Chapter 12

Flotsam

Chapter 12: Faith and Desire

I am meandering at the crossroads of delay and procrastination. I know where I want to go, but I’m in really no hurry to get there. Which probably explains a lot about my life, actually.

At least I know where I want to go for once?

I think again of Halley-11 The Destroyer booming at me from her huge battlemech, telling me in her doombot voice to take what I wanted. Coming from a version of me who killed her own body to win a contest, that advice has a menacing edge. I definitely didn’t want to become a gladiator or sacrifice quite so much of myself to get ahead. A head. Ugh, fuck. Halley-11 seems like such a cautionary tale about what life on Flotsam could do to me, but also in a fucked up way how much potential I had. She was a famed Champion, rich and glamorous, confident and happy, which was all something this Halley had never managed. But that was her path, not mine.

What do I even want?

Do I want to try and get home to Earth? To return to a life of mental illness and hiding in a trailer park? Was that even possible? Do I want to try and find Halley-prime, to figure out why this is happening and why all these clones of me exist? Should I move on and carve out a new life here? Not as a stripper or man or vegetable hippy or cyborg fighter and definitely not as a sexual petgirl, but as something else? I have no idea.

But maybe I want to be with Clem again? Clementine, whatever. Clem had been the best guy I knew, who had stuck with me through all the bumps and twists and setbacks of my mental illness. I doubt I would have made it without him. It felt like just a few days ago that he’d been my guy; even if I rationally knew years had passed for Clem, it felt like we were still together. Except for the whole sorcerer space princess thing... But so what if he was a girl now? I’ve always liked women and Clementine, for all her strangeness, was more beautiful than Clem had ever been. Plus, Clem the man had always been a study in wasted potential, a talented guy held back by the world or his own lack of... something. Flotsam and Shaping had maybe unlocked that, let Clem grow into the star I always knew he was. She, whatever. I’m attracted to her and maybe still in love with her, or at least the idea of her. Did I still even know her? This is all too weird.

I know that I have to at least talk to her.

My Keyband honks at me, letting me know I’m wandering too far off course. I turn left down a narrow flight of turbine fan stairs bolted to a landing pod bungalow and start back in generally the right direction.

After meeting the Destroyer and watching her charge off to another battle, I decided that it was time to get the fuck out of the Arena. Freya and I left a very happy postcoital Bluebell snuggling in the arms of The Strongest and navigated our way back outside to the Plaza of Champions. Freya gave me a staggeringly strong hug and then quested forth to provision for her upcoming return to space. So I was left to wander home by myself. Which got me to thinking about what I was doing here, and about Clementine, and about how I really needed to talk to her.

And so I’m walking to Clem’s space trailer, just the scenic way is all. Well, I’m at least wandering in its general direction. I’ll get there when I’m ready, which has to be eventually, right? I walk along a curved footpath past a collection of steel wire woven baskets filled with vibrant alien flowers. A tidy human woman with steel teeth sees me looking and smiles. Maybe I should buy flowers? Does Clementine like flowers now? Is that too much? The florist snips the stems from a bouquet with her metal mouth, delicately chewing on the ends before swallowing. Maybe no flowers.

I hastily climb a ladder hammered into a rockface between two salvaged homes and onto a new path. My Keyband doesn’t yelp, so it must be the right way. This path leads to a T-junction at a large fuel tank row house with stone stairs leading either up or down the Mesa. I’m pretty sure I need to go up, but starting that way earns a squawking reproach from my Keyband. Down it is. I meander down the staircase until it spills me onto a tarmac paved street lined with shops. Okay, I think I’ve been here before. I turn in the clockwise direction, which my wayfinding approves of, and look around the oddly quiet street. The sparse foot traffic is thin and very Blue for this neighbourhood and many of the shops are shuttered. I guess most humans are too busy packing for the upcoming work Shift or saying goodbyes to be hitting up retail. Above me the silver cigar of a Grey drone hovers sedately, blubbing off a small sphere which trails quietly after me. The road takes a jig-jag of tight blind turns, a product of Mesa shape and a couple ungainly improvised buildings and...

“Hi! Halley! What a joy it is to see you!”

I startle and peep, blushing and spinning around. There, half hidden in a blind corner was a glowing holographic sign, cycling through alien texts, until it said in perfect English “The Circle of The Sleeping God.” Oh good a cultist, and one who apparently knows me, or knows a previous model of me. Grrrrreat.

My eyes shift to the cultist and are immediately drawn to a long horn growing from their forehead. It’s as long as my forearm and sticking up and out, immediately making me think of a unicorn horn. It has a twisted, braided aspect, with a kind of decorative ridge that wraps around a central cylinder before tapering to the the top. It is covered in pale skin and is surprisingly veiny. I look at the tip of it and... what? The flesh horn doesn’t have a sharp point, it has something bulbous and kind of red and... fuck! It’s a cock! This cultist has a giant penis growing from their head! A twisted about its axis with a urethral swirl, capped by a huge fucking red glans, cock growing right from the centre of their fucking forehead! “What the fuck!?”

“I know,” says my own voice warmly back to me, “it’s beautiful isn’t it?”

My stomach drops into my toes, I see the cultist is another me, another clone of Halley. She regards me with a placid look from my own violet eyes and her wide mouth is quirked with bemusement. Cockicorn Halley looks like me if people said I had a horseface: her nose is a bit too wide for her face with prominent, almost equine nostrils, and her jaw juts forward making her mouth too large, with big flat slightly bucked teeth. She has a mane of snowy white hair that cascades over her shoulders and white furry horse ears that stick out the sides and rove around in the air. And of course a fucking unicorn horn made of cock flesh growing right out of her forehead. “Fuuuuckkk,” I whine.

“I know it’s surprising, Sister, but you are truly overreacting.” Cockicorn Halley admonishes.

“Overreacting!?” My heart is hammering in my chest and I take a step back, surveying the rest of my cultist clone. She is dressed in a pink spandex unitard thing that covers her body from her neck to her wrists and ankles, but leaves little to the imagination. She has the usual number of limbs and a decidedly muscular build, with long powerful arms. Cockicorn has the conventional two breasts, although they are quite enlarged and capped with big nipples which aggressively tent the fabric of her pink onesie. Her torso is lean and toned, except for a little belly paunch that sports another pair of small nipples; an equine udder I realize. Her thighs are too wide and her muscular legs have an equine recurve and end in hooves instead of feet. A snowy white horse tail flicks from her very wide and toned ass. The crotch of her tight pink uniform shows the lewd topography of enormous testicles and what I was unfortunately sure was the shape of an equine cock sheath. It seems this Halley has more than one cock horn. I take a long shuddering breath to calm down. Always breathe. “Seriously, what the actual fuck happened to you?”

“Like you, Dear Sister, I too was once lost and alone...”

“What makes you think I’m lost?” I ask hastily. “Or alone?”

Cockicorn whickers, “Because you are wandering by yourself on the last night of Shiftchange. Only the aimless are out now.”

“I’m not aimless, I’m going somewhere. I’m just not *well* aimed.”

Cockicorn continues, ignoring me, “I can introduce you to the Path, teach you to hear the Voice of the Slumbering King. For in his Dreams you can find Meaning, you can Transcend your Mortal Limitations and be the Light that He-Who-Slumbers needs to see in the cosmos.”

Oh here we go. I try not to roll my eyes. The thing about living in a trailer park is that poverty attracts god botherers, and the crappier the park the more evangelical and weird the preachers that would appear. Our park had attracted some doozies. I’d heard it all before, so I’m a bit surprised and disappointed a clone of me had fallen for it. “So you found religion?”

“You make it sound so paltry,” Halley replies with a snort, eyes flashing in annoyance, nostrils flaring. “What I have found is Truth! This isn’t like those pathetic Pretenders who shambled into the park to sell us a sad little creed about an absentee god. What I’ve found is a True Deity, a god-entity that hears our Prayers and Intercedes in our lives. This isn’t spiritualism or superstition, The Sleeping God is Real and one day he shall Awaken.” Halley regards me, a look of raw passion in her eyes, her cockhorn throbbing with the beat of her heart.

With a sinking feeling, I realized that Cockicorn Halley is a zealot. I’d seen this very look before in the faces of the nuns who ran St. Ursula’s Orphanage, where I was taken to live after my parents died. The Sisters there had terrorized us, enforcing a strict code of conduct with a swift disciplinary hand that I’m pretty sure crossed the line into abuse. But to them they were conducting a sacred duty to raise their little girls to be good Christian women, who were obedient and lived according to the Bible. They couldn’t see the way they used fear and their power to brutalize vulnerable orphans because their Faith made them Right and Just. It was sad to see this reflected in my own cloned eyes. I shiver, Cockicorn’s religious zeal was actually more upsetting than her altered body with its forehead dick. Barely.

“That still doesn’t explain the Cockicorn thing.”

“Cockicorn?”

“The whole penis-on-your-forehead, horse-lady thing you’ve got going on...”

“My Sacred Form?”

I rolled my eyes, “If that’s what you call it.”

“It is the Manifestation of my Devotion,” she says, flashing a self-satisfied horsey smile. “When one truly commits to the Sleeping God, one Communes with him by Dreaming together. We Dreamed of horses. You must recall the small farm down the road from the trailer park? Where we would walk to when we needed to get away from Clem and the park for a while? He-Who-Slumbers Dreamed with me about standing at that fence and watching the horses run. He Dreamed with me about feeling so powerless and watching those strong, majestic creatures cantor and run without fear. But then, instead of returning home to my sad little life, He-Who-Slumbers Dreamed me entering the paddock and running with the horses, taking on their Aspects, and becoming powerful and Free.” Halley whinnies in ecstasy, “He showed me a Path to a Truer and Happier Self.”

“And so your god turned you into a cockheaded unicorn?”

“No, Transmigration of the Flesh is a journey, a Manifestation of my Devotion and Worship. It represents my Commitment to Being the Light and Following the Plan that Sleeping God has revealed to me,” Halley tosses her head and paws at the ground with her hooves like an excited equine. “I voluntarily entered this Covenant. I Choose to be this.”

“Okay,” I say for lack of anything else.

Cockicorn Halley looks at me earnestly, but I think without actually seeing me. “It would bring me Great Joy to Introduce you to He-Who-Slumbers so that you might Dream with Him and Learn your Path to becoming the Light.”

Nope. Not a chance in whatever whacky hell she Dreams of. “No thank you, religion isn’t something I’m looking for right now.” Especially a weird Changeling cult. I look at my Keyband like a cartoon person, “Gosh, the time! I really have to get going.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Halley. I will Pray to Him that you will change your mind.”

“Right.” There was one thing I still wanted to know though. “Sorry, but before I go, which Halley are you?”

“I was Halley-21, but now I am Sister Equestria.”

***

I am once again standing at the airlock door to the space apartment of my ex-boyfriend, maybe future girlfriend.

I take a deep breath, trying to quell the butterflies having an orgy in my stomach. I am so completely fucking nervous. What do I even say to Clem? What do I even want from her? Do I even know who this person is anymore? This is fucking crazy! Maybe I should just go... but fuck, I just met a version of myself in a cult with a dick on her face. Life is too short; I have to do this. Preferably without throwing up. Or fainting. If only I had a giant four-armed woman to give me a shove.

I steel myself: gotta grab life by the balls.

I touch the rust coloured steel door which recognizes me, brightly welcomes me home, and smoothly snaps open. I take a breath and step gingerly into the cycling chamber foyer, stepping around piles of fancy handbags and brushing against jackets hung from pegs stuck into air vents. I hear a noise and freeze.

Jesus, I should have called ahead.

A woman makes a low throaty groan and something yowls. It sounds decidedly sexual. I should go...

Instead I peak into the living room, eyes sliding along grey polymer to the plush blue rug surrounded by couches. There I see them, intertwined, Clementine and Pussy, having sex.

Fuuuuuck.

I should really go.

They are facing away from me, fortunately, but at an angle where I can see their bodies. Pussy is on all fours, hand-paws and knees on the ground, eight little breasts hanging and bouncing. Clem is behind and over her, on her knees, delicate back and silver hair and her perfectly toned and soft ass clenching and shaking as she fucks her pet catgirl from behind. Doggy style? Cat? Clem’s three round, unreasonably ripe breasts, seen from behind and beside, surge as she thrusts; her large balls slap the catgirl’s yoga ass, and the slick wet pink of Clem’s labia sometimes peek free from under her tail. Sticking out from between their bodies, Pussy’s long black tail lashes the air. Clem pants and whimpers and Pussy pushes back into her with an inhuman flexibilty of spine and yowls like a cat in heat.

I’m dismayed and furious and more than a little turned on. It’s too fucking weird but also weirdly hot. I want nothing to do with this; I want to be Pussy. I stifle a moan.

I should really fucking go.

Pussy makes an awful cat sound and arches her back even further while the claws of her paw-like hands and feet dig into the rug. I blush as I realize she’s coming. Clem pauses her humping, letting Pussy savor the moment. Panting Pussy agilely rolls onto her back, rotating her body on Clem’s enormous cock so they don’t completely separate. Now face-to-face, Pussy pulls a Clementine down on top of her, nipping her face playfully, and mewling for mistress to keep Fucking her. Clementine groans happily and starts to slowly work her cock in and out of her catgirl pet who purrs in appreciation. I can see her face now, and Pussy is a vision of feline contentment, like she is getting the best head scratch in the universe. I whimper and one of the black kitty cat ears on Pussy’s head twitches. I hold my breath, hoping she’s distracted. Instead the catgirl clone languidly looks at me, pleased recognition flashing on her face as we make eye contact. Clem, oblivious, keeps steadily fucking away. Pussy flashes her clawed paws and drags them down Clementines long shapely back, who gasps in shocked pleasure at the sensation. Pussy, still looking at me sticks out her long rough tongue and licks her pink little kitty nose. Cat’s got your ex. Tears sting my eyes. It’s just so fucking unfair.

Starting to cry I finally go.

***

Chapter 13