Changing Nick

by BRK

Nick’s computer starts offering him choices between one kind of transformation and another. He soon learns he’s been drawn into a strange conspiracy, even as the changes start to spread to friends, strangers, and secret allies.

18 parts 70k words (#42) Added May 2013 Updated 16 Jul 2022 117k views (#20) 4.7 stars (39 votes)

You may be looking for the following similarly named story: The changing by NBCK99.

Part 1 Nick’s computer starts offering him choices between one kind of transformation and another. He soon learns he’s been drawn into a strange conspiracy, even as the changes start to spread to friends, strangers, and secret allies. (added: 10 May 2013)
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4 Nick encounters an old buddy, Brandan, who quickly gets caught up in what’s happening to Nick—along with Brendan’s friend Kevin. (added: 18 Jun 2013)
Part 5 While Nick, Brandan, and Kevin deal with a big change, Zack and Henry enjoy each other’s company, and Larry mulls over the computer he’s sold to that Nick guy. (added: 12 Aug 2013)
Part 6 Brendan and Kevin discover the app on Nick’s phone is triggering transformations, while Calvin, looking for Nick, finds Zack and Henry instead and distracted. (added: 29 Aug 2013)
Part 7  (added: 6 Sep 2013)
Part 8 Nick, Brendan, and Kevin experience some public growth in the campus plaza and meet up with Zack and his new four-armed admirers. Meanwhile, Chaz sneaks into Nick’s room to try to roll back the Transmutes, only to be subjected to his own set of punitive transformations. (added: 8 Oct 2013)
Part 9 In a flashback, we finally encounter the man who’s behind the transmutation-magic app—and who he’s doing it all for. (added: 30 Mar 2016)
Part 10 The Chazzes, distracted by each other in Nick’s room, are confronted by Nick’s friend Filipe, while the Larrys encounter an admirer while shooting hoops. Meanwhile, Nick and his friends, having retreated to the choir rehearsal room, find out exactly who’s been there with them the whole time. (added: 16 Jun 2017)
Part 11
Part 12 Ethan, Nick, and the others make a plan. They decide that Nick’s phone is the most immediate problem and has to be dealt with first. The Transmute app, however, isn’t that easy to make go away. (added: 26 Jan 2018)
Part 13
Part 14 Kevin comes to terms with his crush falling for the multigod Nick, as the group returns to the rehearsal room to discuss the far more difficult task of disabling or destroying Nick’s Transmute-infected laptop. Meanwhile, back in Nick’s room the two Chazzes are having a lot of fun with their brash new friend Filipe. Can two extra-enhanced clones and a hot, cocksure Portuguese guy be left alone long enough to enjoy some horizontal time together? (added: 30 Mar 2019)
Part 15 As the teams head out to take the offensive in resolving the Transmute problem, Nick stays behind in the music room with Brendan. (added: 4 Apr 2020)
Part 16
Part 17 The efforts of the Nickspirators push toward a climax as allies join forces to fight Noah’s plans. The biggest problem, literally, is Nick himself—he’s finally exposed in the student Caff, just as the wizard wanted, and even Brendan, sent there at his own demand, can’t help him. But then, you don’t always know the form help will take until it’s right there, in your hand… (added: 16 Jul 2022)
Part 18
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Part 1

At the time Nick had mixed feelings about getting a brave new laptop. His old one had been a gift and had served him valiantly, and its sudden death—accompanied, shockingly, by a loud zzzt! of brief but intense electronic anguish followed by an eerie stillness—had unexpectedly moved him. In that moment, as if he were in a (rather strange) romantic movie, his eyes had glossed over for a moment as he sat there by its stilled plastic body, nostalgically reliving all the fun times they’d had together in a poignant, misty montage—though generally, Nick thought wryly afterwards, romantic montages in mainstream movies don’t normally feature quite so much time with the rememberer’s dick in his own left hand.

Still, Nick thought with a sigh, one must move on, whether it’s from cheating boyfriends or tragically snuffed computers, both lessons he’d learned the hard way; and as he stood in line one mild late-October Saturday morning at the computer center kiosk in one corner of the bustling University bookstore, daily coffee in hand, he was already feeling a bit of excitement about his new toy. Or rather, his new education-facilitating implement (which nonetheless was also a toy).

They called the next on line and he went to the desk, tossing back a last swig of coffee before ditching the cup in a handy trash bin by the counter. The desk guy at the kiosk was watching him idly. He was a very tall young guy, his age, with rust-red hair, round glasses with thick black frames, and a hunter green tee shirt that hung loosely on his bony frame. He told him his name, Nick Berg, and that he was there to pick up the new MacBook he’d reserved on line.

The redhead nodded and turned to his own laptop computer, clattering the keys briefly, and then nodded again at what came up on his screen. “They have your computer ready, Mister—” He started to say, then paused and looked back up at him. “Your name is Nikolaj Berg?” He asked with greater interest, not like he was confirming the details of his order but like he thought he might know him.

Nick didn’t remember him, though, and mused that Rusty McBeanpole couldn’t have known him too well because he pronounced the “j” in his first name: his most constant, if low-grade, exasperation in life, to that point, was people who brainlessly pronounced his name as “Nikoladge”. He’d long ago vowed not to let it bother him, but it often caught him off guard anyway and generally filled him with an urgent, irrational impulse to mispronounce their name in some ridiculous and unlikely way.

But Nick kept his peace and corrected him, calmly, and then did what he always did, which was to add with a friendly smile, “Nick is fine.”

Rusty was watching him closely as Nick stood there, his friendly smile still in place but faltering under his assessing gaze. He seemed to be looking Nick over with some care, as if he suspected he were lying about his name or the Scandinavian heritage it implied. It was true, slightly to his chagrin in these situations, that he looked more Puerto Rican than Danish, thanks to his mother’s family: he had always been short and wiry, with amber-gold skin and a head of thick inky-black hair that he tended to wear long. He was a little self-conscious about his skinniness and lately had taken to wearing tight tee shirts so people could at least see he was defined, if not buff. He cocked slightly his head at Rusty. Maybe he was checking him out? He didn’t seem pleased with what he saw.

“You’re the Nick who used to be with Josh Tracey?” Rusty said at last.

Nick’s friendly smile shut down and vanished. Rusty pulled back slightly from his closed expression, awkwardly accepting Nick’s silent confirmation. He returned his gaze to his screen, but didn’t type anything; he just stood there, apparently staring at the pixels and thinking about God knew what. They both stood there a moment uncomfortably, Rusty seemingly wrestling with deep thoughts, Nick watching him do so in growing concern edged with annoyance. Then Rusty flitted his eyes to him once him, gave him an unreadable glance, then looked away.

Nick frowned. Was this guy a friend of Josh’s? Was he about to screw up his order in the system or something? He was about to request that someone else help him when Rusty abruptly crouched out of sight behind the counter. When he came up he had a MacBook box in his hands. He handed it to Nick silently. Nick took it. Rusty watched him. Nick turned and walked slowly away through the bookstore. When he got to the glass doors he glanced back. The clerk was still watching him.

Nick didn’t exactly run back to his dorm, but he did walk briskly.

When you inaugurate a new computer there’s always a lot of software to set up and customize, so when he had his new baby opened up and plugged in on his desk in the dorm room, which he shared with a roommate who was around so seldom he was inclined to pretend he was a ghost who only manifested under obscure and abstruse combinations of astral and meteorological conditions, he knew he was in for a brief longueur spent clicking “OK” buttons, entering user names and passwords, synching up his iPhone, and watching blue progress bars crawl slowly across the screen like drugged earthworms. He flipped on the small CD player on his dresser, dropped in one of his pop music mix CDs to play on random, volume low, and got started. (He had a secret love of boy bands that he kept rigorously secret from anyone who would laugh at him for it, which was to say, everyone.)

After a few minutes of this set-up mundanity he started to sort of tune out of what he was doing, clicking buttons and icons mechanically without paying much attention, so he wasn’t really paying attention as the last setup wizard loaded itself. It seemed to be for a utility called “Transmute.” Nick figured it probably had something to do with memory flexibility and optimization. He clicked on the default setup and let it install.

The last screen said, “Transmute will remain running in the background and will perform its random alteration functions whenever you’re near your computer, with or without user guidance. Are you sure you want to complete installation?” He snorted, thinking it goofy that the copy writer had inadvertently made it sound like the software knew when he was intruding into the laptop’s personal space, and clicked OK.

That was it for the installations. He sighed happily and cracked his knuckles, as if he were about to do Great Things; but all he did was load up Firefox and log into his Gmail. He’d already read a few emails from his frazzled ER-intern sister and from his high school best friend Roger, who’d ended up at to a smaller private university not far away, and was starting a reply back to Rog about his awesome new Mac when a small dialog screen popped up, right in the way. The title bar said, “Transmute.” The text in the window said, “Transmute is about to begin periodic alteration functions.” The button said, “OK.” He clicked it, slightly exasperated that this software was insecure enough to be running to him for approval before doing its job.

He thought afterward about how carelessly he’d clicked on that “OK” button, but in retrospect he realized that there had been no “Cancel” button anyway, and no “X” button in the title bar. Still, he had occasion to wonder later, more than once, what would have happened if he hadn’t done it.

The window cleared and, figuring it would get on with its business of deftly leveraging blocs of memory or whatever the hell the program did without bothering him, Nick moved his hands toward the keyboard to resume writing his email to Rog. But immediately a new, larger window opened. The title bar said, “Transmute” again, and now the text said, “Transmute is about to add 5 pounds of muscle to your frame. Would you like it to be distributed throughout your body, or only in your pectoral muscles?”

The buttons said, “Distributed” and “Pecs”. There was no “Cancel” button. The “Pecs” button was highlighted as the default.

He stared at the window incredulously. What the fuck? he could barely even connect words together in his head to react to this bizarre occurrence. Was this a joke? A prank? A line of text appeared under the buttons: “Window will self-dismiss in 5 seconds”, and the 5 was quickly replaced by a 4, then a 3, and it kept counting down until the “Pecs” button highlighted itself and the window vanished.

His eyes seemed to drift automatically down to his own chest. He still had the same incredulous look on his face, he knew, now as much at himself for actually checking to see if something were about to happen to his chest as at the preposterous situation. In fact he was actually laughing now—but even as he did so a part of his brain was starting to consider where this software had come from. Why was this software installed on this computer? It couldn’t be standard on all MacBooks, or it would have been all over the net. Was it because it was the laptop that had been kept aside, under the counter? Had this lame prank been prepared especially for him?

That’s when it hit him. Not an answer, but a sudden unnatural jarring sensation that seemed to twist every corner of his body, inside and out, all at once, as if in the no-time between one second and the next he’d been shoved through a high-powered transmat device, cycled once, and slammed back together exactly as he’d been.

Only, well perhaps not quite exactly as he’d been.

His eyes were still cast down, at his chest. His mouth was open a little. He wasn’t sure exactly what he should think, but that was okay because the front of his brain was buzzing and snapping like a live downed electrical cable spasming in the street.

Nick had done a report in middle school many years ago on fat and muscle, and one of the few things he remembered about it was that, at least in terms of general proportions, the volume five pounds of fat was on the order of a two-liter soda bottle, and five pounds of muscle, because it was denser, was closer to a one-liter bottle. He was still looking down at his chest, and the only part of his brain that was working was nodding at his previously flat (but defined!) chest now seemed to be filling out his snug black tee in a way that might well be commensurate with five pounds of new muscle.

His hand moved to his chest of its own volition and he felt himself up. The front of his brain, now coming back on line, was preparing to stridently insist that he was imagining any difference, but his hand was feeling more pecs, and nicely distributed, as if his thin layer of chest muscles had just been expanded outward at all points—as if the tissue had been raised like a soufflé, only it was hard and hardy muscle.

His cock flexed and began to rapidly harden.

He quickly dropped his hand onto the desk and tried shaking his head to clear it. He decided to agree with his brain that nothing had really happened. It was too weird. He resolved to ignore what his hand had (seemed to!) feel and his eyes had (seemed to!) register, and the fact that even now he could (seem to!) feel his tee pulling just a bit tighter across his chest. It had to be all in his head. Or, maybe, half in his head, and half something completely normal, like his shirt had shrunk a bit in the wash and he was just now noticing because his attention had been called to it. He mean, if you’re not a bodybuilder how often did you really look at your own chest? It had to be the shirt. His cock, though, had its own ideas. It stayed mostly hard, flexing against the thick fabric of his pants as it stretched out along his hip.

He shook his head again, dismissing the whole episode, and slowly returned to writing his email. He’d been working on it for five minutes—leaving aside the whole weird magical software thing, which he wasn’t about to tell anyone about for reasons he wasn’t quite sure of (why not, if it was just a prank?), he nonetheless had a lot to tell Rog about a couple of recent dates he’d been on with some very strange guys—and had just hit “Send” when a new window popped up.

It had “Transmute” in the title bar.

Nick leaned forward, skeptical but alert, his heart suddenly pounding in his (augmented) (no it isn’t) chest. The text said, “Transmute is about to double the amount of cock you have.”

Nick gasped.

“Would you like your cock to be twice as big,” the text said, “or to add a second cock?” There were two buttons, “Bigger” and “Second cock.”

“Second cock” was, weirdly, the default. More cocks was the default answer? Who programmed this thing? He chuffed and, just in case this information was being collected somewhere—perhaps this was all a bizarre poll of some kind?—moved his cursor and carefully clicked on “Bigger.” It highlighted and the screen went away.

His eyes dropped to the crotch of his chinos. Sometime in the last few thumping heartbeats his cock had gotten all the way hard, stretched out straight along the crease of his hip—which, the detached and snarky part of his brain thought, would be convenient for expansion. He felt the thrum of his boner as it flexed against the soft cotton of his briefs and the hard bone of his hip. He thought about his cock as he waited, irrationally, for something he had already resolutely decided was all in his head: it was pretty normal sized, maybe six inches hard (okay, exactly six inches hard, he’d measured) and four around. It was a nice cock. Uncut (his mom had lain down the law on that score, he’d heard) and nicely shaped, in his opinion; it fit in the hand nicely, anyway, and was pleasantly sensitive and eagerly responsive to the slightest tactile stimulation.

He’d always wondered about the size. He thought about what guys say in movies about their cock—”no one had ever complained”—but who sucks your cock and complains, anyway? “Sorry, Nick, that was nice and your spunk tastes good and all, but he was really set on at least seven inches. Have a nice life!”

Well, maybe they’d thought it without saying it. He hadn’t had many repeat customers, come to that…

It hit him. The jarring wave of dissociative sensation. His eyes clouded for just a moment and he had the weird sense of falling—no, not falling, floating—and then everything was normal. Everything, that is, but his very, very hard cock.

Even through the thick fabric of the chinos he could tell the big lump of boner was considerably bigger.

 

Part 2

With impatient, fumbling hands he scrabbled open the waistband button and worked down the zipper, tough in his sitting position, but in seconds his pants and briefs were around his shins and he was staring at it, a big, bold, beautiful cock that was somehow thrusting up demandingly, insistently, from his own hot groin.

No, it wasn’t 12 inches long now. It had grown all over, like his pecs (the tendril of his attention shifting that way, toward his chest, made him feel the muscles’ new weight and the tightness of his shirt all over again). His cock was longer and wider and thicker. His extensive experience with cock (alas, mostly, though not entirely to be sure, on a computer screen) pegged the length at maybe close to 8 inches and with the same proportionate thickness as before—maybe five around?—but on him, looming over his narrow waist and flat, compact abs, it looked very large. Suddenly it flexed hard and he gasped. A large clear drop of precum emerged from the slit and dropped on the tight skin just above his navel with a silent splash. He watched as some of the liquid drained quietly into his belly button.

His left hand was around it. He didn’t remember moving his hand at all, but there it was, wrapped around it and stroking it gently. His hand was surprised by the new girth, by the increased length of the stroke, and it loved it. His heart was thumping in rhythm with his strokes now, the feeling of this new huge cock a constantly renewing source of amazed arousal, and he was feeling close to what he was certain was going to be a whopper of an orgasm when something on the screen drew his attention.

In his hazy overstimulated state he’d forgotten about computer programs, about computers entirely, but he froze, had grasping cock, as he read the new window that had come up. The text said, “Transmute is about to double the amount of cock you have. Would you like your cock to be twice as big, or to add a second cock?” There were two buttons, “Bigger” and “Second cock.”

“Second cock” was the default.

It was the same window!

He started to move his hand toward the cursor, but he hesitated for just a split-second, unsure he really wanted this new beautiful cock to be any bigger. It was then that he realized the self-dismiss message had already appeared and was already counting down.

2…

1…

Quickly he jerked his hand to the touch pad, but it was too late. The default highlighted and the screen vanished. He stared panting at his big new cock, incredibly hard, close to bursting as he cradled in his hand, and suddenly he felt the jarring wave—and when his eyes cleared there were two big new cocks in his now-inadequate hand, side by side, steel-hard and mind-blowingly gorgeous, so close together that they were pushing hard against each other.

Unable to think of anything but the orgasm he urgently needed, he tried closing his hand around both cocks. It wouldn’t reach—he couldn’t close his fist, not even close—but the friction of these two incredibly sensitive sex pistons rubbing together as he stroked them both together was more intense than any sexual stimulation he’d ever felt. He came almost immediately, suddenly and violently, with an orgasm that wracked his whole body with unprecedented, almost unendurable levels of pleasure.

He didn’t black out, not exactly, but it was a few moments before he was really aware of anything, and when he began to focus again his eyes were resting on two large dousings of cum that had painted his abs and splattered even his newly thicker pecs.

His hand was still around his two thick cocks. They were still mostly hard and he was acutely conscious it wouldn’t take much to rile them up again. He frowned at them. They were beautiful, especially like this, pressed together and covered in messy cum. He didn’t know how he would explain them, but at the moment, in his post-orgasmic euphoria, he was more concerned about how horny knowing they were there, jostling each other and providing constant stimulation from all that sensitive skin on skin, was making him, would make him all the time from now on.

“You guys are going to be a problem, aren’t you?” He said to his cum-covered cocks. They pulsed in his hand, but it was a rhetorical question anyway.

He stood up with an effort, resisting his urge to succumb to post-jerk-off lassitude, and pulled his briefs and pants up high enough on his thighs that he could walk over to the basket of new laundry he hadn’t put away yet and fish out a hand towel, holding onto his half-hard cocks the whole way. The fact was, they felt good—the combination of his hand holding them and them rubbing together was just pure, comfortable pleasure. He wiped his double loads of spunk off his torso and began cleaning his cocks with the towel in his right hand, still cradling them in his left, and even this level of stimulation got them completely hard again. He sighed, deciding it wouldn’t take long to make them blow again, and walked over to the chair at his desk.

Even as he was sitting down a new window came up.

It took him a second to read it because it occurred to him, the way it popped up as he was sitting down, that it was almost like the new round had been triggered by his returning to the computer. He suddenly remembered the goofy copy about proximity. Shit!

The Transmute program was dormant if he wasn’t near his laptop. He was certain now. Proximity mattered. Was the laundry basket by the closet far enough away? Or was it a coincidence?

Abruptly he remembered the self-dismissal and cursed himself for getting distracted. The new window said, “Transmute is about to alter the effect that caffeine has on your body. Would you like it to make you a little taller, make you temporarily horny, or both?”

He stared at the screen agape. There were three buttons this time: “Taller”, “Horny”, and “Both”. “Both” was the default.

He wasn’t sure he wanted any of these, if only because he was getting suspicious of the app’s capriciousness—suddenly adding a “Both” default was a bad sign of deviousness to come—and its unnervingly increasing caginess about exactly what it was going to do. It had started out with specific measurements, but now it was “taller” and “horny”. Was it a function of how much caffeine over how long, or something equally opaque? How much taller from how much caffeine? It was anyone’s guess, and as for making him horny—fuck, he was already totally boned just from the having the equipment he had. What would a venti latte do to him?

He needed to put a stop to this, at least until he could figure things out. He tried Force Quit, but Transmute wasn’t even listed as a running application to be forcibly ended. He frowned, a surge of panic tickling the underside of his brain. He reached for the top of the monitor to close the laptop, but he remembered that weird language in the warning screen about how it would run in the background with or without user interaction, and that might mean the app would still be active even while the computer was asleep but still running some of its processes.

He had to kill the program somehow. He tried to shut down from the Apple menu, but he quickly got a screen that said, “Shut Down has been aborted by Transmute.” He cleared that and urgently pressed the power button, holding it down to force a reboot.

Nothing happened.

The self-dismiss message appeared.

Forgetting that he was sitting down he backed away from the computer in horror, finding himself falling backwards in the chair and spilling out of it sideways onto the floor, the chair slamming onto the thin industrial rug of the dorm room beside him. He tried to get to his feet but his pants had fallen down again and, now in the throes of panic, he scrambled madly across the room on all fours until he was at the door to the room, as far away from the computer as he could get.

The Transmute window was still up on the screen, but he could just make out from this distance a smaller window that had surfaced in front of it. He couldn’t quite read what it said, but the shapes were right for “Out of range”. Next to it was an alert icon, two narrow rectangles standing parallel on their ends. Captain’s bars? he thought muzzily. No, he realized, feeling stupid, not that. It meant “pause”.

His heart sank, startling him with the extent to which he thought he’d found an edge over this Transmute app only to have it quickly blunted. Getting away from the computer didn’t end whatever weird little change the program was trying to make to him—it just suspended it, until, inevitably, he got back in range. All he’d done was postpone the inevitable.

He became aware of his undignified position, crouched at the door like a cur at bay, his pants around his ankles. He rose to his feet, pulling his briefs and pants up with him, and let the waistband of his briefs trap his tall thick leaky boners vertically against the muscles of his groin, sticking straight up out of the elastic, and then fastened up his chinos over them with a little difficulty, staring down his own laptop screen the whole time. The “out of range” pause remained steadily in effect, suspending the transmutation.

He needed power over it. Power was information. He needed to know what that range was.

He walked forward, step by step, toward the desk.

He was all of three feet away from his gleaming new toy before the interceding window vanished. The countdown resumed, relentless and already in progress.

2…

1…

He was going to rush the machine, but what was the point?

The “Both” button selected and the window was gone. He stepped back quickly before a new one could come up, conflicted and uncomfortable. He could always give up coffee, he thought unhappily, even as a loud corner of his brain urged him to run down to Starbucks before another second passed, to go down there and buy them out of everything and chug it all down and get tall and horny and taller and hornier.

 

Part 3

He got a disconcerting head’s up, so to speak, about how much he loved his new cocks when he realized he was standing in front of his closet, at a safe distance of course from his deceptively innocent-looking and momentarily harmless computer, resisting the idea of putting on a shirt because it would cover up his beautiful twin boners. Even as he stood there wavering his eyes fell on them in the mirror, sticking a few inches straight up out of his chinos, the warm pink of the shaft and head snuggling in the thick foreskin clashing brashly with the dark khaki fabric. His left hand twitched at his side, itching to grasp them, to be fucked by them, and the thought made them thrust hard against the tight constraints of the slacks’ wide waistband. The heads were both moist in their cocoon. Out of nowhere came the thought that what he really wanted was to lick that cumjuice off those warm, sensitive cockheads, and his mind drifted into imaginative contemplation about how it might be possible if only he just sat through a few more changes

He blinked and snorted at himself. He was glad he’d had that weird stray thought—it brought him back to his senses. Sure, the wily app might make him hung enough to suck himself, he thought, flipping through the various button-down short-sleeves and polos he had hanging in the closet; it might, and it might also turn him into an armadillo. He spotted a thick, dark eggplant-purple polo shirt he knew was extra long and pulled it gratefully off its hangar. Extra long (the shirt, he mean) was what he needed: he didn’t need to deal with worries about his cocks popping out today. He had a mission, and that mission started with tracking down Rusty.

He knew Rusty was culpable, somehow. Those strange looks; the sudden decision to hand him the unit that had been set aside up front rather than back with the rest of the stock; and most of all the way he’d identified Nick as the ex of someone the clerk clearly knew. And if Rusty was friends with Josh, he was certain to know that Josh bitterly blamed Nick for everything that had gone wrong. Nick’s willingness to end it rather than trying to fix everything had, in Josh’s eyes, been Nick’s ultimate expression of contempt toward him. He’d heard Josh’s post-breakup bitching about him more than once third or fourth hand. As Nick pulled on the shirt his resolution grew. Rusty had to have targeted him because of Josh. Confronting Rusty was definitely the first step toward fixing this.

He felt the nice snugness of the knit polo across his newly thick pecs and smiled wryly. He knew better than to be deceived by how much he liked his alterations so far. That was exactly how a revenge scenario like this might work, he thought grimly. A few changes you really liked—that was how you got sucked in. And then, whammo! You’re a fucking armadillo.

He sighed, feeling a headache coming on. He need coffee, he thought absently. He grabbed his wallet, phone, and keys, which fortunately he’d dumped on the dresser as he’d come in with his new “toy” rather than on the desk, and started to head out to locate Rusty at the bookstore. Just as he was reaching for the doorknob, though, he heard keys jangling and the tumbler turning, and he stepped back a half step in time for the door to swing open fast and hard right past his face, just missing clipping his nose. A moment later Zack, his absentee roommate, was barreling past it into the room with downcast eyes, not seeing Nick until it was too late and nearly knocking them both down. Hastily Nick grabbed the door with one hand and Zack with the other, barely managing to avoid tumbling heels over head together into the room.

“Whoa!” breathed Zack. He’d grabbed Nick, too, and now they were standing there in the open doorway, raining their balance together in an unplanned embrace. Someone who didn’t know him might have expected Zack would step back at this point, but Zack had this weird thing where he tended to walk right up to you until he was a maximum of an inch away from you at all points and talk quietly in your face, rather than interacting with you from a foot or two away like normal people.

He’d only been Nick’s roommate for a couple months and was never home but Nick was already used to it. He had decided he didn’t mind, since he used the same wispy voice no matter what, and if he were a foot away you couldn’t understand him. And when you could hear him you were better off because he tended to say interesting and funny things. Nick enjoyed their conversations, face-to-face or not.

And even though he wasn’t Nick’s type Zack was cute enough. He was a bit taller, with loose dirty blond hair, and had big lively hazel eyes and full lips that stood out against his cream-pale skin, and a sweet smile that was actually kind of soul-lightening all close up. And he smelled nice, like cinnamon and vanilla, though Nick never saw him use lotion or body wash that would account for it. But then, who knew what he was up to in the 90% of the time Nick never saw him. Maybe it was just the accumulated scent of everyone he rubbed up against during the day.

“Easy, Zack,” Nick said quietly, matching his roommate’s usual low volume. His pleasant, surprised face was a couple inches from his. As usual he thought about kissing him, and, as usual, decided it would start something he wasn’t prepared to follow through on.

“Sorry, Nick,” he said in his customary undertone. He sounded appropriately contrite, but he could tell he was glad to see him. “Don’t expect you to be standing right there behind the door.”

Nick realized they were still holding onto each other, pressed together in the doorway. He watched Zack’s eyes widen slightly and he knew Zack was feeling his huge boners behind his waistband. Nick tried to pull away but Zack held him where he was. Nick decided to ignore their pressed-together-ness, since he was on his way out anyway. He had a weird, half-formed feeling that a new precedent had been set and that this would be their new conversational position from now on. He decided casually he could probably deal with that. It’s not like Nick really minded embracing him or anything, exactly, and when he was around Nick enjoyed his company enough. He was fun to talk to.

“Where are you on you way to?” Nick asked, feeling Zack’s body pressed hard but still against his heated groin and agonizingly hard cocks.

“Here,” Zack said, to Nick’s surprise. “I have to write a paper and the library computer center’s all full up. Can I use yours—?”

“No!” Nick said, startled into using his regular voice, the effect of which was like shouting at this distance. He blinked, his head moving back a fraction of an inch. “I mean, it’s not working right. Please, don’t go near it until I get it fixed.”

“Don’t even go near it?” Zack repeated with a grin. “Why, will it bite?”

Nick frowned. “I don’t know,” he said, and Zack laughed softly. He fixed Zack in the eyes, hard to do at this proximity. “Please, just stay away from it for now. I mean literally, stay away from it.”

Zack’s smile faded. He looked hurt and tried to disengage a little from their accidental embrace. “I won’t break it.”

“I know.” Nick pulled him back with the arm he had wrapped around him, trying to reassure him. “It’s just that it’s already broken and you might not be able to write your paper.”

“Oh. Okay.” Zack nodded, and his face relaxed.

“Anyway,” Nick said, pulling apart from him, “I gotta go.” He separated himself reluctantly, and he headed past him and out into the long cinder-block corridor. He picked up his pace, acutely aware of the jostling of his huge, hard, cream-slicked cocks and how the wet front of his shirt felt like it was probably plastered against them, but he put all that out of his mind. Time enough to think of his cocks later—he had work to do. He ducked down the stairs, wondering as he thundered down them whether he stood any chance of getting to the bottom of all this.

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Zack watched his roommate disappear down the corridor and then turned and cast his glance across first Nick’s computer, open and running on Nick’s desk by the window, and then the MacBook box it had just come out of lying half-open on the floor nearby. It was literally just out of the box, Zack thought. What could be wrong with it already? Zack knew a great deal about computers—he was hoping for a career in software design—and had done a lot of research on the technical specs of the Mac OS for one of his classes. Maybe he could figure out what was wrong.

He sat down at the desk confidently and reached toward the trackpad, but before he could start checking the system logs and start formulating a diagnosis a window popped up.

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Nick burst into the school bookstore, shouldering roughly through a large knot of unmoving jocks chattering excitedly right inside the store, and made his way quickly to the computer kiosk at the back. There was a line of five or six people but he ignored it, heading straight for the counter and looking around for the clerk he thought of as Rusty. But he wasn’t there. He craned his head around, trying to see if he was behind the panel that separated the counter area from the small stock area behind it, but the only person in the little substore was a short dark haired girl he knew by sight from one of classes, but whose name he could not remember.

“Hey,” he called out to her, interrupting her conversation with a customer, “where’s the other guy?” She looked at him, confused and with visible impatience. “He was here this morning. Tall, red hair?”

“That’s Larry,” she said dismissively. “He only works weekend mornings.” She’d already turned back to her customer, a big guy who looked like a biker.

“Do you know where I could find him?” Nick asked.

This time she only turned her eyes toward him. “No.” It was a “no” that really meant “fuck off.” The biker guy cast a meaningful glower at him. Nick sighed.

“Nick?” came a voice behind him.

He turned. Standing behind him was a beautifully muscled, sweet-faced all-American-boy type in a snug school tee and tight jeans. He seemed oddly familiar. Then it hit him. “Brendan?” he asked in surprise.

The cutie smiled broadly. “Yeah!” He offered a hand, and Nick shook it, a little bemused. He remembered Brendan well from junior high and the first couple years of high school, before he’d moved a few cities away to be with his mom and his new step-father. He was cheerful, calm, and, he remembered, always polite.

“I thought that was you pushing through us up front.” Nick said. “You’re going here?”

“Yeah,” Brendan said enthusiastically. “I made the swim team on partial scholarship. Did you try out? You were really fast!”

“Not fast enough,” Nick said ruefully. “I wasn’t really serious about it.” And these days I’d have trouble with the Speedos, he added wryly to himself. “Not like you, apparently. You really look like you threw yourself into it!” His still-hard cocks jostled themselves in reaction to Brendan’s generous muscles, and Nick wondered how visible they were.

But Brendan had cast his glance down at his classically hunky bod and was smiling shamefacedly. Then he was nodding toward Nick’s own tight torso. “You haven’t done so bad either,” he said. “At least you’ve been working your chest!” he added with a grin.

Nick felt his cheeks warm a little. “It was sort of an accident,” he said.

Brendan’s eyebrows went up a bit at this, but what he said was, “Let’s catch up. Can I buy you a coffee?”

Nick eyed his handsome friend for a moment and then shrugged, in the manner of someone casting doubts and worries aside for now. “Sure,” he said, “Why not?”

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Zack gaped at the screen that had popped up. What kind of virus was this?

The window text said, “Guest user: One alteration per session,” and then underneath that: “Transmute is about to make you considerably more attractive. Would you like it to be more in the face, so that guys you like can’t help kissing you, or overall, so that guys you like can’t help feeling you up?”

There were two buttons, “Face” and “Body”, with “Body” as the default. A self-dismiss message had already appeared under them and was counting down.

Zack was the kind of guy who accepted situations and approached them on their own terms. He thought it through. If this were real, what would I choose? He thought back to his encounter with Nick a few moments before and supposed he already had something close to the second option, though it wasn’t a matter of intense attraction so much as people always having been comfortable with him being close to them. Something about the way he smelled, someone had once told him, and the way he smiled.

Logically, then, he should choose what he didn’t already have. He moved his finger on the trackpad and clicked “Face”.

“Hey Zack!” someone called from the door. He turned, surprised to realize he hadn’t closed the door to the room.

Standing in the doorway was Henry, the cute, lanky senior in the single dorm room next door. He was a computer engineering major, very cute and very straight, almost always shirtless like he was now even though he was more lean and defined than buff or built. Despite being straight he seemed to like Zack well enough, accepting Zack’s propensity for standing close the way most people did, and often sought his help in preparing projects and studying exams.

Zack put up a hand in wordless greeting.

“C’mere a second,” Henry said, and Zack dutifully stood and walked over to where Henry was standing in the doorway. Close up Henry was even cuter. He swallowed, and then shuddered as some weird kind of electric spasm wracked his body. It flared for the tiniest moment and was gone.

Henry knitted his brows. “You okay?” he said. Zack nodded, and then realized Henry was staring at him hard, intensely and with and edge of surprise, as if he’d just realized Zack existed. Henry’s lips parted slightly. He seemed to be breathing a little more heavily than usual.

Zack frowned. “What did you—?” he started to say in his soft voice.

Henry seemed to struggle to remember what he’d wanted to ask about. “Oh,” he said at last. “I wanted to pick your brain about this algorithm we have to design. That okay?”

Zack nodded. He was about to ask for more information, when Henry moved his mouth forward the inch necessary for their lips to brush. Zack froze. He pleasure of their lips touching coursed through him, instantly hardening his big cock and electrifying every cell of his body, but he knew that if he kissed back, Henry would blame him for making a move on a straight boy.

Henry’s eyes closed and he pressed his lips onto Zack’s more firmly, and Zack let out a low, barely audible moan. Henry seemed to take that sound as permission, even as invitation, because he moved into a full-on, open mouthed kiss, and, at last, Zack kissed back. Henry’s tongue advanced, tentatively at first, then more eagerly, and Zack moaned again.

It ended naturally after a few moments, and Henry pulled back, eyes shining. “Is it okay if I do that?” he asked, and Zack noticed he didn’t phrase it in the past tense. He nodded, and Henry grinned.

“Why don’t you get the assignment sheet?” Zack said quietly. “We can talk about your project also.” Henry nodded with a small smile and turned to head into his room.

Zack retreated absently back to the desk chair and sat down on it sideways, facing the still open door, feeling a little buzzed as relived the delicious sensation of the kiss. As he sat there, adjusting his cock and waiting for Henry the shirtless beauty to return, he didn’t see the Transmute window that popped up. He didn’t see the “guest alteration” text that read exactly the same as before, and he didn’t see the default button “Body” select itself or the window vanish, unheeded but not ineffective.

 

Part 4

Brendan stood in line at the coffee shop just ahead of Nick, but resolutely facing backwards, as if he wanted to be just a little perverse and grin inwardly at the consternation of everyone else who knew the right way to face in a coffeehouse queue. And Brendan did seem amused as he regarded Nick, who had been gazing apprehensively up at the price boards for some time, gently worrying his lower lip in his teeth.

“Trouble deciding?” smiled Brendan, taking a step back as the line shifted forward, the counter now only one customer away. The aroma of the coffee seemed to permeate the air and he breathed it in deeply even as he wondered if the caffeine could somehow effect him this way through sheer diffusion. Nick glanced at him and unaccountably felt his cheeks warm again. He thought to himself that it was almost like Brendan seemed cuter every time he looked at him, though his rational mind countered darkly that it didn’t even need to be the coffee aroma affecting him—it was probably just that the constant, too-hard throbbings of his oversized twin animal cocks were forcing him bodily through an upward spiral of unbridled lust. He quickly darted his eyes back up to the board.

Nick shook his head. “I’m not sure what to do,” he admitted, and paused, unable to help taking a deep whiff of the coffee smell. Though they were already standing fairly close Nick leaned toward him slightly while he kept his eyes on the board. “You see,” he said confidentially, “I just found out that caffeine—” his eyes slipped back down to meet Brendan’s, and he was suddenly abashed at his near confession. “It, er, does things to me,” he finished lamely.

Brendan’s dark eyebrows, deliciously strong on his pale, model-cute face, rose into the loose, coal-black locks drifted across his forehead. Nick found even this simple movement unexpectedly sexy, and felt his twin boners squeeze against each other straining against his confining waistband behind his extra-long shirt. “‘Things’?” Brendan echoed. He looked at Nick shrewdly. “Good things?” he asked. Nick just went back to worrying his lip, but he realized he had nodded ever so slightly when Brendan’s mesmerizing boyish grin suddenly shifted crookedly to one side.

“Next!” called the barista, and Brendan took a last step back and turned slightly to face her, his eyes still on Nick and his crooked smile now looking positively wicked. He had somehow already pulled out his wallet and was proffering a debit card.

“I’ll have a medium coffee,” he told her, “and he,” he went on, keeping his eyes on Nick, “will have your largest size coffee—”

Nick’s eyes widened a little. “Brendan,” he said admonishingly.

“—With two extra shots,” Brendan concluded.

“Brendan!” Nick burst out. But when the surprised barista looked to him for confirmation he sighed and rolled his eyes. “Fine,” he said. He might as well find out exactly what the effect was, right? And he kind of liked having this supercute swim hunk of an old buddy to egg him on. He realized as Brendan took back his card and they moved to the pickup bar that he was wondering if that wide, smiling mouth could take both of his cocks at once. He shivered with the just the ghost, the slightest presentiment, of the mind-blowing, brain frying orgasm his cocks might find there, an unexpected orgasm he now knew he was yearning for Brendan to push him into and over the edge into unknown oblivion.

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As he sat at Nick’s desk, waiting patiently for the shirtless Henry to return, Zack turned to face his roommate’s misbehaving computer. He started noodling curiously around in the console log files, looking for evidence of the kind of breakdown Nick had suggested. He frowned as he dug deeper: This computer was clearly brand new, and yet its configuration included a small number of peculiar, anonymous system resources that Zack didn’t recognize—but that were obviously not factory standard.

As he poked at one of the aberrant files with one of the basis system utilities, trying to get a handle on what its function and properties were, a window suddenly popped up. “Transmute cannot be altered or removed except by the Transmute Wizard,” it announced. Zack cocked his head at the screen and frowned slightly. So this “Transmute” app had its own uninstall app that took care of the reconfigs or removals. Zack, a seasoned codehead, didn’t think much of software that took care of things for you rather than letting you get in under the hood and make everything the way it should be. He cleared the screen and went on with his poking of the enigmatic files.

A few seconds later another dialog box popped up, this one a little more ominous in tone. “Repeated attempts to alter Transmute by individuals other than the Transmute Wizard will result in one (1) punitive transmutation,” it all but growled. Zack leaned back, his eyes round. He didn’t know what the “punitive transmutation” to the system might be—it could be anything from wiping the hard drive to switching the system operating language permanently into Esperanto. Zack snorted. Maybe it was eliminating all the fonts but Comic Sans, he thought with a shake of his head.

That screen from before, offering to make him more attractive (“considerably more attractive,” he remembered bemusedly), came back to him. He’d sort of dismissed it as some sort of malware Nick had inadvertently downloaded, but now he realized that that was the very Transmute app that was now warning him off. If that was true, the threat probably involved something more like making him “considerably less attractive,” or giving him a second head or something. Well, maybe a second head wouldn’t be so bad. Making out with two heads—Either way, he had a bad feeling about all this. The escalating messages suddenly put him in mind of the increasingly terse automated warnings of the planet Magrathea in Hitchhiker’s Guide, the culmination of which, he remembered, was nuclear missiles. Zack pushed out a breath and took his hands away from the keyboard.

Just as the window vanished his eyes fell again on the words “Transmute Wizard.” The window went away but the phrase seemed to linger on his retinas. “Individuals other than the Transmute Wizard,” it had said. That didn’t sound like the Wizard was an uninstall app after all. Was the Transmute Wizard a person?

Zack was wondering if there was anything he could find out about the Transmute app without triggering its defensive protocols when suddenly a new Transmute window popped up. “Thank you for desisting with your interference with Transmute,” it said. “You will now received one (1) reward transmutation. Note: to discourage attempting to incur them, reward transmutations are not remembered after they occur. Continue?” There were two buttons, the classic Mac options of “Cancel” and “OK”. Zack, still immensely curious about this app and determined to gain whatever handle on it he could, clicked “OK”.

The window was replaced with another one that said: “For the next six hours, everyone who gropes and kisses you will be altered to increase the pleasure for both of you, and the world will accept the change as normal and the way they’ve always been. Would you rather they add a second set of arms for better groping, or a second head for better kissing?” The two buttons were labeled “Arms” and “Heads”, with “Heads” the default for some reason.

Zack gaped at the window, able to think only that he had just been musing randomly about having two heads and how it would be good for kissing only moments before. He thought of who was likely to “grope” him in the next six hours. Henry. And Nick, he guessed. They way they’d held each other earlier was probably close enough to groping, he mused, and he took it for granted somehow that holding each other would be normal for him and Nick now whenever they talked. Zack turned his thoughts back to his shirtless neighbor. Would he, Zack, rather that Henry have more hands? Or more mouths?

The autodismiss countdown appeared. Zack realized it was an easy decision. He’d always been very, very tactile. And there was something about Nick’s package—Zack wasn’t too sure, but maybe Nick would be grateful for a couple extra hands, too.

He moved the cursor and clicked “Arms.” The window vanished even as he felt Henry’s warm hands on his shoulders through his tee. He smiled up at Henry, who was towering over him, his bookbag slug over one bare shoulder.

“Whatcha doing?” Henry said casually, as if he didn’t really quite realize he was casually ranging his hands over his friend’s trim shoulders.

Zack shrugged, then frowned. What had he been doing? He stood up into the embrace that seemed perfectly natural to both of them, Zack taking a moment to pull the bookbag off Henry’s shoulder and drop it on the ground so they could get comfortable more easily. Their lips found each other’s, because that was natural too, and after a few minutes of this extremely pleasurable interaction Zack smiled into Henry’s kiss, because Henry had started moving his other hands south from where he was still pleasurably feeling up Zack’s back. Soon those strong extra hands were gently massaging Zack’s tight, hard ass through his jeans.

Meanwhile, on the screen of Nick’s computer a new window had popped up, unnoticed by either of them. “New guest user,” it said: “One alteration per session.”

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Nick sat across from Brendan at one of the little round tables in the back third of the coffee house, a huge, stadium-sized coffee with extra caffeine. Steam seeped from it, and maybe it was all in his head but the aroma was so intense as to seem intoxicating. He looked from the coffee to Brendan and back. The model-cute boy was watching him intently, clearly vastly amused by the whole adventure, and Nick felt his snuggling, struggling, straining boners spitting precum all over each other and his hidden abs. He wasn’t sure whether he was turned on more by the fact that the coffee would change him, or that he didn’t know exactly how, or how much.

“Drink up,” Brendan said, eyes dancing. He hoisted his own, mu h smaller-sized beverage to his lips by way of example. Nick shook his head and the ridiculousness of it all and, using both hands, he hefted his java to his own mouth. It tasted great, the complex sharp and smooth tastes of the java somehow having come together perfectly in this one cup. In fact, it tasted better than usual, maybe better than coffee had ever tasted that Nick could remember. After the half-inch of milk he’d added it was just shy of really hot, and it warmed his mouth as he enjoyed the unexpectedly impressive flavor.

As soon as he’d started his swig Brendan instantly lowered his own coffee and before Nick had taken more than a mouthful or two of the bitter ambrosia began chanting in a very low, quiet voice, “Chug chug chug chug !”

Nick sputtered and lowered his coffee, torn between laughter and exasperation. “Hey!” he said.

You said the caffeine does something to you,” Brendan said placidly, eyes still alight. “I want to see what it is. And that means,” he concluded, leaning forward and tapping the table with finality as if he were completing a syllogism, “you need to drink enough of it for me to see the effects.”

Nick cocked an eye at him. “What do you think will happen?” he asked.

Brendan’s crooked grin became positively saucy. “I dunno,” he said, “but I bet it has something to do with the incredible wood I’m pretty sure you’re sporting.” His eyes dropped momentarily in the direction of Nick’s hidden writhing fuckpoles. Nick’s lips worked soundlessly, and Brendan laughed. “No, I don’t have X-ray vision,” he said. “But I’m good at spotting when I have an effect on someone. And,” he added confidentially, and to Nick’s surprise a little abashedly, “to tell you the truth I noticed you staring at me even back in the old days.”

Nick couldn’t say anything, but suddenly he smiled and breathed out in relief. Brendan nodded at the huge coffee Nick was still cradling in both palms a few inches from his face. Snorting again in amusement, and feeling unaccountably more relaxed, Nick lifted the cup to his mouth again and tipped his head back slightly, ready to seriously swig major mouthfuls of the almost too hot but surpassingly, unprecedentedly delicious joe.

As he was all but guzzling down his awesome drink, half as if he’d taken a bet and half because he didn’t want to stop taking this taste, and all that it might do to him, into his excited body (was he feeling it already? was that his shirt riding up in the back? were his cocks surging against his waistband with even greater intensity?), he heard his iPhone chirp—a strange chirp, an alarm-like sound he didn’t recognize. But he couldn’t stop his coffee chug now. He groped for the phone as he drank, but it wasn’t where he’d set it down, right in front of him on the table. He peered around his monster cup, and saw that Brendan was thumbing something on Nick’s phone with a frown. He lowered his coffee, but Brendan was already setting Nick’s phone back down where it was. Brendan looked back up at Nick, looking slightly perplexed.

“What was that?” Nick said.

Brendan shrugged. “I thought something was wrong with your phone, and I figured you were busy,” he said with a coy smile. “But it was just some internet poll or something.”

The hair on the back of Nick’s neck stood up. “What kind of poll?” he asked, and he could hear the alarmed edge to his voice. With a pounding heart he remembered syncing his iPhone to his new computer that morning. But—no, it couldn’t have—could it?

Brendan’s brows drew together, obviously surprised that Nick was reacting so intensely to some browser popup window. “I dunno, something about twenty pounds of muscle and where you’d put it.”

Nick slapped his half-full coffee on the table. “Twenty pounds?” he repeated. Brendan just looked at him in surprised bemusement. “Wh—what did you pick?”

Brendan cocked his head, seeming to have become intrigued by Nick’s strange behavior. “Nothing,” he said. “I just put the phone back down.”

Nick scrambled for his phone and woke up the screen. Just as it lit up a Transmute window disappeared. All he caught was “twenty pounds of muscle” before it autodismissed itself. Whatever the default was, he’d gotten it. Was that—was his shirt feeling—tight? He felt an urge to take it off, to flee before Brendan could see, to grab Brendan and haul him to the nearest empty room—no, screw the empty room, he wanted to slam Brendan and his packed-into-his-clothes muscle and his gorgeous face against this brick wall right next to them and kiss him and suck him and fuck him right here and now and oh god I’m so fucking horny. He was panting, he realized, and his cocks were twisting and throbbing and trying to grow bigger and harder, trying to break free and push into Brendan’s beautiful, beautiful mouth, and his whole body felt like a cock, hard and hot and ready to explode pleasure through his entire being at the slightest touch.

Brendan was watching him with intense fascination. He nodded toward Nick’s half-forgotten coffee. “Drink up,” he said. “I can’t wait to see what happens next.”

 

Part 5

Nick felt himself panting—not great gasps but rapid deep breaths, as if the hormone tsunami raging in his every surging artery and every pulsing cell forced him to pull in more oxygen, more air, more reality to keep on anything close to an even keel.

He knew in the rational part of his brain that twenty pounds was a lot—it was what the skinny Chris Hemsworth put on to play Thor, it was what separated ordinary guys from fitness models. But his rational processes were being downed and stripped away. The fact was that scary thrill of anticipating too much new muscle was only part of what was overwhelming him. Even as he sensed his clothes slowly tightening everywhere with each loud pound of his strong and frenzied heart—his thick tee straining a little across his shoulders, his pecs, his upper arms, his chinos clinging to newly thickened quads and calves and muscle ass—Nick at the same time felt impossibly horny. More than just impossibly horny. His horniness was infused in him, twisting his body with new needs and shivering his bones. He felt potent. He felt made to fuck.

Nick brushed a slightly damp lock of his longish black hair off his forehead, paying close attention to the unaccustomed feeling of bunching bicep muscles, all while keeping his eyes fixed on Brendan’s. His friend’s obvious awe as he realized what was happening only further stoked the furnace of Nick’s arousal. Nick drank in the muscle boy’s naked enthrallment at the unreal sight of the once unremarkable Nick sitting across from him in a coffee bar, panting, flushed, aroused, packing on muscle like a nascent star sucking in tons and tons of celestial dross, and smiled.

Brendan sucked in a breath.

“Fuck,” Brendan breathed.

“Yes,” Nick said in a low growl. He realized his mind was racing ahead, planning a litany of all the things he wanted—no, needed to do to Brendan.

Brendan was gaping. Then he must have realized that was what he was doing because, as if he were consciously trying to reassert himself, he made a game effort at his earlier crooked grin. It was kind of undermined by his wild, staring eyes. “If this is what coffee does to you,” he breathed, trying to sound as though he were making a joke and almost succeeding, “I approve.”

Nick shook his head, drilling his eyes into Brendan’s and not letting them go. He brought a hand up to his chest. It met his pecs a little before he expected it to. They were big now, round and thick and heavy, and his heavy tee felt amazingly good stretched across them. He felt himself up a little, the sensation cascading through him with an unexpected tremor of pleasure as if he were stroking his huge, writhing, impatient cocks. He gasped slightly and smiled, knowing Brendan had caught the reaction and guessed that that simple touch had caused it.

“This isn’t the coffee,” Nick said, tapping his thick left pec with two fingers. His eyes danced as he watched Brendan, willing him to think back over the last few minutes.

Brendan’s mouth made a little “o,” and Nick had to hold himself back from suddenly tossing aside the table between them and kissing him, or possibly shoving his cocks into that gorgeous mouth, right then and there. His breath rasped a little and his dropped his hand to cling to the edge of the table. He couldn’t wait much longer. They would wait much longer. The animals. He’d always thought the phrase “monster cock” had to do with size, but fuck, his cocks were straining to fuck Brendan now, almost pulling him toward the boy against his own strength like willful great danes pulling on their leashes.

“Fuck, the twenty pounds,” Brendan murmured, looking straight at Nick but speaking as if to himself. His eyes gained focus, suddenly asking Nick directly, “That was for real?”

Nick nodded solemnly. Slowly, he rose to his feet. As he did so, Brendan was asking, while trying again to retrieve a wry edge in his voice, “So what was the coffee—?” But Brendan tailed off as Nick seemed to keep standing up. He moved to loom over Brendan as the latter fell silent, gaping up at Nick.

Nick took hold of Brendan’s wrist and pulled him, only a little roughly, to his feet. Brendan swallowed as he looked up at his old teammate, only moments ago the short, wiry kid he’d always been, now a sex-starved Latino hunk who topped out a couple inches taller than Brendan. His body shuddered with desire.

Unstoppable want coursed madly through Nick’s mind, ripping through his bones, his mutating muscle, his flushed, amber skin. Want saturated every fiber of his thrumming, augmented body. “This is,” he rasped roughly, and drove down onto Brendan’s mouth for a hungry, even ravenous kiss, his strong hands gently but eagerly mauling Brendan’s V-shaped back. Brendan held back only a second, and then kissed him back just as hard and deep, suddenly more turned on than he had ever been in his life.

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Henry wasn’t sure quite how long he’d been standing there in the middle of Zack and Nick’s room deep in blissful makeout with this mesmerizing soft-spoken beauty. His sudden attraction to this man was like a bottomless ocean, and he couldn’t imagine ending this kiss, this pressing of Zack’s warm, firm body against his. Attraction wasn’t even the right word. He felt as though his sensations, his tactile stimulations, were being pulled inside Zack’s, like all the touching, all the lustful encounters he’d ever had had steadily led up to and culminated in this moment.

He felt everything in spades. Not just the way his thick, blunt cock pressed against Zack’s long boner, but the way their cocks seemed to want to touch as they rubbed through the fabric of their jeans, the way Zack’s iron-hard cock seemed just a bit thinner than his throbbing slab and very slightly curved. His roaming hands were enjoying the feel of a body as if lustful touch were something newly emerging into the world, a new fire brought by a new Prometheus. His big hands pored over Zack’s tactilely beautiful body like an avid reader absorbing a new favorite book, feeling, taking in the shoulders, the back, the waist, the ass all at once. Never had he felt so lucky to have more hands than anyone else.

But the kiss, this constant kiss, was even more amazing because of something he’d never experienced before. He seemed to be kissing Zack deeper and deeper, and dimly, underneath the serene pleasure he was experiencing on so many dimensions, he knew that he was, in fact, kissing Zack more and more deeply: his tongue, always big and blunt like his club of a cock, was somehow reaching further into Zack’s hot mouth the longer they kissed. It was still his tongue, hurling into his brain endless waves of the amazing sensations of this impossibly deep kiss, and Zack’s tongue was responding appreciatively to the increasing intrusion, wrapping around him and almost dancing with his in a rhythmic writhe that made Henry want to pull Zack closer, if only that were possible.

But Zack stilled.

For a second, as they stood there, tongues still intertwined, their hands all arrested in mid-grope, eyes open now and bright as they gazed at each other, Henry panicked, certain for an instant that somehow he had gone too far and Zack was angry or upset. Zack, seeing this in Henry’s eyes, rubbed gently on Henry’s bare back even as he broke the kiss and pulled back. It turned out this was slightly harder to do this than usual: after separating their lips there was still a few inches of Henry’s blunt tongue to slide off. Zack, his eyes dancing, did this with his lips wrapped around the tongue as if it were a popsicle.

Once they were separated at the mouth, but with their arms still wrapped around each other, Zack spared an impressed glance at the amount of thick tongue protruding from Henry’s kiss-swollen lips, and then glanced around toward the open door.

Henry, startled by the new and uncanny feeling of having way too much tongue to fit in his mouth, followed his gaze. They weren’t alone.

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Larry trudged slowly into the student parking garage, scuffing his boot heels on the cement. He couldn’t get his mind off that laptop he’d sold that kid this morning. The one he knew was … altered. He wasn’t sure about what the guys were doing anymore. I mean, yeah, sure, it was all fun surprises, and the volunteers were all eager and carefully monitored, though he wasn’t quite sure how that controlled for unexpected reactions to their rapidly expanding set of changes. And he’d gotten a couple of very mild “perks” of his own, right? It was all good, right?

He sighed as he took the long way around toward where he was parked on the second level, walking up the winding ramp. He knew he’d been back and forth with himself on this for months. He just wasn’t sure about this brave new word of dicking around with guys’ bods, but if they loved it, if they were eager for it, who was he to judge?

But there was the point: he got the real impression this Nick guy had been different from the rest of the latest subject cohort. He didn’t know exactly how the practical side worked—okay, he didn’t understand any of it, really, it was all advanced secret “wizard” stuff, but he did know that the install Chaz had done on what ended up being Nick’s computer had taken him ten times as long, and Chaz’d spent another three hours QCing it to make sure everything was perfect. Something about this Nick kid’s regimen was out of bounds.

Larry came to a halt behind his car, an old Dodge Aries K-car that miraculously was still running, though the springs were saggier than a septuagenarian stripper. He pulled off his glasses and wiped them ponderously on his shirt tail, one lens, then the other, as he stared off into the middle distance. His mind flicked back to this Nick guy picking up his laptop. He’d looked weirded out by the whole thing, but especially by that funny code question about Josh Somebody he’d been told to ask. All the other guys from the previous two trials had looked excited, or even turned on. A lot of them had tried to ask him a pile of breathless, wide-eyed questions that he wouldn’t have been allowed to answer even if they’d made sense. But this guy, he just stared. And then bolted.

Larry shook his head. If he was right and this was on the way to getting out of control, someone had to tell Jeremiah about what was going on.

Larry’s mouth tightened. He needed to head back to the Cataract. He put his glasses on, focusing on his car, willing it to be strong enough, despite the unreplaced carburetor and an odometer that had rolled over the hard way. He just needed to get to Cataract without it coughing up parts all over the interstate or just suddenly collapsing halfway there into a big hot crumpled heap of used junk right there on Route 9. It wasn’t too late, things hadn’t spun out yet.

He cocked his head, frowning thoughtfully at his Iacocca special: trusty but, let’s face it, decrepit. Maybe he should borrow a car? Because—

Da da da Da da da

Larry pulled out his phone to check the incoming text automatically, idly scratching his breastbone through his tee. The anonymous text said, “Hey where ya goin’?”

Larry’s stomach sank. Suddenly a new window appeared on his screen. It said, “Transmute is about to distract you. Would you like have a mutual all-consuming passion for the next person you meet, or for another you?” There were three buttons: “Next person,”

“Another you,” and “Both.”

Larry quailed. The autoselect had already started and it had started low, at only two seconds. The idea of being helplessly obsessed with a stranger terrified him so thoroughly he didn’t have to think. He jabbed at “Another you” and saw the button highlight just in time. He shuddered violently all over and as he did so became aware of a magnetically attractive him standing just to his right and slightly behind him, already groping Larry’s unexpectedly hot ass (hotter than it had been … before) with a big strong hand, but there was no time to think about that because the Transmute screen had popped back up already. The same Transmute screen. Quickly he jabbed the “Another you” button, almost not in time. He sensed another uncannily attractive him on his other side, but Larry’s eyes were glued to the screen. The millisecond it looked like a window was appearing he snapped back his arm suddenly and hurled the phone desperately out past the half-height cement walls and soaring out into the open air of the campus. It disappeared from sight and a second later there was a distant, tiny plastic smash as it slammed into the concrete walkway outside.

The other two of him were already mashing against him front and back, grinding their extra-wide 14-inch boners against him. He used the heel of his left hand to straighten out his own megaboner, which had gotten hard in to too cramped a space and needed unbending. Freed, it quickly finished hardening, standing up out of his jeans and already leaking. Just being near his other selves, not even looking at them, turned him on all the way.

“Nice job,” said the Larry in front of him in a low growl. Larry looked up and their eyes met, and he felt immediately, looking into those eyes, as if he’d been released from gravity.

He was so fucked.

As if they could read his mind, which for all he knew they could and him too, the Larry behind him pressed his body and cock hard against him everywhere, shoulders to shins, his lips now starting to explore Larry’s neck even as Larry suddenly felt a violent wish that his clothes vanish, immediately, right now, and for that iron pipe monstercock rubbing his musclebutt crack to be pushing into him, pounding him, fucking him.

Larry stared into his own face, entranced, Objectively he knew he wasn’t all that cute, but that didn’t matter when the whammy gets put on you. To him, his other self’s face was so absorbing he couldn’t look away. He felt the awesomeness of the sex sandwich he was in and pondered vaguely taking all this indoors somewhere, but—no, fuck it.

The sooner the three of them exploded together, the sooner he could rescue his sexy-boggled mind and get back to dealing with—that thing. That thing with that guy—well, he was sure he’d have a better chance of figuring out what he was trying to remember after they’d all blown a spectacular triple wad. He dove into a kiss with his other self like a man diving into water and not expecting to come out, because he was a fish, damnit, he was fucking Aquaman and he’d never come up for air again.

 

Part 6

Brendan felt Nick’s strength and passion wrap all around him, and it was intoxicating. He’d never been this aroused with his clothes on. Nick’s hands groped his back eagerly and possessively, one of them finding his hard muscle ass and mauling it through his new snug jeans, Nick’s legs, sheathed in tight denim, bare ankles exposed, rubbed against his perfect swimmer’s legs—those shoulders, those pecs—god, he could get off just feeling how thick Nick’s pecs felt as they were pushing and unconsciously flexing against his.

And Nick’s hungry mouth, mashing their lips and tongues together in raw and honest communication of want. Brendan felt a thrill as he realized not just how hot it was that the fantasy of kissing Nick, making out with the sweet full lips Brendan had been watching avidly since junior high was real, but that Nick was kissing him from above….

The hubbub of the busy coffee shop tossed and churned around them, but to Brendan it had receded to distant noise. Nick was the boy he’d yearned for, only—he gave in and returned the unexpected embrace, fuck it that they were in the middle of a crowded coffee shop—only more. Nick, the beautiful, sweet object of his lust, was also at the same time suddenly a wet dream. He was bigger than he could ever have imagined. Taller!.. thicker!… and (if he was right about what was thrusting urgently against his waist and belly through their clothes) fucking enormous. Nick was an angel, only an angel as built by burning, unslakable teen lust, grown by lust. And, judging from the way Nick was ravishing him right there in the middle of everything, driven by it too.

Everything Nick was doing to him—the fanatical, worshipful kissing, the roaming of his lusty, unstoppable hands across back, shoulders, ass, the way Nick’s whole body pressed into him, against every possible square inch of their inflamed bodies—somehow it felt like Nick was making love to him, that all of the things they were doing were one thing, one motion.

Brendan realized he was starting to get close and moaned into Nick’s deep kiss, half in excitement and half in dismay. Nick’s surreal animal passion scared him and transported him with an intensity of excitement entirely new to him. Brendan felt the real heat of their skin where their bare flesh met—forearms, neck, cheek, lips. Nick wasn’t just willing to inflame them both, almost literally, with lust; he was impatient to, recklessly giving in to an insatiable physical need for Brendan, for them to be one! for them to come as one—!

Shit, he was cumming, hard and ferocious, they were cumming. Their bodies writhed together, two avatars not just of the male form but of maleness, and their groins pushed together, they kissed as deeply as humanly possible, and they came and came… and with a universe-shifting shudder, they came together once more, finding they were still, standing wrapped around each other, their skin hot, their skintight tee shirts and jeans damp with sweat and more, their cocks still hard, like being soft was somehow for lesser men.

They kissed slowly, sensuously now, riding out a long ragged afterglow. Brendan heard clapping and he realized distantly it was for them. They must have drawn a crowd. As he went on kissing Nick languidly, still feeling the intoxicating effects of their impulsive, need-driven public lovemaking, Brendan opened his eyes and, feeling just a little detached from it all as if he were watching them from a cloud, he saw people ringed around them. A couple dozen fellow college students made up most of the crowd, plus a couple of the baristas and a knot of slightly older men in white shirts and ties (junior professors?), and they were laughing, clapping, and hooting. A few had ironic smirks at the ridiculous spectacle they’d made of themselves, but most of them were expressing simple enjoyment of what must have been a hell of a show on a campus not exactly known for rowdy or strange behavior.

Then Brendan’s eyes, sliding over the cheering crowd, fell on a pale, cute face that was watching them with intense interest and a smile that was more knowing than entertained. Brendan felt himself sober up a little. Kevin.

Brendan tried to pull back from Nick’s kiss and embrace, but Nick clutched him fiercely, kissing a little harder as to add climax to their denouement. Then Nick broke their kiss and moved his sweet mouth to Brendan’s ear. “I haven’t even started yet,” Nick whispered, and Brendan shuddered with how hot it was that Nick wanted him so badly. “I need you to suck them so bad.”

Brendan’s sated mind vaguely flagged the word them as slightly unexpected—his mind drifted to Nick’s big pecs and their nips, but the sensations he was registering from Nick’s massive grinding boner made him unsure about this explanation. Brendan was so far gone it didn’t matter, he wanted to suck on every corner of Nick’s big hard body: nips, cock, abs, fingers, toes, everything. He nodded quickly and gave Nick one more kiss, a yes with lips and tongue, and then they started to disentangle themselves.

A few members of the dispersing crowd jocularly clapped one or the other of them on the shoulder as they passed, as if congratulating them for being so reckless with each other. Someone, a jock in grey sweats that clearly showed the outline of his thick, slightly chubbed dick, shook Brendan’s hand and seemed like he was about to enthuse about the show they’d put on, but Brendan looked up at Nick to catch his reaction and when he glanced back suddenly Kevin was standing there instead, his expression calm and still, amused but inquisitive. Their fan nowhere to be seen.

He was staring up at Nick. “So is this what you meant by ‘catching up with an old friend’?” Kevin asked wryly.

They stood in a close threesome, only a few inches from each other, but Nick seemed too engrossed in the sight of Brendan to take much notice of Kevin yet. Brendan was sucked back into Nick’s dark, almost black eyes. They were no longer glazed over with passion but sharp and bright, and they were dancing in what looked like surprised delight as they took Brendan in, as if he were seeing something new in the old buddy he’d just made love to like a tornado in the middle of a busy college café. His face was priceless and Brendan felt his heart somehow move in his chest, as if it wanted to be close to Nick’s. He swallowed, only just remembering Kevin was there at all.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Brendan said distractedly. He was aware that he was not being polite to his friend Kevin, but it was hard to tear his eyes away from Nick’s. “We were on the team together sophomore year…” he trailed off, and Nick smiled in a way that made Brendan’s heart pound and his still-hard dick throb against the cold wetness of his cum-drenched pants.

“No wonder I never had a chance with you,” Kevin was saying, half to himself. He sounded kind of relieved, as if the mystery of his not having made any headway with his buddy had been bugging him. “If I’d known you went for tall, dark and bootylicious…”

Brendan’s realizing the condition of his own jizzed-in clothes made him suddenly very curious about Nick’s. His gaze drifted down Nick’s palpably bigger bod and then stilled, riveted, near Nick’s tight, narrow waist. His thick eggplant polo shirt, already damp with sweat at the pits and in a thin line between his beautifully ponderous pecs, was soaked from the nips down with a huge amount of cum. But instead of what Brendan suspected were amazing abs, the wet tee was plastered to what were, unmistakably, two thick and massive sausage boners, towering up out of Nick’s jeans and obviously as hard as if Nick had never cum at all. not that day, not ever.

The hem of the shirt was now just riding the edge of the waistband of Nick’s jeans, suggesting, in a way that was insanely tantalizing, that if Nick shifted just a little a sliver of a glimpse might just open up of Nick’s doubled cockflesh.

Brendan’s eyes jumped back up to Nick’s. He knew his mouth was agape, but Nick just grinned a shit-eating grin at him, and Brendan realized that Nick’s arms were quaking, very slightly, with desire. For me, Brendan thought amazed, as if being the focus of a want that profound wasn’t possible. Brendan had a sudden and euphoric revelation about the meaning of that grin: it meant Those. Are. Yours.

He grinned back, the two of them sharing the sentiment with what felt to Brendan like a joy too big to be contained by just one heart, but required two joined together.

They would have moved back into a make-out-and-grope clinch if Kevin hadn’t turned to Brendan at that moment and said in amazement, “Shit, Bren! What happened to you?”

Brendan ripped his eyes away from Nick’s and focused on Kevin, thinking momentarily that he looked pallid next to the golden-skinned Nick. Kevin was looking over Brendan’s body with wonder. “What?” Brendan said defensively, thinking Kevin must mean the pint of cum soaked into his jeans and the lower fringes of his shirt. Not one of his usual fashion choices, he told himself with a bit of nervous excitement. He was in new territory.

Kevin didn’t answer immediately, but Brendan saw that his wide-eyed stare was not directed at his wet crotch but higher up. Was Kevin reacting not to what he’d done to his pants, but just to what he’d done—giving in to lust, in public, for someone he barely knew? It was a little strange, yeah, but Brendan, to his own delight, realized he didn’t care at all. Still he watched Kevin’s astonished expression carefully, looking for censure—as much as Brendan was prepared to defend him and Nick, Kevin had always been so supportive of his friend and teammate that it would have been deeply weird if Kevin turned on him now. But Brendan saw only awe.

Brendan, brows knit, pursed in lips and started to ask his friend what he was on about, but he paused as Kevin lifted a finger and gently poked at Brendan’s shoulder. To his surprise Brendan felt the touch on bare flesh. Baffled, he twisted to look at where Kevin was touching him and saw that a seam had opened up on his tee. There was a gap the size of a dime, taut russet cotton pulled away to reveal pink skin. He realized the shirt felt tight all over, too tight. It hadn’t felt that way when he’d put it on. How does a shirt shrink while you’re wearing it? He lifted his right arm and felt another seam straining across his lats, and the sound of it giving way a little bit more, just audible to them in the noisy space. Lifting the other arm produced the same feeling and the same tearing sound of seams overcome by thick, hard new muscle.

“Y-you look like you put on, what, 15 pounds?” Kevin said in awe. The hand that had been touching his bulging shoulder was now cupping it, feeling its size and strength. “Fuck, and you were big before,” he added appreciatively. “How do you gain 15 pounds in one day?”

“Twenty,” Nick said, and they both looked up at him.

Brendan’s mouth fell open again. “That—thing on your phone,” he gasped. “That was the question! Would you want it on you, or the, uh,” and he felt himself blush a little, “the ‘object of your desire’.”

“And the default was ‘both’,” Nick said softly. His hand was stroking Brendan’s other shoulder affectionately.

Kevin eyed them both and shook his head. “Let’s get you guys cleaned up,” he said. “Then you can let me in on whatever the hell’s going on.” His hand slipped to grasp Brendan’s lower tricep firmly and, using this hold, he led away his big, besotted friend, once the oblivious object of Kevin’s desire, now so manifestly beyond his reach. They walked slowly out of the coffee shop, drawing Brendan’s new Latin lover, a grin still splitting his face, their hands clasped now, along with them.

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Zack smiled politely at the guy standing in the open doorway to his and Nick’s room. He was tall, square-shouldered but lean rather than buff, with shaggy black hair worn a little longer than Nick’s. Asian, probably Korean, Zack thought. He was staring at Zack, entranced, his hand scratching the star of his Captain America tee shirt idly.

No one said anything for a moment. Zack started to pull away from Henry to move toward the newcomer, but found Henry was moving with him. He glanced at Henry with a warm smile, and was amused to see that he’d managed to pull almost all of his tongue back into his mouth; only the tip pushed apart his full lips. Henry, looking a little sheepish, disengaged from Zack somewhat, but kept one of his right arms wrapped around Zack as they moved toward the visitor, and his other right hand on Zack’s ass.

The newcomer was moving toward them too, probably unconsciously, and they met in the middle of the room. Unable to help himself the stranger drew Zack into his arms and closed the distance between their lips, shuddering as their mouths made contact. Henry kept a firm grip on Zack’s shoulders and ass but made no move to interfere. After a few moments he lifted his left hands and began gently stroking the stranger’s long back.

The newcomer broke the kiss but kept his face a bare inch away from Zack’s. “You’re so beautiful,” he whispered, his voice catching. “I’m sorry, I had to—”

Zack kissed him gently to stop him. “I’m Zack,” he said in his quiet voice, “and this is Henry.”

“Calvin,” the stranger said. He glanced at Henry and then back at Zack. “Can I please kiss you a little more?” he said, aware that he sounded a little pathetic.

Zack smiled sweetly. “Only if Henry gets a chance too,” he said. Calvin drew his brows together slightly—did he mean a chance with Zack, or a chance a chance with him?—but as he turned his face toward Zack’s shirtless friend he found that Henry had moved closer to both of them, that they were now drawn together into a three-way embrace. Calvin smiled apologetically at Henry—he knew he’d intruded on the two of them, but somehow, in a way Calvin had never seen or imagined, Zack was literally irresistible. Henry smiled back, still with a hint of chagrin at his own possessiveness of Zack, and their faces moved together. Henry and Calvin kissed, increasingly intensely, even as Calvin pressed himself against Zack’s hot body, groping him with what felt strangely like too many hands. Zack pressed his lips against Calvin’s exposed neck, waiting for the other two to come up for air.

When they pulled apart after a long, deep makeout, Henry’s long, thick tongue was protruding obscenely beyond his lips, once again too big for his mouth. Zack laughed. “He’d just gotten that under control,” he said softly. Henry said nothing, understandably.

“That was amazing,” Calvin said, but his mouth was already moving back toward Zack’s. They plunged into a deep kiss of their own as Calvin wrapped all his arms around Zack, feeling both Zack’s and Henry’s embrace. Henry, half in stimulation and half, maybe, in retribution, applied his expanded tongue to his side of Calvin’s neck, moving up toward Calvin’s ear, only half visible under long, black, shaggy hair. Calvin shuddered again and broke the kiss, looking up at Henry with a smile. “Fucker!” he said jovially.

“So, are you a friend of Nick’s?” Zack said, obviously looking to find out why Calvin had come by.

Calvin looked back at Zack, and his face was sober now. “Sort of,” he said. “I mean,” he went on hastily, “I don’t know him, but I want to help him.” Calvin swallowed. “Nick—he might be in danger.”

“What do you mean?” Zack whispered, alarmed.

Calvin shook his head. “I’m not totally sure myself,” he admitted. “I overheard something, and—there’s something that I need to tell him.” He glanced from Zack to Henry, their faces still only inches away. “Do you know where he is?”

“I think so,” Zack said. “Let’s go find him.” Knowing that Henry and Calvin might have trouble disengaging from him he pulled out of the embrace himself and, already pulling out his phone, made for the door before they could pull him back, leaving his two four-armed friends with nothing for it but to follow in his wake, their eyes fixed on his tight ass with helpless lust.

 

Part 7

Larry was panting almost violently, riled up as much by frustration as the animal passion that was now surging limitlessly and brutally as a bottomless well of liquid fire. He was fucking himself, his fat 14-inch-plus monster cock shoved deep between his own pale but beautiful muscle cheeks, plowing his own exquisitely, wonderfully tight, furnace-hot ass, his big hands wrapped around the other him’s just as amazing, just as fat, just as 14-inch-plus superboner, freeing other Larry to lean against the wide hip-high concrete rampart of the parking garage’s third level. And that was only the half of it, or the two thirds of it, because the other, other him was pressing hard against him, his own just as fat, just as 14-inch-plus, just as literally fantastic iron-hard cock pistoning into Larry’s own eager, tight tight tight ass, his naked defined but unbuilt chest smearing wet sweat against Larry’s passion-flushed bare back, mouthing Larry’s neck as if it were phallic muscle he hoped one day to make blow. They were all panting, all three of them insatiable to the point of agonized fury.

Suddenly all three of them started to feel the escalating surges of imminent release, coming first as waves and then as a tsunami crashing violently over them, ruthlessly shoving them into a single massive orgasm ten times as fierce as anything Larry had ever even imagined, much less felt before—until today, until the previous three monstrous orgasms. They weren’t relenting, they weren’t getting any less unnaturally overwhelming in every cell and fiber as he, and he, and he blasted gouts of cumfire from what still seemed like enormous cannons of cock. And they weren’t doing any. fucking. good.

He felt a howl welling up, one that had nothing to do with the delicious epic lust he was feeling. His eyes drifted over the campus beyond the deck. The morning was fading into afternoon. It was a little hard to make out without his glasses, but he thought he could see one or two small, blurry knots of people gazing up at them from the small lawn below. Had people been accidentally gathering down there, watching them fuck?

“Fuck,” huffed the Larry in front of him, gripping hard on the concrete wall. His long, rangy, white-skinned body, nude and delicious to Larry despite his own acute awareness of its objective shortcomings compared to his more gorgeous buddies on the basketball squad he’d barely made it onto, was flushed and covered in sweat, loose red hair plastered to his neck and temples. The wall and floor in front of him was soaked with cum. There was actually a cooling puddle of wet cum just visible in the shadows near his big bare feet.

“Fuck,” the frontmost him said again. “I’m still hard. Fuck!!!” he shouted suddenly, and for a second or two they heard the echo of the shout cascading through the parking ramps over their still-pounding hearts.

Larry already knew this. because his hands were still wrapped around his double’s unrelentingly bonehard boner, and because he himself was not only still hard but still as unbearably horny as he’d been when he’d gone from one lonely geek to three sex machines consumed by fathomless passion for each other. His cock, still balls deep inside other him’s hot tight ass, was as young and tireless and eager as a teenaged Superman, if Superman weren’t a man but a ruler-busting palm-wide permaboner. He could cum again any minute, he thought exasperatedly, as hugely as if it were his first time.

The him behind him was similarly still all the way inside Larry’s ass, and it felt huge, as if he had some primeval oversized boner in him from the days when everything was huge—cats the size of Priuses, cocks to fuck your ass all the way up through your ribcage. Fucked in the heart. How fucking apt. He was stroking Larry’s torso with both hands, gently up and down, as if Larry’s body were itself a giant boner.

“We all are,” the other him behind him said, and it was raspy enough to have an edge of the growl. “I just had you,” he went on, “we just had each other, and yet I still—”

“Gotta have you,” they muttered together. Larry leaned forward and the him in front of him leaned around for a hot kiss, but Larry suddenly broke it off.

“This isn’t going to fix things,” he bit out. “We need to undo this. Shit, I—I don’t mean there being three of us,” he added hastily, having heard an involuntary intake of breath from the him behind him. They all knew they he, Larry, the one in the middle, was the original Larry. It came in part from the shared sense arising vaguely out of whatever linked them in a strange emotional undertow (he feared their connection was less via mystical astral plane than via the base workings of their surging unconscious ids). More practically there were the facts they’d all experienced: he, Larry, had been the one with the (treacherous) cell phone that he’d thrown away only just in time to escape there being four of him.

“I like that there’s three of us,” he assured them softly and with palpable honesty, and for good measure kissed the side of the neck of the him in front of him, eliciting a soft moan.

“But this insatiable lust … thing,” said the him behind him, and the one in front chimed in, “it sucks.”

They needed to take a new tack. His other self was right—fucking endlessly, however much he yearned for, burned for it, was only making things worse. “Let’s clear our heads,” he said.

“Hoops?” said the one in front, straightening up so that they were all three standing, pressed tight together, joined by huge cock. Larry hummed in affirmative and, reluctantly letting go of the front one’s monster wang, he folded his long arms around other him’s sweat-damp torso.

So now they just had to transition from their fuckzone in space 34B of the parking garage to the gym on the other side of the Arboritum. Which meant physically getting there. They turned their chins, not quite all at once, to check that the clothes they’d cast aside onto the hood of an old beat-up white Bronco three parking spaces over were still there: three sets of the same jeans, three green tee shirts, three boxer briefs, three pairs of round, dark-rimmed glasses askew atop the pile. Six almost-worn-out trainers were scattered on the concrete by the tires.

Without discussing it they started to walk together across the intervening distance, immediately finding a loping rhythm that made walking this way surprisingly easy. It was still novel enough having a cock so big you could do something like this, and Larry felt himself grinning, much to his own surprise. It was pleasant sensation, feeling their cocks shifting and shoving inside each other as they moved easily in step, hugging their torsos firmly together, making practical use of the unconscious, baseline connection they all felt at some deep, unreachable level.

The him behind him snickered. “Think we can make it all the way to the gym this way?” he said.

Larry laughed. It felt nice to walk around, the three of them together like this. It was hot, but not like the burning passion of their fucking—even though, he thought wryly, they were technically still fucking, and as if in confirmation he felt a small surge of orgasm, a mini-explosion, come over him, over them, as they walked cock-deep in each other.

“We’ve already been fucking in public for hours,” the front him said reasonably. Larry guessed he’d picked out the blurry spectators too. There were a lot of shadows along here, anyway, and people didn’t usually come this way.

They’d gotten to the Bronco, but none of them had any interest in getting dressed. Everything else was just excuses. He, they, wanted to stay naked, wanted to stay together. A weird thought came to him: the other thing was fucking, animal fucking, and it had gotten them precisely nowhere—not even any evidence of chafing, as if their unflagging huge fat cocks and hot, still cherry-tight asses really did have some kind of Kryptonian invulnerability. But this, this—it was something other than fucking, like making love or something.

This thought, too, amused him. He shook his head. Making love to himself. Well, he was one up on Narcissus—that guy was stuck staring at that that lake forever. Larry and his self-posse? They could go and shoot some hoops, if they could unplow their cocks from each other. That might not be easy to do, come to that, but Larry was in a pretty chill place at the moment and wasn’t inclined to anxiety about what he’d have to deal with later.

All that mattered to him right now was that this was hot, it was comfortable, it was erotic and passionate (his, their, hearts were still pounding from the minor orgasm they’d just enjoyed); and it didn’t feel so colossally futile. His head, glazed over with a torrential flood of sex while they were in the fuckzone (literally and figuratively), was clearing already and he knew his usually fertile mind was percolating away under the surface, putting together the pieces of the problems he, they, faced and what they’d be able to do about it. Right now he was all about keeping things like this as long as he could get away with, and then he’d still push it past that if he could. That would get him back to where he could get himself out of his current jam, so to speak, and then he’d be able to help the people who were really in trouble, like that guy Nick. A sudden memory coming to him of some of the protocols involved in the gamma round of Transmute, and he became more determined not to lose himself in the lust-spell that had been maliciously cast on him.

He sighed and leaned back into his back-self’s slow-caress embrace, feeling more comfort than desperation, and he paid the feeling forward, embracing his front self as his hands grazed to an adagio beat over his chest and abs. Prolong this moment, he thought.

“Screw it,” he said recklessly. “Let’s grab our stuff and just go.” Transmute had done strange things to him? Fuck it, this was him now. Well, these were him. Same thing, and fuck the grammar, too. “Besides,” he added thoughtfully, “something tells me people are going to be getting used to seeing lots of strange shit around here.”

 

Part 8

“We can go back to our room,” Kevin was saying as they left the student center complex and walked out into the plaza, squinting as the early afternoon sun appeared from behind a massive oak tree right in his line of sight. “You sex-maniacs can shower there, and then maybe you can explain—”

He turned as he spoke to make sure that the love-struck sods were right behind him, and sure enough there they were, arms around each others’ shoulders, making goo-goo eyes and oblivious to the world. “You guys are not listening, are you?” he muttered, shaking his head. They looked sickeningly besotted with each other and very, very hot—not least in the location Kevin’s eyes kept drifting to where Nick’s cum-soaked short was plastered to what were obviously twin slabs of rock-hard ubercock.

Unbidden a mesmerizing vision took over Kevin’s mind, of Nick standing right there in the plaza, naked in the harsh slanting light, and Brendan, naked as well, kneeling slowly down before the tall dark-haired muscle Adonis. Kevin watched, spellbound, lust for both studs softly suffusing him. Brendan’s yummy, often-stared-at V shape back was even more luscious thanks to the new muscle his body was now somehow packed with. Kevin felt himself breathing slowly and shallowly as Brendan began opening his sweet mouth wide for Nick’s equipment. Only—there was too much. Brendan could only take one. They were so big. After hovering a moment as if wondering what to do, his face poised over the leaking, uncut pillars, Brendan suddenly dove down and wrapped his mouth around Nick’s massive left cock, causing a surge of sympathetic pleasure in Kevin. Then, having taken most of the monster iron-hard boner, Brendan unexpectedly turned his head just enough to look right at Kevin out of the corner of his eyes. They seemed to glint in the reflected sunlight. Kevin’s heart pounded. He stared at the naked, hard, huge right cock, then lifted his gaze. Up above Brendan’s close-cropped hair, up Nick’s long, tall, golden-skinned body, past a hard fat-free eight-pack and jutting, exposed, oversized pecs, past broad, bulging shoulders, Nick was looking at Kevin now too with a crooked smile, gently beseeching. And Kevin saw that he himself, too, was naked. And hard—so fucking hard—

He felt a sudden light rapping on his skull. “Earth to Kevin!” Brendan laughed, now standing right next to him and smiling down at him indulgently. In his peripheral vision Kevin sensed a knot of students moving past them into the complex, sparing a glance or two for the two happy hunks.

“What was that about not listening?” Brendan’s slightly taller new boyfriend said, cocking an eyebrow, his dark eyes dancing. Suddenly they both enfolded him in a tight hug. Given their intense passion for each other, the two of them sparing some bro-affection for him took him momentarily aback, but Kevin returned the embrace just as tightly, his arms around the jocks’ broad, hard backs, feeling oddly charmed. And really, really turned on.

After a few moments, even as they continued their three-way hug, Kevin’s face buried in Brendan’s slightly sweaty neck, he became aware that Nick and Brendan were exchanging soft, sweet kisses. He felt their excitement somehow despite the languid pace of their deepening kiss, and excitement that was not about lust but about the way their connection was blossoming and intensifying, and he moved to pull away. But Nick and Brendan both held him fast against them, and went on kissing even as they held him close, their muscular arms now wrapped around his skinny torso from both sides. A little confused but acutely aroused and impossibly hard, Kevin decided to enjoy the moment and squeezed back, panting against Brendan’s neck, his lips brushing hot sweaty skin. He barely noticed as he heard another clump of guys pause on their way past them to cheer and wolf-whistle at the spectacle. He burrowed his face into Brendan’s neck, enjoying the feel of his skin and the feeling of Brendan’s mouth and jaw moving easily near where his lips touched Brendan’s neck, as Brendan and Nick shared long, deep kisses that for the moment were like caresses. His hands rubbed the hard muscle of their backs through the thick cotton, both of their shirts slightly damp down their spines with the sweat of passion, and they did the same, their strong hands moving in small circles along the sides of his torso. Kevin wondered if he might cum just from this. He was actually starting to feel close, his boner throbbing almost painfully in his jeans. He wanted to stop time.

Into the midst of this heaven he heard a new noise, a strange buzzing chime. It had to be a cellphone, either Brendan’s of Nick’s, but somehow it sounded to Kevin more like a warning than a ringtone. Still burrowed in Brendan’s neck he felt Nick remove his arm from around Kevin’s slim body, and Brendan, somehow knowing Kevin would miss that warm, strong arm squeezed him tighter as he and Nick went on with their slow, deep make-out. Kevin felt Nick dig in his wet jeans pockets and, after a few seconds’ struggle, pull out his phone—which, to his surprise, he felt Nick press against Kevin’s chest. Reflexively he retrieved his own arm from around Nick’s musclebod and slid his own hand under Nick’s, holding the cum-damp phone now against his own chest. Nick withdrew his hand and moved it around to gently cup Kevin’s ass as he returned his attention to his unending makeout with Brendan.

Kevin was inclined to take a moment to enjoy the strong hand on his ass, but at that moment the phone buzzed insistently against his chest. Still smoothly groping Brendan’s long-coveted back, he looked down into the narrow space inside their three-way embrace and, a little awkwardly pulled the phone enough away from his chest that he could see the screen, ending up with the back of his hand pressed hard against Nick’s massive pecs. He took a half-second to recognize how unusually firm they were, yet still with the natural give of built-up pectorals, as he thumbed the phone unlocked.

It wasn’t a phone call or a text but some kind of poll. Kevin frowned as he read the strange query. The title bar said, “Transmute”, and the text said, “Transmute is about to make you 30% bigger by weight. Would you like it to be an increase in muscle, or in height?” There were two buttons underneath the question that reflected the two options: One said, “Muscle”. The other said, “Height”.

Kevin stared at the two words. They absorbed his attention. It didn’t even occur to him that the question had anything to do with himself. He knew. With intuition so deep he wasn’t aware of it he understood that this was something that was happening to Nick, had been happening, would be happening.

That thing on your phone, Brendan had said, awe in his voice.

The words on the buttons, thin black chasms carved into white light, themselves seemed to grow, Height, Muscle, HEIGHT, MUSCLE, and suddenly, in the midst of his embrace, layered over reality, he could feel it, he could feel and sense and smell a Nick transformed, made taller and more intoxicatingly beautiful, kissing Brendan from above, crushing them both to his unreal body in his embrace, a taller Nick that would then look even more amazing with the muscle that would come later.

His vision swam and he saw the buttons again. Below them an autodismiss was counting down now. 3… 2…

Kevin moved his thumb and pressed “Height”. The button flashed and the “Transmute” window vanished, the phone reverting to the home screen. He had a brief moment to notice a “Transmute” app, the icon just a slate-blue outline of a triangle—no, a Greek delta, Kevin thought—when he felt a mild shudder course through Nick’s frame. He stuffed the phone away in his own pocket without another thought, his heart racing—he would get to feel it happening. His cock tried to get harder in his jeans, but it was already completely hard. He threw his arm back around Nick’s back and pulled himself tight against the still-kissing Nick and Brendan, and they returned the gesture, grasping him hard as Nick … started .. to … grow.

Kevin felt his hand slipping bit by bit down Nick’s back as his body swelled and grew, and suddenly he felt incredibly close. He held back desperately through sheer force of will, but all his other sensations—his hand on Brendan’s back, the feel of Brendan’s skin on his lips and cheek, Nick’s muscular thighs pushing against his legs so he could feel them stretch and lengthen, filled him with lust. He tried to distract himself with math. Numbers. He was panting. Brendan was 6’2”, so Nick was starting out at 6’4”. His hand, sliding down Nick’s back, touched hot skin where Nick was growing out of his long, wet polo and Kevin gasped. Thirty, thirty percent. Nick and Brendan were both moaning as they kissed. Not in height but weight. As the oldest friend of gym-loving jock who carefully charted his weight for swimming and, back in high school, wrestling, Kevin had already pegged Nick at around 230 pounds. His fevered brain leaped to what Nick was turning into—a 300 pound behemoth—and his entire body strained to try to cum, but somehow he held it back. He wanted, he needed to feel it all, to feel Nick grow in his arms all the way, and then, then he could cum. He tried forcing his mind to jump through the hoops. 300 pounds with the same build. Suddenly Nick grabbed Kevin’s arm and pulled it off his back; flustered, Kevin felt Nick’s hand move to wrap around his wrist and shove his hand between them, making contact with one of Nick’s cocks, and without thinking he wrapped his hand around it, his fingertips barely touching, his knuckles brushing against another hand, Brendan’s, wrapped around the other cock. 300 pounds with the same build. Seven feet. Nick and Brendan were still kissing, Nick stooping a little now. He and Brendan started fisting Nick’s monster uncut cocks together. Precum was spilling over their hands. No, it was more than seven feet. Seven feet and change. He realized he was feeling Nick’s cocks getting bigger, growing with the rest of him, growing bigger, longer, pushing his hand open as he and Brendan jerked Nick off.

He couldn’t bear it anymore. His mind exploded. He came violently in his pants, over and over, his entire being wracked with colossal orgasm, and he felt himself pushing his open mouth against Brendan’s sweaty neck to stifle a scream of barely endurable pleasure. And suddenly he and Brendan felt Nick’s cocks and indeed his whole body surge and spasm, and then Brendan’s did too, and they were all cumming hard, again and again and again. It was so intense, so mind-blowing, that Kevin seemed to separate from his own body, expelled from it by the force of his explosion, and he felt himself drifting over the sun-dappled plaza, lazily enjoying the sight of three men tightly embracing: a muscle giant, a lusciously-built boy-next-door Adonis, and himself. Brendan and Nick, panting hard, had broken their marathon kiss at last; now Brendan, his short dark hair plastered to his sweaty forehead and a contented grin on his face, was resting his head against Nick’s pillow-sized pecs, and Kevin and Brendan had both moved their hands back around to embrace Nick, though he didn’t remember doing so at all. From his vantage point floating over the plaza Kevin could see that the seams on Nick’s polo had pulled open under Nick’s arms along his lats and a bit across the shoulders, like Brendan’s tighter, less-forgiving tee had, and that several inches of skin had opened up between the hem of the shirt and Nick’s waistband. Looking down at Nick’s feet he was startled and a little bemused to see that Nick had at some point had the presence of mind to kick off his sneaks, exposing Nick’s big feet and a considerable quantity of ankles and shin, the cuffs of Nick’s loose jeans pulled taut around the thickest part of Nick’s beefy calves.

With a wave of peace Kevin seemed to fall back into his body, and he decided he wanted nothing more than to enjoy the feel of this afterglow embrace when Brendan suddenly said in a low, orgasm-roughened voice, “Who’re those guys waving at us?”

Kevin felt Nick shift a little as if to look up, and took his hand away from Kevin’s ass briefly. Kevin guessed he was pulling his thick mop of black hair out of his face—he’d noticed during his moments of drifting that Nick’s hair had gotten longer, the lower reaches now flopping around Nick’s bulging shoulders. “The one in the middle is my roommate,” Nick said, sounding slightly perplexed. “I wonder what he wants.”

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Chaz ducked out from behind the corner by the elevators where he had been waiting out of sight and, pulling down his Wayfarers momentarily to confirm the coast was clear, rapidly closed the distance to Nick’s dorm room. He felt like he had waited forever for Calvin and the others to go—what had taken Calvin so long? All he’d had to do is get Nick and anyone else out of his room. At least Cal had remembered to leave the door unlocked for him. He glanced around over his shades one more time and ducked into the room, closing and locking the door behind him.

He stood near the door for a few moments, staring at the computer sitting quiescently on Nick’s desk as if it might suddenly come alive and pounce on him. Chaz repeated to himself what the guys at Cataract told themselves when they realized how powerful the stuff they were working with really was. You know what you’re doing, Chaz told himself. You’re in charge here.

He strode purposefully across the room, but his heart was still fluttering. He didn’t really feel like he was in charge. He might look like a Nordic basketball prodigy born from a marriage of number one Scandinavian supermodels, dressed smartly in a crisp brick red hoodie with no shirt underneath, dark slacks, and leather boots, but inside he was still the lanky acne-scarred geek he’d been his whole life. He’d hoped those gift Transmutes would give him confidence, but maybe confidence wasn’t in him. Instead, he thought sourly as he sat down, he got to enjoy smacking his head against door frames, and a dick way too big to fuck anything but his own mouth.

For a second he thought of indulging in just that—it was his favorite way to work, hard cock in mouth, or throat—but cast the temptation aside. Calvin might not be able to keep them away. He had to work quickly. He pulled down his hood and set his Wayfarers down on the desk.

With a deep breath he woke up the screen. There was already a Guest Transmute window up. He sighed. “Transmute is about to make you look facially like the movie star you find most attractive. Would you like it to be Tom Hardy, or Tom Hardy?” Chaz knitted his brows and bent closer. The buttons read “Tom Hardy”, “Tom Hardy”, and … “Both”.

“What the fuck?” he said aloud, but not very loud. The scenario completely baffled him, from a software and data management vantage as much as anything else. “Who programmed this module?” he muttered. How could the same answer could come up as two different options. Maybe—maybe it was picking up Tom Hardy as two different ideas of sexy in his head, from two different movies? But how could “Both” be—?

The autodismiss popped up, counting down from five seconds. He sighed exasperatedly and hurriedly started typing, entering his personal admin password. That would let him past the user interface into the guts of the program, and he could start doing what he’d come to do. He sat back, waiting for the UI to vanish and the master control screens to appear.

But the Guest Transmute window didn’t move. Instead, a small rectangle appeared underneath it with a message in simple black text: “Admin account rescinded. Access denied.”

Fuck.

Chaz’s stomach roiled as his mind fell into feverish, circular thought. What was he going to do? Why had they rescinded his admin status? Did they know he and Calvin were trying to help Nick? What were they—?

His attention was caught by the auto-highlight of a button on the screen and the vanishing of the Transmute window. Fuck, he thought again. The default had been that inexplicable “Both”.

He waited for that jarring sensation to hit him, that frisson through his body that he’d felt more than once before, and it hit him like the slap of an major ocean wave crashing down on someone standing in the surf. He shuddered and realized he was pressed hard up against the hard-muscled body of someone else who was shuddering too. He turned his head and stared into the eyes of Tom Hardy, and knew, instantly, that Tom Hardy was doing the same.

“Fuck!” they said together.

Chaz took in the face shrewdly. “Warrior,” he said. The other “Tom” raised his eyebrows, then, narrowing his own eyes, taking in Chaz’s face and hair, said abruptly, “This Means War.”

Chaz gasped, and the other him grinned. “What?!” he said. “That stupid spy romance with Chris Pine? You’d think I’d at least rate Inception.” He was somewhat relieved he didn’t have the British movie star’s trademark raspy voice. It was sexy, sure, but it would have been too freaky not to sound like himself. He looked down and realized the rest of him was still the same. Great, he was a 6-foot-9 Tom Hardy with a hardened athlete’s body and an 18-inch cock.

“Nah,” said the other him. “He looked like Stephen Baldwin in Inception.

“Geez,” Chaz muttered, looking back up at his twin. “Why did we even see that movie?” He realized he was gazing deep into the other him’s bright blue-green eyes.

“Because,” the other him said, and he did sound a little raspy now, “those lips—!”

And Chaz, moving his face toward his twin’s without even being quite aware of it, knew exactly what he meant.

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Calvin called out to Nick as they trotted across the plaza, raising up one of his right hands, the whole while wondering nervously what was happening with Chaz. He knew his buddy was more than capable, but then, so were the guys who built this thing. He knew he’d be nervous until this whole thing was over. His left hands clasped and unclasped each other anxiously at his side.

He noted wryly as they covered the width of the plaza that Nick—he picked him out immediately as the Latino-looking cutie with long black hair, though he was way taller than Calvin had expected—had gained an entourage: he was holding a superhot hunk and a skinnier, mousy guy close to him, towering over them both in both height and muscle. As they got closer he realized that Nick must have just grown: all three of them were covered in cum and his dark, sopping polo shirt was ripping open at the seams up top with its bottom hems hovering at least a half a foot over the waistband of Nick’s jeans. And unless he was mistaken, around the two friends he could catch glimpses of a huge, exposed boner. No, more than one boner. He drew in a breath and his own cocks flexed excitedly in his boxer-briefs.

Still, Nick wasn’t the only one with an entourage, he thought, as they drew to a stop in front of the hugging trio. Zack moved into his peripheral vision immediately on his left and he kept his eyes straight ahead. He needed to keep his mind clear. But Zack was only a few inches away—he couldn’t make himself move farther apart from him—and his left hands were already straying to Zack’s back and ass as if by their own volition. There were other hands there too. Lots of other hands.

Leaving the dorm Calvin had meant to hurry Zack and Henry to wherever Nick was and keep them there while Chaz worked—he had to account for both roommates if he was to give Chaz a real shot at fixing things. But in the bricked-in quad that the four dorms faced into they had run into a band of six or seven skateboarders, on their way to practice at the skateboard well on the other side of the dorms, and these guys had clustered around Zack like he was giving away amazing moves. They’d taken turns kissing him, two or three at a time, and all of them were sliding their hands all over Zack, on top of his shirt and even under it, and they kissed and felt up Calvin and Henry too because they held fast to their positions, Calvin with his left hands wrapped around Zack, the shirtless Henry behind Zack, his arms around Zack’s torso from the front, his chest against Zack’s shoulder blades, his naked abs pressed against Calvin’s forearms. Their hands, too, were not still on Zack’s intoxicating bod.

But no sooner had Cal forcefully shaken himself out of the sensual dream of making out with and being groped by a half dozen hot four-armed skaters and literally pulled Zack out of the cluster-grope, Henry following, holding Zack’s other hand and the skaters, their boards cast aside forgotten, trailing quickly in their wake, than the same scene was repeated again five minutes later. He slapped himself in the forehead with one of his right hands as he realized he’d blundered into the grassy open area between the dorms and the academic buildings where the hottest guys on campus tended to aggregate on lazy afternoons and play Frisbee or tag football or just lay and sun themselves—anything you can do outside and shirtless.

So now he, Zack, and Henry had found their quarry, Nick; only they’d trawled a troop of hot guys behind them, well over a dozen guys including the skaters, almost as many shirtless hunks from the park, and two weedy philosophy students with round glasses, all of them making use of all their hands, feeling up Zack if they could reach him and each other if they could not.

Nick stepped forward, the muscle Adonis and the skinnier cutie falling back a bit to stand and his sides, arms still around Nick’s back. By stepping forward Nick revealed to everyone his cum-covered body, his generous muscles and especially his oversized pecs, and most impressive of all the two fat monster cocks standing straight up and fully exposed out of his jeans. He stepped up to Zack, and the crowd of four-armed hunks fell back slightly, awed and a little intimidated. Only Cal and Henry held their ground, Cal on Zack’s right, Henry in his accustomed placed wrapped around Zack from behind. Still Cal’s stomach fluttered as he watched Nick’s body move. Shit, he’s way taller than Chaz even, he thought in amazement.

“Hi Henry,” Nick said. “I see you and Zack have finally gotten to know each other better.” Henry smiled and nodded.

Nick moved in and wrapped his arms around both Zack and Henry, forcing Calvin to drop his hands from where they’d been wrapped around Zack between Zack’s bod and Henry’s. Nick, bending down, drew Zack into a hot deep kiss that Nick seemed hardly able to control, his hands roaming Henry’s bare back. But Nick surfaced and, seemingly as a sort of thank you and apology, leaned in further to give Henry a hot, deep kiss as well.

When he straightened up Cal gasped. He looks so fucking hot with four arms! almost burst out of Cal’s mouth. But the gasp and the stare was enough to draw Nick’s attention. Nick turned his head to look at Cal.

“Calvin Park,” he said, offering a right hand. Nick did too, and they shook. Calvin was kind of tall for his family, and while he was used to hanging out with Chaz since he’d gotten way tall, only coming up to a guy’s shoulders was a completely new experience for him. He swallowed, forcing his mind onto the issues at hand. He fixed his eyes on Nick’s cute face, framed by the long inky locks, even as he was dimly he was aware that Zack (and Henry) had started introducing themselves to Nick’s two friends.

“I know about your laptop,” he said to Nick in a low, steady voice. “I know what it does, and—” He paused. Nick stared at him with intense interest.

“—I know who’s doing it,” Calvin finished.

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Suddenly the other Chaz broke the kiss. “We should try to do—”

“—What we came here to do.” He sighed. “It’s gonna be a lot harder now.” Because the laptop was more or less in front of him, Chaz bent back over it, using a utility he downloaded from a software engineering site to expose layers and dark corners of the system users never saw.

“You can do this,” the other him said softly, his arm resting lightly around Chaz’s shoulders. He felt oddly comforted.

“Thanks, me,” he said, casting a quick grin at the other him, and got a matching grin back in return. Don’t think about how hot he is. I am. Whatever, he thought, turning resolutely back to his work.

“There it is,” the other him said suddenly.

“I see it!” he said. “Just need to change one line in the base code,” he muttered. The code window opened and he started typing rapidly.

Suddenly a window popped up in front of what he was doing. “Transmute cannot be altered or removed except by the Transmute Wizard,” the window warned.

“Fuck you and your Wizard,” Chaz growled.

“Ten seconds,” whispered the other him.

“I know,” Chaz said. He felt sweat beading on his forehead. Fuck, he looked like a god now, or at least had the face and the cock of one, and still he could bend under pressure. Other him squeezed his shoulder and he forced himself to make this happen. I know what I’m doing, he all but shouted at himself. I’m in charge here.

He typed madly, suddenly feeling a rush of confidence from the certainty that the code was correct. He clicked on the button to compile and save, knowing that this would cripple the program and make it possible to reverse everything that—

With an audible fzzzt! the screen went black. It came up again almost immediately, but his utilities and the code window—everything he had been working on—was gone. In its place was a single window.

“Repeated attempts to alter Transmute by individuals other than the Transmute Wizard,” it said icily, “will result in one (1) punitive transmutation.”

There was a single button. It said, “OK”.

“No, not OK,” said the other him testily.

“We should—” Chaz started to say, but at that moment the “OK” button highlighted itself and the window vanished, immediately replaced by another “Transmute” window.

They both leaned forward, afraid but perversely curious.

“Since your intent is to undo the changes made by this installation of Transmute,” it said, explaining itself coldly like the murderer in the climactic attack of a grisly thriller, “the punitive transmutation will be to reimpose all of the changes made by this installation of Transmute, past and future—on you.”

“Fuck!!” they said.

The button said, “OK” again, but the window hovered on screen only a moment before self-selecting its own “OK” and vanishing.

“We have to make a break for it!” other him said, moving to get up, but Chaz shook his head.

“Too late.” They stood together, facing each other.

“But the proximity—” other him started to say, but he trailed off, realizing. The proximity threshold was irrelevant after the announcement window was gone. Plus it didn’t apply to punitive transmutes anyway.

“This is gonna be a lot of fucked up shit,” Chaz said, and glanced down at their clothes. Wordlessly they started shucking their hoodies and slacks. By the time they’d hurriedly unlaced and toed off their boots and socks a new window had appeared on the screen. A bulleted list. The first item was highlighted, and all the others were hidden by gray boxes.

“How coy to keep us in suspense,” he grumbled, trying not to think about how many transmutes there were on that list and what they might all be. The first one said:

• Add 5 pounds of muscle to your frame, only in your pectoral muscles

“Well,” Chaz said, “That’s not too bad.”

“Only the beginning,” the other him said. “This thing is deliberately turning us into freaks. Or, wait, will it be just you—?” But at that moment, both of them felt the jarring sensation. Other him sighed. “I guess we’re both still ‘you’ to the software.”

The second one was revealed:

• Double the amount of cock you have, twice as big

“Aw, shit,” Chaz said.

“It’s not gonna fit in my mouth anym—” other him moaned, but broke off when the sensation hit them. They looked down as their cocks swelled and grew. Before, his soft cock had been, thanks to his overeager first gift request, 12 inches long and as thick as his wrist soft—8 and a half inches around, he’d once measured. Now, before their hearts had beaten twice, each of them hand finished growing and was sporting a heavy monster softie that looked more like 15 or 16 inches long and over 10 inches around, still, completely soft.

“Fuck,” Chaz murmured, staring at his twin’s flaccid monster, “how big is that going to be hard?”

“It was already 18 hard,” the other him whispered, staring at Chaz’s cock in awe. His eyes were huge when they lifted and met Chaz’s. “Two feet?”

“And thick as fuck,” Chaz said. They moved closer and grabbed each other’s soft cocks, feeling them swell now with arousal, and looked at the screen together. The next item had already revealed:

• Double the amount of cock you have, by adding a second cock

The frisson hit them before they could react, and when their eyes cleared both of them were possessed of two enormous cocks, all of them hardening rapidly toward at least two feet. They each reached out with their other hand to grab their twin’s new, stiffening appendage. They hauled them to a vertical position, so they could stand up pointing ceilingward between them, and the two of them gently stroked each other all the way hard as they awaited the rest of their changes.

• Alter the effect that caffeine has on your body, both to make you a little taller, and make you temporarily horny

“Hah,” Chaz said, feeling a little breathless as he became more and more aroused. “We can avoid that one, right?”

“Sure,” the other him said, also sounding increasingly turned on. “Code-heads never drink any caffeine.”

The next one was revealed:

• Make you considerably more attractive, in the face, so that guys you like can’t help kissing you

“Fuck,” they said together slowly. They turned toward each other, already completely aroused and their twinned two-foot-long by 14-inch-around boners fully hard between them, topping out at their thick shoulders and already spewing precum, and as the jarring sensation hit them they became captivated by each others’ alluring, almost excessive handsomeness and moved into a fierce and prolonged kiss that crushed their massive cocks between their enhanced pecs. They kept their eyes open for most of it, drinking in each other’s compelling beauty.

They came up for air only when another sensation hit them, and they turned to see what it was:

• Make you considerably more attractive, overall, so that guys you like can’t help feeling you up

They moaned and dove back into their kiss, now groping each others’ naked bodies obsessively. Chaz hadn’t wanted to be this much of a freak—two fat boners that would shove up out of the collars of any shirt he wore—but it felt so good mashing lips and bodies with his other self that he knew he’d take any downside imaginable.

They didn’t look up at the next sensation, they were so immersed in each other—not until they realized they were each groping each other with four arms. They looked at the screen quickly, ecstatic and panting, their damp cheeks pressed together as they read:

• For the next six hours, everyone who gropes and kisses you will be altered to increase the pleasure for both of you, and the world will accept the change as normal and the way they’ve always been, by adding a second set of arms for better groping

“Holy fuck,” Chaz said.

“We gotta go find us some hot boys to change!” laughed the other him.

The glanced eagerly now for the next change:

• Make your tongue more kissable, by making it longer and stretchier

“Oh god,” the other him said.

“We’re not going to be able to st—” but was silenced as the other him hungrily covered his mouth with his own, their tongues dancing as they kissed as deeply as possible. A sudden shudder, and then their tongues stretched and grew in each others’ mouths, almost like their tongues were boning up. It was exquisite. With two of his hands he grabbed the heads of this twin’s precum-covered cocks sticking up from between their (precum-covered) pecs and started rubbing them, and the other him instantly did the same with his, both of them keeping their other hands moving up and down their twin’s long back and muscle ass.

As predicted between their compelling beauty and elongated tongues they couldn’t stop kissing when they felt the next sensation, only pausing slightly to meet each other’s gaze as they realized their muscles were growing. They looked at the screen, fat red tongues sticking out from both their mouths as they read:

• Add 20 pounds of muscle to your frame, both to yourself, and the object of your desire

They’d both gained more than 20 pounds, and as they rejoined their kissing they both knew with a combination of bottomless lust and wry amusement that for each of them the object of his desire was his other self.

They were building themselves up toward climax at a fevered pitch, but the next frisson somehow seemed a little bigger, more ominous. They paused in their makeout, panting hard around their huge, hard tongues, and looked nervously toward the screen for the final item:

• Make you 30% bigger by weight, via height increase

Fuck, they thought, sharing a glance. We’re totally gonna be freaks now.

Entwined in their mutual four-muscle-arm embrace, their incredible cocks pressed between unnaturally massive pecs, both of them close to a soul-wrenching orgasm, they felt themselves start to grow. And they came as they grew, and came and came and kept cumming until they’d become taller than they’d ever imagined anyone being, and they kissed and groped and came for what could have been hours and hours—until real life rudely intruded on them.

The intrusion came in the form of a harsh male voice, and that voice said: “Who the fuck are you?”

 

Part 9

It had been over a decade, but Noah remembered seeing him for the first time as if it had happened only moments ago. That first glimpse had been over in a heartbeat, and yet it was so vivid it remained imprinted on his mind. A beautiful man. The beautiful man.

His man.

It had been his first real experiment. His own abilities were a mystery to him then. He didn’t have a wizened mentor or a curriculum of laborious study and practica to patiently reveal to him the nature and limits of his talent in convenient, digestible chunks. All he knew was that he had some kind of spark within him. A magical spark. A spark he could use to plant invisible magical seeds in the world that somehow, on germination, shoved bits of reality aside into altogether new directions.

Control was the problem. The first time was an accident. His dad had come home from his factory foreman job drunk and absolutely livid, face red with liquor and rage. This had been happening more and more often these last few months, and thirteen-year-old Noah, small for his age but smart and quick, knew to hide. But Carl found him where he’d squeezed himself into the bottom of the linen closet and hauled him out, even more furious that Noah had chosen to cower from him rather that standing there stoically and taking what his father gave him, just like Carl had done when he was a kid. Hauled into his own room, Noah watched with horror as his father loomed over him, shouting obscenities, and fumbled with the clasp on his belt, obviously ready to punish Noah with the fat makeshift whip more thoroughly than ever before.

In that moment Noah’s terror flipped, transforming into a towering rage to match his father’s. He glared at the belt his father had managed to get almost free, wanting with intense passion for it to become something his father feared, something that would hurt Carl as much as Carl wanted to hurt him. More. As his blood boiled the fat brown belt, worn and creased from years of use, filled his vision. He felt a white-hot spark flare up from a secret place deep inside him. He felt himself plant … something in that belt, and his hatred and fury focused on it and filled it, making it swell and blossom.

The world fell. Noah felt his stomach drop as if he were on a rollercoaster that had just gone into a mile-high dive. Reality seemed to whistle around him as the belt … fucking … changed.

Suddenly the fall bottomed out, reality was restored to its normal, rock-solid steadiness—except. There was the thing about what he had done: reality as before—except. The exception was that his father was screaming as the massive, venomous snake he was gripping with his outstretched right hand turned viciously on him and sank its fangs deep into Carl’s thick, pasty-white neck.

Noah barely noticed the succession of foster homes that littered the rest of his adolescent life. He spared hardly a thought for his dad, who’d gone straight from a long and difficult recovery in hospital to an even longer stay in prison for assaulting his son with a deadly weapon—viz., a brown and black Australian death adder, the importing of which was still unexplained and of great interest to the authorities, though Carl, for obvious reasons, wasn’t talking. He didn’t care about any of that—not his cringing foster families, not school, not even himself. He ate when he had to and slept when he couldn’t keep his eyes open. He was obsessed. He swore to himself he would spend all his energies and every waking moment on making the spark come again.

Six months passed. He’d managed to concentrate his emotions a few times intensely enough to feel the spark well up within him, but every effort to do something with it—to plant a seed in something, as he’d come to think about it—like he had that night with the belt and the snake came to nothing. Finally, after a week in which he’d hardly eaten or slept and his mind felt detached from everything around him, he decided to try something completely different.

He would plant the seed in himself.

He didn’t want to change himself—not yet, though he knew that his still-puny just-turned-fourteen body needed a major upgrade. He was too scared to try that, as much as he wanted it. Not yet. What he wanted to do was see his own future. He was balanced on a razor point between hope and despair. He needed a sign. He needed to know that it would turn out all right. And he knew enough about the universe to know that it would do fuck all for him. If he wanted a sign, he’d have to make it himself.

On the wall opposite his narrow bed in the small bedroom he shared with a similarly mousy and undersized human cast-off, a quiet fellow foster kid named Charles who spent most of his time monopolizing the computer in the den and the rest reading about computer programming in the town library, was a large, ugly pseudo-impressionistic oil painting of a bucolic landscape, complete with barn, silo, hay bales, and, to one side of the foreground, a sandy-haired boy in coveralls lounging against a fence post looking out over the hackneyed scene, mulling a long blade of grass. He wasn’t sure of the story behind the painting, but he suspected the foster mom had done it herself, back in her art college days. It wasn’t very good, and yet there was something about it that made him want to stare into it, like it could tell him things. Things about that boy, about what he was feeling and experiencing as he lazed there against the fence, sucking that blade of grass. If that boy were him—he could make that his sign.

It was twilight. He’d left the lights in his room off, and the gloaming of the encroaching night made the empty room feel suffused with transition and mutability. He was alone. The room was silent and still. Half delirious from his self-neglect-induced privation, Noah found himself able to slowly let the painting become all he could see, all there was, as if it were seeping through his entire vision. It became huge before him as the rest of the room fell away. Every daub and brushstroke was visible in sharp detail. He focused on his need, his desperate passion to understand and use his gift, and in seconds he felt his spark flare hotly up from its secret place deep inside him. He thrilled at the sensation, coaxing it into a potent flame within him, and bent his concentration toward the painting. Something happened. Shivers seemed to pass under the surface of his skin as he tried to intensify his focus. And then it happened. The seed shoved through from unreality into the fibers and pigments of the painting, infesting it.

Noah could shape it. This would be no unexpected snake. This would be what he willed. He felt the giddy sensation of the the universe falling, dropping from a great height, plummeting from one reality to the next, and Noah held on hard, driving all his concentration into the painting as it shifted and changed and became what Noah needed it to be. His future. His sign.

The universe bottomed out, and Noah’s stomach turned as the room became stable and still again. Still—but not quiet.

“Hoooo-ly shit, Noah!” Charles whispered. He was standing in the middle of the room, staring at the painting, eyes wide and mouth open. He had two library books in one hand, but the other was carding through his loose, Nordic-blond hair. He dropped the hand, leaving his hair disheveled. “What—wh—?” he stammered.

Noah was too elated at his success to worry about Charles. “Turn on the light,” he ordered. Without taking his eyes off the painting, Charles moved the lamp on the table between their two beds and flicked it on. The twilight fled and the little room was filled with bright, yellow light. Noah clambered to his knees, staring at the painting intently.

It was still faintly impressionistic, though the detail and realism was much stronger than before; but it was no longer a trite vista of a generic farm. It was, instead, a college campus somewhere—that much was clear from the stone buildings in the background and the young men and women emerging from them and clotting the wide walkways through expansive, carefully landscaped lawns. In the foreground to one side, just where the hayseed boy had been, was a young, dark-haired man in his early twenties sitting on a bench, taking in the scene just like the bucolic boy had been doing. He was tall and handsome and nicely muscled, his physique carefully emphasized by snug dark slacks and an even snugger charcoal Henley that looked like it had cost more than Noah’s entire meager wardrobe. Noah knew with simple certainty that this handsome, steely-eyed man was himself—his future self, a decade or so hence. Grown-up Noah was not, as he might have expected, looking out of the painting knowingly at the younger version of himself kneeling on his bed in a foster home in his own shucked-away past. The man was, instead, staring intently, and with what Noah realized was deep desire and proprietary pride, at another young man at the center of the painting.

Noah shifted his eyes to where his older self was looking and gasped. The man was—the only word for it was “beautiful”. It wasn’t that he was really that much more handsome than future Noah, or even that he was better built. His clothes were nondescript—flattering but not-too-tight jeans, brown boots, a white, navy-sleeved baseball shirt that was snug across his strong shoulders and defined chest. His rich brown hair was a little long and charmingly disordered and perfectly ordinary. But something about that man radiated beauty for Noah in a way that was unlike anything Noah had ever seen. Everyone would love him. Everyone would want him.

And yet, Noah knew that part of what made him so beautiful to him was that he was made for Noah. No matter how much everyone lusted after him, no matter how much his beauty drew others to him, they would never fit, it would never be right, because his other piece was Noah. Heart, body, and soul, he was Noah’s other half—his love, his soulmate, his one desire. He was perfect, and he was his.

“What’s going on, Noah?” Charles whispered. He was standing next to Noah’s bed, almost shoulder to shoulder with him, and Noah could feel that he was staring the painting almost as intently as Noah was. There was a very slight quaver in his voice, but his question was insistent, as if he wouldn’t stand for not knowing.

“I can change things,” Noah answered calmly. “I can make things change.”

Charles blew out a breath. “I guess so,” he allowed finally.

Noah’s eyes caught on something else in the painting he hadn’t paid attention to before. The older version of himself had a laptop computer open in front of him, and the light was catching it in such a way as to suggest its importance. He flicked his gaze back to the beautiful man, and he had an object in his hand that looked very much like a small, handheld tablet computer, or some future version of a keypadless BlackBerry. An entirely new idea formed in his mind, one that involved the intertwining of magic and technology in such a way that his gift could be guided and controlled more precisely and with greater impact that he could ever have imagined using sheer willpower.

He glanced as Charles for the first time. Charles turned to look back at him, and Noah could see naked need in his eyes. Charles was a year older than Noah but was actually a couple inches shorter than him, and the jocks at their middle school had ferreted out that Charles was gay and devoted themselves to making the poor kid miserable. Noah knew that this moment, this discovery of Noah’s gift, was the first glint of promise he’d had in a long time.

Noah’s heart went out to him, but more than that he knew that he would need help to fulfill his new vision, and Charles was the perfect partner and ally. “I think we can help each other,” he rasped, then paused and added, “…Chaz.”

A grin blossomed on the blond boy’s face. They turned back to the paint and stared at it together for a moment. Noah knew Charles was looking where Noah was, at the perfect boy in the center of the collegiate tableau. “Who is he, Noah?” Charles asked him quietly.

His communion with the painting during the moment of its transmutation had left Noah with more than just the flat image before them. He had felt that moment, had experienced it shifting through him like a shade, and so he was not surprised to find he knew the answer to this question. “His name is Josh,” Noah said, his voice as quiet as Charles’s. “Josh Tracey.” Noah swallowed, trying to reach out to the young man with his imagination, though he was, for now, nothing but a creation of brush and paint. “He’s going to be mine. When the time comes.”

As he looked again at the beautiful man he noticed something else for the first time. The man had three legs, each of them filling out his jeans with strong, athletic muscle. Noah stared, his dick jumping to full hardness. How had he not seen that before? Or had he been like that when the painting first changed?

How had the painting known—?

He took a deep breath and repeated. “When the time comes, he’s going to be mine … and I’m going to give him everything.”

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

It had been fun, at first.

Josh fell into the armchair by the huge picture window in his quarters at the Cataract, the sprawling manor Noah commanded a few miles out of town. He’d bought a few years back, after his patents on the mass-market technological innovations he’d forged with Chaz had started to conjure stupendous profits. Here, Josh lived like a king—except more and more lately Josh was starting to feel less like a king and more like a bird in a gilded cage.

It hadn’t been that long since he’d met Noah. It had happened a few months ago, back toward the end of spring semester of his senior year, a couple weeks after his heart-wrenching breakup with Nick. He’d gone a little off the deep end then, sending poisonous accusations of betrayal against Nick down every branch of friends and acquaintances he had. It still bugged him that Nick had just walked away from something that had been so special to both of them. But he kept the worst of the toxins for himself. He stewed in his own bile for weeks, diluting it periodically with nights of bottomless beer pitchers and eager, nameless bottoms, only to find its potency not only weakened but practically redoubled the next day.

He might have steered his ship into oblivion on that course. But Noah found him. Noah turned up in his life one day as if he’d been waiting for that night, that moment, his whole life. He sat down opposite him one miserable Thursday night in April in a booth at the off-campus tavern he favored, Lorrie’s, and as Josh focused on him, already a little the worse for wear, he saw to his amazement that the stranger’s handsome face was filled with love and compassion, as if the man had cherished Josh for years. His bright, steely gaze was fixed on Josh as if they were incapable of seeing anything else, in a way that was entirely unlike the starstruck, besotted stares Josh usually got from guys entranced by Josh’s beauty. The meaning in this man’s gaze took Josh aback.

“I’m Noah,” the man said confidently, “and I’d like to make you happy.”

Josh was amazingly good-looking, as he was well aware. He had heard every kind of pickup line, from girls and guys alike, and had spun more than a few himself. If anyone else had tried this line on him, he’d have rolled his eyes and laughed. But Noah—Josh didn’t understand, but there was something about Noah that Josh could feel, in his gut. There was a connection there that demanded to be explored. Everyone thought Josh was beyond sexy. Everyone had a thing for Josh, touching him, propositioning him, letting him fuck them senseless; but it was all just sex, all meaningless, and Josh was getting sick of it. He’d thought Nick was the answer—but that hadn’t worked either, and Nick had pried himself away and turned his back on Josh, leaving him raw, exposed, and angry. But this Noah guy—Noah meant something to him, or would mean something. His stomach fluttered, uneasy as his connections to this man he didn’t know at all laid themselves bare to him.

“Hi,” he said, lamely. He blinked and then remembered to add, “My name’s Josh.”

Noah just smiled. “It’s nice to finally meet you, Josh.”

Josh wanted to asked about that word “finally”, but he had an inkling it meshed with that strange sense of promise and connection that had come over him, and then Noah was ordering another pitcher, and inviting Josh to talk about himself.

So he did. That night, at the bar and later at the Cataract, Noah’s palatial digs outside town, Josh had spilled his woes. He was self-consciously aware of how unbalanced their conversation was, but Noah was such a good listener, and Josh had been finding lately that his friends were tired of Josh’s sinking further into this morose demeanor he disliked as much as everyone else.

So he told Noah about Nick, and how betrayed he felt because he’d thought there was a chance of something real for a change there. He told him about his distant parents and the older siblings who got all the attention. And then, because he thought Noah might be the one person on earth who would understand, he told Noah about how it sucked sometimes being beautiful.

Noah, reclining next to him on an extremely comfortable leather couch facing a crackling fire in a fireplace big enough to store Josh’s motorcycle in, listened attentively. His hand was on Josh’s thigh, but that was pretty normal, and Noah was not trying to slide it north—not yet, though Josh was pretty sure that was exactly what he wanted Noah to do. After Josh had rambled for a few minutes in this vein Noah asked gently, “Do you want to be not beautiful?” There was a glint in his eyes, as if he knew what Josh’s answer would be.

“No,” Josh admitted sheepishly.

Noah smiled, and Josh found that smile to be both comforting and arousing. “I didn’t think so. And I’m glad. I like that you’re beautiful.”

“You’re pretty hot yourself,” Josh said, recovering a bit of his usual cockiness. Noah’s hand caressed Josh’s muscular thigh, making Josh’s already chubbed cock stir in his briefs. He kept himself talking, strangely reticent with Noah to fall into the fucking he would probably already have finished with any other hook-up. “I guess that’s what I want.”

“What’s that?” Noah asked. He was closer now, unexpectedly, and the question was almost in his ear. Jeez, he had had a few tonight.

“More sexy,” Josh murmured. “Lots of sexy. All kinds of sexy. Wild and crazy sexy.”

He turned and found Noah’s face was not far from his. Noah’s brow arched. He seemed amused and intrigued. “Wild and crazy?” he repeated. When Josh only nodded dumbly, Noah asked, in a quiet, solemn voice: “What are your fantasies, Josh?”

Josh stared into Noah’s sea-gray eyes. “I—I’ve never told anyone my fantasies,” he murmured nervously.

“You can tell me,” Noah told him. “I have a feeling they’re a lot like mine. And like I said—I want to make you happy.”

And then Noah kissed him.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

That night in Noah’s bed felt afterward like a sifting succession of intense moments, like short bursts of film emerging from a forest of stilled images. Josh remembered gasping with pleasure as Noah went down on him, swallowing his ample cock, then becoming aware that the intensity of Noah’s pleasuring was increasing somehow, as if Noah were somehow fellating two supersensitive cocks instead of one. Then Noah had pulled his mouth off him and grinned up at him, and Josh had a moment to see that that was exactly what Noah was doing before Noah took both of Josh’s oversized cocked back into his hot mouth. He arched his back and then fell against the bed, luxuriating in the writhing of his sweet cocks against each other, of Noah’s tongue and lips rubbing and lolling against them, pushing him unexpectedly into a surging, body-shuddering climax. He stared down at Noah, and Noah looked right back up him as he swallowed down Josh’s sudden, double orgasm.

Then Noah was on top of him, mouth against his, his rangy, strong body pressed against Josh’s thicker muscles. Their eyes met, and Noah’s were dark with arousal. “How—?” Josh started to whisper, but Noah shushed him and bent down to kiss him hard and deep, and Josh gave in to the lust and passion and everything else that Noah made him feel.

He rolled them over, so that he was on top of Noah, and as they made out hungrily Josh shuddered with a pleasure deeper than any he’d ever known as he felt Noah’s hands groping his shoulders, even as other hands felt up his broad back, and still more hands caressed his thick, round muscle ass. He rutted his huge, hard cocks against Josh’s own impressive member, their precum slicking them enough that Josh thought he could get off this way. He already felt like he was getting close again, as if he hadn’t just cum buckets down Noah’s throat.

Noah broke the kiss, and they fell to mouthing each other’s necks. Noah licked the shell of Josh’s ear. “Fuck me,” he whispered. “Make love to me.”

Josh shifted up onto his elbows, so he could look down into Noah’s gray eyes. He wanted to fuck Noah very badly, but he was also aware he was somehow twice as endowed as he had been an hour before. More than twice—his cocks both felt huge, even more huge than he was used to. He met Noah’s lust-filled gaze. “You sure?” he asked.

All Noah said was, “Please.”

Nonetheless Josh took the time to prep Noah as thoroughly as he could, using the lube on the nightstand. He started looking for condoms, but Noah told him he didn’t need them, and Josh, catching sight of his sweetly handsome lover with his six long, nicely muscled arms, knew he could believe him. So Josh slicked up his massive cocks, then, lifting Noah’s long legs, positioned his cockheads at Noah’s entrance. Then he hesitated.

“I can take you,” Noah assured him. “Please, I want you to fuck me with your huge cocks. It’s both our fantasies.” The he added coyly, “One of them, anyway.”

Josh grinned at him, and slowly, relentlessly buried himself in his new lover.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

That was how it started. During the day Noah returned to his normal body, very sexy in a lanky, limber sort of way that caught and held Josh’s attention and amped his libido every time he saw Noah, but at night they indulged their imaginations, mining fantasies they had never shared with anyone to explore variations on male beauty from the tame to the wild. Sometimes they laughed, giggling as they tried making out while Noah had two heads or Josh had a mouthful of three stacked tongues, but increasingly they were deeply aroused at every experiment and excursion into the wilds of augmented masculinity.

The strangest part was that while Noah returned to a normal body, he smilingly insisted that Josh keep the altered body from the lovemaking the night before all through the next day, and sometimes longer. It was uncannily hot, and Josh loved walking around with three legs or a permanently hard cock the size of his torso or a sixteen-pack range of tight, chiseled abs that made him tower over Noah. He was so turned on by his altered bodies—they slotted perfectly into exactly what he found intoxicating about the male form, but it was even more arousing because Noah had made him that way. Noah was turned on by the freaky, wild body he’d been dreaming about all his life, because Noah had dreamed about them too.

There was a downside, though. Noah’s unbending insistence on his keeping the transformations from the latest round of lovemaking, this game they were playing, was spilling over into real life. There was always something wild enough about Josh, whether it was height or freaky muscle extra limbs or whatever, that kept him from going out and letting people see him. After some pleading Noah had let Josh attend graduation looking relatively normal—but only because the enormous cock Josh was sporting, straining obscenely against the sweats that were all he could wear, was just a couple inches shorter than the hem of his graduation robe. But most of the time he was rambling around the huge house or the huger grounds, enjoying the feel of six legs or nipples that hardened into eight-inch cocks, but feeling a little hemmed in. He was falling in love with Noah, he was pretty sure, and their sex was not only amazing but passionate and emotional and much, much more than just sex. But maybe they could let up on the game every once in a while?

When he brought this up to Noah, though, his lover just told him to be patient. “I’m working on it,” he told him one night that fall, as they basked in the afterglow of singularly intense lovemaking, thanks to the discovery that they both deeply loved being able to stretch like Mr. Fantastic. Josh was still wrapped around Noah, his torso stretched to coil around him over and over while their intertwined arms cocooned them both. This meant that Josh’s head was more or less trapped against Noah’s, though he knew that if he really wanted he could stretch his neck more. He liked his head where it was though, and he nestled it comfortably in the cook of Noah’s neck.

“Working on what?” Josh asked. He was feeling a little hazy and sated, but he wanted to hear this.

“More sexy,” Noah said. “Lots of sexy. All kinds of sexy. Wild and crazy sexy.”

Josh felt like this sounded familiar, but he wasn’t sure why. “Wilder than this?” he asked, wiggling his arms against Noah’s where they were wrapped around each other several times.

“Not just us,” Noah said laughing.

Josh thought about the people he’d been seeing around Cataract. Increasingly over the last couple months Josh had been encountering Noah’s most trusted employees, including the chief programmer, Chaz, who was a super-tall Nordic bombshell, as well as a few others—Calvin was the sexy Korean, Josh remembered. He had the feeling that these guys had been altered slightly, too, though not as extremely as Josh was on a regular basis. Calvin, for one, had met Josh on one of the days he’d had that torso-sized boner shoving up out of his pants, and Calvin had very clearly gotten more than one huge erection of his own, none of which had gone away for a second as they’d shared a delicious lunch in the Cataract private dining room.

“So, what, your employees too?” Josh probed.

Noah smiled. “Think bigger,” he said. “You won’t be the only sexy one much longer, I promise. It’s going to go viral. Your ex is helping us,” he added unexpectedly.

Josh pulled back unexpectedly, straining his wide shoulders against their rubbery arms. “My ex? You mean Nick?”

Noah nodded, moving closer to nibble at Josh’s stubbly jaw.

This seemed unlikely to Josh. Nick was pretty straight-laced and unadventurous, from what Josh remembered of their nine months together. And he was not going to jump at the chance to involve himself in anything related to Josh—especially not after the public and relentless bad-mouthing Josh had done after their break-up.

“Does Nick know he’s ‘helping’ us?” Josh asked, but Noah chose that moment to snake one of his thick, heavy cocks around to push suddenly against his ass, and while he was still capable of thinking Josh reckoned he had his answer.

That had been a few weeks before. Now, Josh burrowed into the immensely comfortably chair as he propped all three of his big, seven-toed bare feet up on the window sill in front of him, the cuffs of his three-legged jeans falling back to expose his slightly hairy ankles. God, Noah even thought his ankles were sexy. He really liked Josh this way—three legs, four arms—and Josh loved the feel of this body even more than Noah liked seeing it (and running his hands over it). This was probably his default body now, he mused. He wasn’t sure he knew the last time he’d had two legs, come to think of it. This was what masculine sexiness could be like, he thought. Not that many people got to enjoy it.

Josh sighed, staring out though the expanse of glass at the bright blue October sky.

“What’s Noah got planned for you, babe?” he asked aloud. He knew Noah’s impression must be of the bad guy that had betrayed Josh, and maybe, as Josh’s lover, Noah felt a need to exact some vengeance on the man who’d broken Josh’s heart. But Nick wasn’t a bad guy—he’d just been the one to decide they didn’t fit before Josh was ready to admit it. He’d have to set Noah straight. If it wasn’t already too late.

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“So let me see if I have this straight,” Kevin said. They’d somehow managed to shed their crowd of admirers, and were now holed up in the main music rehearsal room, to which Henry, who, to everyone’s general surprise, sang in the choir and was one of its officers, had keys. They had the room to themselves, though no one was making use of the rows of staggered auditorium style seating. Kevin was perched on the edge of the small stage, and Brendan sat next to him, absently fingering the hole where his shirt had stretched open at the seams over his straining shoulders after he’d suddenly put on 20 pounds of muscle, but they were both looking at the now-giant Nick, who sat against the wall, looking a size bigger than everyone else in the room—especially himself, Kevin thought dejectedly. Henry had turned on the lights only in the front of the room, so the gathering felt intimate to Kevin, like a council of war.

“Nick’s ex’s new boyfriend is, what, a wizard?” Kevin went on. “And he’s developed an app that does transformation magic? And he roped Nick into it without consent because—what? The ex is still pissed?”

Calvin looked up from where he was standing with Zack and Henry, feeling up Zack’s chest with two hands, while two more hands were slid in between Zack and Henry, who was embracing Zack from behind with four muscular, bare arms, his hands gently sliding up and down Zack’s tight abs under his shirt and into Zack’s loose-fitting jeans as he nuzzled into Zack’s loose, dirty blond hair. Zack, for his part, had both arms wrapped gently around Calvin’s muscular torso, but his eyes were closed as he leaned into Henry.

“I don’t think Josh is still pissed,” Calvin said slowly. “I’ve met him. He seems—pretty happy these days.” With that he turned back to Zack and moved in for a kiss, which Zack gladly reciprocated as the three of them pressed their hips together.

“Geez, you guys, get a room,” Nick laughed, his voice sounding very slightly deeper than before. “I just had a buttload of coffee, and it all went straight to my cocks,” he added, his eyes meeting Brendan’s for a shared grin.

Kevin stared at Nick, distracted by the over-7-foot-tall muscle hunk’s mention of his cocks. If I had two cocks, he thought, I’d—He shook his head. “Guys, we need to figure this out,” he said. “This guy Noah sounds like he’s going to keep upping the stakes, and I’m thinking there should be some informed—”

He was interrupted by the buzzing of a phone. Kevin realized that he still had Nick’s phone. He drew it out, flushing red as his heart sped up.

There was a window open on the screen—he didn’t even have to unlock it. There was Nick’s Transmute app, and a new change for Nick. Without thinking Kevin read the text aloud to the hushed room. “Transmute is about to share one of your cock transmutes with everyone in this room,” he read. “Would you like to share doubling in size, or doubling in quantity?”

There were two buttons underneath the question that reflected the options: One said, “Size”. One said, “Quantity”. And one said, “Both”.

The autodismiss was already counting down.

“What should—” Brendan started to say, then he broke off in a gasp as they watched Kevin unilaterally mash his thumb on the rightmost button.

“Wait! What’d you choose?” Nick exclaimed.

“Tell me you didn’t choose ‘both’,” Calvin said from where he was still locked in his embrace with Zack and Henry.

“Why not?” Kevin asked, surprised.

“Because,” he answered, “I already have—”

Then suddenly they were feeling it. Kevin felt his dick swelling—almost like he was getting hard, but he was already hard, and he was suddenly feeling way more stimulation than usual even as he ran out of room. Frantically unbuckling his pants he yanked down his shorts to expose two huge and rapidly expanding fully boned cocks.

“—already have—more than one——!!” Calvin practically gritted out, even as Calvin’s eyes flew open, staring down at the suddenly very full crotch pressed against his own.

Then came something none of them were expecting: from somewhere in the darkened, upper back corner of the big rehearsal room, behind the raked seats, came a shout—a strange voice bellowing, “What the FUCK?!”

 

Part 10

Filipe stood in the open doorway to Nick and Zack’s room and frowned, unable to believe what he was seeing. His friend Nick had sworn up and down the night before that he’d be in his room at 3 o’clock today to go over Filipe’s English Lit paper. And yet here he was, at 3 p.m. on the dot, and instead of his friend there were two giants making out in front of Nick’s desk, and Nick was nowhere to be seen!

“Who the fuck are you?” he blurted out. His temper was always his worst enemy—the second his blood started to heat up, whatever was riling him would burst out of his mouth. Girls hated it, but then, he hadn’t met anyone who’d done it for him in a while, anyway. He’d always been what some people called dangerously good-looking, and ever since he’d come to America as a young teenager he’d had girls swooning over his Portuguese accent and coloring, his smoldering blue eyes and coal-black curly hair, his tight, football-honed body, and his ravishing smile, only to have half of them tell him he was too temperamental, too mercurial. Even the ones who were turned on by his stormy disposition were never quite right. He hadn’t met anyone who did it for him the way he seemed to do it for everyone else.

The two giants were startled by his outburst and jumped guiltily apart from each other, staring down at him nervously. Several things registered with Filipe in a torrent, all at once. First, these two clearly were not supposed to be here. In his peripheral vision he say Nick’s laptop open and awake on Nick’s desk, and that meant there was a very good chance that the two miscreants had been fucking with it, or something equally villainous.

Second, these guys were enormous. They were literally giants, men so tall they could just barely stand up properly in the dorm room, and this dorm was fairly new and had pretty high ceilings. Filipe guessed they were close to eight feet tall, almost two feet taller than Filipe himself and everyone he’d ever known.

The third thing Filipe noticed as he stood there gawping at them was that they were identical in every way, from their extremely handsome faces (which seemed familiar, somehow, with their full lips, bright eyes, and scruffy beards) all the way down their pale, hardened, very muscular bodies. The fourth thing he took note of, close on the heels of the third, was that they both had, not one, but two unbelievably large erections shoving up out of their half-unzipped hooded sweatshirts, the pink and red of their cocks, and the flushed bare chests behind them, contrasting strongly with the dark brick red of their extra-extra-extra-large, four-armed hoodies.

The fifth thing that Filipe became aware of in that single, extended moment was that it was suddenly very, very necessary for him to lay his hands on every inch of both of these twin giant Adonises. It was equally urgent that he smash his lips against theirs, separately or together, and that he kiss these identical men more fiercely than he’d ever kissed any girl, and more passionately even then these visions had just been kissing each other.

This imperative made him as angry as he was aroused—and he was very, very aroused.

He ignored the aching erection in his tight, custom-fitted jeans, and the twin giants’ damp, inflamed, monumental hard-ons as well. Instead, he focused back on that very first thing. These two clowns, these gorgeous, gorgeous men he had to force himself not to move towards, were not supposed to be here, and might well be doing something nefarious with Nick’s stuff. “Well?” he demanded, planting his hands on his hips to show them he meant business. “Who are you? Where’s Nick?”

The two giants blinked at him. When he’d arrived one of them had been closer to the door as they licked each other’s tonsils, and now that they were both facing him that one was standing closer to him. That seemed to put him in the position of responding to Filipe’s interrogations, though he suspected that if that hadn’t been the case they’d have answered together. “Ah, I’m Chaz,” the nearer of the two apparitions said. His voice was rich and deep and smooth like a mighty river, and it curled around Filipe’s hard dick and coiled through his guts like it was searching out a place to live there.

“Chaz,” Filipe repeated.

“Yeah,” the Nordic godling said. They seemed not to know what to do with their hands, Filipe noticed. The one in back had stuffed all four hands into the front pockets of his hoody, which worked more or less, though he seemed aware it put only a thin layer of fabric between his hand and his majestic, towering boners. The one in front was trying to push all his hands into the front pockets of his dark slacks, which wasn’t working as well. It was all irritatingly adorable.

“I’m Filipe,” he said unwillingly, almost through clenched teeth. He didn’t want to cede any ground here, but he also wanted to be a sandwich between these two. He was feeling a rising frustration that it would not be easy to touch them both everywhere, not as much as he wanted to. He felt a heart-twisting desire to be stroking every inch of skin on them simultaneously, and knowing he couldn’t do that even if he let himself succumb to his crazy, insistent, out-of-nowhere urges was serving at the moment mainly to stoke his anger in the direction of actual rage.

“Hey,” the twins said in unison, and Filipe almost growled with how hot that was.

Sensing their accoster’s shortage of patience, the nearer Chaz hastened on with his explanations. “Nick got a new computer this morning,” Chaz said, nodding toward the desk behind him. Filipe noticed for the first time that the box the new laptop had come in was on the floor, propped against the side of the desk, and there were instruction booklets and smaller boxes strewn about on the desk itself. “There was a problem with one of his apps, though, so I—we—came to fix it.”

Filipe narrowed his eyes at them. His own hands were still positioned at his hips. “You’re from the student help desk,” he said suspiciously.

“Sort of,” the one in back said.

“Not really,” the one in front said at the same time. He exchanged a quick look with his twin and then told Filipe, “We handle this particular app. It’s not a standard installation.”

“Uh huh,” Filipe said. He wasn’t sure why, but he got the distinct impression that they were extemporizing. “And do you always go out on service calls with your dicks hanging out like this?”

They exchanged another look. Filipe wondered if the stories about twins communicating wordlessly were true. The one in back moved forward, pulling his left hands out of his hoody pocket so that he could wrap both arms around his brother’s shoulder. Fuck, they were hot. Filipe’s throat was dry, and his hands were itching. It was all he could do to stand his ground and stay rooted where he was, just in the doorway to Nick’s room.

“You noticed our cocks, Filipe?” the one in back said, just a trace of huskiness in his voice.

Filipe knew where this was going—he knew it—but he had no choice but to let it happen. “It’s hard not to,” he retorted, as if returning a scripted response.

“Very hard,” the nearer twin responded, clearly from the same script. Both twins were taking a great interest in the incredibly obvious tube of flesh that was twitching along his hip against his very tight jeans.

Slowly, Filipe lowered his hands from his hips. As the giant twins watched, he brought both hands to his crotch and, very deliberate, squeezed his dick with both hands, side by side. “Do you want this?” he growled. Then, as if the words were dragged out of him, he added almost involuntarily, “As much as I want you both?”

They looked up and he met their gazes in turn. Both of the twins were looking straight into him with eyes that were dark with desire.

“Come closer and find out,” the nearer one instructed, his voice deeper and more shiver-inducing than ever. Their lust for him—it was intense, growing beyond reason. Their cocks were rigid, quivering, the tips damp and urgent. Their cheeks were flushed and he could almost hear their hearts hammering as their eyes drank him in. Filipe remembered himself. Hot guys lusted after him. The hotter they were the more they wanted him.

Filipe pressed his lips together, wavering on the edge of a precipice. He stared at the two men, wondering if his eyes were blazing. They felt as if they were. He didn’t understand what was happening, beyond the inarguable fact that he wanted these men like he had never wanted any woman. He wanted them with every fiber of his being, and most importantly every touch receptor of his fingers and hands and mouth and lips and tongue. And he knew that the magnitude of his desire for them was driven by the intensity of their profound lust for him. Somehow, he knew. He wanted them that much, because they were desperate for him.

And that made him smile.

And as he did so, the twins’ mouths dropped open. Filipe felt a sizzling thrill course through him. It was his feral smile that always did it. It was also what reassured him now. However fierce and aching was the need for them that was burning through him in this moment, he could now be certain that these two men—these uncannily sexy, eight-foot-tall muscle gods with all those hands and the double-count chest-high cocks—would be taking care of him. They would be devoting themselves to satisfying his needs. On those terms, he allowed himself to take that first step forward, the one he’d been holding back from the beginning.

Filipe walked slowly and deliberately into the room, turning only to close the door. A small snick as the lock was turned. Whatever was about to happen, there would be no interruptions.

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Ahmed hadn’t been planning on cooling down with a few games of hoops after the punishing run he’d put himself through, but when he saw who was occupying the first outdoor basketball court behind the gym it suddenly seemed like a good idea.

Ahmed was often asked if he played basketball himself. It wasn’t that he was all that especially tall. He topped out only a couple or three inches over six feet, well shy of the kind of loftiness his brothers had achieved, the kind that made coaches shove basketballs into your hands and start talking in abbreviations like NCAA and NBA. (In fact his oldest brother, Mido, had just been drafted by the Timberwolves that summer.) Ahmed wasn’t that tall, but he looked like he was tall. His whole body looked like it had been built up to an idealized musculature of the kind that kept gay men up all night jacking themselves over and over, and then stretched. Everything about him looked like it had been drawn out just a little longer than it ought to have been, from his neck and bulging shoulders and long, long torso and thick-muscled arms to his endless legs. It was like someone had crafted a exact, detailed, life-sized figurine of the absolute prototype of a compact, hard-muscled Olympic gymnast or world-champion swimmer in some kind of stretchy material that looked like sweet, warm caramel, and then grabbed it by the shoulders, hands, and feet and pulled.

Not only that, but all of this sense of length and extended proportions had contrived somehow to give him the most perfect ass imaginable, which he always loved to show off by wearing low-slung track pants that showed just the barest hint of crack and, whenever possible, nothing else but his running shoes. He knew his body was distinctive, and while he worked out hard to keep it in the best shape it could be, he tended to think that this amazing body had been given to him mainly to enjoy in every way he could.

Ahmed trotted over through the gates of the tall fence surrounding the outdoor basketball area and stood at the edge of the court for a moment, watching in fascination. It was three tall, skinny redheads in green tee-shirts, loose jeans, and old trainers, playing a very sloppy game of ball that seemed to involve more grab-ass and general body contact than was strictly necessary. There was something about them, something magnetic and compelling, and Ahmed noticed that the only other occupied court, the third one along from the main footpath he’d come in on, contained a mixed bag of five friends playing horse, except they kept stealing glances at the three tireless and handsy redheads in the first court.

What really intrigued Ahmed, of course, was that the players seemed to be three of the same guy: same face, same red hair and glasses, same affectionate grin. Identical triplets, he would have said, but Ahmed somehow knew better. It wasn’t just that the three of them all seemed to have the hots for each other, and were engaging in a little athletic exertion as a means of taking the edge off their agonizing craving for each other; Ahmed had already met one pair of identical twins since he’d come to this school that were very much in love, and had fucked on a regular basis for as long as they could remember. It wasn’t the powerful attraction that they had for each other that made Ahmed felt certain that they just weren’t actually triplets. He wasn’t sure exactly what it was. He just knew somehow that his original gut reaction had been correct—that this was three of the same guy, like some CGI artist had just loaded the same model into the animation render over and over again.

It wasn’t often that Ahmed had hunches, or insights, like this, but they’d been happening more frequently in recent months, and especially when he was on this campus. He’d been thinking lately that it might not be coincidence that the vibes he got were ramping up and seemed concentrated here, in this little isolated domain. Maybe there was something going on, he’d been thinking in the back of his mind. Something to get to the bottom of.

“You guys need another player?” he called out abruptly to the skinny redheads. The three of them were so immersed in each other that the one who was in the middle of making a play toward the basket started in reaction, causing him to lose control of the ball. Fortunately it bounced in Ahmed’s direction, and he retrieved it easily, snatching it out of the air. He held it a moment, all eyes on him, then he strode confidently onto the court until he was in their midst. They watched his every move with great interest, and Ahmed enjoyed the idea that the three of them were glad to distract themselves from their mutual thirst for each other with a distinctively tall, dark, and muscle-carved man that they all found acutely attractive. Ahmed took note of the abnormally large and heavy cock swinging in each of the three pairs of worn, baggy jeans, and the way all of them let their hands gravitate almost unconsciously to the others’ sweaty backs and round, exceptional asses. He held the ball in front of his chest with both hands, looking around at his new friends. “We could play shirts versus skins,” Ahmed continued, favoring them with a crooked grin. “Obviously I already know which team I’m on.”

“I’ll bet you do,” one of them said. “Larry,” he added, proffering a hand.

“Ahmed,” he responded. “So, shall I just call you Larry 1, Larry 2, and Larry 3?” As the three Larrys exchanged surprised glances, Ahmed went on, “Or, better yet, I’ll call the Larry I’m playing with ‘My Larry’, and the rest can be ‘the other Larrys’. How does that sound?”

The three Larrys seemed to adjust quickly to someone having sorted out that they weren’t the way that they were exactly naturally, and the general tenor of their response was relief. “Sounds great,” said another of the Larrys. “So which of us gets to play with you?”

“You could see which one of us is the better kisser,” the third Larry suggested.

“Excellent plan,” Ahmed said with a grin, and immediately set about putting it into action. Shifting the ball to his side he moved in on the Larry who’d introduced himself, wrapping his other hand around his neck and bringing him in for a kiss. The Larry in question responded enthusiastically, eagerly wrapping his impressively long tongue around Ahmed’s, and Ahmed stepped back after a few moments with considerable reluctance. The second Larry, as Ahmed had suspected, was motivated to outdo his facsimile and kissed him with great abandon. The third, having observed the first two encounters closely, used his turn to try to give Ahmed the most sensual and attentive kiss Ahmed had ever received—while, at the same time, feeling up Ahmed’s attention-hungry ass.

The others were quick to protest the third Larry’s obvious cheating. But Ahmed certified that he was the winner fair and square—not with words, but by snatching up the bottoms of the third contestant’s sweaty green tee shirt and whipping it right off him. He cast the top unceremoniously aside beyond the painted lines of the court and held up the now shirtless redhead’s right arm, exposing a damp, rust-red pit. He noticed that the guys playing horse in the third court had suspended their game, at least for the moment, and were watching the four of them with avid interest. “Gentlemen,” he announced, “I give you ‘My Larry’.”

The other two Larrys chucked. “All right, all right,” one of them said. “Can we play ball now?”

“It’s very important that we either play ball or fuck,” the other went on, picking up the thought, “and my feeling is that hoops now will make for better fucking later.”

“I was thinking the exact same thing,” Ahmed said, winking cheekily at them. He walked out of bounds and prepared to pass the ball in, but took a moment first to survey the three tall redheads who’d spread their deep mutual cravings onto him as well as each other, dividing and refocusing their all-consuming lust into something slightly more manageable. He grinned at them as he watched their eyes follow the rippling muscles and fluid movements of his long, attenuated body. There would be time enough for finding out what was going on with these three, plus the other things he had been perceiving lately, in due course. Right now, he wanted to get sweaty, and he wanted the Larrys to help him.

“I think the four of us will have a lot of fun together,” he said, and the three of them returned his grin, the unquenchable hunger within them gleaming in their eyes.

 

Part 11

Ethan Masterson didn’t have anywhere good to read his porn.

It wasn’t even about finding somewhere safe and private to jerk off. For Ethan, jerking off was only the final lap of a long, slow stoking of his sexual need. Sometimes he let it build up for a week, goading his libido to the breaking point with ever tactic he could imagine. Explicit gay romances he downloaded onto the Kindle app on his tablet computer. Nights out at the upscale-but-slutty gay disco in town famous for its full-contact dance floor. Forcing himself to stay in his dorm room pretending to study while his football-scholarship roommate and his wrestling-team-scholarship boyfriend made out before going out on their date (they knew he liked to pretend not to listen). Hot showers where he thought about nothing but the fact that he was not touching himself no matter how much he wanted to. And of course lots and lots of porn. Porn stories, porn picture blogs, porn videos, porn role-play chats. Muscle guys, twinks, cubs, yiff, it almost didn’t matter. It all fed his growing, mounting, swelling arousal, a crackling, sizzling lightning storm he was building within him until it felt like it was the size of a world—until finally, when he couldn’t take it any more, he took a single hour alone in his room and ramped himself up to an ungodly explosion, an organic release fueled and amplified and enlarged day by day, so immense, so extensive, so unfathomed that he could not wait to slowly, gradually built up to another one, and another. The release was amazing, but the built-up was incredible. Ethan was half-hard most of the time, his junk tingling with suppressed excitement, and Ethan loved being half-hard. Not because he was huge down there (the way he was huge all over), but because that brewing, growing storm inside him made him feel more awake and alert than all the other guys he met who seemed to be sliding and sleepwalking through their lives, ignorant of how truly alive they could feel.

The problem was that everywhere he went was full of people. Even apart from the omnipresent boyfriend, his roommate Freddie, like all football jocks, seemed to have an open door policy, with his teammates and their friends and fuck-buddies, male and female, trooping in and out at all hours—and each and every one of them was in a state of deep and perpetual confoundment at being in the presence of a 6-foot-5, three-hundred-plus-pound, heavily-muscled behemoth that not only wasn’t scattering opponents on the gridiron but didn’t, in fact, play football at all. No one could parse that conundrum, it seemed, and Ethan’s very existence, the embodiment of contradiction to all these people, provoked every reaction on the spectrum from amazement to insatiable inquisitiveness to resentment that he was wasting gifts that could benefit everyone on the gridiron.

The situation in the room got old fast, but the rest of the campus was worse. The bathroom and showers seemed to be in constantly in use, and for some reason these days the gym was overrun at all hours with pipsqueak underclassmen guys (and girls) out to push themselves into new levels of strength and vitality now that they were at college. Though usually teeming with students the library seemed like a good place to read, but not if you were reading or watching porn, especially if you were as conspicuous and prone to self-consciousness as Ethan. The cafeterias and student commons spaces were as bad as the library, only louder.

It had gotten so his best bet for a quiet place to read his favorite smut was a narrow, cushy space he’d found behind the rows of seats in the converted auditorium the choir and some of the other music groups used as a rehearsal hall. He had the keys, since as section leader of the baritones he was expected to conduct sectionals here with just his guys. That was another stupid question he was always asked. How could someone so big sing baritone and not bass? I don’t know—how can someone so obviously missing a brain manage to walk, talk, and maintain essential baseline homeostasis? At least if they were asking why he sang baritone they were less likely to be querying how a big tough guy who looked like a walking Marine recruitment ad, or a de-armored escapee from Warhammer 40,000, or any of a number of increasingly unclever attempts to describe his size, even sang at all.

He believed he sang pretty well, thank you, and the solos he’d won in the last three concerts buttressed his position very nicely, he thought. And as for the formal white tie and tails they wore for their anniversary concerts in the Opera Hall every New Year’s Eve? He looked fantastic in them, and fuck you for assuming otherwise.

So here he was on a quiet Saturday afternoon, killing time with “a good book” on his tablet in his dark, appropriated nook behind the rear rehearsal room stalls, when that good-looking tenor who was also one of the managers came in with a bunch of big, loud friends to have some kind of pow-wow in the front of the space. What was his name? Henry … something French. Or maybe Caribbean, he wanted to say, though he looked more French than Caribbean. Whatever it was, he found himself bitterly resenting the tenor’s misuse of the rehearsal room, though he was, at the same time, well aware of the irony involved in thinking so.

At first he’d put his earbuds in, queued up some Béla Fleck, and tried to focus on the libertine sailors in his dirty story and how their inhibitions seemed to be all whipped away by the gusty ocean gales once they were well out at sea and away from prying eyes. But then, after a lot of indistinct murmuring from the coterie down below, something inexplicable happened.

He’d been feeling his shimmering arousal, already banked dangerously deep over a week of self-affliction, building stronger and more unbearably intense as he read this new story from one of his favorite authors. He was allowing himself to touch very near to where his nipples almost poked straight through the worn-thin fabric of his favorite navy blue choir tour shirt from the Australia-New Zealand trip two summers ago, and his long, blunt, soda-can-thick cock was quivering on the threshold of overstimulation like a violin string, three quarters hard and desperately needy in the loose cargo shorts he wore absolutely everywhere. That was when it happened. The air in the room seemed to heat and charge just for a fraction of a second, and then whatever stir or spin had danced the atoms in the air around like a debs’ cotillion seemed to drop away—and into Ethan’s powerful, massive frame.

And then his dick began to expand.

It grew slowly at first, and then more and more rapidly, as if it were accelerating toward some wall, some final push of growth. It was an altogether novel experience for Ethan, his cock growing. When he got hard, normally, it was more like his club of a cock became insanely rigid but otherwise more or less the same, maybe gaining an inch in length to reach its ten-and-a-half-inch size, but hardly anything in girth. So to have his cock actually growing, getting bigger and bigger in his cargo shorts, was a shock, surprising a loud “What the fuck??” out of him almost without his noticing. And then, even as he was snatching his earbuds out and fumbling for the buttons of his shorts to try to see what was happening to him in there, his cock swelled suddenly incredibly wide and then broke apart like fucking Popsicle twin pops, if twin pops looked more like thick-packed sausage. Heart pounding, he got his fly open in time to see two mostly hard cocks thrusting up out of his groin, each double the weight and heft of his original. They were well over soda can thick now, and had to be at least fourteen inches each. “What the ALMIGHTY FUCK!!” he shouted, staring at his own equipment in stunned disbelief.

He could tell his churning balls and newly grown cocks wanted to bring this moment to an earth-shattering climax. He wanted to explode, to release his torrential, pent-up cum all over himself and the wall behind him and the thick, padded carpet he’d been laying on all this time. It could happen, too. He knew it. He could push himself over without a touch, just by bursting the arousal he’d walled up and packed in over the last week, and which now had been swollen beyond the breaking point. But he was too shocked. Even more important than his long-delayed, brain-scattering orgasm was the fact of this … this transmutation. And the abrupt recollection that he was not alone in this room came simultaneously with the certainty that the presence of Henry St. Croix and his friends in the rehearsal hall with him in this moment could possibly not be a coincidence.

He coached himself away from the brink, as he had trained himself to do. He buttoned up his shorts again with some difficulty, stowing away his turgid equipment with acute awareness of the symbolism. He took a deep breath. And then he stood, rising from behind the seats to face down the group that had so willfully intruded on his own personal smut time.

He swept his gaze across the young men standing in little groups down in the well of the large rehearsal room between the seats and the stage. There were six of them, all goggling up at him wide-eyed with expressions that ranged from fear to awe to frank appreciation.

There was a Latino giant, easily 7 feet tall and almost as heavily muscled as Ethan, with a narrow waist, thick black hair, and an air of astonishment at the things that kept happening to him. Perched on the edge of the stage near him was a beautiful boy-next-door type, with a generously muscled swimmer’s build and a cocky grin. A paler, less muscular friend with a knowing expression sat with him, watching Ethan’s every move with a kind of expectant wonder, like he was already coming to the conclusion that Ethan was a catalyst, one that would bung a bolt of lightning into their midst and change everything.

The second group was pressed very close together, especially at hip level, as if they were an inseparable threesome. One of these was St. Croix, typically shirtless and mussed as if this were his freaking dorm room and not the choir rehearsal room, but the center of the little group was a tall, creamy-skinned fellow with dirty blond hair and a presence so magnetic that Ethan felt a sudden tug, as if it were somehow of great importance that he descend the stairs immediately and run his hands over every square inch of the blond’s delicious body and plumb his mouth with his tongue.

It was the very attractive Korean boy that holding onto both St. Croix and the blond, though, that made Ethan notice the cocks.

He’d taken in almost without conscious attention the fact that all six of them had four arms: some thick and powerful, like the Latino guy’s, others long and lithe, like the mousy kid’s or the tall Korean’s. That didn’t surprise him. Henry had always had four arms, so it stood to reason he’d have friends that did too; for all he knew this was the on-campus club for extra-armed guys. What he wasn’t expecting was the cocks, starting with the six huge ruler-busting erections erupting uncontrollably from the Korean dude’s jeans like they’d made a bid to escape from his pants at all costs. Though not all of them had their heavy equipment exposed, he could see that everyone in the room had at least two bulges straining the groins of their jeans or slacks, and the Latino giant, unless Ethen was mistaken, had four fat, rigid tools pushing very hard against his hopefully sturdy chinos. None of them seemed to have gotten quite as big downstairs as Ethan, but Ethan was used to being at the extreme end of any group he was a part of, and it was something of a shock to know that when he stood in front of the Latino guy, he’d be looking up at him.

“Holy fuckwads,” whispered the Asian kid, in a loud aside to his boyfriends. “Who the heck is that?’

“Shit,” said Henry St. Croix, looking pale. “It’s the Mastodon.”

Ethan narrowed his eyes at the tenor. He knew about this nickname, and like anything that made people assume he was a brainless brute, he didn’t like it. “Masterson,” he corrected icily, his voice easily filling the room. “Ethan Masterson.” Leaving his bag and tablet where they lay he moved out from behind the last row of seats and stepped deliberately down the carpeted steps between the seats, the thumping of his boots making the only sound in the room. His suddenly tight-packed cargo shirts shifted with the weight of his enormous cocks, but he mentally put them aside as was usual for him, banking his arousal for later, as he descended into the well of the auditorium. They all stared at him as Ethan casually ignored everyone else and presented himself directly to the Latino giant. He was almost certain that whatever was going on here revolved around him, and that was where he was going to start.

Though he was bigger than everyone else in the room, he found that he was, as he’d anticipated, staring up into those dark, almost black eyes.

“Explain,” Ethan said.

And he did.

Ethan heard about Nick’s new computer, about the Transmute software that came installed on it and how it seemed designed to screw Transmute with his body; how it had gotten to his roommate, the embarrassingly magnetic blond, and then transferred itself to Nick’s phone and started in on his old high school swim-team buddy and his friend as well. He heard about how Calvin, the tall Korean kid (who was currently trying to tuck away his triple helping of twinned cocks without much success), had come to warn them about the guy behind Transmute, who was evidently a reality-shifting wizard with big plans that seemed to involve using Nick, here, as some kind of body-rewrite guinea pig.

“And that’s … when you showed up,” Nick finished. “And got caught in the latest Transmute, evidently.” His eyes fell to the very obvious double bulge in Ethan’s cargo shorts.

“Which I triggered,” put in the mousy friend, from where he stood behind the boyishly beautiful swimmer. “Sorry,” the friend added. He did not look sorry at all, Ethan thought.

He stepped back from Nick and looked around slowly at the six students who’d been caught up in this whirlwind of enforced, either-or transmutations. They were all staring at him expectantly, as if it were his lot to take change of them and make something happened. They assumed just from his size and demeanor that he was the alpha, and that bringing resolution to what beset them all was up to him. Ethan sighed inwardly. He was used to that, too.

“It sounds to me,” he began, “like this so-called wizard—what was his name? Noah?”

“Noah Toller,” Calvin said. His half-dozen rigid dicks were mostly hidden away now, though a damp spot was forming partway up his black Captain America tee. “He lives up at the big Cataract Estate outside town.”

Ethan nodded. “It sounds to me like this Noah Toller needs to be reined in, before he starts getting off changing everyone without asking. Personally,” he said, “I think the asking part is pretty important.”

“Okay, yeah,” Nick agreed worriedly. “But how, exactly, are we going to do that?”

“He has the ability to change reality,” the hunky swimmer, Brendan, said, sounding both impressed and afraid at the same time. “I mean, it’s awesome,” indicating his own bulked-up, extra-hung form, “but it also means he can pretty much do whatever the heck he wants.”

Ethan had no ready response to that, and no one else did, either. He was still trying to formulate options in his head when something buzzed in the quiet room. Slowly, the mousy friend—Kevin, he thought he’d heard Nick say—lifted the smartphone in his hand. Ethan knew without asking that that was Nick’s phone, and the buzzing alert wasn’t a text from his grandma. His heart sank into his stomach as Kevin read the screen, then looked up to meet Ethan’s gaze.

“It’s the Transmute app,” Kevin said, with a quaver in his voice. “It wants to change you.”

 

Part 12

Ethan took Nick’s iPhone from the smaller man, keeping his face impassive despite the twisting in his gut. His slow, tantric sex build-up tended to make him hyper-aware of everything, but especially of rugged, muscular men, and the intensity of being surrounded by six incredibly hot hunks, each sexy in profoundly different ways, felt like six suns all around him battering him with warmth and arousal. When he was like this he felt cocks, even when they were dormant and drowsing, and now each and every one of these guys was sporting oversized, multiple boners that quivered with a feral need for release. They were so incandescent with raw, sexual animus, he could find and touch each one with his eyes closed. He felt these bodies, these rampant cocks around him, behind him, in front of him, and Ethan’s heightened arousal was so powerful he could not contain it. He could feel it mingling with the other men’s warm-glowing over-hotness, tangling his superarousal with theirs.

He was ringed around with stunning men, and he could feel all the manly hyper-allure of these mostly four-armed, over-equipped muscle gods seeping into him in relentless, unending waves of manfuck. It wasn’t just that they were all hot to him, especially in his present state. He could feel their differences too. It was almost like his heightened arousal had gifted him with a new, sixth sense for burning-hot guys, an unprecedented kind of perception that was more… taste than touch.

He was bigger than all of them except Nick, and yet at least for him their transformations had ramped up their magnetic allure to the point of almost overpowering enchantment.

He remembered their names—he was good with names—but it was their feel, their nearness-taste that rocked him, buffeting him with even more brain-melting, body-intoxicating pleasure-stimulation than what he’d built up when he’d thought he’d almost reached as much as could possibly bear. Nick, the handsome, huge Puerto-Rican-looking guy in the purple shirt, with the amazing black hair down to his bulging shoulders, and dark, intense eyes. Brendan, the supercute boyish swimmer with the dark blue eyes and the perfect, extra-pumped muscles. His smaller, snarky, supportive buddy was Kevin, whose cut, athletic build probably went unfairly underappreciated around his thicker, hunkier friend even before Brendan had blown up bigger with Nick today.

Behind him was Henry the shirtless tenor, lean and buff with a bit of darkening stubble starting to show, and sexier than Ethan had realized now that lust was shining from his eyes and cocks raged in his pants. Calvin, the tall, smoking-hot shaggy-haired Korean nerd who seemed to be neck-deep in whatever had started happening to Nick. And Zack. Zack, the standard good-looking, hazel-eyed blond, the only one of them with only two arms, as if the four-armedness had somehow radiated out from him in transforming ripples. Zack, the one whose attractiveness was so intense, so literal, that from the moment he’d started down the stairs from the back of the rehearsal room to confront these troublemakers he’d had to fight a desperate imperative to stomp right up into this boy’s face and worship his body with his hands while planting a deep forever kiss on those delicious-looking lips. Even now Ethan could barely resist the call Zack’s lips and body were singing into his soul. He was only holding himself still, not turning to grab Zack and squeeze him hard against his own much bigger frame and ravish his mouth like no one had ever done before, out of sheer, stupid pride. He was keeping himself planted in this spot with the same willpower that let him stoke his arousal to the breaking point and even now was keeping him from hauling his aching, swollen erections out of his inadequate shores and rocketing himself into a deep ether-universe of calamitous, delirious bliss.

His own cocks raged in his cargo shorts, harder and more potent than any hardon he could remember. His cocks and heavy balls were almost vibrating with need and imminent anticipation. He could punch through walls with these fucking things right now. Over the last few years he’d conditioned himself to holding back as a matter of course, pushing his swelling arousal down day by day until he couldn’t bear it any more as his need built and built toward a moment of exquisite, infinite letting go. And now—now this, after he’d already pushed himself so close, even before this had happened. It was like his arousal had doubled with his junk, or more than doubled. He’d held his towering pent-up need at bay so far through this encounter with Nick and his men, even in the shock of being changed, even being surrounded by their insistent beauty. He had brought every fiber of effort to bear on focusing on the story Nick and the others had told him, because he knew that he was part of this, and that they needed him.

But the whole time his unbearable awareness of all those beyond-beautiful bodies… all those charged, racing hormones… all that pent-up lust expressing itself in heated flesh and smoldering eyes and shivering monster cocks multiplied like a cock-lovers fever dream… all that had been rushing in on him again, closing around him and swarming his thoughts and sensations around in accelerating tempests that would hurl him spinning off the cliff he teetered on the moment he let go of his control.

His field of vision had been slowly narrowing, his concentration shutting down. And then that moment came where all of these transformed hunks had looked to him for an answer, and he didn’t have one. His mind was clouded with sex. It was already past anything he’d endured before. His heavy balls, his massive pricks, his thick, fevered muscles, and his lust-drunk mind were all screaming at him to let the building giant orgasm loose. He needed to let himself explode, he was almost choking from it. Pleasure was flowing through blood and tissue, painful and deliriously sweet, promising unparalleled ecstasy if only he released the tripwire tension holding everything back. His vision had narrowed to the phone in his hand, blurred black nothingness edging what little he could see. Only the words he’d just heard, that this transmute was meant for him, gave him any kind of power to focus on anything but lust, muscle, beauty. Heady male tang, the urgency of cocks, mind-blowing release.

He stared hard at the screen, willing himself to think. There was a notification window. Some text, and two buttons below. He forced his mind to work so he could read it. The window title said “Transmute: Guest Alteration.” Underneath it read, “Transmute is about to alter the newest member of your group. Would he like to take ten pounds of muscle from each of the others, or give ten pounds of muscle to each of the others?”

Below, the two buttons read “Take” and “Give”. “Take” was highlighted as the default.

As he stared, a new line of text appeared: “Window will self-dismiss in 5 seconds.” The “5” was then replaced by a “4”… then a “3”.

Nick had moved around to look over his shoulder, his superior height making it easy for him to see what was going on. As Ethan moved his thumb automatically to the “Give” button, Nick started to say, “Wait—!” But for Ethan, this was, perhaps fortunately given his current mental state, a no-brainer.

Any other guy might be terrified of giving away sixty pounds of muscle, and ten pounds would hardly be noticed on any of these guys—Zack was the least built of any of them, and his tall, well-defined frame was still buff enough to take a hit of just ten pounds, and the rest of them were a lot thicker, with Nick and Brendan edging toward massive. That was probably the way he was supposed to be thinking—the Transmute app, after all, was apparently about building guys up into freaks and making that the norm, making freakdom go viral. Anyone who had muscle would do anything to have it taken away, especially that much of it. He was supposed to take the sixty pounds and become even more disproportionately massive than he already was, becoming the towering muscle-mountain the app wanted him to be.

But the app sure as fuck didn’t know Ethan. The truth was that he had gotten sick of being the big guy. Sick of people actually being resentful of him for not using his six and a half feet of intimidating size and the 320 pounds of hard muscle his body grew naturally to play sports like his bro-tastic roommate and the dimwitted jocks who’d all acted like spoiled princes in his high school because their teams won almost every game and made their boring little school famous. Christ, he already knew he wanted to be a lawyer someday… and whoever heard of a 320-pound lawyer? He was so fed up with all, and the way it had followed him to college like a bad reputation, that sloughing off sixty pounds of thick, heavy Ethan-muscle sounded almost like a dream come true. He mashed the “Give” button without a second thought. Behind him, Nick gasped.

“What?” Brendan asked, looking up at Nick and then at Ethan in concern, his dark brows knitted.

“What’s it doing?” Calvin asked, agitated.

“It’s okay,” Ethan said gruffly, swallowing. He was barely holding onto his control. “It’s only—”

Suddenly it hit him. He felt the force of muscle exiting his body, as if strength and power and mass were being sucked out of him at an impossible rate. It felt for a moment like he was chained up by the wrists and ankles in front of an open airlock, and the very flesh of his body was being ripped right off his bones straight out into the vacuum of space. Only—but no, that was wrong. His muscle wasn’t just flowing out of him… it was exuding from his body into the bodies around him, as if across a membrane from an area of greater pressure to six areas of lesser pressure. As he lost, they all received. They took in his extra strength and his extra size, becoming stronger and bigger, the power they all shared radiating through each and every one of them, Ethan included. He felt more than saw their forms, whether defined and lanky or thick and mighty, all swelling and firming with that extra dose of brawn he’d slid them from his own overgenerous supply.

Ethan’s iron control finally faltered. But instead of breaking through into the orgasm he’d built up to apocalyptic levels over seven long days, he felt his monstrous arousal somehow tamp down and consolidate, quivering hot in his core under new pressure and tension but under firmer hold than ever. As his constraint shifted and reformed he felt all at once the impact of suddenly becoming sixty solid pounds lighter, and he stumbled, his center of gravity way off and his sense of his own body skewed all out of proportion. He knew the others were all staring at him in wide-eyed alarm, contracting around him in a tight circle of worry and support, though somehow he couldn’t land his gaze on any of them. The physical, sub-reality connection he felt to them was there, though: that meshing of their attraction and arousals and shared power, and that sensual nearness-taste of their heated, musky flesh that never wavered. His vision swam and he realized he felt light-headed. The wild thought that his brain was losing mass too struck him as hilariously funny. Fuck, he thought, maybe I am a muscle-head jock after all! He laughed giddily and slumped backwards. His last sensation was of being caught in someone’s strong, steadying arms, before the ground and everything else gave way and he fell swiftly and silently into an endless black void.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Ethan wasn’t out for very long, but on coming to he seemed disinclined to move from where he lay on the rehearsal room carpet with his head in Nick’s lap. Nick had caught him as he’d passed out and carefully lowered them both to the floor, while the others crowded around anxiously until Nick told them to give Ethan some air—mostly because that was what they said on TV when people crowded around someone who’d collapsed. Some passes out, you shout, “Give him air”, right? It was like getting a blanket whenever someone fell asleep on a couch and pulling it over them like you’re suddenly their mom, it happened all the time. But TV didn’t tell him what to do after that. He’d seen people using smelling salts a few times, but he didn’t even know what those were, and he sure didn’t have any.

Kevin, at least, had had the presence of mind to snatch the phone out of Ethan’s hand, and Calvin had taken it and tossed it toward the corner of the room. Nick guess that was to get it out of range. It must have a proximity field, like his laptop. Fuck, he should have thought of that. Shortly after that Kevin had disappeared out into the hallway, the rehearsal room door closing silently after him.

Nick was in full-on self-castigation mode. Ethan, this guys he’d literally just met, had sacrificed himself for all of them without a thought, and it was all down to Nick. He’d been an idiot. No, more than that—a fucking idiot. Sure, at first all this had been like this weird trip. And he’d kind of gotten into it. He’d been loving the way he and Brendan had egged each other into transmutations—not to mention those two crazy bouts of totally public orgasms, one after another. Fuck, he was still feeling the glow from blowing his lid like that, with Brendan close against him and people to see them do it. He never would have guessed that about himself. Who the fuck was he? And his recklessness and self-indulgence had snared all of these people into something that, from what Calvin had said, had been a trap meant for Nick alone. Sure, Noah had intended it to spread out from him like a virus, but… Nick shouldn’t have let that happen. And now all these people, even a stranger like Ethan, were paying for his weakness.

He ran his right hands over Ethan’s now ridiculously baggy navy-blue choir shirt. Underneath it, to his relief, he could feel Ethan was still strong and muscular, at least compared to the skinny paragon of ordinariness that Nick himself had been only that morning, but he looked almost like a different person from the not-as-thick neck all the way down to the long but much more mundane legs sticking out of two-sizes-too-large cargo shorts. Only Ethan’s impressive height and his fat, blunt dicks, now subsided to half hardness and still looking like massive clubs underneath the coarse, heavy fabric of his shorts, recalled anything of the size Ethan had had before.

Brendan knelt next to them, and he seemed as worried about Nick as he was about Ethan. When Nick looked up at him there was a little notch between his brows, as if he sensed some of what Nick was thinking, and maybe wanted to share some of the guilt with him. Brendan caressed Nick’s back and shoulders with his left hands and used one of his rights to hold Ethan’s hand.

Nick carried on stroking Ethan’s firm but no long enormous chest and his tight, brick-hard abs through the too-big shirt. After a moment Ethan opened his eyes and smiled at him. They were pretty eyes, Nick thought, green with little flecks of gold.

“I’m sorry, Ethan,” Nick said, as soon as Ethan’s eyes met his. “You didn’t have to do that. You shouldn’t have had to—”

“I wanted to,” Ethan interrupted him, still smiling.

Kevin returned at that moment, bearing a bottle of water from the vending machines down the hall by the stairs. He knelt down by Ethan on his other side, alertly looking the half-prone man over for any signs of trouble. Shit, Nick thought, everyone was thinking more clearly that he was.

Ethan protested he was okay as Nick helped him sit up against Nick’s chest, all four of Nick’s arms wrapped comforting around Ethan’s long torso. He caught Brendan glancing at the way Nick was cradling Ethan, who was still objecting that he was fine, but before he could sort out something to say Brendan took the bottle from Kevin, unscrewed the cap, and lifted it gently to Ethan’s lips.

Ethan made a little sound in the back of his throat. He genially took it away from him with his free hand and drank on his own. “I’m fine,” he insisted, looking around at the others, all of whom were showing subtle signs of Ethan’s gift, with Henry’s slightly enhanced buffness being the most obvious as he was not wearing a shirt—though Nick was intensely aware that the seams on Brendan’s shirt had strained and ripped still further, beyond the damage the shirt had suffered already from a sudden twenty-pound level-up earlier that afternoon.

As he looked around him Nick noticed Ethan’s gaze seemed to skitter across Zack, moving on rapidly past him as if he couldn’t look quite at him. Nick understood—he’d been that way about Zack, too, like if you looked straight at him it would melt all your resolve. A motion down below caught Nick’s attention, and he checked Ethan’s baggy shirts in time to see massive cocks swelling rapidly back to full, aching erection under the coarse fabric. Nick wished he hadn’t seen that—his own rigid cocks were already enjoying the feel of Ethan’s body pressed against them a little too much, and did not need any further encouragement.

Calvin was stroking his own pert, round, meatier-than-before pecs through his Captain America tee shirt. Its dampness at the bottom reminded Nick of just how much Calvin was packing down there—and also of the very relevant fact that Calvin had been transmuted before. At the source, so to speak, as a part of Noah’s shadowy organization. Calvin’s other arms were wrapped tightly around Henry and Zack—the three of them were apparently inseparable now. “You sure you’re okay?” Calvin asked Ethan nervously.

Ethan rolled his eyes. “Where’s the phone?” he asked.

Calvin nodded with his head toward the other corner at the front of the room. “I chucked it over there,” he said. “It has a proximity field. Three feet. We should be safe.” They all eyed it from across the room. It was like it was a guard dog that remained quiescent as long as you stayed away, but would start snarling and biting as soon as you got close.

“But we can’t just walk out and leave it there,” Brendan said. “It’ll just get someone else.”

“And the moment we get near it again—bam,” Nick said hopelessly.

Ethan eyed the device they’d cast away pensively. “Can the app be uninstalled?”

Calvin shook his head firmly. “Only one of the tech guys from the Cataract can do that. I snuck Chaz down here to do the uninstall on your laptop, but he was supposed to have texted me the all-clear already, and so far I haven’t heard anything. That’s not good.”

“Wait—what do you mean, that’s not good?” Nick asked. Ethan settled against him, and his dicks flexed hard against Ethan’s back. He was drawn to Ethan, though in a latent, shared-energy kind of way—not at all the passion he felt for Brendan. Still, it felt good to hold Ethan, at least for now. Maybe the guilt was part of that, he realized. Nick’s arms were still and unmoving where they clasped Ethan close to him, but his fingers were stroking gently against the dense muscles of Ethan’s chest and abs. Touching Ethan seemed natural—they were connected in some way that he did not understand, though the connection was not just between the two of them. He could feel it, faintly, radiating outward from Ethan to all them as they stood or knelt around the man who, though still tall and reasonably built (though now looking much longer and lankier than before), most likely would at least no longer have to shoulder the nickname “Mastodon”.

Calvin bit his lip, clearly worried about his friend. “If Chaz couldn’t do the uninstall, it’s because his IT authorization was yanked as soon his supervisor at the Cataract saw he’d logged into an a machine he wasn’t supposed to be working on.” It sounded to Nick like Calvin had worried about the likelihood of this prospect from the beginning, and that this Chaz person had been more optimistic. Calvin went on, “If you try to uninstall without authorization—well, let’s just say there are these things call punitive transmutes.”

“Shit,” Henry said.

“We need to destroy it,” Zack said in a flat, soft voice that carried in the silence that followed Calvin’s announcement and Henry’s little outburst. It was the first time Nick had heard his roommate speak to a room, or really to anyone from more than an inch away, wrapped in his arms. Zack looked at Nick. “Sorry, Nick, but your phone will have to die for the greater good,” he added solemnly, though the corners of his mouth were twitching.

“Uh, I can get a new phone,” Nick assured him. “Actually, after this I might just steer clear of electronics altogether.”

“You going to go back to tin cans and string?” Brendan teased. “Oh, wait—my dad has one of those old typewriters, with a ribbon and everything. Should I ask him if he’ll lend it to you?”

Nick arched an eyebrow at Brendan, who was full-on grinning now. “You laugh,” Nick said. “Trusting computers after this, I don’t know.”

“We’ll just have to take care of Noah,” Ethan said.

Calvin drew in a breath, and the rest of them stilled, as if Ethan had announced they were going to war. Maybe he had, Nick thought.

Ethan sat up straight, Nick letting him go reluctantly. He shifted around slightly so that Brendan and Nick were at his left rather than behind him, the whole group in a rough circle despite being half sitting and half standing. He was looking recovered—his color was normal, and the only thing strange about how he looked was his 3XL clothes on an XL body.

Ethan caught the nervous reaction to his pronouncement and pursed his lips. “I just mean,” Ethan said, “that we need to find a way to convince him to stop. I know that’s going to be, well, a big deal to accomplish, but it’s what we have to do.”

Henry looked at Zack worriedly. Calvin seemed about to speak, though he seemed like he wasn’t sure what he was going to say. Ethan continued. “Priorities. First, we need to kill with that thing,” he said, nodding with his chin toward the cast-aside phone across the room. “Then, we need to go check on the laptop, and kill that too if something happened to this Chaz guy and he couldn’t complete the uninstall.” Calvin looked anxious, but Nick nodded slowly, realizing that having a plan helped, assuaging the cauldron of anguish he’d been stewing before.

“And then…” Ethan went on, but Nick finished it for him.

“Then,” he said, “we go to Noah. Noah… and Josh,” he added.

Nick had been paying so much attention to Ethan and to Brendan, a warm presence at his side, he hadn’t really registered that Kevin uncharacteristically hadn’t been participating in all this planning. He was still kneeling on the other side of where Ethen had been lying against Nick, but his eyes were closed and he seemed to be wrapped up in some kind of erotic dream. His cocks were flexing in his pants and his cheeks were flushed. “Kevin?” Nick asked. He didn’t respond.

“He’s doing it again,” Brendan said unexpectedly. Nick looked at him. “Remember before, back in the plaza? He was having this, like, intense vision.”

“Yeah,” Nick said slowly. Brendan seemed fascinated by this apparently new behavior, and Nick guessed he counted it as part of all the other strange things that had been happening to them. Nick had thought Kevin had just been having a really vivid X-rated daydream before, but now… now he wasn’t so sure.

He regarded Kevin closely. He really did seem to be having a trance, or a vision, or some kind of connection—one that was very intensely erotic, if nothing else. Nick tried to understand what might have happened. It couldn’t be a transmute, not unless there was one that had happened without any of them ever seeing the screen. But all the transmutes so far had been physical changes. Was this something else—different, but linked in some way? Had these changes awoken something latent in Kevin, some kind of connection to whatever energies Noah was drawing on?

Whatever it was, maybe Kevin should be regrounded in reality before things got out of hand. Nick put a hand on Kevin’s shoulder. Kevin instantly let out a soft moan, as if he were in the midst of a protracted erotic stimulation and Nick’s touch had intensified it. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Nick said. He grabbed Kevin by both shoulders and both upper arms and shook him lightly. “Kevin, dude, come back to us,” he said, trying to make it sound like a joke, as if he were addressing a medium who’d fallen into a trance. Fuck, this was weird. He told himself he longed for the days when his biggest worry was the dining hall closing early, but he knew better.

Kevin’s eyes flipped open. His pupils were a little dilated, swallowing most of the brown. Nick let his hands drop to his sides. “Red hair,” Kevin said. He was looking at Nick but was not quite focusing on him. “Tall. Skinny. Scruffy beard. Oh—fuck, it’s so hard,” he said, though whether he meant himself or the guy he’d been dreaming about Nick wasn’t sure. Then the description rang a bell.

“Wait, do you mean the guy from the computer kiosk?” Nick said, trying to peer into Kevin’s eyes in a bid to get the young swimmer to resurface all the way. “Fuck, what was his name?” Nick asked himself aloud. “That girl told me. It was something like—”

“Larry,” Calvin put in. “I think he means Larry.”

“Larry, right,” Nick agreed. This was the guy he’d called Rusty McBeanpole in his head, back when the world was simpler. He’d been all in Nick’s face about him being Josh’s ex, too, like he deserved whatever he got for breaking up with Josh. He glanced at Brendan, cocking his head toward Kevin questioningly. Brendan shrugged, as if to say, I dunno, just go with it.

“Larry,” Kevin repeated, dazed. His eyes were closed again. He was still connected to whatever vision he was having, and he seemed to be seeing something that was having a powerful effect on him. “Unh, he’s making out with… nnn, so hot…” he narrated brokenly.

“Who’s he making out with, Kev?” Brendan coached, that teasing note back in his voice.

Kev didn’t answer for a second, then sudden burst out, “Himself. Himselves… oooooh, god, so hot…” Then, abruptly, Kevin’s vision seemed to change. “No, wait,” he said, eyes still closed. “He’s playing basketball. With himself and… with himself and…”

“And?” Brendan goaded.

“…And with this other guy… tall, built… Arab dude… wicked smile. Oh, god…”

“Sounds like the hottest game of basketball ever,” Ethan observed drily.

Kevin’s eyes opened again, more slowly this time. He blinked rapidly and looked around, noticing everyone was gaping at him. “Wha-at?” he asked.

“Welcome back, big guy,” Brendan said with a big grin. “Did you have a nice trip?”

Kevin blushed scarlet. He looked down, and Nick guessed he was probably also double-checking to make sure his raging boners hadn’t made a ridiculous mass in his pants while he experiencing his carnal, triple-X hallucination. “I think we need to find that guy,” Kevin muttered. “It feels like we need him. The redhead, I mean.”

“We need him, huh?” Brendan said, still grinning. Nick swatted him one on the arm. “What?” Brendan asked him innocently.

“He might be right,” Calvin put in. “Larry could be useful. He’s a lot higher up in the food chain than I am, and there were rumors he wanted more testing before a roll-out like this. But it sounds like… well, I don’t know him really, but I do know that there weren’t three of him before.” He frowned. “Maybe they got to him, and Chaz.” Calvin sounded worried. He might not know this Larry very well, but Nick got the impression that he and Chaz were good friends.

“One thing at a time,” Nick said. He reiterated Ethan’s plan. He felt the hint of shared power that connected them. It seemed doable, if they all worked together. “Stage one: we deal with the phone. Stage two: we deal with the laptop. Stage three: we deal with Noah. We’ll find Larry along the way if we can, and Chaz too.”

Kevin nodded, belatedly buying into the discussion he’d missed out on while he was having his little vision. “How should we destroy the phone?” he asked. He was flushed still, but otherwise seemed back to normal.

Instinctively Nick looked at Ethan, who was staring thoughtfully at the water bottle in his hand. “Where’s the nearest bathroom?” he asked.

 

Part 13

The closest men’s room, it turned out, was at the other end of the floor they were on, and they puzzled a bit over how to get the phone down there without triggering a proximity transmute en route. It wasn’t like they had a three-foot-long pair of tongs or anything. Ethan and the others climbed to his feet as they debated. He was half expecting he would feel dizzy with all the changes and so much of his body gone, but it turned out he felt vibrant in a way he didn’t even recognize, like shedding all that muscle weight had somehow liberated him and made him a new man. On the other hand, the monster fourteen-inch clubs he was carrying between his legs felt bigger and heavier than ever on his new, well-muscled but svelter frame, and his pent-up arousal was still dangerously close to the surface, especially surrounded by these six jacked-up, uber-alluring men to whom he felt streaming bonds of primal connection, more compelling then ever now that he was almost literally a part of them.

There weren’t any solutions about the phone. Ethan was just about to volunteer to just carry the damn phone to the toilets and deal with whatever the app threw at him in the time it took to run the length of the building, when Henry suddenly had a brainwave. “Ethan! The custodial closet by the stairs!” he said.

Ethan’s brows furrowed. He and Henry both came here for choir, but Henry knew the building a little better than him. He had a vague recollection of the closet he meant. The door never latched and was usually ajar a few inches, revealing the interior for all passers-by to see. Shelves of cleansers, buckets, mops, brooms…

Comprehension dawned, and he grinned. “Brilliant,” he said.

Henry smiled. “I’ll be right back,” he said. He shared a quick kiss with Zack, then another with Calvin, before disappearing out the door, obviously glad to be useful.

Nick moved closer to Brendan and wrapped a pair of muscle-thick arms around his thick shoulders and more arms around the athlete’s tight, narrow waist. Brendan, however, was looking askance at Ethan, as if trying to figure out the new creature that had barreled into their private enclosure. Nick had to lift a hand and gently turn Brendan’s chin to look up at him, and Brendan smiled at last. It was a brilliant smile when it came, and Nick basked happily in it. He bent for a gentle kiss, his long black hair falling forward and partly obscuring his handsome face, and Brendan closed his eyes and opened for him. Their kiss slowly deepened, and the two men seemed to immerse themselves in each other as Brendan followed suit and wrapped all his arms around his giant Latin boyfriend.

Nearby, Kevin watched them for a moment with a sober expression, then turned away.

Ethan decided he needed to steer clear of all that drama. He’d only known them for less than an hour, but he’d already pegged Nick as a softie and Brendan as fiercely protective of anything he saw as his own. That probably included Kevin, Ethan thought, but maybe not in the way Kevin had wanted.

Ethan sighed and turned his back on the three of them—only to find Zack right there, bare inches away from him. Instantly, every ounce of his built-up arousal was right there, at the surface, ready to blow at the slightest stimulation. He stared into those bright hazel eyes and he had to touch him, had to kiss him… he didn’t know if he could hold back, his willpower was melting under his intoxicating gaze…

“I have a question for you,” Zack said quietly, moving closer still. His thin, quiet voice was a little playful, like he’d clued into the effect he was having on the guys around him and just accepted it as part of what happened when he needed to talk with someone. This close he was eerily, almost supernaturally beautiful. It was as if his beauty was a contact high, wafting off of him in waves and pouring into Ethan’s brain and flesh and balls like the warmth of sunlight. Ethan’s cocks jumped in his loose, too-big cargo shorts. His pulse raced, and he seemed barely able to catch a breath.

“Y-yeah?” Ethan breathed. He’d sort of sensed that Zack smelled nice, like spices you used for baking sweet things, but now he was really aware of it, and it was driving him mad.

“I feel a link with you,” Zack said. “Why is that?” He sounded perplexed, but mainly curious. Maybe he was pretty blasé about how badly everybody seemed to want him, about having two boyfriends, about his friends becoming gorgeous muscle gods, but whatever he was experiencing with Ethan must have been different enough that he wanted to try to figure it out.

Ethan shook his head. He didn’t understand it either, not really. “I feel it with you, too,” Ethan said. “All of you. From the moment I came down here. My arousal seemed to mix with your… your…” Unable to bear it any more he dove in for a fierce and hungry kiss. His hands grasped Zack’s long, bulging torso, all four hands roaming Zack’s lats, his back, his shoulder blades, his lower back…

Suddenly he broke the kiss. “I’m sorry,” he said urgently. His resistance to kissing Zack, to touch him, had gone up in flames, and he knew he was milliseconds from blowing every particle of the astronomical arousal he’d compounded for an entire week, and magnified in the last hour as if it had been another month without release.

Zack smiled and pulled him into another kiss with one hand while, with the other, deftly releasing the waistband button that was, it turned out, all that was keeping his old-size cargo shorts from puddling around his boots. Warm air curled around his desperate cocks, and then… a hot mouth, and… another hot mouth…

Ethan cried out into Zack’s mouth, but Zack’s commanding kiss steadied him for the moment, though he was literally on the brink. His entire body was skittering with sparks of intense, unimaginable pleasure. He tried to figure out who was licking and sucking his enormous cocks, his addled brain trying to figure out if Zack could be doing it even as he kissed him; but he was able to steal a quick glimpse down to see his slightly curved cocks being ministered to by Calvin (who’d pulled his shirt off, anticipating an eruption of his own from the six amazing cocks his had shoving up out of his pants) and, to his surprise, Kevin, who’s freed his two girthy eight-inch pricks and was stroking them together with one hand as he used the other to supplement the spine-tingling things he was doing with his mouth.

Oh, oh, oh… Ethan couldn’t even think. Three guys. Kissing him, sucking his cocks, bringing him to an orgasm he’d been stoking it seemed like forever. He’d almost gone over the edge a million times this afternoon, but weirdly enough the thing that sent him over now, the stimulation that sent him over after all his iron resolve, was a totally unexpected image. He realized that one of his own right hands was tweaking his super-sensitive nipple through his shirt, and, in his euphoric, close-to-release delirium he imagined the shirt gone, melted away, and Calvin and Kevin were sucking and licking his nips and expertly fellating his tremendous tree-trunk cocks. Some seed of what Kevin had said about that redheaded basketball dude, how Calvin had said there were three of him, had snuck into Ethan’s fantasies, and now it was that idea that filled him—Calvin and Kevin drawing impossible pleasure out of his cocks and his nips, while Zack kissed him deeply, passionately, and with unexpected aggression. Ethan moaned again into Zack’s mouth. It was happening. It was happening now. White-hot lightning crackled through his body, and even with his eyes closed his vision filled with white like an exploding sun. He spasmed, and again, and suddenly he was cumming hard, impossibly hard, and the world seemed to expand outward around him, spreading away from him like a big bang. He shot torrent after torrent of scalding seed, his body producing orgasm after orgasm, again and again. It was like a chain reaction, each new orgasm spawning an entirely new and total release.

At some level he was aware of Zack and Calvin and Kevin, all ministering to him, working his sensual, hyper-sensitive body, bringing him pleasure through the intense bonds he felt with them, even as his world-exploding pleasure fed back on them like tsunami after tsunami and brought them to their own shuddering, super-intense nonstop climaxes. At the same time, it also felt like it was just him and the three bonds, pulsing with jubilant release, that connected to them into the ineffable aether to wherever they were. And the other bonds were there too, all of the sensual connections he had newly created, his senses meshed with theirs. They were all reverberating with Ethan’s monumental month’s worth of mega-intense orgasm, while he drifted, soaring weightless, bodyless, in an endless pure white universe of his own.

He came to for a second time cradled in someone’s arms, though this time it was Zack who was holding him, and he was laughing softly, as if the magnitude of Ethan’s release, and maybe all the jizz that went with in, compounded by his own and Calvin’s and Kevin’s, was so unbelievable it was actually funny. Ethan felt himself laughing, too.

“Holy shit,” Calvin shouted from where he lay, collapsed and sweating and covered in cum a few inches from where Ethan lay against Zack. Calvin’s six mighty cocks looked spent, though they didn’t look diminished to more than half-chubbed size, and Calvin’s naked, well-built upper body looked like a fire-hose of human spunk had been let loose on him. Just beyond him Kevin was lying propped up on his elbows, looking just as doused in jizz, probably like Calvin’s a mix of his own and maybe everything of Ethan’s that they hadn’t been able to handle after the first mouthful. Ethan smiled at them, chuckling with leftover euphoria that felt a little like giddy hysterics. “You guys are a mess,” Ethan said.

“No shit,” Kevin said. “I guess it’s been a while?”

Ethan felt absurdly proud at what he had been able to accomplish, especially as it was written all over his partners in cooling, slippery-sticky cream. “I have a knack for… saving it up,” he said.

“Holy shit,” Calvin said again. Ethan laughed. He remembered the others and looked over his shoulder to see Nick and Brendan gaping at them, their own cheeks red with obvious arousal at what they’d watched, though Nick had hinted that he and Brendan hadn’t been able to control themselves back in the campus coffee shop, and Ethan had his suspicions that wasn’t the only time this afternoon they’d blown their loads together. That he’d pushed them close again seemed pretty hilarious. Then a moment later Henry walked in with a push broom, all excited about having solved half of their phone problem, only to find Ethan and the other three collapsed on the ground, spent, and covered in jizz… and the astonished look on his face was so priceless that Ethan started laughing all over again.

Eventually they all got to their feet, and Ethan finally pulled off his now oversized shirt and used it to mop up the cum from his own torso and Calvin’s and Kevin’s as well. (Zack had come too, but had cleverly managed to get all his cum directed at Ethan while avoiding Ethan’s own eruptions.) He paused to admire his new torso: hard-packed but not-too-big muscle, delineated by a thin swath of chest hair and the line of a treasure trail diving through his chiseled abs and right to his half-hard throat-choker cocks. Instead of the bodybuilder or gonzo gym-crazy football jock he was used to being mistaken for, he looked like someone who worked hard at keeping himself fit. Ethan loved it.

As Calvin, Henry, and Zack re-coalesced, Kevin moved closer and joined Ethan in giving his new, naked body the once-over. “Pretty nice,” he said, running his fingers through the sparse chest hair, and Ethan was pretty sure he meant it for all it was delivered with a smirk.

Ethan admired Kevin’s tight, very defined (and ten pounds heavier) perfect swimmer’s body in turn. “Back atcha,” he said.

Kevin tsked. “I’m not as—”

“I mean it,” Ethan said, offering him a crooked smile. Kevin looked up and met his eyes in surprise, and Ethan saw gratitude there, and he felt it across their connection, too. Impulsively, he bent and gave Kevin a kiss, and Kevin returned it, not rabidly, but with a return of powerful mutual appreciation.

“Okay,” Nick said, and they all turned toward him. “Now that all our tension is released,” he said, and there was a snort of laughter at that from somewhere behind Ethan, “let’s, uh, let’s do the thing, okay?”

“Yeah,” Henry said, from where he and Calvin and Zack were holding each other. “I kinda still have an algorithm design project to finish. And Zack has that English paper to write,” he added.

Nick nodded. “Let’s do this and get back to real life.” He looked around at the strange assembly of multicocked, mostly four-armed muscle hunks. “Or… as near a close approximation as we can manage,” he added wryly.

For lack of anything else, Ethan pulled on his damp cargo shorts, but he stuffed the cum-soaked choir shirt in the garbage bin by the door. He’d just have to go shirtless, like Henry, though he had to admit there was something to be said for the straining-fabric look that Nick and Brendan were both sporting. But Ethan’s body was closer to Henry’s now anyway, if significantly taller, and Ethan was looking forward to showing it off.

Henry took charge of the broom, turning it over so that he would be pushing with the back of the wooden broom head instead of the stiff bristles. “Remember your right triangles,” Ethan said. Henry nodded, catching his meaning. “Keep the broom low and make sure you stay three feet back.”

With some deft broom handling, Henry managed to nudge the phone out of the corner. Kevin ran ahead and propped the doors open both here in the choir room, and at the other end of the floor at the bathroom, then ran back and joined the others well behind Henry, giving him room to maneuver. They got the phone to the bathroom almost without incident—there was one heart-stopping moment where Henry pushed the broom over the phone instead of shoving the broom forward, Henry’s momentum almost carrying right onto the phone itself, but he pulled himself back at the last moment, and the screen didn’t even flicker.

In the end, though, once Henry got the phone across the tiled floor of the bathroom to the base of the handicapped stall toilet, there was simply no way to use the broom to grab the phone and drop it into the standing water in the commode. It was obvious what would have to happen next.

“I’ll do it,” Ethan said. He started to move forward, but Nick moved in front of him and placed a hand on his bare chest.

“No,” Nick said. “It’s time I took responsibility for all this.”

“Nick, it’s not—” Brendan started to object, but Nick overrode him.

“It’s my phone,” Nick said. “And it’s my ex that started all of this. None of you should ever have been involved.”

“We are, though,” Ethan said. “Whatever happened before, we’re all in this together, now.”

Nick seemed about to object, but he checked himself, and Ethan knew that Nick was feeling the pulsing connection Ethan had somehow made between them out of the stuff of his own built-up arousal intertwining with theirs—only it was still there, even after his magnificent dam-busting release. They were all together, and that wasn’t going to change.

Nick nodded. “I know,” he said. “I get that. But I’m still going to do this.”

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Nick stood alone in the wide handicapped stall, back against the closed stall door. He brushed his hair behind his ears. It was getting pretty long lately. Maybe he should cut it.

He eyed the phone warily where it lay next to the white porcelain base of the toilet. He should just do it. After all, he’d liked most of what the app had done to him, right? Sure, he was constantly horny and boned most of the time, and he was a giant who’d have to duck through doors and have people wanting to stare at his muscles and touch him and all that, and he’d never be able to hide these dicks again, but all things considered his body was fucking amazing, and he was pretty sure Brendan was already addicted to how awesome Nick’s new physique was. And vice versa, for that matter. Just thinking of Brendan’s gorgeous, sculpted muscles made his cocks twitch. And Brendan’s sweet, dazzling smile. And the way his eyes gleamed with mischief, and …

Okay. Just do this. Nick strode forward.

As soon as he came in range the screen lit up with a Transmute notification. Nick didn’t even read it. He grabbed the phone and dropped it into the water. There was plenty of water standing in the bowl for it to be immersed completely.

Instantly the Transmute shifted from the normal “would you rather” notification to an angry red alarm screen. “EMERGENCY PUNITIVE TRANSMUTATION!” the screen raged, and under it a rapid “1”, then “0”.

Suddenly Nick’s beloved eggplant polo, the one that showed off his heavy pecs so nicely while mostly hiding his double erections (not so much the quadruple ones he now had), ripped apart as Nick’s shoulders, neck and head jumped up out of his torso, leaving his pecs and double set of arms behind as a whole new set of pecs and arms shoved straight up out of his body. Nick gasped, swaying with the unexpected and instant increase in mass and height. He blinked and stared down at the phone, now significantly further away, in time to see the screen clear to black. He thought for a wild moment the phone must have died from water damage at last, but it was only clear a second before the red alarm screen appeared again. “EMERGENCY PUNITIVE TRANSMUTATION!” it raved again, and once more under it a rapid “1” appeared, then “0”.

Nick’s torso shot up again, his stacked monster pecs and shoulders left behind as a third layer of massive pecs were practically hurled out of Nick’s torso—then a fourth row surged up, smacking Nick’s head against the hard panels of the bathroom’s suspended ceiling.

“Holy shit!” someone shouted from where the rest of the guys were gathered outside the stall.

“Nick!” someone else cried out. “Oh god, Nick!”

Nick glared down at the toilet, now far away below him. The phone cleared once more, then Nick’s heart flipped as the red screen appeared for a third time. Come on, Nick though furiously. Die, you fucker, die! The countdown began, but even as the “1” started to blink into a “0” the screen spazzed, freezing in a shuddered, distorted hodgepodge of the horrific red window it had just been displaying. Then the screen went all gray before finally collapsing to a cold, dead solid black.

Nick realized he was panting. He tried to regulate his breaths. Fuck. Punitive transmutations. Fuck, fuck, fuck. He looked down, trying to get a grip what had happened to him. He had four solid sets of massive, round, oversized pecs, stacked tight on top of each other, and four sets of brawny shoulders each carrying his normal complement of four strong, thickly muscled arms. It felt… fuck, it felt amazing. All of his transformations so far had given him pleasure, but this triple helping of freak-making “emergency punitive” transmutations were designed to make him way beyond subtle changes, hurling him completely beyond human and with enough strength, vitality, and sensual thrill for him to intrinsically love everything about it. In destroying the phone and the app with it, Nick had managed to give Noah everything he wanted, and Nick almost didn’t care.

Looking past his superfluity of pecs, Nick had another surprise. In the shock of shooting upward with sudden eruptions of punitive pecs, Nick hadn’t even noticed his abs multiplying each time too. He now had three new rows of well-defined abs to match his three new sets of pectorals. And, inevitably, below that he’d gained three more of his massive, 12-by-8-inch cocks. Actually, given the extent of his super-extended torso they actually looked a little small in comparison, but they were no less violently erect and desperate for immediate action than they’d been, and a wave of insistent, demanding horniness seethed through him and sank into every inch of flesh and bone, like it would never, ever go away.

“Nick?” came a voice from outside—Brendan. He shook his head, a little amazed at the things that had happened to him because his old computer had given up the ghost. He opened the stall door and stepped out into the main area of the bathroom, stooping a little to make sure his head didn’t rub against the ceiling tiles. His hair brushed back and forth the against his bulging traps—it must have gotten even longer, along with everything else.

“Well, that’s stage one taken care of,” he announced to the group, as if everything had gone exactly to plan. Which, Nick supposed, it had. After all, the goal was to destroy the phone, and they’d known it was almost certain whoever did it would get whacked. Compared to being turned into an armadillo, Nick was pretty damn happy with his hugely muscled, extra-hung, crazily transmuted multibod.

The others stared at him in astonishment that seemed to verge on disbelief. No one had expected anything on this scale, Nick included. Ethan gulped and said, “You okay, man?”

Nick smiled. “Never felt better,” he said, and that, at least, was the truth.

Brendan was gazing up at him with an expression of absolute awe. “You so fucking beautiful,” he said, almost reverently. “Can I—can I touch you?”

Nick grinned at him. “You better!”

With four shaking hands, Brendan explored Nick’s extended torso, sliding them up first the eleven bumpy, carved rows of Nick’s long abdomen, then further, up Nick’s stacked chest. Nick suddenly lost patience. With many hands he pulled at Brendan’s shirt, already split at the seams, until it was torn off him in shreds, exposing his lover’s magnificently muscled torso; then he grabbed Brendan and hauled him up against his chest, clasping him tight in a dozen arms and kissing him with a fierce and hungry passion that communication every complex layer of lust, passion, and aching love that was coursing between them. Brendan was so overcome with off-the-charts arousal at this display of strength and need that he started cumming almost immediately, shooting gout after got of hot spend all over Nick’s luscious pecs, and Nick was cumming in raw sympathy, their bodies responded to each other’s cravings even as they kissed like lovers separated until this moment by a hundred leagues and a thousand lifetimes.

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Josh Tracey liked to order pizza on the nights he looked reasonably normal, and by reasonably normal he meant his four-armed, three-legged form, the body he had by default when Noah wasn’t indulging in something a little more outré for him. The good-looking Jamaican pizza guy from Granite Pizza (which fortunately did not live up to its name) seemed used to him looking like this, just as Noah had said he would, and Josh got the impression that this form had acquired a kind of resonance that made it seem unexceptional somehow, though he knew the weirder things that happened to his body would be more likely to provoke comment.

Tonight Noah was working late, and so Josh was free to Netflix and chill all by his lonesome. He had a plan, though. He’d been waiting for a night where things were utterly routine between them and Noah was distracted in the labs, and Josh figured tonight was the night.

Everything he’d learned about Noah’s plans for Nick had him worried, both for Nick’s sake and for Noah’s plans to make him a kind of patient zero for transmutations. Fortunately, Noah was so enamored of the idea of transmutations that it never occurred to him that Josh, the beneficiary of Noah’s most lavish transmutational gifts, would ever be anything but a hundred and ten percent on board with the idea of other people enjoying gifts like he had; and the truth was Josh did like Noah’s gifts, and was pretty damn conflicted about Noah, Nick, his own life, and pretty much everything else. Still, the instinct to try to head off something huge and questionable had been nagging at him. He hadn’t gotten much out of Noah, and couldn’t without tripping Noah’s alertness to his doubts; but Lucas and Wei in the secondary lab were both kind of smitten with Josh, and he’d found ways to engage them in conversation without arousing Noah’s suspicions. He had most of the story, and last week he’d uncovered the last piece of information he needed to try to do something about it.

The doorbell for the private residence rang. Josh jumped up, heart thumping. Just before opening the door he impulsively pulled off his four-armed henley and cast it aside, leaving him in just his three-legged jeans and bare feet. He opened the door and smiled at the delivery guy, who stood on Josh’s porch in his red store windbreaker with wide eyes and an insulated pizza sleeve.

Jimmy seemed unable to stop himself checking Josh out, but he looked down quickly at the order slip on top of the pizza sleeve, his legs shifting as if he really wanted to adjust something down there. “How you doing, Mr. Tracey?” he asked.

“Josh, please,” Josh responded. “How are you doing, Jimmy?”

“Oh, I’m very good,” Jimmy said. He opened the sleeve and pulled out the pizza box, a stack of paper plates and napkins tied to it with thin string. Josh took it easily with two hands, while handing a wad of money to Jimmy.

As Josh set the pizza aside on the hallway table, Jimmy said in a troubled voice, “Ah, Mr. Tracey, there’s an extra fifty dollars in here. Did you… mean to give that to me?”

“I was hoping you could do me a favor,” Josh said. He handed Jimmy an envelope from the back pocket of his three-legged jeans. “I was hoping you could deliver this as soon as you get the chance.”

Jimmy took the envelope doubtfully and read the handwritten address, no doubt noticing the lack of return address. “Fifty bucks… to deliver a letter? What, does this ‘Jeremiah Swift’ not have email?”

Josh smiled. “He might,” he admitted gamely. “But all I was able to get for him was that address, and I only just learned that in the last week. The thing is,” he went on, as Jimmy continued to frown at the envelope, obviously aware he was missing something, “I need this to get to Jeremiah Swift without anyone else hearing about it. At all. Do you think you can do that?”

Jimmy gave him a shrewd look. “This is about something going on in Cataract,” he said. Noah Toller’s small tech manufacturer was widely rumored in town to have all kinds of secret agendas. Most of the talk was bored people gossiping about intriguing outsiders, but the general sense that Toller was hiding something was absolutely spot on. Not that they had even noticed most of the young men in the town becoming a little taller, a little cuter, a little buffer and hornier, and a little more hung. Like Jimmy, here, for example; but then, the townfolk weren’t supposed to notice things like that, nor were the young men.

Josh didn’t answer him directly. Instead he said, “This needs to get to this Swift character without anyone knowing. Not your boss, not your boyfriend, not Mr. Toller—nobody.”

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” Jimmy said quickly, though he immediately realized how transparent he was being and rolled his own eyes at himself. “I mean… I’ll be glad to help,” he added, abashed and serious.

Josh smiled as charmingly as he could. “I appreciate it,” he said. “I’ll look forward to hearing back from you the next time I order a double pepperoni.”

Jimmy smiled winsomely, his eyes flicking down to Josh’s chest and abs and back up his arms before meeting his gaze again. “You can count on me,” he said. As if to deliberately stop himself from scoping out his customer like a hormonal teenager, Jimmy turned away awkwardly and hurried down the walk to his car. A moment later he was gone with a wave and a smile, and Josh closed the door. He turned and leaned his back against it, enjoying the coolness against his bare back.

“Hang in there, Nikolaj,” he muttered. He shrugged. “I shot an arrow into the air. Where it falls… who the fuck knows.” He took his pizza into the living room, wondering what strange futures lay in store for himself, for his strange witch of a lover, and for the ex, too wherever he was, with the target on his back that Josh regretted having put there.

 

Part 14

Kevin stood in a little knot with the others near the bathroom door, feeling flushed, conflicted, and deeply aroused. His newly huge, newly doubled cocks twitched in aching fascination as he took in the sight of his longtime crush literally swept off his feet by the Puerto Rican multigod he seemed to have fallen hard for. His heart told him to look away, and yet… it had been all he could do not to stare at Brendan even before he’d suddenly gained twenty—no, thirty, now—pounds of thick, exquisite muscle. He had all those arms he couldn’t help but imagine wrapped around his own hard, defined body, and now Kevin felt almost incapable of tearing his eyes away even while Brendan and this guy Nick seemed to drive each other crazy with their undeniable passion for each other.

His eyes roved Brendan’s beautifully wide shoulders—distractingly fine to start with, before evolving to even greater eye-catching allure. They drifted down to that broad, sweet back Kevin had given many a supposedly four-handed platonic massage after meets, and not a few waking daydreams of being splattered with Kevin’s hot, spraying spunk. That back had been wrapped in a tight, seam-popped school tee all day, but its lovely, lightly tanned expanse was now fully exposed to the world thanks to Nick literally ripping that increasingly too-small shirt away and tossing it fiercely aside as if such barriers were unacceptable between them. Now the long, lickable expanse was currently being mauled and caressed by literally a dozen slightly darker, amber-gold hands and arms, faintly dusted with fine, dark hair below the elbows, their muscles shifting and bulging as Nick gripped and held his smaller muscle-hunk lover against him.

Below that, Kevin’s gaze fell to a firm, round ass that Kevin had always been certain was the epitome of gluteal perfection even before it had caught its fair share of the thirty pounds of muscular enhancement Brendan had gained in a single day. Brendan’s long, powerful legs dangled off the ground, packed into jeans now verging on being too tight and exposing a bit of ankle above his size-12 tennies, but somehow Brendan’s extra-perfect butt looked as amazing with the legs slack below it as it did when Brendan was pumping his ass hard in the pool or on the treadmill. Kevin wanted to touch that ass so badly, even despite the four big hands that were possessively cupping and stroking it right at that moment, that he actually felt an urge to step forward. He wanted to knock Nick’s many hands away, rip down those snug jeans and drag his tongue along that luscious, round muscle…

His balls shot an urgent warning through his entire body. If he kept up this level of fantasy his cocks were going to blow—again. God, when had he acquired bottomless nuts? He felt like he could cum all day, throwing nonstop jizz blasting all over his own face and chest and everyone else’s too. Arousal thrummed through him like an entire city’s electric current, vibrating his heavy balls, his eager dicks, his subtly improved muscles—fuck, every part of him was shimmering with need, not all of it his own.

He could feel Nick and Brendan’s building orgasm—it was seconds away—and the intensity of it was a part of him. It was breaking over him like wave after wave on a stormy beach. And he could feel others responding to it—fuck, he wasn’t alone. He’d actually forgotten Ethan, and Zack and Henry and Calvin, all standing here with him in this chilly basement bathroom. Their rough breathing was rebounding faintly against the dingy tile, all subjected to a shared stimulation like it was something that was happening to a single organism. A Transmute collective. They were all feeling the arousal grow too fast and too hard. Fuck, this build felt as crazily, stratospherically potent as Ethan’s long-repressed orgasm back in the music room. Maybe more! He knew in his gut that this time they were all going to blow a colossal, conjoined load the second Nick and Brendan did.

He’d managed to miss his shirt with most of the jizz he’d blown when Ethan came, but there was no chance now of not being covered in his own seed, and probably not just his own. Calvin, Ethan, and Henry were already shirtless, like Nick and Brendan, and Kevin was becoming almost self-conscious in this respect. Feeling flushed hot in his face and all the way down his torso, Kevin hastily grabbed a bunch of his black tee shirt behind his neck and hauled it swiftly over his head. He looked down at his buff, now even more textbook swimmer’s build torso with its ten pounds of new muscle. He wasn’t as built as Brendan, but he was pretty damn hot, hard, tight, and bumpy in all the right places. His eyes caught the heads of his thick cocks protruding past his cum-damp waistband, and he took in a breath.

It was coming. It was coming. His breathing turned ragged. He was going to cum—fuck, they were all going to cum. The tingling started in the base of Kevin’s spine, and he knew his whole-body eruption into climax was nanoseconds away. The couple before him seeming to stoke his blazing-hot blood to insane speed in his veins, and he shivered. His heart hurt a little that after all this time Brendan was finally bringing him to a earth-shattering release so intense it was going to be like he’d never blown a load in his life, and yet he could not delude himself Brendan was thinking of anyone but the man holding him tight in too many strong, loving arms.

Kevin had read a fair amount of philosophy in recent years. He’d picked up an elementary text once out of curiosity while he was still in high school and had found himself instantly fascinated by the conflicting welter of ideas. No two constructs were the same, and no two thinkers agreed completely, yet paradoxically the same ideas kept cropping up. Most philosophies revolved in some way around the dichotomy of animal needs and impulses, on the one hand, and rational choice, on the other. We can’t govern the lusts and desires we feel, but how we respond to them is the mark of our humanity. We are not our instincts, Kevin found himself thinking as he stared at Brendan. We are our choices.

Suddenly, Kevin realized he didn’t want to be looking at Brendan any more. He couldn’t shoot the massive, soul-deep double-load already built up in him and ready to burst open like a dynamited dam, not and watch Brendan giving himself and everything Kevin had lusted for to the multigod, Nick. In a sudden, jerky move he turned his back on them to face Ethan, standing close behind him and still staring hard and glassy-eyed at the spectacle of the sixteen-armed beautiful freak and the four-armed Adonis making love. Kevin’s hand shot up to grab the back of Ethan’s neck and he pulled the taller, formerly massive man down into a scorching kiss. It was a choice, something in him said, and a hope. Maybe exploring the pull he already felt toward this man, the connection between them, might nurture its importance to him in a way that would come to displace the old crush he’d worn for years like comfortable, worn-in shoes.

He felt the faint bristle of Ethan’s late-day stubble brush against his lips and chin, and impressed the rough sensation on his mind. Ethan, he told his roiling senses. This is Ethan. There was danger here, because he did not know this man, or if they were at all compatible, or if Ethan even liked him. It was a bit desperate. He knew that. But the heartbreak down the other road—fuck, that was certain and imminent. Almost grimly he pressed himself against Ethan, willing the man to respond the way he needed him to respond.

Ethan was startled, but only for a second, and quickly fell into the kiss, hungrily wrapping all his arms around Kevin as he did the same. They deepened the kiss together as Ethan ground his heat-throwing, iron-hard fourteen-inchers against Kevin’s sturdy, ever-ready eight-inch tools, their searching tongues intertwining. Both of them diverted a pair of grasping hands as one to each other’s asses as the massive multi-orgasm began to crash irresistibly through them. Oh god, oh god… Kevin’s orgasm seemed to double, triple, multiply exponentially in intensity as the shared climax tore through all of them. It crashed upon them, and Ethan and Kevin came together hard, shuddering in their tight embrace. He could feel the others cresting and erupting too, like being in the middle of a fireworks finale, but he gripped Ethan tight, and Ethan did the same as their bodies racked with delicious, shuddering, glimmering release.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

“You’re out of your mind,” Ethan said grumpily.

They were back in the music room. The last holdout, Zack, had reluctantly discarded his shirt, no doubt mentally conceding that its heavy saturation with his own copious seed and his two companion’s equally impressive releases would be icky and uncomfortable soon enough. Henry remembered having seen a battered but clean-looking towel in the custodial closet he’d retrieved the broom from, and with considerable effort (and many returns to the sink to rinse huge amounts of heavy jizz out the old towel and ready it for yet more spunk) they’d managed to get their sexy torsos and handsome faces all cleaned and scrubbed of the streaks and globs of hot, thick cum they’d shot all over themselves. It was a good collective cool-down effort, Kevin had thought, and the giggle Zack had let out as Calvin swabbed his tight abs with the warm, wet towel had stared them all grinning.

After that the seven of them filed back into the big rehearsal room. Ethan, who knew the building, had ducked up a back stairwell to find a soda vending machine while the rest of them trouped back to their secret clubhouse. Except as they moved down the narrow corridor, with Nick (now nearly nine feet tall, he reckoned, thanks to all the extra stacked pecs and abs) having to stoop like a hunky young half-naked wizard in a hobbit hole, Kevin found himself abruptly remembering they weren’t truly in a little world all their own. They were on a college campus, for one thing. Unsuspecting students might spring from the shadows at any moment, and Nick, at least, was spectacularly beyond the pale when it came to passing for anything like a mundane, everyday, totally unremarkable college student. His stomach fluttered nervously.

The same thought seemed to have occurred to the others, now that the dazzle of arousal and release was mostly passed. After Ethan had passed around much-needed bottles of delightfully cold water, they’d fallen into a fairly simpatico discussion. Their next steps were fairly clear, after all. With phase one, the elimination of Nick’s phone, now complete, their attention naturally shifted to phase two—the same, but for Nick’s laptop. The prospect was a little more intimidating, to Kevin anyway: rightly or wrongly, conditioned by years of syncing his own phone to his MacBook as a source of software and updates, he found himself thinking of the app on Nick’s phone as a satellite agent of the original, full-blown Transmute boss-app on the laptop. But then… if what Calvin had told them was right, the truth was that the app on Nick’s computer wasn’t the final boss at all. That would be Noah Toller himself.

Phase two was taking care of the laptop, then, but Kevin’s own vision—and, seriously, what the hell? He still couldn’t quite bring himself to admit that these vision things were even happening to him. Or, rather, that the intense, momentary fantasies he’d been experiencing somehow had an actual connection to reality. Anyway, he’d unwittingly tossed a new vector into the mix, Triple Larry, the redhead who was also connected to Cataract, along with Calvin and the fixer, Chaz, who’d already gone after Nick’s computer, though apparently unsuccessfully. Within moments of settling into the stage area of the rehearsal room, most of them scattered in chairs while Nick and Brendan sat against the back wall, a pair of studies in perfectly sculpted muscle multiplied (pick your flavor, mild or x-treme), they’d agreed to divide into two teams: one to return to Nick and Zack’s room, rendezvous with Chaz if he was there, and deal with the laptop either way, and the other to find Triple Larry and induct him—them—into the Nickspiracy.

Sorting out the teams had been even easier. The first team obviously needed to include Zack, whose dorm room was the epicenter of events, plus Calvin, who knew more about the app than anyone, and Henry, who was inseparable from both Zack and Calvin at this point. And the latent images he still had of three lanky, identical redheads and a hot and sweaty Arab-looking guy shooting hoops would guide Kevin and Ethan to Triple Larry and their grinning admirer.

The only remaining hitch was Nick himself. He wanted to get to work with the rest of them, all the more because this was all about him. Ethan was telling him not to be an idiot, as if it might be necessary to explain to Nick that there weren’t very many nine-foot-tall Latino muscle gods with eleven-pack abs, three extra rows of pecs stacked high and heavy on their torso, and more arms than an entire volleyball team—and so those that did exist tended to stand out a bit when they were out walking amongst the more on-model human configurations.

“No one notices the arms on you guys,” Nick argued, gesturing with a couple of right hands at the rest of them.

Kevin squinted at him. He glanced around at the others. They were all sitting, taking the opportunity to relax, except for Ethan, who’d gotten restlessly up from his front-row seat next to Kevin and had begun prowling around the center of the circle, tacitly taking up the leadership role that seemed to have tacitly devolved on him. All of them were shirtless, but their body types varied—stocky and compact like Ethan… broad shoulders, flared lats, and tiny waist like Brendan… or lithe and vacuum-tight like Calvin. They were Kevin-pale, Zack-creamy, Brendan-tan, or Nick-amber; a spectrum of hair color from Nick’s pitch-dark brunette to Zack’s dirty blond, and eye-color from Brendan-blue to Zack-hazel to Nick-almost-black. Forearms ranged from a bit hairy like Henry’s, to gently haired and ropily muscled like Nick’s, to bare and smooth like Kevin. Fat cocks, thin cocks, flat cocks, bent cocks, cut and uncut. Even their smiles were different—Brendan’s blazing, perfect grin stunned you like a strike to the heart, but Zack’s understanding smile drew you in, and Ethan’s… normally it stayed shuttered and hidden, but when the slats came down and his heart opened up that smile was pure, infectious, intoxicating joy.

The fact was, extra arms was one of the few things the Nickspirators tended to have in common, Kevin mused, apart from being male, buff, and way, far-side-of-the-bell-curve horny, evidently. And the first count wasn’t universal, seeing as two-armed Zack was the odd man out and didn’t conform with the others. So what had Nick meant?

Almost all of them had extra arms. Kevin’s gut told him that lots of guys were born with extra arms like he’d been. It was perfectly mundane having extra arms, he knew, and being in a room full of multi-armed guys seemed obvious enough confirmation of that. And yet…

And yet…

He remembered always having had four arms. He’d always been this way—of course he had. But Kevin’s memories were tactile, and when he tried to think of specific moments from his youth—his hands gripping a baseball bat in Little League; shooting his arms into a tux for his dad’s wedding; arm-wrestling his brother—he couldn’t remember feeling more than two arms and two hands. He huffed out an unsettled breath.

Not satisfied, his brain offered him another reason to call his gut a liar. Supposedly it was not big deal having four arms. Normal. And yet his memories told him that the only guys he’d ever encountered other than himself with four arms were limited to two groups: Zack’s admiring skater-boy entourage when they’d first met back in the plaza with Henry and Calvin among them, and the men in this room, both times with Zack himself excluded.

And there was something else, he realized with a sinking feeling. He knew for a fact that his two hefty, half-hard cocks were not original equipment. Before today there’d been exactly one, not two, and it had been significantly… okay, let’s think that the other way around: the cocks he had now were considerably larger than the not inconsiderable but very ordinary endowment he’d had before. Extra cocks was not normal, and it was not something he’d always had, any more than the ten pounds of muscle he’d gotten from Ethan’s selfless gift to them, or the more massive twenty-pound bump Brendan had gotten, or the radical evolutions that Nick had experienced. His rational mind told him it was a hell of a lot more likely that the extra-arm thing—again, limited to the men in this room and people who’d been in contact with them—had to be a Transmute thing. And as if it had taken this epiphany to make him see it, he realized he’d known this whole time that his first sight of Ethan had been with two arms—until he’d hugged Zack. He wasn’t supposed to remember that, he was pretty sure, and even now something told him the memory wasn’t real. That first sight of Ethan had made a hell of an impression on him, though, enough so that it seeped through from the two-armed universe into this one.

Nick must have already worked through all of this, Kevin guessed, or maybe the x-treme punitive transmutes that had quadrupled his arm count in the space of thirty seconds had forced a new perspective on him in more ways than one. Ethan’s brow was furrowed, though, and so was Brendan’s, which Kevin found gratifying—this “extra arms are normal” thing was some powerful mojo, and Kevin felt himself still fighting it off even after he’d seen through it.

Ethan looked over at Calvin, who was shaking his head.

“The extra arms Transmute is covered by a normality glamor,” Calvin explained. He was sitting in the front row across the aisle with Zack and Henry, Zack in the middle of course. They were all holding hands, apparently almost unconsciously. It was pretty adorable. “It’s powerful, I’ll grant you,” he went on. “I was on the QC team and so I’ve got the immunity conditioning, and I still find myself thinking about how much I love being one of the lucky guys born with four arms.” Brendan grinned at this, nodding, and Kevin knew he was thinking he definitely agreed with that take on being a four-armed dude. Kevin made himself look away from Brendan’s sexy smile and how it lit up those dark blue eyes of his.

“But there’s no glamor on any of the rest of it,” Calvin was saying. “That comes with that particular Transmute. It’s not a standard thing for Transmutes in general.” He spoke with the authority of a geek explaining something from his own world to benighted outsiders. No one doubted he knew what he was talking about.

“So, Nick’s pec-mitosis situation…?” Ethan asked him.

Calvin shrugged. “Maybe screaming, maybe crowds of awestruck muscle-worshippers,” he said, “but definitely instant viral video… and, I’m guessing, the sudden, rapt attention of the whole planet.”

“Which is what Noah wants,” Nick said slowly, his expression grim. “Which means…” He sighed, thunking his head back against the wall. His long hair dragged over his bulging traps as he did so. “Which means I’m stuck here,” he said, “until someone figures out how to hit undo on—” He gestured at his augmented torso. “—all this.”

The room fell quiet. Kevin looked around, noting in particular the compassionate smile Zack was offering his roommate. He guessed the others were all thinking something like what he was—that it was great having extras, if only they could keep it to the people in this room.

“What if…?” Brendan said suddenly. Everyone looked at him. He ignored them, focusing on Calvin, though he seemed a lot more tentative talking about this stuff than Calvin. Neither tech nor magic was Brendan’s area of expertise. “Can we, I dunno, get ahold of that normality glamor?” he asked. “You know, not in the app, but—separately?”

Kevin’s brows lifted. He couldn’t help but feel a little warm glow that Brendan, his cr—er, friend had tried to follow a lateral solution. Sure, “normality glamor” probably wasn’t some kind of bubbling gunk lying around in black 55-gallon drums somewhere the way Brendan was making it sound; but the idea of using the Transmute magic somehow, freed of Noah’s programming… that had a lot of possibilities.

He glanced over at Calvin, who was blinking at Brendan, mouth slightly open. Finally, a surprised smile crept over his face. “Maybe!” Calvin said.

“What do you mean?” Ethan pressed, turning to face him.

Calvin took a deep breath. “There’s a dumbed-down version of the app that’s just the normality/retcon spell,” he said. “I don’t know the details. Noah’s… abilities, I…” He gave up, shaking he head. “But I got the impression it’s a really complicated thing to make happen, even for Noah. A lot more than just, ‘hey presto, you’ve got three legs now’, for sure. That’s just physical, and one person; and the other thing, that’s, like, time and space, or whatever. So he put the normality/retcon thing into its own app, like—” He shrugged. “—like a clicker, or something, for when he was doing extended manual experimental Transmutes on people and he didn’t want to have to worry about normals.”

Ethan’s eyebrows lifted. “Do you know where it is? Can you get it?” he asked.

“No and no,” Calvin said. Despite the negative answer he was grinning as he used his free right hand to extract a smartphone from his pocket, the muscles of his tight frame rippling as he shifted. “But,” he went on, thumbing open his phone and pulling up his texting app, “I know who does.” He was still smiling as he typed.

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Chaz lay sprawled on Nick’s too-small bed, watching with avid interest as their irresistibly cocky and crazy-dark-and-handsome interloper, Filipe, pulled off first one of Chaz’s boots, then the other, all the while aiming a crooked, I’m-going-to-ride-you-like-a-fucking-rollercoaster smirk at his impatient victim… even as the other half-naked Chaz-giant, the one who’d been created out of thin air (or was that him? He’d lost track) by the goddamn punitive Transmutes he’d been trying so hard not to trigger, stood close behind Filipe, grabbing at the bottoms of the form-fitting midnight blue compression tee he was wearing. The moment Filipe had tossed aside the second boot, Chaz 2 whipped the shirt up the boy’s dusky torso and yanked his arms through it. The shirt hurled away onto the other bed to join both of the Chazzes’ hoodies (those were the first to go, followed by Filipe’s toed-off Nikes) and instantly forgotten, Chaz 2 immediately snaked his four unnaturally long arms tight around Filipe’s lanky, exquisitely carved torso.

Filipe kept all his focus on the Chaz in the bed, but his smile grew even more wicked at the hungry embrace and urgent caresses of the second Chaz’s long-fingered, roving hands. He fisted four of his hands around the cuffs of Chaz’s dark slacks, his other two hands drifting up to stroke the bulging forearms of the man holding him so tight and needily from behind. Chaz quickly unbuttoned his waistband and drew down the fly just in time to be completely shucked. And with that single move, thanks to a lifetime disdain for boxers and briefs alike, Chaz now lay completely naked before his aggressor, barring only his gray quarter-length sweat-socks. He stared up into those burning eyes, awed by the fierceness of intent he saw there. Never before had he seen a man desire him with so profound and fathomless a passion, and at the same time so insolently certain that the encounter he wanted so much would be on his terms and no other.

Chaz’s enormous, two-foot cocks thumped wantonly against his heavily muscled chest, spattering splodges of clear, hot precum onto his heroic pecs with every smack-down. Filipe stared and licked his lips, not just at Chaz’s phone-pole cocks but at the whole package splayed before him, his for the taking. As they watched each other, the other Chaz deftly undid Filipe’s flies and jerked his pants down, leaving his massive, tube-shaped cock reverberating wetly in Filipe’s sky-blue boxer-briefs. A second later, those were gone from sight, too, exposing at last a club of a uncut cock that would have been, before he’d gotten the job he had now, the biggest and most beautiful dick he’d ever seen by a considerable margin.

Then Filipe, naked, hard, and ready, climbed onto the bed, still smirking, those blazing eyes locked with Chaz’s. And behind him came the second Chaz, just as naked (when had he—nevermind) and even more ready, his own twin two-foot monsters painting trails of pre-jizz up Filipe’s long, beautiful back. Slowly, almost languorously, like there could be no conceivable limit to their time together, Filipe layered himself onto Chaz, receiving the second Chaz’s massive form against his length in turn. Both positioned two hands against the bed itself somewhere near Chaz’s shoulders, taking enough weight so as not to press him down too much—and thank god they had more hands than that, because all their extra palms and fingers and knuckles were joining Chaz’s in caressing every exposed inch of heated, sensitive skin on their three immensely aroused forms, their ardent bodies already halfway to climax and beyond.

Chaz’s cocks throbbed spastically against their muscled, blood-hot chests as Filipe lowered his full, grin-twisted lips onto Chaz’s, and it was all he could do not to moan loudly into the kiss. He felt Filipe’s huge erection then as he settled more fully against Chaz, and the way Filipe’s heavy cock bent and curved now that it was beyond hard and fully, impossibly rigid meant that its uncut head was actually nosing around and under Chaz’s own triple-huge twin monoliths, finding the tight, warm, pre-slicked space between Chaz’s dicks and his tight, stone-hard abs. As Chaz and Filipe deepened their kiss, Chaz defying Filipe’s efforts to totally dominate him, they began a mutual humping rhythm that managed a simulacrum of fucking courtesy of that constructed space behind Chaz’s cocks, combined with Chaz’s own experience of pushing gently forward and back between his and Filipe’s thick, firm pecs.

Almost instantly the other Chaz joined their rhythm, fucking his cocks against Filipe’s back. Then after a few moment of that had ramped up Chaz’s arousal and even elicited some grunts of raw pleasure from Filipe, the second Chaz managed to twist around and join his mouth with theirs into a scalding hot three-way kiss. Because of the angle it was difficult to sustain, though it helped that both Chazzes were so much bigger than Filipe. Chaz didn’t care. He wanted more of this three-way kissing, as lot more. Sharing Filipe with himself was ten times better than having Filipe alone.

He turned away slightly to catch his breath, leaving the other Chaz to carry on kissing Filipe as the three of them, naked and sweaty slowly humped in perfect tempo together. He blinked over at the laptop, its screen bright in the gathering darkness of late afternoon.

There was a Transmute window on it.

Fuck, he thought. He’d given half a thought to this bed being out of range of the goddamned app, and evidently half a thought hadn’t been enough. “Chaz!” he hissed, and his tone was so clearly not calling out a sex-partner’s name that the other Chaz’s head popped up in alarm. Their eyes met, and Chaz nodded frantically toward the computer. They both turned to look at it, and they both said, “Fuck!” at very nearly the exact same time.

“What—?” Filipe began, sounding disoriented and caught off guard for once.

The Chazzes’ eyes met again. In one swift move, second Chaz dropped off the bed on the side nearer to Nick’s desk and the fateful computer. This allowed Chaz to shove Filipe off the bed in the other direction, beyond Transmute’s active radius. Chaz climbed out next to his double and stood next to him, two hands up, palms out. “Don’t move!” he said. The other Chaz copied him. “We’ll take the hit, whatever it is. You shouldn’t have to be a part of this.”

“You’re safe there,” other Chaz said quickly. “Out of range.”

Filipe was staring at them, clearly not comprehending anything beyond there being some kind of danger. “What about you?” he asked.

Chaz shook his head. “Once it’s triggered, there has to be someone still in range when it hits,” he said. “Otherwise the range expands.”

“Did you see what it was?” other Chaz asked him. Instead of answering, Chaz twisted around to look at the screen, though he kept his hands up and facing Filipe to keep him where he was. He saw only a few words—”merge” being the most alarming—before his eyes hit on the two buttons, which looked like they read “Share legs, separate torsos” and “Share torsos, separate heads”. “Separate torsos” was highlighted.

He met his duplicate’s gaze, and saw his eyes widen at the dismay that must have been obvious in his own. Filipe saw it too. “I’m coming over there,” he growled angrily, starting to climb over the bed.

“No!” both Chazzes said. Instinctively they grabbed the metal-framed bed and flipped it up on its side, unceremoniously dumping their naked, sweaty lover back on the floor behind the bed-barrier they’d made with an enraged yelp. The thin extra-long twin mattress wobbled on its side and then toppled wobbily onto Filipe with a soft thunk.

“Guys—!” Filipe roared from under the bedding.

It had to be time. Chaz twisted back toward the screen in time to see 1 turn to 0.

And then… pleasure. So much pleasure. Rivers of it, oceans of it, searing lava floes of it. All at once, too much pleasure, unbounded euphoria, and he was cumming… they were cumming. He was shooting twin rockets of scalding spunk, unstoppably, shooting hard again and again all over his other self’s back, his brother, his body mate, covering his amazing, tapering back and even his hair and beyond with unending dual eruptions of hot, bitter jizz. And he could feel his other self, his shared self, cumming just as hard, their orgasms multiplied, and it felt like they were delivering all the cum of every horny guy on the entire fucking planet, cumming and cumming and cum—m—m—ing—

He almost collapsed, and he found he was clinging to the torso in front of him woozily with all four arms, his buzzing, still slightly spurting chest-high cocks pressed pleasantly between his thick, square pecs and his other self’s back. They seemed to fit there, sliding up either side of his spine and flanked by the shoulder-blades. The other Chaz was holding tightly to Chaz’s arms in front of him, but they were staying upright together, both of them conscious of not succumbing to the weakness in the knees from that superlative combined climax. Next time, maybe lying down to do that, he thought. He registered, though, that there were more than just the two knees he was used to—there were four, now, and below them four decently large feet, comically still in gray ankle-high sweat socks and together providing some extra help in the stability department. He could sense at some semi-instinctive level that they were all his, but he had only partial control over them. No, “partial” wasn’t the right word. “Shared.” He—they—shared these legs. The legs, and the body, now, at least from the waist down. A part of his brain told him that being giant, eight-foot twins was one thing, but like this… well, he might be stuck in this room for a while. Everything else in him, feeling the pleasure of their body, thinking of the uncannily hot and sexually ferocious partner he had in here with him, was pretty much fine with that.

The room smelled like seed, and sweat, and Filipe’s subtle cologne, dispersed through the room from his heated skin.

Chaz took a long, steadying breath and straightened, though he still kept his arms wrapped tightly around his identical duplicate body-mate. Well, they felt nice there. He realized he was looking over the other Chaz’s shoulder at Filipe, who’d clambered out from under the fallen mattress and sheets in time to get what looked like most of the full blast from front Chaz’s mighty cum-cannons. He was standing there, staring at them, completely covered from hair to knees in fat streaks of white, hot, globby spunk. Chaz kissed the nape of the neck in front of him, and the front Chaz leaned back a little in satisfaction, increasing their contact in a way that Chaz found immensely comfortable. He stroked the ponderous pecs and chiseled abs he found under his hands and was delighted to feel a ghost of the pleasure his caresses brought his other self. He shared another kiss on the side of the neck as they watched Filipe processing what he saw, eliciting a little hum from the other Chaz when he licked a bit of stray spunk from the side of his body-mate’s neck.

Filipe seemed to be poised to demand answers. He was gearing up for a string of questions, Chaz could tell, the first of which was probably going to be “What the hell just happened?”—except… no. His eyes were too wide, and too dark with lust. His dick was hard, too, just as hard as before, a pearl of his own pre on the tip looking incongruous amidst all of the Chazzes’ jizz.

Chaz saw the moment when Filipe tabled his questions and curiosity for now in favor of more carnal demands. First, those eyes sparked and blazed again with a rekindled and limitless passion that was fiercer and darker than it had been before. Then… fuck, then the grin came, and it was the cockiest, crookedest, most debauched grin Chaz had ever seen in his life.

And the Chazzes grinned right back at him.

 

Part 15

The address on the envelope was not easy to find. Jimmy had never heard of the street it named, and his GPS professed a similar ignorance. Finally he had to pull over, put himself in park, and dig an old county map out of his Sentra’s glove box. Poring over it under the anemic glow of the yellow map light, Jimmy finally found his quarry, Blackbriar Road, in the low, empty hills on the western edge of the map, leading into an isolated, empty space marked as the Blackbriar Ranch.

Jimmy refolded the map enough to set it aside in the passenger seat and clicked off the map light, leaving him in the lonely midnight darkness on the side of County Road D, with his glowing dash, his headlights, and the distant stars the only illumination in sight. Briefly he asked himself again whether this was a good idea—but he’d already made his decision. The whole rest of his shift, as he’d delivered pizza after pizza to hungry college students and the occasional townie up late, he’d convinced himself that Mr. Tracey—Josh—entrusting him with this mission meant something was happening, that some kind of corner had been turned that spurred Josh to action. Whatever this envelope contained, it was important, and probably urgent. He didn’t dare risk waiting until tomorrow, only to find out he’d let Josh down. Just imagining himself disappointing Josh tightened a little knot in Jimmy’s belly.

He drew a breath. No, he couldn’t chance it. He’d deliver it tonight, even if he had to bang on the door and wake this Swift guy up out of a sound sleep and shove the envelope in his hands. Better to act now than have things go wrong because of him. Josh was counting on him. Besides, he considered wryly, covert missions really should be done at night. Sneaking around under the cover of darkness on behalf of a man he would do anything for held a visceral thrill. With a small smile, his cock twitching at all the romantic intrigue, he put his car back in drive and pulled back onto the road.

Fifteen minutes later he was rolling down yet another empty county road, looking for the elusive turnoff his map told him lay along this decline, just here, though his traitorous GPS had denied any turnoffs at all and Jimmy had finally turned it off altogether in disgust. Finally he saw it, a lane winding away into the sparse wooded darkness toward what seemed like a shallow pocket valley. The entrance to the lane was blocked by a metal gate. Jimmy pulled to a stop in front of it, hesitating only briefly before jumping out to pull open the gate. It was latched but not padlocked, fortunately, and swung easily and silently aside for him. He pulled through, conscientiously went back and closed and latched the gate again, then started down the narrow, unpaved lane, his stomach fluttering excitedly.

He’d only been driving a couple of minutes when his phone, which he always kept in the cup-holder under the radio, beeped and lit up. Frowning, he slowed to a stop and snatched it up. There was a message on his screen, but it wasn’t a text—it was like the phone itself was communicating with him, in stark white letters on a dark blue-gray screen. “Access to this property is forbidden to Cataract affiliates,” it announced ominously. “Turn around now.”

Jimmy’s pulse sped up as he stared at the message. “Cataract affiliates,” he repeated aloud in disbelief. He worked for Granite Pizza, not Cataract—and he knew for a fact that Granite wasn’t owned by by Cataract, either, because he’d helped Old Man Salazar find a new accountant to keep the books and do the small business taxes when the owner’s numbers-loving husband had died. So how was he a—but, of course. He delivered pizza to the Cataract estate, and to Josh Tracey in particular on a regular basis. Everyone who knew Josh Tracey existed knew he was the love of Noah Toller’s life. Naturally, Jimmy having regular contact with Josh had probably put him on Toller’s radar, his phone jacked as a matter of routine. Maybe the man had even noticed how Jimmy looked at Josh. Well, who could blame him? And who was Toller, anyway, to say that only he could appreciate—?

He swallowed and, setting the phone back in its cupholder, resolutely moved the car forward again down the rough back road. A moment or two later his phone lit again. This time Jimmy kept driving as he checked the screen without picking it up.

Transmute? He’d never installed an app called Transmute. And why was it telling him he was about to get a “warning transmutation”?

He glanced at the road, then back down at his phone where it sat in the cupholder. There was an “OK” button at the bottom of the popup box, but above it was what was obviously a dismissal countdown, and it was already on 2… 1… 0…

The “OK” button self-selected—and suddenly the space at his feet was more crowded. He jerked the wheel slightly in surprise even as he unwittingly applied pressure to the brake with his middle foot while his right foot, jostled by the sudden advent of a while new leg and foot between the two he’d always had, slipped gracelessly off the accelerator and thunked against the footwell. The Sentra skidded to a stop at an angle, barely keeping to the road, and Jimmy sant there, panting, staring down at the three—three!—legs erupting out of his body and disappearing into the gloom below the steering wheel. He could feel them. The warm, firm muscles of three bike-loving thighs brushed familiarly together. His heavy, chubbed dick, now twinned and thick on either side his new middle leg. He tested his three feet in turn, one by one, as his heart slammed violently against his ribs. Each foot responded: left… middle… right. Three feet, undeniably. Three legs—unbelievable, inexplicable—

His vision filled with the sight of Josh opening his door, three-legged and compellingly beautiful. Jimmy had never even registered that Josh having three legs might be at all strange. It wasn’t, on Josh. And, though it was life-twistingly, apocalyptically shocking for it to have happened to Jimmy, the thought came to him like a lightning bolt—now, he and Josh had something in common.

Very deliberately, feeling strangely light-headed as his heart continued pounding too hard and too fast in his hollow chest, Jimmy eased his right foot gently back onto the gas while, at the same time, carefully sliding his middle foot off the brake and positioning it safely out of the way on the floor of the footwell. He stole a trepidatious look at his phone. The unknown app was gone. Now the screen just said, “Turn around.”

Jimmy narrowed his eyes at it.

Defiantly, gripping the wheel hard, he pressed down lightly on the gas as he turned, straightening the Sentra out and resuming his slow, steady journey back down the forbidden road. Josh was counting on him. When his phone lit up again in his peripheral vision, he didn’t even look at it—he just kept driving.

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Henry kept his grip tight around Zack’s freshly bared torso, one right gripping the creamy-pale, toned skin just below the gentle, natural flair of his lats, the other a little lower down, toward his hips, as they walked across campus, headed for Zack and Nick’s dorm room. They still smelled like sex, but under that Henry could detect Zack’s own distinctive scent, a subtle redolence of vanilla and spice that went straight to his groin. A sudden, powerful urge welled up in Henry. He wanted to toss their little mission aside and find someplace alone with Zack, gripping those hips with all his hands, making out and then escalating from there, and his raging, nine-inch erections thrumming against the waistband of his pants all but commanded him to make it happen.

Instinctively, though, Henry knew that quiet, calm Zack wasn’t someone you took control of. Henry was new to liking guys and was still a little at sea figuring out how to act on all of his new, overpowering desires, but the bottomless infatuation with Zack that was now seared into his bones and swirled unstoppably through every tight inch of his hard, fuck-ready body told him that with Zack, harmony was what mattered. They would synchronize their desires, driving themselves together toward release. He’d felt his first true taste of it just now, in the basement while Nick was furiously being turned into a multigod, though conflated with the overlapping releases of all the Nickspirators climaxing together. Pleasure for Zack meant shared smiles and raw intimacy and synchronicity. He could do that. For now, he could enjoy the shifting press of his well-defined, lightly hairy arms against Zack’s sun-warmed back as they walked.

That synchronicity, he knew, didn’t mean just him and Zack, either. Calvin was a part of his connection with Zack. Henry suppressed a twinge of frustration as he glanced across at his tall, shaggy-haired Zackbrother. The hunky Korean was talking advantage of his superior height to sling both of his long, gently muscled left arms over Zack’s shoulders, though he wasn’t looking at Zack or Henry—instead he was warily eyeing the guys who stopped as they passed to gape at Zack’s magnetic beauty. Henry could identify; he’d been doing the same thing a few moments before. A few of the four-armed ones Henry recognized from their earlier trip across campus in the other direction.

He let himself watch Calvin a few moments longer as they passed through the main plaza toward his and Zack’s dorm tower. The truth was, he was almost as into Calvin as he was Zack. No, that wasn’t quite it. His intense attraction to Zack was somehow resonant with Calvin’s, like their need for Zack was luminous and radiant, Henry’s need blending with Calvin’s, until it was almost the same, especially since their unified orgasm back in the music building. It was like the three of them were becoming some kind of single, gestalt being of a physical and emotional arousal. Caressing Calvin—it felt almost as good as touching Zack, like their bodies and sensations were overlapping, fused together by the sun-like intensity of Zack’s allure. He wanted to get to know Calvin’s rangy, delicious-looking body as thoroughly as he did Zack’s. The idea of doing both—of becoming closely familiar with both of these bodies that were so necessary to him was momentarily overwhelming. He swallowed hard.

And Calvin was a damn good kisser, Henry reminded himself. He felt his lips quirking, remembering that first kiss, when Calvin had stumbled on them making out in Zack’s room and had been caught, like he had, by the dirty blond’s sweet smile and bewitching handsomeness. Zack had insisted that the necessity of kissing him meant kissing Henry, too. That… that was when it started, Henry realized.

Calvin seemed to feel Henry’s gaze on him and turned to look at him over the back of Zack’s head, his dark eyes curious and lustful. Henry was suddenly aflame with a desire for Calvin and Zack, and the mental image he’d experienced a few moments before, his hands on Zack’s hips as they kissed hungrily someplace private and secluded, now included Calvin, sandwiching Zack and kissing his neck, occasionally stealing kisses from Henry. Or maybe Calvin was behind Henry, and he was the one being sandwiched—?

As he watched, Calvin’s eyes seemed to darken further, and Henry felt his breath catch. Calvin was feeling it too. They all were—Zack felt hot where his arms were pressed against his back, and Henry could feel the want in him. Their arousals were mingling, and Henry was sure it would not be long before they were one.

Henry closed his eyes, and he felt Calvin look away. They did have a mission, and at any rate they couldn’t just stop and fuck right here in the plaza, probably.

Maybe he should focus on getting to know Calvin apart from his body and his cocks and how hard he came. “Tho, Calvin,” he said, and winced. Calvin at him, his eyes falling to Henry’s mouth and the the bit of tongue that showed there when he wasn’t actively pulling it back. Darn it, he was still getting used to this extra-thick, stretchy tongue he had now. But he needed to practice. He consciously adjusted the bulky, mouth-filling muscle and tried again. “Thso,” he said, “You never told us exthactly what you do at the Caddaract.”

Zack glanced at Henry, then up at Calvin. “That’s true,” Zack said in his low, quiet voice. “How are you mixed up in all of this?”

Calvin seemed to color slightly and looked away. “Uh,” he said, “I’m not sure I want to say.” He definitely sounded embarrassed.

“Why?” Zack asked, surprised.

When Calvin didn’t say anything, Henry spoke. “It’th—” He stopped, then tried again. Practice, he told himself. “It’s not like you were the one that did all of this to Nick and everyone,” he amended.

Calvin looked pained. “That’s the thing,” he said. “I kind of am.”

Zack stopped them, right in the middle of the wide sidewalk leading to the trio of dorm towers of which the middle was theirs. He turned to face Calvin, leaving Henry to move in close behind Zack, his pecs brushing lightly at Zack’s shoulder blades in a way that was not a little distracting. He tried not to think about Zack’s very fine round ass and how close his hot dicks were to it, and forced himself to stay in the moment.

Calvin’s hands slid up onto Zack’s shoulders as Zack turned. Calvin tried to pull them away, but Zack reached up and held them in place as he gazed into Calvin’s eyes. He just waited.

Calvin dropped his head, then looked up to meet Zack’s eyes, then Henry’s. “I’m the one who came up with the transmutes,” he confessed. Henry’s brows rose. “Not the actual software,” he clarified quickly. “That was up to Noah and his magic software dev team. But… they had me making lists of transformations, what the choices would be, stuff like that. It was—I mean, it didn’t feel real, and that was after the perks.” Henry had gathered that Calvin had been multi-endowed even before the transmute that had doubled everyone’s dicks. That must have been what Calvin meant by perks. Perks, plural, though—what other employee benefits had Calvin ended up with?

“Sounds like fun,” Zack said, smiling. By now, all four of Calvin’s hands were resting on Zack’s shoulders, his slightly darker skin making a pleasing contrast with the sheltered pink. Henry moved slightly closer, snaking his arms around Zack’s belly. Inevitably, this brought his stiff cocks into contact with Zack’s firm glutes, but he tried to focus on the comforting pleasure of his hands and arms making inches and inches of contact with Zack’s wonderfully embraceable upper body. Zack relaxed slightly against him, letting himself be held by both of his men.

“It was just making up stuff,” Calvin said, sounding distracted now as he stared into what Henry knew were Zack’s big, irresistible hazel eyes. “I mapped out the questions and options, then I wrote out the specs of exactly what would happen in meticulous detail. It was… kinda… hot.” He broke off his account and pleaded. “I gotta kiss you.” He glanced back at Henry. “Both of you.”

Fuck. Focusing on Zack’s face and all of the magnetic draw to be found there had built up an imperative in Calvin. Henry felt it too, as though once a craving befell one of them it immediately diffused through them all.

“Nick’s counting on us,” Zack reminded him, but his soft voice was tense with his own desire.

“I know,” Calvin agreed. “Just—” He dove down, and to Henry’s surprise he bypassed Calvin and made straight for him. Then they were kissing, fierce and urgent, over Zack’s shoulder. Henry gripped Zack tightly as they made out, needing all of his willpower to keep from grinding his erections into Zack’s ass. Then Calvin moved on to Zack, melding their mouths together in a passionate kiss, and to Henry’s shock it was almost as pleasurable watching them kiss as it was snogging Calvin directly.

Panting, he felt his enlarged tongue pushing past his buzzing lips and smiled around it. So much for practice—he wouldn’t be conversing around this thing anytime soon.

 

Part 16

Ethan looked down at his new friend Kevin as they headed in the opposite direction from the other team, toward the athletic fields. The shorter man was withdrawn and pensive as they walked together, which seemed to suit him. He’d gotten the impression of someone who spent a lot of time in his own head and liked it that way. Ethan didn’t know too much about him beyond his connection to Brendan, but he’d seen how Kevin had been acting in all the drama since Ethan had been pulled into Nick’s circle. He had the sense Kevin was a smart, watchful guy who hadn’t minded being in his swim-star, boy-god friend’s shadow. That had worked for him as long as his position in that shadow, optimally placed to crush on his friend all he wanted and enjoying the attention of being inseparable friends, was something he could take for granted.

Attention was a topic Ethan was familiar with. He got a lot of it. He was used to it. He’d been huge forever—massive and scary to the other kids his age even before puberty had blown him up and started thickening his muscles without even asking him.

Giving away sixty pounds of muscle definitely made him feel like less of a beast, which was… more of a relief than he’d realized it would be. For someone who’d been all but defined by his overmuscled massiveness practically since he’d popped out of the womb, he didn’t miss it. He liked how he looked now. He’d never been lean enough to have a visible eight-pack before. He kept wanting to touch it, letting his fingers rumble over hard, corded abdominals he was more used to appreciating than possessing.

But the fact was, he was still a square-jawed, pink-skinned, six-foot-five, four-armed shirtless colossus sporting at least two hundred and fifty pounds of dense, tight muscle that still looked like it was packed on with a trowel. He’d managed to get his twin fourteen-inchers more or less soft—well, not really soft, they were half-hard still, because of course even transformed and doubled like this his dicks still fucking loved being dicks—but just soft enough he could wrangle them down into his pants and more or less out of sight with a bit of effort. But even balled up in his crotch like that they couldn’t help but make a puppy-sized bulge that was almost as intimidating and eye-catching as his size and bulk and his steely expression. Everyone still watched him as he walked past, some with jaws agape. He was still a bull, even if he was no longer a Mastodon.

But Ethan wasn’t getting all the stares. Kevin’s extra ten pounds of muscle on his already impressively fit four-armed swimmer’s bod had given him a major deliciousness upgrade. He looked like an underwear model strolling to his next shoot. Paler than Ethan, he radiated pure and innocent. His dirty-blond hair was soft and wavy, like it would be really pleasant sliding between your fingers. And unlike Ethan, who saw himself as good-looking only in a bruiser Marine sort of way, Kevin was heart-stoppingly handsome. Brendan, his buddy, had the blues eues and movie idol looks, but Kevin’s beauty was real and somehow personal, as though spending time staring into that sweet face would only uncover the true radiance within. The late-afternoon stubble lining his sharp jawline, just a shade darker than his head hair but still a muted dark blond, enhanced his looks a lot more that the blue smudge darkening Ethan’s own jaw, and seemed to call attention to the relative hairlessness of Kevin’s long, lickable torso even compared to the surprisingly sparse spray of dark hair decorating Ethan’s still-bulky chest and newly emerged abs.

So, yeah, Kevin was drawing a lot of ogling all on his own, and that wasn’t even taking into account the fact that he wasn’t doing much to hide his fat, still-mostly-hard eight-inchers, which formed an impossible-to-miss double ridge in his jeans angling up and to the left along his hip. Kevin, his attention focused inward, didn’t seem to notice. He probably thinks people are always looking at his buddy, not him, Ethan thought—and being on a team with a behemoth like Ethan would mean more of the same. He had a lot to learn about how much he stood out all on his own, and Ethan resolved to show him just how hot he was after all this other stuff was taken care of.

Suddenly it felt weird spinning out all these thoughts about how attractive Kevin was, like he was on one of his weeklong arousal build-ups, absorbing and banking all the hot men he could fit into his fevered imagination. His dicks twitched in their tight package, and he mentally shook his head. Kevin was real. They’d shared something back in the basement, something meaningful and intimate, and Ethan wanted—no, needed—to strengthen the connection between them. He cleared his throat. “You doing okay?” he asked.

Kevin blinked and looked up at Ethan, looking a little surprised that the big man was focused on him. “Uh, sure,” he said. His eyebrows lifted, his light-brown eyes full of snark. “You?”

Ethan ignored the question. “I’m just checking in, ‘cause… I saw how you were looking and Brendan and Nick. I… well, I think I felt it, too.” Ethan wasn’t quite sure what had happened during that group orgasm, but it had sure seemed like the emotions everyone was feeling seemed to be exploding out of them. Most of that was euphoric, primal, incomparable release, but there had been so many layers below that—especially after Kevin turned away from Brendan and sought Ethan instead.

Kevin looked away, aiming his stare straight ahead. “It’s fine.”

Ethan hesitated, then put a meaty hand on Kevin’s pale, nicely defined shoulder. “I’m just saying,” he said, “I’m… here. You know. For you.”

Kevin closed his eyes briefly, then looked up at Ethan with a small smile. He rested a hand on top of Ethan’s. “I know,” he said. He squeezed the hand and then let go, turning his face ahead again. “Oh look, we’re here.”

They stopped walking, and Ethan looked up. They’d reached the basketball courts beyond the athletic center. Only one of the courts seemed to be in use at the moment, four guys playing what looked like an ordinary pick-up game. Except three of the players were identical-looking fiery redheads, joined by a darker, more muscular fourth with a great build and an amazing ass. Their sweaty, athletic play had accumulated a decent-sized audience beyond the tall chain fences, though most of the onlookers seemed to be trying to pretend they just happened to be there and looking in the general direction of the tall ginger triplets and their laughing admirer as they put every ounce of energy they had into their two-on-two contest. One cluster of five guys looked like they had been playing, judging by their sweatiness and the ball one of them was carrying under his arm, but evidently they’d given up on their own game, drifting over to lean against the fence and watch the four hotties play instead, a couple of them with decidedly hungry expressions on their faces.

By the looks of it they were playing shirts against skins; at any rate one of the redheads and the darker fourth guy were both shirtless, while the other two trips were still wearing sweat-stained green tee shirts along with the trips’ regulation glasses, loose jeans, and old sneaks. The jeans did very little to hide a massive sausage cock slopping around down one leg for each of the three redheads, and Ethan realized with a start that his world had changed enough in the last hour and a half for him to register internal surprise, not that these trips were all hung with cocks the length and girth of a forearm (one of Kevin’s forearms, at least), but that they possessed only one of these heavy clubs each. The fourth guy was just wearing running shoes and track pants that seemed designed to highlight his stupidly perfect ass and his long, sleekly powerful torso, which was currently damp from his exertions keeping up with the trips.

Ethan had been right—this was the hottest game of basketball ever, and that was without the visual Kevin described, of the four of them immersed in extremely hot make-out sessions for which the all-in b-ball game was no doubt just a temporary diversion and a distraction.

Kevin was watching them, too, amused at how totally they were focused on their game. Maybe he was thinking of the vision, too—he’d had a direct exposure to what the four of them really wanted to be doing instead of shooting hoops, and just how deeply they wanted to be doing it. “I wonder if we can get them to stop playing with each other long enough to hear us out,” he drawled.

Ethan snorted. He removed his hand from Kevin’s shoulder but stayed close as they moved around the the gate and entered the fenced-in area. Kevin walked directly onto the court where the four guys were playing.

The shirtless trip had the ball, and was caught up short and almost stumbled as he registered the invaders, though he managed to keep hold of the ball as he righted himself. The other two trips seemed to visibly snap out of the game, too, as if they’d been totally immersed, but the smiling fourth guy had been tracking their movements the whole time. Not much got by him, Ethan guessed. He sized up Ethan, then Kevin, clearly taking in their double endowments, and Ethan could almost see him putting the pieces together with the trips-who-weren’t-really-trips and concluding they were all a part of the same thing. Now it made even more sense Kevin’s vision had guided them here, he thought. Larry, the replicated guy, might be the one on the inside, but they clearly needed the Larrys’ shrewd (and hunky) buddy, too. The Larrys was already in this, but… would their new hoops-shooting friend want to get involved in all this mess?

He wondered if he was part of it, too. He was a couple inches shorter than Ethan and the 6’6” Larrys, but he looked a little like a hard-muscled guy Kevin’s size who’d been pulled at from both ends until he was close to Ethan’s height. Maybe he was just like that, but Ethan found himself oddly intrigued by the idea of a guy—a hunky guy, like the Larrys’ buddy here—who was just a little stretchable like that. His own mighty cocks shifted again, wanting to stoke his long-term arousal like he was used to doing, and Ethan performed another mental head-shake and re-fixated on the present situation. All this muscle and cock was going to require an iron will to keep himself on track. Somehow, the Nickspiracy had ended up depending on him, and he was committed to fixing things for Nick and his buddies, but no way was he going to be able to last another week before his next mind-blowing orgasm, not with guys like this around him all the time, and Kevin next to him radiating sexiness and drawing him in at the same time.

A couple of onlookers had booed at the interruption in play, and most of them had started drifting away, casting lingering glances at both the ball-players and the newcomers as they wandered off. The four guys they’d come to see were gathered close around them now, heat and musk and enormous latent arousal cascading off of them in waves, the afternoon sun glinting off of the trip’s round, dark-framed glasses—weirdly, the identicalness of the three pairs of specs seemed almost odder and more uncanny than the fact that the three redheads were exactly alike in a way that real twins and triplets never were, down to the pattern of faint freckles on their upper cheeks and the shapes of their dark red, kissable lips. They were currently checking out both of them equally, clearly leery of strangers but at the same time impressed by Ethan’s size and Kevin’s stunning, underwear-model looks. The Arab guy, meanwhile, seemed to have picked up on Ethan’s recently assumed role as the group’s default fulcrum.

He smiled wide and extended a hand. “Ahmed,” he said. He nodded toward the trips possessively, standing a little in front of them. “These are my friends… Larry, Larry, and My Larry.” This last, said with a slight smirk, no doubt indicated the shirtless one. Ethan wondered just for a second how “My Larry” might have won his favored position, before he remembered Kevin’s kiss-orgy vision and decided he could probably guess.

Fuck. No more storing up sexy images! He’d had enough trouble hiding his boners before his heavy and decidedly rebellious wang had doubled in size and number.

Ethan picked a right hand at random—he was habitually keen to make sure all his arms got equal use—and shook. “Ethan.”

Kevin shook next. “Kevin.”

One of the Larrys spoke up. “Who are you guys?” he asked, looking between them. All of them tensed, waiting for the answer, and Ahmed watched them closely.

Ethan glanced at Kevin, wondering how exactly to describe who they were.

“We’re friends of Nick,” Kevin said. He said it almost defiantly, like the Nickspiracy was a proud underground movement of committed activists. In a way, maybe they were.

Ethan nodded, looking back at the others. “We… need your help,” he said seriously, glancing between the four of them. “We need to make things right for Nick and for his friends.”

The Larrys visibly relaxed. “I was hoping you’d say something like that,” another of them said in relief, and the other two nodded.

Ahmed, taking his cue from his guys, resurfaced his wide smile. “Looks like we’re all yours,” he said brightly, and it was Ethan’s turn to be relieved—even as the sex-obsessed part of his brain stored away Ahmed’s innocent statement for potentially not-so-innocent future use—and anyway that glint in Ahmed’s eye didn’t look all that that innocent.

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Brendan knelt next to his augmented lover where he sat leaning against the wall, unable to stop looking at him. He kept raking his eyes over the rows and rows of magnificent pecs, his twin cocks surging just at the sight of them every time he slid his eyes up and down Nick’s beautiful, dark-gold body. He’d had no idea he was so into the idea of extras on a guy, but—fuck, Nick’s hard-carved cobblestone eleven-pack would be enough to send him into spontaneous boners if he weren’t painfully hard already. But—so many strong, muscular arms. And—his cheeks warmed with fresh arousal—four fucking rows of thick, heavy pecs, each with their own pert, hard nipples. Most of all, this was Nick, a man he’d known was beautiful from the beginning, who’d made him hard as a rock long before that meant towering, twin boners… Now, in just one afternoon, his feelings for Nick had become so deep, he was pretty sure there was no bottom, no end to them, now or ever.

“Can’t take your eyes off of me, huh, Bren?” Nick said dolefully. Brendan looked up to see a lopsided smile on Nick’s beautiful face, as if Nick understood Brendan couldn’t help but be distracted by all of the deliberately excessive transmutes the app on his phone had given him in its last, desperate death-throes.

Brendan cursed himself. He was supposed to be focusing on Nick, not his body and what it did to Brendan’s already incandescent feelings for his old friend. He lifted up his right hands and slid both of them into the lush, shoulder-brushing lengths of Nick’s fast-growing, silky black hair. He returned Nick’s crooked smile. “Sorry, babe.” He bit his lip. “I know you’re frustrated.”

“It’s stupid, but it really feels like it’s my fault, all this stuff happening to everyone. Even you,” he added, glancing down at Brendan’s muscle-enhanced body and his huge, raging erections. “You just wanted to have coffee with me, and now look. One medium coffee, and you’re sucked into all of this.”

“Wouldn’t change a second of it,” Brendan said immediately. He bent for a long kiss, and Nick reciprocated eagerly, pulling Brendan’s long tongue into his mouth and sliding his own along it as they made out. Brendan’s heart was thumping when they finally separated. There was some kind of empathic connection between them now, because Brendan could feel deep inside him not only the heat and passion that Nick felt for him, but something deeper and even more powerful. It was in his eyes, too. Brendan gave him a soft smile, and Nick returned it.

Then Nick abruptly clambered to his feet. Brendan gazed up at him from his kneeling position, newly awed. For the first time he realized that, though Nick’s torso was much longer than before thanks to the extra pecs and abs, it wasn’t quite as out of proportion as he’d expected—Nick’s legs had lengthened some, too, though not as much as his upper body. Shit, though, those were some long, long legs. Brendan admired the beautiful mutant giant looming over him for a moment before standing up as well. Fuck, Brendan was a solid 6’2”, and he felt like Peter Dinklage next to Nick. He had to be upwards of 9 feet tall now, easy.

He looked up at Nick and saw the vexation creep back into Nick’s dark eyes. “I just wish I weren’t trapped down here,” Nick said. “I want to do something. Be out there, fixing this.”

Brendan was about to promise him that they’d be out there together, leading the fight, when a dark voice interrupted them. “You should be careful what you wish for,” it said.

Brendan looked out at the empty, mostly unlit music room in alarm. There, in the shadows at the the top of the stairs—not far from where Ethan had been, before he’d been pulled into all of this—there stood an indistinct silhouette, more a suggestion of a well-proportioned man than an actual, physical presence. A cold shiver slid down Brendan’s spine. This… this was not going to be good.

Nick seemed to instantly divine who it was taunting him. He stepped forward angrily, and—damn, even fury looked sexy on him, Brendan thought. “Noah Toller,” Nick said. “What the fuck do you want?”

Fuck. That guy, of course. Instinctively, Brendan moved to stand between Nick and the shadow, though it felt like as futile a gesture as anyone had ever made.

“What do I want?” the dark shape at the top of the stairs repeated rhetorically, as if seriously considering the question. The voice was a pleasant tenor, the tone reasonable and lucid. “Oh, lots of things. More and more, as time goes by. A couple of them… you can help me with.”

Nick raised his chin. “Unlikely,” he said.

Brendan looked back at the shadow for a reaction. What was that, anyway? A projection? A shroud? Where was Noah Toller, really? Had he been watching Nick this whole time? Maybe. Or maybe those emergency punitive transmutes had triggered alarms somewhere in Noah’s world, whether astral or electronic, and Noah had come to see what had become of his pet project.

Wherever he was, he seemed unfazed by Nick’s contempt. The shadow shifted, as if it might begin strolling about, declaiming as it did so, but it stayed in the same position, separated from them by the wide, tiered steps then ran up the middle aisle. “It’s a funny thing,” the Noah-shape said philosophically, as if musing aloud. “My powers. I discovered early that I can change things, and over time I grew to understand more and more just what that meant. Just what I was capable of.”

Brendan’s teeth clenched, his heart hammering in his chest. What the fuck was this guy going to do to Nick? He wanted to rush the guy and beat him to a pulp, but… even if Noah were physically present, could he really punch out a warlock? If he raised his fist, would it even have a chance to land before Noah turned him into a squid? Brendan had never felt more agonizingly powerless. All he could do was place himself between that thing and Nick, and hope that helped… somehow. Maybe if he shoots energy bolts from his fingers like the emperor in Star Wars, I can get in the way, he thought.

Only—Noah didn’t want Nick dead. On the contrary. He wanted Nick alive, augmented… and visible.

“I realized I can change everything about the physical nature of whatever I turn my mind to,” the Noah-shape was saying. “Every attribute and property. Shape. Mass. Quantity.” He paused for effect. “Location.”

Brendan turned to Nick, wide-eyed, even as his beautiful mutant giant vanished from the room.

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Seth Cameron was carrying his dinner back from the lines as carefully as he could, trying to avoid upending his burger and fries all over the art students he was passing as a bunch of muscle-shirted jocks jostled past him heading for the line (“They’ve still got the boneless wings, all right!”), when it happened. Just as he got past the art students’ table and into the big open space between the two main seating areas, a man just sort of appeared in the middle of the student caff, right there in front of him.

Only, it wasn’t just a man.

Seth lost his grip on his tray as his eyes went up, and up, and up. The man was a dark-maned, golden colossus, shining with raw, sexual potency and a seemingly irresistible allure. And he wasn’t just a regular guy scaled up, either, Seth realized in wonder. He’d been changed. Improved. A good part of his height came from thick, hard pecs stacked on top of each other. Pecs, and pecs, and pecs, and pecs, all of them with their own complement of four long, thickly muscled, impossibly beautiful arms. His luscious abs were stacked, too, Seth saw, his eyes raking back down the bare torso, and… holy fuckwads, how many huge, hard cocks did he have? The bulges in his pants were mostly just long, stiff, very thick bulges, but a few uncut cockheads peeked irrepressibly from the waistband of his low-slung chinos.

Seth could barely breathe. He lifted his gaze to the apparition’s gorgeous face, and suddenly it was as if he was lightning-struck. Every part of him was flushed and on fire with love and craving for this impossibly attractive, beyond-human miracle of balls-churning hypermasculinity.

Other trays had smashed to the ground with his. Other guys were moving toward the sexy giant, were standing up from their tables, were adjusting their sudden raging hard-ons like Seth was. Phones lifted, sending this marvel out into the world. Seth could barely notice. He was standing before the man, part of a knot of guys, a cluster, a crowd, looking up at him with itching hands and hungry lips.

Even as Seth reached a hand up toward that amazing, mouthwateringly misaligned eleven-pack, the miracle tried to step back, his dark eyes full of shock and alarm, but there was nowhere for him to go to—there were guys all around him, surrounding him in a thickening mob from all sides like sperm massing around an egg. Seth’s hand made contact with the warm, golden skin of his tight, chiseled abs, and Seth shuddered, his cock spasming in near-release. He hoped the towering man could feel the heat of his hand-print with all the feels that Seth was putting into it.

“I didn’t know anyone could be like you,” Seth said reverently.

One of the clean-cut jocks who’d been pushing past Seth before was somehow now next to him, his sleeveless red tee shirt showing off arms that seemed inconsequential next to the golden miracle’s many long, solid, perfect ones. But the jock was reaching higher than Seth, toward the lower rows of the huge man’s firm, heavy pecs. “Yes,” the jock was chanting, his voice quavering with lust. “Yes.”

“Please let us see everything,” someone pleaded from the other side of the sex-giant, and Seth’s heart sped up. He lifted his eyes to meet the giant’s again, wondering why they were so full of fear. Was he afraid they would not bring him pleasure? He shouldn’t be. They would bring him lots of pleasure. All of the pleasure there was.

“Yes, please,” Seth begged him earnestly. “Show us everything.”

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“Send me to him,” Brendan demanded, whirling to face the shadow-form at the top of the room. Nick could have been sent literally anywhere, and the terrifying truth was that Noah was his only chance of finding him.

“Please,” he added, reluctantly. Then: “He won’t do what you want from him if he thinks I’m in danger.”

“He’s already doing what I want from him,” the shape countered. “No volition required. It’s already done.”

“Send me to him,” Brendan insisted. “If you want any good will from him—”

“I will do as you ask,” the shadow-form broke in, placatingly. “I will send you to him. I believe in love, after all.” Then he added, “But you must do something for me.”

Brendan’s heart sank even further. What would he ask for? Could he comply with this warlock’s insidious demands? Then he felt it—a slab of metal in his right pocket. Hard and cold. A smartphone, not his, not there before.

It was vibrating.

And then the shadow was gone, and Brendan wasn’t in the music room anymore.

 

Part 17

Transmute secure autolog file PD_M004, summary. Subject: Brendan Modst. Age: 19. Height: 6’2”. Weight: 240 pounds. Hair: dark brown, very short. Eyes: dark blue. Birthplace: Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Social positioning: student, biochemistry major; swim team star. Transmutes, cumulative: 30 added pounds muscle; two 9”x6” cocks; four arms (normalized). Project link: strong emotional connection with subject zero, Nikolaj Berg (PD_B002).

Brendan gasped as he found himself in a different place. No longer was he in the dark, windowless music room, with its illusion of isolation. Instead he was in the vast, chilly expanse of the student caff, its two-story glass-paneled walls revealing the vivid red of the western sky as late afternoon faded into evening, while inside all was consumed in glaring fluorescent white and a meat-locker cool that seemed to harden the nipples even further on his bare, extra-muscled chest. Enticing aromas permeated the sprawling space—chicken wings, cajun fries, tilapia in lemon sauce, milky hot cocoa—but none of the crowd half-filling to the two main seating areas or loosely grouped up by the steaming serving trays seemed to be bothered with food at all.

All eyes, and not a few hands, were on the nine-foot golden-brown, jet-haired multi-pectoraled colossus who stood in the exact center of the room, a god watching as a willing cult slowly coalesced around him.

Nick was frozen, unable to act. This was the outcome they had dreaded and been working to prevent, and here it was, unaverted and irreversible. Nick, impossibly transformed and augmented, so changed as to be beyond mere accidental mutation, and so beautiful as to be almost literally irresistible, stood amidst a gathering of ordinary, mesmerized humans. Even Brendan, filled with concern and urgent dismay as was, felt the powerful pull of his lover’s allure as he took in Nick’s amazing form from across the room. His gaze drifted up across Nick’s heart-meltingly handsome features, and he found himself almost succumbing to the need to go to him, to touch him, to join his eager, awe-struck worshippers…

He cut his gaze away, letting out a slow breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Evening his heartbeat and ignoring his hefty, hot-headed hard-ons as best he could, he set about scanning the crowd, trying to assess the extent of the breach. There were maybe fifty or sixty people in the caff presently, all of them gaping at Nick, and as he looked them over he realized that Noah had, unexpectedly and unwittingly, given them a momentary advantage: Nick’s sudden arrival in the caff seconds before, combined with his uncanny physical form and facial beauty, had been so arresting, the uniform reaction ranged from trancelike staring to swarming close to him in compulsive body worship, that so far no one had enough working brain cells in play to actually pull out their phones and start livestreaming this masculine apparition to the world. That would change literally any second now, he knew, but Brandon knew he had been given a tiny window in which to press their advantage… if only he knew what to do with it.

Uncertain and on the verge of panic, Brendan let his eyes drift back to his augmented man. Nick seemed to feel his gaze and looked up, skewering his heart as their eyes met over the crowd around him. Nick smiled crookedly at him, and Brendan smiled back automatically, his skin heating in the cool caff air. His fat, incredibly hard cocks, meanwhile, were busy trying to burst through the flimsy denim of his fly, driven by a deep, unstoppable need and lust and… other feelings they hadn’t had a chance to explore.

He had to save him. But how?

He felt a buzzing in his pocket, and his heart dropped. As Nick watched in concern, as utterly unmindful as anyone could be of his teeming, murmuring circle of torso-groping admirers and the room full of gawking normals, Brendan reached into his pocket and slowly pulled out the phone that was not his. He looked at the push notification on his lock screen, knowing what it would tell him—that the Transmute app was about to escalate what was presently a simmering chaos into actual pandemonium. He swiped the screen open, hoping for some fluke of pure luck that could let him help his man.

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Transmute secure autolog file CF_S002, summary. Subject: Jeremiah Swift. Age: 36*. Height: 5’10”. Weight: 170 pounds. Hair: sandy brown, medium length. Eyes: violet. Birthplace: San Antonio, Texas. Social positioning: one-percenter. Transmutes, cumulative: unrecorded. Project link: ex-founding investor and patron, Cataract LLC. Recent activities unknown.

Jeremiah frowned at the ten-legged college boy in the close-fitting pizza delivery polo standing before him on the front doorstep of his cozy, secluded ranch-house, no pizza in sight. He hardened himself for the coming confrontation.

He’d known this day would come—the day Noah Toller would finally force him to become a part of his plan to gradually and clandestinely transform the whole of the human race. But he’d expected the wizard himself to come for him, not a wide-eyed whelp who’d transmuted himself to such an extreme he was beyond any ability to appear in public. Not to mention that he fairly reeked of pepperoni.

Jeremiah felt almost insulted.

He folded his arms defiantly over his perfect swimmer’s chest and fixed the boy with a gimlet eye. “Well?” he said. “Did he send you?”

Gratifyingly intimidated, Pepperoni Boy only nodded his head jerkily and held out an envelope he’d pulled from a back pocket of his ten-legged jeans. Jeremiah glanced at it but made no move to take it. It was an ordinary white business envelope, creased and a little battered, inscribed with his name and the address of the ranch but no other writing.

“I won’t be a part of it,” Jeremiah said firmly. He’d used the second of his unmonitored buyout Transmutes well: he was untraceable, magically or electronically. Even if Noah knew where he was out here, there was no way to affect him unless Noah came in person—and he had contingencies for that, too. “Remote-control trickery won’t work on me,” he told the boy, nodding to the envelope with his chin. “You tell him if he wants me, he’ll have to come here.”

The boy held out the envelope insistently. “Please, Mr. Swift,” he said. “I don’t think he can come here. I think he’s scared.”

Jeremiah scoffed. “That asshole? He’s not scared of anything.”

The boy stiffened at this, his Caribbean features hardening. Sparks of anger glinted in his dark eyes. “He’s not an asshole,” he hissed quietly.

Crickets croaked loudly around them in the empty twilight as Jeremiah silently considered the boy, the blood-red horizon behind him fading to black even as they stood there. Instinct was telling him to reassess. Noah might be capable of brainwashing his employees into adulation, but he didn’t think it was the man’s style. Bribery was more his way. Anyway, the boy’s reaction seemed more rooted in genuine affection—a crush, maybe.

He glanced back down at the envelope the boy was still holding out. Belatedly he registered that the handwriting was not Noah’s bold, aggressive cursive but a calm, even block-lettering he thought he recognized. He gave the pizza boy another, more careful once-over. The boy was very fit (but most folks in these parts were these days, thanks to the subtle effects of Noah’s creeping changes), with a lean and nicely muscled physique, long, limber arms, and cyclist’s legs that looked strong and graceful, even in bulk. The jeans had adjusted in quantity with them, hugging the thighs and hanging a little looser below. All of the feet were shod with the same neon-yellow tennis shoes—half lefts and half rights, it looked like.

The clothing mods felt recent, somehow. All of the shoes and pants legs were still identical to each other, not having had the chance to acquire incidental scuffs and wear to make them all distinct and separate. This had to be a clue… a clue that the situation wasn’t what he had been thinking it was. “How’d you get the legs?” he asked gruffly.

The boy swallowed. “This app,” he said. “It got onto my phone somehow.” He held Jeremiah’s gaze as he added, “It told me not to come here. It told me to turn around… or else…”

Well, shit. Jeremiah felt his mouth twist. Noah’s plans had changed—dramatically. Alarmingly, even. What that meant Jeremiah had no idea, but he didn’t know of anyone else in a position to stand in the man’s way.

The boy was now glaring at him, his expression all but demanding that Jeremiah climb off his high horse and take responsibility. A beat went past, then two. The smell of the tea he had steeping in the kitchen wafted tentatively past him—coconut chai, fully infused and ready to pour. Apollo’s balls, even his teapot was telling him not to be such a grouchy fuck.

Jeremiah let out a slow, silent breath, then reached out and took the envelope. “Got a name?” he said, eyes on the gently rumpled portent he’d just accepted. He’d sworn—sworn—he would not get involved again, not ever, and the mere act of asking for this boy’s moniker felt like blowing a hole in his own defensive walls. He cursed himself with a thousand names, but… well, the deed was done, and his priority now had to be assessing the new path that lay before him and act accordingly.

He looked up reluctantly. The ten-legged boy was eyeing him back, half wary, half hopeful. “My name’s Jimmy,” he said.

Of course it is, Jeremiah thought. But he wasn’t rude enough to say it, and the small smile he offered Jimmy felt strangely genuine. Maybe he had been holed up out here on the ranch for too long. “C’mon in,” he said, stepping back and gesturing his guest into the warm light of his home. “Let’s sort this out, you and me.”

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Transmute secure autolog file CL_W031, summary. Subject: Jayden Williams. Age: 28. Height: 6’4”. Weight: 185 pounds. Hair: black, short. Eyes: brown. Birthplace: New Brunswick, NJ. Social positioning: no significant known associations. Transmutes, cumulative: normality glamor immunity conditioning*; enhanced celebrity emulation (Alfred Enoch, normalized)*; permanent invisibility†. Project link: former head of logistics, Cataract LLC. Transmutes are a mix of employee perquisites (*) and disciplinary action (†). Whereabouts unknown.

Jayden was leaning against a wall in the locker room of Morry’s Gym, arms folded contentedly over his naked chest, when he heard his phone buzzing with notifications from the small backpack he’d tucked away unobtrusively in a nearby corner. He ignored it. If he was going to be forced to live his life as an ironically sexy invisible dude, he was sure as fuck going to enjoy the benefits of his unasked-for condition, and nobody was going to put a crimp in him trying to do just that.

The galling thing about it was that he knew Noah had chosen this particular punishment solely because the only Transmute he’d even asked for as part of his employee perquisite package was to get a hotness boost by emulating a certain Harry Potter alum who’d grown up fine (and it wasn’t Matthew Lewis). Now he couldn’t even enjoy looking good in the mirror, and all because he’d snooped into some deep-internal data algorithm files he had access to out of boredom and pure human curiosity. The invisibility penalty had probably been intended to be temporary, but Jayden had just walked away. Since then even Noah’s magic (which, after all, was transformational, not holistic) hadn’t been able to locate him.

They all probably thought he was far away by now, he thought with a crooked smile. They were probably sure that he hadn’t been inside Cataract or been in contact with anyone there in months—if they remembered him at all. Moronic assholes. One of these days he’d stick it to them but good… when the right plan presented itself.

His phone was buzzing again. An ill-tempered muscle-bear perched on one of the nearby benches lacing his shoes grimaced in irritation. “Somebody’s phone,” he snarled to the room. The nervous peach-skinned twink standing a few lockers down in his boxer-briefs who’d spent the last ten minutes trying not to watch the bear getting dressed shot the larger man a quick glance, then looked away again.

Jayden tsked to himself. Straightening from his slouch against the tiled wall, he moved over to the backpack and pulled the phone out of the far pocket, positioned where random folks like the bear and the twink wouldn’t see it momentarily levitating itself from its place. Once it was fully in his hand it shared his invisibility, like any movable object he was in direct physical contact with, and he stood again, checking his notifications.

As it turned out the texts, plural, were all from Calvin, his ex-work colleague and occasional fuckbuddy. They’d actually come a half an hour ago, while he’d been trolling the showers, so the push notifications were all just reminders rather than new, incoming texts.

He thumbed open the messaging app. “Need your help, bro,” his buddy had texted. “As you predicted Noah is going off the deep end. Forcing TMs onto innocents. Need the normality clicker before all hell breaks loose. Can you get it.” This was followed by a wink and six eggplants. Usually he signed off with three, so… maybe he’d gotten a promotion, or some other kind of upgrade. Interesting.

He considered the message and its reference to the so-called normality clicker. It was just a phone, he knew—an early-model Android, installed with a single app that could impose complete retroactive normalization on any Transmute. He’d seen it in the flesh, as it were, when the HR woman had used it on him to normalize his hunky older Dean Thomas swipe so that he’d “always” looked like the actor (and therefore had retroactively spent a lot of the early 2000s getting ribbed for his immense contributions over the eight Harry Potter movies his doppelgänger had appeared in, or not).

What the Cataract folks didn’t know was that he’d also seen a lot of things since that last “goodbye, I quit, and fuck you” he’d yelled on the way out of Noah’s office. Getting punished for snooping had only made him want to do it more, especially after what he’d seen in those files.

So. He knew where the clicker was. What he didn’t know was whether he’d be able to just… walk away with it. If Noah was escalating, as Calvin had indicated, he might have let his paranoia deepen a bit as well, in which case the Cataract facilities might not be as safe to prowl around in as they used to be.

On the other hand, Jayden’s unique assets were definitely what was needed to help stop Noah. And stopping Noah had a lot of personal appeal even without that crazy place he was apparently sliding into.

Deciding to wait to text Calvin back until he got the lay of the land, he slid the phone back into its pocket and grabbed the backpack firmly, bringing it into his invisibility, then hefted it onto his bare shoulder. On his way out of the locker room he smirked as he caught the bear frowning at that dark corner, his expression that of a man sure there’d been a backpack over there the last time he’d looked.

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Transmute secure autolog file PD_A021, summary. Subject: Filipe Almeida. Age: 20. Height: 5’9”. Weight: 195 pounds. Hair: black, curly, medium length. Eyes: blue. Birthplace: Porto, Portugal. Social positioning: student, civil engineering major; soccer team co-captain. Transmutes, cumulative: six arms (normalized). Project link: classmates with Nikolaj Berg (PD_B002). Has recently formed sexual/emotional connection with Chaz Westbrook (CL_W034).

“So I guessed you’re fucked, huh?” Filipe said. He was lying on his new lover, both of them covered in slowly drying cum, the satiation of multiple orgasms still buzzing through them. They were on the floor, one of the dorm beds having been upended and the other being rather too small for his conjoined giant of a lover, but Filipe, at least, didn’t mind. He had the best mattress in the world, though some of its parts were a lot harder than your average Posturepedic. He was bright-eyed and brash, like he always was after sex. It was the one thing girls tended to like about his mercurial personality, that he didn’t descend into torpor after cumming and actually wanted to talk. Not that he was able to get as far as post-coital confabs very often. For himself, he thought of it as a Filipe thing, like his temper and his killer hair-eyes-footballer-bod combo and the animal passion he exhibited on the pitch and in bed and in pretty much anything. Folks who couldn’t deal with Filipe as Filipe could get bent.

Both Chaz-faces were giving him a wry look and a raised Tom Hardy eyebrow. Filipe was pretty sure they had separate consciousnesses, based on the way they’d acted like twins, or clones, before they’d been half-merged into a single two-legged, double-torsoed nearly-eight-foot Scandinavian-blond muscle hunk. Maybe there was some overlap in their psyches, though. He was very curious to find out. “I mean about the computer you came ‘fix’,” Filipe clarified. “It dusted you pretty good.”

All three pairs of eyes turned toward the unassuming-looking laptop sitting pertly on the desk across the room. Filipe knew now it was dangerous and feral, like a carnivorous plant waiting to eat them if they got too close. The “punitive Transmute” the two Chaz twins had taken, merging them into one double-torsoed body, was clearly not the first one Chaz had been hit with—it was actually a relief to have an explanation for him having run into a two-bodied, double-monster-dicked, irresistibly handsome 7-foot-9 fucker with a must-touch, massively muscled body and tongues that got big and stiff like a dick without everyone on campus spending all day every day watching and filming and fucking them within an inch of their lives. Just his cocks—fuck, both of Chaz’s bodies sported ruddy, enormous twin dicks that had to be sixty centimeters long and as thick as Filipe’s forearm. They were leaky fuckers, too, and when they came it was like he was trying to pressure-paint the whole dorm room with his hot, smelly spunk.

Honestly, practically the only thing normal about them was the four arms both Chaz-torsos sported. He himself had six, extra-fine if he did say so and carefully developed over years of programmed gym work to be as strong and beautiful without being bulky as he could make them. He remembered always thinking it was pretty funny and characteristically wrong-headed of him, that with all the arms and hands he had it was football he was rabid about… though the folks in the stands did seem to enjoy watching him run around in his sleeveless jerseys, and he wasn’t averse to being roped into the occasional game of rugby or volleyball. He wasn’t bad at gymnastics, either, and the hands had come in, well, handy there a few times before someone’s mom had complained. They wouldn’t let him go out for boxing. Or wrestling, and not just because the twenty pounds from his extra arms threw off the weight classes.

So, yeah, it made sense that Chaz had only just gotten like this. Before, he was probably pretty normal—maybe just regular Tom Hardy, Filipe thought, grinning to himself. Lucky him—he got here just in time to claim the upgraded version.

They were still staring at the laptop. Maybe it was staring back. The camera light wasn’t on, but Filipe guessed these days that didn’t mean anything. “What we need,” he said shrewdly after a moment, “is a bazooka.”

The Chazzes chuckled, which felt nice underneath him. “You’d need to get your aim exactly right,” the top one observed. “It’s like a mountain lion now,” the bottom one agreed. “You can’t just injure it—you have to kill it.”

Filipe hmphed. He rested his head on the upper Chaz’s hairy chest. It was pleasantly raised at an include owing to front Chaz’s torso resting against back Chaz’s equally muscled frame, though the slightly stretched extra-tallness of their combined form mitigated this slightly. He kept his eye on the laptop, tasking his feverishly busy subconscious with finding a solution, just like he often did on the football pitch. “How’d you get mixed up in all of this, anyway?” he asked.

The Chazzes didn’t answer right away. “My college roommate,” front Chaz said at length. “He had this… ability. He could change things. It’s paranormal, not something you can explain, but it has rules and means of exploitation that are systematic and trackable.” He sighed, and the other Chaz continued, “I was a computer science major, so he brought me in as part of the team that was developing a means of harnessing this ability for a software app.”

Just like I thought—that proves he used to be one guy, Filipe mused. He nuzzled into the hairy chest, using a couple of his right hands to idly stroke Chaz’s shoulders and arms. “Ahh,” he said aloud. “So you ended up screwing yourself after all.”

Back Chaz cleared his throat guiltily. Perhaps there was more to Chaz’s involvement than being a share in developing the magic-harnessing kernel. “Betrayed is the word I would use,” front Chaz said. His body-mate added, “Noah always said we’d sell the app to people who wanted to use it for entertainment, and the changes would be small and normalized. There’s be another version geared toward medical transformations. Instead—” he trailed off, but upper Chaz finished, “It’s like he weaponized it.”

Filipe hummed again. He was already feeling like he didn’t want to get far from this transformed man, despite all the havoc that would be unleashed once he was seen in public. Filipe was troubled by this. He went his own way, normally—people were responsible for their own lives and their own shit, and he took that as a credo for his own life, too. But he was mixed up with the Chazzes’ shit now, and he couldn’t see himself wanting anything else. Heh, he thought, stupid Transmute fucked with my life, too, and it wasn’t even trying. “So how’d Nick end up with it?” he asked. He was gathering information, but also biding time. He could feel some possible solutions to the laptop problem percolating in the back of his head. He could find a way out for them, he was sure of it.

With a grunt the Chazzes sat up, carefully, and Filipe ended up unexpectedly being cradled in front Chaz’s four powerful arms. He stared up into those sea green eyes, caught up again in Chaz’s uncanny glamor, and realized he was hard again. He ignored it. “Long story,” front Chaz said. “From what I can gather, short version is he wanted a guinea pig, and he picked his boyfriend’s ex.”

“Vindictive, interesting,” Filipe said. That part, he could almost understand.

Chaz grunted. “Let’s say you and me, we go find a very hot shower and get some of this spunk off us, and then we’ll tackle—”

Filipe cut him off, eyes round. “Water!” That was the answer his brain had been working on. One of them, anyway.

From what Chaz had said, there was magic involved, but that magic was being leveraged by an ordinary computer running an ordinary app. And that meant it was a basic question of electronics. Namely, besides an EMP—and they had no way of producing one of those—what was the one thing no app, or CPU, could survive?

Fuck, this was it. He could feel his pulse quickening, and that wicked grin he got was already spreading across his face. He bet his eyes were even doing that shining thing that made people start to back away whenever he got fired up about something.

“What we need, my lovelies,” he went on, intense and excited, “is a bucket of fucking water.”

“Way ahead of you,” said a voice from the hallway.

 

Part 18

Transmute secure autolog file PD_B005, summary. Subject: Kevin Boyko. Age: 19. Height: 5’6”. Weight: 170 pounds. Hair: dirty blond, medium length. Eyes: brown. Birthplace: Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Social positioning: student, philosophy major (math minor); swim team. Transmutes, cumulative: two 8”x5” cocks; 10 added pounds of muscle; four arms (normalized); clairvoyance (undocumented, flagged for review). Project link: close friend/teammate of Brendan Modst (PD_M004).

Kevin felt unaccountably nervous as they hurried down the long ground-floor central corridor of the Music Building toward the rear stairs that led down to the converted chamber-music auditorium Henry and Ethan’s choir used a rehearsal space—and which the Nickspirators had commandeered as their headquarters. The building felt abandoned, not surprising for a Friday night with no major concerts in view, but hairs were prickling on Kevin’s forearms. And if there were anything to these “visions” he’d started having—two so far, both central to the Nickspiracy and, at the same time, so freighted with heavy-duty erotic content he was hard just thinking about them—he should maybe start trusting his gut, for everyone’s sake. He slowed, then stopped, the stairwell doors still fifty feet ahead of them.

He looked up at Ethan. The 6-foot-5 walking Marine recruiting poster was, as expected, frowning down at him, but in concern, not anger. “What is it?” he asked, his voice low and soothing. When this was over Kevin was definitely going to carve out time to go hear that choir perform. Especially if Ethan had any solos to show off that deep, honey-smooth voice.

He contemplated taking a second to drink in the lean, sandy-haired, four-armed hunk, still imposingly jacked even after losing dispersing sixty pounds of muscle to the rest of them… and that was without factoring in the two fourteen-by-eleven monster hardons he had erupting from his pants like he had to fight to get them soft every damn time. But that some gut feeling was telling him time was short. A nexus-point was approaching, he could feel it; and how that went would determine the weight of advantage between Noah’s schemes, on the one hand, and the freedom and autonomy of Nick and his friends, on the other.

The three Larrys and their wily tag-along basketball-playing friend, Ahmed, drew up and clustered around him. He wanted to tell them to back off. Being a fast-metabolism athlete who was also a bit on the short side had doomed him to years of being loomed over by taller, more muscular guys, but there were moments when the whole Nickspiracy, from his best bud Brendan on up, seemed like a conspiracy of redwoods and sequoias. Fuck, he was pretty sure the Larrys were a couple inches taller than Ethan. And Ahmed might be shorter than the redheaded trips… but each individual component of him, especially the legs, looked frickin’ endless. And the buns he’d glimpsed—geez, he definitely wanted to see that guy bareassed in a locker room sometime. Or a bedroom…

He took a breath. Focus, K.B. “Something’s changed,” he told the group slowly. “I feel like… like the rehearsal room…”

He let the thought trail off and looked up at the Larrys collectively. The green EXIT sign reflected back at him in their round, black-framed glasses. Their arms were around each other’s waists, as if they needed to touch each other, with Ahmed just to the side, content to be a spectator for the moment, ready to claim any or all of them as he wished. “Would Noah come here, do you think?” Kevin asked.

The Larrys frowned, not quite in sync. Each of them started to speak, then faltered awkwardly, not wanting to talk over each other. The outer two turned to the one on the middle, as though they were developing a protocol on the fly for which among them should act as spokesman. It was kind of fascinating to watch.

Kevin wondered how long they’d been triplets. Not long, probably. Maybe he’d have a vision about it, he thought with a smirk. Or—could he direct a vision, pointing it toward a particular place, or even a particular time? How much control did he have?

A shiver ran up his spine. Yes, that. His instincts were telling him, very loudly, that this was exactly the right question to ask.

“I would have said no, last week,” the middle Larry was telling him. “He spends all his time with the dev teams or—there’s other projects we aren’t read into. And the rest of his time is with Josh. Now, though—” He paused thoughtfully. “I’ve seen him show up unexpectedly for big tests. He’s big on seeing his projects become reality at the—” He cleared his throat. “—climactic moment.”

Kevin nodded. That meshed with his feeling that time was short. “If he’s here—” Ethan said apprehensively. Kevin understood—he didn’t feel ready to come face-to-face with their nemesis, not yet.

Ethan peered down at Kevin. “Can you control your visions? Can you see what’s going on down there?”

Kevin smiled at him. “Funny you should ask!”

“Visions?” Ahmed repeated, intrigued.

“Kevin had a vision earlier—” Ethan began.

“Two, actually,” Kevin broke in. He looked at their four new friends. “The last one led us to you guys.”

Ahmed rubbed his chin. “Cool,” he said, looking around at the tripled Larry and the double-hung Ethan and Kevin. “So it’s not just physical changes.”

Ethan and Kevin exchanged a look. Kevin hadn’t quite made the connection that his second sight might be some kind of special Transmute, though one unlike the others. It was obvious in retrospect—as was the possibility that it was unlike the others because it was not part of the same master plan as the visible bodily mutations of Nick and his friends, and might have another origin and purpose entirely.

Hurry, bonehead.

Right, right.

Kevin closed his eyes and tried to replicate the feeling he’d had during the last two visions. For a moment, nothing happened. He cleared his mind and focused harder. There had been a sense of partial weightlessness, he remembered, like he was floating, a phantasm of himself liberated from the tyranny of a gravity that rooted him not only space but also in time. He felt himself move, but not in any physical direction, and then he was there, suspended in unreality, unmoored and with the whole of spacetime in all directions.

If he had control

He tried imagining his floating having direction and purpose. At first his literal mind pictured his ghostly form equipped with rocket boots and jet packs, but he was too aware of how difficult it would be to navigate such devices in real life and in seconds he was careening out of control, flailing ridiculously through the universe like that one guy in the red super-suit in that old show, the one where he didn’t know how to fly it because he’d lost the instructions. That’s not helpful, he thought sourly.

Scrubbing that image in frustration, he tried again. Concentrating on his own self-image floating in the netherspace between worlds, he formed a smooth, ultra-thin transparent sci-fi-esque sphere around himself and just… willed it to be the kind of rock-solid, mentally-connective tech that responded directly to his own clearly-expressed mental directives. As soon as it was fully in place, humming almost imperceptibly around him in readiness, its surface elegantly marked with subtly curving, nearly invisible branching lines like neurocircuits, he knew he could count on this bubble he’d created to take him wherever he needed to go, and gave it no further thought.

He directed the sphere to return him to where his physical body now stood. He watched himself for a second from a point near the ceiling a few feet away, indulging in the unexpected opportunity to have an out-of-body experience. He did look small, surrounded by five big-and-tall lummoxes like that—but he could also see that that ten pounds of muscle Ethan had sent his way had done him a real solid, looks-wise. He looked pretty damn hot, honestly, especially shirtless and lit from above so the shadows cut his abs and the sculpted planes of his four swimmer’s arms. And of course the bulge in his pants was literally double the size he was used to…

Okay, K.B., he chided himself smugly. Enough narcissism. Even apart from his sense that there was a need for haste, modeling this… active clairvoyance like he was took a considerable amount of effort and concentration, and he knew he wouldn’t be able keep it up for long. It also felt disturbingly good, like the soft thrumming of his astral transport bubble was low-key massaging every pleasure center in his being, not just on the surface but deep down in the inner recesses of his being. Just being in the between-world was subtly erotic and distracting. Every second here was a muted but real enticement to succumb to the kind of sexual delectations one could literally only experience in dreams.

Maybe he could bring someone here. He thought of Ethan, big, beautiful, soothing Ethan, here in the bubble with him, embracing, caressing, fucking—

He shoved the image away, too tempted by it to be gentle. This was like a meet, he told himself—no room in his head for anything else. Steeling his mental self for the task at hand, he pushed his bubble through the floor and into the lower levels.

Before long he found himself being drawn toward the rehearsal room, whether because it was a known place or because Important Things had happened or would happen there. He sped in that direction, stomach fluttering in fear and anticipation.

Seconds later he broached the side wall near the stage. The room was dark, as before, and mostly empty. In fact he was puzzled to see Brendan standing there alone, looking distressed and glaring up into the gloom-shrouded rows of seats above. Kevin knew that Nick was supposed to be here, too—that was the whole point, for him to stay out of sight while the other teams went out on their various missions. So where was Nick?

Brendan seemed to be responding to Kevin’s thought. “Send me to him,” he was saying. “If you want any good will from him—”

“I will do as you ask,” a voice broke in. Kevin whipped around to see an indistinct, man-shaped shadow standing at the top of the stairs—a suggestion of a well-proportioned man more than an actual, physical presence, he thought. “I will send you to him. I believe in love, after all.” Then the shadow added, “But you must do something for me.”

Brendan’s face registered alarm, then in rapid succession both the shadow-figure and Brendan vanished.

Now alone in the dark rehearsal room, Kevin fought to control his panic. Instinct told him he could follow either of them—his ability let him trace the four-dimensional life-contours of any person he could locate, as he phrased it to himself later, though at the time he had only half-formed shapes and impressions of what was possible and what was not.

None of that helped him decide what to do.

He tried to think as rationally as he could, as if this were all equations and probabilities. He wanted to follow the shadow, if only because it represented the danger he and the Nickspirators were trying to end; but if that was Noah, as his instincts had been telling him since they’d first entered the Music Building, then following the climax-loving dark wizard might only get him to where he and the others needed to be at the critical juncture, too late to act.

No. He needed to be where Nick was, and—if Brendan’s “send me to him” meant what it obviously did—that meant following Brendan to Nick’s side. He told the pleasure-making astral bubble to follow Brendan, hoping there was something he, Ethan, and the others could do.

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Jeremiah frowned at the pages of scrawl-covered college-ruled paper his new young friend had delivered, leaning an elbow on his writing desk and chewing a thumbnail thoughtfully.

“What’s wrong?” Jimmy asked from the couch next to him. Jeremiah glanced over at him. He was squirming a little on Jeremiah’s couch, and not just because the furniture in this room was more formal than functional. In an effort to determine the best way to sit now that he had been so massively multiplied lower-limb-wise he’d spread his legs apart as best he could so that they could fall between each other, almost as though he were trying to start a huge braid from strands of jeans-leg denim; but he still ended up with more than one layer of legs and neon tennis shoes tangling everywhere. He was also taking up pretty much the whole sofa.

Jimmy’s dogpile of legs struck Jeremiah as intriguingly apt. Until tonight he’d been cynical and grumpy about Noah’s ambitions because he’d resented the burden of doing anything about it falling solely to him, as the man who’d enabled Noah’s plans in the first place and still held most of his secrets. Rebellion against this onus had been as much a part of his removing himself to his grandmother’s ranch as a need to get off the grid. Now, though, he realized that such a perspective was not only myopic but egocentric. Beyond the startling specifics of Noah’s new plan, as much as Josh knew them, the main burden of Josh’s missive was that there was a ready-made army in a position to act against Noah—the wizard’s own victims. All Jeremiah had to do was use the access he had to the app’s own fundamental processes and network to push the right tool into the right hands.

Jimmy was still eyeing him with concern. All at once Jeremiah felt a dangerous smile creep across his face, sending Jimmy’s brows into his hairline. There was a failsafe that Noah himself had built into the algorithms during testing—an open-ended Transmute override designed to let a target redirect a change that was anticipated not to go well. If he could find the right user currently linked to the app to implement it, and the right words to twist that failsafe into a means of empowering the user in question, that could just go a long way in evening the odds against Noah. He couldn’t make it too obvious—anything that wasn’t a choice of some kind and within the limits of the existing app extended-change-array would trigger review even if it was possible to implement. Thinking about the “army” Josh had mentioned, and with the visual reminder of Jimmy’s battalion of legs, Jeremiah already had some ideas about that.

He nodded toward a laptop case he’d dumped in the wooden magazine corral next to the couch. That one had the network tracking software on it—exactly what they needed. “Grab that and open it up,” he told Jimmy, who blinked and then quickly complied. Jeremiah, meanwhile, turned and switched on his desktop iMac. From here, he could reprogram the failsafe and push the override onto any device with the Transmute app. He rubbed his hands as his dev software loaded, his brain sparking with ideas. “Let’s take this fight to the next level,” he said.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Transmute secure autolog file CL_P037, summary. Subject: Calvin Park. Age: 24. Height: 6’3”. Weight: 215 pounds. Hair: black, long. Eyes: brown. Birthplace: Busan, South Korea. Social positioning: active in three major gamer leagues. Twitch followers: 1.3 million. Transmutes, cumulative: normality glamor immunity conditioning*; enhanced celebrity emulation (Wi Ha-joon, normalized)*; 5 added inches in height with proportionate upsize (normalized)*; six 13”x9” cocks*†; 10 added pounds of muscle†; four arms (normalized)†. Project link: head of quality control, Cataract LLC. Transmutes are a mix of employee perquisites (*) and accidental induction (†). Has recently formed sexual/emotional connection with Zack Cavanaugh (PD_C003) and Henry St. Croix (PD_S006).

Calvin gaped at the massive double-torsoed vision sitting quietly in the midst of the upturned, cum-painted dorm room, presently cuddling a much smaller-looking but impossible-to-ignore muscle cutie. “Ch-chaz? Is that you?” he asked incredulously. The last time he’d seen his buddy had been that morning, when Chaz had volunteered to undo his own installation of the Transmute app on Nick’s machine after they’d uncovered evidence of Noah’s tampering with the code to force huge, visible transformations on people, and then he’d looked like he’d “always” looked: a lanky, hard-bodied, shirt-allergic Nordic basketball prodigy you wanted to just lick up and down all weekend long, maybe while ensconced in a snowed-in ski chalet in front of a roaring fire. This guy, though, with the two Tom Hardy faces, the tawny skin and dark hair, the brawn of a fuzzy Hercules, the compelling beauty of an Adonis—

Fuck, he really, really wanted to kiss him, hard. Both of him. And feel him, all over. Hands on every inch he could cover—that was why he had four arms, for groping guys like him. And maybe do that all-weekend licking thing, too, despite the level-up in body hair. Calvin’s feet actually tried to move toward the man of their own accord, his four hands flexing on the handles of two five-gallon paint-mixing buckets he’d brought with him from the Music Building closet, now filled with water from the dorm showers down the hall. The fact that Calvin recognized this feeling as a Transmute effect, just as he had with Zack, didn’t lessen its pull any more than it had then, though it did annoy him. He was starting to see the choice-robbing nature of Transmutes in a particularly dark light—a sign that for all that a lot of Noah’s changes were sexy and fun, his plans for humanity were more Xehanort than Yen Sid.

The reminder of his encounter with Zack and Henry, however, did help him regain his mental footing. Zack and Henry, he coached himself urgently. Think of Zack and Henry. They’re the ones you kiss and touch. Emotionally he recentered on the men he was already committed to, and Calvin stood his ground, proud if crazily aroused.

The strange figure double-smiled at him in a way that was, despite the new faces, reassuringly, if uncannily, familiar. “Hey, Cal,” he said in stereo. Front Chaz was looking Calvin up and down, perhaps registering the extra muscle and cock he’d gained since Chaz had seen him last. He also hadn’t missed the water buckets, either. The Mediterraneo muscle cutie Chaz was canoodling was eyeing the buckets as well, eyes flinty and alert.

The explanation for Chaz’s extreme condition was pretty obvious, especially given his prior mission. “Punitive Transmutes?” Calvin guessed.

Front Chaz nodded glumly. “It’s still live, man, sorry.”

Back Chaz, meanwhile, was showing off their new facility for multitasking by checking out Calvin’s little posse, though his gaze seemed focused somewhat south of their actual faces. “Who’re your friends?” he asked, not without a layer of smarm. “This is Filipe, by the way,” he added belatedly. “He sort of… stumbled in on the op.”

“Hey,” Filipe said crisply. He seemed ready to skip the amenities and get the game started.

Even so, Calvin was about to quickly explain who his hunky bookends were—Zack being a close-talker and Henry having his stretchy tongue-boner thing meant he’d kind of resigned himself to being the one who did the vocal interaction for the three of them—but front Chaz spoke before he could. “Wait, we know them from the briefing,” he said. He nodded toward Zack. “That’s Nick’s roommate, Zack.” Zack waved hello, and Calvin could see his pull exerting itself on Filipe, though he remained where he was in Chaz’s arms, his single dick twitching with helpless desire. “And that’s the friend from down the hall,” front Chaz added, turning his head to take in the lanky, equally quiet one on Calvin’s other side.

“Henry,” Calvin confirmed. Henry silently nodded hello.

Back Chaz finally looked up at their faces and grinned. “Oh yeah,” he said, unabashed.

Henry had responded to Calvin’s saying his name by sliding a hand along Calvin’s back, sparking an urge to ditch this mission and start making out with his guys, preferably with the goal of producing some serious quantities of sperm to add to the gallons of it already covering most of Nick and Zack’s room. The smell of sex and the pull of beautiful, augmented men was almost unendurable. Fuck, he was turned on right now! There was way too much high-intensity Transmute beef and beauty and cock in this room for anyone to deal with. With great reluctance he quashed the impulse and turned his attention to the laptop across the room, its black featureless screen belying its menace. Behind it, the dorm’s wide, unsegmented window showed a quiet campus shrouded in shadow.

Filipe leapt abruptly out of Chaz’s arms, panting his bare feet on an open spot between Calvin and the Chazzes with catlike agility. “We doing the computer drowning thing or what?” he asked, full of challenge. He stood with his chiseled arms akimbo, all six fists planted on his slim, sepia-brown waist like a naked, multilimbed, boner-popping superhero… or maybe a young corporate CEO on a retreat inspiring his team with his raw, athletic fearlessness and charisma. The six monster-hard-ons pushing past Calvin’s waistband struggled to get bigger and harder out of simple admiration.

Calvin could feel Zack and Henry looking his way in concern, knowing what was to come, but they’d already talked out the plan on the way over. He kept his eyes on Filipe’s. “Yes,” he said. “Let’s do this.”

He squared his shoulders, but Filipe moved in front of him. “Let me,” he said.

Calvin shook his head. “It’s my responsibility,” he started, just as he had with Zack and Henry.

“Bullshit,” Filipe cut in. “It’s that wizard’s responsibility. You guys got duped, just like this Nick guy and all the rest.” He spread his six very fine arms confidently. “Anyway, I’ve got skills, I haven’t been changed yet—” Calvin started to speak, then snapped his mouth shut with an audible click. Filipe carried on, not noticing. “—and I have some ideas, too.” He glanced briefly over his augmented shoulder at the laptop. “What’s the range on that thing, anyway?”

“Three feet,” Calvin and both Chazzes said at the same time. The Chazzes had now stood as well and were moving to lean against the far wall so as to be sure to be out of the way once the action started.

Filipe nodded. Wary of the three-foot radius from the computer, he moved past Calvin to the closet built into the side wall of the room to Calvin’s right. Reaching into one side of the closet with all six hands he quickly dumped all the hanging shirts and their hangers onto the closet floor, then, with a quick wrench, he pulled free the four-foot metal rod and exhibited it for his audience.

“Nice,” Calvin said. “Good thinking.”

“Set one of the buckets down there,” Filipe said, nodding to an open spot on the floor on a direct line between Calvin and the malevolence-corrupted laptop. Calvin did so, setting the other bucket to one side next to the wall to the left of the door.

“Be careful,” he said. “If it does an emergency punitive transmute, there’ll be no countdown. You won’t be able to get out of the way.”

“Got it,” Filipe said. He was already crouching down and using the pole to clear the twisted-up blanket and the overturned desk lamp that stood in the bucket’s path out of the way. Once he’d pushed these obstacles to once side, he repositioned himself directly at an angle the bucket and started using the pole to drive it sideways across the industrial vinyl flooring toward the desk and their ultimate target, the laptop. Zack and Henry held Calvin close from either side, watching intently with him as Filipe worked.

For the final few inches, Filipe squatted directly behind the bucket and pushed it forward. It took him a few tries to find exactly the right angle to use to overcome the water’s inertia and exert steady forward pressure on the bucket, and a couple of imperfections in the flooring caused snags and sloshing that made everyone anxious; but it wasn’t long before the bucket was in position directly in front of the desk. They were one laptop-dunk away from success.

Letting out a steadying breath, Filipe stood. Edging as close as he dared to the app’s perimeter, he took a firm grip on the pole with two right hands and carefully extended it toward the laptop.

“You going to try to tip it in with the pole?” Calvin asked nervously. He wasn’t sure that was a good plan.

Filipe shook his head, evidently agreeing with Calvin’s assessment. “Too chancy,” he said. “But we can improve the odds of getting it in smoothly.” Resting the tip of the pole on the laptop’s lid, in a single motion he snapped it downward, closing the laptop.

“That won’t stop the app,” one of the Chazzes warned from where they were observing events across the room. He spoke as if knew Filipe would likely have guessed this already, but wanted to make sure it was on the record just in case.

“I figured,” Filipe said, keeping his eyes on the laptop as he handed the pole to Calvin. Then he turned to the others with a feral smile. “But it will make it easier to dunk.”

Calvin found himself smiling at his new teammate and his balls of steel. “You don’t have—” he started to say, but Felipe closed the space between them and kissed him, briefly but thoroughly. “Shut the fuck up,” he whispered, meeting Calvin’s gaze.

This close Zack was probably literally irresistible, thanks to the attraction Transmute being layered on top of his already angelic beauty, and Filipe was clear not one to resist such a pull. Smirking, he shamelessly kissed Nick’s roommate as well, sliding his hands down the man’s bare arms and chest. When they separated, Zack smiled and said softly, “Good luck.” Filipe winked, then turned and snogged Henry just as completely. When they broke the kiss Henry’s protruding, telltale red tongue-boner was signaling his amped-up arousal, and once again Calvin had to ruthlessly suppress an itch to set aside the app and the mission for a few hours of mutual pleasure with his guys, the Chazzes, and their new friend.

As Filipe stepped back, Calvin admired his now eight-armed physique with a throb of his wet-headed, oversized cocks. Intriguingly, it turned out that six arms seemed to be the limit per shoulder, as the Transmute had gone ahead and reshaped his torso to sport two stacked sets of firm, hard pecs, each with two arms on either side. Calvin amused himself musing that in this state Filipe could pile on four more of those sexy arms before he got bumped up to a third set of pecs…

The whole thing with the arms was one of the more world-intrusive of the Transmutes he’d seen so far. Calvin had noticed from direct observation that you could only get extra arms once from Zack—which made sense—but that still meant that a lot of people were running around with four arms now, thanks to having met (and, therefore, kissed and caressed) this sweet, unassuming hottie beside him, Calvin included. What he hadn’t realized was, it also seemed that the one-set-of-extra-arms-per-arm-giver limit didn’t stop you getting the extra arms again from someone else with the same Transmute that Zack had gotten. The complement of arm-givers clearly now included both of the Chazzes, presumably thanks to Chaz’s punitive Transmutes. Thus, the six arms Filipe had had when they’d arrived. With the two more he’d just gotten from Zack, Filipe had to hold the title for most arms added in a single day from someone else’s Transmutes.

Not that anyone but Calvin, with his normality glamor immunity conditioning, would even know Filipe had been piling on the arms today. As far as Filipe and everyone else in the world was concerned, apart from Noah, Calvin, and one or three others, as of sixty seconds ago their brazen, super-athletic new friend with the fiery eyes and the sexy Portuguese accent had always been an eight-armed boy since the day he was born, and no one had ever thought it was anything but totally normal and unremarkable.

His eyes flicked to the Chazzes, and his heartbeat spiked as he felt the pull to go them again. They had that magnetic allure that Zack had, and they had the arm-giving gift. If he went to them, he’d walk away a perfectly normalized eight-armed, 6-foot-3, six-dicked version of a certain extra-dreamy kdrama hunk… instead of the four-armed edition of same he was now.

Did he want that, though? He liked his current complement of limbs. It already felt right and balanced, and sexy as fuck in the mirror and when he was using them to hold his guys close. Or to grope their butts, like he was now.

It was unexpectedly thrilling to have the choice. And? Oddly satisfying to say “no.” He’d keep his four arms, thank you. Which just meant staying away from Chaz until the time limit on his arm-giving Transmute wore off.

He slid his arms around Zack and Henry’s strong torsos and smiled, letting his mess-making cocks pump out a bit more pre all over each other. Keeping his distance from Chaz wouldn’t be much of a hardship.

The watched with bated breath as Filipe, looking just slightly top-heavy with his octet of lean, corded arms, first cleared and then crawled on top of the wide dresser that sat next to Nick’s desk. He seemed to be calculating the most efficient move necessary to slide the laptop into the bucket. The main difficulty as Calvin saw it was that it needed to go in end first, which mean turning the device first before dunking it.

Filipe seemed to coil his energy, preparing to spring. All at once he leapt and twisted into a four-palmed handstand on the desk directly behind the closed laptop. Deftly using his feet to steady himself against the window behind him, Filipe used his remaining four hands to grab the laptop, turn it, and shove it down into the water.

The device hit the side of the bucket first, with enough force that the bucket sloshed and almost tipped over. Calvin, his heart in his throat, realized too late he could have been using the pole Filipe had handed him to steady the bucket from a distance, to guard against this very eventuality. But then the bucket righted itself, and the laptop slid fatally into the water, its existence and existence of all its contents, good and malicious, ended forever. Calvin let out a breath. He sure hoped Nick had all his papers saved on the cloud somewhere. He might have imagined the agonized zzt! of the electronics insta-drowning, he wasn’t sure, but it was very satisfying either way.

Filipe pushed off the window (leaving behind an amusingly inexplicable set of footprints) and, vaulting to his feet in front of the desk, stuck the landing and spread his arms wide for his audience. “Ta-da,” he crooned. Calvin, the Chazzes, Zack, and Henry all clapped and whistled their approval, and Felipe bowed magnanimously to his fans. “See?” he added to Calvin with a smirk as the applause ended. “Easy-peasy, and no pesky emergency punitive whatevers.”

Calvin just bit his lip and said nothing, instead looking pointedly down at Filipe’s chest. “What?” Filipe said. He glanced around at the others, but they were all staring at his upper torso as well—the Chazzes with great intensity.

Finally, Filipe looked down and saw what had grabbed everyone’s attention. All four of his hard soccer-boy pecs now had eight-inch, leaky, uncut cocks protruding straight from where the nipples should be—exact dupes of the original uncut eight-incher he had shoving plumb horizontally out from the usual place below. That wasn’t all, though, because immediately under each of these four chest cocks was… another one exactly like it. “Oh, shit,” he murmured, more in surprise than dismay.

Then he looked up and gave them all a suitably cocky grin. “Oh, well,” he said.

The Chazzes were already moving toward him. “Oh, well,” they repeated, an octave lower and in stereo. It sounded almost like a growl.

Calvin turned to the two men in his arms and let out a breath. “Stage two complete,” he said, his attention snagging on Zack’s pretty hazel eyes.

“We should report back,” Zack said in his soft, intimate voice, though he said it with a smile that seemed a little too knowing. Henry, too, was smirking around his protruding tongue-boner, his hand sliding up Calvin’s hairless, muscular chest. The distant scent of his subtly spicy after-shave mixed nicely with Zack’s natural hint of cinnamon and vanilla.

“We should,” Calvin agreed, before bringing their three mouths together and starting the deep, furious kiss session he’d been waiting at least an hour for.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Brendan stared at his screen. The Transmute he’d been given was of the Green Goblin sadistic choice variety: Transmute himself to copy Nick’s level of surreal inhumanity, making another spectacle to breed change outward from… or sow smaller, random changes through everyone present in a hundred-foot radius. Brendan knew he had to choose the first one—and the idea of being like Nick, of Nick not having to be alone in his superfreakdom, struck him as a gift as much as a curse. But his thumb hesitated over the button, and the countdown filled his vision. 3… 2…

The screen on his phone jumped infinitesimally, and then the Transmute, inexplicably, changed into a completely different Transmute. The top bar now read “External Override”, and underneath that was a series of codes in small, faint type with bits like “failsafe” and “CF_S002” and “Codename Warlock”. The app screen had never looked like that before. Was it possible the app had been hacked, and, if so, by whom?

The query text was no longer the diabolical dilemma he’d the app had been trying to shove onto him, either. “Transmute is about to give you a means of taking action,” it read instead. “Out of all of the persons associated with the Transmute app, whose changes and abilities do you need right now?” That was strange—beyond strange, Brendan thought. The countdown was next as usual, already started but counting down from 10 this time—a bizarre luxury by comparison to the usual Transmute countdowns—but below that, uniquely for any Transmute he’d seen or heard of, was a textbox for him to input something—a name, presumably.

Brendan stared at the wording of the question. It was so weird it had to be a clue. “Changes and abilities”—usually the app stuck to the word “Transmute” or the specific change being contemplated (“double your cock,” that kind of thing). He thought again about Nick—he did want to have all of Nick’s changes, just so Nick wasn’t the only one. But “abilities”—did that mean, like the strength that came from having tons of muscle, or—

7… 6…

He thought furiously, trying to figure out his choice. Kevin seemed to have a different kind of abilities, he realized suddenly. That vision thing—how would that help, though? But then it seemed to hit him, almost literally, his stomach falling like he was dropping down the descent on a rollercoaster. It was right there in front of him. Checking that the countdown was still going he typed in a short, four-letter name… just in time for the screen to go completely blank.

Something kindled in Brendan’s chest. He looked up to meet the eyes of his transformed man. They were forlorn, pleading. The men around him were worshipping his body, and soon they’d be doing more than that—the only thing that had kept Nick’s pants on, he guessed, was the fact that the zombie-like adulation he’d induced in the crowd was devoid of any rush or stress or any design at all but admiration expressed through hands and faces and tongues.

The crowd watching from the tables, though, while still stunted by Nick’s mesmeric effect was more active than the entranced inner circle of admirers. A couple had pulled out their phones and were lifting them up in the universal gesture of “I have to film this.”

“I realized I can change everything about the physical nature of whatever I turn my mind to,” the shadow had said. “Every attribute and property. Shape. Mass. Quantity.” He paused for effect. “Location.”

He met Nick’s gaze. He didn’t know how to undo all of this—not yet. But there was one thing he could do, something that felt basic and instinctive and ready to hand. He smiled a small smile. “Come with me,” he whispered, and then… they were gone.

Gone. They were just gone, from the Caff, maybe from the world, leaving the crowd of dazed and very aroused hotties suddenly groping at air, wondering what the hell they had all just imagined.

18 parts 70k words (#42) Added May 2013 Updated 16 Jul 2022 117k views (#20) 4.7 stars (39 votes)

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