Tailesium – New Reality

	The automatic door slid open, and Jacob stepped into the antechamber.

	Surrounding him were four solid walls of bleeping, whirring electronics, a sampling of the various ages of computing arranged like an abstract painting.  He saw a confusing conflagration of flashing lights, panels of switches and keyboards, and green monochrome monitors rapidly scrolling incomprehensible data.  High-definition flat-panel screens displayed three-dimensional simulations of biological processes.  Banks of high-speed solid state memory sat alongside archaic tape drives that spun back and forth erratically.  Transparent panels revealed vacuum tubes inside arranged in tightly packed rows, with circuit boards behind them that mounted multiple CPUs.  In one corner, an office paper box filled with sheets of stiff, hole-covered paper sat next to a lone, disused punchcard reader.    

	Good Lord, what a mess, he thought to himself.  All of this was purely for show, of course.  His decision had already been made at a very simple, very modern terminal in a room prior to this one.  This mass of contradictory electronics was simply meant to keep him occupied and build atmosphere while his choices were processed by the central AI.  
	
	Directly in front of him, he saw a plexiglass window with a protruding panel of keyboards below it, looking out over the room where the real magic was going to happen - the lab.  Directly adjacent was another sliding door, with a light near one corner that would turn green to signify he was cleared to enter.  

	"Hey, shouldn't you be decontaminating me right now?" he asked, with an incredulous smile on his face.  "I bet there's a whole lotta expensive equipment in there, and it'd suck if I got my... microbes all over it."

	He jumped slightly as a pair of plexiglass sheets descended from the ceiling, cutting him off from the walls of electronics and creating a narrow path directly to the chamber door.  He looked up, and saw four ceiling tiles split open to reveal nozzles that immediately began misting him with disinfecting solution.

	"Thanks..." he said.  Great, he probably smelled like a hospital now.  That wasn't doing much to alleviate the clenching nervousness he felt in his gut, the gnarled ball of anticipation that was eating away at his insides.  What he was about to do... he wasn't afraid for his safety so much as his mental health.  He'd dreamed of doing this for ages, and he couldn't shake the fear that it might not be everything he expected...

	Or that it might be better than he'd ever imagined it could be.

	He gave a slightly smaller start this time when the light finally lit up, and a buzzing noise indicated the sliding door as unlocked.  Now the clenching was joined by a cool sensation of  lightness in his chest, as though his heart was trying to head north to a new home just behind his larynx.

	"Whelp, fortune favors the bold," he said through a nervous smile.  That sounded like an appropriate idiom to start things off with.  Or it was just corny as shit.  Not that there was anyone to hear, or that this was being recorded somehow.  It was just him, alone in this automated complex, with the only other carbon-based life form in the area being his own foot fungus.  

	He wouldn't have had it any other way.  If he had even the inkling of a suspicion that someone was watching, he'd turn on his heel and start hammering the "ABORT" button.  

	Summoning all his courage, he stepped toward the door.  It slid open as he approached, allowing him into the still mostly-unlit laboratory.  Initially, the only lights in the chamber were mounted on the wall directly above the doorway.  But, as Jacob entered, he heard a sequence of k'chunks, like heavy wall switches being flipped, and the ceiling lights slowly flickered to life.
	
	As his surroundings gradually became visible, Jacob couldn't stop himself from mouthing a silent "Wow..."  The place's dimensions were spectacular, similar to those of an indoor sports arena, with a huge flat space before him the size of a soccer field.  The dozens of overhead lights hung from a tall vaulted metal ceiling that was probably at least ten stories up.  They were florescent, naturally, and their distant hum was the only sound disturbing what would otherwise have been total silence.  Lighting aside, the lab was completely unadorned, a stark, antiseptic-looking place with featureless bone-white concrete walls.  No windows, and no doors, aside from the one through which he'd just entered.
  
	Strangely, the chamber was completely empty.  You'd usually expect a lab to have lab equipment in it, thought Jacob.  But there was nothing, just a yawning plain of metallic gray tiles.  And yet, this room had to have a good reason for being so enormous.  Unless the architect had designed it using the wrong standard of measurement.

	Slowly, the white-hot anxiety bubbling in his chest started to cool, and be replaced by cold drippings of disappointment.  Maybe something had gone wrong?  He'd studied the guidelines for hours in the process of creating his schematic, and the pre-compiler had accepted it as one hundred percent kosher. What the hell could be wrong, then?  Some sort of undocumented bug?  It'd let him in here; that alone should've been an unquestionable sign that things were ready to go.

	He then gave a start as a booming, robotic voice echoed through the room.  "WELCOME, USER JDRAKEN89.  YOUR SUBMISSION HAS BEEN EVALUATED AND VERIFIED.  PLEASE STAND BY WHILE THE TRANSMOGRIFICATION CHAMBER IS CUSTOMIZED FOR YOU."

	Jacob took a deep breath, putting his hand to his chest as he tried to will his heart to slow down.  That had nearly made him jump out of his own skin.  At least now he knew that the operation was a go, which in combination with the sudden start gave his anticipatory anxiety license to return in force.

	He didn't have much time to wallow in his sturm und drang.  The floor at the center of the room, which was a good hundred fifty or so feet from where Jacob was standing, began to shimmer slightly.  He squinted, trying to make out what exactly was going on.  What he saw was that there was suddenly a raised dais in the middle of the previously featureless room, about four feet off the ground.  It seemed to be constructed of the same metallic gray tiles as the rest of the floor.

	"What the hell...?" said Jacob to himself.

	"SOLID-LIGHT HOLOGRAM MATRIX HAS BEEN CONFIGURED FOR OPTIMUM SPATIAL EFFICIENCY," said the robo-voice.  "PLEASE APPROACH THE PLATFORM WE HAVE CREATED FOR YOUR PROCEDURE."    

	Solid-light holograms?  The floor is made of solid-light holograms?  Seriously? he thought.  Some Star Trek-y bullshit going on here.  Eh, but really, I guess that's not really any more far-fetched than what's supposed to happen in here. 
	
	He followed the voice's instructions, and set out for the center of the room.  He plodded along in his bare feet, anxiety still bubbling in his gut, with nothing to hear but the soft sound of his footfalls and the oppressive drone of the overhead lamps.  The size of this vast, monochromatic room and its emptiness bothered him, a reminder of his isolation and vulnerability.  He quickened his pace, while keeping his gaze fixed on the platform as if it were an oasis in a vast, flat, gray desert.  Near the halfway point, he broke into a flat out run.     

	He reached the center dais, breathing a little heavier but far from winded. Closer to it, he found the structure was circular in shape, and maybe about forty feet in diameter.  Its surface, distinct from the bland grayness that surrounded it, appeared to be a sheet of glass with arrays of softly-glowing LED lights underneath.  He stepped onto it, finding it felt the same against his bare feet as the floor had – strangely cool.  But then, it was all holograms anyway  Solid light being inherently of a certain temperature made the same amount of sense as the idea of solid light itself.

	The floor of the platform shimmered, and a long metal pole began to emerge.  On top of it was a small tabletop with a knife switch stuck into it, straight out of the old black and white Frankenstein.  Wires ran from each end, curling around the pole and continuing into the floor.  

	"Cute," said Jacob.  “I am about to create a monster, aren't I?”

	He heard a whirring noise from behind, and turned to find three connected, floor-length mirrors facing him, similar to a clothing store's changing room.  He saw himself then, in all his five-foot-eight, average-built glory, a pretty standard example of an adult male human in his early 30's.  His soft features were pleasant, not striking, but his partners had told him over the years that he was handsome, in a geeky way.  Shaggy hair, despite being stylishly messy,  did little to hide the fact that his hairline was receding - he'd meant to look into treatment for that, but hadn't found the time or money to do so.  Instead, like many men experiencing male pattern baldness, he'd attempted to compensate with some facial hair, in this case heavy sideburns and a goatee.

	The hospital gown he wore hid his torso from view, except for his ass peeking out the back in typically humiliating fashion, something he was glad nobody could see.  Underneath, he was of an average build; moderately flabby due to age, inconsistent exercise, and the cubicle jockey job that put food on his table.  Food that was frequently a little too fast and a bit less "food-y" that he liked.  But still, he was far from obese, or even fat. 

	"I guess this is so I have a 'before' image fresh in my mind before we get started," he said to himself.  He grinned a nervous, smirking grin and waved to his mirror image.  

	"Catch ya later... uh... me."

	Turning, he faced the extended switch panel again.  This was it, his last chance to chicken out.  His heart was pounding in his chest, sweat dripping down his brow, and the butterflies in his stomach seemed to be spawning more butterflies in a recursive nightmare that made him feel nauseous.  He reached out with a trembling hand, which hovered indecisively over the switch.  It held there, visibly shaking, fingers twitching ever so slightly.  All it was going to take was a simple grab and flick of the wrist.  
	
	A simple motion.  So simple.  All he had to do was let go of his fear.  What could happen if this doesn''t turn out the way I want... what would I do then... DO IT... I've waited so long... it's easier just keeping it a dream, safer too... THROW THE FUCKIN' SWITCH ALREADY... it's a messed-up fuckin' dream too - imagine if word got out - Christ, what would I tell my mom... WHO THE FUCK CARES... just walk away, no disappointment, no crushed expectations ... WHAT ARE YOU, A GODDAMN COWARD... RRRRGGGG 

	"Fuck it," he breathed, and flipped the switch to "on".

	It sparked briefly as electrified metal hit metal, and he reflexively withdrew his hand to avoid an electric shock. Soundlessly, the panel lurched and then speedily withdrew into the floor.  The hole from which it had extended shimmered slightly, and then filled in with the same LEDs-under-glass texture as its surroundings.

	A loud metallic "clunk" made Jacob spin around.  He watched as the wall of mirrors descended, the holes made by their presence filling in a similar manner.  The ceiling lights suddenly extinguished, leaving him momentarily surrounded by pitch blackness.  But the floor LEDs took up the illumination slack almost immediately, rising in intensity until they bathed the platform in a stark white glow. 

	The lighting change made it difficult to see anything beyond the edge of the dais, but Jacob swore he could see more shimmering occurring in the darkness.  Then, there was a loud series of heavy clanks and a steady whir.  A thick metallic ring rose from the edge of the circle, probably about five feet tall and four feet deep.  It paused briefly at about eye level, before splitting into two concentric, circular shapes.  

	Slowly and silently, they separated, with the larger of the two rotating until it was positioned above, while the smaller stayed motionless.  Together with the platform, the assemblage looked sort of like a gyroscope.  One with no visible supports, Jacob noted with surprise - the rings didn't appear to be attached to anything.  Additionally, based on how the overhead ring spun, the platform he was standing on had to be floating in midair.  He found the impossibility of all this extremely unnerving, despite the extraordinary circumstances.

	Another click, then a low steady hum.  The rings' inner edges lit up, revealing that they were lined with a pattern of electric wands.  They looked like tiny radar dishes, maybe  emitters of some sort.  Emitters of radiation, Jacob reckoned.  This machine was going to bombard his body with invisible rays of energy and somehow alter his genome in an incredibly controlled, specific manner.  Which would lead to an unintuitive, strange, but entirely desirable result, effected in an impossibly brief span of time.  And it was going to do this without turning him into a human-shaped lump of throbbing tumors. 

	The humming noise intensified, and the light coming from the rings became tinted with red.  Slowly, they began to spin, faster and faster, until they became nothing but a blur of light and motion.  Then, each ring started to rotate, gradually accelerating until they reached a speed so great that it appeared to Jacob as if himself and the platform were encased in a semi-solid sphere.  Strong winds buffeted his body, blowing his hair and making the hospital gown flap about.

	Bathed from head to toe in the strange orange glow, Jacob noticed that the air around him seemed to be warming, despite the turbulence.  He became aware of a sort of electric tingle on his skin, as nanoscopic particles effortlessly penetrated through his epidermis, his muscles, all the way to his internal organs.  

	"F- fuck..." he stammered fearfully.  Memories of what he'd read about overexposure and the horrors of radiation sickness flooded his mind.  He closed his eyes tightly, and tried not to think of himself in a hospital bed, his skin sloughing off as he writhed in constant agony, attached to a morphine drip that could hardly stop the pain.  No.  No, that couldn't happen.  He tried to remind himself of the technology he was inside, of its limitations. It was impossible.  This was guaranteed to work, or at the very least not physically kill him.  Guaranteed.  

	He tried to suppress the pesky knowledge that no guarantees had been made about his mental safety.       

	The tingling sensation started to alter slightly. It gradually became like an insistent itch all over his body,  one that grew more and more obnoxious with each passing second.  Jacob waited patiently for it to abate, waited and waited, until he could no longer stand it.  He opened his eyes and scratched at himself ruthlessly, along his arms, legs, flank, his chest.  But he felt no relief, no matter how vigorously he scraped, and what was more, it felt like something was getting stuck under his nails.  He brought his hands up to his eyes, and saw hair - on his fingers, under his fingernails, and stuck to his sweaty palms.  Frantically, he scanned his bare forearms, and saw nothing but smooth skin.  He hadn't exactly been a gorilla before, but he was supposed to have somewhat hairy arms.

	"Shit!"

	In a panic, he hurriedly untied his hospital gown and tossed it aside.  His slight chest and belly hair appeared to be intact.  He rubbed his torso to make certain, and his heart jumped as clumps of it came loose and swirled around against moist skin under his touch, adhering to his sweat-coated, trembling hands.

	"Oh god... oh shit, oh fuck..."  His hair was falling out, a sure sign that this wasn't a transmogrification chamber.  He was trapped in a malfunctioning chemotheraphy machine, he was certain.  It was coming off, all of it,  from his back, his legs, his groin, clumping together in the few spots where it was thick enough to do so.  Apprehensively, he ran a shaky hand over his head, expecting to feel shaggy coiffure disengaging from his scalp like wheat before a thresher.

	Strangely, his hair was still there.  He grabbed a handful of it and yanked hard.  

	Nothing happened.  For some reason, the loss of hair didn't seem to be occurring above his neckline.  He rubbed at his chin, and then had to correct himself when he felt his goatee come away, leaving a perfectly smooth, stubble-less face - it was more like it stopped at ear level.

	He let out a heavy sigh of relief.  See, you idiot?  No cancer.  No possible way to get cancer.  Just relax and let it happen. And try to enjoy it.
	
	His neck muscles twitched involuntarily as the itching sensation returned.  This time, it was matched by a shifting of temperature, or at least his body's interpretation of it.  His skin had turned strangely cool, though still aware of heat in the surrounding air.  

	The itching wasn't quite as bad this time, but Jacob still couldn't resist.  He took his left hand and vigorously scratched along the front of his right arm.  Once again, he felt something coming loose under his fingernails.  But he had no hair remaining, so what was it?  

	He checked, and saw that this time it was skin, peeling away like a molting reptile's.  He felt no pain nor saw any blood, but Jacob could tell there was something underneath that wasn't normal. He had to squint at first to make out what it was, and gave a start when he realized - his arm now sported a coating of incredibly fine green scales.

	"Exactly like molting," he breathed, staring bug-eyed at this new development.  "Oh man, here we go..."  The anticipation made his heart thud through his chest, and his stomach clenched like it was trying to compress his last meal into a diamond.

	Previously a mildly irritating buzz, the itching returned in full force.  This time, he put up no resistance, and attacked his epidermis with gusto.  Chunks of it were coming off at a time, revealing more green scales underneath.  He scraped his nails across his chest, and found that the scales waiting underneath were slightly larger, thicker, and a brilliant yellow color.  Scratching his abdomen revealed more of them, with the green kind along the outer edges, giving him a gold stripe down the center of his body.     

	Jacob's apprehension was giving way to excitement now, and he brutally assaulted his skin, determined to eliminate all remaining traces of its former flesh.  It came away like crepe paper, vanishing into the wind almost as quickly as he could tear it off. 

	Most of the front of his body had been taken care of, and he'd just begun to struggle with the difficult-to-reach parts of his back when an electric jolt shot through his entire body, causing it to go stiff.  Almost involuntarily, he stopped what he was doing, and let his arms fall to his sides. He stood there rigidly in the light of the whirling emitters, with eyes closed and teeth clenched tight, barely able to move.  Every muscle felt as though it was tensed to its limit, and he had what could have been described as a full-body charley horse.   

	The tension somehow managed to intensify, and it began to feel as though his muscles were trying to pull themselves apart, vertically.  An unsettling groaning noise emanated from his arm, and the bones ached from deep inside.  Sickeningly, he could feel them wriggling slightly, like they were moving of their own accord.  Jacob felt like opening his mouth and screaming at the top of his lungs, but his jaw was locked tight.

	Then his other arm did the same, and his legs followed suit, followed by his feet, his spine, and on and on until his entire body was taut and sore.  His bones ached like they were trying to snap themselves in two and reduce his body to a shapeless lump.       
	
	  “Rggggh,” Jacob grunted, unable to move his mouth to form any complex sounds at all.  What the hell was going on?  Was this supposed to happen?  And why was he suddenly standing on his toes?

	He opened his eyes and looked down.  It may have been an optical illusion, but it really seemed the tension was making him stand taller, based on how far away the floor looked.  Several inches taller, in fact.  Actually, that seemed like more than just a few inches. Wait... was he growing?

	Yes, he was.  There could be no doubt; as he experienced all this maddening discomfort, he was shooting up like a time-lapsed film of a sprouting tree.  Vertigo inserted itself into the cornucopia of unpleasantness.  He started feeling faint, and the blur of the spinning rings made it feel like the world was tumbling around him, end over end.  Wobbling back and forth, his overextended leg muscles were unable to keep him upright, and he toppled over backward helplessly.

	He hit the ground with an “Oof!”, and a sudden exhalation.  The landing was much smoother than he'd expected, as though the platform had quickly adjusted its elasticity to cushion his fall. And a good thing too, as the ground had been further away than usual.  From the position he'd landed in, it was clear he hadn't just gained height, his body just looked bigger in general.  He wondered briefly how much taller he was exactly.  As he contemplated this, his muscles gradually relaxed, although the soreness still lingered.  Not his feet, though; those seemed to be just as tight as ever.  Worse, in fact.  He raised his neck to have a look.

	Staring down the length of his body, he discovered what all that muscle tension had been about.  His chest and abdomen had shed their flab and become completely flat.  His love handles were no more, and his trunk sported chiseled pectorals and a taut six-pack.  He looked over at his arm, and saw biceps and triceps bulging out under his red-scaled skin, the undulating layers of sinew impressively defined compared to the soft pink lumps they used to be.  He made a fist and flexed briefly, grinning to himself as his arm bulged with its new muscles.  It was just like he'd specified, the physique of an underwear model, buff but a bit short of bodybuilder territory.  

	Maybe later, he thought to himself.

	His feet clenched again, breaking him out of his brief reverie.  They'd still felt strangely tight and sore while he was inspecting his musculature, but now the cramps were back with a vengeance.  He sat up to get a better view, and saw that he no longer had any feet at all.  

	Sort of.  Their remains were still attached to the ends of his muscular legs, but had elongated and bent in such a  way that would have forced him to stand on the balls of his feet, had he been standing.  That part  no longer had any toes attached to it, and was in the process of lengthening and expanding.
	
	Jacob's design included digitigrade feet, but this sight of them forming was still difficult to take in.  Briefly, he felt like a recent amputee, or a World War II soldier staring at the bloody remains of his leg after stepping on a land mine.  But that didn't last long, as those lumps of flesh were starting to look less like strange, alien growths and more like an enormous pair of paws.  But still, there were no toes.  The extra surface area was good, but he'd need something more in order to balance himself effectively.

	He felt an annoying poke that seemed as though it came from the inside of his new feet.  It was sort of like a sewing needle pricking him from within.  Then, it was like a  nail.  Then an icepick.  Then a kitchen knife.  Then a bayonet.  Jacob grabbed his pseudo-foot, teeth clenched against the pain.  There was definitely something trying to force its way out of the fronts of his paws, as he could see the bulges developing.  They grew longer and longer, until suddenly they stopped, and the skin folded back to reveal his new talons.  

	The pain suddenly gone, Jacob stared at them.  Each was huge and hooked, much like a bird of prey's, an eagle or a hawk's, maybe.  There were three on each foot, attached to trio of somewhat nubby toes.  Jacob wiggled them happily, marveling at how natural they felt, despite the fact that he now sported four fewer digits than before.  It was as though his feet had always been shaped this way.  Experimentally, he touched the tip of one of his claws.

	“Ouch!” he said mockingly, and pulled back.  He chuckled lightly; it wasn't actually that sharp, although he could probably give someone a nasty gash if he tried.  Strike that, I could probably disembowel someone with this thing like a velociraptor, he thought.  Noticing something out of the corner of his eye, he glanced at his hand, and saw for the first time that his fingers were slightly thicker, and his nails had grown into a set of pointed claws.  Apparently, that change had slipped by while he was experiencing full-body tetanus. 
	
	After close to a minute of foot and hand inspection, it became clear there was a lull in the process.  Jacob took advantage of it by leaning back on his hands and exhaling loudly.  As he sat there trying to catch his breath, he found it impossible not to be aware of the raging hard-on he sported.  No surprises there; he always expected that transformation would be an extremely erotic experience, and he'd noticed his arousal during all the events leading up to this point.  Unfortunately, his penis looked fairly odd at the moment, covered as it was in the yellow belly-scales that adorned his front.  It stood five point five inches from his groin and, aside from the texture, was still as human-shaped as ever.  He knew this state was only temporary, and a good thing it was.
	
	He thought briefly about how strange he must look overall, his tall, muscular sapient figure covered in green and yellow scales, human face otherwise completely unchanged, with a pair of bestial hindpaws attached to his legs.  It made him glad the mirror was gone for now.  The rotating gyroscope, however, still ran at full tilt, casting its tinted heat over him.  The machinery was still running, so why the delay?

	Seemingly acting on its own, and taking advantage of its owner's momentary absent-mindedness, Jacob's right hand found its way to his dick and wrapped its fingers around it.  He looked down at the rogue appendage, almost in surprise.  

	“Well hey,” he said to it, “that sounds like an excellent idea.”

	  He laid back, placing his idle hand behind his head.  Lazily, he stroked his cock and watched the blurry shapes spin around him, lulled into relaxation by the projectors' constant hum and the heat they cast across his body. He no longer felt afraid of the energy they emitted,  instead eager for it to start him on the next phase of his journey. He sighed and stretched out on the solid-light floor, still slowly jacking himself and lost in a euphoric haze.  So blissed-out was he, it took a moment to dawn on him that his rod was losing sensation.

	Snapping out of it instantly, he abruptly sat up, letting go of his dick. He stared at his crotch, eyes wide and heart pounding once again.  The skin covering his penis was definitely thicker than it had originally been.  He thought back to the groinal alterations he'd placed on his schematic, when they'd seemed like a good idea.  Not too extreme, but still... they were unconventional and, he hoped, wouldn't turn out to be too weird actually hanging off his body.

	The skin continued to thicken and stiffen, despite the shock causing his erection to fade.  The organ didn't appear to be shrinking much, either.  On the other hand, his foreskin bunched up as it grew denser, swallowing the head of his penis like a wrinkled, jawless anaconda.  Within seconds, his manhood disappeared from view, engulfed in a cloak of scaly flesh.    

	Jacob's head spun.  Watching his crotch transform aroused him immensely, but churned his stomach at the same time.  He half expected something to go horribly wrong at any moment, like a bloody explosion or bizarre mutation.  Guys don't like having their junk messed with, he thought to himself, willfully ignoring for the moment that genital piercing was a thing that existed.

	 His sheath was nearly done forming now, and that was what his genitals were now encased inside – a sheath.  The excitement  he felt was tempered by a sobering realization: this was the first sexual alteration he'd ever made to himself, and it was a significant one.  The fact that it was both that and animalistic in nature made him uneasy.  

	The judgmental tendencies of society loomed large in his mind.  How could they not?  He'd seen first-hand how vicious people could be when confronted with something that differed from their standard of “normal”, especially if it was of a sexual nature.  

	In a brief flash, he pictured some faceless stranger standing off to the side, pointing at him and speculating loudly and at length about his sexual proclivities.  No doubt this perverse deviant also enjoyed buggering helpless farm animals, or maybe even small children.  Next to him, a crowd of phantom sycophants nodded in agreement.  A jury of Jacob's peers, they found him guilty in the court of public opinion, the sentence a social drawing-and-quartering.    

	A shake of his head brought him back to reality.  He was alone.  There was nobody around.  Nobody to see him.  Nobody to pass judgment. And he still wanted this as part of his new body.  It was different. Alien. Exotic. And that excited him.  Every change he made, every alteration away from human and toward something else was pure bliss.  And this was only the beginning; some of the stuff he had planned for later would make those invisible prudes' heads spin clean off their shoulders.  

	Distracting ruminations cleared away, he looked down and saw that the change had completed.  His sheath hung stiffly from his pelvis, drooping slightly under its own weight and resting on top of his ballsac.  It was relatively short, maybe slightly longer than his penis had been before in a flaccid state, and covered with tiny yellow scales the same color as his belly.  Is this too weird, he thought to himself?  

	No.  

	No, it was sexy.  Deviantly sexy.

	Almost without hesitation, Jacob grabbed his new equipment with his right hand.  Using the left, he gently cupped his balls, kneading them sensually in his palm.  They felt bigger.  Were they bigger?  Yes, he decided after a little more rubbing, definitely.  Each one felt less like the  human-standard ping-pong ball and more the size of something you'd see tennis players batting around.  They were heavier, to boot.

	Bigger... his testicles were bigger than any human's.  With that realization, his building, simmering arousal finally boiled over, and he felt his cock stir within its fleshy confines.
	
	Moving his hands away, he instead leaned back on them and stared intently, anticipating the spectacle about to unfold between his legs.  The surface of his sheath undulated softly, even expanding just a little bit as it prepared for the show.  Its entrance was still closed, his cock sealed within by puckered, scaly skin, protected for the moment but aching to emerge.  He reached forward with his right hand while still supporting himself with his left.  Using a single finger, he teased the wrinkled flesh, poking a claw gently into the tight hole at the center.

	Immediately, he felt the hole begin to dilate.  It parted rapidly, skin folding back like a nylon stocking around the emerging cock.  The bellend was a deep black in color, and as it pushed its way to freedom, it became clear that its overall shape was unchanged.  On the outside, his genitals looked bestial. But within, their form was still purely, beautifully human.  
	
	Now there was no going back.  His groin came aflame with arousal.  The one-eyed snake was off and running and wouldn't stop for anything short of a bucket of ice water.  More and more shaft pushed its way out, growing turgid, expanding like a perverse balloon.  Jacob moved his hand to let the expanding organ rest along his fingertips, feeling its smooth underside slide over them as it grew.  His gaze was fixed, unblinking, disbelief struggling with the reality of what he saw and felt.

	“H... holy shit,” he breathed.  His member was originally five and a half inches when standing at full attention, maybe a little more if he was really turned on. Now it was definitely already past that, and not slowing in the slightest.  It continued to snake across his hand, hard enough to shake slightly with his heartbeat.  He wiggled his fingers, caressing the burgeoning phallus, silently encouraging it to keep growing.  

	   And grow it did.  With a brief surge brought on by Jacob's ministrations, it reached what had to be a full twelve inches. After that brief burst of effort, its surface became taut and shiny, suggesting that the end was getting close.  But amazingly, it still had more length to give, and strained another inch... then two... then three.  After the last pulse it relaxed.  Work completed, it proudly jutted from Jacob's straining sheath, bobbing to the beat of his pounding heart.

	At first, Jacob could only stare in awe.  He hardly believed it; that ebony monster before him was a part of his body, a cock that would put even the most prodigiously endowed porn star to shame.  Porn star, hell; I could probably beat a lot of horses in a cock-measuring contest, he thought.  It was unbelievable that the whole thing could fit in his sheath, which now rolled back slightly due to the size of the organ it had disgorged.  How long had he made his cock anyway, fourteen inches?  Fifteen?  Sixteen?  More?  Jacob wished he had a measuring tape, just to make sure.  In any case, it was definitely big enough for him to try something he'd always dreamed of doing.

	 Shakily, he reached out and took it in one hand, gripping just beneath the head and wrapping his fingers around as much of the shaft it as he could.  Holy Jesus, it's thick, he thought as he strained to touch finger to thumb.  The skin was tight and unyielding, and spotted with visible veins here and there, showing that he was practically granite-hard.  He could feel it throb powerfully in his grip, as if it was still desperately trying to grow longer for him.  

	A small bead of precum formed at its tip.  It almost looked like an invitation.        

	Eagerly accepting, Jacob pulled his dick toward himself, pressing it flush against his chiseled abs.  Then, with nary a second thought, he opened his mouth and bent forward, plunging as much shaft into his gaping pie-hole as he could.  

	Auto-fellatio.  Holy Grail of the inveterate masturbator, and he'd achieved it.  He didn't care how gay it was, or how strange; in fact he was convinced that most men secretly dreamed of doing it.  And now he was living that dream, without risking cracked ribs or a paralyzing neck injury.  He possessed a cock ginormous enough that he could blow himself, and he intended to go for the gusto.

	Jacob clenched his lips tight around his shaft and began thrusting in and out, frantically wriggling his tongue around.  He’d never pleasured a penis with his mouth parts before, so his technique was completely haphazard.  Luckily, the recipient was himself, and thus wasn’t going to complain.

The frenzied, sloppy nature of his oral attack meant getting a little tooth here and there, but he didn't give a shit.  He was lost in the moment, cognizant of nothing but the pleasure of his wondrously huge tool.  With his free hand, he cupped his balls and massaged them roughly, the tactile reminder of their new size and weight spurring him to pound ever harder.  His abused dick spat more gobs of seminal fluid into his mouth, and he diverted his tongue to probe its urethra in search of more.

	His colossal rod could only stand such a massive assault for so long, and a familiar pressure started building inside his groin, signaling an imminent release.  Shit, he thought in the small part of his mind that could still form coherent thoughts, it's too soon, I can't be done already.  

	 Suddenly, he felt a jabbing sensation from his cock, as if a pin had pricked it.  Yelling with surprise and pain, he instantly pulled out of his mouth.  His impending orgasm died on the vine, drowning in a sudden flood of adrenaline.  An appropriate biological response - if he'd just lacerated his dick, achieving sexual climax was the least of his concerns.  

	He was relieved when he looked and found no sign of injury, but whatever had poked him was sharp.  And the only things in his mouth that could be sharp were...

	His teeth.

	“Oh shit,” he said, realizing what that probably meant.  Carefully, he tested with his tongue.  It was as he suspected; his canines, and the incisors between them, were significantly longer and sharper than he remembered.  Fun time was over; the lab's computer was continuing with the process, its subject's carnal desires be damned.

	Rising to his feet, Jacob kept tonguing his enlarged front teeth while wincing from the nastiest case of blue balls he'd ever had.  He looked down.  His cock hung limply from its sheath, already more than half deflated.  Okay, stabbing himself with his newly formed dagger-like teeth had been a bit of a boner-killer.  But he was so pent up now... conservation be damned, maybe he could just quickly tease his meat popsicle back to life and finish himself off.  If he moved fast enough, he could get relief before...
	
	“Unnnngh!” he groaned, thoughts abruptly interrupted.  There was something behind his face pushing hard, something invisible and intangible.  It started out strong and only built from there, and Jacob could do nothing but close his eyes and moan through clenched teeth.  

	After a few seconds of escalating pressure the flesh finally gave way, and Jacob heard his facial bones crack and groan as they grew outward.  He felt a bizarre sensation - his face was like a scrunched-up sock out of the dryer with an invisible hand inside, pushing it outwards into its proper shape.  He felt his brow shifting as it grew heavier, and along the top of his forehead a series of pinpricks signified the arrival of horns.  His ears felt slightly prickly as they lengthened, growing resplendent frills that protruded outward from the sides of his head.  His neck even tightened a little as it grew slightly longer, taking on a subtly serpentine appearance.
	
	The intense sensations repeatedly came close to crossing the threshold into pain.  He could feel his lips stretching over his forming muzzle, growing thinner to the point where they practically disappeared.  His gums creaked in nauseating fashion as they shifted his altered teeth around, conforming to the changing shape of his mouth.   His tongue throbbed, stretching to proportions that would have made a certain grease-painted glam rocker jealous.  His nose no longer existed, having merged with the protrusion pushing out of his face, and his nasal passages tingled as they lengthened with it.
  		
	He reached out and touched his face, starting just below his eyes, and then running his hand downward.  He quickly encountered his muzzle and found that, despite all the pushing, it was probably only about six inches out so far.  It was definitely still growing, however.  He opened his eyes and crossed them inward, viewing the snout from either side.  Much bigger than his nose had been, but it blocked surprisingly little of his vision.
	
	His facial bones groaned again, deeply this time, making Jacob shudder like he'd heard fingernails on a chalkboard.  Wincing, he put a hand to each side of his face.  This will pass, he reassured himself. The growth would stop once his muzzle reached about a foot in length.  That was its length on the schematic, and events up to this point gave him no reason to believe there would be any deviation.  He just wished it would hurry the fuck up.

	In an attempt to distract himself from his ongoing discomfort, he decided to check on his horns.  He felt along his forehead with his fingers, sliding them back until they touched something hard: two long, hard shapes that swept backwards across his skull.  Those would be his “dominant” horns: long, thick, and impressive-looking, while next to and in-between them were three “lesser”,  smaller ones.   These were also backwards-facing but considerably shorter.  He felt underneath them, and confirmed he still had hair, still short but much thicker than it had been previously.

	He took hold of a larger horn between his fingers, and felt it as it slowly shoved further and further out of his head.  The skin bunched up around its base was slightly sore, but he didn't mind much.  He couldn’t wait to see what they looked like.  And now the pressure in his face had lessened, so he was probably almost finished…

	Suddenly, his entire head was on fire, his vision flecked with stars.  Staggering and gasping, he sat down heavily, the room spinning madly around him.  The pain was unbelievable.  It felt like he'd taken a ride on a Tilt-a-Whirl while suffering a pounding migraine.  His skull was shifting and distorting, sending a deluge of agonizing signals to his brain in protest.  And the worst part was that he could actually feel the bone sliding around underneath his skin.  His stomach churned, preparing to paint the holo-floor with vomit at any moment.      

	Dammit, I should have known this was coming, he thought through the haze of pain.  His schematic didn't stop at just the face; the basic shape of the human head was too squat and stumpy for him.  He'd wanted it to be sleeker and more avian in appearance, and was now paying the price for that desire.  With the changes he'd made, minor distortion of his cranium was inevitable, and the dizziness was his brain protesting what was happening to its chambers.  Obviously, it hurt like hell, but no actual damage to his mind could result.  The compiler would have told him otherwise.  

	And of course, said compiler was guaranteed to be one-hundred-percent bug-free.  Software engineers wrote it, after all.  Working in their spare time.  On a mind-bogglingly complicated program.  With no oversight.  

	He probably would've had a panic attack at that thought, but his brain's pain receptors had used up all the available bandwidth.

Suddenly, just as abruptly as it had arrived, the pain was gone.  Gradually, the room stopped spinning.  The specks in his vision cleared.  All that remained of the excruciating pain of a few moments ago was a mild throbbing, his brain seemingly pulsing slightly to his heartbeat.
  
	Seven times six is forty-two, he thought, Ummmm… Today is Friday.  My mother's name is Janis... I live in apartment 32B... Uhhh… god dammit, how are you even supposed to test for brain damage, anyhow?

	His cognitive processes didn't feel altered, so maybe he was all right.  In any case, he didn't have a way to check for sure, so he decided to let it slide for the time being.

	Now that his head wasn't trying to kill him anymore, Jacob became aware of all the new weight it was carrying.  He could feel his muzzle, his pointed, flared, fan-like ears, and the heavy half-crown of horns, without having to touch them.  His body realized that something had changed, and every nerve in his head was letting him know it.  He felt like a person who'd just had his face pushed out, skull reshaped, and scalp punctured by bony protrusions.  

	The changes he felt weren't just limited to the physical, either.  Now that his enormous ears were fully grown and his nasal passages properly lengthened, he noticed alterations to his hearing and sense of smell.  The whir of the spinning rings seemed louder now, and he could  make out subtleties in the sound that had been indiscernible minutes earlier, like the creaking groan of stressed metal.  And, as he'd feared, he did in fact smell like a hospital.  Every inhalation through his nasal holes brought a powerful scent of antiseptic, far stronger than before.  But unlike then, it also contained previously hidden whiffs of plastic, metal, plaster, silicon, and rubber, materials the lab and its machinery were made of.  

	In sum total, the effect of all these new sensations was nigh-overwhelming.

	I'll get used to it, he thought.  It was like the time he’d had to get braces at age 14.  It'd been impossible to ignore those bits of metal on his teeth for the first week, but they became increasingly familiar after that, if not comfortable.  Heck, his mouth had felt weird as hell when the orthodontist finally removed them.  This was just a little more extensive than braces, but he knew he could adapt, because this time he wanted it.

	Jacob shook his head, feeling his ears flop about slightly and relishing the brace of warm wind on his new snout.  His horns' eruption sites throbbed gently with the movement, still a little tender.  He reached up and stroked the smooth, curved surfaces, grabbing one of the long ones and shaking it slightly just to feel its solid connection to his head.  God, he wished he could see what he looked like now.  But it wasn't time for mirrors just yet - the show wasn't over.

	From a sitting position he slowly tried to rise, using his arms to steady himself.  The adrenaline pumping through his veins made him shake like a caffeine fiend which, along with some residual dizziness, meant he had to take his time.  Not only that, but he wasn't really used to his new digitgrade feet, so balance as a whole was sort of a challenge at the moment.  

	As he hoisted his butt off the floor, Jacob could feel it ache slightly.  Well, not the entire thing; mostly it was the coccyx, his “tailbone”, that gave him guff.  

	Hmmmmm, he thought to himself, that's either from the fall, or...

	A shit-eating grin spread across his long face.  He'd been looking forward to this part.  

	Deciding it'd be best if he remained sitting, Jacob lowered himself back down.  Instead, he stretched out and rolled over onto his stomach, twisting his body to get a good view of his scaly posterior.   A sight to behold for sure; he found he couldn't help ogling its tight, well-muscled contours.  Clearly, the slimming-and-buffing process hadn't skipped anything.  But while it was a great view, he didn't see what he was looking for.  His tailbone still ached, so maybe he actually had just bruised it?

	He ran his hand over his ass, just to make sure.  Wait... there was something there after all: a tiny bump at the base of his spine.  He tweaked it with finger and thumb, and winced as the ache intensified, almost like he'd bashed his funny bone.  Retracting his hand, he watched as the bump pulsated, and he felt the bones of his coccyx start to shift.  

	Jacob's heart leaped.  His tail was growing in.  He stared intently, transfixed, unmoving.  The hum of the whirling emitters, the wind and the constant motion they created at the edges of his vision, the heat that permeated the air around him; all these faded into insignificance as the universe  contracted until it contained nothing but what was before his eyes.  Unblinking, he watched, waiting.  

	His lungs started to burn, and he realized he'd forgotten to breathe.

	Quickly correcting that oversight, he inhaled sharply.  As if inflating in response, the bump lengthened and thickened, becoming a knob, then a fleshy protrusion.  Its pace was slow and steady, accompanied by the constant ache.  Now it was a stump about four inches long, not unlike something seen attached to a gila monster.  

	Clearly not satisfied, Jacob's tail paused for a moment before redoubling its pace, apparently determined to become an appendage worthy of adorning such a robust reptilian arse.  Once again, bones groaned and flesh distorted tortuously.  He grimaced slightly, feeling discomfort but by now used to the aches and pains that accompanied these sounds. 

	 Inch upon inch thrust into the air, while the base grew thicker to support it.  It was developing nicely now, approaching a size that looked more proportionate to the rest of his body.  A few seconds passed, and Jacob's tail had nearly reached two feet.

	As it began to droop to one side due to its ever-increasing length, a disturbing realization sliced through Jacob's glee like a knife.  He couldn't feel a thing.  Or rather, he couldn't feel enough. His tail was becoming ever more serpentine and muscular with each passing second, and yet his brain seemed to be aware of nothing other than moderate pain and the sensation of something heavy glued to his lower back.  

 	He reached out to the growing protrusion and grabbed it, feeling the warm scales under his grip, thus verifying to himself that it it was made of flesh and bone.  He squeezed enough that his fingers could faintly make out the hammering of his heart, but from the tail itself, there was no sensation.  It was like the times when he'd fallen asleep drunk and slept on his arm, waking up to find it numb and unresponsive.  But in those situations, feeling would quickly return once he removed the constricting pressure.  Here, with no pinched nerves or restricted blood flow, he felt nothing, not even a tingle.      

	His mind raced, and he looked away, thinking.  Okay, so I definitely fucked up somewhere.  Didn't hook the tail up right on the schematic or something like that.  The software was supposed to take care of that for me, but maybe there was an exception for limbs past the standard four.  I did skim some of the documentation, after all.  

	He craned his neck around to look at his tail again.  Still growing, still limp as a strand of overcooked spaghetti.  He shook his butt, and watched as the unresponsive limb flopped pathetically.  A burst of anger shot through him, as though it deliberately defied him by refusing to respond.  He looked away, furrowing his heavy brow.  

	No, I definitely cocked it up somehow.  God damn it, what was I even trying to do, making the whole body myself on the first go, with no help.  I was being a fucking moron, that's what.  'Course, that's what I do best, isn't it, charge in expecting perfection with one try.  Stupid, fucking stupid asshole.  

	 His tail reached the floor, and still kept on growing.  It tapered from its thickly-muscled,  eight-inch base to its tip,  the underside lined with familiar yellow scales, an extension of the strip that ran from his neck down between his legs.  From the way in which it bent, it was clearly extremely flexible, possibly even prehensile.  But what difference did it make if he couldn't even move it?  As he watched it snake across the glowing hard-light floor, approaching its prescribed length of six feet,  his only emotion was bitter frustration.      

	What the fuck chance did I have, anyway?  I'm scared shitless of letting anyone know about this, so forget ever getting any help.  Outside of Drew... but shit, even he doesn't have all the details.  He might understand, he might not.  But I didn't ask.  So basically, I'm a goddamn fucking cowardly, perverted, incompetent, mind-fucked asshole.  Hooray, go me.   Goddammit. 

	He looked again at the tail, which had finished growing and now sprawled limply across the floor.  He wagged his rear and watched with impotent fury as it shook back and forth lifelessly, like a dead python's back half grafted to his spine.  The elation was gone, all the excitement he'd felt about this new body was dead and buried, and that thing was the cause.  

	“FUCK!” he screamed, and pounded the floor with both fists.  He looked around him, eyes narrowed and teeth grinding.  The goddamn emitter array was still happily spinning around and around the platform, still showering him with its useless mutagenic rays.  Almost taunting him, really, with the promise it had once offered.

	Why the fuck hasn't it stopped?

	Then anger turned to despair, and a thick, suffocating cloud of depression settled over him.  The changes that had succeeded - like his musculature, his face, his groin – suddenly seemed inconsequential, meaningless.  If one part of the ensemble was ruined, what did the rest matter?  His body was incomplete, like a model airplane kit he'd painstakingly assembled piece by piece, only to find the landing gear missing.

	So, what now?  Jacob didn't know, but he sure as hell didn't want to lie on the floor staring at that useless limb any longer.  Slowly, laboriously, with the heavy motion of a man defeated, he gathered his legs and arms into a crouching position, and began to stand up.  

	 Just then, his eyes went wide as he heard something go “pop” in his head.  His brain felt strangely cold, as if his skullcap had been popped open like a cooler and a bag of ice dumped into his cerebral fluid.  His arms and legs, suddenly keen to imitate his tail, instantly lost all sensation, and he tumbled back to the ground as they went limp.  

	One of his longer horns ricocheted off the floor as he landed, provoking a grunt from deep within Jacob's throat as his neck wrenched to the side.  He would have made more noise, but he couldn't move his jaw.  His limbs were numb, immobile as if they were no longer a part of him.  Just like his tail had been.

	Lying there, Jacob fought the urge to panic.  It didn't help that his body had ended up in an awkward position, as he'd been starting to stand when the disconnect happened.  He was flat on his back with his head bent to the left from where his horn had collided with the floor, and his arms were like limp noodles at his side.  His legs remained bent at the knees, feet and talons generating enough friction with the floor to keep them from relaxing.         

	He took took stock of his situation: immobile, and without a single spark of feeling coming from any of his limbs.   But he was still breathing, and the lack of agonizing chest pain meant his heart probably hadn't stopped.  No, as he listened, he could clearly feel it pounding in his chest.  Overhead, those goddamn emitters were still spinning, softly humming as they spat out their warm orange light.  They were still going, so clearly, they were doing something.    

	 These rational thoughts struggled against the realization that, as far as his central nervous system was concerned, his body was a limbless torso, and always had been.  Not only could he not feel his arms and legs, his brain had no memory of what they should feel like.  He wasn't even experiencing the “phantom limb” phenomenon described by amputees, where the parts seemed to be connected and the nerve impulses could still be sent, despite their conduits no longer existing.  There was simply nothing there.  An utterly terrifying, alien sensation.

	Okay, he thought, trying to stem his growing panic, every time I've been afraid something went wrong so far, it worked itself out.  The machine hasn't stopped... maybe there's more to this bit?  I mean, I've lost all voluntary muscle function, right?  So maybe something's happening there, some sort of brain alteration?

	 He felt a glimmer of hope.  Turning his attention inwardly to his brain, he noticed the metaphorical ice that covered portions of it melting, the cold patches slowly warming.  Holy shit, he speculated, maybe my motor centers are being rebooted?  He felt like a complete dork for making the analogy, but what if it were true?

 	Suddenly, he noticed that he once again had arms and legs, and a weak sensation coming from them.  It was the nerves in his skin starting to once again transmit information to his brain.  Despite the heat in the air, the holographic floor was cool against his back, and that same feeling was spreading to his extremities.   The nerves that ran through them were flickering back to life like florescent light bulbs.  

	Focusing on his returning sense of touch, he sighed with relief as the sensation expanded into a renewed connection to his limbs.  Experimentally, he flexed a finger, and was glad to see it respond as expected.  He wiggled his three stumpy, taloned toes, and could feel them move in response, rubbing against each other.  Everything was back, both arms, both legs, and...

	Oh, my.

	He boggled for a moment, unsure what to make of the bizarre new signals coming from the base of his spine.  No longer just a useless weight hanging off his butt, he could feel his tail, and the air's warmth over every inch of its terrific length.  It was uncanny; just like his brain had been telling him moments earlier that he'd never had arms or legs, it now insisted that he'd always had a fifth appendage.  

	Rapidly, he flipped over onto his stomach, revisiting the position he'd been in earlier.  He felt his tail's muscles involuntarily flexing as he did, and the sensations made his heart pound with childlike excitement.  Glancing over a shoulder, he surveyed his backside yet again.  He delighted in how his tail no longer laid limply along the floor, but instead its tensed, responsive muscles made it curl slightly upward as it jutted from his body, before running south between his legs. 
	
	“Time to run some tests,” he said, grinning like an idiot.

	He started by thrashing it from side to side, as if he were trying to use it for propulsion.  Gleefully, he swung it so hard that it smacked against the floor, like he was an overenthusiastic terrier.  Then, loosening his muscles, he let it drop, marveling at its weight. 

	 Narrowing his eyes slightly in concentration, he raised it up, and managed to curl just the tip around and back over itself.  This was simply amazing; the level of control was fine enough that he could probably pick up a broom or a lightweight section of pipe.  

	Now, he started to curl the entire thing back, starting at the base.  It wasn't easy going, as the lower, thicker parts of his tail weren't very flexible, and weren't really meant to move in such a way.   He squinted his eyes, straining muscles he'd never had before. Finally, he got it to bend far enough that he could reach out and grab the end.  

	Smiling to himself, he shook his appendage in his grip, then wiggled its prehensile tip.  It was almost like his tail was waving “hello” to him.   	
	
	“Hello yourself, beautiful,” he cooed, and then chuckled lightly to himself.  God, he wasn't only becoming a fantastical creature; he was changing into a narcissist as well.  

	Well, the purest form of love is self-love, right?  I think some philosopher said that...

	Playfully, he made his tail pull against his grasp, as if it were trying to escape.  It lurched back and forth, struggling valiantly, but he held fast.  Actually, although he was just fooling around, its strength surprised him.  Maybe he could lift more with it than he thought?

	Letting go, he allowed his tail to relax, and it rolled back until the first foot of it or so was standing perpendicular to his backside, the rest lolling off to the left.  He stared at it silently for a while, flexing its myriad muscles and watching it move at his command.  He found it absolutely entrancing.

	“Okay, so maybe I have a tail fetish,” he said to himself with a smile, “That's not a terrible thing, right?”

	Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed blurry movement in his near vision, around his shoulders.  Refocusing his eyes, he saw that a new set of lumps were pushing out of his back, one right over each shoulder blade.  Accompanying them were the muted beginnings of that familiar transformational ache.

	“Oh-ho-ho, what do we have here?” he said jovially.  These were doubtlessly his wings, the last piece of the puzzle.  He couldn't completely make them out due to their position on his back, but he could see they were shifting and twitching.  Much like his tail stub had before really starting to grow.    

	Sure enough, the bumps almost immediately began to distend, and the groaning of  distorting bone and flesh could once again be heard.  They were lengthening rapidly, much like his tail had, only this time Jacob could see the lumpy shapes of brand-new bones forming, rather than old ones changing shape.  It made sense, as his wings would essentially be an extra pair of arms jutting from his shoulders.  

	A full bone had just formed on each limb, and another was beginning to grow just past it, along with the connective tissue necessary to make a joint.  The pain continued, present but manageable.  Not unlike what his tail had felt like, only this time coming from two separate sites instead of just the one.  

	Leathery skin grew on the underside of the developing wings, descending gradually like a curtain.  The second “arm” bones finished their growth, and now the “hands” began to appear.  The structure of both wings was extremely similar to those of a bat, yet stylized, keeping with typical depictions of dragons.  Their “fingers” were going to be heavily elongated, and articulated such that they could spread themselves to let the wings unfurl. 

	Jacob was unsurprised that he couldn't feel anything yet.  It was the same scenario as with his tail, after all.  The reason behind both was now obvious: as a human, he didn't have an extra limb poking out from his lower back, nor did he have two more sprouting from his shoulders.   His brain, therefore, naturally didn't know how to talk to them.  At the moment, all he could feel was an increasing weight hanging from his back, and the usual aches and pains he associated with the transformation process.  Another motor center reboot would doubtlessly get them online and responding properly.

	Good thing I'm already lying on the ground this time, he thought to himself.       
	
	A bit more shuddering and cracking, and his wings were almost fully formed.  They looked positively majestic, with a span of at least twenty feet.  Jacob could hardly wait to try them out.  He'd always dreamed of flying under his own power, and now it was close to being a reality.  The laws of physics might try to put the kibosh on that, but as he understood, he could negotiate with them.  Using science as a mediator, of course.

	With one final push, the wings reached their full size, and relaxed slightly.  Jacob could hardly believe how big they were.  They wouldn't be as obtrusive when folded up, but  would still make ordinary activities like crouching, lying on his back or, heck,  fitting through doorways more difficult.  Still, it was worth it, in his estimation, for the gift of flight.  Not to mention that proper dragons always had wings.

	Although he was still waiting for the “reboot” that would let him control them, his wings suddenly folded up of their own accord.  Now that they were compacted into the tightest possible shape, Jacob was slightly relieved to find that they didn't seem to be as cumbersome as he'd expected.  But still... maybe he could find a way to temporarily remove them, for when he didn't feel like flying?  

	As if I'd ever feel that way.

	He continued to lie still, on his stomach.  He thought of what it would feel like once his wings were fully “connected”, when he'd be able to beat them against the air and sense the wind caressing their leathery contours.  The muscles running through them, as well as those that had developed at the connection points on his shoulders, were tremendously thick and solid-looking.  Jacob could tell they were built for pure strength, rippling with latent power.  Nothing less could generate enough lift to get his body off the ground.

	He suddenly realized that he'd been flicking his tail back and forth in anticipation.  He curled it back again, touching its tip to the end of one of his wings.  He could only feel half of what he was supposed to, but that would soon change, he thought.

	However, he was soon proven wrong.  

	A loud “click” sounded through the cavernous lab.  Abruptly, the orange light of the emitters shut off, leaving only the LED floor lights shining through the hologrammatic platform.  The rings' constant whirs shifted in pitch, growing lower and lower as the apparatus wound down.

	Jacob lifted himself up on his hands, and looked around.  

	“What the fuck?” he said.   

	The rings came to a full stop, and rotated until they were flush with each other, as they had begun.  With a loud “CLANK” and the hum of a spinning drive shaft, they descended back into their home at the perimeter of the platform. 

	“PHASE ONE COMPLETE,” said the robo-voice, almost as if in reply, “PHASE TWO WILL COMMENCE IN T-MINUS THREE HUNDRED SECONDS.”

	“No, seriously, what the FUCK?” shouted Jacob, clambering to his feet.  “You stopped too soon!  You didn't hook my wings up!”

	There was no reply.  The overhead fluorescents popped back to life, and Jacob could once again see the drab off-white concrete walls of the laboratory.  

	“Goddamn it, RESUME!  RESTART!  Do SOMETHING!  It's not finished!”

	The computer ignored his commands, or maybe it just wasn't programmed to respond to them.  Okay, this time I did do something wrong, he thought, but what was it?

	 Behind him, the floor image rippled, and a new whirring noise began.  He turned to face the sound and found that the three mirrors were once again rising out of the holographic floor.  At first, he could only see his taloned footpaws reflected in them, but as they rose, more and more of his body came into view.  Finally.  He was finally going to see what he looked like.  Jacob stared, fixated, his nonfunctional wings forgotten for the time being. 
	
	 The mirrors eventually came to a halt with a sounding “CHUK” and sudden jolt, indicating they were fully extended.  They now reflected an image of his entire body, and Jacob stood silently, overcome by what he saw.  It was hard to believe that he wasn't looking into a trick funhouse mirror, or a cleverly disguised TV screen.  But the creature staring back at him from the glass, the one wearing the same utterly gobsmacked expression across its reptilian face that he felt himself making, was not only real – it was him.

	And what a creature it was.  Much taller than the puny human man he'd seen in there the last time, it was a towering seven feet tall.  Powerful, finely-toned muscles coursed across its broad frame.  Thick biceps like softballs protruded from its upper arms, on its chest two taut slabs of pectoral muscle sat atop a tower of bulging six-pack abdominals, and its legs were twin rippling pillars of sinew.  From head to toe, it was covered in brilliant sapphire-green scales, speckled with darker-hued patches along the backs of its arms, the fronts of its legs, and near its extremities.  A strip of golden yellow started at the tip of its muzzle and ran down through the center of its body.  

	Jacob smiled, and the creature smiled back, its thin lips parting slightly to display savage, pointed teeth.  Its sleek visage was handsome in an unusual way, bestial features merged with human facial articulation, eyes shining with a clear intelligence.  The multi-tinted, pointed, fan-like ears seemed almost oversized, and its short, raven-black hair its fell off the sides of its head, interrupted in an elliptical pattern by bony white horns.  

	He began to turn, and it turned with him.  He was starting to come to grips with what he was seeing.  The disconnect he felt between himself and his mirror image had been powerful at first, but his brain had almost squared itself with the new reality.  Now, he thought of Halloween 1999, standing in front of the mirror in the dragon costume his mother had made for him, feeling simultaneously like himself and something else.  

	One piece of that memory was, happily, not reflected in the present: disappointment from knowing what he saw wasn't real; that he was still a human boy underneath, only playing at being a shape shifter.  But not this time.  This time, his skin wasn't made of velour.  His tail wasn't a stiff rod of stuffed fabric sewn to his butt.  His horns weren't corrugated cardboard.  His eyes weren't slotted so he could navigate the block without unintentionally hugging a tree.  What he saw was what he was.      

	He continued to turn, his smile broadening.  He noticed horizontal black stripes lining the sides of his arms and legs, but didn't remember putting them there.  But they looked nice and broke up the scaly pattern of his skin somewhat. Similar stripes ran along the tops of his wings, and along their outer edges.  It almost didn't matter that those majestic things still hung uselessly from his shoulders, folded and immovable.  He just looked so damned beautiful, not to mention hot.

	With that thought, his gaze drifted south.  His large, yellow-scaled sheath still protruded stiffly from his nethers, oversized testicles hanging loosely underneath it in their similarly-colored sack.  They actually looked even bigger than he remembered, closer now to fat, ripe oranges than tennis balls, although that might have been a side effect of the interrupted wank session earlier.

	Staring at his impressive manhood, Jacob could only feel an inextricable desire to become intimate with himself again.   Succumbing without a moment's resistance, he reached around with one hand and cradled his balls.  With the fingertips of his opposite hand, he gently stroked the top of his sheath, and felt the onyx monster inside begin to stir.  Caught up in all the excitement, he'd forgotten how incredibly horny he was.  His sheath's puckered entrance started to open, ready to disgorge its contents for another play session.

	“ATTENTION.  MID POINT REACHED,” blared the computer, “T-MINUS ONE HUNDRED FIFTY SECONDS TO PHASE TWO.”

	Jacob jerked slightly at the surprise announcement, and ceased his ministrations.  His libido was made of sterner stuff however, and proceeded in its mission undaunted.  Jacob's penis rocketed out of its fleshy pod like an MX missile, eager to finally deliver its overdue payload.  It deployed rapidly from his sheath, seemingly quicker than before.

	He watched its progress in the mirror, hands still frozen.  Two and a half minutes to the next phase.  One hundred fifty endless seconds of agony.  Every cell in his body screamed at him to follow his base instincts, to hold on to that growing sceptre of flesh and jerk it into submission.  Fire raged in his prostate, tingling sensitivity ran up and down his hardening member, and his engorged balls squirmed with need.  His hands were already in position, and once he got started, it wouldn't take long.  Just a little relief.  It would feel so good.

	God, look at how big it is already.  But... no.  No,  I've got to save myself for later.  Lots more coming later... soon, even.     
	
	With truly herculean effort, he disengaged his hands from his junk and slowly, shakily, returned them to his sides.  He had to ignore it.  Just wait for it to go away.  It would go away if he could just stay strong.  Looking his mirror image square in the eyes, he tried to ignore the slowly growing charcoal-colored pillar wiggling just at the bottom of his view.

	Just come on, it's only a couple of minutes.  You can do this.  Can't eat your sundae without the whipped cream and cherry on top.  Remember, you didn't jerk off for almost two weeks on that one family camping trip.  Strength... strength...

	What he needed was a distraction.   Just two minutes' worth of distraction.  Maybe the computer could help?  It hadn't been listening to him before, but maybe all its voice processing threads had been tied up, or something.  Whatever.  It was worth a shot.  Better than punching himself in the dick for two minutes at least, which was the only other thing he could think of.

	“Ummm, hello?  Computer?”

	Was that a tone?  Had it just played a tone to indicate it was listening?  He decided to assume it had, and continued.

	“Uhhh... hi.  Could... um... could you help me with this?”  He gestured pathetically to his now fully turgid sixteen-inch erection, taking care not to look directly at it or accidentally brush it with his hand.

	There was a pause of several seconds.  Then came the response:

	“CERTAINLY, JDRAKEN89.  PLEASE STAND BY.”

	Jacob's breath caught in his throat.  He could have either just found his salvation or his doom, depending on how the computer interpreted that command.  Just how smart was it, anyway?

	He suddenly became aware of movement underneath his feet.  He looked down, and saw that the holographic floor was changing.  It sprouted dozens of tiny holes in its shimmering surface, which were distributed haphazardly in a random pattern all around where he was standing.  

	He puzzled at them for a few moments.    As they continued to appear, they began to remind him of something.  In fact, their arrangement was becoming less and less random, and more like the holes of...    

	A shower head.

	As the realization hit him, and before he could react, there was a sound of rushing liquid. Small yet powerful jets of water sprayed from the array of holes.  Instantly, Jacob was struck all along the underside of his body; the bottoms of his feet, the underside of his tail, with several streams pounding the length of his cock.  He jumped and made a sound that was halfway between a draconic roar and the piercing scream of a high school cheerleader.  This was partly from surprise, and partly because the water's temperature was just above freezing.

	“Aaaaah!  Fuck!  FUUUUUUUCK!”

	He danced about from one foot to the other and, betrayed by his unfamiliar new feet, quickly lost balance.  He landed flat on his ass, tail thankfully tucked between his legs, but the bottoms of his wings striking the floor and bending in a way that would've been uncomfortable, could he feel them.   With lightning speed, he flipped over onto his stomach, still screaming as the holes kept mercilessly coating the front of his body with frigid water.  With stiff, jerky motions, he lifted himself with his hands and leaped back to his feet.

	“Stop!  STOP ALREADY!  I'm GOOD!” he yelled.  He couldn't feel much of anything other than his rapidly dropping core temperature, nor see very well with flecks of water spattering his eyes, but his boner could not possibly have survived this icy onslaught.  Either way, he definitely didn't feel like touching himself anymore.

	No, what he really felt like doing was running.  His instinctual brain finished weighing the relative merits of fight versus flight, and settled solidly upon the latter.  Its orders, then, were clear: to get out of the numbing spray as quickly as possible.   And no falling down this time.

	Obeying, he took off like a shot, booking as hard as he could for the edge of the platform.  But the holes followed him, moving in formation under his feet.  He leaped over the side and skidded to a stop, hoping they wouldn't be able to reach him.  His hopes were instantly dashed as the spewing spigots effortlessly transitioned to the broader floor of the lab, and continued their stinging deluge.

	 Giving another bellow of displeasure, he broke into a run once again, although this time his destination was unclear.  Maybe he could still outrun it.  Or maybe the computer would recognize that its objective was complete, and turn off the jets.  It would turn them off eventually, wouldn't it?  Modern artificial intelligence wasn't advanced enough to produce a program that liked to prank, or even torture its users.  Right?    

	  He thought this to himself as he sprinted across the broad plain of gray that was the enormous lab's simulated floor.  So far, the spouts were doing a good job of keeping up, as well as making sure he remained coated in icy water.  But now he found himself minding it less and less.  Despite himself, he was getting slightly used to the temperature and offsetting it somewhat with the heat of exertion.  And, he was thrilled to find that thanks to his long legs and streamlined musculature, he had the speed of an Olympic sprinter, with endurance that could only be described as superhuman.  He felt like he could keep running for hours.  

	Still, this was getting pretty tiresome.  He had to have killed enough time by now.  And his arousal had definitely gone.  Hell, his gonads had probably sucked back up into his abdominal cavity, hoping to snuggle with his kidneys for warmth.

	He slowed his pace somewhat.  The water kept on spewing, its controller undeterred.  Gradually, he decreased the pumping of his legs, and came to a full stop.  The spouts defiantly continued their spray for a few seconds, but then seemed to realize the fun was over, and began to weaken.  The jets of water bobbed lower and lower, until they sank into the floor, and the holes quickly closed behind them.  

	Jacob suddenly became aware of how chilly it was in that big, open room.  He folded his arms against his body and started to shiver, wishing he could unfurl his wings and wrap them around himself for additional insulation, or that he was the kind of dragon that could breathe fire.  Clearly, despite his appearance suggesting otherwise, he was still a warm-blooded mammal.

	“Thanks, that was just what I needed,” he said to the ceiling, voice dripping with sarcasm.

	“SUBJECT HAS LEFT DESIGNATED OPERATING AREA, “droned the computer in response.  “SUBJECT MUST RETURN TO PLATFORM BEFORE PROCEDURE CAN CONTINUE.  YOU HAVE THIRTY SECONDS BEFORE COMMENCEMENT OF PHASE TWO.”

	“Right, right,” he replied, and began making his way back.  As he walked briskly to the platform, still shivering and cursing under his breath, he could swear he briefly heard a quiet crackling sound coming from the unseen speakers, sort of like static, but not quite.  Almost like a coarse, raspy laughter, as if the AI was... snickering?   Could this computer not only be sentient, but a total dick as well?  A worrisome thought, but unlikely, he told himself.  

	He made it back just as the overhead lights shut off, the floor LEDs came back on, and the AI began counting the final ten seconds.  Approaching the center of the platform, the mirrors had gone, and he saw the hospital gown lying in a heap off to one side, where he had left it. He bent down to pick it up and held it out in front of him, letting it dangle from his claws.  It was so small now, that even if he could tie the string all the way around his body to secure it, it would barely be long enough to cover up his privates.

	A loud clank sounded, and Jacob heard the sound of the drive shaft spinning back to life.  He tossed the gown to one side, into the darkness at the edge of the platform.  Clearly, he wouldn't be needing it anymore.

	As before, the edges of the platform separated, and the twin rings began moving back into their impossible positions.  It was then that Jacob remembered what was about to happen.  He was going to complete the transformation, open the sluice gates of weirdness, and let his freak flag fly.  He'd been uneasy about the sheath before, but now he was about to set sail for a new horizon of deviant debauchery.  

	He sincerely hoped that still nobody was watching.           

	As the emitters' warm, carrot-orange light bathed the dais and the rings began to spin up once again, Jacob couldn't help but feel a twinge of regret.  He had just been getting into this body, and now he was about to make a series of significant alterations to it.  He reminded himself that this interstitial stage of the transformation was saved as a separate schematic, and that he could always return to it if he so desired.  For now, it was better to see the whole affair through to its conclusion.  

	 Buy the ticket, take the ride, he thought, recalling that one Hunter S. Thompson novel.   Fitting, since from his perspective, this whole experience wasn't entirely unlike a hallucinogenic bender, although it was a lot more lucid.  Still, things were about to get downright surreal.  Sort of like how they were now, only moreso.

	The rings spun at maximum speed now, making the same steady hum as before.  Jacob felt a lump in his throat from the anticipation.  How long did he have to wait?

	The answer was apparently “not long at all”, as the lump immediately began to tense.  It quickly built to an almost unbearable degree of tautness, as though something inside his neck was attempting to collapse into itself.  Jacob grabbed his throat with both hands, and coughed loudly.  Was his throat closing up?  That was what it felt like, although he wasn't having any trouble breathing.  

	As the tension mounted, reality became less and less of a factor; he knew his windpipe was swelling shut, just like a suicidal peanut allergy sufferer who'd scarfed a box of Nutter Butters.  His heart quickened as mortal panic began to set in.  Falling to his knees, he choked and wheezed, rational mind oblivious to the fact that his breathing was actually not restricted at all.  Doom was upon him, and the unbearable clenching tightness in his neck was all the proof he needed.    

	The room started to spin, and Jacob became light-headed.  The compression was so tight now that it felt like his flesh was about to collapse into a gravitational singularity.  Stars flecked his vision, and he felt himself passing out.  It was just then that the squeezing abruptly ceased, leaving him kneeling on the floor coughing and supporting himself with his arms.

	As he stood back up, he noticed no residual sensation of the terrible tightness remained.  His larynx felt completely normal, as though nothing had changed at all.  Jacob knew better, though, and moved one of his hands to his neck.  As he ran it slowly downward he made a startling discovery: his Adam's apple was gone.   

	His heart skipped a beat.  “Hello?” he said hesitantly, and immediately clasped both hands to the end of his muzzle.  His voice no longer sounded male.  

	“This... is my voice?,” he said.   

	It was indeed, but instead of his original masculine baritone, it had become something  more akin to the dulcet timbre of a mid-20th century movie starlet.  Smooth and throaty, it probably had a broad vocal range to boot, if he ever decided to take up singing.  His mind, having only just accepted the strange lizard-man in the mirror as its new body and still reeling from the gymnastics involved, struggled to recognize this strange voice as its own.       
	
	But before he could even begin to get a handle on what had just happened, his scalp tingled, and something slid down his muscular back, between his wings.  At the same time, gossamer strands of black intruded upon his vision, grouping at the sides.  His hair had just experienced several months of growth in a few seconds.  Apparently, it now hung just about down to the base of his tail, and felt soft and smooth, as if it'd been treated by an extremely expensive salon.  Bringing a handful before his eyes, he saw it was still the same deep black color.

	“Oh man, oh man,” he said while running the silky locks back and forth between finger and thumb, “we're actually doing this, aren't we?”   

	“Yes,” said a voice from above.  

	Jacob swallowed heavily.  

	“Any chance we could... slow it down a bit?  Like before?”  

	“No.”
	
	His nipples began to tingle.  In response, he closed his eyes and locked both arms at his sides, clenching his maw tightly shut.   He knew exactly what was happening now, but fear wouldn't let him look.  A chill swept through him, and he started to shake.  His sense of self, of his psychological limitations, of his propriety; all were now as a crumbling castle held up by rickety wooden supports.  And the AI, that bastard AI, was taking a sledgehammer to the entire edifice.

	He tilted his head back and clenched his teeth hard, feeling the lips that covered them curl back in a bestial display.  Sweat dripped down his back, flowing around the muscled protrusions of his wings.  His tail twitched spastically back and forth, lashing the floor with audible thumps.  A growl of consternation built in his throat, rumbling deep and resonant, but also feminine in timbre.

	You wanted this, he thought.  Well, here it is.

	 The tingling had stopped, and now he felt a sense of mild pressure in his pectorals.  He could distinctly sense lumps on the tips of them, around his nipples, that were slowly growing in weight with every beat of his racing heart.  He thought briefly about reaching up to touch them, to find out what they felt like, to feel them expand.  His arms, though, refused to move, staying stiffly at his sides, and his eyelids felt like they were welded shut.  

	He gasped when a sudden constriction of his waist surprised him, like a belt had cinched around it and a sadistic tailor was pulling it much, much too tight.  He could feel the pelvic region beneath start to spread out in response, as though compensating for the loss of girth just above it.

 	You're missing it, you know, said a nagging voice out of the corner of his mind.  You're getting exactly what you wanted, and you won't even watch.

	I don't need to see, he responded, I just need to hold on.

	Hold on to what, exactly?

	My...

	 His face, from muzzle to brow, ached as the bone underneath slid about, making fine adjustments to its shape and density.  He gritted harder, swished faster, growled deeper.

 	Again, what are you afraid of giving up?

	Myself, he thought.  I need to hold on to who I am.

	 There was a brief pause, and then the voice responded.  It sounded jovial, not condescending:

 	Silly bitch.  This is you.

 	Jacob opened his eyes wide.  He stared a thousand-yard stare into the darkness, past the whirring blur of machinery above, and a sudden epiphany struck him.  The voice was right.  Regardless of the changes, the strange creature he'd chosen to become was him.  Not because it was a “true reflection” of his “inner being” or something similarly trite, but because the urge, the desire that had driven him to create and then inhabit a body like this was an inextricable part of him.  

  	He thought of stories rapaciously consumed during his formative years, tales of magic or science gone awry, where men and women transformed into monsters.  As he absorbed them, their shared theme had lodged itself deep inside his imagination, inundating his daydreams with visions of himself endowed with a fantastic power: the ability to alter his own body as he saw fit. In particular, with bits and pieces borrowed from other species.  Maybe there’d be a change in stance upon occasion, an alteration of mass here and there, or a few extra limbs.  Gender, too, could become a sliding scale, another attribute to tweak and play with endlessly.  And then, there was the aftermath, where he could explore that new self in as many different ways as he could think of.  

	That fascination had led him to the present moment.  One he thought would never come.  One that he'd told himself could never be possible.  “Magic doesn't exist, Jacob” they always said.  But now technology, as ever indistinguishable from sorcery, made it so.  No longer a mundane human man bound by the stifling laws of physics and biology, he was a shapeshifter at last.  And yet, his subconscious mind still wanted him to resist, to reject his reverie like a destructive foreign pathogen that needed to be expelled, as if it hadn't been a part of him all along.  A last-ditch defense, but why was it necessary?  What did he really have to be afraid of?     
       	  
	Absolutely nothing.

	With that thought, he unlocked his neck and let his head swing downward.  Immediately, he saw a pair of rounded peaks cresting over his chest's horizon, bulging from his sculpted pectorals.  Nearly perfect in form, pert, plump, teardrop-shaped, sporting half-inch long, pure black nipples that were surrounded with silver dollar-sized areolae.  And as he watched, they continued to develop, filling out before his eyes.           

	Jacob reached out to grab them with both hands, trepidation shoved aside to make room for slathering lust.  He caressed their supple contours, letting them slide over his fingers like soft lumps of bread dough.  They were quite large already, nearly a handful, and probably approaching a D-cup.  But he knew they had much, much further to go.

	Tilting his head back again, he let out a near-orgasmic sigh as he continued to grope himself.  He could feel his breasts steadily blossoming under his grip, flesh expanding at impossible rates, obscuring more and more of his firm pectorals.  Soon they were outgrowing his sizable hands, flowing effortlessly into the double-D range, soon to continue to F and beyond.  Arousal ran hot through his veins once again, and his dormant maleness surged back to life.  This time, though, his hands were thoroughly occupied. The gigantic rod reached its full extent in record time, but found itself left to bob in front of its host, ignored.

	God, did he love boobs.  And now he had a pair of his very own.  He just couldn't stop squeezing them, smushing them together, running his fingers over their erect, sensitive nipples.  And with every second that passed he had more to work with, more glorious titflesh to explore.  He looked and saw that his breasts had each surpassed his head in size, and continued to surge ever outward.  Their areolae were now comparable in diameter to drink coasters, and both nipples had added an additional half-inch in length.  He could feel the weight pulling him forward, but his highly developed neck and back muscles bore it with ease.   

	  Something shifted within his abdomen, and he abruptly stopped the self-molestation.  An annoying cramp was building in what felt like his digestive tract, recalling experiences as a human college student eating way too much Taco Bell in one sitting.  It suddenly released, and he felt his innards move aside, making room for something new: growing warmth deep inside, pulsing, radiating.  

	His breathing quickened; his heart thumped heavily.  This could only mean one thing, the arrival of his gender-bending experiment's final and most dramatic phase.  Thoughts of the female reproductive organs forming inside him at that moment allowed anxiety to creep back to the fore.  He'd mostly dealt with all those nagging thoughts, but their ghostly remnants still flitted about his mind, looking for a chance to reinstate themselves at full strength.  He began to doubt of his readiness for what was about to happen.

	Mercifully, the process gave his fear no time to metastasize.  A new sensation arrived, this time between his legs.  Beginning as a single needling point right behind his scaly scrotum, it immediately started growing vertically down his taint.  It had the feel of an extremely dull knife, one that seesawed back and forth as if trying to use pressure to compensate for its lack of edge.  It stopped shortly before reaching his tightly-clenched pucker, continuing to undulate, but with steady speed and force, as if unsure of its purpose.  Jacob's hands, still on his breasts, clenched tightly in agitation.  His knockers were enormous by this point, significantly exceeding his grasp and overflowing the sides of his fingers.
	
	Slowly, the invisible blade's back and forth motion increased in speed.  Like a butter knife trying to slice a skirt steak, the strokes rapidly grew in pressure.  The feeling was gut-wrenching, like the most sensitive part of Jacob's body was experiencing the slowest, broadest stabbing ever committed.  If this continued, his flesh would eventually cleave in two just from the sheer force.  Escalating, the torture continued, somehow staying short of inflicting pain, but on the verge of starting at any second.     

	Jacob held his breath as the maddening pressure rapidly built to a climax.  He could feel the skin begin to bifurcate, splitting under the abuse into a pair of loose, fleshy strips.  Still the thin trail of blunt force strengthened, stretching connective tissue to its absolute limit.  Finally, it could take no more, and with an audible “pop” the two sides finally separated, shaking slightly as the incredible tension released.  They hung there, pulsing and sore while a yawning hole formed between them and began secreting a moist, sticky substance that Jacob instinctively knew was not blood.  He let out a gasp that reverberated through the cavernous lab, and fell to his knees.

	“Oh shit... oh shit... oh shit,” he chanted softly to himself.
	
	At the top of the newborn chasm, just south of his balls and underneath the newly separated flaps of meat, he felt a new heat as a small, round lump squirmed its way out of him like a particularly determined earthworm.  Jacob winced as it burst from its confines, immediately finding moist, warm embrace in the mass surrounding it.  Quickly, the small knob expanded, becoming taut and turgid, a new erection to complement the one he already sported; comparatively diminutive, but still intense.  It joined its blanketing flaps of flesh to pulsate in a singular throbbing symphony, conducted by the turgid black cock bouncing in front.

	He froze.  The absurdity of his present situation cast itself into sharp relief against his ingrained notions of reality.  He had a vagina.  A female sex organ between his thighs, just behind the male one that had always been there.  It was ridiculous.  Inconceivable.  His confused ego took this as the last straw, and recoiled from the situation, separating from his now-alien body.  Briefly becoming a distant observer, it floated free. Its attention fixated on the scene below where, beneath the spinning arms of an impossible machine sat a bizarre aberration, a creature that could never exist in nature.  

	Abruptly, violently, his sense of self slammed back into place.  What AM I now, anyway? he thought to himself, lucidity restored.   How would science classify a seven foot upright-walking lizard with wings, outsize mammalian traits, and two sets of genitalia?  Traditional taxonomy wasn't equipped to handle a beast like him.  And on a less grandiose, more personal level, could he even refer to himself as “him” anymore?  Was he a “he”, a “she”... an “it”?  Or something entirely new, a “hir”?

	No no no, too confusing.  Not now.  I'm male, a guy, yeah... at least 'till I get things sorted out.

	He stayed still, on his knees, feeling heat pour from his new organ, watching his cock bob softly before him as it slowly dripped pearls of pre-spunk.  His tremendous breasts were heavy in his hands, having now ceased their expansion.  From his perspective, they looked like overinflated basketballs, dominating the lower part of his vision, making it certain he would never see his feet without bending over.  Their size was such that they could not only provide the standard-issue top, under, and side-boob, but also the vanishingly rare back-boob.  At least they would if his wings weren’t in the way.

	He couldn’t stand it any more.  With a single shaking hand, he grabbed his ample scrotum, lifting it as high as he could.  The other hand slipped beneath it, into the warm, wet cavern that now lurked between his thighs.  Instantly, a jolt of tingling pleasure rocketed to his brain, and he cried out in surprise.  Tenderly, he took a pair of fingers and slid them deeper into the slit, prompting a new deluge of lovely sensation.  He sighed and closed his eyes in utter bliss.

	“Oh shit… ohhhhhh shiiiiiiiit!” he drawled.

	Slowly, sensuously, he fingerbanged himself, shifting fingers to caress the velvety walls of his newly formed birth canal and tease the turgid lips of his labia.  He panted heavily, realizing for the first time why the women he’d been with tended to make so much noise in bed.  Getting a little more adventurous, he slid upwards, looking for his erect pleasure-buzzer.  Finding it easily, he took thumb and forefinger and gave it a tiny tweak.

	“AAaaaaAAah!” he gasped, involuntarily heaving his chest forward, straining against a sudden, intense sensual pulse.  “Ohhhh… man… okay, so it’s easy to find the clit when it’s your own… Jeeeeeezus.”
  
	“Enjoying yourself?” said the voice from above.  It still sounded artificial, but had lost the blaring sound and halting cadence it had had before. 

	“AAAAH!  What do you… nggggh… think?” Jacob replied.  He had a cascading waterfall between his legs and his dick no longer dripped precum so much as spurted it.  But for some reason, he couldn’t climax.

	“Then you ought to really enjoy this,” it said.  Even though he was in the throes of passion, Jacob’s eyes shot open.  What did this potentially sadistic AI have in mind?

	 Amidst the onslaught of pleasure, he felt a new tightness from his poor, neglected cock.  It felt as though his body was pumping even more blood into the already-immense tool, even thought it was filled to capacity.  Its black surface bloated, the shiny skin spread even tauter.  He stopped what he was doing, heart freezing in terror.  Was that goddamn computer having a Skynet moment and going to make his dick explode?

	No, it was not.  Instead, with a mighty surge and a sound strangely like squeaking rubber, his cock speared forward another inch.

	“Wha… what?” he stammered.

	After a brief pause, it strained again, this time stretching twice as far, making another tortured squeak.  He felt his balls bloat under his fingers, determined to keep pace with the burgeoning shaft.  Letting go of them, he also pulled out of his dripping pussy and grabbed on to his cock with both hands.

	“Ohhhhhh man, you read me like a book, you son of a…”

	He stopped.  Suddenly, he had an idea.  A wonderful, sexy idea.  If it wasn’t already too late…

	He pulled his penis flat against his stomach.  As he’d hoped, it was almost long enough to penetrate the bottom of his expansive cleavage, but not quite.  One or two more pulses ought to get it there.  Grinning in drunken sexual reverie, he leaned back on one hand and waited.   

	He didn’t have to wait long.  Another surge added inches more to his towering cock, and it effortlessly pushed between his pillowy tits, engulfing the head in warm, scaly flesh.

	“Ohhhh, perfect!” Jacob sighed.  He was actually doing this.  He was titfucking himself with his own growing cock.  The sheer impossibility of it created dissonance that tried to shoulder its way into his thoughts, but it bounced off an impenetrable armor of lust.

	He looked down at his tits, elongated neck allowing his muzzle to just brush the tops of their supple contours.  Tongue hanging from his maw, saliva dribbled from it and into his cleavage as he awaited the coming eruption, like a bird stalking an earthworm.  His pussy, now finding itself the one without attention, throbbed insistently, but he couldn’t attend to it.  God, he wished he could - if only he had another set of hands.  

	PUSH.  His cock drilled deeper into his mammary cleft.  At the same time, he felt his balls expand, sliding further down his thighs.  The precum was flowing fast at this point, slicking the insides of his melons and dribbling out the bottom.  

	PUSH.  It penetrated a bit further.  In the back of his mind, he wondered how many inches long it was now.  He knew his body could not possibly pump enough blood to maintain an erection of this size, but since it didn’t seem to care, neither did he.  Vascular anatomy was for people with small dicks.

	PUSH.  It was almost there now.  Some of the precum bubbled through the surface of his cleavage, mixing with the drool dripping from his extended tongue.  His balls almost reached his knees, and he swore he could feel their contents sloshing about, eager to be expelled.

	PUUUUUSH.  He had wormsign.  The immense, obsidian cockhead breached the surface of his jugs, creating bulges to either side as it displaced mounds of titflesh.  Like a majestic sperm whale, it crested out of the undulating sea of green and yellow breast.  Having grown significantly in girth during its time underground, it was now almost as big around as a two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola.  It was so big, so thick, Jacob worried that it might not fit in his mouth anymore. 

	But, he intended to try.  Opening wide, he glommed on to the protruding phallus with an audible “NOM”, almost stabbing it with his fangs in enthusiasm.  Jumping a bit in shock, he backed off slightly, loosening his jaws.  The fit was all right, but his jagged teeth made it a tender one, so any pumping was out of the question.  He would have to settle for tongue action this time.  Mentally, he made a note to include retractable teeth in a future revision of this body.

	Luckily, his serpentine tongue came well suited for the job.  Languidly, it lapped about the sides of the tremendous dick, sampling the streams of pre it spurted, inserting itself into the inch-long piss-slit, fellating the whole shaft like a horny pink snake.  Jacob's eyes rolled back; he was in heaven, his previous misgivings completely forgotten.  He just needed to come, and he could die happy.

	“Looks like I was right,” said the compu-voice, a little smugly.  “In case you were wondering, your new size is thirty-three and one-quarter inches.  That’s just a little under three feet.”

	Jacob coughed as his cock spurted what felt like a full liter of precum into his mouth at that statement.  Thirty-three inches.  Almost three feet long.  He was hung like a horse… no, two horses.  The term “third leg” was insufficient to describe his level of endowment.  His tool’s size in relation to his mass was unheard of amongst bipedal members of the kingdom animalia. 

 He had a really… big… dick.   

	“This concludes phase two of the process,” the voice continued.  “We hope your experience has been agreeable.  The mirrors will now extend for your self-viewing enjoyment.  Have a nice day.”

	The lights came on.  The spinning gyroscope slowed to a stop, and began folding up as before.  Jacob slowly, tortuously pulled his cock from his mouth as if amputating a limb, and then clambered to his feet.  He wanted so badly to orgasm, but he also wanted to get a good look at himself.  After he’d done that, then he’d finish.  Hopefully, he’d finish.  It shouldn't be hard; he was so horny that a single touch should have him painting the walls.  But strangely, all that frigging and licking failed to produce a climax.  So what the hell was going on?  

	“Hey, uh… computer,” he said, as the mirrors began to rise from the floor.  “Why can’t I come yet?”

“This facility is inside a particle field that causes moderate orgasm suppression,” it replied.  “This is to prevent premature cessation of the subject’s arousal.  You need to try harder.”

Harder?  Harder?  How much harder could he masturbate before his bits fell off?  Something wasn’t right.  

“Uh… What’s with the normal speaking stuff now?” he asked, suspicious.  “Why’d you start out sounding like a robot?”

He kept a hand on his cock, which was still spurting pre with wild abandon, as feminine lubricant rolled down his legs.  A puddle had begun to form on the holographic platform from all of it.  Just how much fluid did he have inside him, anyway?

	“Standard procedure,” it said.  “Once I determined you were no longer sensitive to being observed, I changed to a more natural human manner of diction.”

	“No longer sensitive?” Jacob asked incredulously.  “But, I’m…”

	He stopped.  Was he really that opposed to being watched anymore?  He searched his feelings, trying to find signs of the overwhelming shyness that had gripped him earlier, and came up short.  No, he wanted to be seen now.  He felt big, powerful, confident, and most of all, sexy.  And why shouldn’t he feel that way?  As a tall, muscular, hermaphroditic dragon-creature with tremendous endowments, he’d transcended every traditional human notion of sexuality.  Why shouldn’t he parade around for all to see?

	A loud “CLUNK” caused him to spin, and face the mirrors.  Immediately, he found his beliefs verified.  The creature looking back at him this time was definitely related to the individual he’d seen there earlier – a sister maybe, or a cousin.  But this one was so fantastically beautiful, so tantalizingly exotic, that he wished it would step from the glass and fuck him right then and there.

	From head to toe, that creature – him - was covered in impressively-defined muscles.  Whereas before he’d looked like a moderately buff male model, now he found himself comparable to some of the most juiced-up female bodybuilders he’d ever seen.  And yet, he saw no trace of the aesthetically disagreeable elements they frequently sported, like overstretched leathery skin or grotesquely bulging veins – no, his body looked as though it had been designed from the ground up to look good being this bulky.  Which, of course, it had.

	And, despite all the rippling sinew, plus his fairly broad shoulders, there could be no doubt of this body’s femininity.  He had a narrow waist compared to his broad upper body, and his rounded hips bulged to a child-bearing wideness.  His face had undergone a general softening: muzzle more rounded, brow less dominant, eyes darker around the edges.  If a humanlike lizard could be considered gorgeous, this face was definitely it.  The flowing locks of black hair that rose atop his head, flowing off the back and sides with a few errant strands floating tantalizingly in front of his face, further cemented his female-dominant status.

	Nothing, though, made him look more womanly than his enormous breasts.  His estimations had been incorrect; they were basketball-sized in relation to his broad seven-foot frame, but on a woman of average height they would have looked more like inflatable beach toys.  Yet, despite their size and presumed weight, they were almost perfectly round, hanging solidly from his chest like they were pumped with silicone, but with the jiggle and give of fully natural boobage.  Their plump, two inch-long nipples sported aureolae the size of 45 rpm records and pointed perpendicular to his body, thus completing the breasts’ gravity-defying aura.  So large and full, the huge bust all but completely obscured Jacob’s powerful pectoral muscles, only allowing a glimpse around the top near his shoulders and collar bone.

	However, one feature threatened to undo Jacob’s aura of femininity, that being his colossal cock.  Jutting from his groin, standing erect and proud in front of him, the glistening black goliath was truly a sight to behold.  Its length and girth should have prevented it from rising into the air as it did, but still it stood there, bobbing slightly with the pulse of what had to be a gallon or more of blood running through it.  The sheath at its base, despite having grown as well, looked virtually overwhelmed by the monstrous phallus, rolled back and stretched beyond belief.  His balls were near the size of watermelons against his legs, hanging almost to the knees.  They sent a continuous stream of precum to the giant above them, which flowed from its yawning slit, dripping down its underside.  

Clearly, he wouldn't win any foot races with endowments like these.

	Another whir sounded beneath him.  At the same time, the floor shimmered slightly to his right, and a mechanical arm extended.  It had a flat-panel display attached to its end.  The screen flickered briefly, and then lit up with a counterpoint to the massive manhood, a picture of an aroused, engorged vagina, ringed by yellow scales.  Its lips were puffy and swollen, its turgid clit the size of a human thumb.  It dripped feminine fluids steadily, the surrounding scales coated in the stuff.  

	Jacob stared at the live feed of his pussy, struck dumb by visual confirmation of his girl parts.  Feeling it had been one thing, but seeing was another.  As a test, he lifted his balls with one hand and waved the other between his legs.  The picture on-screen filled with a scaly green mitt that mirrored his movements perfectly, verifying beyond a doubt that the puffy-lipped feminine flower on there belonged to him.  His horniness spiked sharply – that thing is attached to my body, he thought. He felt slight disappointment his nethers were so crowded that he needed a camera or mirror to actually see that treasure between his legs.  Before, he'd recoiled at the idea of giving up his penis, even temporarily, but maybe an all-female variant of this body wasn’t completely out of the question?

	Whatever.  The time for contemplation was over.  The computer said he had to try harder if he wanted to get off, and that was the only thing that mattered right now.  He could not remember ever being this horny in his entire life, not even as a hormone-addled teenager.  His blood ran hot, his mouth felt dry as a desert, and he shook with barely-contained lust.  Before his eyes he saw his gargantuan dick bobbing, while his pussy pulsated in silent desperation.  Both seemed to be begging him to service them.  

	So, he obliged.  With his right hand, he brought his enormous manhood back between his tits. Once he had it safely nestled in his cleavage, he let go and moved the hand southward, while lifting his scrotum with the other.  Slipping underneath his balls and between his legs, he searched for his snatch.  Easily, he found the prize, and it greeted the return of his probing fingers with a jolt of pleasure.

	“Round two, fight!” he said eagerly, and resumed masturbating.

	Like before, he worked his tongue around the head, tasting the pre that just kept flowing as if his balls were an endless reservoir.  He slid it rapidly over the sensitive valley of his glans, shivering at the powerful, erotic tickle that shot through his cock in response.  Meanwhile, his fingers tweaked his swollen button mercilessly, causing him to cry out into his cock in ecstasy against his will.  Occasionally, they moved south for a brief while to tease his drooling slit with loud schlicks, as the sensations his clit generated were at times almost too much for his poor mind to handle.

	He continued like this for an indeterminate length of time, probably not more than a few minutes.  For obvious reasons, his sense of time was severely compromised.  But, despite how frantically he licked, frigged, and stroked, the sensation of building orgasm eluded him.  He was full of pleasure, his tits jiggled enticingly with the sheer effort of his ministrations, and his tail swished back and forth like a whip.  But still, he could not find his climax.  Frustration built, and he attacked himself harder, whimpering softly, desperate for release.  He noticed his cock head actually growing slightly sore, and his poor clit beginning to chafe, but he didn’t stop; couldn’t stop.  He had to be getting close…

	Suddenly, he found himself awash in the orange glow, this time coming from the floor lights.  The air once again began to warm, and his scales tingled.  The transformative radiation was flowing, this time for unknown purposes, but he willfully ignored the implications.  He was so godawfully pent-up that the computer could make him grow a second head on his shoulders and he wouldn’t care – he just wanted sweet, sweet relief.

	“Please move your hands, Jacob,” said the computer.  

Jacob didn’t.  

	“Again, please move your hands,” it reiterated.

	Jacob lifted his head, and withdrew his tongue so he could respond.

“Fffuck you,” he growled, “It’s y-your fault I’m not coming.  Why... why are you doing this?”

	The computer paused, and then attempted a different tack.

	“If you move your hand, I promise you’ll get what you want.”

	Jacob stopped.  Clearly, that goddamned AI had something more planned for him; something involving further modification of his body, beyond the schematics.  Whatever it was, he wouldn’t be allowed to finish until it was done.

	“Fine,” he said, pulling his fingers free and standing up straight, breasts jiggling slightly with the movement, tail tapping against the floor in irritation.  “T-this had better be worth it, though, asshole.”

	It occurred to him just then that it might be a bad idea to sass an apparently independent, mischief-prone AI that had the ability to mutate his body as it saw fit.

	He heard a mechanical whir from behind.  He turned slightly to look, and saw that it was that robotic arm again, rising out of the holographic floor.  This time, though, it wasn’t carrying a computer monitor.  No, instead its metallic claw gripped something long, cylindrical, and pink…

	Before he could respond, the arm swung underneath and jammed the object deep into his pussy.  “UNNNNNNFH!” Jacob shouted in surprise, and he actually jumped several feet into the air, almost causing his buoyant breasts to bounce up and smack his chin as he landed.  Despite this violent motion, the intruding object stayed firmly put.

	The arm retracted, its job done.  Jacob stood stock still, eyes wide and hands on his abdomen, reeling from the sensation of being vaginally penetrated for the first time.  From top to bottom, his canal was filled to near-capacity with the object, which he realized now could only be a dildo.  Its soft and yielding surface rubbed his inner walls and brought forth tingles of joy from new, deeper locations.  The experience was bizarre, but still Jacob found it strangely fulfilling to have something big lodged deep inside him.  Furtively, he wished he had an actual, flesh-and-blood cock in there, and not just a synthetic substitute.

	“Thank you,” said the computer.  “My apologies for the forceful insertion, but that will allow you to experience complete satisfaction when the time comes.  If I didn't act now, that point would eventually become inaccessible.”

	Inaccessible?  What?  thought Jacob.

	“It’s time now for the bonus round.  I guarantee you’re going to love this.”

	If what you jabbed in my funhole is any indication of what’s to come, I just might.  He clenched his thighs together, shivering as he felt the thing inside him shift slightly.  Yes, more like that would be extremely welcome.

	A soft hum sounded from the floor beneath him, and the orange light shifted darker in hue.  The mild heat that hung in the air grew stronger, reaching an intensity that caused beads of sweat to form on Jacob’s brow.  He felt a shifting in his groin, and looked down over his tits to see his sheath expanding in size, gradually swallowing up his cock as if trying to reclaim it for itself.  It stopped as it became more proportionate to the girth of his member, looking now as though it could easily hold the whole rod, were it in a flaccid state.

	The hum suddenly increased in pitch until it became an excruciating screech.  Jacob yelled in pain, covering his sensitive ears with both hands.  The light grew brighter, brighter, brighter, approaching an eye-searing shade of white.  Heat poured from the floor as if a giant electric coil lurked beneath it, intent on searing everything above into chunks of pure carbon.  Jacob swore he could smell ozone in the air.

	Then, he felt all of it entering his body; all the kinetic energy exploding in the air around him siphoning into his being, filling him beyond his natural limits.  His every cell strained against this sudden influx of raw power, feeling as though they would each burst at any moment, like kernels of corn in a superheated kettle.  

But then, the overwhelming innervation found a conduit, and flew like a raging river to coalesce at a single point, binding together deep within him, becoming like a tiny, flaring sun embedded in his flesh.   

	The light went out.  The heat dissipated.  The godawful sound ceased.  The LEDs in the floor switched back on, filling the platform from below in soft, non-intrusive light.  Jacob stood, shaking uncontrollably; sweat slicking his silken hair, running down his neck and into his voluminous cleavage.  His wide-open eyes trained on an imperceptible object far off in the distance, his mouth hanging wide open and dry as a strip of sandpaper.  The composed energy twitched inside him like an overeager racehorse at the starting line, tensed in anticipation of the starter pistol.

	And the location of that starting line was right at the base of his dick.

	“Omigod,” he whispered. “Yes.  Do it.  Do it!”

	“With pleasure,” said the voice.

	Jacob thrust his hips forward with a strangled cry as the silent pistol sounded, and power flooded into his manhood.  He righted himself, then looked down, watched with eyes wide as multiple feet of cock shot out of his sheath.  In less than a second, his member's length had tripled, as well as swollen to a foot in girth. No longer able to ignore the laws of gravity, the massive rod swiftly lowered, still growing noticeably, until it became parallel with the floor, its tip drooping slightly downward.   

	He could hardly believe it; whereas he had been impossibly sized before, now he was downright ludicrous.  Over eight feet of throbbing, onyx shaft now jutted imposingly from his crotch, with more on the way.  His sheath disgorged cock at a steady pace, its mouth rippling from the speed at which the turgid meat spilled forth.  The rate of growth had slowed from that first explosive push, but he still gained a whole foot every few seconds.  In the span of several breaths, he crested the ten-foot mark, and the fire still raging at the base of his burgeoning organ promised that this was only the beginning.         
	    
	Something wonderfully soft and heavy bumped against his knees; he knew without looking that it could only be his balls.  They felt plump and full like a pair of overripe tomatoes, and only grew fuller as they rolled over the tiny speedbumps that were his kneecaps, growing past them and toward his feet.  Thoughts of the gallons of spunk they held, and the gallons more to come, caused the pre to flow once again, this time in a steady stream that rolled out of his swelling cockhead and spattered across the floor.

	With both hands, he let his fingers trace his sheath's opening, caressing each new inch as it pushed free of confinement.  His cock grew thicker in proportion to its ever-increasing length, the head bloating obscenely, already the size of a large beach ball.  It touched the floor now, unable to stand straight due to its enormous weight.  Thankfully, the holo-floor had automatically lowered its friction level significantly, allowing the bell-end to slide forward without resistance.  The platform he had been standing on was now gone, the rest of the artificial floor having risen to meet it.

	The floor to his left shimmered slightly, and out of it raised another robotic arm.  Jacob looked over in curiosity, hoping it brought with it more sensuous, delightful stimuli.  In a way, it did, as he saw it held a red-on-black LED display, much like a bedside clock's.  On the screen shone a number: “19.3'”, his colossal tool's current length.  As he watched, the fractional value rose, and in a couple of seconds rolled the 19 over into a solid 20.  Then that number sprouted a new decimal point, and the steady uptick continued.  

	“Holy shiiiiiiiit,” Jacob groaned, returning attention to his expanding pole.  He gripped the base of the shaft tighter, shivering with erotic delight as he felt it run through his hands.  He was unbelievably huge.  Unthinkably massive.  And he was only getting bigger.  

	He twitched slightly as he felt his balls touch down, covering his feet and swelling out over the floor.  They were like a pair of boulders, ponderous and nearly immovable.  Foot races were definitely out of the question now, not to mention that the simple act of walking would likely prove difficult, if not impossible.  He could never live a normal life in this hypertrophied state. Not only that, but the expansive proportions of his meat torpedo rendered it useless for penetration; there wasn't a creature in existence that could handle its unbelievable length and girth.  He might be able to fuck a municipal drainage pipe if it were large enough, but his window for that was closing fast.

	None of this bothered him in the slightest.  Utility, mobility - both were trivial concerns.  All that mattered now was getting as big as possible.  Every inch he gained sent his pleasure soaring to new heights as millions of new nerve endings came on line and added their voices to the uncanny, cacophonous chorus of sensation pounding his mind.  And all of the stimulation they took in only augmented the extinction-level event his eventual orgasm was sure to be.	

	The counter had just passed forty feet.  Jacob reached down to stroke his burgeoning ballsack, which now filled the entire space between his legs and was on the verge of forcing him to sit on it.  His stuffed pussy drooled fluids onto the bloating bulk of his scrotum, the viscous liquid flowing down its sides in thin streams.  His cock had stretched into the darkness surrounding where the platform once stood, but the overhead florescent lights helpfully switched back on, allowing him to view it in all its glory.  

	“Come on,” he pleaded.  “Bigger.  Bigger!”

	Obeying, the monstrous dong redoubled its efforts.  Jacob screamed in ecstasy, watching new shaft spill from his sheath at the rate of roughly a foot per second.  His balls slid past his rear, lifting him off his feet, while his tail settled into the cleft between them.  

His maleness was truly going for broke now.  Forty feet became fifty.  Then sixty.  Seventy… eighty… ninety… Jacob felt like he could black out, although inexplicably from overstimulation and not blood loss.  He sat perched atop two hot-air balloons, while a crude 1/6 replica of the Washington Monument speared out from the undulating tube between his legs.  The head of his cock was approaching the size of a minivan, the length of its shaft dappled with arm-width veins.  The gallons of pre-cum it spurted made loud slapping noises as it struck the floor.

	The elephantine rod easily crested one hundred feet, and then continued to 110.  But, as it approached 120, its rate of growth slowed rapidly, until finally it stopped right at 125.  The supernova at its base flickered, and went out.

Jacob’s stomach sank.  He knew he was already so huge that any more length would surely be subject to diminishing returns of sensational intensity.  But, he found himself caught in a hypertrophic frenzy.  He needed more, needed to grow and grow and grow until his cock was so mind-bendingly titanic it shifted the gravitational constant of the universe.  He wanted to be nothing but a tiny, useless appendage to a deific entity far greater than himself – a superfluous appendix for the biggest, grandest fuck-stick in all of time and space.         

He heard whirring noises behind him.  No doubt more robot arms were on the way.  Maybe they could help resuscitate his growth, by defibrillating his dick with electric shock pads or something.  To his surprise, something soft shoved underneath his buttocks that felt like the two prongs of a forklift covered in memory foam.  They supported his legs up to the knee, but left a gap in between.  He turned to look, and saw an arm holding a small, odd reclining chair, the back heavily padded much like the seat, with a hole for his tail and narrow enough to allow his useless wings to protrude without being crushed.  Two similarly pliant armrests rose up from the chair’s sides.  They had small vertical rods at the end of them, at just the right distance for Jacob to grab if he laid his arms down.             

“It’s almost time for the grand finale, Jacob,” said the AI.  “If you’d like, I can provide something for you to bite down on.”

	“No, no,” Jacob stammered.  “C-could you just p-p-please make me b-bigger?  J-just a little?”

	There was a brief pause.

	“I’ll see what I can do.”

	“Thank youuuuuuuuuuuu,” Jacob drawled, leaning back and letting his tongue loll out the side of his mouth.

	More whirs, the sound of more robot arms extending.  Jacob felt contact with his penis from below, at multiple points all along its length.  Slowly, the charcoal leviathan rose from the floor, suspended by several dozen extremely thick pillars with heavily-padded “U” shaped supports on them.  They had a tremendous downward bulge right in the center, positioned such that they would not obstruct flow through the urethra.  Despite being made of shiny burnished steel, the creak of tortured metal could be heard as they struggled to bear multiple tons.

	Briefly, for only about a single second, the floor lights glowed orange, and Jacob’s skin tingled.  He turned his head eagerly to the size-ometer, and watched intently for several seconds. Mechanical clanking sounds around him indicated the appearance of still more robotic limbs, but he ignored them.  Impatiently he watched, squinting mightily as if it would help him reignite the fires of growth.  Then, finally, he felt movement from his sheath, and the number on the display ticked up, to 125.1.

	“All riiiiiight,” he sighed.  “That’s a good sta… HUUUUUUUUAAAAAAAA!”

	He felt sudden tickling sensations all along his schlong.  Leaning forward, he strained to find their source, although it was difficult to see around his gigantic meat.  Then he saw one of them, along the right side of his penis – an arm with what looked like a rotating feather duster attached to its end.  Then he caught a glimpse of another, and another.  From the feelings he was experiencing, there had to be dozens.  Suddenly, realization hit him – this was it, these automatic fluffers were about to give him what he’d been so desperate for.

	“aaaaHHH!” he shouted, as the dildo deep inside him sprang to life, vibrating against his inner walls.  The long, cylindrical invader shook like a jackhammer, ricocheting off the sides of his velvet tunnel, making him reflexively clench his abdominal muscles in response to a sudden onslaught of rich, tingly stimulation.  A new torrent of lubricant issued forth, and soon the quivering false phallus was awash in thick feminine fluids.  Jacob’s enhanced hearing could just barely make out its wet squelching noises emanating from deep within himself.  He leaned back and moaned sensuously, trying in vain to thrust his hips as his dripping pussy soaked up every delightful bit of friction.  

	“Oh… oh… oh fuck.  Oh fuck.”  Rendered inarticulate by the onslaught, he couldn’t reach his cock or his box.  So, he did the next best thing and grabbed his jiggling, pillowy mounds, manhandling them as if kneading enormous lumps of pizza dough. 

	The maddening ministrations continued.  Dimly, Jacob felt a single fluffer-arm working its way down the outside of his urethra, effortlessly winding around the groaning supports.  It was almost to his cockhead, bearing down on the wide valley of its glans.  It found its way there, and swept up and down the meters-long chasm, its feathers licking at the taut, strained skin of this most sensitive region.  The entire bulk of the Uhaul truck-sized bell end began to shake, and Jacob felt that familiar, blessed tightening in his loins he’d been thirsting for.  The pressure built, built, built, and then… 

	And then the heavens cracked open.

	Jacob opened his maw and screamed in ecstasy as his maleness came with the force of a typhoon.  It was nothing less than his every ounce of pent-up frustration – the arousing transformations, the endless teasing, the denied orgasms - multiplied by one hundred and twenty-five feet of receptive, tender dickflesh.  Every swollen inch of his Rhodian colossus came alight with unbelievable pleasure as the fertile twin planetoids underneath it unleashed their vast reservoirs of man-milk.  Instantly, he felt an awe-inspiring rush of fluid through his capacious internal plumbing and into his urethra, what seemed like hundreds of gallons.  The underside of his cock bulged obscenely with its passing.  

	His manhood had fired its first salvo, and as it refracted, its counterpart took the opportunity to issue a rebuttal.  The entire length of his birth canal clenched like a vise around its quivering passenger, and he arched his back and moaned, tail going stiff, insensate yet majestic wings unfolding of their own accord.  He had no experience with the female orgasm, and found himself utterly unprepared for its distinct, yet sublime differences in texture, depth, and intensity.  

	He couldn't help gasping loudly as a soft yet almost overwhelmingly brilliant light built in his vaginal walls and throbbing clit.  It released and spread like wildfire, rippling through his body, filling him to bursting with pure, unbridled ecstasy.   Passing from his torso out into his extremities, it left warmth and a transcendent sense of contentment in its wake. 
	
	Simultaneously, the raging cataract of pearl jam racing through Jacob's monstrous member reached the end of its long yet expeditious journey.  Exploding from his cockhead in a tremendous gout of white, the globulous mass of molten spunk could easily have filled a large hot tub.  Instead, it arced through the air as if fired from Old Faithful itself, splattering with tremendous force against the lab's wall and artificial floor.  

	No sooner had he expelled that first burst than his powerful internal muscles clenched mightily, sending the second shooting out of the starting gate.  Still replete with the rapturous high of his nascent feminine climax, Jacob couldn't stop himself from doubling over as signals from his dual genitalia crisscrossed each other. Some of his flaxen hair spilled over top of his forehead and into his eyes, while his mouth snapped shut involuntarily, thankfully missing his tongue.    He let go of his bouncing bust and grabbed the handles at the end of each of his seat's armrests, hoping to steady himself before the next wave.    
	
	As he did, he felt his passage ripple around the still-vibrating dildo, provoking a flood of love juices from his slit.  Another female orgasm rocked his body, and he threw back his head, whipping his sweat-drenched raven locks out of his face.  His heart skipped a beat as he let out a sound he didn’t realize his vocal cords could produce; a trilling draconic cry of satisfaction reminiscent of both a birdsong and the triumphant roar of a savannah lion.  His hands strangled the seat's handles, shaking with the near-seismic force of it all.

	Another thick rope of jism launched from his cock as the second load reached its destination.  Hazily, he checked himself, realizing that calling it a “rope” was an inadequate description; with its tremendous volume it exited looking more like a viscous, pearly-white tree trunk, sailing through the air as if launched by a lascivious sexual ballista.  The illusion was fleeting, however, as the bolt of semen quickly spread out, raining its many globules upon the floor like an obscene monsoon.  

	Then the next ejaculation came, followed by another delightful contraction from his inner walls.  Moments later, the latest batch of semen erupted, and the cycle began again.  And again, and again, and again.  Seemingly caught in an infinite loop, his overstimulated male and female parts went tit for tat in a relentless call-and-answer routine - just as one sounded its thundering cry of supremacy, the other would respond with equal force.  Gradually, their  voices lost  individuality, and flowed together into a single oscillating waveform of ecstasy.  

	Jacob leaned back, mouth open, long tongue hanging out the side of his mouth, drool dripping from its tip.   He couldn't focus his eyes, and stared blearily at the ceiling with pupils that, despite the harsh lighting, remained thoroughly dilated.  Time had long ago lost all meaning to him.  His climax felt as though it had neither a beginning or an end, and instead simply existed.  This had to be Heaven, as he couldn't imagine a plane of reality more rapturous than the one he inhabited at that moment.  

	It couldn't last forever, though.  Eventually, each pulse began to diminish in strength, his vagina clenching a little less tightly, ponderous testicles aching slightly as they slowly ran dry.  And then, his body coasted to a stop, his clitoris ceased its constant buzzing, and his last reserves of jizz dribbled out his poor, tortured cockslit.  

	The dildo switched off, then contracted like an earthworm, launching itself out of Jacob's pussy with a single, powerful motion.  He couldn't stop himself from gasping as it rubbed past his labia, slid onto the broad curvature of his scrotum, and rolled down the side, a thick splash sounding moments later.  Now his canal was empty, and the void felt almost as pleasurable as being stuffed had moments earlier.

	“Hmmmmmmmm,” Jacob murmured in profound satisfaction.  Leaning back, he stretched his arms and languid, dangling legs, relishing the emptiness of both balls and vaginal passage.  

	He looked around at the floor and saw that his impossibly colossal junk rested in a warm, thick pool of spooge.  The entire lab was filled with it from wall to wall,  at least a foot deep.  Its hot, tangy aroma filled his sensitive nostrils to bursting.  He could even make out hints of his musky, copious feminine ejaculate around the edges of the scent.  How much had he expelled to make such a mess?  

	The wall opposite him, maybe forty feet from the tip of his cock, was coated in a thick layer of his slime.   Squinting, he could make out large patches of gray, exposed concrete, where the impact of high-velocity jizz  had chipped away at the off-white paint like grit from a sandblaster.  Despite being so relaxed, this evidence of his incredible potency startled him.  He'd done all this damage, and the ocean of spunk had come from his body.

	He recovered quickly from his surprise.  “Mmmmm... Nice job, boys,” he purred, reaching out sideways to pat his golden-scaled nutsack.  Stretching once again, he leaned back, resting weary muscles on the cushioned support behind him.  He closed his eyes and basked in a radiant afterglow more pleasurable than any drug-induced high he'd ever felt.  Everything was perfect.  His life, job, relationships, bank account, even the general state of the world at large - all were as they should be.  

	He yawned.  Looking down at his vast bosom, he reached up and traced the edges of their midnight-black nipples with both index fingers.  He pressed his muscular shoulders together, forming a spectacular cleavage.  All the while, he sensed his pussy lips' sore yet satiated throb and the warm cum ocean lazily lapping at the bottom of his bloated nutsack and gargantuan member.  This body was amazing.  He didn't care anymore what other people might think of it; hell, they could call him a freak and a pervert right to his face and he wouldn't mind.  No, he'd just smile, maybe flip the bird if he felt especially saucy, and then go on his way.  They didn't know, after all - couldn't know - how it felt to be a creature of such stunning beauty, power, and fertility.  He felt like a god... no, a goddess.

	“This concludes your treatment,” said the AI.  “Later, you will be transferred to a secure location for post-procedure recovery.  We at Bio-Agri-Pharma-Corp hope you've enjoyed the experience, and will think of us in the future for any further work of this nature.”

	Jacob grinned.  His cock was nearly half the length of a football field, and must have weighed as much, still fully erect, as an eighteen-wheeler.  He'd need to be shrunk down to a reasonable size before he could be “transferred” anywhere.  The thought troubled him - maybe he could get a giant Rascal scooter for his dick instead, although such a thing would probably look more like the mobile platform NASA used to have for moving the space shuttle around.  

	Yes, even though he could never live a functional life like this, the prospect of losing even a single inch bothered him on principle.  But, it had to be done, or he would never get out of this room.

	If you can make me this big again, I'll definitely be back for “further work”, he thought. Actually, there's still plenty of space in here... maybe even bigger?  His six stubby toes wiggled while his serpentine tail twitched at the prospect.

	He laid there for several more minutes, unbelievably exhausted, for obvious reasons.  Soon, he noticed his thoughts beginning to stray as he drifted off to sleep.  This will be perfect, he thought dreamily.  Now I won't have to watch when my junk gets shrunk.  

	“Sleep well, Jacob,” said the AI.

	Jacob smiled softly, and slipped into unconsciousness. 

	He had no idea how long he'd been out.  Every muscle and joint felt stiff.  As his consciousness slowly floated to the surface, the dark tendrils of sleep reluctantly released their tenacious grip.  He'd been drifting in a sea of dreamless oblivion, so black and bottomless that his first thought upon waking was to wonder if he hadn't been dosed with a powerful sedative.  

	The second, the one that took hold of his mind and yanked it out of its groggy half-awake state, was that the air smelled heavily of fish, water, and salt.  All the newfound subtleties he could sense with his enhanced snout caused it to clash with what he remembered, but it still seemed highly reminiscent of the ocean.  Which didn't make any sense, given where he remembered falling asleep. 
	 
	He opened his eyes and saw a broad expanse of blue, crystal-clear water stretching out in front of him, sparkling with sunlight from the cloud-speckled sky overhead.  He could see the outlines of a coral reef beneath the surface, and colorful schools of tropical fish swimming around it.  Small waves lapped lazily at the shore, while seabirds ran in and out of the surf.  

	He sat up slightly to get a better look at his surroundings.  He was sitting in a reclining pool chair, one of many dotting the tan-tiled patio around him.  The others looked to be built for average-sized humans, but his was simply enormous, as it needed to accommodate his abnormal height and weight.  Directly to his right was a table with a large white parasol in its center, tilted slightly to one side, shielding him from the hot mid-afternoon sun.  The center of the deck contained a cascading, multi-tiered swimming pool adorned with exquisite marble and tile work, fed by an artificial waterfall.  In the center of its lowest level, the pool featured an apparently well-stocked wet bar with submerged benches surrounding it.     

	 Behind him, he saw a ritzy-looking 20-story resort hotel.  It had a walk-through garden before it, impeccably landscaped with flowers precisely arranged and hedges meticulously trimmed.  Amongst the plants were several impressive neo-Grecian statues depicting nude men and women with Olympian physiques, contorted into a variety of athletic poses.

	Jacob looked down at himself.  To his surprise, someone had dressed him.  He was wearing an a bikini of sorts, one heavily custom-tailored to fit his unusual body.  His enormous breasts were covered by something that looked like a black nylon half-shirt, as the large wings sprouting from his back would have made wearing a conventional top impossible.  Its sweeping neckline displayed a healthy amount of gold and green-scaled cleavage, while some of his bust protruded from around its bottom edge, ensuring that his under-boob was also well-represented.  The bulge of his big, rigid nipples were easily visible through the material. 

	Around his nethers he had a combination of two separate thong bikini bottoms, one for each set of genitalia.  A larger, looser “banana hammock” hung from a cord around his waist, girding his tremendous sheath and oversized balls.  Those were back to the proportions they'd had before all the unexpected, explosive growth; his testicles were the size of melons, and his properly-proportioned sheath's tumescence suggested its contents were once again close to three feet in length.  Attached to the same nylon cord, the second bottom hugged his pelvis, diverting around his elephantine maleness and snugly obscuring the cleft beneath it.   

	Next, he turned his attention to more distant scenery. To his left and right, the beach stretched off into the distance.  Further out in both directions the shore curled inward, forming a large yet cozy inlet.  There were no other signs of civilization around, as nothing could be seen behind or next to the resort grounds aside from palm trees and thick tropical vegetation.  Even the resort itself seemed strangely empty, as though he was its only guest. 

	All this serene beauty was comforting after that harsh, utilitarian laboratory, but Jacob still felt disoriented by such a drastic change in locale.  He looked around, his eyes searching for something to restore continuity, to indicate how he'd gotten here.  He found it when he spotted a small island not more than a mile off shore where, poking over the tops of the trees lining its banks, there was an ugly, grey building.  It had a sign on top he found difficult to read due to the distance, but his eyes could just barely make out letters spelling “BIO-AGRI-PHARMA-CORP”.  Clearly, it was the facility he'd recently been inside.

	“Well, that answers that,” he said.  Clearly, someone (or something?) had delivered him here while he was unconscious.  

	Satisfied, he yawned and stretched, leaning back in the reclined chair.  He smiled contentedly, one hand absent-mindedly fondling his expansive boobage.  As secure recovery locations went, this one was pretty damn nice.  He'd expected a hospital or a holding cell, but an idyllic, sunny beach was much, much more to his liking.  Even better, it looked as though he had the entire place to himself.  Some of that legendary orgasm's afterglow still remained, but he found himself feeling a little frisky already. 

	“Your drink, madame,” came a smooth, cultured voice from his right.

	He yelped and sat up sharply.  Standing to the side was a finely-dressed waiter; human, tan-skinned, middle-aged, and with a shining bald head.  He balanced a tray on one hand that carried a large cocktail glass filled with a thick white liquid, that sported cherries and a pineapple wedge.  Moments ago, the patio had been empty; it was almost as though this man had appeared out of thin air when Jacob wasn't looking.

	“Uh, thanks,” he said.  The waiter placed the glass on the table, gave a smile and a small bow, and turned to leave.  Jacob watched him as he walked away.  The man hadn't seemed to have noticed he was serving a seven-foot tall hermaphroditic dragon, or at least didn't appear as though he thought this was odd in any way.  

	The glass perspired profusely, indicating that whatever it contained was very cold.  He held his snout over it and sniffed suspiciously, as the white liquids he had seen so far that day were not the sort of thing he wanted to drink, chilled or no.  But, the only scents he could make out were those of coconut and rum.  

	So, whoever had dropped him off here had also left an order for a piña colada.  How considerate, he thought.  Relaxing with a nice cocktail would be an excellent way to cap off the day's events.  He started to reach for the glass, and then stopped himself.  This was a perfect chance to test something out.      
        
	He sat up and turned in the seat so that his back was facing the table, his partially-extended wings folding up automatically as he did.  Looking over his shoulder he slowly, carefully, reached out with his tail.  The tip poked the side of the glass, almost tipping it over, but then he came in from another direction and managed to wrap the tip of the thing around the stem .  Shaking with concentration, he lifted it up and began to bring it over to his open hand.  

	“Whoops!” he said, as he tilted it too far to the side, spilling a bit onto the hot patio surface.  Hoping to avoid any further accidents, he reached out and took hold of the glass, relaxing his tail and allowing it to slip away once his fingers had a firm grip.    
			          
	“That'll take practice,” he said.  Anyway, it didn't matter.  He had a tail.   He had a tail that could grasp things.  He felt as though he could explode with joy.  It seemed such a foolish idea that this experience could have turned out to be less than he expected, as he'd worried at the start.      

	“Don't worry, we'll try again later,” he consoled it, smiling toothily and stroking its tip with his free hand.  Turning, he leaned back in his chair again, bringing the chilled beverage up to his mouth.

	He stopped, wincing slightly as his contracted wings smushed against the reclining support and he heard a few uncomfortable popping noises from their joints.  They couldn't feel any pain or discomfort, but the thought that he could break one of their bones and not be able to tell disturbed him.  Those things were the one part of this operation that hadn't measured up, the single flawed facet of his otherwise perfect body.  There had to be a reasonable explanation for his inability to control them.      

	He sighed heavily and leaned back again, slowly.  His wings seemed to understand his intentions this time, and extended slightly to avoid compressing too much of themselves under his weight.  That part puzzled him also: the way they sometimes moved on their own, like how they'd folded up shortly after sprouting from his back, or unfurled during his epic climax.  Something unseen was controlling a part of his body, and he didn't like it.

	Trying to relax and take his mind off that uncomfortable mystery, he took the drinking straw into his mouth and sipped from it.  The creamy cocktail was smooth, cold, and rich, offsetting the heat of the sun overhead.  It helped put his mind at ease, reminding him as it did of the tranquil beauty of his surroundings.  He closed his eyes, letting the gentle sounds of the ocean wash over him.  

	He laid there for a while, idly sipping at his drink and watching long-beaked shorebirds dash to and fro across the wet sand.  Tiny waves lapped at the shore, while the occasional gull gave a shrill cry as it flew overhead.  Warm, soothing sunlight began to inch its way up his body as afternoon transitioned into early evening.

	Then, he heard a soft, melodic tone from out of the ether.  He sat up sharply, looking around for its source.  It sounded vaguely like a cell phone ringtone, but he didn't see anything electronic around him.  Moments later, a flat panel screen appeared three feet in front of his face, transparent and hovering in midair.  On it were bright white letters against a black background: “INCOMING CALL”.  Beneath that was more text, in green that read “FROM: DrewGasm69”.  Then, beneath that, a pair of buttons popped up, asking whether he wished to accept or deny the request.

	“Shit,” said Jacob.  He leaned forward and touched the “accept” button.

	The text cleared away, and the screen widened to show a pair of pop-up windows, one labeled “VIDEO FEED”, the other “CONVERSATION TRANSCRIPT”.  Along the bottom was a series of preference checkboxes.  At the moment, the 'video' window wasn’t showing any, instead filled with a placeholder image of an archaic rotary dial phone and the word “Connecting”.

	“Ah!” Jacob yelped, reaching out with lightning speed to tap the “Disable Video” checkbox.  He was just in time, as mere moments later the video window changed to “Connected”, and the transcription box printed a timestamp to mark when the call had begun.

	“Hey Jay!” came a voice from the screen.  It was definitely male, smooth and markedly high-pitched.  Jacob didn't recognize it.  “What is happening, my man?”

	“Uh, Drew?  Is that you?” he asked hesitantly.

	“Yep, it's a-me!  Man, I never thought I'd see you on here!” Drew replied excitedly.  “'Course, I can't actually see you at the moment.  Why the shyness, bro?”

	“Well, that's... that's complicated.  But I'm here, sort of.  Nice username, by the way.  Figures you'd choose something like that, you pervert.”

	“Oh, so I'm a pervert, am I?  FYI, nice pipes, 'Miss' Drake.  Called any other kettles black lately?”

	Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck, thought Jacob.  He'd forgotten that he had a feminine voice.  Now part of what he'd done to himself was out of the bag; it would take some quick thinking to maintain what little cover he had left.

	“Er...”

	“Hey, hey, it's all good,” said Drew jovially.  “Nobody's a pervert here.  Even if your flavor of freakiness is freakier than average, I guarantee you no shits will be given.”

	“...right,” mumbled Jacob, unconvinced.   	   

	“Seriously.  Now, can I come in?”

	Jacob gave a start.  

	“Wait, what?  Come in?”  

	“Yeah, I need to check up on you, make sure you're doin' alright, and all that.  I'm sure somebody told you that was part of the deal.  The feds get all antsy when we don't test people after their first time.”

	“No, I knew someone was going to do that, but why you?”  Jacob's confidence was deflating like a punctured balloon.  He'd assumed his evaluator would be some random guy he didn't know, someone to whom he was as anonymous as anyone else on the 'net.  But this was different; he and Drew went way back.  The promise that nothing Jacob could do would disgust his old college bud was little consolation when the consequence of Drew overestimating his own tolerance was the end of a friendship.           

	“Cause I’m a SysOp, and because I requested it.  You gonna let me in, or what?”

	“Uh… wait,” Jacob stammered.  “Gimme a few minutes first.  I’m not ready.”  There had to be a way to switch back to his human form before Drew got here.  He shuffled forward to the edge of the chair and drew a four-sided polygon in the air with a clawed finger, summoning his personal console.  Opening up the first menu it showed him, he searched frantically.

	“Jay, what the hell are you doing?”  Drew sounded less jovial now.  “I have to come in and see you face to face or you get banned for a month while your membership’s reevaluated.”

	“Just a second,” Jacob said hurriedly, having found nothing in the first menu and moving on to the next.  He couldn’t help noticing his tail slapping with anxiety against the edge of his chair.  It motivated him to speed up his search.  

	“God damn it, Jay,” said Drew, in the strained tones of someone addressing a misbehaving child, “if I get in there and you’ve switched avatars, I’ll ban you for two months.”

	“But…”

	“Look,” Drew sighed, and his voice became calm and even, “Your kinks.  Do they make you a threat?  Like, to yourself, or anyone else?”
	
	“No…”

	“Ok, question two.  Are you religious?”

	“What?  Why does that matter?”

	“What I mean is, do you think there’s a man in the sky who’s very, very concerned about how and why you get your orgasms?”

	“Fuck, no.”

	“Then it doesn’t sound like there’s a problem here.  Hold on, I’m coming in.”

	“Wait…” Jacob trailed off as Drew canceled the chat.  Immediately afterward, a tall white door appeared out of thin air above the patio to his right, looking like it had been torn from a archetypical suburban home.  It flashed yellow, and had text written on it in a big, bold font: “DrewGasm69 WANTS TO JOIN YOUR SESSION.  ACCEPT/DENY?”  The “accept” and “deny” buttons floated out of the door to hover a few feet in front of his face.

	“Fine,” Jacob sighed, reaching out and pressing “accept”.  The door stopped flashing yellow, and the text changed to read “CONNECTING…”  Moments later, the word disappeared, and the door began to open.  Jacob drew his arms and legs inward, folding them over each other as if trying to hide his tremendous endowments.

	Out of the door stepped a humanoid red fox, probably six feet tall, with a thin yet muscular build.  It was male, at least outwardly, and wore a brown blazer with a white shirt underneath, and faded blue jeans.  Its short black hair was excessively spiked in a nature reminiscent of a Japanese anime character, and its face smoothly blended vulpine and human in a manner that Jacob couldn’t help but think was quite handsome.  Behind it swished an enormous bushy tail, one disproportionately large for its host’s height.  

	The fox looked directly at him, and raised an eyebrow quizzically. 

	“Okay,” it said.  “Stand up, let me get a good look at you.”

	Reluctantly, Jacob obeyed.  Once upright, he was surprised at how thoroughly he physically dominated the smaller creature.  He had a foot in height and probably 200 pounds or more on the comparatively diminutive fox, with a broader stance and arms as thick as the vulpine’s head.  

	Drew whistled appreciatively.  “Very nice.  You were seriously worried this would squick me?  Turn around, let me see the whole thing.”

	Jacob turned in place, his green and yellow scales glinting in the setting sun.  He felt a bit like a runway model.  “But, what about…”  He gestured to his gigantic package.

	“Yeah, I see that.  So you’re packing some heat down there, eh?  I never would’ve figured you for a hyper-herm.  Or is it hyper-shemale?”

	Jacob stopped turning, and faced his friend again.  “No, I’ve… got a… a….”

	“A cooch?   Fantastic!” said Drew enthusiastically.  “That’s my favorite way to go; why limit yourself to rear entry when you can have that and a hole made specially for the purpose?”

	“Uhhhh,” Jacob drawled.  This was a side of Drew he hadn’t seen before, and it was weirding him out.

	Drew seemed to notice his friend's discomfort.  “Sorry, I’m being pretty forward.  Not as ‘forward’ as you, though!”  He chuckled at his lame joke.  “But seriously, people tend to be like that here.  I’ll try to rein it in a little, at least until you get acclimated.”

	Jacob followed the fox’s gaze.  “Wait, are you staring at my boobs?” he asked.

	Drew looked away, averting his eyes.  Turning his head back and carefully realigning them with Jacob’s face, he said, “Ok, yeah, I was.  But can you blame me?  They’re just about at eye level!  Plus, they're perfect... God, you’re just smoking hot, in general.”

	“Uh, thanks.”

	“I mean, I don’t usually go for amazon types, but… wow.  Where’d you get that schematic from?”

	“I made it myself, actually,” said Jacob, a little proudly.

	“Seriously?”  Drew whistled again, something he shouldn’t have been able to do with his thin fox-lips.  He walked over to a chair opposite Jacob’s, and sat down.  “That’s fuckin’ awesome!  Most people, when they try to roll their own, they wind up looking like a furry thalidomide baby.”

	Jacob lowered himself back into his oversized chair. His face felt flush; he wondered if it was visible at all.  “Well, you remember all the 3D modeling I used to do?  I kept my skills up over the years, and it turns out avatar schematics are really similar to construct.”

	“Nice,” said Drew with a toothy grin.  

Jacob’s eyes drifted down his friend’s body, and then it was his turn to stare.  Drew either was smuggling a honeydew melon down the front of his jeans, or he was extremely well-endowed.    

	“Christ, Drew.  Looks like I’m not the only one packing heat.”

	“Oh, you like that?”  Drew’s smile broadened.  “It’s not a touch on yours as far as size, but yeah.  You and me, we're both of the same mind.  Why settle for average when the sky's the limit, right?  Except I've got something I bet you don't.”

	“Oh yeah, and what's that?”

	“Akimbo action!” 

	“... the fuck?  You mean you've got more than one dick?”

	“Hells yeah!” said Drew.  “Actually, they're not akimbo... not side by side.  Too hard to do a good D.P. that way.”

	Jacob's blush deepened.  He pictured what Drew's vulpine form would look like naked. Then he thought of lying next to him, stroking the lithe little fox's soft, downy chest fur with one hand while alternating between his twin schlongs with the other, watching rapturously as they rose to full attention.  Once they were ready, he'd turn, bending over and lifting his tail to present his eager holes.  He imagined the shafts pounding both his helpless orifices mercilessly as he cried out in ecstasy, his first climax arriving within seconds.  His cock stirred inside its sheath and his pussy began to moisten as he fantasized.

	Nonononono, FUCK! He thought, catching himself.  This is DREW, remember?  Tall, thick-set, shaggy-haired Drew who roomed with me for three years and majored in English Lit?  The guy I used to smoke up with on Fridays after class?  Who always beat me at Magic the Gathering?   I don't want him to penetrate my anything!

	“That's... pretty cool, man,” he said with an uneasy smile, trying hard to smother his libido.

	“Thanks,” Drew replied, smiling back.  Then, he added, “I'm not squicking you now, am I?”

	“No!  No no no no, not at all,” said Jacob.  “Actually, I kind of wish I'd thought of that.”

	“Baby steps, bud.  Baby steps.  Anyhow, what made you finally decide to take the plunge?  I've been hounding you to get a VR implant for ages.”

	“Well, you know I've been interested since they first hit the market, but it's always been too expensive.  Also, you know, I'm like a lot of people.  The idea of nanobots sitting at the base of my spine feeding my brain simulated input is kind of... well, you know.  Weird.”

	“I blame the media,” Drew grumbled.  “Ever since the FDA approved 'em, the 24-hour news channels've been airing all sorts of scaremongering bullshit.  'What if they wouldn't shut off'.  'What if they put a power surge through your temporal lobe and turned you into a vegetable?'   'What if long-term use induced psychosis?'  But that's how it works, isn't it?  New medium comes along, the other mediums all shit themselves 'cause they're scared people'll use it instead of their old crap.”

	“...right,” Jacob continued.  “Anyway, my company needed people from their US HQ to meet with workers at overseas offices, but the higher-ups decided plane tickets and hotel rooms are 'unnecessary expenses', plus they'd had a lot of trouble with abuse of the expense account.  So, they finally jumped on the telepresence bandwagon the rest of the industry has been all over for the last year or so, and bought a fleet of avatar 'bots.  Problem was, none of their employees had the hardware to interface with them, and most were suspicious of the tech.  So, they started offering to subsidize VR implants for all salaried workers, with a decent-sized pay raise to boot.”

	“And you jumped on it.”

	“I wouldn't say I 'jumped', exactly,” said Jacob.  “I was nervous about having tiny robots in my brain.  Hell, I still am.  But it gave me the final push I needed to get over my hangups.  Mostly because I knew about sims,  sims like this one.  You'd been evangelizing it to me, and I thought it could be a chance to do things... kinky things... I've always wanted to do but never thought would be possible.”

	“And now that your virtual reality cherry has been popped?  Was it worth it?”

	“Jesus fucking Christ, you have no idea.” 

	“Actually, I probably do, but go on.”

	“All right.  This has been the single greatest experience of my life,” Jacob expounded.  “I love being big and muscular, yet curvy and feminine at the same time.  My scales are freakin' awesome, having a snout jutting out of my face is a total trip, and I fucking adore my tail...  I feel more confident, more beautiful, more alive than I've ever felt before!  I've been dreaming forever of being able to do this, to shape-shift I mean.  I don't even care that it's technically 'not real' because it feels real to me.”  He ran his arms along the side of his torso, demonstrating how 'real' he was.  “ And then there's the sexual stuff.... I love my tits... and the female orgasm is incredible, man!  And when you combine it with a male one from a hundred twenty-five feet of cock...  My god, I still can't stop thinking about that!  It might actually be physically burned into my brain, that's how powerful it was.”

	“Sounds like you went pretty nuts, then.”

	“I wasn't the one who did that.  The computer – the AI that controlled my transformations – it somehow knew how badly I've always wanted to have an impossibly gigantic schlong, and made it happen.  And then it knew just how to stimulate the thing.  I've never come that hard before, or that long.  I can't believe it could do all that; the science blogs always say we're a long way from 'strong AI'.”

	“You were in the 'Hard-Light Lab' scenario, weren't you?  With Hugo?” said Drew.  “Yeah, he's pretty convincing, and intuitive too.  He's programmed to extrapolate the user's desires from the schematic they provide, then turn them up to 11.  Also, he's a mischievous bastard, so you won't know what he's up to until he does it.”

	“That's the truth,” said Jacob, thinking of the boner-killing ice water bath Hugo had subjected him to.

	“Not a true 'strong AI', though.  Try engaging him in a long conversation; you'll find out what his limits are right quick.  Still pretty impressive.”

	“Yeah,” said Jacob.  “One thing, though.  When my tail grew in, I couldn't feel it at first.  Then...”

	“... Hugo rebooted your motor centers and you could control it?” Drew interrupted.  “Yep, that's the way tails are done.”

	“You don't understand, my tail works fine, but my wings...”  he gestured to his wings, which were partially unfolded from before and still as numb as ever.  “They never came on line.  I still can't feel them, or move them.”

	“Aw, dammit,” Drew groaned, making an aggrieved expression.  “Nobody told you, did they?”

	“Told me what?”

	Drew sighed.  “I take it you used AlterEgo 4.1 to design your avatar?”

	“Yeah I did, so what?  It had the highest user rating.”

	“It's a nice piece of open-source software, I'm not gonna argue with that,” Drew continued.  “But when you were going through the limbs, making compiler suggestions, I assume you picked the 'Left Wing 1' and 'Right Wing 1' hooks for those things?”

	“Yes...” 

	“Well, here's the thing: those hooks don't go anywhere.  As in, they don't attach to anything in your brain.  They're placeholders.”

	Jacob's heart sank.  “What the fuck?  So, what was I supposed to do?”

	“Nothing.  We don't know how to connect those extra limbs to your nervous system.  The only reason we can do tails is because there're plenty of examples to study in nature.  But can you think of any six-legged vertebrates?”

	“Fuuuuuuck,” Jacob sighed, leaning against the backrest.  He noticed his wings move slightly, adjusting their position.

	“So what about that?” he asked, pointing over his shoulder with a thumb. “They've been moving on their own.”

	“The compiler silently linked an AI script to them when it couldn't find any connections in its brain map.”

	“God damn it,” said Jacob sullenly.  The depression was creeping back in again.  He'd really, really wanted to have the chance to fly under his own power.  

	Drew rose up and walked over the patio to Jacob's side.  Kneeling, he patted the dragon on a meaty shoulder.  “Don't worry, beautiful...”

	“Never call me that.”

	“Ok.  Don't worry, Jay.  The great thing about technology is that it never stays still.  The reason those hooks are in the editor to begin with are because the authors expect them to be available someday.”

	Jacob perked up.  “Like, soon?”

	Drew shrugged.  “Not a clue.  Could be years from now, could be tomorrow.  I suggest, though, that you appreciate what you've already got: a metric fuckton of cool shit to play with.”

	Jacob considered that.  He smirked slightly.  “You're right.  I've got ninety-five percent of what I ever wanted.  I can wait for the last five.”	       

	“Damn straight,” said Drew, rising and returning to his seat.  “In the meantime, you could always make a variant of what you're 'wearing' now with wing membranes under the arms.  Makes more sense from an anatomical standpoint, anyway.”

	“Yeah... I kinda like having opposable thumbs, though.”

	“You could switch between them at will, with a command word or a gesture.”
	
	“Or by concentrating really hard on changing my body?”

	“Nope.  Again, tech limitations.”

	“Fuck.”

	A floating, transparent rectangle about two feet in width appeared in the air not far from Drew's head.  He turned to look at it.  It must have been covered with data and UI controls, but Jacob could only see a blank, two-dimensional blue screen covered with big, bold type reading “PRIVATE CONSOLE”.  

	“Looks like my client's done downloading your session's brainwave data,” said Drew.  He contemplated the screen silently for a while, scratching the tip of his foxy chin with a clawed hand, occasionally reaching out with it to touch one of its invisible controls.  

	“Hmmm.  Well, the preliminary scans have been run, and it's reporting pretty standard results so far.  There's a big spike near the beginning that reads as a fear response, though – like, mortal-terror type stuff.”

	“Uh, yeah.  Early on, I really, seriously believed the stuff in that lab was irradiating the hell out of me, like, for real.”

	“So, would you say that you believed that what was going on was really happening, and you were in real danger?”

	“Yes,” Jacob said hesitantly, quickly adding: “But I talked myself down quick.”

	“Good, good,” said Drew, eyes turning back to him.  “That's normal, actually.  What we're worried about are the 2% or so who don't come back, who can't do that.  But I can tell from talking with you that you're perfectly lucid.  How do you feel right now?”

	“Right now?  I still feel amazing.  Fucking amazing.  I wish I could stay like this forever.  I don't want to leave.  I... I can't leave.  But I know I have to... soon.”  He stared downward at the ground, clenching his hands into fists as an unexpected surge of emotion hit him.  “I don't want to go back to being human, Drew.  Not in that tiny, pudgy, scrawny lump of a body, not after this!  I wanna keep my cock, my pussy, my horns, my tail, my everything!  I can't lose all of that... it'll... it'll be like tearing my own goddamn heart out!”

	“Whoa, whoa, take it easy, Jay.”

	“You don't understand!”  Jacob looked his friend square in the eyes, desperation playing across his draconic features.  “On Monday I've got to go back to that hell-hole of an office, plop my ass down in my tiny little fuckin' cubicle prison and pretend nothing happened, that everything's the same as it was.  But I'll be back in the same old goddamn grind, dealing with my fat little prick of a boss and his bullshit, wrangling all that petty fucking office drama, drinking piss-weak coffee all day, nuking a shitty microwave meal for lunch and... I… I can't do that, man.  I need to stay here, Drew.  Tell me there's a way to stay here!”

	The muscle-bound femme dragon grabbed his friend roughly by the shoulders with enormous clawed hands.  The fox winced as the larger creature's powerful grip dug painfully into his furred flesh.  

	“Ugh... calm down, man.  Calm down!”  He shook, trying to get himself loose.  Jacob, suddenly realizing what he was doing, released him.

	“S-sorry, dude, sorry,” he babbled apologetically. “It's just... fuck!  I... I...”

	“S'allright.”  

	Drew rose and laid a reassuring hand on Jacob's shoulder.  “This is pretty normal too, man.  I didn't want to go back after my first time, either.  But we have to; our meat bodies need us.”

	“Then I can get an IV drip, set myself up on life support...”

	“And where will the money for all that crap come from?  What'll you tell your friends?  Your family?  How will you deal with muscle atrophy?  How about those bedsores?  You'll have to spend at least some time in your real body, just to take care of business.  Do you really want to fuck it up beyond all recognition?”
	
	“No...”

	“I knew you didn't.”  Drew's voice was reassuring, his affect making clear that he'd been in Jacob's position once before, and sympathized.  “That’s why you’re gonna jack out, pop a bunch of those mood stabilizers that came in the welcome packet – they’re custom made for your DNA, you know – and go back to your life.  Tailesium’s not going anywhere.”

	Jacob sighed deeply, looking down at his sinewy forearms and clawed hands, then past them to the gigantic bulge of his bikini-clad package.  It was unavoidable - he’d be saying goodbye to them soon.

	“If it makes you feel any better, it’s not gonna be long till you can stay in here full-time and nobody’ll give a fuck,” Drew continued.  “SpaceX-NASA’s got life support chambers in development for their manned trip to Europa.  Guess what else those could be used for?”

	“Really?”

	“Yeah.  And the social stigma’s going to go away as well.  In ten to twenty years, nobody’s gonna recognize human civilization anymore, anyway.  Real, virtual – there won’t be a distinction.  Eventually, we’ll have such fine control of real-life matter that you won’t be able to tell the difference.  And you won’t have to worry about holding a shitty job, either; all your necessities will be taken care of.  Which means you’ll have all the time in the world to just create, experience, commune, fornicate, fuck… just live life to its fullest.  And nobody’ll be able to stop you, not the government, not the corporations, not the fundamentalists.  They’ll either adapt, or go extinct like the fuckin’ dinosaurs.”

	Jacob felt his friend’s grip tighten, and now it was his turn to wince uncomfortably as the fox’s pointy claws dug into his scales.  “I get it, I get it,” he said, brushing Drew’s hand away with a sweep of his arm.  

	“You sure you do?  ‘Cause the Singularity…”

	“… is near, I know,” Jacob finished.  “You have mentioned that to me before.  Like, a billion times.”  He didn’t like the look in Drew’s unblinking eyes, nor the maniacal grin plastered across his vulpine face, end-to-end.  It reminded him too much of religious fanatics he’d seen spouting foam-flecked diatribes on Youtube.     

	“Sorry, dude.  I just get so freakin’ pumped thinking about what’s coming!”

	Jacob rubbed at his shoulder.  “It’s great that you’re excited about something, but you know, I wouldn’t place all my hopes on some techno-topia that might never come.  There’s still plenty of ways for humanity to fuck up.”

	Drew shrugged, snapping back to reality and dispelling his dogmatic aura with that simple motion.  “It’s a theory.  A really, really good theory, but yeah.”

	He looked up at his console, which was still floating in midair near his head.  “Uh-oh, looks like your session’s almost up, bud.”

	Jacob stood up, stretching.  “Shit, already?  How long ‘till I can come back?” 

	“I’ll submit your brainscan the moment I’m out.  As to how long it’ll take the ‘gummit to look at it, I dunno.  Depending on the state of the bureaucracy, it could be a couple of weeks.”

	“Two weeks?  FUCK!” Jacob shouted.  

	“Don’t worry, man.  Like I said, this place’ll be waiting for you; it ain’t going anywhere.”  

	He stood as well.  “Look, you’ve got almost fifteen minutes left,” he said.  “How ‘bout you go for a swim?  I can guarantee the water will be perfect.”

	Jacob looked out over the inlet, where the setting sun was casting a soft, golden glimmer over the sky-blue waters.  A little dip in that beautiful virtual ocean sounded like a nice, refreshing way to finish off his inaugural VR session.

“Maybe I will,” he said.

	“I bet it’d be even more perfect without the suit…” said Drew melodiously with a lascivious, foxy grin.

	Jacob glared at him.  

	“Not yet, man.  Not yet.”

	He turned and set out for the shore, while Drew snickered softly behind him.  Stopping after a few boob-bouncing strides, he turned and looked over his shoulder.

	“I’ve been meaning to ask… Tailesium?  Really?”

	“It sounds less retarded the more you say it.  Trust me.”

	Jacob continued on his way, and found he felt lighter and lighter with each step he took.  He’d come home, and it didn’t matter how stupid home’s name was.