NOVEL NEXT 48 of 62: Shoulder Angels
Some little while later, we got dressed again and crawled through the narrow spaces out from under the blanket and into the now-brighter light.
“Looks like y’all had fun,” Poppy said. She and Lisette were leaning back against their T-shirt, which they’d crumpled up a bit until it was high enough to lean against. Britt seemed to still be sound asleep; she’d rolled over on her other side and was drooling adorably.
“Soooo much fun,” Jada replied instantly with a satisfied smile, while I tried to not show my embarrassment too much. I punched her lightly in the arm.
There was an enormous rumbling sound some distance away, and Jada said, “I think Steph’s awake. What about if I boost you up onto the pillow so you can see farther?”
So we went over to the pillow and I stepped into Jada’s cupped hands. She heaved and I jumped — remember, we were a lot stronger than normal humans relative to our size — and I went flying. For a moment I was afraid I’d go past the pillow and the head of the bed, hit the wall, and fall down behind the bed, but I came back down on the pillow, and after picking myself up (feeling even more wobbly standing on the pillow than on the sheeted mattress), I turned around and looked across the room.
Steph was just now sitting up, giving out another rumbling yawn as she did so.
“Oh, hey, you’re up,” she said. “Is everybody else up?”
“Everybody except Britt,” I said.
“Yo,” Britt said. From where I was standing, toward the back of Jada’s pillow, I couldn’t see the others.
“Okay, everybody,” I amended.
“Cool. Um, I’m gonna run down the hall to the restroom, okay, and then I’ll come back and fix breakfast and take you guys to the Venn machine.”
It was then that I realized I needed to pee too. I’ll gloss over the next bit because it’s kind of TMI, but Britt, Poppy and I needed Steph to help us in the restroom. I’ll just say that dangling over a sink the size of a swimming pool with no drain stopper and a drain wider than your waist while you plunge your hands into a stream of water wider than your head to wash them is kind of terrifying.
When we returned to the room, we found Jada and Lisette playing on the pillow like a bouncy castle.
“That looks like fun,” I said, and joined in. Britt and Poppy did the same a few moments later while Steph started getting breakfast ready.
She opened up the refrigerator and got out one cup of yogurt for herself, and another one for the rest of us. The five of us couldn’t eat a whole cup between us, and we couldn’t even reach the rim of it until she set one of Jada’s books next to the carton on either side, so we could stand next to it and reach in to scoop our handfuls of yogurt. Of course, the resulting mess necessitated another trip to the bathroom for all five of us, and another terrifying dangle over the sink to wash our hands and faces.
During breakfast, we talked about what to do in the next ten hours or so until the party started. Steph would want to start getting ready for her date with Greg about the same time we venned into our Halloween costume forms. Jada offered to take us on a tour of the campus, which would kill an hour or two, and suggested that after that, we watch one of the classic horror movies that were playing this weekend at the campus cinema.
So after we finished washing up, Steph packed us in the box lined with towels, carried us to the Venn machine, and set it up, then took us out of the box and set us on the sidewalk in front of the Venn machine one by one. Jada and I went in first, and changed each other into nagas. Then Jada venned Britt into a naga as well (still with four arms), and Poppy and Lisette venned each other into kangaroo-girls.
“I guess I’ll go back to the dorm,” Steph said once we were all full-size again. “I’ll see y’all later in the day.”
“Have fun,” Jada said.
So we followed Jada around, getting the hang of slithering. I’d never venned into a naga before, somehow, and Jada and Britt hadn’t done so in a long time. Poppy and Lisette hadn’t been kangaroo-morphs before, either, but they hopped along gamely enough. By the time we’d seen most of the central part of campus, and some more interesting outlying parts, we pretty much had our new locomotion down pat. It being the weekend before Halloween, there were a lot more people visibly venned than usual, Jada told us. “On a regular weekend you see maybe one person in fifty venned into something cool like this, but today it looks to me like it’s at least one in ten.”
“Yeah, about that,” I said as we passed a jackal-headed couple.
We ended our tour at the cinema about fifteen minutes before Tales from the Crypt was to start. At first, getting ourselves into theater seats was not easy, but we managed to coil our tails on them after a few tries, and settled in to watch (and grab each other in panic when the movie got scary, which it quickly did).
Afterward, we slithered to a nearby off-campus restaurant for lunch, and talked about the movie. Jada asked Poppy and Lisette about their motorcycling adventures, and we talked about the stuff Jada had been getting involved in on campus.
After that, we returned to the Venn machine to change into our costume forms for the party. We’d prepared them ahead of time, so they were in our recent history, and it didn’t take us long to change.
I was a two-headed dragon, but bigger than usual, tall enough that I had to duck slightly to fit into the Venn machine booth. I had black scales on my left and white scales on my right, and a long tail with a wicked-looking thagomizer. (The spines on the thagomizer looked sharp, but were actually rubbery and would bend back if they bumped into someone or something.)
Jada was a little demon, only about eighteen inches tall, with short horns, bat-like wings similar to mine, short reddish-brown fur, and cute little hooves. I picked her up and gave her a piggyback ride with her legs around my left neck.
Britt was an angel of the same height, with feathery wings and mostly-human legs with bird-like feet, wearing a white robe. I picked her up, too, and she straddled my right neck.
Lisette was a vampire biker; her venned form had more exaggerated fangs and longer fingernails than in her everyday body. Poppy was a motorcyborg, a sort of centaur with a small motorcycle for her lower half and a seat behind her torso for Lisette to ride on.
We went back to Britt’s car to get the rest of our luggage, the toiletries and costume accessories that we’d left in the car so Steph wouldn’t have to carry so much stuff to the dorm. When we got to the dorm, we didn’t try to get Poppy up the stairs to Jada’s floor, even though I might have been strong enough to lift her; she and Lisette used the ground-floor bathroom to change clothes while Britt, Jada and I went back to Jada’s dorm room, where we unpacked the costume accessories — a little toy pitchfork for Jada and a toddler-size halo for Britt — and put away the rest of the luggage. A few minutes later, we rejoined Poppy and Lisette downstairs. Lisette had changed into her biker leathers and applied some temporary tattoos. The Venn machine couldn’t produce a traditional biker’s outfit with all the patches and insignia, or tattoos that weren’t just abstract patterns. Poppy had changed from the abstract pattern T-shirt the machine had given her into a “Look Twice, Save a Life” T-shirt.
Once Jada gave me directions and we headed out, she started telling us more about the people from the queer group we might meet at the party. She’d told us about some of her new friends earlier, in phone conversations with me and Britt, or chatting with Lydia in her room, but now she gave us a thorough run-down of everyone she knew in the queer group, however casually they were acquainted. That took us halfway across campus to the student center, where the party was being held. When we entered the building (I had to duck my heads to get through the door, but the ceilings were high enough for me after that), we heard music coming from the party and followed it down the hall to where a few people were standing around chatting outside an open door. A couple of them waved to us.
“Happy Halloween!” said a girl venned as a spider-taur, with spidery fangs and eyes, wearing a corset on her human-ish torso. “You don’t have to introduce yourselves, we’ll be having a contest to see who can guess the most people’s identities accurately. But we’d like to know if you’re a member or a guest.”
“I’m a member,” Jada said, and showed her invitation. “These are my guests, friends who’re visiting me this weekend: my girlfriend,” (she patted my left head), “my other girlfriend, and our other friends.”
“Awesome! Okay, hang on a minute.” She gave us nametags that didn’t have names, just “Guest” or “Member” and a number. “If you think you’ve figured out who anybody is, write down their names and the numbers on their nametags, along with your name, and put it in the big jar on the table near the DJ. You can find paper and pens there.”
We continued into the room and saw about five couples dancing, three or four people sitting in the chairs along one wall, and a couple more browsing at the snack tables. We headed over to the snacks and picked up a few things to eat and drink; I took requests from Britt and Jada and handed them their snack plates and drinks. Then we started dancing.
Not many other people were venned as drastically as me or Poppy or the spider-taur who was greeting people, but most of them were venned in some way, or wearing really elaborate costumes. There was only one person that Jada recognized without difficulty, though by the time the party was half over, she had tentatively identified three other people by their speech patterns or mannerisms. After we’d danced for a while, we chatted with a couple of girls who were cosplaying as Bastet and Hathor, with cat and cow heads on mostly human bodies wearing the Venn machine’s best approximation of ancient Egyptian clothing, and some guys who’d venned into inventive monsters: a centipede-taur with eyes all over his bald head, and his boyfriend, a wolf-like robot or living statue with a lot of sharp pointy bits.
“Yeah, I’m doing a lot better lately,” Bastet said. “I’ve got a lot more worshipers and they’re not just giving room and board to my avatars, but sending pictures of their inscrutable deeds all over the world, and even becoming my avatars in their own persons.”
“All that worship must be tasty,” Hathor said wistfully. She was gaunt and pallid compared to Bastet’s healthy glossy fur and rounded curves. “People are treating my sacred animals like crap on an industrial scale. There’s some who do better, but not enough.”
Lisette pitched in with some disparaging comments about industrialized agriculture. I turned my left head to my right and said, “If I were to devour those inhumane farmers, would you object?”
“Yes!” my right head said. “Good people, bad people, they’re still people. No matter how tasty they are, we should only eat them if they ask nicely.”
My bad shoulder angel took the opportunity to goad me on. “Yes! These gods and monsters look very tasty, except for the robot wolf. Rend! Devour!”
My good shoulder angel gasped in horror and exclaimed, “No! It would be wrong! Besides, the gods are too ethereal to be filling anyway, and the vampire looks like she would rot in your stomachs.”
After we’d danced a while longer, when the party was about half over, the music changed to a low-volume instrumental track and the spider-taur said it was time for everyone to turn in their guesses about who was who. Jada and a few other people scrambled to write something down and put it in the jar. Then the music started up again louder and we danced while the spider-taur and Bastet tabulated the guesses, and then, after that song, they had everyone introduce themselves. Three of Jada’s four guesses were right, but a couple of other people had guessed five right, and one person guessed six.
After everyone’s identities were revealed, Jada introduced us to some of her friends. The spider-taur was Hope, a senior psychology major and one of the leaders of the group. Bastet and Hathor were Jaylyn and Karen; Karen was a freshman, and was in Jada’s World Civilizations class, while Jaylyn was a sophomore.
“So you’re Jada’s girlfriends?” Jaylyn said. “What kind of body do you wear when you’re not venned for a party like this?”
“I’m still a dragon,” I said, “only not so big and scary, about five-seven with purple scales, and I only have one head most days. I work at a restaurant that allows all kinds of venns.”
“Cool.”
“I’m mostly human, about five-ten with four arms,” Britt said. “I work for my dad’s car repair business. He usually has four arms too.”
“Awesome,” Karen said. “I need to get a job somewhere that lets you venn into whatever.”
“I got lucky,” I said. “My friend who’s worked there since they opened told me they were hiring again and recommended me.”
We talked about our jobs and the jobs we’d like to have for a little while, and then Jada introduced me to some more people, and despite my imposing draconic appearance — I was the tallest person at the party, and one of the most massive — my anxiety finally started getting the better of me. I excused myself “to go to the restroom,” and set Britt and Jada down on some of the chairs at the edge of the room, then went out in the hall and looked for a restroom with a handicapped stall big enough for me to hide and be alone for a few minutes to get a grip on myself.
I didn’t try to sit on the toilet; I wasn’t sure it could support my weight. I just leaned against the wall of the stall and took slow, deep breaths for a while, finally starting to feel more okay.
Then I heard Jada call out, “Hey, Lauren, you okay in there?”
“Hmm? Oh, yeah. Just needed to clear my head. Too many new people too fast.”
“Sorry about that. We can go back to the dorm early if you want. No big deal.”
I opened the stall door. Jada was riding on Poppy’s passenger seat — which shouldn’t have surprised me, because she was small enough that opening the restroom door would have been an issue for her little arm’s muscles.
“I don’t want to be the reason y’all bail early —”
“I wasn’t planning to stay all night anyway,” Jada said. “Come on, you don’t have to go back into the party room, just hang out in the hall with me while Poppy rounds everybody up.”
“Thanks.” I bent over and kissed her with my right head.
So I sat down in the hall outside the party with Jada in my lap, stroking her fuzzy fur between her horns and making her purr (which was a surprise to both of us; we hadn’t realized that this venn form had a cat-like purring mechanism). A few minutes later, Poppy returned with Britt and Lisette. Britt and Jada got on my shoulders again and Lisette got on Poppy, and we left to walk, or roll, across campus to the Venn machine to get ready for bed.
This time none of us were as small as before, since we didn’t have Steph to carry us. Jada was the size of a five-year-old, tall enough to reach doorknobs, though with four arms to make it obvious she was a venned adult. The rest of us were about eight to ten inches tall; small enough that the five of us could comfortably share Jada’s bed, but big enough that we wouldn’t have the same difficulties we’d had that morning. I’d venned Jada wearing a sort of baby-sling that she could carry several doll-sized people in, and she was strong enough to carry all four of us easily, although getting back to the dorm took a while on her short legs. By the time we got there, she was tired enough to go to bed right away. Britt and I snuggled up next to Jada at the head of the bed, and Lisette and Poppy took the foot, and most of them were asleep pretty soon. I was awake long enough to hear Steph come in, and sort of see her, though I couldn’t make out a lot of detail in the dark. I saw her look over at us and say, “Awwwww,” very softly before grabbing her pajamas and going down the hall to the bathroom to change. By the time she got back, I was asleep too.
