Chapter 15
I am laying awake in bed staring at the corrugated steel ceiling and wondering what the fuck I just did.
The sex, besides who it was with, was totally fine. Very good even! I have absolutely no complaints about that. Hank certainly knows what he’s doing in bed, especially as a former owner of the female equipment. And since Hank used to be me, he knows exactly what I like. With the practiced ease he applied this knowledge, I suspect last night wasn’t his first ride on this particular breed of pony either. Which, now that I think of it, puts the not so amicable departures of previous Halleys in a new light. Oh Hank, you beautiful dog you.
I look over at Hank’s sleeping form next to me. He is snoring softly, blanket fallen down to expose a muscular shoulder and arm. I can feel the radiant heat of his body and he smells pleasantly of man and sex. Although the sex smell is probably also the bed and a little bit me too. I blush. I consider waking Hank up and straddling him, fucking him from on top, something we didn’t get to last night, and then, when that doesn’t quite do it for me, pulling him behind me, having him fuck me from behind, squeezing my tits with one arm and rubbing at my clit with a slick finger just like he will know I like. Or maybe I should take his sleeping cock in my mouth and wake him up with a blow job, something I’ve always kind of wanted to try. But no that would be stupid. Without the giddy confidence of Bliss I can recognize that a bonus fuck would just make things more complicated. Compound my mistake. Fuck.
Besides, Hank is my clone! A genderswapped version of myself! In the light of day this fact seems more significant and fucked up. Like I’ve committed some kind of incest or maybe the penultimate act of narcissism. I really need to get of here before I make things worse!
I slip out of bed as meekly as I can, grab some clothes from the floor, and slip out of the bedroom. I tiptoe to the bathroom, pee, wash out my mouth, and pull on my arousal scented underwear and black tights from last night. I groan in frustration, I grabbed Hank’s grey T-shirt and navy workshirt by accident. Not wanting to risk waking Hank, I squirm into his large shirts. Hanks borrowed clothes smell like him evoking a mixture of mammal happiness and shame. In the mirror I frown at myself, fucking keep it together Halley.
I slink through the apartment, collect a pair of cute short boots, and quietly exit into Hank’s rooftop garden. The sun is just starting to rise over the horizon of the Junk Desert and the two moons are still visible. I fasten my boots and button Hank’s shirt against the chill early morning air. I make my way to the rooftop fire escape ladder, kick it free, and climb down to the gangway below, my escape from the Hideaway complete. Hair a mess and wearing my lover’s clothes, I start my walk of shame.
***
I am once again upset and aimlessly wandering the paths and alleys of Flotsam. Except this time instead of being heartbroken, I’m mostly just angry with myself. Which would be an improvement if I hadn’t just sexually torpedoed my living situation.
At least I finally got laid?
I look around at unfamiliar shops made out of globe-shaped cargo pods clustered around taller buildings made from a hodgepodge of welded together steel panels. The shops are shuttered and the holographic riot of advertisement is still shut off for the night. Flocks of drones whirl through the air baring early morning deliveries while smaller land based bots attack pieces of litter. No other sapients are around. I’m not sure where I am. I go to check the map on my Keyband and realize it’s missing, that I had left it back in Hank’s bedroom during my escape. Which means I forgot my phone, keys, and wallet all in one. Fuck! I am actually lost now.
I take a deep breath. Maybe this is a good thing? A challenge to keep my mind busy! Flotsam is just a city built on a stone pillar, there are only so many ways to go. I just need to find one of the paved ring roads that go all the way around and walk until I can see a landmark like the Blue Congregation Hall, or the Arena, or the trees of the Grove. Then I can figure out where I am and come up with a scheme to get my Keyband back without seeing Hank. You can do this Halley. How hard could it be?
***
I’ve been walking for over an hour and I’m cold, hungry, and regretting the boots I picked. I flop onto a stone bench surrounded by planters to rest my aching feet for a minute. The sun is officially risen, but it’s still early and the frustratingly maze-like streets, ladders, alleys, and paths of Flotsam are still mostly deserted. The yellow flowers in the planter are just starting to open their petals and the flying lizard-bird-analogues have wiggled out of their nests and are sunning themselves. A new day has dawned...and I already feel defeated. I sniffle and wipe tears from my eyes. God damn it Halley, do not cry. Crying is the last thing you need right now.
I hear the clop of hooves and my heart sinks when I see a too familiar face with a phallus growing out of it. Ugh, not now. Sister Equestria smiles a wide horsey smile when she sees me and almost gallops over. “Greetings Halley! What a Blessing it is to see you again!” the cultist nickers and frisks her snowy white tail.
I try not to stare at the long braided cock jutting from her forehead. “Hi, uh, now isn’t a great time.” Not that there ever is one...
“Horsey-cock,” Equestria replies tartly, “It is always a glorious time to talk about The Sleeping God! It is never to too early to be the Light!”
I look beseechingly at Equestria’s companions, the four-legged redhead I’d seen before and a new one with a weird fleshy skirt-thing and a hooded veil covering her head and face. The quadrupedal woman smiles at me primly and thrusts out her four large breasts, but the hooded cultists rolls her eyes and walks over to Equestria on strangely configured feet. She gently grabs Equestria around her upper arm with fingers that coil bonelessly around her bicep. “Sister, why don’t you and Sister Quadra go on ahead and prep the skiff while I talk with Halley?” The hooded cultist says in a flat Siri-ish electronic voice.
Equestria’s nostrils flare but she demurely answers “Yes Superior.” The cockicorn woman obediently trots off. Over her shoulder she flashes me another toothy horse smile. Quadra crabishly scurries after her, trying to keep up in her weird squatting/sitting gait. The hooded cultist watches her Sisters depart for a moment before looking at me with my own violet eyes. “Sorry about Equestria, her heart is in the right place but she doesn’t know when to turn it off.”
“Yeah, well, it sucks.”
“Ha ha ha!” The electronic voice brays while the hooded cultist’s eyes crinkle in amusement. “Yeah, it kinda does.” The hooded cultist places her weirdly boneless hand with its too long and tapered fingers against her chest. “I’m called Sister Superior Tuethida these days, but please call me Halley-14.”
I frown and look Halley-14 over. Her head and face are mostly hidden by a cerulean blue veil and hood, kind of like a spacey niqab that only shows her familiar eyes. The hood of the veil is tented oddly and shifts as something unexpected moves. She’s wearing a skintight cerulean spandex-like top that hugs her normal looking, albeit bustier torso and arms. Instead of hands she has five finger-width tentacles that gather at the wrists of her top. Tuethida’s skintight top ends above her waist revealing a midi length skirt-like growth of flesh. This ‘skirt’ is made of stacked lobes of wrinkled, red-pink tissue that has the sheen of wet lips. From between the folds of these flesh petals are short tentacular growths of darker red tissue that wriggle lazily, sometimes caressing. The entire mass pulses slightly, as if to a heartbeat. As I become aware of a certain pungent smell it clicks that the skirt is labia, a massive growth of cunt-flesh ballooning from her waist and enveloping her legs down to her knees. Which probably makes those tentacles some sort of animate clits. Fucking hell! What the fuck is up with my clones and genitals? Okay... Moving on I see that emerging from this cunt-skirt are relatively normal looking spandex clad legs that end in tentacled feet which match Halley-14’s hands.
Great great great. Yet another one of me has turned herself into a sexually deviant freak cultist. A cunt-freak to balance out the silvery giant cock-me. Blah.... At least this cultist seems to have a decently normal personality? Halley-14 is watching me with amusement from within her veil. I swallow my anxiety and think about how to gracefully make an escape. “You aren’t going to preach at me, are you?”
“Sleeping Lord, no.” Halley-14 rolls her eyes but then gives me an appraising look, something shifting under her hood. “But you look lost,” she sticks out her tentacle hands defensively, “not in a metaphysical sense, but like you literally don’t know where to go.”
“I, uh, left my Keyband behind...” I say, blushing.
“Shit, that sucks,” Halley-14’s eyes smile at me sympathetically. “You must be cold and hungry, can I buy you breakfast? Call it an apology for Equestria?”
I rub my cold arms and think. A cup of warm tea would be, well, divine right now, but the idea of sharing it with a wiggly cultist, even an apparently cool one like Halley-14 is worrisome. “That’s okay. If you could just like, point me in the direction of...” where did I even want to go?
“If you insist, but, well, maybe you could do it for me? It’s nice to get away from my more... ardent companions sometimes and chat with a regular person. Please?”
“I don’t know....”
“Ha ha ha. Don’t make me beg!” Teuthida places one hand on her heart and makes a tentacle based Scout’s Honor salute with the other. “I promise that I won’t harass you about my religion!”
A hunger pang makes up my mind for me. “Fine, okay, let’s do breakfast.” Please be cool enough that this isn’t a mistake...
“Awesome! I know a great 28 hour diner-type place that’ll be perfect.” Halley-14 beckons at me with a squidy hand and starts walking at a brisk pace. I scramble to catch up. “So... what brought you out onto the streets of Flotsam at this ungodly hour without your Keyband? If you don’t mind me asking...”
I blush and stare at the ground. “I slept with Hank...”
“Woof!” Teuthida’s electronic voice grunts. “Welcome to the club...”
“You slept with him too!?”
“Ha ha ha. I think most of us twelve-and-up Halleys have fucked Hank at least once. That boy is a dog.” Halley-15 glances at me slyly, “a beautiful dog though...”
I sigh, “yeah...”
“And pretty great in the sack, hey?”
“Yeah...” I say almost wistfully.
“Although, you have to wonder does he seem that good because he knows *exactly* what we like, or does he actually have game?”
“It does seem like an unfair advantage,” I smile a little, “but based on the sounds he and Freya make in their bedroom, I think he might just be good at sex.”
“Ha ha ha. Touché!”
Before I can dwell on Freya and the fact that I just slept with her guy, Halley-14 gently grasps my hand to guide me. Her fingers are warm and soft, but coil around my hand like ropes and have a scary strength to them. “Over here,” she directs, as she steers me off the small street we’ve been following and under a beautiful arch made from steel ingot bricks and blocks of brightly coloured plastic. The archway opens into a narrow alleyway that is hung with dozens of colourful paper lanterns and is lined with small shop stalls under apartments with balconies. The stalls are mostly closed behind steel shutter doors, but a few are peaked halfway open with lights on underneath. A couple of albino pale human men vape in front of a stall and leer passively at us. Teuthida ignores them and leads us to a purple door sandwiched between two shops. She opens the door and leads me down a narrow hallway and into a, well, diner. There is a long lunch counter lined with stools in front of a partially hidden kitchen, and several small booths line the opposite wall. The room is decorated with grainy holograms of the junk desert, strips of polished chrome, and tubes of retro-spacey lighting. Vaguely doo-wop sounding music is playing, made uncanny by strange instruments, while the air is thick with the familiar smell of frying food. I’m in a 1950s style nostalgia diner in space, which is charmingly stupid. Halley-14 waves at a weathered waitress behind the bar who makes a circle gesture on her forehead which Sister Superior Teuthida returns. “The waitress is friendly to the Church,” Halley-14 explains as she leads me to a booth, “not every restaurant in Flotsam is so accepting of our Acolytes.”
We sit down and Halley-14 summons up a menu hologram and starts selecting options which causes three-dimensional representations to appear in the air. “We’ll get tea of course,” her electronic voice buzzes, “but it’s up to you what you want to eat. They have a scrambled egg like thing made with tofu-stuff that I think you’d like...”Teuthida points at a floating bowl of scrambled stuff.
“Do they have pancakes?” I ask. Stressed Halley could use some carbs and sugar.
“Ha ha ha. I was just going to suggest them: they have a savoury red pancake analogue you dip in a kind of sugar water. They’re my fav!”
“Oh! I’ll have that, please.”
“Two then.” Halley-14 punches in the order, her fingers crawling like an octopus as she types. The waitress clogs over and puts down two Art Deco looking glass teacups and fills them with black tea. “Itllbealonginjustaminutesugars,” she drawls before clogging back behind the lunch counter.
I place my still chilly hands around the large cup and sigh happily at the warmth of the tea. This is really nice. “Thank you.”
“It’s no problem. I know what it’s like to be a down on her luck Halley on Flotsam.”
We share smiling eyes as I take a long sip of tea. It’s hot and very sweet and delicious and just what I need. Teuthida sits quietly, her hands folded into a complex knot, and lets me enjoy my moment. Sitting up close in a booth like this, our knees nearly touching, the pungent smell of her cunt is unmistakable, a funky counterpoint to my tea. I don’t know how I feel about Halley-14: she is this very poised, cool, and kind version of myself, what my therapist would have called actualized, but also some sort of ranking cultist with a very sexual transformation and... whatever is going on with her hidden face. I’m not sure if I’m proud of her or disgusted, which makes me feel like kind of an asshole. Am I being prejudiced? The waitress clogs back over and deposits two big plates heaped with red pancakes and bowls filled with liquid. “Hereyallaresugarsenjoy.”
I smell the pancakes which makes my stomach growl and my mouth water. I want them inside me. There isn’t any recognizable cutlery and I wonder how I’m supposed to eat. I notice Teuthida watching me with... concern? “Halley,” she says, “I have to take off my veil to eat. As you’ve no doubt guessed, my face isn’t normal. The changes are weird enough that I wear a veil in the city but I’m okay, alright? I like how I look and I’m happy to answer any questions you have about it. I also won’t be offended by your reaction. I just don’t want to surprise you, so I’m giving you this trigger warning. Okay?”
I take a deep breath and blow it out slowly, this moment was obviously coming. How bad could it be? “Okay...”
Teuthida fiddles with her bicep mounted Keyband and her sleeves retracted to her elbows revealing that her arms are actually tentacles from her mid-forearms down. She enters another command and her hood contracts to form a cerulean headband, revealing the tangled mass of skin-covered tentacles that she has instead of hair. The tentacles are as thick as ropes and would hang down to her shoulders if they weren’t in motion, coiling and flexing and twisting. I’m keeping it together; this is all weird, but on my new weirdness grading scale it’s still within bounds. I smile lamely and nod. Teuthida pokes her keyband and her veil becomes a choker, revealing her face. I gasp. Halley-14 no longer has a human mouth. In its place is what looks like an anus, a tight round puckered sphincter. Surrounding this pinched ring of muscle are fingertip sized projections, a circle of tiny baby tentacles. I’m hyperventilating. This is weird even on my new scale. Halley-14 smiles encouragingly at me, her eyes bright and her cheeks pulling at her anus-like mouth. “This is me,” her electronic voice says as her sphincter flexes in a ghost of speech.
I nod mutely, taking deep breaths and clutching the table. Halley-14 deserves me not losing my shit. She is a nice person who looks weird. I am being the bitch here. I should say something, break the tension. “Wow.”
“Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!” Tuethida is laughing, her eyes wide, her anus-mouth winking and her little face tentacles waving around.
“Sorry,” I say, blushing.
“Ha ha ha, it’s fine!” Teuthida does a soothing, waving motion with her tentacle arm which resembles a cat-‘o-nine-tails whip lash. “Wow is a reasonable take! I know it’s a lot to see.” She wraps her tea cup with tentacles, like an octopus latching on to prey. She lifts the cup to her face and takes a delicate sip through her sphincter, some tea slipping out and dribbling down her chin. She flicks the tea off her chin with a tentacle and a slight twinge of annoyance. “It’s a lot to live with too.”
I nod. I can’t imagine living with an altered face like that: the shame of having a facial disfigurement with the added humiliation of a sexual orifice where everyone can see it! I think I would actually die from embarrassment. And then there would be the challenges of not having a mouth or losing your voice; it’s basically a form of disability. What would drive someone to voluntarily do this to themselves? To stay this way and not get it fixed? Especially someone as seemingly cool as Halley-14. “Why? Sorry, but why would you do this?”
Teuthida tears off a pice of pancake with her tentacles, dips it in the sweet water and pushes the moist pancake into her sphincter mouth, her tiny face tentacles flexing inward like they are trying to help hold the food in. Her voice buzzes from a metal strip attached to her throat just above her cerulean choker and says, “In a way, it’s my penance, a stigmata of my guilt.” Her hair tentacles knot like wringing hands, “I’ve done some bad things.”
I blush as my mind plays over the big mistakes in my own history. My recent decision to get high and fuck Hank for selfish reasons, which doubles as a betrayal of Freya, one of my only friends on this planet. The way I blamed my parents for dying in the car accident, as a kid, but also well into adulthood. The time I sold out poor Samantha when the nuns caught us kissing at Saint Ursula’s, completely betraying her for no reason since we were both expelled anyway. Deserting my high school sweetheart Clem when I went off to college, completely blowing off that sweet dorky guy who took a chance on the weird new orphan girl who was maybe a dyke. Sure, some of that was a healthy urge to experiment and test out my bisexuality, but it was also a shitty need to restart my life and a shittier sense that I was better than my history and better than Clem. Which, fuck, look how that turned out. I’ve certainly done some shitty things that I feel terrible about, but nothing that would justify having an anus on my face for the rest of my life. “Halley,” I say, “we might have been a total bitch at times, but I’m not sure we’ve done anything that bad....”
Tuethida nods, “It’s what I did after waking up on Flotsam that haunts me.” She rubs her face with her arm tentacles, “You should try your pancakes while they’re still hot.”
Using my fingers I tear off a small piece of pancake and sniff it. It smells, well, like a pancake. I dip it in the sweet water, let it get wet but not too soggy, and then pop it into my mouth. The pancake is toasty and nutty and the sugary liquid gives it a burst of floral sweetness. It’s delicious. I will definitely come back here for more of this. “These are,” I say while pulling off another chunk of pancake, “so good. Thank you.” I dip and chew and mumbling around a mouthful I ask, “So what happened?”
Theuthida nods. She has her octopus death grip on her mug with one arm’s worth of tentacles, while her other collection systematically tears up pancake, dips, and inserts into her facial orifice with a worrisome amount of dexterity. Despite having an anus full of food, her synthetic voice speaks: “I moved in with Hank and Freya shortly after waking up on Flotsam. It was... a pretty fucked up time in their relationship. Hank wanted to get serious in the Earthling sense: go monogamous and commit to some kind of long term future. But Freya rejects monogamy as weak and she is honour bound to eventually return to Holmspace.” I nod, familiar with the conundrum. Tuethida takes a long sip of tea. “So Hank, angry and jealous of Freya’s other lovers, started to bring home all kinds of girls. This completely failed to make Freya jealous, but did manage to piss her off. And so she started sleeping around way more than normal and tried to seduce Hank’s conquests. It was like a weird sexual arms race. That I, in true Halley fashion, foolishly dived right into by fucking Hank. A lot.” Teuthida winces, and her head tentacles all contract, “What can I say? I was lonely and sad and horny from the parade of ass strutting through our small apartment. And if nothing else, Hank is a pretty excellent lay.” Amen to that. “At a certain point I thought maybe Hank was falling in love with me, which was weird but also kind of nice, but looking back on it, I think it was only ever about Freya.”
I shake my head, “That sounds miserable.”
“It was.” Teuthida pauses as the waitress clogs by refilling our tea. “But it was through this bullshit that I met Zephryne. Hank called me into his room one night and asked if I wanted to have a three way with him and this beautiful woman with ink black skin, electric blue curls, and eyes that glowed in the dark. Desperate for Hanks approval and aroused by this sexy stranger, I was down to fuck. Afterward, her skin glistening with sweat and face smelling like my cunt, the beautiful stranger asked me to run away with her. Which is how I ended up living and falling in love with Zeph.”
“Zeph was a Flotsam native, a daughter of Salvagers who grew up on hover caravans and in the camp-towns of the far Junk Desert. When I met her she’d given up the Rust Life for being an artist, although in all the time I knew her I never saw her actually make anything. Instead Zeph seemed to be more of an art maven, someone who knew everyone in the scene and was constantly organizing events or shows or parties. And maybe most of all, she always had the best drugs. When I ran away with her, Zeph was living in this borderline derelict warehouse in the fringes of the Purple District with two other artists: Abruptly and Q. Abruptly was a gifted Blue male artist who made tremendous ornate glass sculptures. They were experimenting with Deviancy, abandoning the smooth tranquil forms of Orthodox Blue sculpture and instead creating violently jagged works of sharpened glass. They were maybe the most gifted artist I’ve ever met. Q on the other hand was a pure dilettante, a rich brat with technical proficiency at painting but no real viewpoint or passion for it. Q was noteworthy for how they played with gender, though. Using their mothers’ money they had their body Shaped to be hermaphroditic and almost totally androgynous. Q would steer into that and use their body as a canvas to create a new character for themselves every day. One day Q might wear a neutral bodysuit and just be them. Sometimes Q would wear aggressively male combat clothing and be TurboQ or maybe throw on a wig and fancy dress and be the Lady Q. For a week Q wore a tight latex bodystocking and was our pet lil’Q. Q might have been a lazy painter, but they certainly never lacked for creativity in their life. And suddenly there I was too, Halley-15 the mysterious Earthling clonegirl, living and partying and fucking with the group, just another weird character in Zephryne’s orbit.”
“At first it was amazing, kind of the dumb college party life we never got on Earth. I got high and drunk and had sex with almost strangers at parties. I wore ridiculous clothes made by fashion designer friends and did stupid things with my hair. I went to art shows and modelled naked for photographers and painters and sculptors and tactile sensorium composers. I watched experimental theatre and shot my own terrible art films. I got embarrassingly into bad poetry that never translated right and would always sound stilted. I was in an open polyamorous thing with my roommates, having sex with an experimentally genderqueer hermaphrodite and an actual fucking alien. And I was completely, madly, insanely in love with Zeph.” Teuthida’s eyes crinkled and her anus spasmed with what might have been a wistful smile. “While I cared for all three of my regular lovers, Abruptly’s true passion was their art, and while they loved to fuck humans they were always a little distant, meanwhile Q was mostly infatuated with themself, or at least the versions of themself they were performing on any given day. Zephryne though, Zeph and I really connected. She was my insane best friend, a lightspeed pulsar whose gravity dragged me in her wild wake. And we had incredible sexual chemistry, she was easily the best lover I had while still, y’know, a baseline woman. We were inseparable in bed and in life. I would’ve, I did, absolutely everything for her.”
“So what changed?” I asked between mouthfuls of pancake.
“It was the drug dealing,” Halley-14’s synthetic voice modulated sadly. “Zeph had sold drugs since forever. Initially it was a social thing, a way to ingratiate herself with cool art scene sentients. She used her Scavenger connections to smuggle in fun synthetic drugs cooked up in Junk Desert labs and basically gave everything away. When her art buddies wanted more of the usual Flotsam drug fare, Zeph worked out a deal with a Syndicate dealer to buy stuff in bulk, and then resold it cheap, making just enough to cover expenses. This was all pretty harmless; Zeph was mostly just a party supplier of fun shit for recreational users.” Teuthida pauses to take a long drink of tea. “Back in the early days of Zeph’s warehouse, Q would pay for everything with their family money, but too many years spent pissing off mommies dearests got the cash flow cut off, which meant that Zephryne had to start drug dealing for real. She went to the Syndicates and used her connections as a bulk buyer to get a chance to deal directly. By the time I met Zeph she was an actual low level Syndicate agent, complete with a swirling trail of iridescent green scales climbing up her left arm.”
“The thing I feel guilty about, my original sin, is that I started dealing too. To keep the warehouse scene afloat and to pay for the drugs she’d give away to friends, Zeph had to constantly hustle to actually sell enough to cover her obligations to the Syndicate. She trusted me and I loved her and wanted to earn my keep, so one day she brought me along on a re-up and introduced me to her superior, an up-and-coming enforcer, a human woman with a domino mask of midnight blue scales and dreadlocked hair hung with ceramic rattles. I will never forget the enforcer’s eyes, still biologically human, but cold and hungry like a snake.” Halley-15 shivers and her tentacles coil in octopodian terror. “And then I was a deputized courier, delivering drugs to wherever Zeph sent me. Which, this wasn’t boutique party drug dealing anymore; on Flotsam that’s a social thing for rich sapients looking to impress their friends. This was actual selling-hardcore-drugs-to-addicts drug dealing. This was preying on human misery and slowly killing people and destroying lives. We were, I was, the vector of a disease.”
I shake my head sadly. I’m horrified that a version of me would stoop to something so shitty, but I can also sympathize with the position she was in. I’d probably have started dealing drugs too if the woman I loved was a dealer and I was broke and otherwise homeless on an alien planet. Which, actually, is uncomfortably close to my current position. “Okay, I can see why you would feel guilty. But how do you go from being a drug dealing member of the Flotsam Factory to a... tentacally cultist?”
Haley-14 blows out a deep breath, her little face tentacles flapping. “We fucked up, badly. There was an especially big party, an art exposition and rave we were hosting. We loaded up on a big supply of drugs, the largest we’d ever been entrusted with, so we could be awesome hosts and still have enough product left over to cover what we owed the Syndicate. Zeph also scored us something new, a wild new drug cooked up in some shanty in the Junk, and insisted we try it. As the first thumps of music started playing, Zeph and I did a hit and went into a synesthetic hallucination of euphoria, like psychedelic molly. And that’s all I really remember until the next morning when we woke up in a tangle of naked sapients and found out our entire drug stash was missing. Just totally fucking gone. Maybe we gave it away, maybe our guests used it all, maybe someone stole it, hell maybe we flushed it all down the plumbing; but it was gone gone fucking gone. We were absolutely fucked.” Tuethida takes a ragged breath, her tentacles all knotting and contracting in a way that I worried would break her teacup. “The first rule of being a low level dealer is that you always. Pay. The. Supplier. The Syndicates are not to be fucked with and they never forgive. And since we never paid up front for our packages, Zephryne had to put herself up as collateral.”
“What happened?”
“They collected.”
“Wh-what does that mean?”
Tears shine in Halley-14’s eyes, “It means the enforcer with the scale mask showed up at our warehouse a day later and told Zeph to come with her. Zeph kissed me goodbye and that was the last time I saw her. I don’t know what happened. She might be dead, killed as an example. She might be indentured, a slave in a Reptilian Breakyard paying back her debt with years of labour. Either way my world was destroyed. Q returned to being Quardbert, ran away offworld to their mommies and went back to being a good little offspring. Abruptly abruptly found Orthodoxy and focused on making safe sculptures and becoming a pillar of the Blue community. And I was suddenly homeless, alone, and in agony at having lost the love of my life. It was horrific.”
I reach out and touch a tentacle, giving it a squeeze. It is warm and muscular and kind of rubbery. “I’m so sorry.”
Halley-14 grasps my hand, her tentacles winding around my fingers and wrist in an elaborate grip. “Thank you.” She takes a practiced, calming Halley-breath, “I was distraught, wandering the streets, unsure of what I would do when I met missionaries from the Church of The Sleeping God. This was in the early days of the church, and the High Priestess herself would come to the city to preach.”
“Jesus, they didn’t try to convert you did they?”
“No, the Priestess saw how upset I was and offered to buy me a meal and help me sort through my problems. She bought me lunch and I talked and cried while she listened, gifting me her sympathy and compassion. Instead of giving me platitudes or trying to save my soul, she offered me a place to sleep for a few nights while I figured out what I wanted to do next. So I went back to the Convent and stayed with the Church. There I saw a family of people who had been cast off from society, who had banded together around a common set of beliefs, and were working to make the world better, at least in a very specific way. I didn’t buy into the whole spiritual part of it, it seemed like more bullshit like from those preachers at the trailer park, but everyone accepted my skepticism and were happy to let me live with them. I was encouraged to join them in worship of course, to commune with their Oracle, but they would always be cool when I said no. It was like they knew something I didn’t, like they knew they were right and I would either figure it out or not. They didn’t really care.” Teuthida shrugged, “In the face of weeks of that constant certainty of belief, well, I got curious. It couldn’t hurt to see what all the fuss was about, and maybe they did know something. So I asked to commune with the Oracle.”
“And?”
“Ha ha ha. Well, I’m Sister Superior Teuthida now!”
“What changed your mind?”
“I asked the Sleeping God himself if it was all bullshit, and through the Oracle He Answered. The Sleeping God isn’t some mythical deity, He is an actual, existent Cosmic Entity able to communicate with us and subtly change our reality. We call Him a God mostly as a short hand for His Power, but also because we Worship Him.” Teuthida moves her various tentacles in a shrug. “The fact is the Circle of the Sleeping God is a True Religion.”
“Okay, so I get that the Sleeping God being real helps with the whole skepticism thing, but I still don’t see why you would join this religion just because some alien space Jesus exists.”
“The Sleeping God Understood me. He Reached into me and Saw me as I am, with my sin and my failings and my guilt, and still needed me to be His Light in the cosmos. At my lowest, most wretched point, this powerful god-like being valued me, personally, and wanted me to join his beautiful family. It was... exulting. Transcendental.”
Okay, that explains the whole religion thing: cosmic televangelist nabs down-on-her-luck Halley. Or I guess, in a less shitty and judgmental way: Halley-14 finds new meaning in life through spirituality and discovers a family and place here on Flotsam. Not for me, but Tuethida seems happy enough. “I still don’t get the whole tentacles and mouth thing...”
Teuthida’s eyes grow rapt and her face sphincter pulls into a puckered version of a beatific smile, “When I dream with He-Who-Slumbers I dream of who I am and who I want to be.”
“Sister Equestria told me about her dream, about how she saw the horses by the trailer park and envied their freedom. Which I kind of get; I definitely remember feeling that way.” I don’t get the cock on her head thing but... “No offence, but I’ve never looked at a squid and went yep, I want that please.” I shrug, “I just don’t get it.”
“Ha ha ha. I didn’t dream of a squid. My Divine Dream is about everyone I’ve lost and about my shame. I dream about Zephryne and how much I miss her. I dream about Q and Abruptly, Hank and Freya, and I dream about Clem. I dream about poor Samantha O’Connor and the feelings we never explored. I dream about Mom and Dad, those blurred half memories of them, taken from me too soon. In my mind I see them each get swept away from me and fade, swallowed by the cruel riptides of the world and leaving me bereft and alone. I wish I could reach out, grasp them and save them. Keep them with me. And then The Sleeping God Hears my Prayer and so I do it: I grab Zeph and Clem and the others, wrap them in my many arms, no my tentacles, and clutch them to me, protecting them from danger and keeping us all together. In my dream I am strong enough, many limbed enough, to hold everyone who has ever mattered to me. At the same time I dream about my guilt, the shame that I fear everyone can see. In my dream it marks me with a stigmata on my face, makes my shame unavoidable. And yet, despite my ugly guilt, I learn that if I am strong enough to hold on to everyone that it is okay to have fucked up, that I can live with this mark of guilt, that people will still love and accept me.” Tears shine in Teuthida’s eyes, “And I wanted this for myself, to have these Aspects, to be this strong and many limbed, to own my guilt and shame, and to become the strong grasping nucleus that protects and holds onto the people I love. If not the sapients from my past, then at least my new Family in the Circle of the Sleeping God. And so I joined the Path of Light and took up the Sacrament of the Transmigration of the Flesh. This body is a Manifestation of my Devotion, but also a physical representation of who I want to be in this world.” She pauses dramatically and wiggles her tentacles in a silly way, “Or just a sign I’m too clingy! Ha ha ha!”
I snort at the joke. Halley-14 is still weird, but it is hard to fault her for her choices. Tentacles and cults side, her heart is in the right place. I mean, assuming she still has one. Do squid even have a heart? Hearts? Whatever, she’s cool. I smile at Teuthida and she smiles back with her eyes and sphincter, facial tentacle nubs waving. “You really believe all this?”
Tuethida nods, “Yep, I really do! Sorry to get all religious nutty there.” She waggles her tentacles in the silly way again.
I laugh, “It’s fine. I kind of asked.”
“So what now?” Halley-14 asks as the waitress clogs over, removes our empty plates, and tops up our tea one last time. It’s a good question. I obviously need to get my Keyband back, but I am so not ready to deal with Hank and all of that right now. But without a Keyband and access to my whatchamacallet wallet what will I do for food or finding a place to sleep? Who else can I go to? Clem? Nope. No fucking way. Bluebell? Mayyyybe... But she’s friends with Hank and Freya so that might be weird too. Call that a last resort? Maybe I could track down another Halley... Halley-23 or stay in The Grove with 22 or.... I startle as I feel warm tentacles gently ensnare my fingers and hands. I look up and see Teuthida looking at me sympathetically. “Halley,” she says, “do you need somewhere to sleep tonight? You’re welcome to come stay at the Convent for a few days while you figure out a plan.”
“That’s really nice...” which it is, but also, “I’m not so sure... it might be too much for me right now?”
“I promise we won’t try to indoctrinate you into any weird cult stuff. I’m just trying to be nice here, to pay it forward to another Halley in her time of need.”
“And I appreciate that, and you’re so cool, but... well, what about your Sisters? Equestria is... way less... chill...”
“Ha ha ha. Equestria is a special case. Between us Halleys, we found her sleeping rough and dumpster diving for food. Now that she’s found a purpose she is maybe a little drunk on the Faith. But it’s just a phase. I’m sure I was almost as insufferable when I first started down the Path.” Teuthida winks, “You’ll find that most of us are pretty relaxed about things. So long as you don’t mind being around some funny looking sapients who pray, everything should be fine.”
I guess it does buy me a couple days to figure out how to get my shit back from Hank without actually having to see him. “Sure, okay. I’ll do it, I’ll come visit.”
What’s the worst that can happen?
***
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