Strip Evolution

"Could you two p-u-l-eeez settle down? Look and see what you've made me do."

Gude giggled and Yeval snorted as they viewed the sphere hovering in front of Alnor, one ring circling its middle, but the second, larger one, askew, its spin causing the sphere to wobble. Alnor was rubbing an elbow that had been jostled as the two imps were chasing each other about.

"Sorry, Alnor," Gude murmured.

"I think you should leave it that way," Yeval cooed, a look of mock innocence on her face. "We haven't seen the effect of a wobbler, yet. It might be fun."

"This is serious work, not fun," Alnor said with an admonishing stare at Yeval. But then Alnor chuckled and said. "No matter. What was created can always be discarded and restarted anew. No big deal. But why don't the two of you stop thrashing about and do something quiet for a change?"

Gude and Yeval looked at Alnor expectantly, waiting, as always for Alnor to take care of them. The answer to any predicament was to expect Alnor to fix it.

Alnor was busy fiddling with the ring, gently moving it in one direction and then the other, with little effect, so it took a few ions to realize that four eyes were following every movement and waiting expectantly for guidance. Alnor sighed at the recalcitrance of the ring and then noticed, with a slight start, that the two gremlins were still there.

"Oh, I know. How about a game?" Alnor leaned over and dug down into a box of spheres of all sizes. Coming up with a smallish, blue-green one, Alnor held the sphere out to the two urchins, who stood there, moving from one foot to the other, Gude with a thumb in his mouth, and Yeval already slitting her eyes and looking from pillar to post for an opportunity to upset an applecart or two. "Here take this. It's not choice enough to worry what you do with it. How about a calm little game of strip evolution? That should keep you out of my hair for a while—and you might create something interesting and useful."

The two stood there, looking from the pitiful little sphere Alnor was holding forth and then back at the box full of nice, plump spheres. And then Gude smiled, grabbed the sphere and raced off—with Yeval giving pursuit in his tracks, the layers of her flowing mantel flopping around her.

Alnor sighed, grabbed the rim of the lopsided larger ring around the sphere hovering in space, gave it a good jerk, and then gave a little laugh as it clicked back into alignment with the first ring.

"Me first," Yeval demanded when the two of them were settled in a cloud of pillows with the small blue-green sphere hovering between them. "Give me the firop. I go first."

"Always you first," Gude started to complain. But then he shrugged his shoulders and smiled. "Well, OK, I don't mind."

Yeval cast the firop and then Gude did so as well.

"Sorry," Gude said

"Crap," Yeval exclaimed. "An efty right off the top. Alnor must be looking over you for you to have such good luck."

"Shhh," Gude mouthed. "You know the rules. You have to remove something, and I get to choose, because I won that round. OK, off with your overmantel."

"Fine with me," Yeval said. "It's too hot up here anyway." But it wasn't hard to see that Yeval was sulking as she took off her overmantel. Yeval did not like to lose.

Meanwhile Gude was studying the sphere. "I get to do something with this too now." He studied it with deep concentration until Yeval started to complain that he was holding up the game. At long last, though, he sighed and muttered, "I know." He reached out and flicked the sphere, and it began to spin slowly. And then he raised his hands and snapped his fingers and a light came on from across the chamber. The beam of light was directed at the sphere and lit up one side of it as it spun there.

"Foul," Yeval yelled. "That was two things."

Gude looked a bit bleary eyed. "I only meant to spin it; the light thing happened on its own."

"So you say," Yeval scoffed. "I think you cheated."

"I'm sorry if you thought that," Gude answered in a crushed voice. "I wouldn't cheat. It just happened. Should we stop playing? I want to be fair."

Yeval sat there, pouting, for a moment and then got a sly look on her face. "Well, maybe if you take something off, it will be OK."

"And then you won't think I've cheated?" Gude asked. It was obvious that the thought of cheating really disturbed Gude.

"I'll overlook it this time," Yeval said. "If you take off your tunic."

Gude did so, and Yeval smiled. Gude looked very good with his tunic off. Very good indeed.

"And of course, I get to cast the firop again first," Yeval said.

Gude wasn't sure about this, but Yeval didn't wait. She picked up the firop and cast it.

"Hmm, pretty hard to beat," Gude said. But then he gave a little cry of delight as he cast the firop and scrutinized the result. The mirth died in his throat, though, when he looked up and saw the angry stare Yeval was giving him. "An efty again. That does beat a double thisac, doesn't it?" he asked tentatively, willing it not to be so if that would wipe the scowl off Yeval's face.

Yeval was silent for a moment, but it was obvious that Gude did know that an efty beat a double thisac, so she just grunted and gave Gude a sour look.

Gude didn't want to push the point, though, so all he asked Yeval to do was to remove her hair comb, which she did with a small smile, shaking her head as she did and making Gude catch his breath and feel warm inside at the sight of the luxurious raven-black curls cascading around her face.

Then Gude turned to the sphere and contemplated it. He placed his hands over the globe and waved them a bit, and the slowly spinning sphere responded to him. The colors were changing. The blue was getting bluer and a brownish-green was separating from the blue, until there were distinct areas of blue and then of the brownish-green.

Gude then gave a little laugh, being pleased by the effect he had made, and he looked back at where the light was coming from, his attention caught by the play of the alternating areas of light and shadow on the sphere.

While Gude wasn't looking at the sphere, Yeval leaned over with a scowl on her face and petulantly punched at both sides of the sphere with her small fists, causing lumps to rise on a couple of the brownish-green sections. She was going to hit it again, but just managed to pull her fists back and replace her scowl with a beatific smile as Gude looked back at her.

With an apologetic look on his face, Gude picked up the firop and cast it again.

"Ah, that's a lot of nothing," he muttered as Yeval chortled.

Then Yeval grabbed up the firop and cast it with a fling of her wrists. "A thrice ewat. That beats you four ways from gesplot. Off with the trousers."

"The trousers? That's not how it's usually done. A shoe or something. This is supposed to be a progressive type of game. Slower, you know."

"The trousers. I get to pick." Yeval didn't even look at Gude as he shrugged and started to untie his sash. Her attention was taken by the sphere and what she could inflict on it. After a moment of contemplation, she leaned over and blew hard on it in separate puffs of breath. Areas of the blue retracted and sections of the brownish-green areas turned a dead brown color.

When Yeval looked back at Gude, she was pleased. He was well uncovered now, and had a hard body that made Yeval feel tingly inside and thinking all sorts of interesting thoughts.

Gude blushed and reached for the firop, but Yeval lashed out with her claws and took it up. "You forget. I won that round. So I cast first."

"Sorry," Gude said and pulled his hands back guiltily. The sorrow on his face was genuine. He had been disconcerted by the lecherous look Yeval had given him—and particularly so, as he felt himself stirring inside.

Paying no heed to Gude's distress, Yeval cast the firop hard and then hooted. "A virmic. I got a virmic. You needn't even cast. Nothing beats a virmic."

"Well, if I cast and got a virmic too—"

"Nope, whoever casts one first overrides all. I win this round."

"I don't know. I'm not sure that's—"

"You're not thinking of cheating again, are you, Gude? Thinking that since I'm female and you're male, you can just—?"

"Oh, no, no, sorry," Gude broke in, much in distress. "It's OK, you win. Don't cry. You win."

"Very well, then. You can lose that breechcloth while I decide what to do with the sphere."

"The breechcloth?" The words almost stuck in Gude's throat. "But . . . but, it's too soon to—"

"I get to decide. Those are the rules of the game. Of course, if you want to go all 'I'm man, I know best' on me—"

"No, no," Gude said meekly. He reached down to his waist and started to pull his breechcloth down. The look Yeval gave—and what she was looking at—didn't help Gude as he stripped the breechcloth off his legs. He tried to cover himself with his hands, but Yeval slapped them away. He could hear a deep rumbling down in her throat, which came out as a purr—and he felt his manhood rise.

"Please, the firop. It's your turn again," he said in a husky voice.

They both cast again, and Gude's upper chiam bested Yeval's inside rutki. Yeval gave no argument, feeling a little heated now and not at all averse to getting a bit cooler. As she unbuttoned and cast aside her middle mantel, Gude busily set plant life to grow on the unscorched parts of the brownish-green areas of the hovering sphere.

The next round went to Yeval, who punched the sphere with her finger, causing magma to rise up and create cones, while Gude was taking off a shoe—and while he wasn't looking, she slashed a great rift valley and a grand canyon with a swish of her fingernails for good measure.

Gude's single sefti was just too good for Yeval's nokye, even though it was a double—the presence of a britgo took away the advantage of the double—and Gude created separate heart-beating creatures for both the blue areas and brownish-green areas of the spheres after having snuck in an ordering of the seasons for the spheres.

Gude felt a little sheepish. This taking of two actions was clearly cheating, but he was beginning to feel his need and didn't think the game could go on very much longer—and he had just had a dilly of an idea what he wanted to do with the sphere. He felt he had to last at least one more winning round, or the sphere would not be perfectly balanced.

Still, Yeval was not playing fair either. While Gude populated the separate areas of the sphere with fishes and birds, Yeval was playing her hands over Gude's body and she was getting flushed and her breathing was becoming ragged—as, indeed, was Gude's.

Gude was quite sure that Yeval cheated in the next round—but in a strange way. Gude's cast of the firop had resulted in an inner ipoch, and Yeval's in a grand weatel. And Gude was quite sure that a grand weatel was the better throw. Yeval insisted, however, that her firop casting had gone out of bounds and insisted in casting again. Even the next case, a larow slam was better than Gude's ipoch, but Yeval tsk tsked yet again about something wrong with the throw that Gude couldn't understand and wasn't concentrating on, because now Yeval had a hand wrapped around his phallus and Gude could think of little else. It was hard enough for him to maintain his focus on that last touch he wanted to make to the sphere.

On the third throw, Yeval cast an xotna, which was about the worst result you could get, and she cluck clucked her loss and started to move her hand on Gude's phallus in a most arousing way, as Gude did his best to concentrate on creating little reasoning beings in his and Yeval's images and setting them down on the brownish-green areas of the slowly spinning sphere.

Such was distraction Yeval was creating, though, that he wasn't all that pleased with his handiwork. He thought he could do better—and decided that maybe later he would try to make the creatures a little less ugly and cloying. But then Yeval spoke, and he turned and drew in his breath.

"You won, and I know what you want me to remove," Yeval was cooing at him. Her inner mantel was gone and she was arching her back to Gude and working the nipples on her breasts with the fingers of her free hand.

Gude groaned and lost all interest in what he had been doing with the sphere as Yeval pulled his lips down to her nipples.

Still, while Gude was lost in her breasts, Yeval looked at the world they had created and she was displeased and angry. That last addition of Gude's had been a stroke of genius, and Yeval was jealous. While Gude fed on her breasts and she worked his phallus with one hand, she used the other to, first, guide his hands to her womanhood, and then to reach out with that hand and flick the slowly spinning sphere with a system of recurring hurricanes, tsunamis, and earthquakes.

"There, let the little fuckers deal with those," she murmured.

"What, what was that you said?" Gude raised his head and asked as he tried to focus his glazed-over eyes on her face, not at all sure of the quality of the smile he found there.

"I said, the game's over; you win," Yeval answered, while murmuring to herself, "at least you think you did." And drawing his pelvis to hers and guiding him into her with her hand, she whispered, "Let's fuck."

And so they did, suspended over the sphere they had evolved. They fucked for forty Earth days and forty Earth nights, and the sweat of their exertions and body fluids of their endless coupling rained down on and covered the Earth.

After they were done, they were both exhausted and floated off in separate directions to shower and refresh themselves.

When they had departed, Alnor glided into the chamber and stood, looking at the globe slowing spinning as it hovered midair, awash in the exhausted lovemaking of Gude and Yeval.

"Hmmm," Alnor murmured. "They certainly screwed this one up. I'll have to start all over again with it."