*chirp*
The wrist still looked wrong. Gibson stared at the page, the woman restrained on a Saint Andrew's Cross, and sighed. He'd tried getting equipment to simulate bondage, but it had never really helped for two reasons—he couldn't restrain himself safely and a poseable mannequin didn't flex and twist in the right ways to be usable.
His client had paid for it already, however, and even given him a tip. Further, it was getting upvotes and faves on each site he'd published it to—but he hated that wrist. He hated it so much. "Why can't I get more pony commissions? At least then I don't have to deal with wrists and hands!"
What was the worst bit was having to scroll past it on Twitter every time someone commented—and he would see that wrist. Closing his eyes, Gibson let out a breath and proceeded to close the tab and move on. The money had been good, but he was barely making ends meet. That is, it wasn't making ends meet in a way he'd have liked.
He'd thought about it before, even written up the ad and saved it as a draft, but now he'd had to resign himself to the fact that living in a three-bedroom house on his own wasn't viable—no matter how much people paid him to draw sexy bondage art of their characters with bad wrists.
Craigslist wasn't the best place, but he could have done worse. He published the ad and opened his inbox—then quickly put on some music.
That had been a week (and a whole other project that had annoyed him because of rope-bondage inaccuracies) ago, and now Gibson had to deal with a surprise interloper upon his personal domain.
A housemate.
He'd cleaned up the spare room, even given her the option to swap to his art room if she wanted, though she'd said the one he'd emptied was fine. It wasn't that Gibson didn't like her—far from it, they'd chatted for quite a while and he'd found out she was an artist too—it was just having someone in his space.
"I'm sorry you have to do this, Gibson, but at the same time it's a huge relief to have somewhere to live. I promise I won't be a burden or stress you out with rent." Catherine wasn't lying at all, though every single statement was a half-truth. She absolutely was sorry they had to do this to him, it was a relief to find someone compatible for their purposes, and she would never personally be a burden. Rent wasn't going to be a problem either.
Gibson wasn't the first susceptible human they'd found, and she hoped he wouldn't be the last.
He was sitting in the living room, on the couch, with his sketchpad out. With a housemate who didn't know his primary income was porn, he quickly covered the sketch of a wolf woman being lashed and tried his best not to look guilty of something. He wasn't as good as Catherine at bending the truth. "It's fine. I mean, it's not like you're going to intrude on every aspect of my daily life or anything."
It was a good attempt at a joke, and Catherine could appreciate the loner lifestyle, but this was business—and business for her meant fitting in and making Gibson more relaxed. "I can if you want, but I have sooo much work to do, you know? I—uh—hope you're okay with maybe seeing the odd explicit piece. It's just I do paintings on commission, and some people—" She cut-short her made-up little spiel when she saw Gibson's jaw drop. It was perfect. "You want me to move out, don't you?"
"N-No! It's just—I'm kinda in the same boat. It's just freaky to find someone else who does this too." Slowly, and using every ounce of his willpower, Gibson lifted his sketchbook up to show Catherine.
"Huh. Mouse-girl strapped to a cross and being flogged? Nice lines." Catherine tasted the sweet desires people had when they thought no one else cared, and what she saw on the page didn't surprise her in the least.
At least a third of Gibson's anxiety drained away—though that still left him with quite a bit. "Th-Thanks. I was freaking out, you know, that I'd have to keep my art locked away and hide in my studio. Not exactly everyone's cup of tea, you know?"
Sitting down in one of the armchairs, Catherine rolled her eyes. "Totally. I'm sure my mom would have all kinds of words for me if she knew what I was doing." Again, not strictly a lie. Praise, however, would be different from what she implied. "I guess it's my turn to pay for dinner?"
The first week together had been the usual kinds of awkward. Each discovering the other's diet, habits, and surprises. Catherine ate light and usually had salads, she had an odd way of wanting company while she worked on her art that meant she set up her easel in the living room, and she was an exceptional painter and study of the human anatomy—though she seemed to focus mostly on males. These were all things that didn't overly bother Gibson, except when it was her night to cook food.
Still, the Saturday evening at the end of their first week together heralded a small celebration, and Catherine had bestowed upon the house a honey-mead that, to Gibson's tastebuds, was just about the most amazing thing ever.
The more he drank, the harder it got to focus—not that this wasn't normal. Gibson put on a music stream and just chilled on the couch and talked with Catherine. They talked for hours and his drink seemed to never run empty for long.
It was funny how the more he drank, the harder it was to understand and make sense of the world around him. When Catherine told him to just relax and drink as much as he wanted, he took that advice to heart because, by that point, he literally couldn't say no to her.
The royal honey used to spike the drink, Catherine knew, made Gibson's mind soft and pliable—at least at first. She ensured he kept drinking right up until the moment his eyes fluttered closed and he started to snore. "That's enough, little sister. Soon you'll be focused on a different task."
Carrying Gibson down to the basement, Catherine was surprised by what she found—surprised and pleased. "Well, this means I don't need to waste any resin to bind you up. Now, how does this go on again?"
Gibson, when he woke, could barely move. His arms were sore, his legs felt odd, and there was a chillness to his body that his brain told him simply meant he was naked. That was one thing he'd discovered, the other was that his arms were held above his head and restrained somehow with a tightness all the way from his elbows to his wrists.
Looking upward, regretting the movement immediately as the room seemed to sway, Gibson examined the ropes binding his arms with curiosity. They weren't just tied like a normal kidnapper would—they were tied together and had interlaced knots and loops like the shibari commission he'd taken.
"Like it? I had to do some research, but I figured out where you'd gone wrong with the design you'd used." Catherine wasn't wearing her Catherine skin. She looked down at the bound-up Gibson and then crouched to be a bit closer to his level. "Sorry for the confusion"—she gestured at her body—"but you know how it is, a person disappears and the police are called."
Staring at his body-double, Gibson tried to speak only to realize there was something large between his teeth—held in place by a strap behind his head. He'd purchased the gag—and had actually tried it out himself—when working on another piece. He knew the feel of the thing as it stretched his jaw, and he also knew that with his arms restrained he couldn't get it off.
"You promise not to scream?" Catherine asked.
What else was Gibson going to do? He nodded. When she—still looking just like Gibson—reached out and unbuckled the ball from the straps, he let out a gasping breath. "Why are you doing this? How are you doing this? What are you? What did you do with Catherine?"
Frozen in surprise, Catherine tried desperately to hold back her giggles—and failed. "You think I'm—and not—" More laughter spilled into the air before finally Catherine managed to calm down enough. "Gibson, you don't get it. I am Catherine. I am the one who tied you up after I fed you royal jelly. You poor, poor trusting human. You let a monster into your house."
With that, Catherine caught fire and burst into green flames that stung Gibson's eyes and made him panic. When the flames receded, however, a black monster remained. It was small, quadrupedal, and had holes in its limbs and a vaguely equine shape that seemed odd to his sensibilities. "What are you?"
"I'm a changeling, but the better question is what are you, Gibson." Catherine waited a moment before rolling her blue, glowing eyes. "You are weak to magic. I could scramble that mind of yours in a moment or blast you into a million pieces—or feed you royal jelly so that you start turning into a changeling queen."
That's when it hit Gibson what they reminded him of. "Wait, like My Little Pony stuff? I think—"
"We needed money. Selling a cute story to humans is like shooting fish in a barrel." Stepping around her prisoner, Catherine checked the bondage equipment. It was good quality stuff, and she could see it hadn't really been used before, but it was sure going to get a workout now. "It also made them great food. So, Gibson, do you feel any different yet?"
That brought Gibson up short in anything he might have replied with. Gears turned in his head. Feel any different? What are you? Weak to magic. Then, when his brain was finally firing on all cylinders again, the important one hit. Turning into a changeling queen. A clenching in his belly was the first sign that anything Catherine had said was true. He squirmed in the bindings, realizing again that he was naked and something was strapped to his legs.
A spreader bar kept his ankles far apart, the cuffs on each end locked on with itty-bitty padlocks. He knew all this gear because it was his gear. Gear he'd purchased in the vain hope that it would help him with his art and that one day—maybe—he'd find someone who'd use it on him. Another pang of tightness in his belly pulled him back from musing on the bondage equipment. "Why are you doing this?!"
"Hey, keep it down or the ball-gag goes back in." Walking around her prisoner, Catherine could see his skin darkening at the small of his back and smiled. "Why I captured a human who's susceptible to magic and started turning them into a changeling queen is because we like you guys—we really do. Humans are capable of so many more emotions than anything else, and you're so easy to keep happy. We love this world and we love that you love. But, ultimately, there's not enough of us to go around. Our queen is doing everything she can, but she can only lay so many eggs, you know?
"So, you're going to help. Congratulations! We, uh, don't need actual queens, though, so I'll be stopping the process the moment you start making eggs, but I'll have a team here in no time that'll take care of you and see to it that you want for nothing for the rest of your life, Gibson."
"You say that like I—like I won't be leaving this place for the rest of my life." The words were hard to say, doubly so with the cramps he felt in his gut that seemed to be drifting upward. "Is it going to hurt?"
"I've only helped detain and convert two others. Neither of them said it hurts, but if you want I could mimic their cries as they transformed?" It wasn't love that streamed from Gibson, but Catherine was able to drink it just the same. She preferred love because it was sweeter.
Gasping for breath, feeling his diaphragm changing inside him, Gibson tried several times to speak but the lack of air pressure in his lungs robbed him of speech. It was everything he could do to just keep breathing.
It was his own personal hell he struggled through, feeling his insides twist and roil, but he didn't have to just feel them. A moment later, as the skin around his belly and back hardened into chitin, a band of green broke up the black—circling around his belly. What shocked him was that he could see through it.
Straining against the ropes, Gibson couldn't tear his eyes away from the view inside his body as his organs twisted and reshaped themselves—at least until he noticed more external changes. The bondage—something he'd always fantasized about without ever being able to ask someone else to help with—had stirred up strange feelings inside. He loved the feel of the cuffs holding his legs apart, of the rope's soft coils restraining his arms, and he'd even loved the feel of the gag stopping him from uttering a word.
His penis stood proud as a testament to his newly expressed love of bondage.
Right before his eyes that bastion of manhood started to shrink. Not shrink in the deflating-after-orgasm way. No. He watched his rock-hard shaft get smaller in both girth and length but remain hard.
Gibson's eyes flicked between his insides and his shrinking penis. Inside, he could see an organ attached to tubes that led to his penis shrink down to a dot, then start to grow again. Only, that organ now had a large tube that attached just below his penis.
Straining in his bonds to look at what was happening on his exterior, Gibson was rewarded when his penis had shrunk enough that he could see a pair of thick, puckering lips start to migrate down from his groin to his taint. Swapping to look inside, he could see that tube moved with it and—with a gasp of shock—he knew what it was. "V-v-v-vagina?"
"You expected to remain male and still lay eggs? Come on, Gibson, you're smarter than that."
He was, but he wasn't thinking too well as he watched his new sex form within his body. A pair of orbs moved up and along that tunnel and attached themselves deep inside him.
It was all happening too fast and too real. He could barely follow what was going on, and almost missed as his womb started to swell for the first time.
"There we go. Your eggs are starting to grow. We can stop all these transformations now." Catherine reached out to Gibson with her magic and she tweaked the royal jelly inside him—stalling the transformation. "There's still a little inside your blood. You might lose that pretty face of yours and maybe grow a tail, but that's it. You'll be our little brooding princess."
Staring at his womb swelling with small, bumpy shapes, Gibson felt tears start to sting his eyes. This wasn't meant to be his life! He was an artist! He should be making things to make people happy. He shouldn't live chained up in his own basement!
A pressure started to grow inside, and against his will Gibson felt pleasure spark inside him as an egg moved from his womb to his vagina. Grunting and panting, his body acted without him, straining new muscles and pushing the egg slowly down his birth canal and to his vulva.
The pleasure spiked, and with it an orgasm rushed through him as the egg breached and his body pushed it out. He had just a moment to regain his senses when a second egg started its journey.
Gibson couldn't focus for more than a few seconds between long, drawn-out pleasure as an egg passed through him or the final breach of an egg that always forced him into an orgasm. Hanging there, unable to do more than squirm as his body did exactly what the changeling wanted it to, anger started to build.
This wasn't what he wanted.
But his mind raced to work out what he wanted now.
Freedom was the easiest answer, but he had changed too much to pass as human anymore. He couldn't see the final changes that had crept up his face, but he could feel the partial snout and fangs he now bore.
What else was there for him, he wondered. A small—tiny—voice spoke up in his head: finish it.
Finish the change.
It was stupid. Gibson ignored that voice throughout a dozen more eggs, but each time the pleasure of laying wore him down a little more, that voice became more and more believable. What else was his option, surrender and just let his body be used for the rest of his life?
Let his children be stolen?
It was the final thought that made his mind up. He wasn't just being used, his children were too. With that in mind, he started trying to focus on his body—caught between human and changeling—between each rising tide of pleasure.
For nearly fifty eggs he found nothing. His body was pushed through rising pleasure, peak, and scant moments of calm before the process repeated. Eventually, and with the sound of other hooves in his home above his head, Gibson found something.
The strange magic inside him was weak and tiny, but it was magic. It called to him for help, begged him to give it just a little faith.
Wrapping up all his anger and loss, Gibson fed that little flame of magic—and it grew. Brighter and hotter with each emotion he loosed fed it, he found himself huddling around the fire of magic as it got brighter. He fought to ignore the pleasure that egg-laying brought, but that was impossible.
The flame, though, it fed on that pleasure too, and Gibson found that he could relax and just enjoy it. It was nice to relax, after all, and feed everything to the fire of magic that was building up higher and higher inside.
Only when one of his legs slipped from the spreader-bar's cuff did Gibson think to focus on the rest of his body. His leg was pitch black, smooth chitin. At the end was the remains of his human foot as it curled up tighter—hardening slowly into a hoof.
Accept it.
That was the key, Gibson realized. They had made him half a changeling queen—not even that, maybe a quarter. Well, he was going to finish the job properly and become more.
Focusing on his other leg, he sent the magic fire rushing down the limb and felt excitement grow as his limb changed from muddy pink-black to shiny black chitin. He got to watch as his human foot hardened over and his toes curled up before becoming the perfect limb that slipped free of the remaining cuff.
Part of him regretted getting free. He remembered clearly how much he enjoyed even the changeling binding him up—but that was the old him. Being bound wasn't for him—not now, not ever again. Looking to his left arm, he sent fire rolling up it to change the limb into another perfect leg. He ignored the added strain from the ropes as his wrist turned to chitin and his hand screwed up into a ball, hardened, and became another hoof.
Shaking free of the ropes, Gibson still had one issue to deal with. Focusing his attention on his belly, he pushed his will into his new anatomy and—with knowledge borne of the instincts his new form came with—he paused the egg production that even now wracked him with pleasure.
The backlog of eggs needed to be dealt with, however, and Gibson settled down on his belly to enjoy their laying.
Now, with his own will directing his actions once more, Gibson could appreciate how wonderful it was to lay the eggs. His body seemed to change little by little with each new egg that left him. One changed his neck. Another formed his face into a snout. Yet one more caused his face to change from soft and yielding flesh to hard chitin that only articulated at certain places. Ears, even his hair took the growing pleasure and peak of orgasm to change until there was nothing left of the human Gibson had been.
Coming down from her last release, Gibson felt renewed—and empty. The feeling of eggs growing was now absent, though there was a desire to make more. And why not? Laying eggs is what changeling queens were born to do. Lay eggs and rule their hive. Standing, Gibson looked around at the pile of eggs behind her.
Some of the eggs—the last few—were still small, but some of the ones at the rear of the pile had grown to the size of her head. This, in Gibson's estimation, was correct. She had no idea how she knew, she just knew.
"Let's go check on that new breeder and collect their eggs. They'll be almost completely blissed out and mindless by now. No human mind could withstand all that pleasure."
It didn't sound like Catherine, or even like Gibson's old voice, but the words inspired a righteous fury to grow in Gibson. Advancing on the stairs that led up to the kitchen, Gibson slipped into a nook where anyone coming down the stairs wouldn't see her until they were almost at the bottom—and even then they'd have to turn their head.
"Ugh, what's that smell?" Skrrt asked.
"It's your first time dealing with a breeder, huh?" Leading the way down, Articulate rolled their eyes at their companion's reaction. "You'll get used to it. This one's fairly new, as Catherine said. Hey, where's the breeder?"
That was Gibson's cue. Realizing she had two foes to deal with, instinct drove her to reach out with her magic for the first one. When the first—looking like a young human man with startling blue eyes—turned to look at her and flashed with green fire, Gibson felt contact with their mind directly.
Changeling minds were tough and resilient things, but they all had a particular limitation—changeling queens could dominate them if they weren't defended by their own queen. When Articulate's mind felt Gibson's press into it, their own thoughts fled and they felt the will of their new queen rush in to take their place. Turning to look at Skrrt, Articulate lowered their head a little and let loose with a stun-bolt from their horn.
It was utterly disconcerting for Gibson to be controlling two bodies, twice so when she was flooded with Articulate's emotions and instincts. Fear was the strongest emotion—they hadn't expected a fully-fledged changeling queen to be in the basement.
Projecting calm toward Articulate, Gibson reached out for Skrrt and touched their mind too. It was meant to be a far more gentle touch, but the disorientated changeling felt Gibson's mental weight settle into place.
"I'm not going to hurt you so long as you explain what's going on." Gibson's voice sounded strange, like a horror-movie-alien and a voice-changer had a baby. "First, what are you doing with my eggs?"
Lying, as a concept, was impossible for Articulate. She stared at Gibson in shock, unable to move a single muscle without her new queen's permission, and slowly opened her mouth. "We take them to the hive's nursery. They are raised there and taught to serve Queen Chrysalis."
"Not anymore." Gibson's words were spoken low, but they carried the weight of a creature that knew her place was not just the top of the food-chain, but the top of civilization. "We will need a new nursery. Your old queen holds no sway over you anymore."
The moment the tight grip on her mind relaxed, Articulate dropped to one knee. Instinct was strong, and her instinct now told her that this was her queen. "My queen"—the words had needed to be said before anything else—"I will do as you say."
Feeling a rush of excitement as her first drone fell in line, Gibson looked to the other one. She relaxed her grip on their mind a little. "And what of you?"
One of the more recently hatched changelings—born from a human hybrid's egg—Skrrt felt a connection with Gibson that ran deeper than just that of a changeling for their queen. "Please let me serve you! Queen Chrysalis didn't even—I don't think she even cares about a single drone."
The words were as true as Gibson could fathom. She knew these two changelings literally couldn't lie to her. Walking forward, she touched their minds and told them both to advance.
Gibson's new height was far above the smaller changelings, leaving her feeling more like the queen her instincts screamed she was. "Then do what I ask. Tend to my eggs, raise my drones, and we will free others like I was from the prisons this Chrysalis has built for them. We won't take over the world—at least not until we've taken over this invasion."
Author's Note
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