[center][b]Elements: Water[/b]
by [name]JustLurking[/name][/center] 

I was lucky enough to see the whole thing.  I saw when the hero arrived and I saw when he came back from the dock.

You see, a hero of legend is just a fur that happens to have had a lot of (successful) adventures, and an adventure (more often than not) is usually just taking care of some village’s monster or bandit problem, or recovering a lost or stolen artefact.  It follows that anyone can stay home and become a local hero, but a hero of legend must travel from one tricky situation to the next.

Again, more often than not, these ‘adventures’ tend to be more mercenary than merciful.  The ‘hero’ is no such thing to the starving outcast bandit tribes, and poets tend to gloss over such unheroic things as demands for recompense.  In the end no one wants to hear the story of the relic recovered from the corpses of half a dozen furs who arguably had as much right to it as the greedy villagers who could not bare to part with it.  Such stories do not make good entertainment in the dark nights, so a ‘hero’ can depend on the bards to ‘clean up’ their actions for them.

Now, Issac wasn’t bad as far as adventurers went.  He went from settlement to settlement looking for action and adventure.  He didn’t (usually) demand anything more than food and shelter when he took on a ‘job’, and otherwise he paid for his supplies and boarding when in town.

The world outside of towns and villages has never been a pleasant one.  Thick forest is all you will find beyond the walls and fields of civilisation.  If you are lucky there is a path from one town to the next.  If you’re not then there is a lot of pressing your way through thick brush and climbing over hills.  Either way you have wild animals and wild monsters and wild men to contend with. 

So you understand that living through that day after day meant that Issac was quite a buff looking raccoon.  His lanky body muscled nicely from swinging that heavy sword and lugging about that heavy pack.  His reaction were sharp too form years of snap decisions and chasing down cultists who were foolish enough to set up communes too near to superstitious farmers, but he wasn’t too bright.

That isn’t to say he was dumb, but if Issac had listened to his first instinct when he walked into our nearly town he would have turned and walked right back out.  I could see it in his face, his discomfort and unease, but he pushed on and that’s how the whole thing started.

Anyway, I was sitting on my doorstep playing jacks with the set my father gave me for my eighth birthday when he walked up to me and asked: “Where are all the adults young man?”

Well I looked up at him and I said: “There aren’t any grown ups in this village any more.” In the cutest lil’ cub voice I could manage.

It was a pretty bad voice let me tell you, but Issac didn’t seem to notice, perhaps he was still put off by how mush like a ghost town our village looked.  A village just doesn’t seem populated if no one in it comes up higher than a door handle, and no one in ours did.

“What happened to them?” He asks me and I have to bite my cheek for a second to stop from grinning.

“They went to the dock.”  I sez once I had suppressed my giggles.

“And they haven’t come back?”  He asks and I just shake my head because I don’t trust myself to speak.

Then he looks up the street in such a meaningful, heroic way—you know; one foot on the step of my porch, hand resting on his knee, as he looks up the village in the direction of the sunset, all thoughtful and deep.  Well that just set me off.  I managed to choke back the laughs, but his head snapped round and he would have suspected something if I hadn’t thought on my feet and dragged my arm across my muzzle like I had just sneezed.

Well that allayed his suspicion for the moment, but I might as well not bothered because then we were off to interview the rest of the kids in town and they were much worse at keeping in the giggles than I was.  I tell you there were a few heads I wanted to bop that day!

In the end we ended up here at the tavern.  It was dark so us cubs got the fire going and put on a meal for him.  I think he was surprised that we were coping so well without adults and that we weren’t all crying and traumatised, but then he kept getting the same answer, in many different cubby voices, when he asked how long the adults had been gone for;  “Two years.”

I think he was starting to believe by the time half the town was gathered in the tavern and I know he had accepted it when he lifted his twelfth ale of the night and swore on his life and his sword that he would rescue all us defenceless cubbies from the terror that besieged our fair village.

Yes, he actually said that bit about the ‘terror that besieged our fair village.’  It got a big laugh.  I admit I couldn’t keep a straight face either.  Judging by the way his face turned Isaac wasn’t used to laughter during his big ‘hero’ speeches.  I suppose it might have been a bit creepy to him as well, being surrounded by unnaturally calm cubs all giggling at him.

Well, we bundled the drunkard off to bed then before he could think too hard or get suspicious or anything.  Telling him it was ‘bedtime’ and giving him a knee-high twenty-cub hug when he asked what was so funny works really well as a method of being disarming too.

Anyway, the next morning we were up bright and early.  We made sure our ‘saviour’ had a hero’s breakfast (so he would be ready for what was to come) and then a few of us escorted him down to the swamplands dock.

Now the dock was much like it is today.  You don’t pick up and move a heavy wooden thing of planks and beams and jousts.  So it was in the little lake just east of our village.  I don’t say ‘the same little lake’, because it wasn’t; not quite.

Today you can go down to the lake and the whole surface is nothing but bubbles of blue-pink jelly with cubs inside.  Back then there weren’t nearly so many jellyfish in the lake, and you could still see the surface of the water between them.  The water line was a damned lot lower too let me tell you.

Anyway, back to the story.  I know it sounds amazing, but back then it was possible not to see the jellyfish in the pond until you were right on top of them on the end of the dock.  Isaac’s face, when he saw those teens and cubs, just floating there inside their pulsating bubbles in that foetal position the jellies put you in…well it was something to see.

I don’t know if Isaac suspected us then, because I have never asked him, but he turned on us and asked us what the hell was going on.  Well we just titter to ourselves, and make sure we are lined up across the end of the dock as we undress so he can’t make a break for it.

“This is where the elders went.”  I think it was Dave who said that.

“But these are teens and cubs…like you…”  His ears; they turned the brightest red as he gestured at the squirming cubs with their hard cocks and spread open mouths and bums and cunnies.  Naturally he couldn’t see the tendrils around their dicks or inside their bodies, being as they are as translucent as the skin of the jellyfish itself, but there is no mistaking the way the sleeping cubs inside squirmed in lust and pleasure.

Well we were getting as excited as he was flustered.  I don’t mind telling you that nothing turns me on quite as much as the thought of being deep inside the jellies’ embrace again; my cheeks flush with their taste and their bodies’ potions.  Going under as they pull me inside and position my teen form to best service them.  There is nothing like a young body for getting hard at the drop of a hat.

Heh.  Yes, yes, it’s my time coming up in a couple of weeks again.  I’m excited for it.  Anyway!

“Well yeah,” Dave (I think it was him) says, “but they are also the elders, or were anyway.  Y’see these jellyfish came to our village in a storm two years ago.  It took us a while to realise where our fishermen were disappearing to.  If we had worked it out earlier maybe we would have killed them, but we didn’t know what had happened to them ’til they came waddling back up the path to the village naked and regressed.”

Not a bad Dave impression huh?

Anyway.  Dave says that or words to that effect, and Isaac just starts saying.  “What?  You mean you are the elders of—”  when one of the cubs in the lake moans and kicks inside his bubble.  Sending the water around him splashing and stretching out his gelatinous prison.  His cock almost as active as his thrashing body as it pumped out six or eight months from his body.

Our ‘hero’ whipped his head around, but he didn’t get to appreciate big-Eric’s cumming or the way his lil’ bod shrunk further, because he saw what we were trying to distract him from all this time:  The seven foot, tankard-thick tendrils that were reaching towards their fresh prey.

Well Isaac yelps like a lil girl and goes for his sword, but it’s too late and the tendrils wrap around him; making him lose his balance and slamming him to the deck as they tear off his clothes and pull him towards the water.

Being the hero that he was, Isaac didn’t go willingly.  No.  He dug his claws into the wood and tried to pull against the jellyfish with all his might.  Even with the little hairs on the tendrils injecting his legs and backside with their pleasant relaxing venom he was tenacious.  Those gouges you see in the docks when it is your time?  That was Isaac.

We tried to calm our hero down and explain what was going to happen to him so he wouldn’t be scared of it (though Isaac swears he wasn’t).  “The jellyfish just  some of your body mass so they can reproduce.” Dave said (always the scientist that one).

I was the one who had to put it in words normal people could understand “They take years off of your life he means.”  I said.  “Literally.  They make you a cub again, and then you spend a few years growing up, you come back and you do it again.  It’s the fountain of youth, and it even feels good too.”

Well Isaac kept screaming and hollering even as his lower body went limp and his adult cock got hard (six inches, you don’t see many those size about the village any more) from the jellies’ aphrodisiac.  Well you’ve all been there, you know how good it is when the jellyfish upend themselves and feed your defenceless body into their pucker.

There’s the bit where your feet and slip into the warm envelope inside.  Then there’s the bit where your hips and bum and tail and naughty bits all slide through into the space inside the jelly that exists [i]just[/i] to hold [i]you[/i].  By then the jelly is usually shuffling your body about; positioning it; moving your legs into position and you [i]know[/i] there is nothing you can do about it.  And then there’s the moment when your head slips inside.  It’s scary for all of us that instant when you’re cut off from the air, inside a water tight chamber and the ’fish flips over.

It was scary for Isaac too as he tried to breath in air that wasn’t there, but then the inner tendrils started pressing at his holes.  The one at his mouth slipped into his gasping maw no problem, and you could almost see his relief as he found that it provided him with air.  Not to mention the wonderful sweet drug it mixes in with that air.  Mmmm tastes so good.

The one at his tail hole went in almost as easily since Isaac had prolonged the time he was in the grasp of the jelly’s hairs.  He had got quite a good dose of the relaxing venom and it had plenty of time to take effect.  Why I swear it slid right in.  Heh heh you should have seen his eyes shoot open as the jelly started to pump its transformative lotions into him.

Oh he was quite the sight, knees up by his chest, legs spread slightly, arms behind his back keeping him helpless no matter how he struggled.  And of course we were lucky enough that he ended up ‘belly-up’ so we got to see as the jelly wrapped around and started to stroke his big dick between his thighs.  I love seeing that little ‘dent’ in a boy’s pink flesh where the tendril squeezes firmly.

The others did too because we started to beat ourselves off over his wobbly prison without a word said between us.  Looking down at the fallen hero beneath us; exposed, denied his accolades, his freedom and soon even his adulthood.  Everything taken by the ‘monster’ that imprisoned him, that made him helpless, that was feeding off of him and that would soon tame him.  It was hot.

I came just as Isaac was slipping into his half-sleep.  I’m sure my seed landed on his bubble before he closed his eyes.  The others didn’t take long after that (I’m sure you cubs know all about triggering chain orgasms).  We stayed there quite a while as we watched the jellyfish coax climax after climax from our hero’s half-sleeping form.  Stealing his life away and addicting him to its feeding.

I swear I could see his body slowly yielding to the jellyfish; surrendering to the pleasure, even if he wasn’t fully awake.  His flesh submitted quickly without his mind there to get in the way.  Ask the others if you don’t believe me.  Isaac was quite the celebrity.  Lots of cubs came down from the village to look at his regressing body over the next few days.  Heh heh lots of them got off too looking at his helpless body.

Anyways, a few weeks later Isaac comes marching up into the village just an itty bitty raccoon of five now, and very, very damp.  So we get him inside and get him dried off, and we throw a welcome party for our new brother.  Back then we didn’t get new-comers as often as we do now so it was a big deal and a [i]very[/i] big party.

Well, during the party Isaac asks for some clothes.  He didn’t know our rebirthday rule; no clothes for the newly reborn!  Well he doesn’t take well to that answer.  You need to understand Isaac was proud, and even if his body and soul were willing thanks to his time in the womb of the jellyfish his mind was not.  He stamped his feet and told us he was going to bring down an army of heros on our village.

Now, I know this seems unfair of us, but we were just hazing him a bit.  He was our new little brother and we were going to take good care of him, but he was acting a bit silly.  So we dressed him in his old clothes and told him to go ahead.

“You’ll be laughed out of the first town you come to.” I think were my exact words.  “A cub dressed like that?  Talking about monsters and how he is a hero and a great swordsman and a doer of fantastic deeds?  They will send you back to us as a runaway or put you into an orphanage.”

Well he tried to take his sword to me, but he couldn’t even unsheathe his weapon with his new cub muscles.  Then he broke down and cried and that is when we knew we had gone too far.  It was time for massive damage control.  We hugged and soothed him and let him cry his lil cubby heart out on our shoulders.

I’m not proud of how we treated our new little brother, but we never meant to hurt him.  The party continued after that, but it was a little more sedate; more about welcoming our new baby brother and helping him feel better than about laughter and uproar.

Did we help Isaac feel better?  Well it took a while.  Isaac made a couple of escape attempts, but eventually he started to fit in.  He found a role in the village and friends and love.  He gave into the instincts the jellyfish gave him and had many happy days and nights with me and several others.

And what happened to Isaac?  Perhaps you know of our village’s hunters?  The brave boys who go out and find more brothers and sisters for all you cubs?  Well among them Isaac is a legend.  He has brought more new comers to this village in the last hundred years than any other.

So you see, Isaac got to be a hero after all.