Pink and Black

A cheerleader and a goth become exaggerated versions of each other through a weird Facebook quiz. Mature.

'Find out what your Friends think about You! Stephanie Madison took this Quiz!'

Amber didn't use Facebook much, but she had an account because everyone did. Her phone had pinged when she got the email notification, which had taken her to Facebook, where she saw the ad for some quiz app. Stephanie, huh?

Amber wiggled her black-nailed thumb over the link, thinking about whether to do it. It couldn't hurt, and to be honest, she was interested in finding out what Stephanie thought of her these days. Back in middle school, they had been tighter friends, but it seemed so much easier to be friends when they were young. They had hung out, played in the yard, done sleepovers; typical little kid friend stuff.

Once they'd gotten to high school, Amber had followed her interests into alternative music, cheesy vampire novels, and finding the darkest clothes her mom would buy her. Stephanie had gone off and gotten all athletic, and by now, in her senior year, she was on the cheerleading team. So it made sense that they didn't hang out a whole lot, but they had been good friends before, so...

Ah, what the hell. Might as well give it a shot.

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'Find out what your Friends think about You! Amber Lee Knowles took this Quiz!'

Stephanie had assumed the ring from her phone was another update from one of her group chats, but instead it was a message from Amber. Amber? Wow, she had barely even talked to her in years. Maybe she wanted to reconnect during their last year of school together?

The mirror on Stephanie's closet door caught her reflection as she glanced up and fixed her hair, then leaned on her elbows and took a look at Amber's profile. Stephanie herself was pretty close to your standard-issue, small-town cheerleader, with a figure she kept slim through daily gymnastics and cardio, and naturally wheat-blonde hair. There on the screen was Amber's profile photo, trying to look dark and mysterious, with heavy eyeliner, and her straight black hair draped over one eye. Amber's hair was natural, too—she was half-Korean on her mother's side.

Sure, they did look different, but Stephanie did her best to not let looks influence who she was friends with. She and Amber hadn't talked much, but she wasn't going to shun an old friend just cause she was a bit goth now.

Stephanie hit the button and started answering the questions the quiz asked about Amber.

Mer-Made

Poor spellcasting turns both Stella and her boyfriend into mermaids. Explicit.

Michael opened the door to his Santa Monica apartment and found candles strewn across the counters and tables. Curled runes written on sheets of printer paper were stuck to the wall with masking tape.

'Not again,' he thought.

"Stella? Are you casting a spell?" he called. He dropped his messenger bag next to the door and took a few steps toward the hall. Stella stepped out of her studio, with two more sheets of paper in her hands and a roll of masking tape around her wrist.

"It's almost ready," she said, flashing her boyfriend a smile as she passed by. With a creak of tape, she tore off enough to stick up the last two runes on either side of their TV. Stella took a seat on the sofa, then looked up at Michael expectantly.

Michael walked up behind the couch and leaned on its back. "I thought you said after the vacuum cleaner nonsense you weren't going to cast spells."

She rolled her head back, so that she was looking at him upside-down. "I've been practicing. Just small stuff, but I haven't messed up again. This isn't even a dangerous spell, it's not going to go...'vacuum cleaner'." She gave him an upside-down smile and reached up to scratch his neatly-trimmed blonde beard. "Besides, this is a spell for you."

Rood Awakening

Woken from cryosleep, a cat must escape a post-apocalyptic training facility designed to turn him into a kangaroo supersoldier. Explicit.

In 2036, war began. Destructive, planet-wide, all-out war. Civilians, fleeing the encroaching devastation, sought out cryogenic stasis en masse. Governments pooled their resources with private companies in order to preserve their citizens, with the promise that, in five or ten years, they would be brought out of stasis and would return to the post-war world.

Sixty years later, war has changed. Gene-spliced soldiers fight a constant battle of attrition on the war-torn wastes. To fuel the never-ending conflict, warlords and military dictators search for stasis pods to replenish their bleeding ranks. With fresh pre-war blood, and genes ready for splicing, the civilians in the pods are the newest recruits in the endless war.

WARNING: HOMEOSTASIS BREACH. POD UNLOCK BEGIN.

He tumbled limp onto the floor. His lungs seared with chemicals as he coughed for breath. A computerized voice, back inside the pod, was saying something to him.

"You may be experiencing mild memory loss. This is normal. Please wait for a care counselor to come retrieve you."

No. This wasn't normal. His lungs were dying. His memories were a haze of feelings; anxiety, fear, wanting to curl up until the war went away. But who was he? It was a big blank in his mind. Brown fur, short claws, whiskers: cat, male, young. He spun the plastic tag around his wrist and read the name on it. 'Circutron.' Was that a name? Didn't sound like one, but it was all he had. 'Circ' was good enough.

He grimaced and clutched his chest. The sting in his lungs seeped into his veins. It spread into his body, some foreign thing that shouldn't be there.

The floor was littered with dust and flecks of concrete fallen from the ceiling. He leaned against the wall, cushioned by the tubes and hoses running between the pods. One hose had been ripped from the wall and connected to a rusted red canister with strips of duct tape. In yellow spray paint, the words 'RooD Jooz' ran down the middle of the tank. He coughed. Was that what he'd breathed in?

The Amazing Talia

A batty hyena magician kidnaps a feline superhero and turns him into her stage assistant. Mature.

As he walked through the lobby of the abandoned Verite Theater, Celsius was stopped by an usher.

"Can I see your ticket?" she asked.

Celsius was caught off guard, but the hyena girl in a red cap and jacket didn’t bat an eye at the ruined posters, or the splintered boards piled up near the concession stand, or the fact that chunks of the theater doors were missing. She didn't even notice that he didn't have a ticket.

"Right this way," she said.

With an arm behind Celsius's back, she swept him forward through the doors and into the ruined theater hall.

Celsius had been combing through unsolved, odd crimes for something to investigate. He had to put work into making a name for himself as a vigilante. 'Little brown cat with ice powers' was not a marketable superhero identity, so it came down to research and legwork. What he'd found was a number of thefts—cellophane, light bulbs, fabrics, a Halloween costume store, video equipment—that all had similar MOs. They'd all involved drivers who'd fallen asleep and had no memory of what happened afterwards.

The thefts were spread out over months; if you weren't looking for connections, you might not have pieced together that someone was stealing supplies for a stage show. And in Empire City, that meant it was time to go digging around in old theaters to figure out who was taking all this stuff, and what their plans were.

"Hey, I've got some questions for…you?" Celsius said. He whirled around, looking behind him, but the usher was gone.

Someone threw the breaker for the lights, and the theater lit up, pouring light down onto the right side of the stage. The whole stage had been repaired and re-finished. It stood out, almost unreal and pristine against the rest of the abandoned theater. The red velvet curtains on the right side ruffled.

"And now, for the very first time," boomed a woman's voice over the speaker system, "the amazing, the mysterious, the lovely, Talia Tsannarova!"

Trade-Off

A nerdy tigress invents a device to steal her boyfriend's muscular build. Explicit.

The last time Sam had tried to spice up things in bed, she'd nearly given her boyfriend an electric shock.

She was a tinkerer by nature. She was never happy when something just worked. She had to know how it worked, why it worked, if it could do its job faster, and how many volts she could run through it before it started smoking. The inner workings of a device spoke more to her than most people did. She didn't get out a whole lot.

Somehow she'd found a boyfriend in Ivan. Actually, she knew exactly how: physics tutoring. Ivan needed it for his distribution requirements, and she wanted a chance to sit and stare at the cute hockey player while he tried to stomp his way around unit conversions.

They couldn't have looked more different. Maybe that was why Sam wanted to make it up to him by coming up with new ways to have sex: because she didn't feel like she was enough for him on her own. She was five foot four at her best, a tigress with stripes that almost looked like glasses and a soft midsection that spilled out a bit if she wore anything too close-fitting. Ivan was six foot five, broad chest, with the sort of shaggy handsomeness that arctic wolves were ideal for. She spent her time in her workroom messing around with disassembled microwaves and scrapped lab equipment, while he was out at the gym, keeping himself in shape.

The Curse Deepens

Captured by the Lion Clan, a cursed adventurer struggles to keep his independence. Mature.

The misty forest hung heavy on Circ's whiskers. The droplets of dew weighed each whisker down. The weight of the drops became an unseen hand pushing his head down, telling him to stop, to turn back, or at the very least, to rest. If Circ knew anything about this land, that feeling meant this was the worst possible place to rest.

The young cat pushed on through the mist, clinging to his spear like it would draw him through the woods. His armor creaked softly as he moved, stretching around his slim form. Armor was little help if he was ambushed, though, and he was so slight that only light leather could give him enough mobility to defend himself. His best defense was the small shield buckled to his forearm, followed by the tip of his spear. If anything came at him, the best he could do was put it down quickly before it could get its claws into him.

Minutes crept by and trees emerged from and disappeared into the haze. He had no idea where he was going, but at the very least, he couldn't see any tracks ahead of him, so he wasn't circling around. Every sound of shifting leaves made him turn and squint into the mist. He was almost sure he saw a figure moving or a bit of fleeting motion behind a tree. When he looked again, there was nothing, just the mist playing with his eyes.