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."

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!"

Broadway Was Waiting For Me

A superpowered cat sucked back in time is introduced to the high society of the Roaring Twenties. (And also turned into a girl.) Mature.

A wave of gray slush crashed up over the curb, then hung, frozen, an inch from colliding with the young cat.

The businessmen on the corner stared from beneath their dark-brimmed hats. A fox clutched at the fur stole draped around her neck, like she had been frozen in place along with the water. Someone let out a low whistle of amazement.

This was worse than the cell phone.

Today was Celsius's bad day. Number one, it was the twenty-third of December and he'd had a final to take this morning. Come on, you couldn't schedule it any earlier?

Number two, he'd ran out of people to ask to the school's Holiday Bash. Stupid party. He didn't want to ask the cute archaeology major to the party anyway.

Number three, he'd missed his bus stop, and the next stop was all the way down in the historic district, so he'd either have to go to an ATM and get change for the bus fare back, or spend half an hour walking home.

And number four, he was stuck in a time-warp to the Roaring Twenties.

Galatea

A body-sculptor sets her eyes on improving a young coyote by way of turning him into a woman. Explicit.

While the beat rumbled away above them, Mel's hands grazed over a gazelle's clay-thick ass. Her fingers stayed in constant motion, like a potter's hands spinning a terracotta vase.

"Like a brick house, yeah?" the gazelle asked. She knew she looked great.

She thought she knew, at least. She'd been breathing in Mel's smoke for a good half hour, and Mel had been telling her she looked great, so she had to look good. If Mel told her that she knew French, she'd know for certain that she was fluent, even if the closest thing she knew to French was that 'si' meant yes.

||||||||

Null drones convert a hapless photographer poking around an abandoned hospital. Explicit.

Eight clicks echoed through the dead hospital.

Thomas raised his head. His ears rose too, stretching to hear the sound again. To him, rusted gurneys and rubble-strewn beds were photogenic, not eerie, and an odd noise was cause for investigation, not panic.

He pulled his camera off of his tripod. He thought it might be a wild animal, or some sort of scavenger. Whatever it was, he was going to get a picture of it.

He walked back across the ground floor of Bellvue Hospital, closed down and left to steep in its own formaldehyde for the last thirty years. There had been a quarantine then, a panic—but it was all before Thomas's time. The hospital had never been sealed up airtight. If there were any pathogens left, simply going inside couldn't hurt.

The Snow-Black Fortress

Instead of studying barbarians, a fantasy anthropologist winds up joining them instead. Explicit.

Footsteps dented the snow without any feet to make them. The falling snow and gusts of wind would cover them up within minutes, and then there would be no sign that anyone had been there.

Edward paused, and the footsteps stood still. He crouched down, digging two gloved fingers into the snow and putting a clump of it onto his tongue. He was loath to chill himself any more than he already was, but he'd read in a book that it kept your breath from fogging up.

Ahead of Edward loomed the fortress, built out of greying stone, perched on the side of a mountain. Behind him was the less perilous peak he'd climbed. And beneath him, beyond the thick stone bridge, were thousands of feet of nothingness down to a rocky cleft between the two peaks.. Edward's heart hammered in his chest.

The tracks began to move again, dotting the snow with dark spots where the gray-black flagstones showed through. Edward grabbed the edges of his cloak and pulled them closer together against the cold. On his chest, sitting above his traveling robe, was an unevenly round disc of lead. Stamped on it in a puffy, bulbous way was the image of a half-closed eye.