"He is the Kumlots Humperach!"
"What?" Ali looked deeply confused as she walked into the room, her brow furrowing as she looked at Opal, who was thrusting her arms into the air, her breasts heaving as she looked upwards at the ceiling, her face a mask of religious devotion.
I gently put my finger against Opal's back, pushing her. She let herself fall limply onto the bed.
"I'm an orgasm bender," I said, cheerfully.
"Zuh?" Ali cocked her head.
"We need to educate your girlfriend," Opal mumbled into the shimmering blue sheets of the bed.
"Leave the tired sci-fi references for later," Magnum said, his voice gruff as ever as he stepped into the room.
"Tired!?" Opal exclaimed.
"We worked on the Kumlots Humperach for, like, whole minutes!" I put my hands on my hips.
That was when the biokinetic that Ali, Magnum and Tycho had gone hunting for stepped into the room. And the effect was a bit like having your balls shrunk several sizes and then rush screaming into your belly to hide in desperate fear while your dick tries to do the same. I was shocked I didn't suddenly become as dickless as Walter Peck in that instant. Though to be quite honest, I kinda thought he had a
point
. You don't want four failed college professors running around with unlicensed, unregulated particle accelerators and nuclear power plants strapped to their backs. That just had Chernobyl in Manhattan written all over it.
But none of that had anything to do with the fact that a six foot tall, twelve foot wide spider made of pure black nightmare fuel had just scrunched its way into the room. It had fifteen fucking eyeballs, each one set along the central mushroom of its body, and each one glowed with a baleful light. Several mouths opened between the spidery legs, each one drooling and dripping onto the floor as fangs fluttered and twitched inside of puckered lips that were as rubbery black as a deadly dildo bat. The whole creature radiated a kind of menace that made even a Doyen Paladin in their warform seem cuddly and approachable.
"Greetings," the spider hiss/rumbled/echoed.
"Hi," I squeaked.
"I am to be your
instructor
," the spider hiss/rumbled/echoed.
"My name's Pirate Mask," I said, trying to sound calm. It came out as a high pitched whine. Like a balloon escaping.
"To pronounce my name correctly, you would need to...rip out your tongue," the spider monster hiss/rumbled/echoed. For purposes of brevity, I will abbreviate that now to 'said.'
I coughed. "Well, uh, Mr. Underhill," I said, reaching up to adjust my collar before I remembered I was buck naked and hadn't worn a collar for what felt like five lifetimes. "Since I'm technically here to learn how to shapeshift, I suppose I could. Uh. Do that." I grinned. "Right?"
Sherkaner Underhill (that was the name I'd given him, if you don't get it, read a fucking book
philistine
) paused for a few moments. His eyes
rippled
as they blinked in a slow pattern that looked a bit like something a video game would use to show that it was loading a level down at the bottom corner of the screen. Then he said: "I like you, unknown alien."
"We're..." I paused. "Vulcans."
"Yes, Vulcans," Mangum said, shooting me a glare. "That is, indeed, what we are."
"Vulcans..." Sherkaner said. "Interesting. Now, we shall have to enter into a chamber with minimal biokinetic residue. This one will not do."
"It won't?"
"Too much free floating DNA imprinted into the local skien of subqauntum strata," Sherkaner said.
I exchanged a glance with Opal. Opal made a 'hey, don't look at me, buddy' expression. Ali covered her mouth, but failed utterly to hide her laughter from our local telepathic field. Her giggles followed me as I stood and followed Sherkaner - and was, myself, followed by Ali. Since, after all, this was theoretically her hiring someone to train one of her slave-servants to be better at doing his slaver slave job.
What was less comforting was her saying: "I'm really hoping that he follows through on that 'tongue ripping' thing." She grinned. "Then maybe you'll stop making references I don't
get
."
I gulped.
"Wait, no," Ali said, frowning. "Then I won't get to orgasm sitting on your face."
I breathed a sigh of relief.
"Wait, you can cause orgasms through telepathic powers," she said, nodding.
I gulped again.
***
I didn't ask where we were going. At first. Because I figured that, like all grumpy mentors who taught their young but handsome and talented students who were destined to go and save the galaxy from evil, Sherkaner wouldn't be interested in questions. But by the time he had led us through a back alley and out of the main entrance of Gateway, I was starting to get curious. By the time we were about half a mile into the petrified stump forest, I had to know. I raised my hand.
"Mr. Underhill, where are we going?"
"Do you know why this forest is dead?" he asked.
"Asteroid impact," I said. "That seems the most likely explanation."
"Correct." He paused to let me and Ali scramble over some boulders and then start forcing our way up a dune that he had crested with a few great big steps with his stupid cheating spider legs. "You're quite an insightful species, you Vulcans. Many here need to study the ancient histories to draw such an inference. Most don't even know the heavens can fall and flames can sweep across a world." He bobbed his whole body in a spiderish bow. "Good work in selecting them for your personal slaves, Princess."
Ali smirked. "They have their upsides."
I panted. "Glad to know you're so appreciative of your good, hard working, tongue having slaves."
"Oh, slave, I was
joking
about the tongue ripping."
"Hurm," the spider said, sounding irritated. "I thought it was quite a good suggestion. Well, we are isolated from most non-microbial life forms here. I shall now demonstrate what a master of the biokinetic arts can accomplish, vulcan."
And with that, Sherkaner bobbed his body downwards, drawing his legs in against his body. He now looked like a well armored boulder made of pure hatred and evil eyeballs. Then I became aware of a slowly growing heat - a heat that built and built and built. At first, it was comforting, considering the chilly wind that cut through this dead planet's musty atmosphere. Then it got hotter than that. Red light shone from the boulderish mass of spidery limbs. I lifted one hand - and realized that, since he was showing off, I should instead be watching intently. Then I mentally smacked myself. Peeping with my eyeholes would be fucking useless, considering it was a fucking
psychic power
he was using. So, I opened up my telepathic senses.
Oh.
Looking at Sherkaner here, with my
mind
eyes, was an entirely different story. I could see that the heat was actually caused by a telekinetic bubble that was shunting the waste heat from his internal psychic brains to the air around him. And that was because his brains were tugging on a
huge
amount of psychic energy. But the trick was that he wasn't doing it fast. Heck, at the rate he was going, it looked like we might be here for a long ass time. But each time he drew psychic power into himself, he expanded his brains, thus, letting him pull in more psychic power.
Holy shit that was dangerous.
Like, it was a bit like making your rocket fly faster by building more engine into it
while it was fucking flying through space
.
One slip up, and all that psionic energy wouldn't just not have anywhere to go. It'd have nowhere to go and it'd be entirely contained in his body. It'd be like setting a microwave to
death
and turning it on inside of your squishy brain. I shuddered at the thought and forced myself to keep my feelings to myself. Any distraction right now would be fucking bad news bears for our highly expensive biokinetic teacher. But out of the corner of my eye, I could see that Ali was looking shocked as well.
Then the power finished gathering and, like a surgeon operating on a rocket motorcycle while his patient was on a different, slightly faster rocket motorcycle, my biokinetic instructor focused their stored energy into a single massive bodily transformation. Muscle mass and chitin was hurled into subspace, while new flesh was spun from raw nothingness. Skeletal structures bloomed and eyes shifted and vanished and popped. The whole transformation sounded like an orchestra of horror movie Foley artists being run over by a freight train.
When the light faded, Ali and I lowered our hands.
Standing on high heels made of solidified chiten was Lloth, Spider-Goddess of the Drow. Okay. Not literally. But my biokinetic instructor (who I hasten to remind you, had just been a fucking horse sized spider) had become a six foot tall woman with legs that swept up for miles, an ass as perky and full as an Olympic athlete played by a Hollywood movie star (and taut enough to bounce a machine gun belt's worth of quarters off of), and breasts
the size of my fucking head
. They were as midnight black as the rest of her completely nude body, and tipped with nipples as white as distant stars. Her hair was a Sarah Kerrigan style profusion of bone-spines that flexed themselves into a cascading pattern as she shook her head and brushed her fingers along her shoulders to clear away tiny bits of steam that clung to her body like a shroud. Her arms were muscular and her fingers were tipped with white nails.
Ali slowly reached over to close my jaw.
"So," my instructor said. "Do that."
"I should have gone for Victory Smith," I whispered.
"What?" Ali looked baffled.
Victory Smith frowned. "I sense you are thrown by my humanoid form."
"I...just kinda...thought..." I said, slowly, rubbing the back of my neck. "You were a dude."
"I am the male of my species," Victory said.
"Really?" I asked.
"No." She frowned. "I have mammary glands. And in my spider-form, I clearly have exposed
thuuung
and venom injectors. Now!" She clapped her hands, which set her breasts (which I hasten to add, are the
size
