Sul’vari Consular Office’s Guide to Human Culture, Chapter 2:
Humans are, by Sul’vari standards, an extremely chaste species with a deeply conservative culture when it comes to matters of intimacy and sexuality. The majority of our social customs are considered inappropriate, offensive, or highly controversial in human societies. Casual physical intimacy, discussion of sexual relations, and even common greetings must be carefully contextualized during your stay. When in doubt, always err on the side of restraint.
After the ordeal that was ingesting liquid mana and the subsequent changes it brought about in my body, I had another round of imaging and poking. I was sort of dazed and foggy-headed, and leaned on Vael heavily for support to get me through it and back out into the city. She had us back in a transport with our stuff, heading home in no time at all.
I was eager to get back to 5-3, though I would miss the feeling of sunlight on my skin. The trip down was fairly short, and there weren’t any security stops besides automated scans.
Things were quiet between us on the ride back down. Vael put on some music, but I asked her to turn it down a bit because my head was throbbing. I tried cycling my mana and pushing some into my braincase, but it didn’t seem to help.
We’d no more than gotten back to Vael’s apartment when her slate started buzzing with messages, and she was rather distracted with responses. She told me she had some business that had come up, and she’d need to go out and take care of it on her own.
It didn’t bother me at all. I was feeling out of it, and some time to myself sounded good to me. I got changed into comfortable clothing: a pair of stretch sweatpants and a World of Divers shirt I’d found in the markets.
I was somewhat deliberately ignoring the fact that my balance had shifted, that my center of mass had lowered, and that my tail had both grown rather significantly in length and girth, as well as in the shape of the tip. That was something to go over when my brain wasn’t throbbing like mad in my temples, behind my eyes, and at the base of my skull.
I sat cross-legged in the middle of the living area floor and worked on some of the User exercises that Vael had shown me, the kind that’d left me feeling like I had done a hard workout before.
My mind was stuck on something Director Mallard had told me before we’d left Veris, it’d been stuck there since I’d heard it, and now was as good a time as any to try and pry it loose.
I’d asked her if the changes I’d experienced were going to end soon.
“Your symbiote is entering the period of peak growth and development. Expect physiological changes to accelerate, not slow. They might not be visible. Changes seem to be dependent on the individual, similar to how User development works.”
I’d already changed so much. My life now was unrecognizable from what it had been two weeks ago. I barely even resembled the same person. Maybe in elements of the face, but the weight loss had changed my face nearly as much as the… feminization had. If you were talking about the body and figure, well, it was totally unrecognizable. I’d gone from an overweight pear shape to a thin and very curvaceous woman.
While I was focusing on drills to improve my mana flow through my circuit without losing control of it and it seeping out, my mind was flooded with images from the past couple of days.
Geel’s eyes languorously roaming my figure while she licked her lips. Imir pressed against my back, her arms resting on mine, her hands guiding mine through the strange dance of fighting with a partisan. Lael holding me up in the pool, Vael rubbing lotion on me while I drifted off sunbathing.
They all had something in common, something I was struggling to come to terms with and accept. It felt like the kind of conclusion that was embarrassing to draw about yourself. Or maybe even conceited. Like I might be seeing or feeling something that wasn’t really there.
Except Geel had been rather unambiguous.
Even if I let myself follow that thought somewhere, I wasn’t sure where it went. That was the part I kept shying away from. Not the conclusion itself, but what came after it. What it meant that I’d noticed, what it meant that it kept sticking in my head. I’d spent so long not being looked at that I hadn’t thought much about looking back.
I’m not sure I know how to want something back.
I felt useless in these encounters, and it annoyed me.
I finished my exercises, and while I felt like I was making real, tangible progress with these training exercises, I was being pulled out of my meditation by the steady, aching pulse in my head. I was sweaty as hell after working my circuit as hard as I had, so I climbed to my feet and dragged my gross ass to the shower I was falling in love with. I popped a pair of painkillers after rummaging in the medicine cabinet, washed them down with a cup of water, stripped, and climbed into the shower.
I planted my hands on the wall and let my heavy chest hang with the water blasting pressurized, pulsating jets of water on the back of my neck and head. Resting there with my eyes closed helped. The ache was moving from my head and into my jaws, and I kept running my tongue over my teeth.
I needed to wash my hair. I reached out and felt for the shampoo bottle, then grabbed it.
It was when I wiped the water off my face with both hands to open my eyes that I realized that I was holding the shampoo bottle… with unoccupied hands. I cracked my eyelids to see my tail holding the bottle in its new mouth, the way one would hold it in their hands.
Just another day in the life of a developing biological horror.
I took the bottle into my hands. It was very strange. I’d gotten used to my tail just sort of doing its own thing. I couldn’t really control it well without dedicating a lot of mental effort to doing it. I thought about opening and closing the mouth and watched it repeat the motions seamlessly right in front of me.
Well. That’s new.
It had grown longer and thicker, more muscular-looking, and the head had changed fairly significantly. Previously, it had been a cone shape with a pair of independent mandibles that locked into the underside of the cone. The head had grown larger and split into four matching quarters, each one now acting like an independent mandible, and, as I’d just learned, was capable of grasping things. It had been around the size of my hand before; it was nearly twice that size now, and more of an elongated diamond shape. When I fully closed the mandibles, it still formed what looked like a kind of spear tip.
I reached out a hand and stroked the head of my tail after closing it. It felt nice. Like I was getting much more sensory information from it than I had previously.
Well, I suppose as you grow and take up more of my body, it’s not an entirely one-sided relationship. That’s something.
I finished cleaning up and had another quick session with Vael’s grooming tool. It felt like I’d just done this a day or two ago, but I had a good amount of body hair growth regardless. Strange.
I’d dried myself off and was working on drying my hair while examining myself in the mirror. My backside, specifically. My spine had changed along with my tail. Thankfully, not in any way that would turn heads; if anything, it looked like the kind of back you’d see on a serious athlete. Someone who’d put in years of work. The disks were distinct and visible, each one sitting proud under the skin, and the muscles flanking them had grown to match. Thick, paired columns running the length of my spine. It looked dense and trained.
I pressed my fingers into the muscle on either side and felt firm resistance there. Resistance that hadn’t been there before.
I wasn’t sure what it meant in terms of functionality. More leverage, maybe. A stronger foundation. Something to hang more weight off of. I’d been unconsciously hunching my shoulders since my body changed, which was something Vael kept nagging me about. I stood up straighter and pulled my shoulders back in a way that made my chest really stick out.
Huh. I can still tell they’re big and heavy, but I don’t really feel them pulling anymore. I’ll have to file this under ‘probably useful outside my tits’ and move on for now.
I paused in brushing and blowing to turn around and rest my elbows on the countertop. I had to close my eyes; it felt like someone was driving a pair of fucking ice picks through my skull from top to bottom behind my eye sockets.
I let out a low, pained groan and tasted blood in my mouth.
A pair of soft clinks sounded on the sink below my head, and I didn’t have to look to tell what they were. My tongue was probing the source of the blood in my mouth, the two gaps left behind where my upper canines had been minutes before, a hollow socket–
Ow, fuck!
Correction. Not hollow sockets, but sockets with very sharp additions growing in. I pressed my mana up the sides of my neck and into my head, and the pain intensified. I rested my forehead on the spigot and let bloody drool run out of my open mouth. The sensation of teeth sliding and grinding against one another was nearly as maddening as the pain. Additional teeth fell out, or rather, were pushed out, by new sets coming in from below. Two became four, six, then twelve. The rest soon followed. Using my mana helped to accelerate the teeth growing in and my gums healing up. The entire process took maybe five minutes, but those were a long five minutes of feeling like someone was hammering nails through my jaw and skull.
The end result was…different. Familiar in places, subtly changed in others, and dramatically different in the remainder. After rinsing my mouth out several times, I poked and prodded at the inside of my mouth with my upper body and neck craned as far forward as I could get without planting my face on the mirror.
Incisors were the same, just extremely bright and shiny white. The benefits of being brand new, I suppose. Canines and the teeth that were right behind them were the ones that had come out first, and changed the most. They were straight-up vicious-looking, sharp, daggerlike things that looked like I could use them to take a big old chunk out of the butt of one of the pig-monsters I’d fought in my first Dive. I made a mental note of that, even though the image of me gnawing on a portal monster was enough to get me to crack myself up. My molars were slightly changed, sharper and more defined, with pronounced ridges.
I worried about what people would think about me when I opened my mouth now.
I closed my jaw and grimaced at myself from several different angles in the mirror. Unless I was pulling my mouth open in a big grin, the changes were mostly unnoticeable. Besides looking like I just came from a dental clinic, that is. If I opened my mouth, the teeth separated, and you could see that the corners of my mouth were wrong.
Predatory. But… not in an ugly way? They look different than the Sul’vari fangs.
I had to be careful with those things; they weren’t display models. My teeth interlocked satisfyingly, fitting together into a single cohesive unit. I liked how slick they felt.
Of all the things that had changed, I think this was the first one I actually liked. I saw different things with each pose and angle. Beauty, exoticism, differentiation, and a threat display. There was one that brought out a stronger response in my chest. The woman smiling in the mirror looked like someone you’d think twice about.
I looked down at what was, optimistically, a horrifying mess of teeth and blood in the sink. Most of the blood had been washed away when I was rinsing out my mouth. My initial thought was to clean up the mess and toss it into the bin bound for the incinerator. I thought about what Vael had told me about Tokh beliefs and practices.
I had an idea, but I was going to have to make a short trip out of the apartment for some odds and ends.
***
Several hours had passed, and it was entering the late afternoon. I’d paid a visit to Wrapped & Loaded and stocked up on some supplies and replacements. My account had been updated with my pay from Veris, and I was sitting comfortably in the mid-five digits. I didn’t have to be quite as frugal as I had been on my first visit. After a back-and-forth discussion with Dahlia about some of my gear issues, she squeezed into a changing booth with me and made some suggestions after taking measurements.
I’d splurged and bought a sports bra that was, frankly, absurdly expensive, but Dahlia had promised me that I’d be happy with it, or my money back. It was woodland camo-patterned, had straps that looked like they were rated for industrial hauling loads, and looked absolutely absurd. The thing had a buckle, zippers, and pockets that could be used for padding (not that I needed any), inserts, or to stash things. Dahlia was a well-endowed woman, and it was only through her vehement insistence that I was willing to give it a try.
It was extremely comfortable with the middle part unzipped, and the inner part was mesh and very well ventilated. When you zipped the outer shell up, it squished everything into a tight embrace, which was fairly warm, but kept things entirely under control. That itself was its own form of comfort when one was, say, getting flipped through the air by alien fauna. It came with an instruction manual. When I’d wrapped up at W&L, I’d hit some odds and ends merchants and headed back to the apartment.
I’d just gotten done putting the finishing touches on my new necklace when the door beeped, and Vael came in. She paused in the doorway and blinked at me several times, then smiled.
I was sitting in the middle of the living room floor with piles of crafting stuff lying around me, from a pen drill to epoxies and lacquers.
“You look like you’ve been keeping yourself busy!”
I immediately felt the need to apologize, saying, “Sorry about the smell; some of the stuff stinks when it’s drying.”
She waved a hand dismissively and came over to take a seat opposite me.
She couldn’t contain her curiosity. “What did you make?”
I blushed. “Well, err. I was thinking about that trophy thing, and I decided it would be weird to have a big claw flapping around on my wrist. So I took Mom’s bracelet and gave it a new lease on life, and added some things to it.” I extended the necklace over to her from where I’d been holding it with my tail.
She glanced between the tip of my tail, which had one mandible cracked open, and the necklace looped around a tooth. It looked silly, but it left both my hands free to work on it while I held it with my tail, which had been a game-changer.
“Yeah, uh, things have been changing. I can sort of just do whatever with it now? Some other stuff happened while you were gone, too.”
Vael ran her fingers over the lower half of the wood-beaded necklace. Front and center was the black boar-monster claw and Mom’s leaf Four icon. I’d added more wooden beads in a lighter color and made a pattern with her original beads, and I’d drilled out all the holes to fit a heavier and nearly indestructible polymer paracord. Flanking the claw and the icon were my former upper canines, which I’d cleaned up, dried out, and lacquered. The necklace was held together with a breakaway clasp, now too. More than secure enough not to get lost by accident, but I also wouldn’t run the risk of strangling myself.
Ugh, wouldn’t that be ironic?
Vael frowned as she ran her thumb claw over the pair of teeth, then glanced back at me. I rubbed the back of my head.
“So I had another change, and I actually like this one, so I thought I’d commemorate it, too.”
Vael gasped. “Ooh! Show me!”
I smiled, and her brows rose. Then I opened my mouth to show off my sharply pointed chompers. She squealed and clapped her hands excitedly for me, then pulled me into a chest-squishing hug.
“You look great, Kiera!”
I smiled and squeezed her tighter.
When she let me go, I told her that I’d done a little shopping.
She was excited to share her news when I was done.
“So! I got a promising lead on someone to add to our team!”
I couldn’t help it, I felt a touch of excitement at the news. “Oh? Did you meet them already?”
She shook her head quickly. “No! I wouldn’t, not without you!”
I’m not anyone. But she waited, so.
I could feel the excitement radiating off her from where we sat facing each other.
“So, what do you think about going out tonight?”
Umm…
“Like…?” I let the question linger.
“To a battle arena! To watch some fights! Our guy is one of the participants!”
Oh, thank fuck. I was worried there for a moment.
Something was telling about the giant smirk on her face.
I let out a big sigh and asked the question I was pretty sure I already knew the answer to. “You already bought the tickets, didn’t you?”
She flicked out a pair of plastic tickets and held them up between her fingers in a sleight-of-hand trick motion.
“Great, I always wanted to see ultraviolence up close and personal.”