SLOTH.LAND

Being Brittany Slide's partner was sometimes tough for Lawn Rotelli. It was the height thing. Walking the beat with her every night, it's hard for him to feel imposing next to the six-foot white tigress—it would be hard for anyone, let alone the three-foot ferret; her regular morning workout, 45 minutes of cardio and heavy lifting never missed once in the eight years she's been on the force, have paid off in a lean, muscular body more than capable of doing all of the door-kicking and suspect-roughening it takes to be a NACRE agent. So Lawn and Brittany have a good-cop bad-cop thing going, which suits the generally unthreatening ferret. He also liked to think of himself as the brains of the duo, although that creates the incorrect impression that Brittany is dumb. She's not, by any means, although it might be accurate to say that Lawn was the more observant of the pair, the one to point out "Well hey Britt, isn't this ink on this guy's hands?" during a routine questioning, and sure enough, he's the one with the printing press in the basement running off all those subversive pamphlets. Together, the two might be the most effective detectives in NACRE (Nova Archangel Citizens' Revolutionary Enforcement).

On this particular evening, Lawn Rotelli and Brittany Slide are sitting at their desk in the squad's office, which is covered in the detritus of their job—file folders, endless notes on cases, grainy black-and-white pictures clipped to the rap sheets of Persons of Interest, dulled green pencils, coffee in dissolving paper cups leaving brown ringlets on the wood, day-old copies of The Truth (the official and only newspaper, all carrying the same front-page stories about the new andradite processing plant firing up this week…)

It's late. Lawn and Brittany are the last ones in the office; overhead fluorescent lamps cast triangles of harsh, buzzing white light down out of the indeterminately high blackness above. From out of the darkness a monotone voice drones on and on—it's station NACL with a news report about the very person our detectives are puzzling over.

"…citizens to stay in after nightfall, but please rest assured that NACRE has already identified the criminal known as the Chirurgeon and will be apprehending him in the near future; he will assuredly be brought to justice for his crimes against the nation's citizens, specifically those of the city of Nova Archangel, and for his treacherous anti-Party actions. Please stay tuned to Nova Archangel Citizens' Listening for more information…"

Lawn sighs unhappily and the powerful white tigress, sitting with her arms crossed, snorts. They both know it's a crock of shit. They're no closer to solving this case than they were last week, when Chief Vandergroov was stomping up and down the office's aisles, trying to literally scare up new leads, roaring at the tired officers about just how far up his ass the People's Central Party was about this case. Well. It's been a month since the Chirurgeon struck for the first time, six days since he got Vandergroov, and now—he's due…

It was a month ago that the provost of Nova Archangel University phoned in to report vandals had broken into the observatory and locked out the faculty. NACRE dispatched a cadet and a locksmith in a motorcar, who nervously phoned in 30 minutes later to insist on backup, and that a Party official would probably want to see this, too.

Inside the grand dome of the observatory, lit warmly by the afternoon sun streaming in through the enormous, empty roof window (the telescope lowered for cleaning) floated Cordelia Brinns-Cadwell, the Party's very own Secretary of Agriculture, bloated to an unbelievable degree. Cordelia, a pig, was inflated like a giant pink balloon.

Secretary Brinns-Cadwell wasn't a bad-looking pig. She's avoided the artificial, formaldehyde-preserved look you sometimes see in women of her age that try to hold on to their beauty for too long past the freshness date—oh, there are tiny crow's feet around her narrow eyes, and her young housemaids gossip that she dyes her wavy hair that lemonade-yellow, but who among them wouldn't inform on any of the others just for a chance to look that good? The Secretary of Agriculture was like a movie star when she appeared in fuzzy phosphor white and black on the evening news, everyone lighting up when they saw her retroussé porcine nose and warm smile—it was always good news she had, times of plenty, lower food prices, while her many gray-faced subordinates were the ones that delivered news about shortages (with unhappily greater frequency).

Four ropes tied her down, each attached to one of her limbs, her arms and legs not distended nearly as much as her round, smooth body but still lumpy with pressure, ankles swollen around hooves, palms pushed outwards into round balls with perfectly straight digits sticking out—yet her curlicue tail all the way at her back retained its helicity. Totally naked, her breasts were giant circular mounds on her chest eight or nine feet across, capped with big, rigidly erect nipples.

The cadet was too freaked out to go back in and the locksmith split; Detectives Brittany Slide and Lawn Rotelli were the first to arrive. Both stopped dead in their tracks when they went in, craning their necks up to see the gigantically inflated Secretary of Agriculture swaying gently in the vast chamber's air currents. Cordelia saw them and ineffectually waggled her arms; they could hear her say, in a tight, clenched voice, "Well, don't just stand there, help me, you idiots…"

Brittany stepped forward to ask the secretary what had happened to her while Lawn immediately began scurrying around for clues. There were cylindrical metal tanks, at least two dozen, lying on the floor. "Helium, I'll bet," says Lawn, looking at a tank's conical nozzle.

"Why, what brilliant findings, Detective."

"Madame Secretary, if you could just tell us how this happened to you…" pleads the tigress.

"I shall be happy to tell you everything, if you will— just— uncork— me…"

"Cork? What's she talking—oh," said Lawn, who had just scampered across the diameter of the observatory floor and seen for the first time the secretary's backside. Her vagina had stretched along with her body to ridiculous proportions—Lawn was particularly struck by the fact that he probably could have managed to fit inside—and it had a keg-sized cork stuck in it.

By that time, reinforcements had arrived and Brittany directed them to find the biggest ladder they could get. Two officers came back carrying a bulky aluminum ladder under their arms that was just tall enough to reach Cordelia when it was all set up. Lawn scurried up the ladder, at the apex looked to his left and right to see the secretary's legs both far out of reach and visible only from the knees down, her thighs hidden by the inflated curvature of her body. He looked up, and was face-to-slit with a pussy as big as he was, sealed tight with that cork.

"Stop sightseeing and take the cork out, already!"

"Okay okay, just, er, one moment…" The ferret had both paws on the cork and pulled. It was really wedged in there tight. "Doesn't seem to… want to… budge," grunted Lawn, tugging on the cork in Cordelia's pussy. Suddenly, with a slick pop that echoed in the wide-open observatory, Lawn freed the cork from the crevasse and hoisted it overhead—and was blasted in the face by a humid jet of air escaping Cordelia, roaring out of her wide-open hole, blowing the ferret clear off the ladder. "It was like being in a wind tunnel," he later told Brittany.

Luckily, his partner was there to catch him. But as the great quantity of gas escaped Cordelia it rocketed her in the opposite direction, the ropes on her ankles and wrists straining for only a split second before they fell away and the pig-balloon shot out of the observatory's roof window with a scream that fell off into the distance. Students all across campus could hear the wet sputtering thwpt-pt-pt-pt of Cordelia in flight; citizens in a straight line from the university to the sea called to claim they saw an unidentifiable round object streaking across the sky in a wild corkscrew; the Military Aeronautics & Oceanography Institute even reported picking her up on radar.

She began to run out of gas over the beach. Like a parachute, her limp body glided out over the ocean and splashed down barely a half-mile from shore, floating on the cold and choppy water like an oil slick until a motorboat from the Coastal Bureau collected her with a net.

All news about the dramatic expansion and subsequent deflation of Secretary Brinns-Cadwell was, of course, suppressed by the Party—and yet there were rumors, materializing out of nowhere among the populace like condensation on a cold glass, about a mysterious medical madman who had extraordinary (perhaps occult) skills. They called him the Chirurgeon.

Posters reminding citizens of the immorality of spreading false rumors were pasted up all over the city. Political pressure from the very top bore down on NACRE to find the person responsible—to have something like this happen to one of the eleven Administrative Secretaries of the People's Central Party was unthinkable. Chief Vandergroov tore around NACRE headquarters demanding progress. Frankly, the lion was getting on everyone's nerves. And worse, forces were already stretched thin due to the upcoming Director's Ball, inconveniently scheduled one week to the day after someone pumped up the head of Agrosec like a piggy balloon.

Plenty of high-ups in the Party were certain to be at the annual Director's Ball, given the high social status of Blackdell Röder, General Director of Nova Archangel. It was a big event, and though it was not technically a municipal function, NACRE was expected to provide security. This year, Brittany and Lawn were working the door. It was one of the better jobs; some cadets had to go around carrying trays of hors d'oeuvres.

On the night of the event, nobody had seen Röder since the early morning. Socialites in their suits and gowns were lining up at the Director's Mansion downtown, shivering standing on the snowy sidewalks. There was a vast diversity of species and fashions—a rotund brown bear in a black suit and bowler, a gangly gray bird wearing some kind of oriental smock, a tall reptilian woman resplendent in shining jewelry… The walls outside were covered in big brightly-colored posters of Director Röder himself—identical, realistic portraits of the tall, distinguished wolf in a steely-blue suit the same color as his fur, standing in front of a mass of enthusiastic laborers, looking confidently into the distance with the text "Let's work for our city!" underneath him in blocky letters.

It was 10:20. This shindig was supposed to start twenty minutes ago. Detectives Brittany Slide and Lawn Rotelli looked at each other nervously with sidelong glances. The chilly crowd was growing restless; Brittany was uneasy about telling increasingly irritated Party cadres that they would have to wait in line.

"You think they forgot to tell us to open the doors?" hissed the white tiger to her partner, standing on the other side of the mansion's huge, carved wooden doors.

"I'm sure everything's fine."

"These people are starting to get pissed. Maybe we should go in and check?"

"We should definitely just stay here, Britt, we have guys in the building, they have it covered."

For a second Brittany seemed like she was going to offer an argument, but then there was the heavy click of an opening lock, the ornate doors of the mansion swung open, and without waiting for the officers to give the go-ahead, the crowd rushed in to find, in the expansive entryway, on the lush red carpets under the constellation of lights in the blazing golden chandelier, Blackdell Röder getting fucked like a bitch.

It was clearly the Director; the face, the body were recognizable even though they had been altered. Blackdell had breasts now, two great big spherical tits both bigger than his head, bigger than basketballs, bouncing wildly from the pounding he was taking, even slapping him in the face. He moaned and grunted in a husky contralto with his knees and elbows on the floor, eyes squeezed shut, ass pointed up in the air. He'd clearly undergone some sort of surgical process that had feminized him, if somewhat imperfectly. His hair had been redone into a long womanly style, his nose was smaller, though much of his previously strong jawline remained, as well as the wide shoulders that had looked so good in those suits he wore on the posters…

Röder's partner pumped hard one last time, humping the wolf face-down into the floor and holding him there for a few seconds, presumably climaxing while hundreds of Nova Archangel's stunned glitterati stood there in silence so complete Blackdell's strained, quiet moans carried all the way out to the crowd at the mansion's gates. All of them could even hear the tapping echoes of the spiked high heels on Blackdell's feet as he slowly, shakily stood up, trying to cover his enormous breasts by putting one arm across his bust at the nipples, putting a paw over his crotch to hide the lack of external parts—they'd changed him there, too, as there was now a visible pink slit between his legs that had white fluid running out of it, collecting in his blue-gray thigh fur…

His wide eyes, lined with lashes thick from mascara, met the stupefied crowd. His night-blue cheeks were purple with embarrassment. Suddenly, with a whooshing pop, a camera flash blinded everyone for a fraction of a second. The floodgates opened; the crowd boomed forward with amazement, pointing, shouting, and yelling. While a line of NACRE officers held them back, Brittany took off her service jacket and draped it over the trembling, naked wolf.

By morning, though it was never mentioned in The Truth or on NACL, nearly everyone in Nova Archangel had seen the Chirurgeon's latest handiwork. A samizdat photograph had already spread across the city showing Blackdell awkwardly wobbling to his feet in sharp black and white, hiding his artificial breasts and vagina—clearly the first picture that some unknown citizen had taken last night, showing the Director in all her newly obtained womanhood.

Over the next week it felt like there was an invisible festival in Nova Archangel. Citizens waiting for trams on benches, sitting at counters in restaurants, waiting in long bureaucratic queues, all conversed freely and fearlessly, asking each other if they had heard anything about the Chirurgeon.

"I heard he's a doctor from the West they trained to turn the Party's leaders into horrible monsters."

"Well I heard he is a monster, a big flying dinosaur from the steppes…"

"Naw, but he came from the steppes—he was caught in the blast at the first andradite plant, right in the middle of the Zone, and somehow he survived…"

Only a sampling of the ridiculous things Brittany Slide heard walking through the alley markets to pick up coffee beans (expensive, but one of the few luxuries she permits herself). The gossiping old women running the stalls didn't even bother to quiet down when they saw her NACRE uniform. Everyone was excited by not just by the incredible news but the knowledge that they were living out an event as it happened, and the hidden excitement grew daily until the morning of the Sunday seven days since the Director's Ball…

Reliable sources indicated that the Administrative Secretaries were all holed up in an underground bunker somewhere deep in the mountains. Even lowly city officials were refusing to go anywhere without at least two bodyguards, and the demands from the top to find answers only became more and more insistent. The Party even sent some men to sit in NACRE's office and do nothing but regularly interrupt them to ask if they had discovered anything yet. When detectives Rotelli and Slide were informed that they had a 12:00 meeting with Chief Vandergroov, they assumed they were due to be berated at the hands of the ornery lion, and looked over the meager collection of evidence the force had assembled in the time they had before lunch…

Brittany slumped in her swivel chair, rubbing her tired blue eyes. "Damn it. This guy left us nothing to go on."

Lawn looked over the scattered expanse of papers on their desk, as if searching for a counterexample, and then gave up. "Yeah." A defeated sag. "What about the medical report on Röder? I haven't read it yet. Doc Pork's pretty thorough, he find anything?"

"Well, it's only a preliminary, and it's pretty light on the details. It's not just Porcupine, the Party's best doctors have looked at the, uh, guy, and they're still not really sure how the Chirurgeon did what he did." Slide flipped through the pages of a dog-eared report, stark black lettering fuzzy from the photocopier, interspersed with grainy black-and-whites of Blackdell Röder's feminized body, harsh lighting and unimaginative medical angle doing nothing flattering for her figure.

"I guess he did a lot of work on the face. Bone structure's been changed somewhat. Nose is way smaller, see?" asked Brittany as she showed Lawn the series of attached photos, pictures of Röder that could have been taken any time in the last year, probably for The Truth. There was a closeup of the wolf's strong face, looking confident. Below it, for comparison's sake, facing roughly the same direction, was a closeup of Röder's newly softened face, which had the appearance of being in recovery from some medical procedure—black circles around the eyes, swollenness, a bandage on the side of the neck. But it was unmistakably a woman's face now, a woman who looked frightened and nervous. The nose was tiny compared to before, her cheekbones had been raised, although her jawline had been left a little strong and there was still a slightly masculine jut to her brow.

"The breasts are roughly spherical inserts made of an as of yet unknown substance. Comes up transparent on the fluoroscope. Judging from the scars under them, they were inserted from below." Brittany handed Lawn the next page of the report. Someone had managed to dig up a picture of male Blackdell at a beach, seemingly shot from a distance—most like only the Party keeping tabs on its own. He was walking around in the foam from the surf, facing the camera, sunglasses, no shirt, and a baggy pair of zig-zag pattern swim trunks that were so loud and bright you could almost see their color through the monochrome photo… Obviously, he had no breasts on his lean, muscular chest.

And yet, in the accompanying neck-down photo taken some time in the preceding week, things were different. Blackdell's shoulders were still fairly broad—the docs figured that there was only so much you could do, even with whatever medical technology the Chirurgeon had at his disposal. She still had a slight six-pack; the most striking difference was the addition of two huge breasts, spherically round tits with noticeable half-moon scars under them, prominently enlarged nipples jutting out perhaps a little off-center from where they were supposed to be (although the docs' report noted that the implanted material already seemed to be "settling" in the time he had been under observation, and it was likely they would eventually come to rest in a slightly more natural position…)

"And if that turns your crank, wait'll you see this," said Brittany to Lawn, who perhaps was lingering unnecessarily on the headless photo of Röder's reconfigured chest. The tiger tossed another picture into the ferret's paws, covering the one he was looking at. "Docs have pretty much given up trying to explain how he did this. Pork's got no idea. They say it doesn't have any of your more advanced vaginal functionality—the Director won't be getting a techka or getting knocked up, but other than that, they expect it to be nearly indistinguishable from the genuine article once the swelling goes down…" The photo, which did not have the benefit of an accompanying pre-procedure version, was of Blackdell Röder's crotch, showing his stomach to upper thighs (which seemed to have given a greater roundness). His groin area had been totally shaved down, exposing the newly created slit. The lips were obviously more swollen than they should be, and the area inbetween was darker in the photo, probably postsurgical redness…

"What about Chaser? He give us anything new?" Lawn was referring to David Chaser, the wolf who had been caught in flagrante delicto with Röder. Brittany shook her head; his story was consistent and relatively believable. David, who was one of Röder's personal aides, had been busy with paperwork all day, when the Director, in a slinky black dress and a different body, appeared out of nowhere and begged David—ordered really—to fuck her. She was insistent. He was a loyal citizen, of course, and could not refuse an order from a superior Party officer. Together, they had lost track of the time, and been as surprised as anyone when the mansion doors opened.

"Where's the guy now?"

"PISCaE's still got him. Don't think there's any reason not to believe him, but maybe he'll turn out to remember something useful."

Lawn tapped softly on their desk clock. High noon, time for their meeting with the Chief, and no leads, no clues, nothing… after an unhappy trudge they arrived at his office door, at end of a short red-carpeted corridor, a frosted glass window with Frank Vandergroov, NACRE Chief of Operations etched into the center. Lawn Rotelli raised a little fist to knock, hesitated, looked up nervously at Brittany… the white tiger rolled her eyes and knocked herself… "Sir? It's Detective Slide and Detective Rotelli." No answer. "Sir?" Emboldened by the silence, Lawn makes a couple quick raps on the door and he, too, gets nothing…

They stand there, puzzled. It's not like Vandergroov to miss a meeting, but one doesn't just barge in to the Chief's office… From a nearby open door, Myron Inundé, a Party functionary that mainly handled finances, poked his head out from his office, a small fox in a baggy suit, and said "Are you looking for the Chief? I'm certain he's in there, I saw him go in his office this morning and he hasn't come out yet."

Exchanging a momentary glance, Brittany and Lawn took a deep breath, and Brittany tries the doorknob; it turns freely and the door opened... "Sir, we're here about oh shit—"

Brittany stopped dead, Lawn smacked face-first into her elbow, while Myron came running up to see what the commotion is and froze at the doorway to Vandergroov's office—where, behind the chief's stately, reflective hardwood desk was a massive Vandergroov-sized penis, almost three feet of stout red shaft visible, plus a cock-head with triangular bumps along the ridge. There was even a leonine rumple of foreskin surrounding the head like a mane. The two detectives suddenly sprang into action, the tiger reaching for her handgun and scanning the room for signs of break-ins, damages, anything, while the ferret sprinted around the desk to investigate the penis that must presumably be the Chief…

The giant cock was firm and erect, the shaft throbbingly red. Lawn sees that the shaft was actually Vandergroov's torso—it was rounder now, and hairless, but still had impressions of his powerful, square build. For example, there were subdued but recognizable shoulders, slight nubs where his arms were, and even visible six-pack abs and a navel—but no trace of facial features, just a glans the same angry red as the shaft, puffy but not overly fat, roughly the same width as the shaft at the barbed ridge, tapering off conically to a vertical slit leaking clear fluid in fist-size drops that battered and soaked the papers on his desk in hammering drip-drip-drips…

Lawn studied the penis quizzically, and turns to the tiger to ask, "Hey, isn't this what a—"

"Yes Lawn that is what a cat dick looks like."

Judging by the traces of musculature remaining on Vandergroov's shaft, it was just below his waist that a furry ridge encircled him, below which he was covered in sandy, weatherbeaten wheat-blond fur that was the same color as that he'd always had, only now its range was restricted to two enormous testicles, as below the waist he was one big scrotum, his giant ballsack contained mostly within the executive swivel-chair the giant penis was sitting in…

"There's nothing here! Nothing!" yelled Brittany. Myron Inundé stuttered wordlessly in the doorway, locked in place. "Shit. Lawn, run and get Doc Porcupine…"

Things had really gone to hell since then. The Chief of Operations, unable to do much other than leak fluids, had been sent south for study in a military hospital, and without Vandergroov's zealous leadership, NACRE was effectively brainless. Inundé, being the highest-ranking Party official on site, was appointed as interim Chief, but he was an accountant, not a cop. He had no idea what to do, and even if he did, he was too scared to leave his office, barricading himself inside with rotating bodyguards on sentry duty, living off of pierogis they slid under the door, listening for news on the radio and vowing not to come out until they caught the Chirurgeon. Since he was responsible for catching the Chirurgeon, things were not looking rosy.

And so, presently at NACRE detectives Brittany Slide and Lawn Rotelli are the last ones left here at headquarters. It's well past official hours, and the officers that had even bothered to come in have gone home long ago, except for the white tiger and the ferret. Brittany is drearily catching up on the duo's inter-office mail, tearing open envelopes and throwing most of it away, until suddenly she snaps upright, causing Lawn (who was busy trying to balance a pencil on its eraser) to take notice. She's staring at some quadrilaterally folded paper, which she subsequently jams into Lawn's face. "Fucking look at this, Lawn! I can't believe nobody noticed this!"

He snatches it out of her much larger paws. It's a map of Nova Archangel, with a geometrically precise green triangle drawn on it. Below it, where the fourth corner would be if the triangle was a square instead, is an isolated dot in the same color. It takes him a second to see it. The triangle's northern point is directly over the city university, the eastern point right on top of Blackdell Röder's glitzy neighborhood, and the western point located downtown, over NACRE headquarters.

"This is everywhere the Chirurgeon struck," he says.

"And I bet you that last point is where he's gonna strike next."

"Oh, damn. Where did you get this?"

"Someone sent it to me. No return address. That's all that was in the envelope…"

"Britt, that's shady as shit."

"It's all we have to go on! We have to check it out. He was supposed to strike again today, maybe we can stop him in the middle of something…" So they grab a pair of electric scooters from the motor pool and race south. Maybe it's too late for whoever he snagged this time, but maybe they can stop him from getting away… The fourth point landed precisely on the headquarters of a mining collective, surrounded by rocky, empty quarry for nearly a mile around in all directions. They cross the bridge separating the busy northern downtown and sparse, suburban districts south of the river and buzz down empty snow-edged streets, zipping into the quarry over vertiginous hills and giant piles of boulders and stone tailings.

They finally reach the three-story gabled wooden house the collective used for its offices, and realize that among its many shuttered windows a single one at the top is lit. They park their scooters on the road, scan the still landscape for signs of threats, and carefully walk down the driveway, guns ready… The bizarre geography of the area is such that, due to the way the house is perched on the edge of a downhill cliff, beyond which is a wall of labyrinthine mining infrastructure, it feels like gravity is malfunctioning and any second now they should by all rights start falling sideways, past the house and a long long ways down into a rusty tangle of storehouses, furnaces, smelters, and grinders all linked by a maze of belts and lifts…

They reach the front porch. The door's ajar. Lawn peeks in at about shin-height, and, seeing no danger, the detectives move in. Lawn is holding a flashlight, Brittany is holding out her gun, arms locked in the isosceles stance. Silence. Wind outside and Lawn breathing. They move slowly. There's light filtering down from the top of a long staircase.

And that was all that Brittany remembered.

Detective Brittany Slide woke up an unknown amount of time later, strapped down to a flat board inclined so her head was higher than her feet, with an intensely bright halogen overhead lamp aimed at her naked midsection in an ominous fashion. Next to her, on a board of his own, Detective Lawn Rotelli slept peacefully in his restraints. The room was clinically cold, like alcohol evaporating off of bare skin.

"…Lawn?" mumbles the tiger.

He remained inert, but a shift at the dark edges of the room indicated something else stopped moving. "Oh—you're awake?" mumbled a caustic, gravely voice from somewhere outside the ring of white light afforded by the surgical lamp. Brittany, collared to the table with a leather strap, cranes her head up to try and see the speaker. He's a—he's a—no, no, she can't see him…

"Well, Detective, now we can talk in confidence. Did you guess that you'd been done wrong? I was surprised that you didn't even bring backup."

"Didn't even feel you get us…"

"I excel at what I do." He stepped out from the darkness, sliding long rubber gloves onto scrubbed, scaly fingers, ruffling the feathers that stopped at his wrists. He was a bird of some kind with a hooked bill, gangly and tall, a dusty dirty gray. He had on a rumpled white medical coat that he wore more like a martial artist than a clinician—the garment was secured around his waist like a karate gi with a thin leather belt, and the belt had a holster that contained a one-piece saw, silvery and gleaming.…

"You're the Chirurgeon."

"Quite a nickname, isn't it?"

"Why are you doing this?"

"I'm only your average reactionary anti-Party maniac, hell-bent on bringing harm to our great nation from within, and so forth," he said drily as he lined up pointed metal instruments on a rolling table. "A loyal citizeness like you wouldn't want to listen to my nonsense."

"If you're about to do something horrible to me, the least you could do is tell me why…"

He looked at her with acid green eyes. "My story is not that interesting. Imagine the story of any of the nameless unfortunates that have been touched by the People's Central Party. I am sure you meet them, in your line of work."

"Nobody does shit like this unless it's personal."

The chirurgeon sighed. He continued his prep work, scooting around the room on a rolling stool. "I was a surgeon at a hospital far out east. Near where they built the first andradite plant," said the bird, letting the last sentence hang ominously. Calmly, while he was busy getting his tools in order, he told Brittany about the extent of the PCP's brutalities out in the eastern steppes, where every citizen and citizeness is given a grain production quota to meet. If you do the math on population density, this quota works out to be around 350% of what the nutrient-poor land can support, and in practice it works out to be both a terrific excuse for Party workers and the army to take whatever supplies they need from anyone they like and a handy way to ensure the peasant population is kept in check every winter. Medical personnel being fairly high on the rationing priority, this bird and his family never went hungry, but every day while he tended to soldiers' lacerations and officers' indigestion he watched them take people into the Other Wing of the hospital and occasionally bring them back out again. He knew what went on in there, past the steel doors the soldiers guarded, having been called in to consult on some of the more medically imaginative tortures. Whenever they had a case that required punishment above and beyond what could be doled out at the police barracks, punishment that required surgical precision, they were brought here for "experimentation". And even though our doctor was born and raised with all of the Party's loving guidance every step of the way, even though he knew that everyone that was dragged thrashing through those doors was an enemy of the people, he knew that he would be a coward if he didn't at least try to do something.

So he wrote letters to family, other doctors, friends from school. Telling them about the quotas, the abuses, the high number of remains pouches and total absence of anaesthesia on the Other Wing's supply requisition forms. Well, of course the first time he tried to send one of these letters a mail inspector read it and they came and took him to a sharashka to teach him a lesson. It was not that bad there; it was a camp for scientists and so there were two hours of hard labor in the morning followed by two hours of political education, then a modest lunch, and research for the rest of the day. But he continued to make trouble, disrupting the ideological lectures, refusing to contribute to the medical research. After they caught him in an escape attempt, he figured he would be sent to the gulag, and that would be the end of him. But instead he stayed where he was, and was sent as a courtesy a copy of the orders for the arrest of his wife and daughter and their subsequent transport to the arctic camps, where they did not bother to record the names of incoming prisoners. At once he became a model inmate, exceeding his labor quota and praising the PCP, but there was no clemency, no show of mercy.

Silence. "I'm sorry about your family." The Chirurgeon nodded noncommittally, and flipped a switch on a machine suspended from the ceiling, a chrome barrel that tapered to a thin nozzle. It started to hum, emitting sickly green light that glowed in the same unhealthy way as his eyes. He slid it along a track, rolling it into position above Brittany.

"But why me and Lawn? Secretaries and Directors I can understand, but…"

"Practicality, for one thing. Ever since I first saw you and your ferret friend, I knew you would be perfect candidates for a technique I wish to try," he said as he locked the machine in place so that it pointed down between Brittany's thighs like a big chrome cock. "But don't think I hold you in any higher regard than honorable Secretary Brinns-Cadwell, or respected Director Röder. Are you not a loyal citizen and Party member?"

"Maybe, but I don't—I've never—Look, I'm only a cop."

"The cops are tools of the Party, Detective, in a literal sense. Don't you see the things they do every day? Don't they use you to do them? Look at Pomorskaya street, for a recent example—"

"I… I only do what they tell me to. I have to."

"Ah. You are only following orders. Of course." He broke their uncomfortable eye contact to push the air bubble out of the tip of a syringe, and quietly went on. "In a lot of ways I dislike those like you more than any corrupt bureaucrat or cruel general. The elite at least get something out of their system. But what do the little people get out of collaborating? You do all the Party's dirty work and get what in exchange? Enough food and an apartment that usually has electricity? You have no excuse other than simple cowardice," said the Chirurgeon grimly, "and cowardice is the worst of all vices."

He suddenly jabbed her with the syringe, and her consciousness cut out like torn cassette tape.

After some time Brittany Slide woke up. She had no idea how long—could have been an hour, could have been days. Blurry figures carrying lights were running around, making a lot of noise. The first thing she did was look over at the table next to her, where Lawn was, and saw that it was empty.

She tried to figure out what was happening. She couldn't see very well. She was in a lot of pain, generalized soreness all over her lower body. In a second she recognized the figures as NACRE agents, and the cacophonous sounds they were making coalesced into words. "Nobody's in here!" "Second floor, clear!" "She's in here, she's in here!" A brownish blob carrying a medical bag came jogging in.

Bleary, she sat up, and found most of her body between the waist and knees was wrapped in gauze, with spattered patches of dried, cinnamon-brown blood. The uncomprehending tiger looked around the room for further clues, and saw, poking out of a plastic-lined bin against the wall, two furry little arms, fingers curled and rigid. Ferret arms. She closed her eyes, went icy and numb, wanted to vomit, swayed dangerously, may have actually vomited… When the roar in her ears stopped, she found herself sobbing all over the medic trying to calm her, pricking her paws on the quills running down his back like a heavy overcoat. "I couldn't save him, I finally got him killed," and so forth, over and over again.

"Brittany, lay back, just lay back—would someone please help me get all these bandages off her…"

It will be some seconds before Brittany realizes the calm porcupine tending to her is Doctor Anders Stikkende, better known to her and most of NACRE as Doc Porcupine. It's a small comfort to have him here, and makes the big cat feel a shade better about being exposed like this, naked from the waist up, tits out in full display, not able to bring herself to cover them or really care right now—and Porcupine is gently but insistently removing the bandages around her crotch…

Stikkende, who was surprised by little in his career as NACRE's de facto chief of medicine, had consistently been surprised by the work of the Chirurgeon. He was the first doctor on site at each of the previous three attacks, and had been puzzled—and a little fascinated—at the medical impossibilities in each case. Brinns-Cadwell's plasticized skin, the techniques used on Röder, everything about the Vandergroov case. And yes, shame on you Anders, he was eager to see what the Chirurgeon would come up with next, well, now he gets to see… He had made two long incisions above the subject's crotch—Brittany Slide, he has to remind himself, this one you know, damnit—aligned with the inguinal creases, and instead of the stiff, ugly black wires usually seen sprouting from such cuts it looks more like she was sewn up with a tiny, shiny metallic zipper. Removing a little more gauze at the juncture of Brittany's legs, the doctor sees the base of a giant pink shaft, ringed with the same strange sutures. He figures he could only just get both hands around it—it's almost as big as one of the tiger's thighs. He pulls more of the bandages away, and he thinks for a second that he recognizes the muscular layout of the lower lumbar region, even a slight spinal groove going down the top of the huge penis, like it's someone's back… Even though all the traditional penile hallmarks are there, veins, slightly oblate cylindrical shape, a certain spongy-firm texture, his suspicions grow as they begin to reach the end of the massive cock, where just below the coronal ridge the shaft widens like it has shoulders, faint bumps where the arms would have gone—and then, as he removes the last wad of bandages, he sees the head and its two beady eyes looking back at him.

It was Detective Lawn Rotelli. The ferret's head, though it is still about the same size, had somehow been drastically reshaped into the familiar quasi-bell found on the end of most dicks. His facial features had been pulled up, leaving his eyes on the wide sweep below the tip where his vertically-reoriented mouth is now a urethral opening. In between was his flattened-out nose, which had smoothed down like most of the ferret's face. His ears were gone entirely, and his chin just connected right into his neck.

"Wh—where am I," the penis is heard to ask.

Blue-eyed Brittany Slide bolts straight upright. "Lawn? Is—is that you?".

"Britt? How come I can't move?" Lawn asks her, with a rising intonation of worry. Instead of answering him, she tentatively picks him in one paw, felt his smooth skin and weighty heft, and gasps in surprised pleasure at the same time as her ferret-cock's eyes bug out. "And why does that feel like that?"

"`Cause you're my cock," she says in quiet amazement. The length of his body begins to slowly elongate and he rises up out of her paw of his own accord, sticking out at a low angle from between her legs.

"What do you mean, I'm your cock?"

"You look like a penis, and the two of you have been surgically attached," says Doc Porcupine.

"I can't move my arms!"

"You don't have 'em anymore," he says, continuing to be helpful. Brittany fixes him with a pissed-off glare; Lawn continues stiffening and seemed to be wiggling back and forth.

"I can barely move at all! I can't even move my head!"

"Lawn, calm down! At least you're alive! Come on, it'll be alright…"

"I'm a penis! Brittany, I'm a cock!" Now fully erect, his panicked eyes look into Brittany's. "How is this gonna be alright?"

"Well, at least you're my cock…"

The People's Central Party was not an organization to waste resources. Cordelia Brinns-Cadwell, a skilled and well-connected bureaucrat, was quickly reinstated as the powerful Secretary of Agriculture by an 8-2 vote (reported as unanimous in The Truth) among her peers, and the sight of her expanded body zipping through the corridors of the Party's headquarters became a regular one. Inflated to a comfortable circumference with a blend of helium and neon specially developed at the Military Aeronautics & Oceanography Institute, she enjoyed the efficiency of being able to float right over crowds, although sometimes she had to have her subordinates steer her.

Blackdell Röder, on the other hand, was not reinstated as General Director of Nova Archangel. But soon, in the small and dingy community marketplaces, a new pornographic videotape began to make the rounds. Such tapes were produced by an officially nonexistent branch of the Party, and their latest release, entitled I Fucked the Director starring "Blackie Röder", proved to be the most popular one they'd ever made.

It was four scenes of thoroughly plotless sex, total running time 46 minutes of grainy color video of the ex-Director's enthusiastic sucking and fucking. The first scene fades in on Blackie in an amazing set that even smells like a street. We see her walking down this dark alley, glancing in window panes and looking pleased with herself, wearing a tank top that left the spherical undersides of her tits exposed, and fuck-me pumps, and a nimble microdress just a little longer than a belt. Fast slide to the other end of the street, to a bar with scrawls on the outer walls, where two big canines are just now leaving. They are both burly Dobermans in the uniforms of average workers, except for the inexplicable diamond ear studs the two dogs both wear. They walk down the street, towards Blackie, woodenly reciting their dialogue:

"Well, time to go home after laboring to do our part to bolster the People's Central Party and build a great and prosperous people's nation!"

"Comrade! Isn't that Citizen Röder, who failed to control civil unrest and was unable to stop a dangerous criminal from harming the people of his great city?"

"You are mistaken, comrade! That is not Citizen Röder, but Citizeness Röder!"

"Let us show him what we think of officials who betray the People's Central Party and their nation by willfully disregarding the duties the people have entrusted them with!"

At which point the two dogs quickly remove their laborer's jumpsuits, walk over to the trembling Blackie, who is taller than them both, and rip the wolf's meager garments right off of her, one jamming his tongue into her mouth while groping her oversized breasts. The other gets behind her, jamming two digits into her snatch; Blackie moans and is soon begging in a dark brown voice to be fucked "like a bitch". They make her kneel down and fuck her from both ends, the camera recording her wet gagging noises, her unfocused eyes, her mouth straining to accommodate the fat cock going in and out of it, and her shoulders violently shaking from the pounding she's taking in her pussy. And at the end of the scene, when the dogs have left her in the alley, naked and splattered with semen, the camera zooms in on her dreamy, satisfied expression and fades to black. Credits roll.

Just like his subordinates had been saying for years, Frank Vandergroov was a giant dick. The enormous phallus occupied one of the very best suites in a comfortable apartment block for retired military types in downtown Nova Archangel, and spent his days watching banned western films, being fed delicacies and fancy beer, and being jerked off by a rotating team of lithe young Crimean women of varying specie, thus fulfilling his retirement plans to the letter 25 years ahead of schedule.

Brittany Slide they kept in observation, in a hospital room that was clean, comfortable and lonely, with a view of a landscape she didn't recognize. Every now and then doctors came in to take pictures of her—and Lawn—and she realized that the results of every flash were probably going into a lengthy report just like the ones they'd been poring over the night they met the Chirurgeon; she doubted she could wipe her nose without them slotting a photograph into her file. They gave her scratchy hospital gowns to wear, but she usually went around naked. The gowns covered up Lawn, and she'd have felt bad about not letting him see anything. It was already boring enough in here. She was not permitted to watch television or listen to the radio; every day they brought in yesterday's copy of The Truth. Most of the time there was nothing to do but talk to Lawn, and she was rarely feeling talkative.

"You alright, Britt?"

"Yeah, I'm fine."

"You seem all sad lately." Silence. "Look, maybe… the docs can find some way to take me off or something, and you won't have to be dragging me around all the time…"

"Lawn, don't be a shithead. There's no way you'd be able to survive on your own. You're my cock. We gotta get used to that, and we will."

"Then how come you're all mopey?"

"Look, don't worry about it. I'm fine. I promise."

Actually, having Lawn permanently affixed to her crotch was bothering the tiger far less than what the Chirurgeon had said. If there was anything Brittany Slide hated to be, it was a coward. And after everything he had told her, she felt more cowardly than she ever had. She wanted to tell Lawn everything. He was always the smarter one. She wanted his reassurance, wanted him to explain to her how they really weren't the bad guys after all, but she was afraid of who might be listening…

The first time she jerked off was the second day she was in the hospital. She'd woken up with a tremendous erection, just as she had the day before, only today Lawn didn't subside to an ignorable half-flaccidity. Her huge ferret-cock only got harder as she impatiently paced the room, reread yesterday's copy of The Truth, went into the bathroom and splashed some cold water on her face, paced some more… They said nothing to each other, remaining awkwardly silent as Lawn bobbed around in front of Brittany. Eventually—actually, not more than a half hour after they woke up—she had to say something.

"Lawn, I'm so fucking horny."

"You think you're horny? I'm a cock, imagine how I feel!"

"Can I—"

"Yes! Anything!"

She sprinted into the bathroom, paw already on her hard pink cock, not bothering to close the door or anything, thinking only about finally getting herself off; her libido had never been either remarkable or deficient, but now that she had a cock she felt like she couldn't go more than a few minutes without thinking about sex.

She sat on the flat edge of the bathtub and squeezed Lawn. She'd never masturbated with a penis before—not one of her own, anyway. As she stroked him, her paw quickly found the sweet spot below his head; she jacked faster and her cock closed his eyes, sighing happily, while Brittany looked down at him with half-lidded eyes and an open mouth. She wanted to stretch out her legs, so she let herself slide down into the tub and stuck them out in the air, and soon she felt the unfamiliar but unmistakable sensation of an approaching penile orgasm.

"C-can I come on your tits?"

"Fuck yes," said Brittany, grabbing her dick and enthusiastically rubbing him into her breasts, squeezing him between them, trying to fit her nipple into his mouth-slit. Soon, Brittany was squealing ecstatically, and Lawn made a high-pitched moan that was cut off with a wet squelch, as he began to squirt gobs of tiger cum out of his mouth, helpless to slow or stop them, not that would ever have wanted to, and they came together…

As Brittany lay back in the bathtub, softly panting, looking at a dripping glob of cum she'd accidentally splattered a mirror set into the bathroom wall with, she thought she heard a noise come from somewhere beyond it. A chair moving against a floor, someone coughing? Maybe just the building's plumbing settling. She got up, wiped her cum off with gobs of toilet paper, and noticed that the sticky white fluid touched its own reflection in the mirror. Hmm.

They spent five more days in the hospital room. Brittany brought them to orgasm at least once each day; it was the best of their limited entertainment options. And then, with as little fanfare as when she'd been brought there, she found herself waking up in a cushy military transport vehicle a few minutes before it arrived at her apartment in Nova Archangel. The driver helped her out of the truck, said "Have a pleasant night, Detective Slide," drove off, and that was that.

The next day she was back at usual desk at NACRE, only instead of Lawn sitting next to her, he was under her dress. She wasn't used to it yet, and she wasn't sure she ever would be. Nobody on the force made jokes about them, at least to her face. Nobody even seemed to want to talk about it, or to her, like they'd all been instructed that Slide was off-limits… And even if people had to talk to her in the course of official duties, nobody at all would talk to Lawn. People seemed to find it too weird to talk to a bump in her dress. But she still talked to him, refusing to be embarrassed for her friend.

When the Chirurgeon failed to strike again, the case was kicked up to PISCaE. Officially, NACRE no longer had anything to do with it. Brittany was mad, but what could she do? Lawn told her it was for the best— they had the resources to deal with something like this—but Brittany wanted something. Closure? Just the chance to talk to him again, to defend herself?

They hadn't assigned her a new partner, not that she wanted one. She had no actual idea what the personnel situation regarding her and Lawn was now, really. But together they soldiered on, mostly putting old paperwork in order, the ferret-cock staying in good spirits even though most of the time there was nothing to do other than sit in the hazy blue light under Brittany's dress, lying in the valley of white fur between her thighs. He tried not to get hard too much, since he knew it was an inconvenience, although sometimes he couldn't help getting a little chubby—sometimes he didn't know why, figured someone cute was walking by their desk but didn't want to embarrass Brittany by asking out loud…

At Brittany's apartment (they had picked up most of Lawn's stuff from his; Brittany said she knew a factory worker who'd pay to move up to a policeman's apartment) the tiger usually lounged around in the evenings on her couch, reading or listening to the radio—she brought over Lawn's television and left it on often, positioning herself so he could see it. Their abruptly conjoined life was awkward at first, but they quickly developed patterns of behavior, and Brittany was continually surprised at how upbeat Lawn seemed.

In the dark northern evenings, when she got back from NACRE, she lounged around her apartment in an old brown jacket, rough leather with a soft woolen interior that extended out onto the cuffs and collar. It was comfortable, and helped when the heat was spotty in her building. Underneath it, she wore a plain black sports bra and rarely anything else; she didn't like to keep Lawn cooped up.

One night she zoned out while listening to NACL's endless drone over the radio, blankly navel-gazing while horizontally sprawled on her sitting room couch.

"You okay?"

"Huh?"

"You've been looking at me for about five minutes. What's buggin' you?"

She tried dismissing him with the usual everything's fine, everything's fine business, fooling neither of them. It was the Chirurgeon, and not what he did but what he said that was still eating at her.

"I feel like a coward," she said after a long silence.

"A coward? Britt, you're the bravest person I know! Remember Pomorskaya Street? When you saved my ass from those rioters?"

She knew that to explain any further would be to endanger herself and Lawn. There were things you did not speak of, not even in the privacy of your own apartment (it was, after all, not yours but on gracious loan from the Party), things that maybe everyone knew already but could not be said to anyone, no matter how loved or trusted. She looked at Lawn and wondered if he'd see things her way. He always was the one that knew—knew what to do, or say, or think…

"Pomorskaya Street never would have turned into a riot if it wasn't for us. They were protesting official food prices. They would have stayed peaceful if we left them alone." She vividly remembers a few dozen gaunt and hungry faces out of the crowd that had been brave enough to turn out for the protest looking back at her from the increasingly smaller cordon NACRE was penning them into. NACRE surrounded the group and walked forward in unison, violently shoving anyone on the periphery of the crowd. Brittany pushed one of them over and the officer next to her kicked the downed dissident in the ribs until he started rolling towards the mass of people. Like clockwork, soon someone on the inside threw a rock, and sure enough out came the truncheons. The protesters put up some resistance, which nobody minds because that gives them the opportunity to be really mean assholes about this instead of just breaking some bones and throwing them all in a motorcar fleet to Solovetsky. The air was filled with the thuds of nightsticks striking bodies, skeletal crunching, and screaming. It may have been some feline instinct that tipped her off to the one rioter that got past their constrictive perimeter, a lean and angry young ram that slipped between two officers and bolted. They took him for a runner and went back to their fun with the ones who had already given in, laying prone on the ground, waiting for this to end one way or another. But Brittany spun around and saw him heading towards Lawn with a knife. For these kind of maneuvers, Lawn was always on the outer perimeter that kept away prying eyes, not being one of NACRE's bulkier officers. He didn't see the ram until it was too late, and stumbled backwards onto the ground with his hand up over his face, while the ram raised his knife above his head and swung it with a fearsome downswing to skewer the ferret when crack Brittany's truncheon connects with the side of his head at such a velocity that Doc Porcupine told her, as a point of curiosity over lunch a week later, that it was actually his neck snapping that did him.

There was a long silence from her cock. "Maybe that's true, but we gotta do what they tell us to. And if it wasn't for you, I'd be dead."

"We don't always have to do what they tell us to, though! If nobody did, then maybe things wouldn't be so awful! The Party isn't always right, you know!"

"I know, but what good could we do? You cause trouble, you get disappeared." Brittany crosses her arms, remaining quiet. "And Britt? Uh, you know I'd never say anything to anyone, but if you go around saying stuff like that to people—"

"Geez, Lawn, I'm not that dumb."

Brittany still worked out, 45 minutes each and every morning, most of it spent pressing free weights in her bathroom on the rickety iron bench she salvaged from a permanently closed gym years ago, while Lawn lays flat on her stomach. Presently, on this clear and frosty-bright Nova Archangel morning—the kind where it hurts to look just about anywhere because of the northern sun's utterly pure light reflecting off of the white snow and the gray concrete, and the whole cloudless sky is a glacial blue nearly as intense as Brittany's own two blue eyes—our white tigress has just finished a set and lets the eighty-pound weights clatter to the floor, panting.

"Done for the day?" asks her cock.

"Yeah, I think so."

"Reward yourself for a good workout. Jack off," says Lawn.

"You are such a bad influence."

"C'monnn, we've got an hour before we have to be at NACRE, and you gotta take a shower anyway…"

Slowly, the tiger draws herself up to standing, examining her body in the cloudy and frameless full-length mirror on her bathroom wall. She is satisfied; she likes her body, her clear and present lines of muscle tone, her big breasts she thankfully has the back muscle to adequately support… Lawn is erect, sticking straight up, his underside visible in the reflection, slight remnants of abdominal muscles and a navel dimple, an elongated shoulder ridge… You could only see the details in his head up close, the intimation of a face in the glans, the impression of lips near the piss slit, so that she has to lean down a little to say: "Fine, cock-boy."

She pokes her small pink tongue into her own urethra, parting the rubbery slit, already wet and slippery with salty precum. Lawn makes an appreciative murmur. Brittany kisses her own penis for a while, swirling her tongue in Lawn's mouth, and then slips his entire head into her own mouth, a maneuver she'd been practicing ever since they got back. At first, she'd only been able to nibble on Lawn's tip, but her flexibility had rapidly improved and now she could get the whole end of her penis in. Lawn was a big fan, although it was hell on Brittany's back and she much rather preferred to rub Lawn against her nipples.

She just plays with him at first, pinching at his base and wiggling him back and forth in the air, bouncing him off of her breasts, pressing him between them and giving herself a titjob, before progressing to serious jerking. She lays back on her bench, arching her back while one leg reflexively kicks up a little, eyes squeezed shut and head thrown back, while her busy paw becomes a white blur up and down her shaft, glimmers of precome appearing at Lawn's tip for just an instant before cascading down his side and over her fingers in wet streams. His eyes are open; he likes to see the room dissolve into linear streaks of vivid color, the visual experience heightening the overwhelming tactile one. Thankfully cocks have no inner ear, and thus no motion sickness. Though sometimes he can't help wondering, as a penis must, what it would look like from his end to be stuck in someone, to penetrate… They come, semen shooting out of Lawn like a pressurized vanilla milkshake geysering out of a pink soda straw, making a single gluggy wet sound as it first exits his mouth and then a series of spatters some seconds after as it rains onto the bathroom's linoleum floor in droplets.

They walk into NACRE five minutes late due to their morning diversion. A Party cadre is there waiting for them. "Detective Brittany Slide? If you would follow me, please?" She is politely escorted into the back seat of a stately black automobile with tinted windows, the cadre gets in the front, and the preternaturally quiet car begins whispering its way through Nova Archangel's slushy streets.

Brittany is, of course, nervous as shit, and she's pretty sure she can read similar panic in Lawn's beady black eyes. She wishes desperately that she and her penis had some kind of mental connection so that Lawn could provide the reassurance he always did in bad situations. She's naturally thinking of the conversation she and Lawn had a few nights ago, the one wherein she expressed doubt in the People's Central Party in the privacy of her own apartment, but they must have heard her somehow… She's trying to tell herself that she wasn't really fucked because this wasn't a PISCaE guy, it's just some suit, if she was really fucked then the People's Internal Security Commission and Executive would have come for her…

It does not calm her that she can see, through the backseat's smoked black glass windows, that they are entering the city's massive governmental complex. Looming tall buildings with sunken square windows tower over them. The car stops at a security cordon, and the driver shows the sentry a handful of documents. Eventually, through further checkpoints and chain-link fences, they arrive at their destination, a building that does not seem any different from the others, where the car pulls up to the curb and two uniformed guards with large guns open the door for her. Her driver calls to them: "Detective Slide has an appointment with the Secretary, gentlemen," before gliding away and leaving Brittany to wonder: Secretary? Which? She experiences the unfamiliar sensation of testicles retracting into her body. Inside the building, she is led through a maze of fluorescent-lit corridors to two imposing wooden doors; her guards each take one side, nodding to her. "Secretary Brinns-Cadwell is inside, ma'am."

She pushes open the heavy doors and steps into a huge room, some kind of concert hall or theater. Behind her the doors slam shut and echo in the vast space. The sloped floor leads down to a stage, lined by leafy potted ferns along the way, plus glass cases containing medals, insignias, certificates, and framed pictures of important Party personages. On stage, in front of a black velvet curtain, is Secretary Cordelia Brinns-Cadwell.

From her seat a massive desk up on the stage, she watches Brittany enter. The pig looks a lot like she did the first time they saw each other, when they found her floating in the Nova Archangel University's observatory—plump, round, and balloonish, although Brittany figures she's maybe two-thirds the size she was then, which still makes her one big pig. She's also wearing clothes now, a maroon skirt-suit that must have taken yards and yards of cloth to make, the necessarily bespoke outfit fitting snugly to her sizable curves, complementing the light pink shade of her skin and highlighting her well-maintained flip of electric blonde hair.

"Detectives Slide and Rotelli! I appreciate the both of you taking time out of your schedule of service to the Party to come here." She spreads her legs slightly, and the Secretary is suddenly propelled up out of her high, high, high-backed leather chair in a graceful parabolic arc that almost reaches the expansive room's decorated ceiling at its apex; for a period of time the white tiger is standing entirely in the inflated pig's shadow, and thinks she might be about to fall on her, but instead Secretary Brinns-Cadwell lands with finesse an arm's length away, jiggling slightly on touchdown, looming large many feet above her.

"Do you like the new office?" she asked Brittany, waving a puffy arm expansively. "This building had a ballet hall that hadn't been used in years, and my old office was… no longer suitable. Couldn't fit through the doors, got stuck and had all these young clerks running head-on into my posterior to try to dislodge me, if you can imagine such a thing. Of course, now I'm having all of Agrosec's doorways renovated. Minimum 48-foot clearance."

This was not the scenario Brittany had in mind when she entered this building. "Madame Secretary, I, uh… so you're… satisfied with your changes," she ventures.

"I daresay I'm learning to enjoy it. There's a certain sensuality to being so big," says the pig. "The others are also doing well. Frank seems quite content, and Blackie's having the time of her life."

"Director Röder?" Brittany searches for a diplomatic way to ask about Blackie Röder's new career in cinema.

"Oh, you've seen her films, no doubt. All her idea. They wanted to put her back in charge of Nova Archangel and pretend nothing ever happened, but she wouldn't hear it. Practically seized control of the Adult Films Department from Propsec, scripted her debut movie, personally interviewed dozens and dozens of potential cast members, quite thoroughly… if you ask me she's just cock-crazy, though I can hardly begrudge her that… But what about you and Lawn? How are you two faring with your new intimate coupling?"

"We're managing, Madame Secretary; thank you for your concern."

"Good, good. Detective Rotelli? Is everything going alright?" says Brinns-Cadwell, directly addressing for the first time the prominent bump in the front of Brittany's uniform dress, which presently squeaks in an intimidated voice:

"Doin' great, Madame Secretary! Just fine!"

"Wonderful," says the Secretary as she smoothly rotates her body in place, bringing her face closer to the tiger. "But don't you feel cooped up in Brittany's clothing all the time? Constrained?"

"Actually, I don't really mind. Not like there's anywhere else for me to go," says Lawn like he's never even considered it. "And besides, that's normally where penises are. In clothes," he adds in a small voice.

"Well, normally penises don't talk and think, either. Brittany, why don't you take Lawn out? I'd like to see him and he might like the fresh air."

"Uh, yes ma'am," says Brittany, wondering exactly how to proceed with exposing herself to one of the Party's Secretaries. She unbuckles her plain polyvinyl belt and stepped out of her coarse blue NACRE dress; Lawn bounced gently from being released while partially erect, looking up with unmistakable embarrassment, even though there's much less detail in his face now to go by, his mouth hoisted permanently vertical, cheeks smoothed out into glans tissue, but still a certain sheepish tilt to the brow lines visible above the black eyes that are awkwardly darting around the renovated dance hall. He is vibrantly pink, the color of chewed bubblegum, glossy highlights appearing now in his tightening skin to reflect the bright ambient glow of the countless electric lights shining in the hall's recesses…

"My my, you're certainly packing some impressive heat now, Detective. The thought occurs to me, however, that your friend is almost certainly too big for most women to accommodate. I do hope you have some outlet for the urges that must come along with those big round balls you have now. Lawn, is Brittany adequately caring for your needs?"

"She's uh… been handling that alright, I guess…"

"I must say, I now find the dalliances with my clerks that I used to thoroughly enjoy somewhat underwhelming. I got a few kicks out of stuffing one of them all the way up there and letting him wriggle his own way out, but it's simply not the same as receiving a good fucking, as really being seen to…" Brinns-Cadwell's eyes flash slyly as Brittany catches on to her angle here, the tiger now realizing that either she's been harboring some latent lesbiant tendencies or Lawn has more control over his tumescence than they had thought—he's grown fully erect, quickly enough for Brittany to not even notice.

Without further talk, Brittany and Cordelia kiss lewdly, mashing their faces together. The tiger puts her arms around roughly where the pig's shoulders would be if she wasn't an enormously inflated sphere, and holds on as Cordelia rolls backwards, lifting the tiger up off the ground like she was ascending a Ferris wheel. Cordelia tugs at the back of Brittany's collar and the tiger undoes her buttons with one hand while she hangs on with the other, switching as she pulls off the other half of her NACRE uniform, letting it float to the floor, baring her breasts and the pink nipples capping them, black stripes narrowing to sharp points at invisible circles around her areolas.

Brittany manages to undo the buttons going down the front of Cordelia's top without losing her hold and falling off, and she throws open the giant garment like the flaps of a tent, revealing Cordelia's expanded, balloonish breasts. Through some rolling and wriggling, the Secretary has gotten her own skirt off, and shrugs off the shirt as well, leaving both women naked. While Brittany is splayed out on Cordelia's surface, erect Lawn is bent down at a tantalizing tangent line to Cordelia's circular form, only touching her body along his top at the base where all the sensations are the weakest, leaving his sensitive head jutting out into the cool, prickly air—suspended over the cleft between Cordelia's legs, in full view of her pussy, being doubtlessly close enough to smell her if his nose was anything more than a nub above his narrow mouth, able to see moisture on the lips below but unable to bring himself closer in any way, when all he wants is for Brittany to stick him inside.

Having lowered herself a little on Cordelia's body, the inflated globe she's clinging to, pawfuls of puffy tits as handholds, Brittany is presently in a position to do just that. Coarse, bristly hairs scratch at Lawn's sensitive face as the tiger lines herself up, unused to being the one penetrating, until he dips down into a hot humid depression, the heat from it so intense to him it was like staring into a bonfire. And then just like that, with some pressure from the back applied from Brittany's helpful gluteals the opening gives way and schlick he's inside, the vaginal walls enveloping him and offering only a little resistance as Brittany pushes in, so that in a moment his vision goes from a bright, extreme, and intimate close-up of Cordelia, to an indeterminate redness lit bottom-up, to total black. Deposited fully to the hilt, he lies there in the dark, hearing watery noises from outside and the rapid tidal pounding of Cordelia's heartbeat. Every inch of his stretched skin glows with sensation.

Brittany looks down to see her cock entering Cordelia's pussy and realizes that's all it looks like, her cock. With Lawn stuck all the way into Cordelia and only a thin pink band of the ferret-cock's base visible, it just looks like she was immensely well endowed. Before this, when she was jerking off, it was always still her and him, together. But now for the time being she forgets him, only concerned with shoving not Lawn but her penis successively further and further into Secretary Brinns-Cadwell…

Brittany's thrusts fall into a rhythm. In fact, they have fall into a standing wave—every time she slams her ferret-dick back into Cordelia she transmits a certain amount of force into the pig, which jiggles down her body, reflects off the floor and travels right back up, and whap Brittany slams Lawn in again at the peak. Like someone bouncing on a trampoline with their feet never leaving the surface, the wave amplitude grows a bit each time, Brittany compressing Cordelia a bit more towards the elliptic and Cordelia bouncing Brittany a bit higher in response…Soon, the accumulated energy is enough to bounce Cordelia right off the ground, and the next time Brittany retracts Lawn, she simultaneously experiences the unreal sensation of gravity falling away as the floor recedes. They travel a few feet through the air, moaning gas-filled Cordelia rebounding on the downstroke with an elastic, resonating thump, and they begin to bounce around the room.

The coupled pair manages to pick up a good amount of velocity and height, making high, lazy arcs that scare the shit out of Brittany—it's not easy to steer a pumped-up pig in the throes of pleasure, and gravity keeps trying to flip them around so that Brittany's on the bottom. "Don't stop, damnit!" yells Cordelia when Brittany slows down to prevent smooshing herself between a wall and Cordelia's body. She has no intention of stopping, not when it feels this good, the hot friction of Lawn's surface sliding in and out of her snatch building to sensations previously unimaginable to Brittany, maybe unimaginable to anyone who doesn't have a couple square feet of penile surface area at their disposal.

She wants to prolong this, really does, but she can't hold on much longer, and they come together as they hang weightless at the apogee of a flight path for far longer than it seems they should be able to. Their landing is fairly graceless and Cordelia rolls over Brittany and skids them into a shelf of identical burgundy-backed books. The pig's skin is soft and her body is light, but it's like being pinned against the floor by an enormous latex balloon. The tigress explosively gasps for breath when Cordelia rolls off of her and onto her back. Lawn flops out of her, slick and soft and spent.

She sighs, satisfied. "That was lovely, Brittany. However, I did have more in mind than a good screwing when I requested your presence. NACRE has a position that needs to be filled, and right now you're the PCP's candidate."

"You mean… Vandergroov's job? Chief? The Party wants me?"

"We find it's important to head important organizations like NACRE with persons we know we can rely on. And you're an excellent officer. You'll make a fine Chief."

"I—" Stunned Brittany Slide is aware of what a position like this means; if she is now a pawn of the People's Central Party then this is a promotion to knight. She might not be able to tell herself that she's only following orders anymore. She might have to give them. Of course, most of what Frank Vandergroov did was pass down orders from higher up. And it's not like NACRE is all bad. It's not just kicking down doors in the nighttime, they've caught robbers, murderers… And maybe if she was getting something out of all this, if she was above what the Chirurgeon called the "little people" when he had her strapped down to that table, then maybe he wouldn't be right about her being a coward. That was what his speech was all about, right?

She has her mouth open to speak when her penis interrupts. "She'll take the job," says limp Lawn as his eyes blink open.

"Wonderful! Myron Inundé will bring you up to speed with your duties. Congratulations, Chief Slide."

"Thank you so much," says dazed Brittany. "I… look forward to serving the Party in this expanded capacity," she says, aiming for something that sounds professional, but Cordelia is already chattering and rolling away.

"I do hate to run on you, Brittany, but I'm afraid I'm having lunch with the Secretary of the Interior, and as much as I would rather coax you and co-chief Rotelli into a second round…" Lawn twitches a little but remains peacefully curled into a C on the wet fur of Brittany's thigh. "…I'm afraid I have to go put up with Innersec for a while. Take the rest of the day off, have one of the drivers from the motor pool take you to your apartment—oh, and don't worry, we'll find you a more fitting residence," says Cordelia, bounding through the air and through the hall, disappearing between the heavy velvet curtains onstage.

They don't speak until they're back at Brittany's place, where they can reasonably assume nobody else can hear them. The tiger flops onto her couch in a tired upside-down slump, shoulders on the cushions, butt in the air, right leg draped on the back of the couch, and lets Lawn dangle near her face. It's only mid-afternoon, but she's exhausted.

"Shit. We're gonna be Chief of NACRE."

"Listen, uh, I'm sorry about speaking for you back there. It's just that I wasn't sure if you were going to say something that might get you in trouble…"

"It's alright. I was going to take the job. Just was kind of amazed, is all." Exhausted, she closes her eyes and lies there. Minutes pass before her bright blue eyes open again, pale azure ice flecked with snow, and she looks at Lawn, her own big pink penis that shows only faint indications of his former life. "You smell like the Secretary," she tells him.

"You know what you oughta do? You oughta jack off again."

"Fuck you, cock-boy. I'm going to sleep." And tired Brittany Slide curls up there on the couch and does just that, falling into an sleep that is deeper than wells. When she wakes up, the room is bright from sunlight reflecting off the falling snow outside, Lawn is still sleeping but sticking up in the air stiff as a club, and placed in front of Brittany's eyes there is a neat, folded triangle of paper and a single dust-gray feather. Trembling, she opens it, already aware of who the message is from.