the big lunk around besides the view. He would get it for her! Just as soon as—
Thump!
She shook her head in momentary confusion. What was he doing up there, anyway? Karate-chopping the ceiling? What could he have possibly found that could compete with the lovely…
The lovely…
Her eyes glazed over as they focused on yet another maelstrom of want swirling above, and her legs quickly propelled her toward it. There were two of them? How could there be two of them? How could there possibly be—no… no, this one was different, she suddenly realized. It was accepting the light, not giving it off. The female of the pair.
She licked her lips uncertainly as the need to taste this one as well swelled within. Mike would not want to share it with her… would he? Surely, his need would be far too overwhelming for such niceties. Perhaps… perhaps if she made herself useful somehow?
Thump! Thump! Thump!
She glanced at him hopefully as he stabbed over and over at the ceiling, urging him on. If he could just break through the surface, maybe she could pry a claw in? That would show she was helping. Then they could feast! Together! And after… after…
Watching him work, seeing his muscles bunching and uncoiling, furiously pounded away… Her body twisted slightly as an altogether different sort of hunger reignited within her loins.
After, she would reward him for his generosity.
Somewhere, in a distant corner of her subconscious, she recognized how completely she had lost it. These hypnotically pulsing objects were a mechanism of some kind. They had to be. Whatever function they served, whatever alien race had conceived of them, she knew eating one was about the last thing either of them should be doing.
People did not eat machines! They used them. Preferably for opening a path toward oxygen! But there was no reasoning her way out of it. Even if she could have figured out how to interact with them, she simply could not quell her urge. It was too powerful.
That must have been why Mike had been so drawn to the walls, she suddenly realized. He had sensed them somehow, even before laying eyes on them.
Beautiful man! She could have kissed him! She might even have to compliment him later for his prescience. With how backward his sensibilities were, he would probably even appreciate it.
But should that be before… or after she had her way with him? The corner of her lip twitched as she mulled it over, but the answer came quickly. It would have to be before. Otherwise, he might assume the compliment had something to do with his sexual technique, and that would not do at all.
Ugh… what was taking so long?!
Shlup!
She blinked at the sudden, almost comical noise. What kind of sound was that? Glass crashed and tinkled, not… whatever that had been.
But it hardly mattered. He was through. The ceiling had parted for his blunted claws like some sort of hard yet pliable rubber, and she was quick to slip her own far-more-delicate hooks into the seam.
Bracing her feet against the roof, she joined him in yanking and pulling with all her might, but the protective layer guarding their prize was not going down without a fight. It seemed impossible for something with the consistency of putty to be as hard as steel, but then, there was nothing logical about this place. Alien, reality-warping devices of unknown purpose? Check. Lightning that flowed like water? Absolutely. Why not line the whole thing with transparent, rubberized metal?
It took a monumental amount of effort to pry open the puncture sufficiently to even wriggle her fingers behind the protective layer, never mind fitting an arm inside or reaching for her prize. However, before she could do much more than that, the constant flow of lightning surrounding it delivered a less-than-subtle reminder of its presence.
With a jerk, she snatched her hand loose and began nursing at her smoking flesh. Cursing herself for a fool, she watched as the treacherous substance slipped through the crack she had left behind, forcing even Mike’s toughened claws from the opening.
It was more than a little surreal to see something like that bleeding out into the water. Its movements remained just as slow and random as ever, yet the delicate fingers of energy seemed almost methodical in how they quested into the room, closer to a root system exploring fresh territory than a discharge of electricity. It was almost a living thing.
A living… thing…
The realization—or, more accurately, tangential association—flooded her body with a fresh and overwhelming need, one which had nothing whatsoever to do with rationality. This… whatever it was… she would consume it. Add it to her whole. It would make her stronger. Tougher! Tough enough even to seek out the true prize! Those nothing-disks thought themselves safe in their little shell of pain… but they would soon learn better.
Despite the rest of her rational mind screaming at her to stay away from it—the insane heat emanating from those tendrils of light was literally vaporizing the surrounding water—both she and Mike pounced on it immediately. And they suffered for it. However bizarre its behavior, however unexpected its texture, it was still lightning. It burned to the touch, singed their tongues, cooked their innards.
It was also orgasmically delicious.
Her body convulsed with a heady mixture of screaming agony and mind-numbing ecstasy from the moment she bit down. Much like the first time she had arrived on this world, her implant had detected a new, almost certainly life-threatening food source and began adjusting her physiology accordingly. Options and prompts were neither given nor required. Her changes began instantly.
But before she could assess what was happening to her—indeed, before her body had even settled into its latest form—the light in the surrounding walls gave off an uncertain flicker, there was a beat of silence, and then a groaning sort of hum spread through the water. If she had been in a state of mind where worry was possible, she might have allowed herself some level of concern over this. And she certainly would have once the surrounding water suddenly flew into a raging boil. But she had no room for such feelings.
None of that bothered her in the slightest. Her only concerns were for the delicious feelings coursing beneath her skin. Racing up her spine. Tingling at her fingers…
And for the soothing balm that had replaced the molten lead she had forced down her gullet. It was there, between the pain and the pleasure, that a certain clarity resided: the kind of clarity that came from madness.
She loved this.
Every moment. The danger. The hunt. Adventure. Pain. Her mutations. All of it! She felt dominant. Sexy and powerful. Like she could take on anything. Do anything! Eat lightning. Rip apart the oceans. Conquer worlds!
…if she was so inclined.
The trouble was, this fractured moment of clarity was also revealing just how little control she had over her own actions. The driving instinct to consume everything in her path was as unmerciful as it was unrelenting. Even had she wished otherwise, there might well come a day when she had no choice but to conquer worlds.
And didn’t that defeat the purpose?
About then, her feet unexpectedly alighted on the ground, pulling her from her deranged fantasies, and she realized she had been slowly sinking through the boiling water. Then she realized she had been sinking through boiling water.
How could that only now be occurring to her? Boiling water was not a thing a person could generally ignore. But then, she had just swallowed a mouthful of lightning, so her perception of what should and should not be possible had been rather permanently skewed.
Though, for lightning, it had tasted an awful lot like rutabaga…
And now that she was thinking about it, the water was still perfectly comfortable. It was just… bubbly. She could even see where the bubbles were coming from. Microscopic vents had apparently opened up all along the walls and the floor, forcing some sort of gas into the room.
She clapped her hands together with sudden realization as the last of the transformative fog lifted from her brain.
Gas! Gas meant air!
The muscles in her legs bunched as she launched herself gleefully upward once more, and she breached the surface like a dolphin at play scarcely halfway up the room. The breath she had been holding for so long instantly exploded from her lungs with a bright whoop of laughter as fresh oxygen finally tore through her veins. She felt alive again!
“What happened?” Mike shouted between hacking coughs somewhere to her right. Somewhere in the excitement, she had lost track of him, but it sounded as though the poor boy had accidentally sucked in a mouthful of water in his haste. Which was understandable. The bubbles were making treading water unexpectedly difficult. “Where did all this air come from?”
The where was obvious if he had bothered to look, so she did not bother to explain—though how it was displacing all the water remained a mystery. It was the why that concerned her. But when she spied the gap they had torn into the ceiling, the beginnings of an answer came to her. She could see no sign of the unusual lightning leaking through. In fact, the puncture looked to be in the process of sealing itself through some automated self-repair mechanism.
“I think we may have triggered something when we poked a hole in the roof,” she pointed out, trying not to sound too bitter. They had put a lot of effort into that hole, never mind how they ever planned on reaching it again.
His eyes followed her finger, prompting a thoughtful nod. “Maybe this place didn’t appreciate having a bunch of water in its electrical system.”
“Maybe,” she allowed. It was as good a guess as any.
Without ceremony or warning, the descending water levels reintroduced her feet to the floor, and the last of the liquid sloughed away mere seconds later. It seemed impossible, but the entire room had drained in less than a minute, leaving the pair of them dripping in the cavernous space left behind.
Of course, it might have been longer. It was fairly easy to lose track of time mid-transformation, the results of which seemed to be entirely internal. She could detect no changes to Mike’s overall physique, so she had to assume this was mainly a digestive alteration. It would have to be to allow them to eat that.
“What now?” Mike’s voice reverberated out into the room.
It was a fair question. The water was gone, but they were still trapped.
Besides the obvious, however, there were several things Naomi would like to do. Her hair was full of moss, and she had been swimming in what amounted to shark soup for what felt like days. So a shower ranked high on the list. Also, now that her body had been reintroduced to gravity, she was confronted with just how much her breasts had grown since diving into that pit.
She did not appear to be sagging by any stretch. From her vantage, they appeared just as proud and full as though newly grown… which she supposed they were. Regardless, some support would have been appreciated.
Fortunately, Mike had already hit upon a reasonable solution to that problem so, her attention fully devoted to seeing how he would react, she peeled her soaked boy shorts down and away in one smooth motion.
Mike looked at her askance and stiffened—both in posture and… otherwise. To her immense satisfaction. “What are you doing?!”
“What?” she replied, affecting an offended pout. “You don’t want to?”
“I—I mean… yeah, but…” He began fidgeting nervously while his eyes twitched about, as though he was finding it difficult to decide where to look first. Or if he was even allowed. “Wouldn’t you rather dry off first? I’ve heard water can make things… difficult.”
She did not see how that could be true. A detachable showerhead was a girl’s best friend, after all. But then, her own experiences with sex remained frustratingly limited. Boys had never exactly fallen over themselves to seduce her, so her couplings had been as sparse as they were unsatisfying.
But that was an old Naomi problem.
Laughing, she swatted Mike’s chest playfully. “Down, boy. My girls just need some support is all. If we have to go anywhere in a hurry, they’ll be jumping around all over the place.”
“Oh…” He had the grace to at least look crestfallen. Then, smiling a little, he added, “I’d… like to see that, actually.”
“Ha! I’ll bet you would.”
Still… for Mike, that was downright daring. Flirtatious, even! Both of which were behaviors that deserved rewarding. So, she gave him a little show by gently shaking her chest from side to side.
His eyes glazed over instantly, sending a thrill of pride up her spine.
But she had no plans on giving him more than that just yet… unless he pursued the matter, of course. Absent the overwhelming rapture of a transformation event, their relationship had not exactly progressed to the point where she felt comfortable simply jumping the man out of nowhere. Much as she would have liked to. They might have fooled around a little, but without that little oomph to get things going, they were still well within the awkward initial stages. In the meantime, she would have to settle for lesser pleasures.
So, she gave her boy shorts a quick shake, flipped them inside out, and yanked them over her head, upside down. It was not an ideal solution, of course. They had never been designed as a top, so she had to pull the crotch to one side, making it into something of a one-strap bra. And the elastic waistband kept riding up the underside of her breasts, leaving her in danger of flopping loose at a moment’s notice.
She eyed Mike’s basketball shorts thoughtfully. Maybe she ought to broach the subject of their donation to her cause, after all? But alas. He needed the pretext of decorum. Otherwise, he would feel the need to pretend she had nothing to do with his constant erections. And that she would not tolerate.
“So,” she began, turning. The air problem had somehow resolved itself, and now that she had tasted some of the energy flowing behind the walls, the allure of the strange, rotating machines rotating was far more manageable. Not that it was gone, but the urge to beat her head against the floor until something gave had subsided. She would need to spend some time processing that, but there were plenty of other traumas to work through first. “I guess we still need to figure out how to get out of here.”
“Uh…” Mike agreed once he managed to clear his head enough to speak again, but his eyes remained firmly glued to her. Where they belonged. “What, uh… You’ve got a little… on your—” He gestured at her back lamely.
That was not what she had been expecting him to say. Swiveling around quickly, she tried to see what he was talking about. “What? What is it?”
He hesitated, but before she could yank her top off again to look, he stepped forward and plucked a sizable clump of something from between her shoulder blades.
Her first thought was that it was just another patch of moss. But then she noticed the color. And the texture. And the sheer amount of it.
Her face went flat. Turning away—not that she could hide from his gaze without some twenty feet of distance and a wall of solid concrete between them—she carefully leaned forward until she could see between her legs. Sure enough, there was nothing there.
She was now bare as the day she was born.