SLOTH.LAND

They are woken up by knocking in the darkness.

Sid tries to move and isn’t surprised when nothing happens—by now he’s used to waking up locked inside Skeila’s constrictive six-armed embrace. But he can’t even wiggle his fingers. Instead, enormous planes of fur sandwiching him on either side begin to shift, he realizes those are her thighs, and he remembers, oh right, he’s a spider’s cock now…

The world moves around Sid as Skeila sits up in her web. Things look so different from between her legs, not just the angle but how he can now see the outlines of her furniture in her room’s near-complete darkness…She makes a series of irritated grunts and then moans “aw, fuuuuck.” It’s like Sid can sense her brain waking up, her heart rate increasing, pumping slow waves of consciousness through him, though his body is limp and that doesn’t feel like it’s going to change any time soon. “Guess we fell asleep—shoulda fuckin’ known…”

More knocking, light but urgent. “Skeila?” It’s her roommate Ketta, and she sounds distressed. “Skeila, um, you’ve got visitors…”

“Huh? What? Just c’mon in,” mumbles Skeila while trying to rub the sleep out of a few eyes.

The door swings open and light floods Skeila’s webroom. All-black Ketta stands in the frame like a nervous shadow, wringing her claws. “They’re downstairs—it’s your boss, I think? And…”

“Ugh, Klatz? Whassa—oh, shit. Right. This stupid interview we gotta do.” She recalls the throng of spiders and the assembled news media waiting outside for her, and suddenly Sid can tell Skeila is far more alert. “Alright, alright, tell him I’ll be down in a couple of minutes—”

“…him and the Mayor.”

“What?” Now Skeila’s awake. Sid is too. It feels like some potent cocktail of adrenaline and panic just got dumped into their shared bloodstream.

Ketta nods uncomfortably. “Yeah. They’re downstairs.”

“The…the Mayor,” says Skeila.

“The Mayor.”

“The Mayor. Here. In our apartment.”

Ketta nods again.

“Why is he here?!”

“Um…I think he’s waiting for you,” says Ketta. “I’ve been feeding him and your boss cinnamon rolls.”

“Oh shit. Oh Eris. Okay, okay…” Skeila shakily gets to her feet, looking around her room as if trying to find some secret escape route…“Keep them busy for like ten more minutes? I gotta get ready.”

“I’ll try…”

In her cramped en-suite bathroom, Skeila inspects herself in the mirror behind the sink, relieved to see she didn’t get any fluids on her that would warrant a shower followed by a lengthy blow-dry. She opens her mouth to see her teeth and leans in close to get a good look, squashing Sid between her and the side of the sink for a moment. “Whoops, sorry. Not used to having a big piece of meat like you down there yet.”

No problem, it didn’t hurt. (In fact, the pressure felt kind of nice—though Sid keeps that part to himself, or at least tries to…)

The counter around her sink is strewn with clutter, most of it pushed up against the mirror so that the mess looks doubled. There’s scented soaps that have left colored rectangular residue on the counter surface, fur-care products, an orange pill bottle, a wrung-out toothpaste tube next to a toothbrush with three inches of bristles, Skeila’s still-plugged-in blow dryer, loose earrings, a series of claw-files, a haphazard collection of mascaras and lipsticks, and a half-dozen hairbrushes of various shape and size all well-clogged with tufts of brown fur. Skeila somehow squeezes one more ribbon of toothpaste out of the exhausted tube and begins scrubbing away at her many teeth. Simultaneously grabbing three brushes, she goes to work combing tangles out of her fur, impatiently tearing through her coat.

All this motion has Sid jiggling from side to side. He can see most of himself in the mirror, a girthy black pillar sinking into a forest of toiletries and cosmetics. (He notes he compares favorably to a bottle of Pantene Arachnid Silkfur Plus with Vitamins.)

“Oo ehhihng haah hahn air?” asks Skeila, dribbling toothpaste into the sink.

What?

Skeila spits out a mouthful of foam and repeats, “You getting hard down there?”

Should I not be?

“I wasn’t complaining,” she says—then looking to the side, adds “uh, actually, hang on for one minute. Gotta go, and I don’t wanna piss with a boner.”

Wait, seriously?

“You can’t feel it?” Skeila fills a glass to rinse her mouth, and the sound of the running faucet makes Sid realize that’s what that uncomfortable pressure is that feels like it’s both below and inside him—technically above him, suspended between the spider’s legs as he is, but it doesn’t feel like he’s upside-down. No blood rushing to his head, no disorientation, just hanging here perfectly comfortably with his sensitive underside resting on her big ballsack, like it’s the most natural thing in the world. And he has the sudden realization that during his entire previous length of time as a penis, brief as it was, Skeila never went to the bathroom. And now, well, he can’t ask her to hold it in, can he? He volunteered for this. This is perhaps the most basic function of the body part he signed up to be, even above the sexier purposes. And yet he wasn’t really thinking about how Skeila would be pissing through him four or five times a day for however long this lasts…

Skeila keeps a clean bathroom, if not an orderly one—the toilet may have a salon’s assortment of toiletries lined up on the tank but the porcelain itself is sparkling white, and in its still waters Sid can see their own pale reflection as the spider steps into place. (At least she goes standing up, he thinks.) The image is not unlike what he sees on the occasions Skeila stands astride him expecting oral service, but now her cock is even bigger—and it’s him. The fur to his left shifts as Skeila rests a claw on her hip. Then, taking hold of him at his base with another claw, she aims him with a third she places just underneath his head. Something about seeing the water makes the pressure behind him build to almost intolerable levels—and then it’s too much.

He can feel the exact position of the advancing liquid rushing through his core and, when the front reaches his extremity, he can feel his lips—no, his mouth—no, not even that, his slit—opened wider by the pressure of the fluid as it leaves him. There is a remote but tangible taste, predominantly saltiness. It’s not entirely pleasant but not nearly as bad as Sid would expect straight piss to be (and from here, Skeila doesn’t look unusually well-hydrated) so his conclusion is that his sense of taste has been mercifully altered to suit his new phallic body.

The feeling of the stream coursing through him, the overwhelming relief, is sublime. Tingly pleasure radiates a third of the way up his length. Even the sight of the arc falling towards splashdown is majestic, in a way. The mere feet separating Sid from the toilet seem like a mile, putting him at the top of this vast yellow waterfall pouring into an increasingly frothy lake.

Eventually the pressure tapers off and the stream subsides to a mere trickle, then a dribble of rapid drops, each of which Sid feels leaving individually. And then—Skeila suddenly clenches a muscle, bouncing Sid upwards and forcing a jet of pee through him. And then she does it again, producing a second, smaller squirt. And then, it seems, she’s empty. One last droplet clings to Sid’s tip like a runny nose. She shakes it off of him, whipping his view up and down faster than any carnival ride ever could, but it’s pure exhilaration—he’s not nauseous or dizzy at all when she lets him fall back into place.

She flushes, and Sid’s whole field of view spins into a vortex. “See, that wasn’t so bad.”

Nah, it was fine. More than fine, it was actually kind of enjoyable for him. But he doesn’t think that to her, and hopes she’s not picking up on it anyway…

She steps back in front of the sink, quickly washing her claws with one of those scented soaps, then goes to work on her makeup. For Skeila, that’s mainly lipstick and mascara. Some spiders like to contour their fur, but she doesn’t consider herself that skilled and besides, accentuating eight pairs of eyelashes is itself no small task. Hanging there between her legs, Sid enjoys the sight of the body he’s become a part of, and by the time she’s done with her mascara he’s halfway erect. Skeila hasn’t said anything, but she glances down at her hardening penis as she opens a tube of black lipstick and smiles…She applies it to her already-black lips, making them glossy, then smacks them together and bares her teeth to make sure she didn’t get any on them.

“Think we look okay?” she asks.

I think you look great. This time he really does want all of his thoughts to cross their psychic border—he doesn’t know what to say to tell her how pretty he thinks she looks without sounding ridiculous.

She takes some small silver hoops from the sink countertop and affixes them to a linear series of piercings in her left ear, running from the angular tip to about halfway down. “Oh, they’ll definitely want me in uniform for this…” She goes into her webroom to get her AAA sash and belt off the floor, putting them on over her head and adjusting the buckle where they connect until it’s the perfect tightness, standing in front of the mirror again and wiggling around till it sits just right…She takes a breath. “Still okay with this?”

Yeah, I…I actually am. I can’t imagine being able to do this normally. Go out there in front of so many people, you know? And it’s crazy, but I don’t even think it’s going to be bad. It’s not so scary from down here. What about you, though?

“Are you kidding? I get to go show off my huge cock to the whole city. I bet people lose their shit when we go out there. Y’know…everyone’s already pretty sure you’re my human. You can guess what they’ll think when I go out there and you’re my dick.”

Well, people can think what they want.

The spider looks down at her penis in the mirror and grins. No doubt he’s getting firmer. “Well, if there’s anything you want me to say, or not say, or you just start getting freaked out or whatever and want to leave, just let me know, ’kay?”

Yeah, but what if you have something you want to tell me?

“I just tell you. It’s not like I can think to you, like you can.”

Oh. Cause…when Ketta told you the mayor was downstairs waiting, it felt…I dunno, like I could feel you get nervous all of a sudden.

“Really? Huh.” The spider seems pleased with this. “I mean, yeah, sometimes humans pick up on quick, intense stuff. And it’s normal to get vague impressions of how I feel. But you don’t usually get specific unless you’re really…connected.”

We’re not connected?

“Guess we are.” She grins, but it fades quickly when she remembers what they have to do—and Sid deflates too as he picks up on her nervousness. “Okay, we better get downstairs…”

Ketta wasn’t lying. Sitting at their shabby kitchen counter, perched on a stool like a barfly scarecrow while he thoughtfully chews a pastry, is Hizzoner the Eleventh Mayor of Midway, Arachnypoundcake. The lanky spider’s short, velvety fur is warm black streaked with silver, like someone did a half-assed job of dusting an old speaker grille. The side facing Skeila as she comes down the stairs is the one with his chipped-off fang. He’s set his thin black cane on stool to his left, and to his right sits Klatz, who’s wadding a glazed bear claw into his mouth as he reaches for another. (Seems Ketta’s been plying them with baked goods while they waited.)

Skeila’s already apologizing. “Mister Mayor, I’m so sorry for keeping you waiting…”

Arachnypoundcake turns with a lopsided grin that shows off his one long, curved fang. When he talks, his voice is as craggy as a dynamited cliffside. “Ah, Lieutenant Skeila, good seeing you again. Was wondering what was taking so long, but I guess that explains it,” taking his cane here and pointing it directly at Skeila’s crotch.

“Uh, I—we—thought it’d be in his best interest if I changed him first…”

The mayor seems to consider this. Behind him, Klatz makes a snorting sound. “Befft inthrest, huh?” he asks through a mouthful of pastry.

“No, honestly—Captain Klatz, you made it pretty clear we both had to come down for this, this press conference thing,” says Skeila, gesturing with irritation towards her closed front door. “If that’s my job I’ll do it, but Sid’s really bad with crowds. He gets scared, okay? We figured this way we could still do it together. I mean, I wasn’t even gonna make him do it but I can’t just leave him in here alone—”

Skeila, who came down the stairs about to faint, is now actually getting kind of agitated. Arachnypoundcake waves a claw dismissively and chuckles—a low, dry sound like boulders rubbing together. “Lieutenant, relax, relax. Nobody’s mad. Hell, I’m impressed. I cock a human and you can just write me off for the rest of the day. Need a solid eight hour sleep after that kind of noise, myself. But here you are, saving the city, getting a new dick, and dealing with the press. Ah, youth. I do feel a little guilty making you do two interviews in one day, but think of it as an opportunity for a do-over.”

Abashed, Skeila says “Yeah, uh, sorry about that first one. I guess it didn’t go so great.”

The mayor waves it off again. “It’s not a big deal. I can assure you they’re never gonna air it again. Besides, they played the clip of the human jacking you off about ten times more than the interview anyway.”

Skeila feels a sudden tingle and rush of heat in her penis and realizes Sid’s actually blushing. “He’s so embarrassed about that,” she says.

“He’ll get over it. Point is, maybe the interview wasn’t great, but I’m just happy you didn’t pull a Gunter Schabowski on me.” He catches the uncomprehending look on Skeila’s face. “No? Never mind. Human thing from before your time. Point is, it coulda gone worse and this one’ll go a lot better, so don’t worry. Smile and wave, answer a few softballs, show off the new goods if you want, and we can all get on with our lives.”

“I think I can do that, mister Mayor.” Skeila looks warily at her door. “I dunno if I like all the attention, though.”

Arachnypoundcake grins. “Can’t say I’m too sympathetic. But you get used to it.”

“Aw, nobody’ll remember me in a week…”

“Careful, Lieutenant—you sound like me, circa thirty years ago.” The mayor grabs his cane and stands up in an easy, fluid motion. “Shall we?”

“Already?” Another uncertain glance at her front door. “Is there anything I should say out there? Or not say?”

The mayor thinks for a moment, then says “Nah. Just be yourself.” He stands. “Miss Ketta,” he says, nodding in Ketta’s direction, “thank you kindly for the delicious pastries. I’ll have to drop in on you at that bakery.” (Ketta, claws folded demurely in front of her, giggles and nods.) “Well then, Lieutenant, shall we?”

Skeila takes a deep breath, then looks down at her penis. “Ready, Sid?”

Sid’s already getting used to being a bystander; it surprises him to be directly addressed in a conversation like this but Skeila doesn’t seem to have a problem talking to her penis in front of the mayor. He thinks for a moment about what’ll happen when they go outside. As soon as Skeila steps out that door and the crowd sees her big new dick, they’ll all know her big new dick is him. It’ll literally be on the news. He imagines side-by-side comparisons—a headshot photo someone dug up inset with a closeup of his new, round head. The natural assumption will be that he’s Skeila’s human. Why pretend he isn’t?

Yeah, he replies in his thoughts. Ready as I can be.

“Your boy all good down there?” asks Klatz, who wipes crumbs out of the fur around his mouth as he gets up.

“Yup,” says Skeila. “Let’s do this.”

The decibel level in the room suddenly swells as Arachnypoundcake opens the door for Skeila. “Ladies first.” He steps aside and invites her through with a gesture from his slender black claw. Ketta says “Good luck!” and flashes her roommate four thumbs-up. And Skeila goes outside.

Of course the crowd goes wild. The AAA officers flanking Skeila’s door smile and try to say something to her but it gets lost in the roar. Nearby a ring of camera flashes go off, and past all the reporters there are more AAA spiders setting a boundary between them and the crowd cheering for the heroes of Midway. But there’s a secondary wave of even greater excitement that propagates outward a second and a half later, as the mayor and Captain Klatz follow Skeila out but Sid Greenstreet does not—and everyone notices the big piece of meat hanging between Skeila’s legs and comes to a collective realization that he’s already here. The roiling mob is screaming, jumping, waving their arms. You’d think this is the greatest thing they’d ever seen.

Skeila gives a tentative smile to the sea of faces and waves a small wave, arms bent at the elbow. Two steps beneath her at ground level, spiders from every news agency in Midway wait with microphones at the ready—and front and center, mere feet from Sid, is Midway’s most famous reporter of all.

Moldywarp stands there unblinking, unmoving, waiting patiently to strike, drilling into him with that electric stare like she’s trying to make eye contact with his urethra. That and her distant smile are just as unnerving to him as a penis, maybe even more now that her yellow and purple eyes loom like gemstone planets in his field of vision. Finally, the crowd settles enough to make communication possible and she moves in. Other reporters shout questions too, but there’s no point. Even their own camera crews are filming Moldywarp instead.

“Beautiful viewers, I’m here with Lieutenant Skeila of the Arach—” is all Moldywarp can say before being drowned out by a resurgence of applause. The reporter simply smiles serenely. “…of the Arachnid Altercation Agency. It’s so nice to be talking with you again, Lieutenant, and I think I can speak for the whole city in thanking you for your heroic actions—and am I correct to assume that this is Mr. Sid Greenstreet?” she asks, nodding towards Skeila’s cock.

The first time they spoke, Skeila was too focused on protecting Sid to even think about being on TV, but now it’s all too easy to remember the massive market share commanded by the star of Moldywarp in the Morning!, Slime Time with Moldywarp, and all the other spinoffs in her media empire. Bending down slightly towards the mic and looking directly into the closest camera, Skeila haltingly replies “Uh, that’s right Moldywarp, that’s Sid, who is my penis, right now.” Awkward delivery aside, the wild cheering following this disclosure lasts for nearly a half a minute.

The whole time Sid’s just hanging there immobilized—Skeila’s bare cock naked before Moldywarp, the Mayor, dozens of Skeila’s fellow cops, many hundreds of live spectators, and oh yes, the numberless viewers behind the cameras. He’s hot with with shame, like a full-body sunburn, and though it’s too loud on the street for him to hear it he feels incredible waves of pressure as Skeila’s heavy heartbeat repeatedly pounds through him. To his horror, he finds every systole makes him just slightly firmer. It’s unmistakable now with the upward drift of his field of vision, fifth-story windows on the building opposite coming into view and the cheering spider faces closest to him sinking out of sight. He’s getting hard and he knows it’s not because of him, he finds no appeal in the idea of being displayed like this, the luscious cock he is now exhibited for the whole world to see and salivate over—except he can’t seem to stop himself from thinking about it in terms like these. No, this is coming from Skeila, who he can sense absolutely loves this. Her glee at the thought of the whole city seeing her hard human cock is this soothing salve in the back of his mind that somehow takes the edge off the idea of the whole city seeing him as her hard human cock. And as embarrassed as he is, he can tell from his psychic vantage point that Skeila’s not taking some perverse excitement in humiliating him—no, she’s proud to be able to show him off like this. Half-erect, now…

“Lieutenant, how were you able to spot the bombers?”

“Sid was the one that saw them,” says Skeila. She gives him a little wiggle. “I dunno what would’ve happened if he wasn’t there. He’s great at stuff like that, finding suspicious patterns. I told you he was smart, didn’t I?”

“You certainly did, Lieutenant! I’m sure all of Midway is impressed with Mr. Greenstreet’s girth, length, and observational abilities. Will he be assisting the AAA on an ongoing basis?”

“Um, it’s possible. He may be doing some…consulting for the MARC as well. Lotta people want him right now, I guess,” adds Skeila with a small smirk.

“I’m very sure they do! Back to the bombers, how did you decide to chase them down yourself?”

“Well, I’m on the Human Attitude Adjustment and Re-education Project squad, so catching humans is kinda my specialty. I was worried nobody else would be able to get there in time. But I guess it was instinct too. I…wasn’t really thinking about it, honestly.”

“Lieutenant, we’ve all seen the terrifying footage of this would-be terrorist actually trying to shoot you—how were you able to so courageously continue the chase after that?”

“I dunno if I was courageous, just…mad. Now it feels kinda dumb. But I wanted to stop him and make sure he couldn’t hurt anyone. And I’m still pretty upset that I couldn’t catch him. But I know we’re going to be working very hard and doing everything we can at the AAA to find them and keep Midway safe.”

“All of our cherished viewers will rest easier knowing that, Lieutenant. Certainly we could tell that you did everything in your power, even hurrying so fast back to the scene of the incident!”

Skeila smiles sheepishly. “Well, that was kinda when I realized I left Sid by himself,” she says, then quickly adds “I mean with the other AAA officers. I’d never leave him, like, alone alone.” She glances down at fully stiff Sid and says “Though I don’t have to worry about getting separated for a while.”

“You very surely don’t, Lieutenant! Which brings us to another question, and I know the first time we spoke you were reluctant to specify what your relationship to Mr. Greenstreet was, but ever so many of our cherished viewers are just dying to know—Lieutenant, is Sid Greenstreet your human?”

Sid, who is now quite solid down there, can feel a little pang of resignation coming from Skeila beneath the steady tide of arousal. He knows she’s about to evade the question as diplomatically as she can in order to avoid using the possessive, just like he asked her to. So he interrupts. It’s okay, he thinks to her. You can tell them I’m your human. I mean, unless you don’t want to.

In response to Moldywarp’s question, her viewers see Skeila freeze, then suddenly look down at her fully erect penis and almost shout “Of course I—I mean,” Skeila now turning back to Moldywarp, “of course he’s my human!”

The loudest burst of applause yet. Skeila stands there with this shiteating grin, upper arms akimbo, knuckles resting on her hips as if to frame Sid, who’s so helplessly erect that he’s twitching. UDKA-TV viewers at home are treated to a closeup shot of Sid, during which the lower third switches from “lieutenant skeila—aaa officer, haarp squad” to “sidwell greenstreet—statistician/penis”.

“Thank you so very much for joining us,” says Moldywarp as the noise tapers off. “Lieutenant Skeila and Sid Greenstreet, heroes of the city. We’ll be right back here on UDKA-TV with ongoing coverage…”

At this point Moldywarp deigns to let the lesser reporters participate. There’s some procedural questions for Klatz. He tries to put as positive a spin as possible on not a lot of good news: did you find the other two? No, but we’re reviewing CCTV footage. Any leads on the bombers? We’re still reviewing the evidence and in contact with surface-side officers—and so forth. Someone asks if they think the bombers are connected somehow to the Huntsmen. Klatz laughs and says “We don’t have any reason to think so. Why? You think the Huntsmen are working with humans now?” Everyone gets a good chuckle out of this.

Skeila stands at ease behind him, assuming an expression of professional neutrality. She stays calm even with Sid still twitching a few times a minute, not responding to the isolated claps and whistles set off by each bounce of her boner. Sid knows that even though Klatz is speaking the crowd is still focused on him. And he knows—only he alone in this whole crowd could possibly know—just how thrilled Skeila is to have everyone looking at her dick despite that staid facade…

You really like showing me off to everyone, don’t you?

He could swear he hears her giggling. She sticks her hips out just a tiny bit, not far enough for anyone to notice but enough for him to feel. Spiders watching UDKA-TV throughout Midway would have only seen, just then, Skeila’s cock jerk suddenly upwards. Viewers in high-def might even have seen a hint of wetness forming at the tip.

Three rows back, a spider wearing a fedora with a white card reading PRESS stuck in the rim waves a claw. “Mister Mayor! Mister Mayor! Will today’s events change the plans for the lockdown?”

“Aw, c’mon,” says the mayor. “I’ve been talking about that all day and we’re here to give Skeila props. We’re still not sure and we’re still going to get things moving again as soon as we can. Stuff like this makes the surface humans jumpy.” Nervous murmurs of discontent from the audience. “But everyone’s being real cooperative. They wanna get back to normal as much as we do. In addition to the joint investigation with Metro PD, we’re working with the MARC to see if we can’t arrange some kind of limited one-way travel for those of you with humans stuck topside. We’re doing what we can. Now, anyone have a question that’s not about the lockdown?”

Front and center, Moldywarp raises a claw straight up, sending dozens of bracelets in a clattering cascade down to her shoulder. Without waiting to be called on, she asks “What’s next for Lieutenant Skeila?”

Arachnypoundcake and Klatz both turn to Skeila to give her the chance to respond. She doesn’t. Just kind of freezes in place. (What’s next? How should she know?) Mercifully, Captain Klatz jumps in: “The HAARP squad’ll miss her, but she’s being temporarily assigned to a special detail we set up to investigate the Huntsmen, due to her involvement with the case. And of course she’ll continue her ongoing work protecting Mr. Greenstreet,” he says with a gesture towards Skeila’s twitchy dick.

The reporters shout more questions, but Arachnypoundcake waves them off and booms “Alright, alright, no more questions. We gotta wrap things up here. But first we wanted to do something to officially recognize Lieutenant Skeila’s bravery, cause she really put her ass on the line, above-and-beyond style. So I hereby award her the Key to the City. Here you go, Lieutenant.”

The mayor hands Skeila what appears to be a small nineties-era car key, from before they had buttons. The black part has the Toyota logo on it. “Thank you so much,” she says, accepting it with grace. Camera flashes go off and there’s one more round of applause.

“Folks,” Arachnypoundcake continues, “the party’s gonna keep rolling but you gotta clear the street. There’s food trucks from the Midway Department of Festivity Concessions right over there, so go get yourself some grub, and get outta the damn road. Show’s over, people.” As if by mayoral decree, the crowd slowly but surely begins to shift. The news crews pack up their cameras and cables. Arachnypoundcake comes over to shake Skeila’s claw one more time before leaving.

“Sir,” she says, “it was such an honor—”

“De nada. Great work with the bomb thing, both of you. I got a feeling we’ll talk again some time. Oh, and don’t worry, the food trucks are gonna Pied Piper everyone’s hungry asses outta here in fifteen minutes. The food trucks always work. Be seeing you, Lieutenant.” A tip of his cane and Midway’s mayor saunters off Skeila’s front stoop, parting the crowd before him as he goes.

Captain Klatz says to Skeila, “Bet you thought we forgot about that detail assignment, huh? You start Monday. Bring your dick, he sounds useful.” With that, the stout red spider hurries after the mayor.

And…that’s it. The crowd is receding from the street like the tide going out, flowing towards the fleet of trucks lined up at the intersection with Arch Street and following them as they move southerly towards downtown at a crawling pace, dispensing tacos, pizza slices, chicken wings, pepperoni rolls, sandwiches laden thick with french fries, not to mention the bar-truck manned by spiders filling plastic cups of IC Light as fast as they can and handing them out six at a time. Skeila’s not sure what she should be doing with herself and shuffles around awkwardly on her stoop. Even Sid’s down to half-hardness. Should she just go back inside? She’s still tired, but some quality time with Sid would be nice…

“Skeila! Skeila!” Suddenly, here comes a pack of AAA spiders—Izlil, Keedin, a few of Skeila’s fellow HAARPies, and some of the spiders who were just pulling guard duty at this very event. They all run up and encircle her, clambering onto the stoop, everyone talking at once.

“Skeila, that was amazing!” says Izlil.

“You’re amazing,” agrees a thin mint-green spider with a dreamy look in his black eyes.

“Cocking your human right before going on the news, again! Legend! Fucking legend!” says the muscular yellow-furred male next to him.

More officers chime in. “She rode one of the cargo elevators—”

“—and got jerked off on the news—”

“—dude, and she stopped a fucking bomber!”

“—almost got shot—”

“So amazing,” says that mint-green boy.

This dude’s staring right at me, Skeila…

“Keedin, you’re creeping my dick out.” He breaks eye-to-glans contact and takes an awkward step back. “Gimme some breathing room, guys…” They take a few steps back while continuing their adulation.

“So,” says Izlil, “what are you two gonna do now? We were gonna go out to Blurred Vision now that we’re all off duty.”

“Honestly? I was gonna crawl into my web, maybe get Sid off, and go back to sleep.” Groans of disappointment from Skeila’s compatriots; one of the boys cups his claws to his mouth and boos. Skeila says “You guys. Come on. The day I had—and you want me to come out with you? To Blurred fuckin’ Vision?!”

Incredulous, Izlil says “Skeila, you two are literally the hottest couple in all of Midway right now. And you’re just gonna go back up to your room and jerk off? There’s no way. I won’t let you. You have to come out with us. You can definitely find someone to give Sid a better time than that.”

One of the spiders next to that thin green male elbows him and says “And even if you can’t, I bet Keedin would take care of him for you!” to his further embarrassment.

Skeila, what’s Blurred Vision? Is that one of those…volunteer clubs?

“Nah,” says Skeila, looking down at her penis. “It’s just a droneclub. But it’s just too fucking much.”

Izlil can’t hear Sid’s question but she can infer it, and jumps in to respond. “Don’t listen to her, Sid! It’s the biggest club in Midway. You’ll love it, and everyone there is gonna want to have fun with you. Siiiid! C’mon, make Skeila come out with us!” And then suddenly all these other spiders are whining like sad puppies towards Skeila’s cock too, like there’s anything he can do. Though he has to admit the idea of really being put to use as a penis for the first time in the middle of some spider dance floor has a certain—no, a strong appeal to it somehow, despite his mid-grade agoraphobia.

“Sid, if you get Skeila to come, there’ll be so many spiders there that will want to blow you,” says one of them.

“Oh, everyone there will want Skeila to stuff you in them…” adds Keedin with a certain wistfulness.

“Haha, it’s working! Sid’s getting harder!”

“See, he wants to come!” says Izlil.

“I know he wants to come,” says Skeila with an exasperated sigh. She can’t stand droneclubs, but maybe it’ll be worth it. She does feel like she owes Sid an exciting first time as her cock, yet is a little embarrassed that she doesn’t have any good candidates in mind for who to give him that first time with. “Will they at least have something you can actually dance to? Last time I was there they were playing some techno that was kinda alright.”

“Um…” Izlil hesitates. “Saint Alaika’s doing a set there tonight.”

“Yeah, she’s promoting her new album,” adds Keedin. “I hear it every day on the radio.”

“Ugh.” Skeila wrinkles her nose. “Isn’t she the one that does shows wearing Huntsmen ink?”

Izlil shrugs. “It’s her gimmick. She’s not really a Huntsman.”

“Why even go? There’s so many places we could go right downtown without having to take the Tube out to Sunkfield. Places with real music and DJs that aren’t wannabe terrorists.”

“I know you only listen to human music, but it’s going to be the hottest place in Midway tonight. C’mon, Sid, think about it—hundreds of horny spiders for you and Skeila to pick from!”

Ordinarily, Sid’s the kind of guy who thinks of jam-packed dance clubs as earthly echoes of the lower circles of Hell. Ordinarily, Sid can only withstand the weight of a few disinterested strangers’ gazes at a time before anxious panic has him charting escape routes. But ordinarily Sid is not a penis. All he has to do, all he can do is hang there, and he has Skeila to move with assurance, to draw fire from all those eyes…

“I don’t know, Izz. I mean, I’d have to go get ready…”

“Oh please,” says Izlil. “We’ll wait. And besides, you already look great.”

She had already gotten herself ready for TV. No excuses left. She heaves a sigh. “Well at least let me go change. I’m not going in my fucking uniform…”

+ + + + + + + +

Blurred Vision is all the way out in Sunkfield, at least a half hour’s walk from Skeila’s place in the Lower North Side—fortunately it’s only a brief Tube ride away. It’s so popular it has its own stop, where riders disembark directly across the street from the monolithic edifice that takes up an entire block. One reason the club’s proprietors established it out here is that downtown Midway simply wouldn’t have had room for their grand design: it boasts no less than five major dance floors, each of which alone would dwarf any of the puny downtown droneclubs. Three stories up and wide as a freeway, the club’s name is spelled out in white, squat block capitals backlit by a color-shifting glow: blurred vision, sandwiched between two rows of rectangular windows.

At peak times, like now, there are spiders waiting a hundred deep or more between the velvet ropes in a messy kind of line. It’s a long wait, and everyone here is biding their time talking amongst themselves in clusters, making out with partners (unusually tame for spiders, perhaps wanting to save the real lewdness for when they get inside), hurrying to chug beers before they make it to the front and the bouncer confiscates the glass bottle, passing joints that are thoroughly cashed before making it barely a quarter of the way down the line, or just standing and swaying gently to the booming wash of sound issuing from the open doors.

Skeila and her entourage—Izlil, Keedin, a few of Skeila’s fellow HAARPies and some other AAA officers—are just now exiting the Tube station. “Fuckin’ Eris, this place is packed,” Skeila grumbles. “We’re never gonna get in.”

“You’re kidding, right?” says Izlil. “We’re with Lieutenant Skeila, hero of Midway! Guarantee you we skip that whole mess.”

“Here? No way. Nobody’s even gonna know who I am out of uniform.”

“Bet me!” Izlil dashes across the street towards the head of the long line, and several scooters blast their horns at the giddy spider. Skeila and the rest of her crew are still waiting for a break in traffic as Izlil argues with a highly skeptical bouncer.

Sid’s mostly limp and feeling a pang of embarrassment coming on—or is he picking up on that from Skeila? Neither of them are thrilled with the way Izlil’s drawing attention to them, excitedly pointing them out as they cross the street. The spiders waiting are shooting dirty looks in their direction too. Who are they to expect to jump the line?

The bouncer Izlil’s talking to is a stocky tan-furred male with every pair of arms crossed over his broad chest. Tufts of his fur poke out from the collar and sleeves of the tight black shirt he’s wearing that says STAFF on the back. The only other thing he’s wearing is a pair of mirrored sunglasses that cover only his lowest, largest pair of eyes—he’s not wearing any pants, like the majority of spiders here, so his decently large but clearly non-human cock is out on display. Skeila’s about to pull Izlil away from him and apologize when, seeing her, he raises his shades and his eyes go wide. “Lieutenant Skeila?” he asks.

“Uhh…yeah, sorry, that’s me…” Skeila pulls out a badge from her purse by way of identification, but the bouncer is already unhooking one end of the velvet rope. Behind her, the other officers grin to each other. Murmurs ripple through the line of waiting spiders; the air of hostility vanishes and now half of them have their phones out, the ones in the back raising it up as high as possible to get Skeila’s picture while the ones at the front are turned around trying to take a selfie with both themselves and Skeila in the frame.

“Please, come right in. They all with you? Hang on, let me get you wristbands,” the bouncer says. Still a little stunned at the special treatment, Skeila offers him her lower right wrist and he affixes a gold-striped plastic wristband. (And, she notices, the bouncer’s cock seems to be firming up…) Izlil and the others get the same wristbands, different than the plain purple ones Blurred Vision usually uses. Another bouncer wordlessly holds the door for them and gestures them inside.

“Told you,” says a smug Izlil to Skeila as they and the rest of her retinue cross the threshold separating Midway’s halogen-lit streets from the club’s dim interior, and what sounded like a distant rumble out on the street becomes heavy sonic pressure all around them…

Sid is disoriented all at once, not so much from the flashing lights in the darkness or the crowd packed in as dense as plutonium, it’s that he’s seeing it all from thigh height. He thought he’d already gotten used to viewing life from the vantage point of a penis, but it’s something else to be down here so close to the endless furry bodies swaying to the beatless industrial rumble of whatever “music” this is, glowing under the blacklights in their multitude of colors like a forest of menacing alien anemones, faces invisible from down here, distinguished mainly by their genitals—guess it makes sense for a dick to only see others by their junk…

They wend their way into the dark recesses of the club, with Izlil out in front cutting a path through the crowd like an icebreaker ship. Blurred Vision’s interior is drab, even cheap, to those few sober enough to look closely. The floor is smoothed concrete and the walls are all matte black slabs of drywall, painted in a hurry by staff in the off hours to facilitate a reshuffling of the floor plan or to replace sections that drunken spiders fell through the night before. The bars, which are painted over the same as the walls, have a flimsy particle-board feel to them, and there’s little creativity in how anything connects, all right angles and squares. The doors are standard commercial push-bar models with a few extra feet of height to accommodate the locals. The architectural vision seems to have been to enclose the maximum amount of space as quickly as possible. There are strands of LEDs tacked up all over and machines casting moving beams of multicolored light to give the place some kind of ambience, but the effect is like someone tried to stage a half-assed rave in the Navidson House. This is fine with the clientele, who aren’t here for the decor.

“Whaddaya think?” yells Skeila, over what sounds like an ongoing avalanche.

“You know I love this place!” Izlil shouts in reply over her shoulder.

“I was talking to my cock,” Skeila shouts back.

“Does he like it?”

This is pretty nuts, thinks Sid to Skeila. He tries to think loudly. He’s not sure if he has to imagine himself shouting for her to hear him.

“Let’s get drinks first,” says Izlil. The bars here are interspersed throughout the wide corridors connecting the dance floors. Izlil pilots their group through the crowd to the nearest one, but they’re dismayed to find that the spiders already waiting for drinks are encircling the bar three layers deep, and the spiders behind the counter are serving them as fast as they can.

“Should we try the other ones?” asks Keedin.

“They’ll all be like this,” says Izlil.

“If we’re listening to this stuff all night I’m gonna need to get pretty fucked up,” says Skeila. (The avalanche has dissolved into white noise with the low end boosted to window-rattling levels.)

“This is gonna take forever,” moans another spider with them, a male named Myrett, an officer on the scooter parking squad with army helmet green fur. “What time’s Saint Alaika come on? Should we just wait?”

“Not for at least another hour,” says Izlil. “Guess we just have to—wait a minute, we don’t have to wait, we’re with Skeila!”.

“Keep it down,” says Skeila. It’s loud in here, but a few heads are turning in their direction. “And I’m not just gonna cut in front of everyone…”

“No, no,” says Izlil, holding up her gold-striped wristband. “We’re VIPs! I bet we can go up to the mezzanine! I bet we can get bottle service!” she squeals, bouncing up and down. “Come on!”

Izlil sets off again, the others following close by so as not to get separated in the wall-to-wall crush of spiders. They maneuver one slow step at a time around dancing spiders, drinking spiders, oblivious groups, squeezing themselves down to single file when the crowd narrows them to a choke point, slipping past a stream of others going the opposite way like a two-lane traffic jam…They move with little to no space between them to stay together, and with Izlil leading the pack and Skeila following right behind, Sid’s constantly bumping up against Izlil’s back.

It feels good.

Izlil’s fur is this long, smooth, golden blonde luxurious stuff that hangs on her like a horse’s mane, and here at point-blank range Sid can see it’s her platinum-white undercoat that gives her that extra shine. It’s visible in slices when she moves just right and the yellow fur parts to reveal a dazzling patch that glows unearthly in the club’s shifting lighting, or from up close when Skeila steps out of sync with Izlil and mashes him into her back, parting that silky outer coat with his sensitive body and driving him into that downy undercoat for a moment, Izlil’s body heat all around him. It’s like he can feel every single strand of hair moving across him, and he can hardly think from the sensation of being pushed face-first in—no, glans-first, though the distinction is getting hazy for him. Skeila’s a lot taller than Izlil, so he presses into the middle of her back. He’s half-soft but that may change, and he’s embarrassed, though he knows by now he doesn’t need to be.

“Is that Sid I feel?” asks Izlil, clearly unbothered.

“Crowded in here,” says Skeila.

Izlil shakes her ass a little on her next step. For Sid it’s like twin hills seen from the cockpit of an out-of-control plane, and then he’s pressed into her fur again…

They continue forward; when Sid has space he bounces slightly left, then right, then left again, off of Skeila’s thighs in a rhythm that’s becoming familiar, even natural to him. He’s watching for other humans—those like him are the majority by far. He’d estimate the number of spiders with huge once-human cocks attached to them to be, oh, about one in forty-eight, give or take. Even he miscounts sometimes. He feels a kind of solidarity whenever another cocked human goes by; as their hosts pass each other he can see them head-on, as it were, some flaccid and some erect and some in-between, and he knows that they too were people just like him, once. He has the urge to touch them, to make contact…There are regular humans here too, but only a few. Some look like they’re having a good time, some don’t, but they all have a certain hunted aspect. There’s a guy who may not have realized what he was getting into, heading in the direction of the exit, as snickering spiders block his path…further on an androgyne in a jean jacket with a tall drink in their hand dances alongside some spiders, but seems to keep a wary eye on all the claws moving over them…and here, attracting quite a lot of interest, is a human in the final stages of changing from one state to the other. The owner of the soon-to-be penis is a small asparagus-green girl whose six arms barely seem big enough to hold the changing human up. She’s getting help from her friends, every nearby spider reaching out to touch the human’s shaftlike body. It’s too late to tell much about who they were. They’ve reached the stage in the change where their face is mostly an out-of-place arrangement of bumps on a dickhead.

The staircase leading up to the mezzanine above the main dance floor is steep and so narrow that they have to walk up single file; Izlil leads the way with Skeila behind her. “I’ve only been up here once before,” she turns around and says to Skeila as they climb. “Remember when I was hooking up with that guy from the Booze Distribution Board? He got us in.”

There’s some tables in the mezzanine, each surrounded by shiny black pleather couches and artsy egg-shaped chairs. One table’s already taken by a group of three males, who nod at Skeila’s group when they take the next table over. Their server soon returns with the standard chintzy clear plastic tub of booze and mixers. There’s vases of cranberry juice and lemonade, smaller bottles of fancy branded juices, and ice buckets with an assortment of liquors that includes the biggest bottle of Stoli that Sid’s ever seen in his life.

“What’s everyone wanna drink?” asks Izlil.

“Uh, I’m more of an IPA guy…” mumbles Keedin.

“Don’t have any. Here, have some tequila.”

“Um…well, maybe a shot. Not too much,” he says.

Izlil pours him a glassful. “Just sip it,” she says. “Skeila? What do you want?”

“Just gimme a vodka cran for now,” says Skeila.

Izlil complies by scooping a little ice into a glass, then pouring from that massive jeroboam of vodka until the glass is nearly full, finally adding enough cranberry juice to turn it mildly pink. “Here you go!” She pours one for herself in the same generous proportion, and continues handing out drinks until everyone in the squad has at least one. “Cheeeeers! To Skeila and Sid!”

“To Skeila and Sid!” shout the assembled spiders, hoisting their glasses.

“Aw, you guys…” Skeila tastes her drink, and admits to herself that this place isn’t as bad as she remembered it, though being up on the mezzanine helps a lot. Even the music is…well, it’s not what she’d listen to, but it’s kind of danceable. “This that Saint Alaika you all wanted to hear?”

“Nah, this is just some warm up DJ. Saint Alaika’ll be on in about an hour, probably,” says Keedin.

“Don’t worry,” Izlil chimes in. “It’ll get less dead in here by the time she starts her set.”

This is dead? Skeila wanders over to the balcony and looks out at the dance floor below. A hundred or more spider silhouettes are down there gyrating and grinding in the dark, and there are another hundred at the edges of the expanse, in the furniture pushed up against the walls, writhing slowly with one another or lying motionlessly supine. Like most droneclubs, Blurred Vision provides an assortment of furniture—love seats, long backless divans, even small beds—for those who want a soft place to fuck, or recover from post-cockifying exhaustion, or just to space out and appreciate the music.

Sid dangles out past the balcony railing, getting an aerial view of the dance floor. Even for spider eyes there’s not enough light in here to see much other than the outlines of the dancers below, so he doesn’t feel too exposed. (That vodka cranberry helps, too.)

“Well…happy they talked us into coming?” Skeila asks her cock.

Clubs aren’t really my thing, but this is kind of interesting, Sid mentally replies.

“Me neither. At least not this kinda place.” Skeila sips her drink and watches the indistinct chaos happening beneath them. “You see anyone you like?”

Uh…well…it’s kind of hard to see anyone from up here…

“Well, keep a look out. We’re here on a mission, don’t forget. We gotta find someone to stick you in,” says Skeila. She enjoys the pleasurable wave of embarrassed arousal spreading over the surface of her penis as Sid twitches towards hardness.

Would…you really have sex with someone right here?

Skeila shrugs. “It’s not like we’d be the only ones. I mean, look.” She’s right—even now there are at least half a dozen couples (or higher-order groups) rutting on the club-provided couches. She gives her penis a playful stroke. “And you make such a nice looking cock, Sid. They were right when they said all the spiders here are going to want us, y’know. I’ll be easy to find a nice tight hole to put you in.” Blood rushes into Sid, making him half erect.

As if summoned, Izili pops up at Skeila’s side. “Hey! You didn’t run away on us already, did you? We can either wait for the mezzanine to fill up or we can go down to the floor and look around…I wanna be back up here before Saint Alaika’s set starts, but what do you wanna do? Sid looks eager to go,” she says, eyes on Skeila’s hardening penis.

“We were just trying to figure that out,” says Skeila. “Maybe we’ll go down to the floor. Wanna finish my drink first, though.” (She’s about half deep into that extra-large vodka cranberry.)

“Oh, good call, me too. Let’s finish these and I’ll come with,” says Izlil, who’s somehow already approaching the bottom of a second tumbler that was full of something clear and bubbly. “Soo…how are things going with you and Sid?”

“Pretty good so far, I think.”

“That’s it? Didn’t you just spend like a week on the surface with him?”

“Okay, pretty great.” She pauses for a second. “We’re already sharing thoughts.”

The blonde spider’s yellow eyes open wide. “Whaaaat?! You are not!”

“Honest, he’s picking up on stuff. Like when we got woken up to go on the news, he told me he could feel how embarrassed I was to have the Mayor in my place.”

“You to him? Not just him talking to you? That’s crazy. I’ve never heard of that before, like, a month straight of cock time. At least.”

“Well…” Skeila can’t help smirking here, “maybe it’s just different when you find the right human for you.”

“Mmmkay, tone it down, honey. How long are you gonna keep him, anyway?”

“Long as he wants.”

“So what you’re saying is we gotta convince him life is better as your cock. No problem.” Izlil drains the rest of her glass, then chirps “You want some molly? I’m pretty sure this is molly, anyway,” as she produces a tiny baggie full of crystalline gray-white powder.

“You don’t know, Izz?”

“That’s what the human said it was.” Izlil holds the bag up to her eyes and flicks it a couple times. “I caught one selling in Apostrophe Park without a license yesterday. Sthalen got to take him. He got the dick, but I got the drugs!” she says, nodding over at one of the spiders they came with, back at the table with Keedin and the others, who has a gigantic pink penis hanging between his yellow-furred legs that sways almost on its own.

“I wondered where he got that,” says Skeila. (Sid feels a little spike of anxiety from his host here, questions she hopes he won’t ask…)

“I could go have him ask, buuuuut…” Izlil dips a long orange nail into the baggie and, scooping some powder out, she licks it with a look of deep concentration. An instant later she screws her face up into a rictus of disgust. “Bleeeuuugh! That’s molly, alright.” She tips up her glass looking for some relief from the taste, and gets only a tantalizing half-swallow of ice melt. “Ugh. You want any?”

“Well…maybe a little. I mean, not every day you’re in the VIP floor at Blurred Vision, right?” Suddenly Sid feels a pang of apologetic concern. “I…probably ought to check with Sid first though. If he wants to.”

“C’mon Sid, don’t be lame!”

“You leave my dick alone.”

I’ve…only actually had it once, thinks Sid to Skeila. It was fun at the time. Made me feel really…cuddly. And I don’t normally want people to touch me that much. If you want to do it, I’m fine with that.

“He’s in. Alright, yeah, gimme a little.” Into the soft flat leathery palm-pad of one of Skeila’s claws, Izlil taps out a dose of at least four times what she took (but then, she’s going back for seconds already). Skeila licks it. The taste—awful synthetic bitterness, chemical desolation—is somehow instantly transmitted to Sid. “Gawd, that’s gross,” she says, an involuntary shiver of revulsion rippling down her body, which includes Sid. It’s like the taste is in his urethra. He finds himself longing for Skeila to go take a good long piss; it’d be a real improvement. She guzzles the remainder of her drink, all that cranberry astringency useless for washing away the alkaloid horror. “Fuck. Alright, let’s go.”

Izlil, on their way out, yells “we’re dancing—c’mon!” to the others. Keedin and a few more break off from the group and follow while the rest hang back at the table. Izlil leads the way back down the narrow stairs to ground level with the hoi polloi and, taking Skeila’s wrist to not get separated in the crowd (Skeila taking Keedin’s behind her to form a chain), they wind their way around to the doors leading into Blurred Vision’s main dance floor. By the time they get there she’s pretty sure she’s rolling—every passing stranger brushing her fur is a pleasant tactile explosion, but more than that, she’s suddenly, unaccountably glad to be here and that Izlil dragged them out—grateful for Izlil and all her other friends in the overflowing way usually engendered only by near-death experiences or chemicals (making her two for two today). Even Keedin, whose unrequited puppydog affection she usually finds annoying. Tonight, if Sid doesn’t find someone he likes more, she might just deign to let him suck her cock.

Entering the dance floor is a new revelation. Izlil looks back at her and grins maniacally as they pass through the doors. It’s an impressive sight from up on the mezzanine, but the god’s eye view steals some of the sense of distance. Down here it’s like being underwater on a strange planet. The spiders dancing next to them are lit in new shades and at new angles every second under the club’s lights, shifting poses in the momentary blackout, looking at you, then away, then suddenly back at you with leering fang-forward smiles…Far away, silhouetted at the edge of the space like a remote mountain range at night, the spiders in the furniture are reclining and grinding, some lost in the music, some in a narcotic haze, some merely in each other.

Down at the stage, apparent distance miles away and receding telescopically in Skeila’s view, are speakers the size of small buildings pumping out a constant sonic wall. It’s loud everywhere in here, but on the floor the sound has a physical presence. Skeila feels it as a deep vibration in her chest; for Sid it’s like there’s a single nerve resonating with the sound, a hot electric wire running down his underside and into his balls. He wants badly to be touched, touched for real and not these constant tantalizing grazes—furry spider hips, thighs, now and then the back of a claw, all bashing into him with frustrating quickness.

Izlil turns around and says something to Skeila. It’s like watching a muted video. Her mouth’s moving, but nothing’s getting above the decibel level in here, even three feet away. She points down, and is mouthing something—here? Yeah, this looks like as good a place as any to dance. The stage might as well be on the other side of Midway for how close it is and how little Skeila wants to push through the forest of spiders between it and her. She nods, and turns around to tell Keedin and the others that they want to dance here—yells for some reason even though they can’t hear her, even though she can’t hear herself, but they understand and their group forms a little circle. There’s almost no rhythm to dance to in this wash of sound, just a steady, slow pulsation like a wave, all the spiders moving in strange uniformity as it passes over them. The effect is like a bed of kelp being pulled in one direction and then suddenly another by changing currents, tangled arms flowing from side to side as their owners sway. Skeila’s more into nineties punk, but when in Rome…she closes her eyes and joins in the dance.

Soon she is being touched all over, light caresses from the dancers around her, expected and normal in a place like this. She welcomes it, extending her arms to touch them too as she moves. Some are her friends, some are strangers. Shy Keedin brushes her ass and thigh. Cheeky Izlil, getting thoroughly felt up herself, cups Skeila’s balls for a split second. Other claws trace down the brown fur of her back, or her long arms, or around the wide circumference of a breast…More and more spiders reach out to her. Has word has spread that Lieutenant Skeila is on the floor? Is it just that she’s one of the taller spiders here, an easily visible nine-foot reference point? Or is it her rapidly hardening human cock that’s drawing attention, Sid now nearly at his full length? In any case, Skeila finds herself enjoying the contact and this feeling of being so widely desired…

With Skeila swaying and turning, solid Sid swoops and bobs in wide arcs in front of her, pivoting uncontrollably at her hips. As her penis he’s merely along for the ride, totally unable to control his movement, but whatever concerns he may have had about bodily autonomy have been cast out of his mind (along with most concerns in general) by the overwhelming pleasure. He wants more than the light fondling he’s getting now, in fact he would never have imagined how badly he could be want to touched like this by strangers—but these feather-strokes along his shaft, these torturously quick touches of clawtips, well they’re going to drive him mad. He needs someone to just grab the shaft he is now and tug. Or is that what Skeila wants? Or is there no difference anymore? And why can’t she do something for him?

Skeila…can’t you…touch me? Just a little? he thinks to her. If they hadn’t jerked off a couple of hours ago, he might be ready to explode already.

He can’t hear anything over the thunder of the drone and of Skeila’s blood rushing inside him, but he can feel Skeila’s response, coming over as a synesthetic sensation in his mind like seeing rain on a babbling brook. Giggling. Delighted at how much of a cock he already is. Demanding to be jerked off—what could be more phallic than that?

Skeila touches herself, not him, clutching her breast and then heavily dragging her claw over her chest and stomach to her hip, tracing the path where her AAA sash would be if she was wearing it. He can feel it as her claw approaches, like you’d be able to feel vibrations in the ground if a rhino was charging you, but just as she makes contact with the base of her shaft the claw veers off and she strokes the inside of her thigh instead…

Grab me! Jerk me! More mental laughter. He isn’t actually sure whether he’s even using words or if the only thing he’s getting across is the raw need.

The dancers around Skeila are petting her heavily all over her body but not, except for the barest briefest brushes, that big hard Sid. As tempting a target as his stiff black glossiness presents, it’s like they’re all in on this edging session, plotting to drip-feed him a touch here and there to keep him throbbing. His whole cylindrical surface is buzzing at nothing more than the air on his tight black cock-skin and even the most incidental, glancing contact is as sudden and electric as a bug zapper. He loses track of time in this whirling storm of spider fur—loses track of most of his thoughts—until the sound fades and the light shifts…

“…is that it?” asks Skeila. There’s a low beat going, but can hear herself talk again.

“No,” says Izlil, “they’re setting up for Saint Alaika.”

“How long were we dancing?”

Izlil flashes her phone’s clock to Skeila too quickly for her to see. “’Bout thirty minutes.”

“Whoa.”

“I’m going back up to the mezzanine for Saint Alaika. Coming with? You need to to the bathroom? I’m gonna go before I go back up.”

She could hold it, but likes the idea of using Sid as the dick he is now in a busy bathroom in Midway’s biggest club. “Yeah, let’s go.”

Bathrooms in Blurred Vision are divided not by gender, spider biology obviating that distinction anyway, but by what you want to do in there and how you want to do it. There’s several for boring, pedestrian elimination, of course, and they all see heavy usage with the volume of drinks the bartenders here hand out. There’s another bathroom that’s lit like a movie set and full of mirrors with adjustable angles and magnification, specifically for femmes who want to fix up their makeup. Next to it there’s a bathroom with lots of extra horizontal surfaces (glossy black, natch) and a tasteful basket of tiny straws, replenished by staff throughout the night, for patrons who want to powder their noses. And there’s another bathroom, one with endlessly flickering lights, that doesn’t get cleaned as much as the others, where each and every stall partition has a glory hole and the doors have been ripped off, so there’s nothing stopping anyone walking through and watching you suck anonymous dick. Over the sinks opposite the stalls is a long, cracked mirror, so you can get a good view of yourself too. There’s not really anywhere sex is off limits in Blurred Vision, but sometimes you just get that ol’ nostalgie de la boue…

They make their way to one of the non-themed bathrooms; Keedin hesitates at the threshold, needs to pee but doesn’t know if he’s invited until Izlil looks back and asks if he’s coming. Sid sympathizes—he doesn’t like public bathrooms either. He’s chronically pee-shy, the kind of guy that drives for eight hours flat with no rest stop to avoid even the possibility of having to take a leak while someone’s in the same room. So the twenty or so spiders in here have him somewhat alarmed. Faucets run and soapy claws clack together underneath them. The jet of the hot air dryer overrides the thumping beat from outside, except when it briefly cycles off before the motion detector turns it on again. Spiders wait two or three to a line in front of a row of urinals and stalls, carefree and chatting, mostly not getting up to anything salacious—whole rest of a club to be naughty in, after all—except that towards the back, two spider girls are making out against a wall and the nearest stall has grunting and high moaning sounds coming from it. Nobody’s paying much attention, but the spiders waiting for the stall seem annoyed.

Izlil heads for the stalls while Skeila and Keedin queue up at the urinals. Skeila takes the one at the end—an oversized model intended, it seems, for use with human-sized cocks.

Uh, aren’t you gonna use a stall? Sid asks, nervous quaver audible even via thought.

“Why would I? This’ll be faster. And easier, if you’re gonna stay that hard.”

There are two guys in front of Skeila, one using the urinal and the other waiting. Neither have human penises. The one waiting looks back at her and, seeing throbbing hard Sid, immediately offers to let her cut in line. (Sid figures the etiquette involved must be something like the handicapped stall, capacity dictating the human-cock urinal gets used by everyone but still awkward to be caught at when someone really needs it.)

The guy in front of her finishes and flushes, and Skeila steps up to take her place. She uses three claws to angle Sid down at the urinal and, with this great white wall of porcelain in front of him…nothing happens. Here’s an unpleasant new form of performance anxiety. She stares at the band stickers affixed to the wall over the urinal and waits. He can tell she has to go, can tell from the feeling of her flexing some muscle deep within that she’s trying to make him go, but still nothing. Certainly not a lack of trying on his part, but he can’t seem to loosen whatever it is at his base that’s stopping the flow, not to mention he feels awfully pinched off, being held down while he’s this hard…

Skeila looks around nonchalantly, catching Keedin staring at her as he waits in the next line over. “Don’tcha just hate peeing with a boner?” she asks him.

“Oh, uh, yeah,” he mumbles, claws folded strategically in front of him to hide his likely growing arousal.

“C’mon, Sid, I can stand here all day.” She’d probably have to, were it not for all that vodka cranberry she drank—not just for supplying the raw pressure Sid is trying to allow himself to succumb to, but for the disinhibitory effects. Calculating powers of three in his head to distract himself, to their great combined relief Sid finally relaxes enough to let a hot thin jet shoot up through him and out his tip, and once the floodgates are open they can’t be closed.

From the center of Sid’s field of vision, where the foggy bump of his nose usually sits, proceeds a turbulent yellow stream straight towards the porcelain blankness in front of him. It makes a radial splash where it hits, a little motile sunburst shimmering under the restroom’s fluorescent lighting with a comet trail that dribbles down towards the drain and the pink puck on top of it. He barely notices the taste this time, focusing more on the sensation of all this liquid rushing up through and out of him. It’s like having a fire hose hooked up to your throat, but in a way that feels nice. He particularly enjoys the vibration at the edges of his slit the flow produces as it exits him.

After a good long piss, Skeila’s on empty. She flexes him, forcing the last few drops stuck in the pipes up and out. She hits the flush handle and heads for the sinks, stealing a glance at Keedin, who’s finishing up at the urinal next to her—yup, he’s hard. By the time she gets a free sink, lathers up with that pink soap that smells like almonds and chemistry, and rinses off, Keedin’s done too.

She flicks her claws dry and turns to face him. “Keedin, help me out here?” He’s not sure what she means, or why Skeila’s waggling her enormous cock in front of his face like that, but he’s not complaining. “Sid’s still a little wet,” she explains. “Clean me off?”

“Oh! Yeah yeah sure, uh—” he looks around for a paper towel dispenser, eager to jump into action.

“No, do it with your mouth,” says Skeila.

Keedin hesitates, jaw slack, transfixed—but then he lurches forward, glomming onto Skeila’s cock and inelegantly engulfing the outer half of the head. She exhales sharply and her eyes go fluttery as, inside his mouth, he gives Sid a nice big lick up the underside of the glans and over the piss slit. This is Sid’s first time experiencing anything even close to a blowjob as a penis—first time for anything more than Skeila jacking him off, really—and it’s like having a hot, wet bucket of pleasure thrown in his face. Some of the spiders nearby cheer Keedin on, but he pulls away with an awkward smile. Mission accomplished, although Sid is certainly no drier than before…

“Are you two ready?” There’s Izlil, who’s already done her business and is waiting by the door, golden arms all crossed in front of her like braided wicker. “C’mon, I don’t want to miss any of Saint Alaika! Skeila’ll let you suck her off more in the mezzanine.”

It’s somehow even busier in the club now. Moving through all these spiders is like bushwhacking through a jungle that pushes back and occasionally wants to grab your dick, but they eventually make it back to the staircase up to the VIP loft. It’s standing room only now, even up here, with every table occupied past capacity and no chairs without at least one spider butt in them except for the ones designated for the pile of their group’s jackets, purses, scarves, and whatever clothes their owner may not want or need anymore. (Skeila hopes her friends held down the AAA table…) Club waitstaff, boys and girls alike all in matching black microskirts, flit from table to table carrying trays of shots and fancy cocktails in every claw. Skeila passes by while a server bends down to present, with a flourish, six guests with six cocktails at once. Spiders mill around the mezzanine’s small dance floor and lean on the balcony, waiting for the show to begin.

There’s even a few uncocked humans in here; any human willing to venture into Blurred Vision gets free VIP access, naturally. At one table there’s three that look more like they’re dressed for the office than the club, a young woman and two men in plain button-ups. They’re with a group of spiders but they too, somehow, emit that same office worker vibe. Skeila’s surprised to realize that it’s her table next to them and the two groups have begun to meld, rearranging chairs at the edges to facilitate conversation and idle groping, with the AAA spiders noticeably eager to sit by the office humans…

One of the office workers, a short spider girl, sits cross-legged facing away from them as they approach. She has blue fur with streaks of gleaming white that glow brightly under the lights here, like rainbow-outlined clouds that pop out from the surface of her gently curved back. She has it styled into puffy bands around her elbows and hips—wait. Isn’t that…Skeila feels her cock recognize her before she does, and then, when she remembers that girl from the MARC who seemed just a little too interested in Sid, she feels a stifled wave of desire and realizes Sid must be trying to hide his attraction for her sake. Silly cock, he doesn’t have to hide his desire, that’s his whole job now. Maybe she just found her target for the night. Though it is weird to run into her here. What are the odds? (No, Sid, I don’t know what Midway’s population or Blurred Vision’s nightly gate is…)

They rejoin the table. Keedin winds around the back of the group, Izlil instantly tries to sidle up in between the human office boys, and Skeila stands looming over Kiklori’s right shoulder. “Skeila! Welcome back!” says Myrett from the scooter squad, with his arm around one of the other office spiders and another creeping up her thigh. “We met a buncha people that work at the MARC! I guess you and Kiklori already know each other? She was telling us about how your cock is like, super fuckin’ smart or something.”

Kiklori turns around, putting her face at most a foot from Skeila’s balls, and looks up past the shaft to say with apparent cheerfulness, “Lieutenant! Hi again! I can’t believe we’re running into each other here! Listen, I’m really sorry we got off on the wrong foot, but it’s so nice to see you and Sid!”

Skeila’s a little caught off guard. Wasn’t expecting her to be so friendly. “Uh, yeah. Hey. Sorry about being a huge bitch today, I was having a pretty bad day.”

“No, not at all! I mean, after everything you went through, and then you probably thought I was trying to steal your human…I don’t blame you!”

“Aw, well, no harm done.” Both spiders glance at Sid, who twitches involuntarily. He bounces up and down, coming even closer to Kiklori’s face on the downswing. “He knows who he belongs to,” Skeila says, grinning.

“I can tell! He sure looks happy to see me, though.”

“Yeah, now he has someone to talk to about math.” They both laugh. “Sooo…you all big Saint Alaika fans at the MARC? Doesn’t seem like the ‘human friendly culture‘ you guys are always talking about.”

“I know, right? I’m not really a fan or anything, but they were giving out VIP passes for Blurred Vision at work, kinda as a perk I guess. I don’t think they knew who was playing tonight. What about you?”

“Me? Pfah. I don’t even like drone. More of a punk rock girl.”

“A cop who listens to punk?”

“I like to think they’re only singing about human police.”

“So what brings you here, then? Just felt like showing Sid off?” Kiklori’s ice blue eyes glance over the impressive length of Skeila’s cock.

“Well, look at him. I think he’s worth showing off, don’t you?”

“Oh, absolutely.”

The merged group has been passing around someone’s weed pen, one of those fancy models with vents, a dozen tiny buttons, and a backlit display for the temperature. “Want any?” the spider on her right asks, offering her the little black cyberpunk flute.

“Well…yeah, why not. Sid does like to smoke.”

Sid wonders, as Skeila takes the vape, whether that means she’s going to stick it in his piss slit or something. But no, that would be silly. Dicks don’t inhale. Instead she just takes an audacious double sized hit for the both of them, cough-lurching but managing to keep it in before passing the pen down to Kiklori.

“Wow, that was a big hit,” Kiklori says, taking a daintier one herself. She holds it while locking eye contact with Skeila, then exhales a thin stream of vapor directly at Sid. He can feel the moisture in her breath and the flow of the air bifurcating around the shaft he is now, sensing it move over his phallic body as clearly as a smoke test in a wind tunnel. He jumps, aching for contact. Kiklori turns to pass the vape on to her left, and as she does so she unhurriedly uncrosses, then re-crosses her legs, giving Skeila a bird’s-eye view of her own hard pink dick nestled in among that sky blue fur, standing up just as erect as Sid, if much smaller.

That, or the weed, leaves Skeila dumbstruck for a few seconds. “…you guys order more drinks or anything? I should get something before my mouth goes all dry.”

Myrett, sitting on the other side of Kiklori, leans over to say “Yeah, but they’re slammed tonight. We put an order in like fifteen minutes ago when you were down on the floor,” then resumes cuddling up to one of the office spiders.

“Fuck it,” says Skeila. “I’ll just try the bar. You want anything, Kiklori?”

“Ooh, could you get me a Paloma? Thank you!”

“You bet.”

“Oh! Are you going to the bar?” asks Izlil, looking up from where she’s sitting across the table, now snug between the two human boys. She works fast—she’s already getting handsy with both at once while using her leftover claws to spoon out doses from that baggie she’s got. “These two want drinks. Would you get them something?” One seems like he’s about to object, but quickly forgets his complaint when Izlil places his hand on her breast and pushes a clawtip laden with a lump of molly right into his open mouth. “Now,” Izlil says as Skeila’s getting up to go to the bar, pulling both humans closer to her, “which one of you cuties wants to go home on me tonight?”

The bar up in the mezzanine isn’t quite as busy as the ones below, but Skeila’ll still be waiting a while. There’s a couple dozen spiders here being served by only three harried bartenders, each mixing multiple drinks at once. She stands there waiting for her turn to catch one of their eyes, hoping height gives her an advantage. She can feel the weed now, the happy headrush and that fascinating and sometimes threatening newness at the edge of everything. The last time she smoked was—it was the night she met Sid, actually. When she changed him the first time, not exactly willingly, with those Huntsmen watching…(are they turning the lights down? Saint Alaika must be coming on.) There’s a lurking guilt still nagging at her from that night, the kind of self-doubt weed is so good at dredging up: part of her is glad it happened. In an awful way she feels like she has to thank the Huntsmen for bringing her and Sid together. Would Sid have stayed with her, otherwise? She was just playing tour guide up until they ran into the Huntsmen, yeah it may have seemed like they were hitting it off but why wouldn’t he have just thanked the nice cop lady and left her? The thought of just how close she came to a reality where she doesn’t have Sid, doesn’t even know him—well, it’s horrible. She’ll never forget the Huntsmen or what their leader told her…you don’t have to change him back. He’s yours now. Deep breath. He is hers now. He’s her dick. And if things go well with that MARC girl, he just might want to stay that way for a while.

Were…you thinking about me just now?

Skeila’s startled out of her reverie. “Yeah,” she admits. “And about what we’re gonna do to Kiklori in a little bit.”

Kiklori? Really? I mean it seemed like you were flirting with her but…

“Pretty sure there was some major flirting back. What’s the matter? Don’t act like you don’t wanna get in her.”

It’s just that, uh, it seemed like you got a little jealous when we were talking to her today.

“Why would I be jealous? Silly human. I’m gonna be the one fucking her, and I’m gonna use you to do it.”

Just then a beleaguered bartender points at Skeila—her turn to order. That’s a Dark ’n Stormy for herself, Kiklori’s Paloma, and for those two humans Izlil is trying to put the moves on—hmm, probably want to get ’em good and fucked up—a pair of Long Island iced teas. The bartender was probably hoping for a simpler order, but he sighs and goes to work. He scoops up four glasses of ice and fixes all the drinks simultaneously, pouring gin, tequila, rum, and so forth into each glass as necessary, coordinating bottles flying from claw to claw with the skill of an air traffic controller. In less than a minute he’s setting all four down in front of Skeila without a word and taking the next spider’s order. Skeila’s struck by how the bright pink Paloma perfectly matches the color of Kiklori’s cock as she grabs all the glasses. (One nice thing about drinking with spiders—each trip to the bar is three times as efficient.)

Their group has diffused somewhat when she gets back, some of the spiders having gone over to the balcony to watch the show start, but Izlil and one of the human boys are still back at the table. He’s sitting in her lap positively brimming with anxiety while the yellow spider amuses herself twirling his hair around a clawtip.

“Izz, here’s your drinks…where’d that other one go?”

“Oh, he ran off somewhere,” says Izlil, deftly taking the glasses from Skeila without looking away from the human’s eyes or undraping her upper arms from around him. “But who cares? More for us, right Dave? Cheers!”

Dave takes his glass and clinks it with Izlil’s. “Uh, right.” Izlil giggles into her glass and he tries to laugh along, as one does when one’s not sure what the joke is.

“Where’d Kiklori go?” asks Skeila.

“Who?” asks Izlil, but luckily Dave’s there to point out his coworker. Kiklori’s over by the balcony, in a little pool of shadow where none of the club’s many moving lights quite manage to reach, her blue fur darkened to a night sky. She leans against a support beam with her back to them, waiting for the show to start. As Skeila goes over to her, Izlil giggles some more and says “Have a good time, Sid!”

Sid’s not completely hard anymore, but when Skeila steps up next to Kiklori he’s still sticking out enough to get swept by the occasional polka-dot of illumination. This dim pocket is just big enough for the two spider girls, even standing shoulder-to-shoulder with their arms touching…another passing light momentarily dazzles him as he looks up at the two towering over him, faces hidden at this angle by the bottoms of their breasts.

“Hey. This is what you wanted, right?” Skeila hands Kiklori her drink.

“Ooh, yes, perfect. Thank you so much!”

“Yeah, no problem.” Way down below, six-armed technicians scurry around onstage plugging in equipment, moving speakers, and unfurling banners covered in the same wild black tangle the Huntsmen dye their legs with. “Been waiting long?”

“Yeah, feels like it’s been seven years.”

“Damn. I didn’t think I was at the bar that long.”

“Oh, no, I didn’t mean you! I was just talking about Saint Alaika. I don’t know why it took so long, but I guess she’s got to get started sometime.”

There’d be an awkward silence, if the air didn’t constantly simmer with chittering from hundreds of spiders and the omnipresent deep bass rumble bleeding through from Blurred Vision’s other, lesser dance floors.

“So,” says Skeila.

“So,” says Kiklori, hiding a smile behind her drink.

“You’re trying to get my human to work on this MARC project with you, right? I dunno if he made up his mind, but it seems like you got his interest.”

“Oh yeah?” says Kiklori, leaning forward against the balcony, sticking out her butt. An innocent stretch. “Well, we’d love to have him. Anything I could do to…help convince him?”

“If you really wanna impress him, maybe now’s the time.”

“Hmm, whatever can I do to impress him?” says Kiklori, theatrically tapping a clawtip on her cheek in contemplation. “Ooh, maybe I could tell him about what I just finished working on? It’s an R script that runs a spatial correlation on our data set of how stable deep spider warrens are relative to the distance to shale gas deposits. Pretty straightforward application of Moran’s I, but the results should challenge a lot of people’s assumptions. Is that the kind of thing that impresses Sid?” she asks with the slightest wiggle of her ass.

Skeila knits her brow for a few seconds and looks skeptically at her dick. “…okay, he says that’s actually really interesting. But you gotta convince us both here. I mean, he is my human.”

“And what can I do to convince you, Lieutenant?”

“This is his first time as a cock, you know.”

Kiklori looks shocked. “Really?”

“Well…there was some shit with the Huntsmen that doesn’t count.”

“The Huntsmen took him? And you got him back!?”

“Naw, more like they made me change him.”

“Oh, they made you. Mm-hmm.”

“Hey, they did. But this time he volunteered. And I wanna make sure he gets the full experience. I don’t want him to be like, oh, being Skeila’s dick is so boring, I should just go back to being a plain ol’ human…”

“No, of course not.” Kiklori slowly moves a claw towards Sid. “You want him to feel good, right?”

“Right,” says Skeila, grinning and moving closer to the smaller spider, as Kiklori ever so gently takes hold of Skeila’s shaft.

Kiklori’s inner claw pads are marbled azure, plush little frozen blueberry clusters with tufts of fur poking up between them, and Sid can feel every one on his screamingly sensitive underside as she grasps him and wraps her claws all the way around his body. The sensation of the short, velvety fur on her digits, warm lines of pressure on his surface, gives way to her smooth, hard, cool clawtips and their points poking just microns into his delicate skin.

They’re looking down at him admiringly. “He’s so hard,” says Kiklori.

“He likes that,” says Skeila.

Kiklori gives him a squeeze, and he throbs helplessly in her claw. Whatever she though of him earlier, now she’s looking at him like he’s just a cock—and he can see that’s all he really is when enough light catches him to see his own reflection in the shiny panoply of eyes looking downwards…she slowly moves her claw up the shaft. “I do want him to come work with us, but it’s kind of a shame to waste a cock this nice.”

“Right? Look at him,” says Skeila. “Look at how big and fat he is and tell me you don’t want to taste him. Tell me you don’t want Sid in you.”

“Oh, I definitely do. He looks dee-licious. Buuut…I dunno,” says Kiklori, smirkingly defiant but still stroking Sid. “Maybe that’s your evil plan, Lieutenant? Trick me into making Sid feel so good he never wants to stop being your cock?”

“You really are smart.”

Skeila pulls Kiklori in close. As the blue spider steps forward, the parting of her thighs lets her pink little cock spring free. And as the two women kiss, arms snaking around one another’s backs, breasts pressed between their bodies, their cocks rub together. Kiklori’s dick rolls back and forth against Sid, her tip barely reaching a quarter of the way up his length, owing to the difference in size (both in penis and height) between the spiders. His world becomes hot, soft static as the roar of Skeila’s blood in him and the rustle of fur drowns everything else out, and he can’t see anything but sandy brown and seafoam blue. He can smell her, he realizes. Like a fish not perceiving the water it swims in he only now understands how fully wreathed in Skeila’s familiar scent he is once Kiklori’s mingles with it—floral, sweet, bananas and lilac.

Being sandwiched between the two spiders feels wonderful. There is pressure and heat all over his penile body from above and below as he is crushed delightfully between them, their taut stomachs cushioned by soft, silky fur. The girls make out, grinding into each other, every little lateral hip wiggle sending their hard cocks rolling past each other again. It feels to Sid like he can sense every vein on his dance partner’s shaft, can read the exact curve of the rubbery head…what would it be like, he wonders with the dwindling part of his mind not fuzzed-out by pleasure, if Kiklori’s cock was a human too, like him? This feels so close, so intimate that he’s sure somehow they could communicate…

The spiders kiss for another minute before Kiklori pulls back—there is a chilly inrush of air, and their cocks are left barely touching in the space between them. Skeila and Kiklori run their claws over each other, necks and shoulders, arms and backs, each squeezing lightly the other’s breasts, a network of furry segmented arms crisscrossing above Sid like tangled cables while he’s left hungry for contact—until Kiklori sinks to her knees, letting her claws drag grooves down Skeila’s fur, and Sid realizes what’s about to happen.

“Oh, now you’ve got his attention,” says Skeila.

Kiklori’s grinning face lowers into Sid’s field of vision like a huge new planet, and she looks him directly in the piss slit. “Yeah? You wanna get sucked, Sid? Like the big hard cock you are?”

All he can do is throb helplessly, but luckily his spider’s there to express his thoughts: “Fuck yeah he does,” says Skeila.

“Slap me with him,” says Kiklori.

“You got it,” says Skeila, grasping him at the base and levering him forward into Kiklori’s face, over and over—whap! whap! Kiklori squeals and closes half her eyes, giggling, maybe not expecting so much heft. Then she opens her mouth and sticks out her tongue expectantly. Skeila slaps him against that too, his underside smacking wetly on her waiting tongue. “Go on,” she says, “suck my human.”

Kiklori obediently opens up as wide as she can, and Skeila pulls Sid down until he’s level with Kiklori’s mouth. At this distance he can’t see much below her chin or above her blue button nose—just her vast maw ready to receive him, tongue rolled out over her teeth like a red carpet to welcome him inside. And while he’s tingling with anticipation all along his length from tip to base, he still has the presence of mind to be concerned about how sharp those teeth are, especially the two fangs he realizes he’s going to have to fit between—stubbier than Skeila’s but pointy enough that he doesn’t want any accidents. Skeila doesn’t seem at all worried, though. She moves forward, inching him closer. Sid can feel her hot breath rolling over his mushroom-shaped head with every exhalation, and he can see deep into the recesses of her throat as Skeila aims her penis into Kiklori’s mouth—and then, Kiklori curling her lips over those sharp little teeth, she cranes her neck up and engulfs Sid.

He is immersed in hot damp darkness up to the place where it feels like his shoulders once belonged, just below the ridge of his plump phallic head. Kiklori’s formed a perfect lip-lock around his upper shaft, expertly protecting him from her teeth. She bobs back and forth, massaging him with the soft inside of her mouth and working his underside with her tongue, this enjoyably rough slab of muscle undulating along that oh-so-sensitive upsweep where the shaft ends and the glans begins. He can hear only muffled bass from the music, wet squelching surrounding him as he moves back and forth in Kiklori’s mouth, and this deep resonant humming that vibrates him from his tip to base with quavering pleasure—it’s Kiklori moaning, he realizes.

Kiklori starts trying to take him in deeper, going a little further every time she bobs her head. Sid’s blunt tip bashes into what feels like a firm wall—he’s hitting the back of her throat. For a moment everything seizes up around him, but Kiklori gets her gag reflex under control and then Sid feels himself going yet further in as she deep-throats him. His upper few inches are bent gently downwards to follow the curve of her throat, and she keeps him there, snug in a firm, quivering tunnel. Light choking noises from all around him. He can picture Skeila’s view with total clarity, practically seeing it somehow, the top of Kiklori’s head nose-deep into Skeila’s crotch fur as she chugs the larger spider’s enormous dick. Skeila puts a claw on the back of her head to keep her from going anywhere, and Kiklori looks up at Skeila, kneeling on the club floor with her own pink little penis equally hard and twitching almost out of sight, wide blue eyes watering at the effort of keeping that huge human shaft down her gullet, which she manages to do for several more seconds and then—

Suddenly, Sid’s view snaps back and he’s retracted with a quickness, like being yanked feet-first out of a well. Light breaks around him, Kiklori’s tonsils, tongue, and teeth appear and recede in sequence, and he finds himself throbbing in the suddenly cold club air. Sound returns. He’s covered in spider drool. It rolls down his shaft body, drips into the thick fur covering his balls, and a thin sagging strand of it bridges back to Kiklori’s mouth.

Kiklori pants and gasps for breath. “He tastes so good,” she wheezes once she can finally get words out.

Sid feels oddly satisfied to be a delicious cock. He’d swell with pride if he could swell any further, but right now he’s at his steel-hard maximum. Gone are any concerns about Skeila keeping him as a penis or any worries about succumbing to the desire to be one forever. Right now he just wants more. Kiklori’s holding onto his base with one claw, but it’s not enough.

“Sid thinks you’re pretty good at that,” says Skeila. “I agree.”

“Yeah?” says Kiklori—and, stamina recovered, launches herself back at Sid. This time she doesn’t take him inside her mouth, but instead goes to work on his lower half with her lips and tongue, nibbling at his base, probing the boundary where Skeila’s smooth black cock skin erupts from the dense brown fur covering her balls. “Does he wanna cum in my mouth?” she asks from below the shaft. Poking through Skeila’s fur with her tongue, she finds a ball and begins licking. “Do you wanna cum in my mouth?”

“Oh, we definitely do. I just want to shove him back in that pretty mouth of yours and blast a load down your throat. Buuut…”

“—uut?” replies Kiklori, muffled by one of Skeila’s testicles.

“Well, you wanna get him to work on that Safe Caves whatever with you at the MARC, right? And I mean, you made some good points. But I just don’t know if he’s really impressed enough yet, y’know?”

“Oh, I get it,” says Kiklori, pulling back but maintaining a loose grip on Sid at his base. “Well, he’s your human, Lieutenant…what do you think would impress him?”

“Think he liked that cute little butt you got.”

“Oh did he?” With a seductive smile, Kiklori slowly gets to her feet. The claw she used to hold Sid maintains contact with Skeila’s body the whole way—tracing up the shaft, running lightly through the fur on Skeila’s stomach, then gently cupping one of her breasts once she’s standing and looking up into Skeila’s eyes, close enough for her own hard cock to brush against the larger spider’s thigh. “Maybe he’d like to get closer to it.” She turns around and backs into Skeila.

At first Sid only presses frustratingly into the hollow of Kiklori’s back, poking into her fine azure fur and rolling back and forth over her spine as the two spiders move tight against each other’s bodies. Skeila takes rough hold of her dance partner from behind, putting all six claws to work: the middle pair clutch and knead Kiklori’s breasts while the lower ones tease her achingly erect penis, smearing a bubble of precum forming at the tip all over the shaft, making the little rod poking out from her sky blue hips as pink and shiny as freshly chewed gum. And the upper claws? Well, she’s holding Kiklori by the chin and angling her face to look up at her, into an increasingly manic grin…Seems Skeila’s not just a control freak when it’s her human she’s fucking. And again Sid somehow senses all this is going on, even though he can’t really see anything other than endless sky-blue fur. Normally he’s about as far from dominant as you can get, but he likes this—it feels right, like he’s on the same team as his spider, doing exactly what she needs him to do, fulfilling his purpose…Language, for the time being, has left him. But he knows the thoughts are getting across to his host. The encouragement—the need…

It takes some readjustment, but they manage to get at least Sid’s lower half lodged in the cleft of Kiklori’s ass—Skeila bends her knees and the smaller spider raises herself up on the two tiptoes of her feet, and Sid is suddenly snug between two cerulean mounds. Kiklori pushes back hard into Skeila, hot-dogging him between her buttocks.

“Maybe we should take this to one of the couches, Lieutenant?” she asks, looking back at Skeila.

“Good call.” Skeila looks around. Pretty much all the furniture in here is occupied—there’s a divan over by the tables the AAA spiders and the MARC group are sharing, but half of it is taken up by their jackets, purses, and other accoutrements, and it seems Izlil has claimed the other half to have some alone time with that human boy.

Kiklori notices Izlil and the human too. “Oh, Dave seems like he’s really getting along with that one friend of yours.”

“Yeah, sure does,” agrees Skeila. Presently Izlil has one leg across his lap, multiple golden arms around his back, and one claw down his pants, all while she coyly wraps a silvery strand of silk around a clawtip like she’s playing with her bubblegum. “Hope he doesn’t have anything important to do this weekend.”

“Oh, he’ll be fine. But I don’t see anywhere we can…hmm, better idea,” she says with a devilish smile—then breaks away from Skeila and scampers to the balcony overlooking the dance floor. She grabs on to the railing and bends over, sticking out her ass with a shake. “Well, Lieutenant?”

“Fuck,” says Skeila, working her long, hard Sid-cock and aiming him at Kiklori’s inviting ass like a missile. “You must really want him to come work for the MARC. Or you’re just a freaky lil’ slut.”

“Yes,” Kiklori says, grinning over her shoulder at Skeila.

“Lubrication, ma’am?” asks a Blurred Vision server who’s just appeared next to Skeila, a waif-thin gray spider boy carrying around a tray of single-serving lube bottles like shots.

“Hey thanks,” says Skeila, plucking one off the tray without taking her eyes off Kiklori’s ass, and the waiter boy winks four eyes and flits away. Sid’s still a little slick with Kiklori’s spit but it can’t hurt to grease him up further—going to be his first time getting stuffed in an asshole, after all. She drizzles the slippery liquid all over his shaft, stroking him up and down to cover him until he’s as black and shiny as an oil slick from base to tip.

Kiklori, still looking back, watches Skeila approach. The mezzanine is crowded but the nearby spiders have cleared out a path between them, leering from the sidelines as the tall brown spider advances step by step, stroking her gigantic human penis. It’s obvious to the spectators what she intends to do with it, black eyes all fixed as they are on Kiklori’s blue bubble butt, still bravely stuck out and waiting as she bends over the balcony railing, even swaying a bit with the music. It’s less clear whether Skeila will succeed or not—sometimes these humans just won’t fit, you see, especially when they’re as big as Sid here and when the receiving spider’s on the shorter side. But it doesn’t look like anything’s going to stop her from trying.

With her lower arms, Skeila takes hold of Kiklori by the hips. Below them on the dance floor, the headline act is at long last getting ready to take the stage, but Skeila’s paying no mind—she’s just enjoying the sight of her cock as she presses it down onto Kiklori, running along her lumbar spine up to the middle of her back. It would take a small miracle for her to get all of Sid inside Kiklori, but hell if she’s not getting the first six or seven inches in…she reaches around with another claw and finds Kiklori’s stiff little dick, gives it a quick stroke or two more teasing than anything, flicks it and feels it bounce back into place like a stiff spring…with another claw she’s prodding at her asshole, using the soft inner part—can’t get very far in but nobody needs a sharp spider clawtip up there, and all she has to do anyhow is open her up a bit for Sid…

“Whaddaya think, princess?” says Skeila, giving Kiklori a cheeky little slap on the ass. “You ready to take my human?”

Kiklori, grip on the railing noticeably tighter, has lost her seductive smirk—now she’s biting her lower lip, small fangs protruding cutely, with a look somewhere between arousal and significant concern playing over her eyes. But still she nods. “Uh huh. Put…put him in me.”

Skeila holds Sid at his base and swipes him up and down the length of Kiklori’s ass. He is easily hard enough to part her buttocks. His fat glans slides between them and his head is enclosed in gentle indigo darkness with the low light of the club only reaching him at stray angles through the blue filter of her fur. Even though Skeila’s only applying slight force it’s easy for him to tell on every pass exactly where Kiklori’s asshole is. The silky fur sliding against his head gives way to a firm, tight ring of exposed skin and for a moment he’s caught, and it’s almost like he’s about to go inside—but then like a car jumping the curb, he slips off. On the downstrokes, at his nadir, he can see Kiklori from below and between her legs, her furry blue balls hanging down and obscuring most of her from this angle. On the upstroke, at the top of his arc, he can just barely see backwards enough to see Skeila and her hungry grin—his spider, host, owner…

“Alright, enough teasing.” Now Skeila takes Sid and presses him directly onto Kiklori’s opening, hard enough to squish flat the tip of his pliable cockhead, but she’s too tight for him to really go in. (You might think being smashed face-first up against an asshole big enough, relatively speaking, to engulf your head would be unpleasant if you hadn’t already developed a serious taste for eating ass, which Sid hadn’t. But no—the smell and taste is about what he expected but he actually wants more. Either the same transfiguration of sensation that made it tolerable for Skeila to piss through him applies here too, or her horniness simply overrides his senses. In any case, he’s too far gone to give it much thought, and the main thing Skeila’s picking up on from her dick other than the raw need is frustration at not being inside yet.)

Skeila bends down over Kiklori. “Are you resisting, little girl?” She moans in response, holding onto the railing with four claws now. Skeila wiggles Sid in tiny circles, pressing on Kiklori’s hole but not getting him in any deeper. She slides a claw up under, moving along her stomach against the grain of her fur until she finds a breast…she squeezes it roughly, digs through the fur to find a nipple to pinch. More moaning. Kiklori gyrates and presses back but Skeila’s cock still isn’t in…Then, cackling, Skeila says “Police, open up!” and pushes forward with a sharp hip thrust. Kiklori squeals so loud the whole mezzanine notices, even over the booming music—and Sid’s inside.

There’s murmurs of approval and light applause from the bystanders, though Sid can’t hear it. He’s only in past the head and about an inch of his shaft; Skeila may have a sadistic streak but she’s not going to shove an entire human cock in anyone all at once. She holds him there, giving Kiklori time to adjust…it’s tight, incredibly so—intense, wonderful pressure all over him, around the entire circumference of his being. It’s not as wet in here as it was in Kiklori’s throat, and the texture of the tissue enveloping him is harder, pebbly, more muscled. He loves it, but naturally wants to be deeper. He feels the constrictive ring squeezing him at the point separating inside from outside, and wills his owner to put him in further…

“Sheesh, Sid, give the poor girl a minute to get used to how big you are,” says Skeila out loud.

“Hah…huh?” asks Kiklori, evidently distracted by the penis in her ass.

“Aw, just talkin’ to my cock. He wants me to just shove him all the way in there, but don’t worry, I’m gonna be nice and let you take him real slow. He’s big, ain’t he?”

“Sooo big,” Kiklori breathily agrees.

“What do you think? A little more?”

Kiklori hesitates. “A little more.”

“Just a little,” says Skeila, slowly sliding more of Sid in. Kiklori grimaces and groans and grips the balcony railing harder; Skeila holds her by the shoulders and sides and hips and can feel all the long muscles of her back tense up. Sid can feel the resistance too, as if the dark, hot tunnel he’s in is trying to push him back out as Skeila pushes forward, but his spider is easily stronger, and further in his phallic body goes…

“How’s that?” asks Skeila.

Kiklori can only respond with wordless moaning at first, then manages a weak “ahh—uh huh…”

“Good,” says Skeila.

Sid’s not even a third of the way inside yet, but there’s enough of him in Kiklori’s ass that Skeila can actually begin to fuck her now. Not fast, not at first, and only with the slightest back-and-forth movement; a half-inch in, a half-inch out. Still, even this gradual motion is proportionally magnified to Sid, who feels like that small upper portion of his body is dipped into pure ecstasy. He wants more, of course—to go deeper, faster, harder; what else would a cock want? But this is already maybe the greatest thing he’s ever felt.

Skeila keeps her six-point hold on Kiklori, but the smaller spider certainly isn’t trying to get away. She pushes back slightly on each thrust and her pained, petite groans are becoming rounder, deeper oohs and aahs of pleasure. Skeila takes a claw off Kiklori’s hip and sneaks it around front to find her cock is diamond-cuttingly hard—as soon as Skeila makes contact she bucks and makes this sudden little eep! sound.

“Damn, girl. Feels like you’re about to go off like a rocket down here. Can’t have you cumming too quick.” Skeila withdraws her claw, but not before giving Kiklori’s small ballsack a cheeky little squeeze, producing another sudden squeal.

Inch by inch, the tall brown spider works her massive dick further into her partner’s ass, and before long Sid’s going halfway deep into Kiklori’s ass on every stroke and Kiklori—well there just isn’t any other way to put it, Kiklori’s moaning like a bitch in heat, no hint of shame.

“You think I can get him all the way in you?” asks Skeila.

“You better—ah!—fucking try, Lieutenant!”

There are a few other couplings happening up on the mezzanine and many more down on the dance floor, but Skeila and Kiklori are clearly attracting the most attention, front and center on the balcony for everyone above and below to see. (The runner up might be Izlil, back on the couch, and that human from the MARC who is now well and irreversibly on the way to becoming her banana-creme-colored penis.) The pair is putting on a real show, which may be why the club’s roving spotlights seem to pay them special attention, sweeping their place along the balcony with every orbit. At least half the dancers below are turned around to watch them instead of the stage, and Skeila’s happy to give them a show.

Meanwhile, nearly a foot into Kiklori’s ass, enveloped in absolute darkness and absolute bliss, Sid continues to plumb the spider girl’s depths with every thrust from Skeila. First one way, then the other, as Skeila pulls him out and pushes him in. Polarized ecstasy, both directions equally pleasurable in magnitude but opposed in a way hard to explain to anyone who’s never been a penis. There’s an enjoyable jolt every time Skeila alternates, which may not happen 60 times a second, but it’s frequent enough to scatter any real thoughts from Sid’s mind. And the skin effect applies here too, with the current of pleasure flowing all over the taut surface of his absurdly erect body where it meets Kiklori’s insides, the interaction mediated less now by what little lube remains than the copious amount of precum bubbling up from deep within him all the way to his tip. He’d be dripping like a faucet if it wasn’t all going into Kiklori.

“Fuck,” says Skeila, grabbing both of Kiklori’s sky-blue buttocks and pulling them wider apart. “Your ass is so good.”

Kiklori only makes a long moan in response—like Sid, she’s beyond words now. And also like Sid, she’s leaking precum everywhere. Her rigid little cock flaps wildly up and down as Skeila pounds her, casting droplets like a sprinkler onto the floor around them, up into her abdominal fur, even off the edge of the balcony and down into the roiling crowd. She grips the railing tighter and holds on for dear life as Skeila picks up speed.

Faster and faster she goes, taking long, hard, merciless strokes that put at least two-thirds of Sid inside Kiklori at the maximum, surely approaching her physical limit. “You like that? You like taking my big, hard human?”

Much like when he getting blown by Kiklori, Sid presently experiences an odd bifurcated perception: his immediate physical reality, as the gigantic penis inside Kiklori’s ass, is darkness, pressure, heat, constriction, the gurgling wet sounds of the spider’s innards, her pitch-shifted moaning transmitted directly to him from her throat through her body, and more distantly, Skeila’s taunting voice, muffled as though he was underwater. Yet there’s another set of sensations overlaid on top of all this—the curved azure sweep of Kiklori’s back, her pained but ecstatic face as she looks back at Skeila, biting her lip and exposing her stubby fangs, eyes all half-lidded little crescents. He can almost feel where Skeila’s gripping her, her bony shoulders, soft hips, even the meaty clawful of Kiklori’s left buttock that Skeila’s still holding on to. He sees but doesn’t see all the spiders standing around watching them fuck, his ghost-vision lights up in blinding white when the spotlights sweep them, and when it passes he sees the churning ocean of spiders below watching them, too. He can hear the strange atonal music the club plays—though really he can only hear the watery squelching of Skeila using him to rearrange Kiklori’s guts—still there is the undeniable sensation that the fuzzy, booming beats are syncing up with Skeila’s thrusts…

They both feel it coming—Skeila’s orgasm, though for Sid it’s an overwhelming presence, something bigger than himself, an enormous storm on the horizon while he stands alone in the middle of a vast plain with the wind picking up.

Skeila’s bent down over Kiklori now, fucking her so fast it’s all the smaller blue spider can do to hang on…“Where do you want me to cum,” Skeila raspily huffs into her ear.

“Ahh! Ahh!” Kiklori can barely get words out. “In—ahh! In me!”

Sid hears her simultaneously from inside and outside. Something about knowing he’s about to get to unleash the unstoppable force brewing deep within him and do it inside Kiklori kicks everything into overdrive. He feels his phallic body tense and his head bulges, pressing into the hot firm warmth of Kiklori’s insides as Skeila somehow begins to pound her even faster—the force is like nothing Sid could have ever imagined before, he’s being pulled and shoved back and forth by entire body lengths in a fraction of a second inside this tight little tunnel. On top of everything now there’s another sound, a continuous high-pitched keening wail—and then everything around him is seizing, twitching, squeezing—is Kiklori cumming? The pressure is indescribable. He can feel Skeila trying to hold on, but neither of them can anymore. He’s a pipe, a vessel, a conduit—all he knows right now is the pleasure surging up and out of him, as Skeila finally lets go and the first jet of cum rockets through the center of his being.

The club spotlights zero in on them as Skeila fills Kiklori’s ass with a surge of spider jizz, and hidden within the acute angle between Kiklori’s thighs and stomach, her own cock twitches wildly up and down then squirts clear thin fluid out over the balcony, raining scattered droplets down onto the dance floor. Panting wildly, Skeila forcefully holds the blue spider tight as she pumps out another blast of cum, and then another. She can see Sid’s lower few inches, below where he’s buried in Kiklori’s ass, throb and jump with each spurt. It feels like she may never stop. She loses count of the pulses but eventually—after pumping out at least a dozen rounds of cum, plus a few dry twitchy aftershocks, Sid is empty and Skeila is utterly spent.

Kiklori has evidently used up the last of her stamina—she lets go of the railing, collapses to the floor, and Skeila flops right on top of her, Sid still deep inside. The two spider girls lay there panting in a jumbled heap, totally exhausted. There is sustained applause from the entire room as everyone—dancers down below, bystanders up on the mezzanine, even a few of Blurred Vision’s staff that had stopped to watch—show their appreciation. The spotlights slide away, but truthfully neither of them had really noticed them.

Skeila leaves Sid in for a bit while they lay there recuperating; at first he’s still too sensitive to retract. But he’s acclimated to his new shape now. When Skeila finally does gingerly lift herself up, pulling out of Kiklori’s asshole, withdrawing Sid’s spent, sticky body and uncorking a gloopy mess that dribbles down Kiklori’s leg and onto the floor, there’s no phantom arms he expects to catch on her soft insides. When Skeila dries him off by squeezing him in a bar napkin, the scratchy contour the cheap paper creates on his body accords perfectly with his self-perception.

No matter what, at least part of him is always going to be a cock.

Skeila collects herself and gets to her feet, offering a claw to Kiklori to help her up. Kiklori, who’s still out of breath, asks Skeila, “Well, what did Sid think of his first time as a cock?”

Skeila grins. “I’ll let you know when he can think again. But if he liked it half as much as me, you’re gonna be outta luck about him coming to work with you, cause he might just decide to go full time with me after that.”

Kiklori chuckles. “Aww, guess I did my job too well.”

“Thought your job was that numbers stuff. If everyone at the MARC is actually taking cock like that all day, I had you guys all wrong.”

“Outreach is everyone’s job at the MARC. Just doing my part to improve spider-human relations, Lieutenant.” Kiklori winks at Skeila, briefly covering four cornflower-blue eyes in a darker hue, and then turns to the balcony to watch the distant DJ. “Oh, wow,” she says. “We didn’t even notice her start. Saint Alaika is already playing!”

Kiklori doesn’t see the thunderstruck expression on Skeila’s face, and even though Skeila left an arm draped around the smaller spider in a cuddly fashion, she doesn’t seem to feel how Skeila suddenly goes rigid.

How had Skeila not noticed?

They stand at the center of the balcony overlooking the vast dance floor, all lines here converging toward the stage at the far end of the room and the DJ booth, atop it like an altar, surrounded by tall speakers decked out in black drapery that loom like statues, blasting out a sound like a fleet of freight trains rumbling down the tracks while a thousand fans whirr a white noise supernova, while somewhere under that a languid 10 BPM pulse hits like a felt-wrapped wrecking ball. The main act has indeed already begun; Saint Alaika is here.

She hadn’t even seen her. But Alaika saw her. Had been watching the whole damn time.

Skeila’s fur heats up as three of the club’s spotlights spiral away from the pattern they were following and reconverge on her. (So that was what the goddamn spotlights were about.)

“Now that was an impressive performance,” says Saint Alaika, her hallmark deadly flat monotone booming out over her music across the entire room. “Let’s hear it for Lieutenant Skeila and her friend. And her human, of course.”

Kiklori plays along with the hundreds of cheering spiders in the dark, throwing up peace signs with half her claws, even reaching back to grab limp Sid and wiggle him. By contrast Skeila, dumbstruck under the bright, bleaching light, looks like she’s gone catatonic in front of an oncoming train. She’s seen her before, knows she has, and Sid has too. He didn’t have to tell her, the shock of recognition is like having ice water pumped into her body, even—especially—Sid. It’s like all of a sudden she’s teabagging a snowdrift.

And Alaika knows she knows. The cruel faint smile makes that clear enough, even without looking at her face magnified tenfold on the giant projection screens next to the stage. There’s even some mirth in the spider’s cloudy gray eyes. She remembers clearly her face, her fur—not flat brown like Skeila’s own, but varying from deep mahogany on her arms and legs to dying-ember orange at the very tips of the long spiky bunches on her torso. She remembers the massive once-human penis that’s probably underneath the DJ booth, and even the bulky canvas messenger bag sitting on top of her equipment. And of course she remembers the intricate black tangle dyed into the left side of their fur, the same now as it was that night…

Alaika continues as if having a friendly conversation with Skeila across the murky expanse. “It’s good seeing you again, Lieutenant. And it’s good seeing the human really is yours. Remember, you don’t have to change him back.” The faintest wry uptick at the edge of Alaika’s mouth, the mildest taunting lilt in her flat voice…then, mercifully, the lights wheel away from Skeila, even though for a few seconds after Alaika stares through the darkness at the spot where they stand. Then she turns her attention back to her instruments, sinking the room into a new wash of sound.

“Well that was cool,” gushes Kiklori. “What did she mean, again? Do you know Saint Alaika?”

“No. I don’t. I…I guess she must have meant on the news.”

“Ah, yeah. Still cool. Listen, I’m going to go clean up and then go down to the dance floor. Maybe you want to meet me down there in a bit and we can give Sid round two?”

Kiklori’s looking up at Skeila like everything’s normal, meanwhile Skeila’s staring at Kiklori like, well…can she not read her face here in the dark? Or can she?

Skeila nods dumbly. “Yeah. Sure. Round two.”

“Great! See you soon, Skeila.”

The blue spider melts into the crowd, which has already turned its attention back to Saint Alaika. Skeila stands there dazed and alone among a numberless horde of her kind…gotta find someone she can talk to, someone she knows…

Izlil is presently reclining sumptuously on the same divan, arms splayed across a piled collection of other spiders’ jackets and handbags and accessories, recovering from the exertion required to turn Kiklori’s coworker into the limp custard-colored phallus lying flaccid over her thigh. She drowsily opens one big eye as Skeila approaches hissing her name.

“Oh, hey Skeila. Mmm, saw you giving it to that MARC girl. Pretty sure you have a cock for life there.”

“I just saw Saint Alaika!”

Izlil’s rolling way too hard to pick up on the tremor in her friend’s voice. “Yeah, that was cool.” She lazily stretches her upper arms. “Imagine getting to change a human at a Saint Alaika show, how perfect is that…”

“Izlil! She’s a Huntsman. She’s a fucking Huntsman.”

Izlil does her best not to sound patronizing. “I know it’s kinda grody but it’s just her gimmick, I’m sure she doesn’t really believe—”

“Izz, she was one of the five that tried to kidnap Sid.”

“What?” Izlil picks her head up off the divan in disbelief. “Come on, there’s no way. She’s famous, she’s not gonna go around with real, actual Huntsmen trying to kidnap humans. You hit Keedin’s weed pen pretty hard. You’re getting paranoid.”

“I’m not paranoid! This is a paranoid fucking situation!” Skeila’s trying to keep herself from shouting, and not quite succeeding. “Me and Sid both know it was her! I remember all of them, swear to Eris! There was Margreta and that chunky orange chick that was at the bank, and a big blue guy and a smaller brown guy, and her, I know it. She even had that same freaking bag she’s got down there right now!” Skeila takes a breath. “That was what that shit with the spotlight was. She knows it was me. She knows I recognized her.”

“Okay, okay.” Izlil’s propped herself up with her elbows, maybe not convinced, exactly, but full of concern for her friend all the same. “What do you want to do? …you’re not gonna go down there and arrest her, right?”

“Hell no, I’m not that stupid. I just gotta get out of here. I’ll figure out what to do tomorrow.”

“Whoa, hold on. Are you sure you’re okay?” With concerted effort, Izlil pulls herself up into a sitting position, big new dick sliding limply off her thigh and into her lap. “Maybe you oughta just chill here for a bit.”

“I’ll be fine once I’m outside. I…I feel like I can’t fuckin’ breathe.” All of a sudden the air in the club is intolerably hot and stuffy, Saint Alaika’s music is pounding horribly into her head, and who knows how many out of the hundreds of spiders dancing to her tune, the spiders grinning and pointing at the big hero from the shadows, are secretly Huntsmen themselves…“I’ll text you when I get home.”

“Hey, wait up! If you’re really leaving I’m coming with you.” With effort, Izlil hoists herself up to her feet and steps shakily over to Skeila, taking one of her arms to steady herself.

“Are you sure you’re okay? You just finished cocking that human.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m not letting my friend run out of here alone all fucked up and yelling about Huntsmen. What about Kiklori, though? Do you wanna wait for her to get back?”

“Oh, screw her. For all I know she’s in on this. I mean, a MARC girl who just happens to show up here? At Saint Alaika’s show when we’re here? In the VIP section? Come on.”

Fortunately Skeila’s already making her way to the exit and doesn’t see the look Izlil shoots her, or hear her mumble “Suuure, you’re not paranoid…”

Working their way back out of the club is a struggle. The pleb areas have somehow gotten even more crowded and it’s beyond Tube-at-rush-hour levels of density in here, spiders shuffling forward against one another, arms all sticking out at random angles in the crush. Skeila’s tits are mashed into someone’s shoulders and Sid keeps getting jostled in a way that’s not pleasant for anyone.

“How is it this crowded?” Skeila yells to Izlil. “Are there even this many spiders in Midway? Isn’t there a fire code?”

“What do you expect, it’s a Saint Alaika show…”

It takes long, agonizing minutes but they battle their way back to the entrance. Which, it seems, is a problem. Blurred Vision’s main entrance has two sets of double doors, both of which are wide open. One is entrance-only, and has a small team of bouncers managing the steady incoming flow of spiders. The other door is blocked off by velvet ropes and one bouncer who appears to just be there to stop people from getting out that way. She’s a short, butch girl with rust-red eyes and closely-trimmed coffee-colored fur, and as Skeila and Izlil approach she moves into their path and holds up a claw to signal there’s no exit here.

“Uh, we’re just trying to leave,” shouts Skeila, looking past the bouncer at the wide-open doors and the slice of empty Midway street.

The bouncer says something in response, but doesn’t make the effort to raise her voice enough to be heard over the endless rumble emanating from deeper inside the club. She only briefly glances at the pair and looks away from them before she’s even done talking, over Skeila’s shoulder, as if deliberately ignoring her. She doesn’t move out of the way.

“No, no, we’re trying to get out,” says Skeila, thinking the problem is miscommunication. “Y’know? Exit?” She helpfully points up at one of the illuminated exit signs directly above them.

The bouncer frowns. Again she says something too low to be understood, but her body language makes it clear she’s not pleased Skeila is still talking to her.

“Okay what the fuck,” says Skeila, gesturing outside and letting her claw fall in an angry show of frustration. “We want to leave. Outside? Like right there?”

The bouncer crosses her six arms and glares at Skeila.

Skeila doesn’t understand what’s going on and doesn’t want to spend one more second in this club getting her brain rattled by this Huntsman music. She’s considering just walking around the bouncer, or even making a run for it if she tries to stop her—all she has to do is jump a couple velvet ropes, and anyway what are they gonna do? Kick her out? And if the bouncer does start shit, well, she’s pretty sure she’d be able to take her. Except then all those other bouncers probably jump in and then it’s seven on one. God, all she wants to do is leave—

“Skeila!” Izili is tugging at Skeila’s elbow. “C’mon, we probably have to go out by the bar.”

Skeila allows herself to be pulled away, but shoots a dirty look at the bouncer as they leave. “What the hell was that? Why can’t we just leave?”

“I dunno, but the bar on the second floor has an exit you can always leave by. C’mon.”

“Uuuugh,” moans Skeila, “this is torture…”

So they wade back in to the crowd, Skeila looking despairingly behind her at the receding gateway to freedom, still considering just making a dash for it—can’t really explain to herself why she doesn’t. What exactly is stopping her? Part of her is ashamed she didn’t just go for it, but already there’s a wall of spiders between her and escape…

The second floor is accessed by a wide spiral ramp clogged with spiders coming up and spiders going down, and since most everyone here is too wasted to worry about keeping to one side it’s a soup of spiders fighting the current. With all this uptight pushing and shoving, many of the smaller ones are actually moving backwards, helpless looks on their faces as they get carried away. Izlil’s out in front, but when Skeila gets frustrated with her lack of progress, she takes Izlil’s claw so they don’t get separated, maneuvers around her, and begins forcing her way through. Their rate of ascent increases dramatically.

But hope dies in Skeila’s chest when they get to the top of the ramp and she sees just what the second floor bar is like. The room is a long rectangle, the invisible far end presumably being where the exit is. One wall, as far down as she can see, is taken up by the bar, and behind it is a platoon of bartender spiders and a plenitude of bottles and glassware, doubled in the long dark mirror behind them that stretches into darkness. But the thing is that the whole rest of the room, bar to wall, is taken up by yet another dance floor—and she thought the rest of the club was crowded? Well, the density here can best be described as “solid”. It makes the main dance floor back downstairs look like the Scandinavian ideal of personal space. Skeila’s not sure if it would actually be physically possible to wedge her way into the grinding mass of spiders without the whole terrible swarm acting like a Newton’s cradle and forcing someone on the other side out a window.

Izlil’s unperturbed, ready to leap merrily into the maelstrom. “C’mon,” she says to Skeila, standing at the precipice of the dance floor. “Almost there.”

“Oh no. No, no, no. Are you shitting me? This is how we have to leave?” Her chest feels tight. Can’t take a full breath. Things are spinning. She has the distinct sensation that she’s going to die, right here, in this stupid club, listening to—listening to—Eris help her they have speakers up here, piping that Huntsman bitch’s music into this nightmare place, as if you couldn’t hear it everywhere anyway. Fuck that. Fuck this.

Skeila grabs Izlil’s claw and, putting three elbows out in front of her, arms angled like a train’s cowcatcher, goes in hard. Indignant dancers are immediately shunted to her left and right. She gets dirty looks and a few shouted complaints as she moves slowly but implacably across the dance floor, and even a few half-hearted shoves back, but Skeila is not a small spider and as an AAA officer she has powers of intimidation beyond raw physicality—a short glare at the offending spiders is enough to make them think better of starting trouble. Besides, Izlil is there following closely in Skeila’s wake, tossing out chirpy apologies like candy at a parade to everyone they ram their way past. “Sorry! ’Scuse us! Coming through,” she says, as a spider too busy grinding on his partner to move catches Skeila’s elbow in his upper back and staggers aside.

Skeila struggles onward. She is not only unable to see the far end of the room but, glancing over her shoulder, now realizes the end she came from is lost in the dingy club darkness too…luckily the sides of the room, with the preternaturally long bar to her left and the smoky black windows on the right, only reflecting points of interior light, are there to allow her to orient herself, to remind her she’s not actually adrift in an infinite sea of maximally packed spiders, it just feels that way. Deep breaths, Skeila. She’s not usually this bad with crowds. Never been a problem before, in fact, even back when she was a cadet and working on Bar Squad she never had any issues…could be the drugs but she doesn’t feel that far gone, could be Alaika has her shook but it makes her too mad to think the Huntsman could have that kind of power over her…so what’s different? Sid? Sure, he hates this kind of thing but they came so hard he’s still out of it, and Skeila’d swear this is her feeling it, not him—when suddenly, like a lighthouse emerging from fog to a shipwrecked sailor, the comforting red glow of an EXIT sign appears in the corner of the room on the now-visible wall.

With renewed determination Skeila steers toward it, scattering dancers asunder as she moves through the throng. Her target is an unassuming push-bar door just like every other door in Blurred Vision, and as she fights forward she watches a handful of other, closer spiders slip through it into blessed freedom. She is powerfully jealous. Anyone trying to stop her this time is going home minus at least one limb; fortunately for everyone, nobody does. She gets there at last, practically exploding through the door.

Skeila and Izlil are now in a poorly lit stairwell with a rickety set of metal stairs going up to who knows where and down, she hopes, to street level and a way out. There are other spiders coming from above, and below them are still a few of the spiders that just left the bar, everyone’s claws clattering on the scaffold-like stairs. The pair adds to the ruckus as they race down the steps. Reaching the landing on the next floor, they shove the door open so hard they nearly fall through it, and just like that, they’re outside.

They are in a narrow side alley off the street they came in on. The door closes behind them with a click, presumably locking—as if Skeila’d want to go back—and suddenly, even with the deep muffled thrumming coming from beyond the monolithic windowless wall behind them, it’s wonderfully, blissfully quiet. There are a few spiders traversing the alley on their way to or from Blurred Vision, and a little group standing in a circle and smoking at the far end of the alley. After hours of relentless grinding bass obliterating all sounds at a distance greater than two feet, Skeila’s so happy to hear the click of a lighter and a conversational mumble fifty paces away that she could weep. She can breathe again.

“Thank freaking Eris it’s good to be outta there. Let’s go.”

“Skeila, the Tube’s that way,” says Izlil, pointing the opposite direction Skeila’s already going.

“The hell I’m cramming myself on the Tube after all that.” Skeila shivers. Of course the Tube wouldn’t be anywhere as packed as it was in there, especially at this late—early?—hour, but she doesn’t want to deal with any kind of confined space right now. “Let’s just walk.”

“We’re all the way out in Sunkfield! It’ll take forever to walk back from here.”

“C’mon, it’s not that far. Plus it’s kinda neat being out here this late.”

Izlil is flustered, but agrees—“fiiine,” and rushes to catch up.

Sunkfield is part of Midway, just not part of the downtown core. About the only things open in the suburb this late at night aside from Blurred Vision itself are a few food carts, greasy spoons, and after-hours crash rooms set up to cater to famished, fatigued droneheads, but those are clustered around the club and as Skeila and Izlil get further away they find themselves walking deserted sidewalks along streets with no traffic, passing shuttered shops with black windows and pull-down grilles over the doors, low-rise apartment buildings with no lights on…

“Skeila, can we, like, take a break?” Izlil asks.

“Yeah, sorry Izz,” says Skeila, with a guilty glance at Izlil, who’s clearly wiped out. “I forgot you just changed that human. I just wanted to get away from there and not have to deal with anyone.”

“No worries, but I have got to sit down,” says the yellow spider. There’s no seating nearby, but they happen to be passing a small park—not a legit city park like the ones downtown with basketball courts, picnic benches, and assorted public slings and harnesses, but one of those little lot-sized ones that’s more ornamental than anything, the kind of park you see topside that’s mainly used for flagpoles and replica cannons and statues of whichever man in town had the most money in 1895. Here the grass is astroturf, and the only statue present is one dedicated to Mayor Pixcreel (it portrays the former mayor holding a martini glass with one claw, making a lewd gesture with another, and masturbating with a third) but the vibe is similar. Izlil finds a spot on the fake grass and flops spread-eagled onto her back, that big new cock of hers landing between her legs, feet and claws making eight points on a rough circle, and sighs a sigh of deep relaxation. Skeila lays down next to her and does the same, and together they stare into the bombinating brightness of Midway’s ceiling.

All cities have secrets reserved for the night’s last holdouts. They can’t be seen properly from the other side of the day, not by the garbage crews and mail carriers—no, you have to be wearing the dissipating aura of last night to get it. For human spinouts, it’s the horrible sound of birdsong that signifies that time has once again moved on without your approval and you stand rudely intruding on a fresh new day. In Midway that function is served by the emptiness of the city’s stone streets being so total that you can hear what’s really always there: the endless fluorescent buzz from the overhead lights dotted into the false sky as regularly as the Cartesian plane.

The girls lie in silence for nearly a minute before Izlil says “They look so much bigger out here. It’s what, twenty stories deeper downtown?”

“Something like that. You should see ’em up close. They’re huge.”

“When did you ever see the lights up close—oh right! When you and Sid came down. And he was jerking you off but didn’t even finish!” Izlil, her brain still marinating in a cocktail of pleasure chemicals, lapses into a giggle fit.

“Alright, it wasn’t that funny,” says Skeila while Izlil continues to cackle. “He was so embarrassed.”

“Sorry, sorry,” says Izlil, blotting tears of laughter with the fur on the back of her claws. “I can’t believe that was this morning. How’s your new cock doing, anyway?”

“Good, I think. Sid?” Skeila pokes her flaccid penis in the side. “You there?”

There’s a pause before the reply comes in, and Skeila hears Sid’s familiar scratchy voice in her own head: I—yeah, geez. Still here. I was just…was out of it for a bit, I guess.

“Yeah, that’ll happen after you blow a load like that,” Skeila says with a note of satisfaction. She turns to Izlil. “He’s good. How’s—uh, what was his name?”

Izlil seems to think for a second. “Dave? It was Dave, right?” She picks her head up and looks at her own penis, the big sunshine-yellow tube lying between her splayed blonde thighs, as if waiting for a response. “Yeah, it’s Dave. He’s good.” Another pause. “Says he’s gotta go to work on Monday.” Izlil seems to find this hilarious and dissolves into another bout of prolonged laughter.

“Don’t get him in trouble at his job, Izz. Humans get cranky about that.”

“Someone’s got to teach these MARC people how to have fun. I’m gonna take him out for a spin this weekend and we’ll see how much he still gives a shit about his Monday meetings or whatever.” Izlil reaches down to adjust her new equipment, moving her balls to a more comfortable position, then stretches out for a great cavernous yawn and goes quiet.

“Izz?”

“Just resting my eyes…”

“We probably shouldn’t pass out in the middle of the park.”

“Yeah, yeah, just gimme ten minutes. You’re the one that wanted to hike all the way across Midway.” Izlil yawns again. “Keedin’s gonna be so sad you left. You know he thought he was getting his chance with you tonight.”

“He’ll get over it. Maybe if he asks nice I’ll let him blow me on Monday. If Sid doesn’t want to go back by then.”

“Hey, Saint Alaika said you don’t have to change him back.”

“Don’t you even fucking joke about that Huntsman bitch.”

“Geez, lighten up.” Izlil curls her lips and sucks at her fangs. “You, uh, really are sure about her being one of the ones that tried to get Sid, huh?”

“Yeah. I know it was her. We both do.” Skeila, head resting on her topmost pair of claws, turns to look at Izlil and says—no accusation, no anger, just a flat statement of fact—“You don’t believe me.”

“No…no, I do,” says Izlil, sounding as if the only thing she believes in right now is that she needs a nap.

“It’s alright. I know how crazy it is. And I know no one else is gonna believe me either, until I figure out a way to prove it. But I will. It’s just…” Skeila turns to face the Midway ceiling again, shaking her head in frustration. “It’s just, she’s not even trying to hide it! She wears Huntsman ink, she puts all that goofy shit up at her shows, she goes around talking about how humans belong to spiders, so how come anyone should be surprised when it turns out, oops, she’s really a Huntsman?! She’s straight up telling everyone! But if I marched into HQ tomorrow and told the captain about her he’d laugh in my face and say the same thing you told me, it’s all an act, she’s just pretending. And I can’t even blame him, cause I’d think the same thing if it was the other way around. But I don’t know why. How come people don’t believe what’s right in front of them, Izz? …Izz?”

Skeila turns to look at her friend. Izlil’s head is slumped to one side and a trickle of drool runs past her fangs into the fake grass as she snoozes peacefully.

“Guess the party princess is pooped.”

Sid had been lying between Skeila’s spread legs, quiescent in this verdant canyon formed by the two enormous brown thighs on each side. The astroturf pokes gently into his skin, a thousand pinpoint prickles he can feel individually on his ventral surface. But now Skeila picks him up, swinging his long limp body up and onto her stomach in an arc. Lights go flying past in a wild blur in his field of vision until he lands in her warm, comforting fur. Her body is like a mountain hanging over him, leading up to her giant face looking down at him like some happy deity. He’s not even surprised to see the shadowy reflection of a penis falling into place octupled in her eyes—that’s him, after all.

“Just us now,” says Skeila to her cock. She gives him an affectionate squeeze at his base.

So…what are you gonna do? About Alaika, I mean?

Skeila slumps back into the grass, exhaling a long, troubled sigh up towards the ceiling lights. From across their mental connection, Sid can sense a deep, heavy tiredness like a huge stone block. “Fuck if I know. I’m right, right? Imagine trying to tell Captain Klatz we have to arrest Midway’s biggest DJ because she’s a Huntsman.”

Yeah, maybe nix the direct approach.

“At least I got put on that special detail that’s supposed to investigate the Huntsmen. Maybe I can get them to check her out, and who knows what we’ll turn up.” The spider rubs her two largest eyes with one pair of claws, and a few of the smaller eyes with another pair. “What about you?”

What do you mean?

“What do you wanna do?”

Me? Skeila, I’m with you. Whatever you need me to do.

“What about taking that job at the MARC?”

That was just a thought. If you don’t want me to, I won’t.

“Honestly, now, I dunno. Maybe it’s not such a bad idea. The MARC has a lot of resources. Might be useful to have inside access.”

What about that friend of yours that works for them?

“Tony? Yeah, Tony’s great, I’ve known him since college, but…” Skeila trails off, looking away from Sid and out into the tract of stone suburbia opposite the park, gray cuboid homes repeating and receding into darkness…“He works for the MARC, not for us, you know? After tonight I just feel like I don’t know who I can trust anymore. Except for you.”

If I do this, though, I’ll literally be working for the MARC.

“It’s more like you’ll be an undercover agent! A sexy undercover agent.”

And you won’t get upset about…y’know? Me working with Kiklori?

“Huh? No, ’course not.”

Wait, really? You won’t be jealous?

“Jealous?” Skeila snorts. “Sid, I just used you to fuck her. I guess it’s kind of hard to explain to a human, but it’s like…I stuck you up her ass. After that, what is there to get jealous about?”

Fair enough, I guess. But it would mean you’d probably have to let me out of your sight, you know. At least for a few hours a day.

“Yeah.” Sid was trying to make a joke, but Skeila clearly doesn’t like the idea. He picks up on a sudden pang of anxious dread coming from his host. “Don’t worry, I’ll get used to it. I know I can’t keep you right next to me forever. It’s just that…the last couple weeks with you…” The spider trails off, shaking her head.

Now Sid’s getting this total mess of scrambled signals coming across, giddiness and excitement and apprehension and fear all running together, peaks and troughs colliding into noise. Skeila? What’s wrong? he thinks to her.

Skeila rolls over on her side and curls up into the fetal position so she can put her face closer to her cock. It’s almost like cuddling. “Look, what I’m trying to say is, whatever you wanna do, I’ll support you. A hundred percent. If this MARC thing is what you want I’ll be behind you the whole way. And if it’s not, that’s fine too. What I’m trying to say is…” —and here the spider lets go of a tremulous breath before continuing— “I feel like I’ve been dragging you into worse and worse shit, you know? That first night we met, I just wanted to show you how cool Midway is. And I ended up almost getting you kidnapped by Huntsmen, everyone saw us messing around on the elevator, we were on TV, twice, and the whole city knows us now…I know you’re real shy. So if what you really want is to go back up topside until this all blows over…or longer…I’d support that too. I’d find a way to get you back up to the surface. I promise.”

What? No way! Skeila, I don’t want to go anywhere. Yeah, all this has been kind of overwhelming, but the whole reason I can handle it is cause of you. You’re, like, the most badass person I’ve ever met and you’ve been keeping me safe this whole time. Besides, I’m…I’m still your human, right? I can’t just leave you.

Skeila doesn’t seem to know what to say. But something happens—something that had been there for a while, simmering under the surface all along, suddenly blazes uncontrollably to the forefront of their shared mindscape. Hot and incandescent, all-encompassing, overpowering, like a bonfire Sid feels compelled to throw himself into. Oh. Oh. So this was the danger. Incredible sex and mind-blowing physical pleasure over every millimeter of his body was one thing, but he never really doubted he could walk away from that. He might have even been right. But how many human beings have ever gotten to experience direct, unalloyed love, transmitted mind-to-mind? Usually one has to rely on the hopeless insufficiency of words, usually one has skin and touch in the way, an air gap attenuating the signal to a safe dosage…but instead he’s having it mainlined straight into his psyche, and now he understands the risk, now he knows what it was the Doctor’s friend from school found (but how could someone like the Doctor have ever comprehended this—and who could have ever shown him?) Lovers have ached to subsume themselves in their mate since the I was first able to recognize the Other, but it’s never been possible. Not, it turns out, unless your beloved is a spider.

And as Sid looks up into Skeila’s face, it’s clear from her sudden dazzled expression that she must be getting the same thing from him, reflected and amplified. After all, he feels the same way. Ever the bashful one, instinct demands he make a mental scramble to stop it somehow, hide his thoughts, block her out—but it’s like trying to cover up a lighthouse with a lampshade. So he gives up, drops the mental guard he’s always carried like a shell, and they lay there radiating to one another in silence.

At some point Skeila finally begins to say, “Sid, I…” but she never finishes the sentence. There’s no need; they both know.

The spider rolls onto her back, gently holding her human. “You and me are gonna catch Alaika. Maybe even stop the Huntsmen, if we can. Together.”

Yeah. Together.

Twenty stories above them, Midway’s lights drone on and on.