Bulbous Hymenopus: Wishes of the Shimmering Chunk

PROMPTS

A pretty Martian girl with a big dumptruck ass

- trying to score weed before lockdown hits

Datura infused astral journey gone HORRIBLY wrong

a snake and a mongoose who have a homoerotic rivalry like from a 1980's movie

catboi gender fuckery

The stars are getting closer every day, forming strange and familiar symbols

A sentient electric scooter with a thick Jersey accent

Wild jaguars are just a daily nuisance in this town/city/state/whatever

a ghost that’s ethereal except for its huge ass

Perhaps a polite duel

Rat people, can't beat rat people in a story

There's a gay sauna in 16th century Paris and everyone has to resolve their sexual tension with a sword fight

Stacked nuns

There's a cultural memory of bread, but nobody remembers how to make it.

A box of chocolates that contain a lethal poison and its antidote but only when eaten in the proper sequence

a fog rolls in; everyone in it becomes part of some kind of hive mind, but only as long as they're engulfed in the fog

A girl is obsessed with Northern Exposure. She tends to categorize her friends and lovers as "a Joel", "a Holling," "a Maggie," "a Ruthanne," et cetera.

wallpaper that has cilia that eagerly tastes your hand as it touches it

A tooth that was not there before

living in a post-post apoc situation and the big metal ribcages that ppl see dotting the landscape are actually disintegrating airships and stuff they just have no context for em:pleading_face:

A dinosaur wearing a letterman jacket who is everyone's friend

centuries after the fall of Western civilization there's a new Renaissance, but the only literature they've rediscovered is erotic fanfic of The Office (US version)

The trees have complex, long-running inside jokes which they reference constantly. No human has ever been able to understand them.

the eucharist is now tide pods. A schism has erupted over which flavor is the body of christ.

A few centuries old skeleton wakes up in a graveyard and decides that she's going to run for office

To go with the large ass trend: think the infinity gauntlet, but it's hot pants that can only "snap" if Thanos claps his cheeks

Story pitch: A symbiote-ish goo monster teamed up with a genderfluid person so they are constantly tweaking how they look. (And possibly occasionally eating people)

Rome never fell, it only phased slightly out of our reality, and if enough people recreationally vomit at once the resonance will bring the empire back

The dead are all around us in incorporeal form, and siphon away brain function if you get too close

A woman fondling her own breasts? Maybe I’m just horny?

The current pope is a 12 year old Twitch streamer from Michigan known as Gamer Pope

STORY

“The resonance…” whispered Bud the dilophosaurus, staring out over the sea of bent and heaving backs at the crackling outline of a vast amphitheatre fading in and out of being. The acrid stink of vomit filled the air. “We’re almost there.” He clenched his clawed fists, display crests flushing a hearty red. “Keep vomiting, my friends!”

Another great wave of recreational upchuck splashed onto the broken paving stones of the town square. A few errant droplets spattered the sleeve of Bud’s letterman jacket as he stalked among the kneeling throngs. He sniffed, scenting ozone, and as a particularly vile retching sound heralded both a hernia for one of the ceremony’s participants and the point at which it reached a critical mass and intensity of vomitus in a single concentrated area, black lightning struck the amphitheater as it burst into reality. “Yes!” cried Bud, raising his proportionally tiny arms. “We did it! We did it!”

“I still think this is a bad idea,” groused Bud’s best friend, a cold spot drifting beside him with only a juicy ass clad in hot pink booty shorts to mark her presence. Rosalind the ghost. “You could destabilize all of time. Maybe. I don’t know physics.”

“Haven’t you been dead for, like, centuries?” Bud asked, momentarily distracted from his triumph. “Why don’t you have more forbidden knowledge?”

“I mean yeah, but I didn’t really know anything when I died, so, like, why would I be a smart ghost?”

Bud nodded thoughtfully. He wished he could scratch his chin in contemplation like he’d seen the actor playing Jim do in last year’s production of The Office in Stump Park, but again: proportionally short arms. “That makes sense.”

In the distance, a vast wall of lilac fog had boiled up around the amphitheatre’s tiered arches. Bud’s friends got shakily to their feet, looking toward it and pointing in wonder. “That’s Rome!” they shouted to each other. “Holy shit, we summoned it out of the immaterial realm, just like Bud said!”

The wall of fog rushed toward them, sweeping over the skeleton of the ancient city, blowing through vacant buildings and startling flocks of pigeons into flight where they were swiftly intercepted and infested by other symbiote-possessed flocks of pigeons looking for hosts in which to lay their young. Bud wondered what secrets Rome would hold, what it’s people were like and whether or not they’d like him. As he took his first halting step toward the dark silhouette of the amphitheater, now shrouded heavily in the blowing fog, the onrushing bank broke over him, and in an instant thought dissolved.

Warmth.

Flesh.

No division, thought Bud, and it was not his thought, or not his alone. It flitted along unfamiliar neurons, crackling down the branching paths of dendrites that were not his own. Human and saurian, symbiote and enginese. No conflict.

The solutions to theorems he’d never seen bubbled up from somewhere in the tangle of the me-us-them. A burst of chemical relief came in its wake. Dopamine. As though they’d been in pain, and now that pain was over. Their body-in-many relaxing, unwinding, opening to

Good.

“Bud?” Rosalind whispered as she breezed through the cloud from silhouette to silhouette, righteous dumper clenched in anxiety. “Bud?”

The sound of hundreds of pairs of lungs breathing in unison echoed through the boiling fog. No answer came.

“Are you there, Bud?”

In a forgotten graveyard not far from the square where Bud’s great ritual had summoned something for which he hadn’t been prepared, Louise Chang-Johnson woke in her looted burial plot and discovered she was made entirely of bones. “Hot christmas!” she shouted, leaping out of the partially excavated grave and swiping clods of dirt from her skeleton with clattering metatarsals. She wondered briefly how her bones stayed connected, and what kind of force drove their action. Then she wondered how she could think, given that when she tapped her skull she heard only a kind of dry rattling sound like a crumpled piece of paper hitting the sides of a tin cup. After that she thought that probably there were better ways to spend her time than pondering the impossibility of her own functioning existence.

Louise wandered out of the graveyard, staring out in wonder with hollow sockets which nonetheless perceived as though fully occupied by rich ocular jelly and connected to a thriving brain by feathery optic nerves at the ruined city beyond. Huge towers of steel and concrete crumbled all around her, the exposed girders of their upper reaches clawing at the sky above where huge clouds of birds schooled like fish against the bloody light of the setting sun. Purplish fog trickled at ankle height through the cracked streets, the occasional waist-high billow spilling from an open doorway or broken window. It seemed harmless enough, passing over Louise’s exposed osseous matter without incident, but something about it gave her a bad feeling in the pit of the empty air where in life her stomach had been.

Where is everybody? Louise wondered as she clacked past a row of vacant storefronts, plate glass cracked and overgrown by mold. More purple fog roiled within.

“Ayyyy,” came an abrasive voice from somewhere to her left. The sound of a straining motor reached her non-ears as something sputtered and lurched out of the mist. A scooter. A Vespa, to be precise, like extremely uncool people who thought they had good taste had ridden before Louise’s death of an allergic reaction to datura in the year 2007. In place of a headlight it had a mobile and expressive human mouth set in a little circle of skin complete with a philtrum. “Whaddya doin, toots? Ya lost?”

“I just woke up in my own grave,” said Louise. “What the hell is going on?”

“Bud da dinasah did a ritchwal ta invoke da ghost a’ Rome,” said the scooter, idling loudly and flipping out its own kickstand to lean on. “Heard a ghost say da timestream was gonna go oobatz.”

“I’ll say,” said Louise, thinking that what this nightmare of bizarre post-apocalyptic miscreations needed was some structure and administrative insight. “I’m a skeleton, you’re a Vespa motor scooter. You say this Bud is a dinosaur?”

“Yeah,” said the scooter. “Name’s Paulie Peanuts, on accounta my severe allergy ta peanuts. But I’m normal, and so’s Bud. You’re da weird one.”

I’m going to run for mayor of this broken-down mental institution, thought Louise, theorizing that at that level of authority she could properly deploy her education in theoretical physics to tackle this “time-stream” problem. She sighed heavily, in spite of having no lungs. “Would you show me where this ritual happened, Paulie?”

“Ay, fuggedaboutit!” the Vespa exclaimed.

Sister Marie-France sat hunched in the steam room with the other nuns, counting the minutes until she could wriggle back into the cloaking anonymity of her habit. She hated having her body on display, hated the way she felt looking at the other sisters in nothing but sweat and skin. Heavy breasts like teardrops. Fat, dimpled thighs, soft tummies, and jiggling backsides. How was it she could so covet on them the same flesh she despised on herself? Watching Sister Agnes soap her bosoms felt like being immersed in molten lead from the waist down, and when the other nun gave her own nipples a cautious tweak Sister Marie-France bit her lip hard enough to draw a little blood. She could take it no more. As quietly as she could she slipped out of the sauna, covering her bountiful breasts with both arms and simply accepting the humiliation of the rest of her bare skin. A few of the others looked up from their teasing and their whispered gossip to watch her go. She wished they would always look at her. She wished they would never look at her again.

In the empty frigidarium down the hall she pressed herself flat against the cold marble wall, shivering at its touch against her flushed and sweaty skin. You mustn’t think of it, she told herself fiercely. You mustn’t, you mustn’t. Our father, who art in heaven...

A pitiful high-pitched peep tore her from her frantic silent prayer. She looked down. A pigeon lay fluttering weakly at her feet. “Poor thing,” she whispered, kneeling and scooping its small, furnace-hot body into her hands. There was something wrong with it, some rich, waxy yellow substance clinging to the skin beneath its moulting feathers. “How did you find your way into the baths?”

Before she could scream the yellow wax had flowed up to her elbows, abandoning the pigeon. The bird spasmed, shitting on Sister Marie-France’s hands, and then the wax was on her throat, sheeting down her belly to slide in between her legs, coating her perineum in a flexible, resinous skin. She staggered to her feet, struggling to breathe. She had oily feathers in her mouth and her limbs weren’t working right, weren’t listening to her, and oh god something was wrong with her body, her stomach burning hot, her bowels so icy cold she could hardly draw breath. Something opened at the small of her back, slits cut through skin, and hot black tar oozed out over her backside and down her thighs. Her jaw crunched, widening. Teeth pinged against the marble floor, one striking the dead pigeon and lying there bloody-rooted on its breast, as fangs like hooked needles burst out from her gums in thickets of gory bone. Somehow she had left the frigidarium, staggering out into the central corridor as she pulled futilely at her changing face, and in that moment she realized that her breasts were gone, that the soft hills and slopes of her body were squirming sluglike into new configurations, calcifying into filigree of bone and strands of singing muscle.

She lurched past her screaming sisters only to be met by a wall of bared steel and naked flesh, Sisters Aloysius, Joan, and the rest of the nunnery’s fencing club holding her at swordpoint as she struggled to speak past her gnashing teeth and the arm-long tentacle of her rough black tongue. Her arms and shoulders bulged with lava flows of new-made musculature. Something in her… flattened, somehow, morality atrophying in the face of naked threat. The gills on her back expelled more sludge as she propelled herself at her fellow sisters, her lower jaw splitting in half and flying open to receive the arm Sister Bridget raised in warding. A snap and shredded flesh and blood slapped wet against the corridor walls. Blades pierced her hulking form and felt no worse than pricker stings. To dig her knife-like claws into soft bodies, to cut between rolls of fat at side and elbow, joint thick limbs and peel the muscle from the bone beneath. A hungry thing between her legs, straining and struggling, fighting to be born as she gorged herself on milky meat.

God could never give me this. I had to take it.

And then on up the stairs, slick with blood, dawning horror breaking over her as thought returned, and out through the door into a slap of cold night air and whirling lilac mist, no Parisian night but a vast ruin of ancient towers and rusted metal awash in that purple sea of air and water. In a gutted wreck across the street, strange rat-like creatures with the build of men sit and lie sprawled in the fog, more of it boiling from their open mouths and raw, infected tear ducts, forming plumes that rise and rise and rise into the sky where the wind catches them and blows them all to rags.

The mist was taking them. Victor the MongooseBoi may have been but a humble himbo werekin scavenger living in the airship graveyard and foraging for mutant fireflies with enough charge to power his Hitachi, but he’d puzzled that much out for himself. Once it touched you, you sat down and put your head back to start spewing out more of it. It had started with that big vomit ritual in Pam and Jim Square where all the playwrights had their offices. Now there was a scary coliseum and an ocean of the purple stuff seeking out new bodies to make more of itself. And that wasn’t all. Things kept happening around the city. Doors opened into strange houses. People in funny clothes walked out blinking into the street. It was driving the jaguars crazy; he kept hearing them yowl in agitation, which at least made it easier to avoid them.

“What are you looking at, Vicky?” came the derisive sneer of his rival, the scaly snakeboi Christopher. He stood at the far end of the rusted train compartment where Victor sat perched with his day’s haul, a ventilated jar of fireflies and the most edible plates and ridges of the fungus Bud the dinosaur and his theurges had summoned while attempting to invoke the spirit of bread that he’d been able to find, in his backpack at his feet.

“I’m tryna figure out what the hell happened to the city!” Victor snapped back, on his feet with hackles raised in the blink of an eye. He snapped his sharp little teeth. “What are you doing? Spying on me ‘cause your life’s sad and you’ve got no friends?”

“Oh you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” hissed Chris, stepping closer and flaring his patterned hood in a pretty impressive threat display. His forked tongue tasted the air inches from Victor’s pointed black nose. “But I have a lot of friends, and they’re cooler than you, and when they’re done with their roller derby league practice we’re all probably going to get together and beat the snot out of your dumb ass.” He let out a long, sibilant hiss, the pupils of his huge amber eyes dilating to pinpricks. “Unless you wanted to join up…”

“I’ll never join you,” Victor snarled for reasons he was not entirely clear on. He felt all hot and stupid and his thoughts were bumping into each other. “I’m just — look, this mist stuff is bad news. It’s possessing everyone.”

“Well, obviously,” scoffed Chris. “But say more about that. I want to make sure you understand.”

Victor sniffed, peering over Chris’s shoulder. “Hey, is that a skeleton riding a scooter?”

Galatea tapped her chubby fingers against the wing casings on the sides of her head, trying to stimulate better thoughts. Why exactly had she poisoned one of the chocolates and hid the antidote inside another? She couldn’t really remember. She’d been insanely high at the time. Gamer Pope’s latest stream had been about setting challenges for yourself, so maybe that had something to do with it? She had to admit it wasn’t exactly a challenge with a lot of growth opportunity built in. Anyway she was still nauseous after the Tide pod (she belonged to a church which had decided to take the side of the PineFresh heresy) she’d taken at mass that morning, so chocolates were beside the point. But still… why?

The floorchime pulsed and Galatea tossed the box of chocolates aside and leapt to her feet, pausing only to stretch, hands planted at the small of her back atop the broad, muscular shelf of her well-padded ass. That would be her weed guy, just in time before the next coriolis storm shuttered the hab. The first crop of imported hydroponic cannabinoid bulbs were finally ready down-hab and she’d been lucky enough to get onto the co-op — all she’d really had to do was lock mouthparts with Ersina Klaivex in Nutrient Distro and let the other nascent feel her up. When you lived in a hive of latent psychics awaiting their awakenings, there wasn’t much to do besides fuck and smoke, and Galatea had long ago discovered that the obsessive fitness routines of the other nascents A: did not cause them to awaken any faster, B: were a huge drag, and C: robbed one of one’s grabbable, kneadable fat deposits and all the eyes they drew.

Had she been a little slower to answer the cloaca she might have seen the view from her out-hab window flicker and shift, but as it was she got her first taste of reality’s sudden breach when the fleshy sphincter squelched open and she found a human skeleton, an electric scooter with a mouth instead of a headlight, and two half-animal half-teens, one mammalian, one reptilian, who were alternately glowering and — whenever one of them turned away — gazing with longing at each other. She blinked, still a little Tide-addled and more than a little high. She steadied herself against the wall, the wallpaper’s cilia eagerly lapping at her palm and the armored back of her hand. “Uh, can I help you?”

“I’ve deduced you likely have a lot of datura growing on the premises,” said the skeleton. “My name is Louise. These are my associates, Paulie Peanuts and the scavengers Victor and Christopher. May we come in before a mind-melting purple fog rolls through here?”

“Check out da junk in dat trunk,” the scooter stage-whispered to Victor, who blushed angrily and turned away.

“Um,” said Galatea, blowing a little leftover stale weed smoke out her spiracles and peering past the visitors. “Where’s Mars?”

“So,” said Louise to the group assembled in Galatea’s living room. She clapped her hands together with a dry clattering sound. “It’s hard to explain, but based on my observations I think time and space have ruptured thanks to this guy Bud who you all say is your friend. I notice you, Galatea, also claim Bud as a friend, in spite of having been born on Mars while Bud resides in the ruins of what was once Detroit, Michigan, on Earth.”

“Oh for sure, yeah,” said Galatea, passing the joint Victor had rolled on to Paulie the Vespa, whose lips quested for it eagerly. “I mean, it’s Bob… he’s just…” She paused, smooth brow wrinkling, and crossed her plump bluish-green legs, causing her shimmery golden robe to ride up dangerously close to whatever she had for genitalia. “Wait, how do I know him?”

“You don’t,” said Louise with evident satisfaction. “Bob is, I believe, a latent psychic of enormous power whose specialty lies in the unconscious shaping of opinion and perception. His deepest wish is to be liked — no, to be known, and loved — and in this ritual to invoke ancient Rome he finally reached a critical mass of adoring obedience which caused the stars to align in sympathy with his wishes. He didn’t summon Rome, or if he did it’s only a kind of etheric battery powering this gas, which itself I believe to be an emanation of Bob’s subconscious drawing all organic life into his being. You’ll know him, and you’ll love him, and you’ll become him. A universe driven entirely by the workaday insecurity of a man whose only exceptional trait is that he’s also a dinosaur and he found a letterman jacket that fits him.”

“Haha, good old Bob,” said Christopher.

“No,” said Louise. “Not good. The only way to stop him is by entering a psychoactive state — Galatea’s datura should be sufficient for all four of you — and venturing into the cloud to pierce the super-psyche at its source. We’re going to give the hive mind our bad trip, and once it separates and draws back into Bob to regroup, we’re going to kill him.”

“Aw, Bob,” said Galatea.

“Dat’s what I’m talkin’ about!” the scooter exclaimed, blowing smoke. “Reminds me a’ when my cousin Tony got blown away at da feast a’ San Gennaro. Bada-boom! Right inta da zeppole fryah!” He sobered, honking his horn in a quiet funeral dirge. “Buon anima.”

“Wait,” said Galatea. “How’d you even know I had a bunch of datura?”

“Because I tasted its psychic resonance when your dimension overlapped our own,” said Louise, wishing she had a dry erase board. “You see, my existence here is an extension of Bob’s power. I died in a psychoactive state, tripping real nasty on datura seeds, and across time and space the resonant properties of his power pulled my still-hallucinating essence back into my skeleton. So, basically, I’m already whacked out and you all need to join me.”

“I’m in,” said Victor, bristling bravely.

“Oh please,” said Christopher. “I better come along so you don’t piss yourself when we get into a fight.”

They snarled and hissed for a little, then broke off awkwardly, not looking at each other. Louise wished they’d just fuck.

“Okay,” said Galatea, nonplussed. “Me too.”

“Let’s do dis,” said Paulie Peanuts, revving his little electrical engine.

The streets. The rippling glass. Reflections stalking them, warped and dripping, grotesquely deformed. Whole buildings breathing as the air flexed around their bodies. Victor kept reaching for something, then forgetting what it was he’d reached for. He saw a mantis in the center of a pale white flower. Had he chewed up some flowers recently? It seemed possible. He scratched his wrist and his fingers sank into his flesh. He started to scream and then cold bone took hold of him, guided his face away from the sight, drew him on down the street. Okay, he thought. I can do this. Psychic resonance. Bob the dinosaur.

Is he my friend? Do I… love him?

They walked into the lilac fog. At first it only swirled around their feet, but within minutes it had risen higher than their waists. Each step seemed like falling forever. Symbiote-infested pigeons watched from the rusted lampposts, their colorful waxy exteriors glistening with dew, their toothy mouths slightly agape. They didn’t seem to mind the fog at all. Had they crossed a bridge? He could feel the roar of the river in his mouth. Beside him the chunky Martian with the big ass was walking in a daze, the little diaphanous wings on the sides of her triangular skull buzzing fitfully at random intervals. Paulie the scooter peeled past them, tires squealing, and started doing donuts, the skid marks he left in his wake oozing and bubbling, reaching for them with little black fingers.

He wanted to look at Christopher, but didn’t dare.

The first living fountain they came across was a pachycephalosaurus in a sensible skirt and cardigan lying on her back beside a defunct Radio Shack, fog boiling out of her mouth, nostrils, and tear ducts in a choking cloud. To Galatea, who’d never been outside her hab, it was pretty wild. The night breeze was cool, at least, and she’d brought plenty of larvae to snack on while they wandered. Also she kept seeing her reflection grow a hundred feet tall and collapse screaming under its own weight, bones tearing fragile skin, but that was all happening a long way away. It didn’t really have much to do with her. She ran her hands over her skin, savoring the feeling. Velvet over pudding.

In the sky above the stars were shifting behind veils of clouds, forming constellations that she knew and others that she didn’t. The whorl of the Milky Way sprawled gold and purple like a fading bruise across the ceiling of reality, black lightning crackling between its glowing points.

Their little psychic gestalt reached the square in the shadow of the coliseum. There were people in tunics and togas lying on leveled streets of dirt and paved stone, all of them vomiting fog. More lay on the steps of a great temple. And then there was Bob, a twenty-foot predator, sleek and muscular, one sleeve of his letterman jacket stained with a little bit of vomit. The whole square was slippery with half-congealed puke. Louise gently herded her own little clade of psychonauts toward the dinosaur and the unconscious forms of all his “friends”, gripping in one bony fist the dried leaves and seeds she’d taken from Galatea’s apartment.

She needed the werekin scavengers’ help to lift the dilophosaur’s jaw so she could put the datura on his long pointed pink tongue. Then, kneeling with a click of patella on stone, she began to massage his throat until he swallowed with a sigh and then stretched his whole body in a catlike yawn, huge hind claws scraping channels in the pavers. “Okay,” she said, straightening up, but the scavengers were already rolling around in a grunting tussle with a suspicious amount of tongue involved while Galatea sat on Paulie’s seat, her booty overflowing it, and popped little green grubs into her mouth, staring out at the coliseum. A few minutes later, it began to flicker. Green froth dripped from Bob’s jaws. His long tail lashed the air and Paulie shouted, “Maddona mi!” and threw himself into drive, peeling out with Galatea hanging onto his handlebars, her robe billowing behind them. Louise stood still before the dinosaur as the datura worked its way into his bloodstream. He rolled onto his back and clawed the air.

A thick ass in pink hot pants bobbed toward Louise out of the fog. The sound of the werebois fucking seemed to come from everywhere. “Who are you?” came a woman’s voice, high and thin with fear. The ass shimmied to a halt. “Can you help him? Can you wake them up? I don’t know what’s going on!”

“Ah, I was hoping for a ghost,” said Louise. She couldn’t smile because she had no face, but in her head she was smiling. “You’re the medium he used to pierce death and bring me here. His psychic power, amplified by your proximity, drawing legions of the dead to provide the ethereal balance for his ritual even as they sap his intellect…”

“Like, whaaaaaaat?” the ghost whined loudly. “Speak English!”

“When I tell you,” said Louise. “Clap that thing.”

The ghost took an invisible step back. “Whaaaaaaaat?” she screeched again. “That’s, like, so rude! You’re such a Ruthanne.”

“Just do it,” said Louise, sinking into a fighting crouch as Bob began to rise up from the stones as though drawn skyward by a fishing line, one eye drooping and the other rolling madly before settling on her, its iris a vivid lilac hue. “We’re out of time.”

Trees erupted from the square in showers of stone and earth. Tongues of black lightning walked among the thrusting trunks, pulping branches and incinerating leaves. Louise scrambled over boiling tangles of python-thick roots, throwing herself at the awakened dinosaur who now hung head-down twenty feet or so above the growing forest. Even the trees grew toward him, reaching for their maker with clawing limbs, wanting to love him, to be him. She could feel the thunder of their weird tree in-jokes, which they started making the second they took root and never once ceased riffing on, as they poured into the hive mind. A few of the dreamers lying on the square amid the trees convulsed and stroked out, brains popped like blisters by the sheer density of the deciduous memes.

But the datura was doing its work. Even as Bob’s unconscious mind tried to web him in reality’s unceasing love, the trip was starting. His fears were beginning to manifest, and Louise was ready to grab at their nacreous green sludge and start to pull and stretch and shape, working them like taffy, making something any idiot would recognize, that any brain-dead ghost could wear and wield. Anyone that boring had to have seen the Marvel movies, and without a hand to work with, gilded short shorts set with gems of power would have to do. She was just putting the finishing touches on it when one of the whipping branches slid by chance through her ribcage and hefted her up off of the branch where she’d perched. The shorts fell down into the thickening tangle. She rose up and up, reaching futilely back earthward as she rocketed toward the dinosaur.

And then there was a blur of yellow and she was falling, tumbling through the air to smack against a broad dark bough that knocked no wind out of her non-existent lungs but still left her feeling somehow winded. Above, balanced on the highest branch, was a strange waxy figure with an oddly sinuous and shifting outline, and between its barbed and drooling jaws stared a face the gender of which Louise couldn’t guess but whose lips were curled in excited bloodthirst. “Want to dance?” the creature hissed up at the floating Bob, and it hurled itself straight at him in a wild leap as Louise rolled off of her branch and clattered to the forest floor below. The trees were still meme-ing, photoshops blurring up and down their twining roots, captions rewriting themselves at the speed of photosynthesis if that’s fast and the speed of light if it’s not.

A glitter of gold among the branches, drawing nearer. Paulie Peanuts sped over the roots and fallen branches, Galatea holding the Infinity Shorts in her arms. They pulled up right beside Louise. “I do not know where I am or what my name is,” said Galatea, holding out the shorts. Her square pupils were enormous and her skin had turned a faint silvery hue.

“That’s alright, dear,” said Louise. She took the shorts and turned to where she knew the big-ass ghost would be waiting as above the symbiote warrior ripped and tore at the bulk of the great dinosaur, showering them all with scales and hot predator blood. “Put this on, specter. And when it’s secure, then for the love of god… make that ass clap.”

With a sob, the invisible spirit peeled off her booty shorts and jumped and wriggled into the gilded shorts of power, twisting and jerking to get them up all the way over her booty, and then, bending invisible knees, she sniffled, “I still don’t get any of this” and gave a single mournful twerk.

A pile of bones lay in a strange forest in the middle of the city. People woke up in puddles of their own vomit, blinking dried-out eyes and coughing themselves hoarse. A mongoose-boi and his cobrakin lover fucked noisily and messily under the sheltering leaves, still high and occasionally pausing to snap at each other’s necks and posture. A chubby martian stoner sat on a scooter at the edge of the square. No coliseum in the distance. No black lightning or stars drawing closer. It was over. The datura was beginning to fade.

Not far away, the symbiote warrior that had been sister Marie-France washed themself with their long, rough black tongue, licking Bob’s blood from their literally rippling muscles as features fluttered across their face. Now narrow, now bold. Now coquettish, now rakish. They straightened, shrugging their massive shoulders into a narrower configuration as their hips flared and their thighs thickened with cables of muscle.

“Damn girl!” Galatea called, hands cupped to form a megaphone. “What that tongue do?”