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?

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.

Heart's Desire [Illustrated]

Three friends play a fortune-telling game to grant their hearts' desire, but is it really giving them what they want? Explicit.

Cole stood beside the cabinet, like he was presenting it to them. "It's like a fortune telling game, but it's got special rules to it. You play it with a bunch of people, you get one fortune per day, and the first person to get to five 'blessings' wins."

"Wins what?" Tricia asked.

Cole pointed to one of the rules. "Your heart's desire."

Alex made a soft snort. Cole grinned. Tricia was starting to smile too. It was a cheesy old game.

"So, want to give it a shot?" Cole asked.

"That's what we're here for," Alex said. Even if it was silly, it was something they could all play together.

Alex stood up, fished one of the tokens out of the open coin return, and dropped it into the slot. A tinny recording of a sitar played as the cards on display in the booth swirled around and the lights on the outside flashed on and off in a spinning pattern.

A slot in the front spat out a yellowed card. Alex picked it up, then moved to the side. Tricia stood by her after getting her own fortune, and once Cole got his too, they all turned to face each other.

Growing Confidence

A nerdy wolf girl starts getting bigger and stronger, and not even her boyfriend can stop her. Explicit.

Stephanie tilted the envelope toward her hand and shook the silver pendant onto her palm.

“Oh, wow," she said. “You didn't have to do this. Dinner was enough."

Her boyfriend, the tiger across the table from her, shrugged. “I thought you could wear it to Pathfinder." Though he was trying to play it casual, he watched Stephanie's reaction, hoping she'd like it.

“Yeah," the white wolf girl said, paying more attention to her present. The pendant itself was about an inch and a half in diameter and made of silver. It was shaped like a disk, with the image of a snarling wolf carved into it, its eyes looking forward and its mane making up the outer part of the disk. Its small steel necklace chain had pooled in her palm underneath.

This Mine Of Mine

Instead of bringing education to his fellow kobolds, Thuk discovers the benefits of mining. Explicit.

Thuk was a rare thing: a kobold with an education. He'd been part of a scavenging clan when he was younger, and then one day it just wasn't enough for him any more. He'd spent a year away from home, learning all that he could, and now he was trying to bring that knowledge back to his fellow kobolds. It was about as easy as breaking through a dungeon wall with his head.

The latest kobold settlement Thuk had tracked down was a mine, hidden deep down behind crevasses only the wiry little lizards could slip through and worming its way throughout the depths of the mountain. They mined the ores and gems that hid in the stone, and traded them with the creatures that lived higher up for food and small trinkets.

Thuk slid down to sit beside his bag and pulled out a scuffed and scraped book--a human-made one, for teaching basic math. If he could get these kobolds to think about their mining in terms of math, they could trade more wisely, improve their quality of life, and live more easily.