Things That Go Chirp in the Night
"Hey, want a lift?"
The words had come out of the blue, or so it seemed, but when Stacy turned her head to look, the shiny form of a modern electric car was beside her. It had seemingly approached under the cover of the noise created by the downpour she was walking through.
Normally, having a strange man pull up beside her and offer her a lift would set off so many alarm bells Stacy'd already be reaching for her mace, but after a long night working and a long walk home in only her gym shorts, a sports bra, and a shirt to cover her, she was so beaten down by life that she would have said yes if it happened to be Lucifer himself in the driver's seat.
At least Lucifer would take me somewhere warm.
"Thanks. I'll get your car all wet, though." Despite her warning and how expensive the car looked, the door opened for her soggy self. She shrugged then climbed inside. "You're a life-saver. I'm Stacy."
"Hugo. Let me turn the heat up for you, Stacy." Hugo wasn't all he seemed. He wasn't a guy for a start. He wasn't even human. "Where am I driving you?"
"Home." As soon as Stacy said it, she felt stupid. She quickly rattled off her home address. "It's not that far…"
Hugo had no plan at all of driving Stacy to her home. He'd spent weeks searching for her—that is, someone with her particular structure and her particular career. "It's across town. Are you warm enough?"
"Yeah. My car broke down after work, and it wasn't raining when I started walking…" Stacy felt almost compelled to give reasons why she was out walking in the pounding rain wearing the least appropriate clothing possible.
"It happens. So what do you do, Stacy?" Pulling back onto the road, Hugo focused a good third of his attention on the woman seated beside him. The question, he well knew, would not be one most women would admit to a perfect stranger—he wanted to know if and how well she could lie.
For Stacy, the nature of her employment was an easy lie to tell. "I work as a barmaid. The pay's pretty terrible, and so are the customers, but the tips are nice."
The smooth way Stacy lied told Hugo he'd made the right choice. "I bet it gets really hectic working behind a bar. All the crowds of people wanting drinks…"
Stacy just wanted to change the topic, and leapt upon the first one that came up. "What do you do?"
Hugo smiled at the question. Of course he wouldn't lead her to this part of the conversation without having his own story straight. "I work in acquisitions for a large, family firm." The best lies, he knew, was any that was the complete truth. "I'm working on a big project at the moment, actually."
"Oh? What are you acquiring?" Stacy asked.
"Not what. Who."
Warning klaxons sounded in Stacy's head. Her eyes flicked to the door to see if it was unlocked—it wasn't. "W-W-Who?" Her throat was dry as she asked.
"You're not stupid, Stacy Richards. You work hard to make a living by doing something that you actually enjoy—yes, I know what you actually do—and you bend and scrape to make ends meet each month without a hint of planning for the future. I acquire people like you, Stacy, because you're a survivor and in your one particular profession, you are loved."
"I didn't tell you my last name…" While she spoke, Stacy's hand that was hidden from Hugo's view slid to her bag that had her phone in it. "W-Where are you taking me?"
"To a safe place. You won't be harmed—far from it."
Stacy had just a moment to realize there was a green ball of fire in the car before the man sitting next to her disappeared and left behind a creature of blackness. She actually managed to scream as it sank a big pair of gleaming fangs into her arm.
Shapechanging back to his human form, Hugo let out a sigh. "One day I'll find a candidate that won't panic. One day." The car gave up control to him as his hands closed around the wheel. "But not today. I hope you sleep well, Stacy."
"She's waking up."
In all, Stacy was done with her day. She'd been dancing on stage for her full shift, her car had died, she'd gotten rained on while walking home, kidnapped, bitten by something, and… As her slightly wonky brain got back through recent events, she sat up straight.
"Sorry I had to bite you. You were panicking, and I didn't want to wreck the car. If it makes you feel any better, I'll get you one when we're done."
Rubbing at one eye (with the arm that didn't feel like she'd been sitting on it), Stacy caught her first proper look at Hugo. The creature stood as high as her thigh, had a pair of huge blue eyes, and looked vaguely like a cross between a small horse and some kind of bug. "Forget all that. Just let me out, please? I won't even report you guys to the police if you just let me go."
"It doesn't work like that. Oh, they're about to turn the machine on for the night. There'll be more people arriving soon—if you want to speed things up, you could disrobe and step toward the belt at the back."
Stacy stared at Hugo. "Does that ever work?"
"Never, but I'm being honest. We're not going to hurt you."
The sound could be felt in Stacy's gut. Electric motors that weighed more than her car expressed their distaste at standing idle. The room seemed to come alive with movement as Stacy realized she was in some kind of factory and more specifically she was in some kind of pen at one end of the factory line.
Hugo wasn't the only of his species, Stacy saw, as more of the little black creatures seemed busily moving around and inspecting equipment, while one—it's horn glowing green—pulled a person along behind them.
About to ask what was going on, Stacy felt something slap against her back. A moment late her shirt was ripped free of her body. Turning, she saw that there was a slowly turning flail-drum above them. The long, rope-like pieces of rubber on the flail looked like they were sticky—they still had the remains of her shirt attached. "I thought you said you wouldn't hurt me?"
"It won't hurt."
For a moment Stacy was about to reply, but then there was another slap on her back, and this time rather than her shirt, the sticky stuff on the flail adhered to her back.
Yanked off her feet, Stacy let out a scream as she was lifted into the air only to get flung down a chute and into a vat filled with black, bubbling, goop.
The substance was hard to swim in, and Stacy had landed in it with enough force that she was plunged completely under the surface. Squirming and trying to get to air, she finally broke free with a loud gasp—only to feel something clamp around each of her ankles.
As the things holding her legs pulled forward, Stacy was at a loss as to how to fight whatever it was the machine was doing, though she quickly realized it was pulling her out of the goop.
Stacy spat and spluttered to get the goop out of her mouth, but it wasn't until she was completely free of the stuff that she realized what had happened. Her head was lighter, but she was more focused on the fact she had not one stitch of clothing left on. The goop was designed primarily as an agent for the removal of biologically dead substances—Stacy's sports bra, her shoes, socks, shorts, and panties were all gone, but that wasn't as much as a shock to her as when she realized it had eaten away all her hair, too.
The couplings holding her ankles to the chain-mess belt that was pulling her onward were flexible enough that she could move her legs around and even kneel on the belt, but freedom was beyond her. Even reaching down to her ankles and rattling the restraints did nothing to free her.
What Stacy didn't notice was the secondary effect of the goop. The stuff was literally soaking into her pores and flesh, staining her skin an ebony color and sealing up her pores behind it. She didn't know it, but her body was already changed forever.
Tossing her head to get rid of as much as the goop as she could, Stacy had just a moment to realize that the belt was pulling her into a new machine.
This one was the first of the magic-tech hybrid machines. It ran off electricity and the magic the factory kept stored in a reservoir. What it did was shrink anything put into it.
Stacy felt strange as she entered the mostly hollow machine, the inside feeling both hot and tingly at the same time. She rubbed at her arms and body to try to dispell the tingling, and failed to realize that her ankles had been freed by the belt (which ended in the middle of the machine) only for another belt to reach up and clamp around her much smaller ankles. She was nearly a quarter of her original size when she left the machine, but this resulted in her being sixteen times lighter.
"Hugo! Get me off this thing!" When her shout came out far higher pitched than she'd expected, Stacy looked down at her naked self in confusion. "Has this stuff messed with my voice?"
Unlike the others of his kind, Hugo was very particular about those he chose to undergo the process Stacy was now experiencing. He also had a 100% success rate. "Relax. You'll be fine. You're just a bit smaller than you were."
"Smaller?" When Stacy looked up to see where Hugo's voice was coming from, she had to look way up. He was on a catwalk just above her, but compared to her foot-and-change in height, he was massive. "What did you do to me?!"
"Nothing that will hurt you. You're about to go into one of the stranger bits. Just relax. It won't take long."
"Hugo, when I get out of this, I'm going to kick your butt so hard you'll feel it the rest of your—" Stacy's words were cut off as the next machine on the line opened up a door and she entered its overly hot interior.
When the door closed behind her, Stacy felt the temperature inside rise steadily, and then her skin started to tingle. It wasn't entirely just heat, there was a significant amount of magic bombarding her body. Her skin started to pull and squeeze, tugging on her body even as the bones inside her started to melt.
Stacy stared at her arms as her fingers seemed to melt together and harden, then her wrists and more. "What iss gorn orn?" It got harder for her to talk as even her jawbone melted into her flesh. The oddest thing was what happened to her arms next.
Her hands seemed to swell a little as large bubbles formed in what was left of her hands and forearms. The limbs seemed to thicken out slightly, and when the bubbles burst she realized she could actually move her forearms. There were joints at her wrists (which were higher up her arm than normal) and elbows.
The changes seemed to happen in her legs too, and Stacy fell forward to plant her new forelegs firmly against they belt while her rear legs formed out of her formerly human limbs.
Everything seemed to change at once now as the magical heat started to sink deep into her body. Her insides churned, and even her head was twisted and reshaped.
Stacy squirmed in place and tried to stand up, but her legs didn't seem up to holding all her weight. The other problem she had was her limbs not working right. Human (and all mammal) movement worked by muscle and sinew attached to bones working like levers. Now Stacy had to get used to muscles inside her hard exoskeleton pulling and tugging on her chitin.
Pushing out with her new forelegs, Stacy managed to sit up like a horse, then doing the same with her back legs stood her up completely. All her limbs felt strange, but yet she was getting more capable by the second as the magic rewrote the motor control parts of her brain. "What have you done to me?!"
The doors opened before her, and Stacy could see the next machine had a large pipe of glowing green stuff coming in on one side and what looked like balls on the other. The green goop looked suitably horrid and slimy, but it was the balls that had her attention. Each one was about the same size she was, which had her oddly worried.
"You're almost there, Stacy. Just one more stage and you'll be one of us for real."
"You could have left me how I—" Stacy hissed in surprise when her midsection gurgled and she felt a sting of hunger. The hiss was almost as much of a shock as the emptiness in her midsection, for a start her tongue was nearly five times longer than it used to be and had a forked tip.
Sitting back down and reaching her hooves up to her mouth, Stacy was about to examine her tongue when she noticed what had happened to the bubbles in her legs and arms—they'd popped and formed rigid, large holes.
The next machine caught her by surprise when it tilted the belt forward and unlocked her restraints. Stacy was left scrabbling for grip before she fell into a guided chute and into half of one of the balls.
A hose moved over her, and Stacy had barely a moment to take a deep breath in advance before the green goop sluiced out of the nozzle and poured all over her. The stuff wasn't a liquid, however, it was like gelatin. It filled the bottom half of the ball Stacy was sitting in and started to pile up around her. She tried to stick her head out, so she could keep breathing, but the top half of the ball hinged closed over her and she was stuck inside with the goop.
Worse still, the stuff seemed to be expanding to fill the ball.
Holding her snout shut as best she could, Stacy nonetheless felt the goop invading her nostrils and shoving into her mouth. One cough was all it took for the pressure inside the ball to shove the stuff all the way down into her lungs.
She wanted to scream and panic, so she tried both at once. This didn't exactly work, though she quickly realized she wasn't drowning—or breathing. The stuff in her lungs was too dense for her to pump it in or out, but despite that she wasn't drowning.
Sleep, however, pushed its way into Stacy's head and started clubbing her consciousness down with pillows of snoozy-times.
The last thing she saw was a distorted view of Hugo picking up her ball—he was huge.
The feel of warmth pulled Stacy from her sleep. She felt floaty and calm. She hadn't slept so well in months—probably years. When she tried to stretch and sit up on her bed, however, reality intruded and memories of the ball she was in flooded back.
Around her, the goop wasn't as thick anymore. She pushed at the ball, and rather than be rubbery and firm like it was originally, her little hoof shoved a hole right through it.
Freedom was only a little bit of frantic stomping and shoving away, and soon Stacy pushed herself through the hole she'd made.
Tumbling onto the floor, Stacy shook her head, then again, and finally started coughing as her lungs remembered they needed to work.
The goop she spat out from her lungs tasted horrible, but after nearly twenty seconds of coughing she could finally breathe again. "What the actual heck was that?!"
Blinking rapidly, Stacy looked around the room she was in. Her first impression was bathroom, but her seconds was how big it was. Her head was on a level with the rim of the bathtub, which meant she had no chance of reaching the sink or the mirror above that to see what had happened to her.
Struggling with her stubby little legs, Stacy quickly realized that she had twice as many as she should have. Examining herself took all her attention, and what she found shocked her. She was almost exactly the same as what Hugo had been. She had a hard, black skin that covered her whole body; four small stumpy legs with holes in them; and a tail that seemed like some kind of fin.
Closing her eyes, Stacy tried to focus on the here and now. She'd been turned into some kind of monster and was trapped inside a house. "Right. First step is get out of this tub."
That was easier said than done, as it turned out. Stacy's new hooves didn't do a particularly good job of grabbing onto the tub, and the remains of the egg she'd hatched from didn't help. Grumbling, she looked around at what she could use to escape the tub with, and her eyes landed on a towel that was at the end of the tub.
Using the towel to stop herself from slipping, Stacy managed to shimmy and climb her way out of the tub, only to flop down on the tiled floor.
"You've hatched at last? How are you feeling?"
What surprised Stacy most about the voice was it sounded just like her. When she looked up at the strange woman, she saw that it was her. A doppelganger of Stacy stood in the doorway of the bathroom. "What did you do to me?!"
Discarding his disguise, Hugo shrank from Stacy's form into his more comfortable changeling one. "I thought that was obvious. We made you into a changeling—like me."
"What if I didn't want to be a changeling? Did you ever think of that? And why am I so small?"
"Okay, that's a few questions. Let me answer them while I clean you off."
Stacy let out a chirp of surprise (a sound she didn't realize she could make) when Hugo picked her up in a green glow that flowed out from his horn. She squirmed in his grip, but found herself calming down when he put her in the shower.
Hugo turned on the taps to get some water to wash off the last of Stacy's egg-muck. "No one would want to be a changeling. We don't have the luxury—yet—of offering a choice. We pick people who we think will survive the process, observe them to make sure, then… you know the rest of that.
"You're small because you need to start off with only a little power. If we just popped you into a full-grown changeling body, you'd starve inside a week or explode from all the magic you gather. You need to learn how to use your powers."
Stacy stopped in her tracks and looked at Hugo. "Powers? What do you mean?"
"Demonstration time?" Hugo used his changeling magic and became a copy of Stacy again—Stacy's former form, of course. "The easiest to show—and my favorite—is shapechanging. You can look like anyone with the slightest thought." He quickly cycled to his old form, then several movie stars, but finally back to his buggy form. "Get the idea?"
The first thing that jumped to Stacy's mind was, I can finally get a boob job. That, she realized, was a stupid thought. She wasn't even human anymore. "So you can duplicate people? Can you modify aspects of them?"
"See? This is why I tapped you. Not only did you survive the process intact, but you're already thinking of ways to use your magic."
"What was up with that? You keep saying I survived it. Could I have died there?"
"Yes and no. It won't kill anyone, but this"—Hugo reached a hoof up to tap at the side of his head—"sometimes doesn't make it. I haven't lost a changeling yet though."
Thinking about it, Stacy let out a little chirp of discontent. "Seems about the same as killing. Okay, so I'll be able to do that transforming stuff? What else?"
Hugo decided to ignore her morality questions, as was prudent for a changeling—the hive doesn't grow without people to go through the process. "Well…"
Dancing was an odd thing for Stacy. When she was younger, she danced for fun. She took some classes in dance at college while working as a waitress, but then even that job fell through and dancing became her job. Money and smiles were her pay, but not any longer.
Shaking her hips and twirling around the pole on the little stage, she took huge gulps of love from her patrons. Dancing was more than just a way to make people happy and take their money—dancing was now how she kept herself fed and fed her hive-mates.
But it was still fun.
Author's Note
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