“Hey, looks like the second row is suddenly the happening place to be,” said one of the second-row spectators, a horse. A whinny of excitement followed.
All but the donkey in the first row and the panda bear, sitting upright, forever nibbling his bamboo, were complaining. “Yeah, whatever happened to seniority?” the crocodile balked. “I see all those many more seconds we spent together before these latecomers arrived amounted to naught.” The low register of his voice echoed his concerns about the circle.
Soren’s senses were starting to mute the voices of the animals as he succumbed to the tunnel vision of his focus on Naomi. He undid the second button of her shirt, exposing her breasts, slipped his hands around in back to unfasten the bra’s strap; the elastic rebound snapped him in his face so hard it had to leave a mark. Was she wearing a bra two sizes too small on purpose, to play down her sex appeal? Or was that a safety measure, a magic-charged strap to help him resist the urge of going any further if she could no longer resist herself? If so, why? Ah, the beast. She felt the sex might summon him, and not Soren. An admittedly justified concern, but Soren couldn’t feel more in the moment if he tried. He pressed on, tossing the bra.
“Hey, if you’re looking to upgrade the kid’s blinders…” the donkey said, peeling the bra off his face with a toss of the head in the panda bear’s direction.
Soren’s nibbling on her left nipple caused Naomi to moan so loud, it was like the call of Tarzan; the animals came running—apparently their numbers included a lot of the ones who hadn’t gotten the word earlier. The ground was literally shaking, not that Soren could feel it directly, now that they were levitating a few feet above it; the chi flowing through the power spot informed him of the incoming tide.
Naomi and Soren were starting to pant and moan in two-part harmony; they weren’t the only ones; the animals were making the same sounds in sync—the congregation that dialed in to the mutual worshipping going on upon the altar before them.
The balcony seats were filling up—the monkeys and other tree crawlers scaling the trees to take up a branch—as Soren found out, losing his footing and sliding under Naomi, where he was suddenly looking up rather than down, before narrowing his focus onto her again.
Naomi and Soren were still busy slipping clothes off of one another while being pressed up against each other and keeping their hands busy on one another’s nipples and mouths; that turned escaping their clothes into a Houdini-worthy event that involved more snake-like writhing and foot work than he’d expect from a circus acrobat without hands trying to do the same thing.
He hit a threshold of intensity with his passion that triggered a switch. He should have known to hold himself short of it. But who was he kidding if he thought he had that kind of control with her?
The beast popped out, as she’d expected it might, and as he’d denied to himself that it would, allowing his hormones to dissolve all cautionary, fear-driven endorphins in his brain.
The brute’s lovemaking was decidedly rougher and angrier and more domineering.
“Oh, yeah, they’re definitely finding the animal in themselves,” the donkey said.
“Amen,” came the wolf, howling, joined by the rest of the chorus.
Naomi, no longer enjoying herself, was fighting back. And something else. She’d morphed into Soren—as he was once, without nano-disfigurement, and mounds of black swarming piles of nanites along his surface. Soren thought that she was seeking to draw on Soren’s chi abilities to even the match, and possibly didn’t realize she’d triggered her morphing magic, or, intending to turn this into an all-out fight, had possibly morphed deliberately into someone who was best qualified to wrestle the beast off her.
But the shapeshifting just egged the beast on more, this time joined by Soren, who could feel his presence inside his own body slipping away, until he saw a chance to reunite with his old self again; relishing the chance to pour into his old body like a genie escaping the lamp of his current prison along the seven primary chakras running up and down his spine—to say nothing of the chi energy pouring out of his mouth in his kisses.
The panda bear huffed. “Okay, this is getting weird.”
“Not by donkey standards,” the donkey said, “not really.”
“Or by wolf standards,” said the wolf. “Definitely not by wolf standards.” He howled louder than last time.
“Anybody else buying this is weird?” said the doe, looking about. She didn’t get any response from the still-riveted-on-the-show audience. The doe bleated. “Figures I’d be the one with the sensitive disposition. You wait until I get with that reincarnation board of judges the next go around. Should have come back as an electric eel, with a thing for shocking people.”
Soren and the beast weren’t just wrestling one another anymore—they were shooting blasts of chi energy at each other from some distance, still too afraid to venture beyond the arena of the power spot, for fear of weakening their positions. The catfight had turned into a dogfight, and then morphed into wizard war in quick order.
Naomi switched back to Naomi to access still more power than Soren could, working more forms of magic than just chi channeling.
“Okay, this is getting a little too much like domestic life for me.” The donkey brayed its discontent, and walked away from the circle. He was being joined by an exodus of animals no longer interested in what was going on between the couple.
As that audience cleared, another one was on the way—the rest of the Fab Five.
Where was Victor? The rest of them couldn’t hold off the beast for long without him. Soren’s last thought faded along with any sense of himself, melted now into the beast.
***
Naomi quickly realized that exchanging chi energy blasts with a chi master was going to get her nowhere. Soren’s natural aptitudes were being tapped by the beast. She threw an energy shield around him in the shape of a sphere. Ordinarily, it was a shield she’d put around herself as a form of protection.
The beast found its access to chi energy cut off. The lack of energy coming out of either hand now to direct as a weapon frustrated it. It groaned its protests with each aborted blast, and then hammered its fists against the shield, its groans escalating to roars. The roars perhaps meant as an acoustic weapon meant to shatter the shield.
Stealy arrived on her motorbike, tearing through the trail in the woods, looked up at the imprisoned Soren, hammering impotently at the shield. A couple seconds later, Player flew in, his personal tornado whirling around him; he hovered over the ground at eye level with the still-levitated Soren. “So, is this problem contained? All he has to do now is rage away, right, until the storm of emotions has passed?”
“That creature is too cunning to be contained so easily,” Naomi said.
Natura arrived next, on the back of her purple lion. She was chewing her fingernails, nervously. She remained the furthest back of the lot of them in the clearing.
***
Lar, in his role as Cypher, was trying to work the maze of trails and getting lost; even when he could look up at Soren, levitated and trapped in the energy sphere, and see which direction to head in. The trails just kept bending away from that direction. Returning his attention to the book in his hand intermittently wasn’t helping.
He finally grew exasperated with himself and sighed. “Maybe Harry Hopeless is a better superhero name for you than Cypher.” He took a few more ambling steps blindly, his nose back in his book, when he found himself in the clearing by dumb luck. “Oh, I see I arrived in the nick of time. Captain Perfect Timing, for once.”
The shrieks emanating from the beast trapped in the sphere were modulating in pitch.
“What’s he doing?” Player shouted with a combination of anger, impatience for an answer, and fear. “Is he trying to shatter that shield?”
“No. Worse,” Lar said, craning his head to Naomi who was wincing in pain. “Naomi, get out of here!” he shouted.
On “here” she collapsed to the ground, and so
did the shield around the beast, who also fell to the forest floor. The Frankenstein’s monster got up and lumbered into the forest, disappearing among the leaves; he moved with purpose and intent, some new mission already in mind.
Lar rushed to Naomi’s side. “Quickly! Someone help!”
Player lowered himself to her side. “Help how?” Player asked.
The leaves and dust kicked up in Lar’s face before the twister settled down caused him to fan his face and to add irritation to the desperation in his voice. “The beast isolated a frequency to shatter the blood vessels in her brain.”
The others all looked at one another helplessly; no one had magic for this. And their man of science, Soren, was not likely to volunteer the help needed, not in beast mode.
“I’ve got this,” they heard a voice say. Lar looked up and into the eyes of a transsexualist from the Transhumanist district. She was leaning over Naomi, her hands to either temple of Naomi’s head, her tits hovering over Naomi’s face just a bit higher than her dick.
Lar gulped hard, then he shifted his attention to what she was doing with her hands. Comprehending finally, he said, “You’re sending nanites into her to repair the blood vessels. Will they be enough to do the trick?”
“They should,” she said without looking up from her handiwork. Apparently, there was concentration required to do what she was doing, perhaps because she was tweaking the nanites’ coding on the fly. Most of the transsexualists—he meant transhumans—were chip-enhanced as well, so they could better rewrite the coding of their nanites for specific functions and to cover emergencies where unanticipated variances in their behavior were needed.
“You wouldn’t perhaps be seeing anyone right now, would you?” Lar asked, gawking at her cleavage and her crotch again. “I’ve always had a thing for transsexualists.”
She/he smiled at Lar. “I’m afraid I’m in a relationship with someone. He’s standing right over there.”
Lar panned his head. The significant other waved at him. “Just call me Perma-Gal, if you like, since I’ve lost the ability to change sexes at will, unlike my partner, at least until we can shake the influence of the Dark Matter Man. Or Ry, if you prefer. My partner’s name is An.”
Lar smiled and bit his lips at the same time. “Maybe you’d consider a ménage-a-trois?” Lar said, trying to keep the whining and pleading out of his voice, and not entirely succeeding.
Ry smiled at him. “We’ll talk about it later.”
Reassured, Lar calmed down, realizing he was suddenly more desperate to ingratiate himself with these two than he was to see Naomi come around. But Naomi opened her eyes, causing another wave of calming hormones to shoot through Lar’s mind.
***
“I’m afraid your head is going to hurt like hell for a while,” An said, staring into Naomi’s bewildered face. “But the danger has passed.”
“Thank you,” Naomi replied, wincing and touching An’s arm. “You’re part of Victor’s team. He recruited you?” She realized she had no reason for posing that as a question, since she already knew the answer. It was her own disbelief going along for the ride with her words.
She gazed away from her at Victor who just grimaced at her. “I see he’s not entirely happy about the arrangement. Well, at least things haven’t changed that much since the lights went out.”
She rubbed her temples, then gazed up at some of the other frequent fliers. “Superman?”
“No, the ‘S’ stands for Silly or perhaps Scrap,” Victor interjected. “Since I really don’t know what Muscles over there is good for yet. I warned him that irritating me was going to be worse to his health than kryptonite, but the damn genes they bred him with make him as fearless as they make him stupid. Hey, another ‘S’ word that seems to fit just fine.”
“He seems immune enough to your personality,” Naomi said, her voice strained, as she peeled herself off the ground, with some help from An. “That’s one superpower I wouldn’t mind having.”
“Surf” the Silver Surfer lookalike said, giving her something between a salute and a wave. Naomi knew his genetic alterations would also be keyed to whatever nanites infested that hoverboard of his, however they worked. He and his silver skin were as much a product of the superheroes district as the Transhuman sector; the latter alone could have pulled off the engineering required for his board.
Naomi winced taking in the aerogel people, who were clearly a couple, because the sun was shining right through them, with little impediment. “Airy” the female said, “and my husband, Aeros. We thought the names at the time more of a big joke than they clearly were.”
Naomi smiled and nodded at them.
“Well, thanks for nothing,” Player said, swirling up to their level, hovering off the ground with his twister. “We had the situation well in hand. We have our own healer, so as you can see, we really don’t need you.”
“It seems every group has at least one charmer,” Naomi said to their guests, putting herself on damage control.
“Where’s Soren?” Victor asked. “You’re all a waste of space if anything happens to him, that I’ll happily sweep the space-time continuum of.”
The ground was shaking, hard enough to throw Lar to the ground.
“I think you’re about to get your answer,” Superman said, turning three-hundred-sixty degrees overhead, his x-ray vision scanning the forest for bodies which could not otherwise be seen through the dense foliage.
The first faces to tear into the opening Naomi recognized—sort of. They were the cutesy animals from earlier at the waterhole—only cutesy no more. They’d been made over by the beast’s magic. Black. Armored. Like armadillo-versions of their former selves, with additional makeovers to make them look more savage still; the only things longer and deadlier than the spikes on their surfaces were the fangs in their mouths. They were either possessed, or their souls had become tarnished with exposure to the beast’s spirit science—which seemed to cross the barriers between what science could do and what the darker elements of the spirit world could do for him. That was one bridge Naomi didn’t fancy crossing.
Soren was mumbling words of power again—it was the only way he could have pulled off the animal makeovers this fast.
Stealy, another usually-less-than-friendly member of their team, didn’t wait for the other side to make the first move, ejecting fire boluses as fast as she could from the palm of her left hand. But no matter which perverted creature they landed on, they did absolutely nothing. And Player was getting frustrated that his twisters—forming around the creatures—were also accomplishing nothing.
“Why aren’t my fucking twisters working!” he screamed with fear.
“The lessons learned from our last encounter have been incorporated into their designs,” Victor explained. “Step back, all of you. None of you will have magic that will work against these creatures now. Let my team handle it.”
Natura retreated on her lion, which was walking backwards, slipping back into the woods and taking advantage of the invisibility provided by the foliage for protection.
Stealy jumped back on her motorcycle. In beating a retreat she decided she had to make sure for herself, so she tried her stealy magic, trying to rip the heart out of the panda bear on the drive by. But her hand could no longer penetrate its form to steal its heart. She managed only to bruise herself. Even when her other forms of magic had failed her, that one never had.
The next thing Naomi heard, Stealy was bearing down on that throttle, tearing out of there faster than ever. Knowing Stealy, it wasn’t a cowardly act; she was racing to steal more magic that might well work against anyone who would make her feel impotent.
Naomi knew there was no way to test if all of her powers had been neutralized or not. And to even access some of them anymore, she’d likely need to be out of options enough for her unconscious mind to reveal something hidden inside her and long since forgotten. But it wasn’t worth the risk; not when she might have to live to fight another day if she was
ever to save Soren.
She psychically commanded everyone in Soren’s ad hoc family to pull back, even the refusing-to-listen-to-reason Player, still trying his elemental magic on Soren’s creatures, from hurtling trees like spears at them, to dropping boulders on their heads, with his command of the wind element to…. “Enough, Player! Pull back I said,” Naomi screamed into his head.
He finally did, though she could tell the idea that he would be leaving the other team with the impression he was anything less than all-powerful was eating at him more than obeying her orders, especially when he was certain there were still things he could try. He was itching, for instance, to put some of his practice with the ultimate building blocks from the table of elements into play. But Naomi figured that wild card was better played later, when they would all be looking for ways to get around Soren’s increasing immunity to their interference.
Naomi levitated herself to a high perch in a tree where she could keep an eye on the fight going on between Victor’s team and the creatures.
Airy and Aeros were working in unison. Airy was synthesizing gases, using her own body as a catalyst for unique compounds she was formulating on the spot with the nanite hive mind in her brain to coordinate the experiments. The hive mind was more sophisticated than any Naomi had experienced before when she’d psychically bonded with the nano-infested. Perhaps because Airy’s unique body didn’t allow for a mindchip as a backup. Even if Naomi couldn’t mind-link directly with mindchips or nanite hive minds—she could sense the extra-intelligence being pumped through the biological systems they were connected to.
Actually, Naomi realized her mistake the more she looked into Airy’s mind. That wasn’t a nanite hive mind in her brain, those were flexible, porous, paper-thin, mind chips wrapped around every neuron in her head, and every cell in her brain. She’d managed to give herself the equivalent of numerous mind chips with the aid of nextgen technology—nextgen even for the Transhumanist district. Victor couldn’t have picked a better partner if he’d tried for synthesizing new compounds on the go to toss at the Beast’s creations in the hopes of incapacitating them.
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