Demophagiai

Scythian hyena-barbarians capture a Greek man and make him join their warband. Explicit.

Demos had no reason to be scared of the Scythians. They were like beasts, or were they like amazons; they devoured everyone, or maybe they kidnapped everyone, or both. No matter who was telling it, though, they always came in the dead of night for misbehaving young boys and girls and snatched them from their beds. In short, they were the monsters at the edges of childhood.

Demos had no reason to be scared of the Scythians until they came. He was grown up. He sold oil all over Thrace. He had a slave who stayed up night to make sure no one tried to make off with a jug of his oil and another slave who brought him dinner. He was supposed to be beyond monsters, but they had come in the dead of night and then pain had exploded across his head and everything was black.

On top of him lay a thick weight and beneath him it was uncomfortably lumpy and all around him the smell was awful. At the tips of his fingers, arms outstretched, he could feel a breeze. Animal instinct drove him toward the open air, squeezing and pushing and grunting. At last his head and shoulders were free.

Another One of the Girls

A fox-squirrel runs into one of those trashy rat girls. Surprise surprise, she TFs him. Explicit.

The doors started to close, then stopped and pulled back. Fortune stepped into the elevator and tapped the brass button for the fifteenth floor. The bed was waiting for the fox-squirrel up in his room, where he could rest his legs and feet before dinner. Probably Italian food, he thought—it seemed fitting while he was in the city, even if he'd had pizza for lunch for the same reason.

He looked from the doors up to the number three which slid up to four, then to the other person standing in the elevator with him. The way her ass jutted out in the thin black dress made it beg to be squeezed, and the way one of her knees was crooked, lifting one of her tall black heels off of the ground, seemed almost inviting. Her pink tail swayed from side to side behind her. The dress ended just below her shoulder blades, amid the thick curls of her black hair, while on top of her head, a pair of rounded ears held up heavy golden hoops.

Subject #39-01-4

A parasite slowly converts a feline test subject into a gooey, draconian form as he tries to escape. Mature.

AFTER ACTION REPORT

SUBJECT #39-01-4

DOCTOR ???????

NARRATIVE:

The subject was received from the retrieval team operating in ?????????, ?????? on March 30, 20??. The subject was unconscious as per protocol, identified as biologically male, feline (domestic cat), age approximately eighteen to twenty-one. All identifying documents had been properly removed by the retrieval team. Doctors Allbright and Kim were on hand to transport the subject.

Specimen Room A3 was reserved for the initial procedure. Upon entering, we learned that during processing #39-01-1, the previous team of Doctors Lee, Mayers and Reyes had neglected to properly clean all equipment. At this point, Allbright and Kim finished the work left undone by the previous team, where I filed a disciplinary report which has yet to be processed at the time of this writing, but can most likely be found by accessing my record.

Pacem Per Tyrranidem

A hacker discovers a Reptilian conspiracy. She can't beat them, but she does join them. Mature.

Four in the morning was a terrible time to be awake. It was when Alyssa worked best. The noise from outside her windows, the endless waves of the city's shore, was quiet, reduced to a ripple when a wayward car meandered through the tight streets. Anyone with sense was sleeping, but Alyssa was searching.

But it was alys_null who was really searching. Alyssa was the young woman, the stringy dark hair, the hunched back, the salty noodles and empty soda cans congealing behind her keyboard and around her monitor. Alys_null was her on the inside, the more accurate approximation of who she was. Alys had no creed and she was not fed by ego. She wasn't looking for fame. She wanted a challenge, and here she had found one.

A program on a computer, an average node in a banking network, was running a peer-to-peer file transfer. Each chunk of the file was copied and sent, and once the 'received' message from the computer at the other end came through, the chunk was deleted. The same program was running on the other computer. The file was stuck in constant motion, scrambled between the two computers.

Don't Enable Magic Animals

A cautionary tale about wishing that girls would find everything you say cute. Mature.

"That's not fair," said the young man.

"That's the rules," said the fox.

The fox was lying. There were no rules. Thus, there were no rules against lying about there being rules to get out of granting terrible wishes.

The little red beast stood atop a small boulder, which put him about at eye level with the man. The young man was standing on the ground, arms folded over a rough cloth tunic. A strip of fabric had been torn from the hem of his tunic and was now wrapped around the fox's left paw.

"That's the fourth one," the man complained.

"And all four of them were against the rules, so if you want a wish you'd better come up with one that isn't," said the fox.

"Can you tell me what the rules are?" the man asked.

"No. That's against the rules."

Silken

A cat tries to rob a Chinatown store, but its owner finds a better use for him. Explicit.

The lanterns were strung up, the already-cramped streets were choked with stalls and people, and every single shop was busy. Obviously, Chinese New Year was a big event in Chinatown, and that was what made it the perfect time for a bit of petty thievery.

See, all of the shop owners would be busy as hell—and likely not even in the shops, if they had a stall out on the street. With so many people around, one little orange tabby cat could easily go missing. No one would pick him out when the place was packed with tourists. He knew a couple of the back streets, since he'd come here a couple of times before. One of his friends had a thing for Chinese food. It was simple, easy, hard to fuck up. Get in the back of a shop, grab some expensive stuff, and make a couple hundred selling it all on the internet.

Liam had gone for the nondescript look. Hooded sweatshirt, pair of jeans, sneakers—just a college kid checking out Chinatown. There were some roadblocks that blocked off the back roads so that people wouldn't go back there, but it took no more than ducking underneath to get past them. No one said a thing to him, if anyone even saw him slipping past the barrier at all.